WARNING: Real news will be printed, and trolls will be removed

So George Osborne is to extend his business loans scheme designed to bribe banks into lending SME entrepreneurs money…..something that is supposed to be at or near the top of their remit anyway. Ten months ago, the Financial Services Authority said Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland had agreed to “provide redress” to SMEs after it uncovered “a range of poor sales practices” – including inadequate disclosure of exit costs and “failure to ascertain the customers’ understanding of risk”. This a polite way of saying that at least two of the banks tried to swindle SME customers out of their property assets. By October of last year, this site was reporting that  a support group for SMEs – ‘bully-banks.co.uk‘ – had been formed to bring fraudulent bankers to justice.

You may have noticed that no bankers have been put on trial for those crimes. You may be hoping I can tell you why, but I can’t. You may be wondering therefore why our Chancellor is entrusting funds to these unjailed crooks, given their track record…but sadly, I can’t help you with that one either.

What else, I wonder, are you wondering about? Why, thirty years on, the Elm House paedophile case is still without a single conviction? Why just two Newscorp journalists face trial for phone hacking offences, and yet neither case has yet gone to trial? Why nobody has been charged with perverting the course of justice in the Welsh care homes paedophile scandal? Why Tony Blair was never brought to justice for interfering in the BaE Arab slush fund case, or for lying to Parliament about the legality of the Iraq War? Why Jeremy Hunt not only got away with lying to Parliament about his conduct over the BSkyB bid, he got promoted to the job of Health Secretary? Why the investigation of Plebgate has petered out?

It’s not just about little olde Englande. Across the world, folks ask themselves why nobody at Goldman Sachs was charged with helping the 2008 Greek government defraud Brussels. Why J P Morgan’s behaviour towards Lehman Brothers on the Friday before the latter’s collapse never evoked criminal charges. Why nobody has been arrested over the Libor scandal.  How Lord Mandelson got away with doctoring the evidence about his dealings with Russians importing metal to the EU. How Wayne Swann has avoided investigation over his dealings with