What would Jesus do?
The alternative title was ‘Kristallnacht’ in light of the unremitting ‘pogrom’ against all bankers regardless of guilt in pursuit of a Socialist ideology of a banker free world….with the Occupy storm troopers putting boots on the ground and a Goebbels like media riding shotgun behind Miliband.
To save you reading all of this I’ll give you a quick precis….Exam boards have been rigging the market for their exams leading to a dumbing down of exams and the resultant narrowing and truncating of pupil’s education and destruction in trust in their qualifications and therefore reduced job prospects and a commensurate damaging effect on the economy.
And yet there are no opportunist Milibandian calls for a judicial inquiry or cries that this has damaged our schools’ reputation world wide etc.
How different a reaction to the banks rigging the market….surely no more important than education, education, education?
However it seems no one is really interested in the kids when they’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Ed Miliband receives his certificate of education.
A funny old world where the massive chorus of outraged politicians and media commentators shouting to the rooftops about scandal and rigging the financial markets to the detriment of ‘the public’ have marched Bob Diamond out to the firing squad and told him to shoot himself.
We’ve been told the bank’s actions have been unprecedented.. a shock to all…a scandal of historic proportions…who knew! who knew!
Really? I would imagine fixing of the Libor has been going on since its inception…as have all the other dodgy financial scams that the banks have (yet again) been caught at recently.
Let’s ask ourselves ‘what would Jesus do?’ Two thousand years ago he was tipping over the money lender’s tables……so not a new problem then with bankers and financiers….and yet it comes as a surprise that bankers are involved in shady practises?
The BBC have singularly failed to join the dots on this and gone solely with the banker bashing narrative. They deserve to be bashed…but it was ever thus. Who doesn’t remember the old black and white films from the 20’s and 30’s where the desperate widow was being evicted by the greedy banker?
The BBC’s highly focused reporting and commenting on essentially one aspect of a society in pursuit of its chosen victim…not so long ago it was Murdoch…..means that other ‘culprits’ , such as Brown, Miliband and Balls, are allowed to escape and an overemphasis is placed on Barclays which suffers enormous damage whilst others get off scot free.
Look at this story which has gone not unreported but reported without exclamations of shock and horror and cries for judicial inquiries from the opportunist flim flam artist that Miliband is turning out to be.
Exam boards are ‘rigging’ the market to sell their products….meaning exams are being ‘dumbed down’ , made easier, so that more schools will buy them with a resultant increase in pass rates and a leap up the league tables and….
“a public loss of confidence in exams such as GCSEs and A-levels”.
…leading to pupils with a narrow and truncated education, leaving them without the jobs they could have obtained and employers either importing skilled immigrants or restricting their production and therefore the country’s economy.
Is not the rigging of exam papers and the dumbing down of education a national scandal that equals and maybe surpasses Bob Diamond and his nifty footwork with the Libor?
And yet this comparison passes the BBC by….it simplifies to the point of stupidity which results in a massive distortion of the news and the relative importance of a story.
Sure the bank scandal is big but not unusual or unexpected in reality…we all know it went on since the first ‘bank’ was created.
Examine the claims that the banks manipulation of the Libor may have cost people money whether in pensions or mortgages or otherwise.
Labour instigated a massive printing of money, Quantitative Easing, to stabilise the economy. This resulted in a devaluation of the pound…and inflation….it therefore cost everyone, rich and poor, a lot of money (remember the BBC reports of the ‘poor’ being hit by Tory VAT increases…but no such squeals here). Not only that but interest rates are being held down…making savings a worthless prospect especially if you rely on savings to fund your pension from the interest on them….all of which continue now…with the prospect of another interest rate drop and more QE.
And yet such serious consequences go pretty much unremarked by the BBC…..no comparison to the Libor…in principle it is the same thing…rigging the interest market…only it was being done by the Labour government to cover up its own massive failures in financial regulation and overspending.
And yet Labour get away unscathed…Miliband claiming today that ‘Yes we failed to regulate properly and we’re truly sorry…but hey, we’ve learnt from it and we’ve learnt lessons for the future…let’s move on and so vote us in!’
‘Sorry’ isn’t enough….Labour have brought the economy to the brink of complete ruin and go unscathed legally and without public scrutiny by the BBC…no trial by media inquisition here. Let’s face it Bob Diamond resigned…’sorry’ didn’t cut it for him, he had to go.
In fact he sent a letter to his staff yesterday in which he made the same claims Miliband made….‘What went wrong happened on my watch…and I’ve learnt lessons and so it is up to me to put things right.’
And now he’s gone whilst Miliband and Balls are still there and basking in the lime light from the unquestioning BBC.
As I’ve said the banking scandal is massive with important consequences but it should be looked at in respect to other events and in relation to history, neither of which is happening, leading to a highly febrile atmosphere and media lynchings…all of which the BBC is supposed to prevent by a measured, balanced and accurate reporting of events.
A few things puzzle me. Apart from the obvious inflation in fuel prices and seasonal food prices there does not seem to be any real inflation in manufactured goods.
This despite a huge increase via QE in the money supply.
Where has that money created gone?
Was it not undertaken to prevent massive deflation in the price of goods and services? Asset price collapse along with tax revenue collapse is as great a danger as inflation if not more so and it would have bought the banks and the government to their knees.
That QE has gone awol. Or is the hands of the banks and the government. It has not filtered down to the real economy except in the form of government spending which only marginally creates wealth when spent
It is beginning to look as if the powers that be have not a clue what to do .
The bankers have never been trustworthy. I think old William Cobbett had it right when he said- I quote from memory- that he would rather sit down with a common thief that with any huckster who earned his living by the turn of the market.
When the Left mean “Education, Education, Education” they mean “Indoctrination, Indoctrination, Indoctrination” – see Lenin.
There are no standards for the Left – only power.
You are not only forced to pay for public sector TV you are also forced to pay for all that public sector education tripe – if today’s youth knew the meaning of rebellion they would vomit up all that left-wing propaganda they have been fed since Primary school and start to think for themselves.
Isn’t it time public sector teachers went on strike over their pensions?
Sitting in the banks and loaned back to the government at an interest spread of 2% slowly rebuilding impaired balance sheets in insolvent banks…..the government is paying the banks to lend the nations money back to the government. Not in the real economy< yet….wait four or five years , then the inflation genie will burst out.
If you are correct and I think you are then what it really means is we are paying. The government has no money. And they wonder why we are so disillusioned. I would have thought the BBC approved of it. They too are paid for by us.
In quantitative easing, the government buys back debt than it previously issued in the form of gilt bonds using money that has been created out of nothing (it is simply an electronic entry in a balance sheet at the bank of england).
The people from whom they buy back the bonds are those who would ordinarily sell them but who now see a better price from the government. This includes banks and insurance companies.
So these bonds, which are highly liquid assets, are therefore replaced with the same monetary value in the form of cash. So the supply of “money” in the economy has gone up. But whether it has any effect depends on what is done with it. If it simply sits in a cash account at the bank then nothing will happen. If it is used to repair bank balance sheets and meet the new Basel 3 capital requirements then nothing much will happen. If it is used to lend to customers then something will happen. But that is not compatible with Basel 3. So in all likelihood it has no effect.
But what then is the point of QE ?
First note that the process is reversible as the government could in theory go back and sell those gilts back to the market and take back that cash they created and electronically burn it so that it is gone and we are back to where we were.
But look. The government has created a scheme where it has effectively purchased about a third of its own debt and is now paying itself interest on its own debt. At some point some bright spark will say, this is dumb. Let’s just retire this debt. And the cash is never extracted from the economy.
The result is that the government has paid off a third of its debt without any current cost to anyone. But all of those hundreds of billions of cash are still sitting in the banks. One day as the economy starts to recover,, they will start to come out. At that point inflation will take off.
From what I can tell, QE is going mostly to the public sector (unions) and favored private sector contractors. As for the banks, they’re told they need to have more capital reserve before they lend but then are told they have to start making more risky loans again. One doesn’t have to trust the banks, really. Just properly enforce the penalties for f@#$ing it up for a change.
Jeff Randall, Sky News, indicates that a massive public inquiry into the banking scandal at Barclays, etc is unnecessary as Diamond, Agius are now providiing evidence of what, when and how Barclays perpetuated its deception.
More details at Jeff Randall, Sky News, after 7 pm tonight.
“Barclays board begins fight to claw back Bob Diamond’s £22.9m share package as it’s revealed Mervyn King ‘gave him final push'”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168069/Bob-Diamond-resigns-Barclays-chief-executive.html#ixzz1za09VOGy
Yes, the BBC is always very careful what stories it spotlights when it goes on a whole ‘state of the nation’ kick.
Don’t expect anyone at the BBC to asking about the wider ishooes raised by this case:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2167643/Patient-dying-thirst-rang-999-Inquest-hears-mothers-fury-nurses-neglected-son.html
They are hiding something. No one has asked where the nurses were trained, whether they were staff or agency, what the staff to patient ratio was on the wards, what clinical supervision of the boys treatment, the consultant responsible.
Nothing. The problem with reporting health is the press think anyone can do it, so they know nothing, never ask the right questions, the hospital aplogises, claims lessons learned, and not one single thing will change.
What would Jesus Do?
Mr Jesus Christ would refuse to pay the licence fee, even if they crucified him.
And , of course, Jesus was able to go to a synagogue at the age of twelve to pester his elders about Scripture/Torah etc…no social workers hounding Mary and Joseph about not “paying appropriate attention” as to his whereabouts.
Nor were the Rabbis all CRB checked…nor was Jesus forced to put condoms/parchment in vinegar over a small gourd by way of “sex education”.
The temple was, of course; open all day and not closed all week-as the authorities then knew that religion mattered even to this Jewish rabble under Roman occupation.
Unlike today-if Jesus had a question about the Bible, anyone trying to answer it had better give equal weight to Dawkins, Mohammad and their inanities too.
In short-Education WAS far better not only 20 years ago…but 2000 years ago too.
Yet as you say-not a squeak from the Labour liars of 19997-2010…
Lots of good comment over at Guido’s re the ability of the bbc to avoid any hint that labour may have had some insy winsy involvement with the rate fixing fuck up.
Meanwhile, tomorrows headline news likely to be that tony robinson again asks if bankers eats babies.
“Who were the ‘senior Whitehall figures’ who tried to fix the Libor rate? ”
By David Hughes
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidhughes/100168879/who-were-the-senior-whitehall-figures-who-tried-to-fix-the-libor-rate/
To be tediously accurate, Jesus didn’t tip over the money lender’s tables, but the money changers’ tables. On big feast days Jews would come to the temple from all over the Med., but the priests only took shekels (or animals, a bit bulky if you travel from Marseilles). The money changers were offering rip-off exchange rates for all the different currencies being brought in.
Rather like Barclays tinkering with the interest rate on wholesale dollar loans, if you stretch your imagination wide enough.
Sounds like Jesus didn’t like the free market at work. Surely there would have been competition between different money exchangers tables? Or perhaps would Jesus have prefered central “rate fixing” by the National Bank of Judea? I smell sly Socialist propaganda.
You have it backwards, the money changers fixed rates between themselves and lent money at interest in a fixed (rigged) market. Jesus opposed such corrupt corporatism.
Indeed. Especially since the whole point of it was to buy an animal for the priests to sacrifice on one’s behalf, a vital part of being of the Hebrew faith in those days. At the time, the priests were the path to God, and nobody else could do sacrifices for the purposes of worship or assuaging sin and all that. It was a big deal – to reformer types – if buying that pascal animal was made more difficult, or the process was corrupted in some way. Jesus was part of the reformer crowd, and it was a perfectly natural and logical thing for him to do from that perspective. Contrary to the Giles Fraser/BBC mentality, it’s not like Jesus was running around the countryside hassling everybody in the coin business (yes, I’m aware of his statements about getting rid of wealth as a sure path to heaven and all that: different issue altogether). It was specifically an old school, hardcore religious worship deal.
Ian H– to be even MORE tediously accurate, Jesus didn’t have a problem with the money changers at all, or the bird sellers. His threw His tantrum because they were doing business on the steps of the temple. 😉
The BBC makes me think of Brian more than Jesus.
They’d twist Brian’s story to their own agenda as well.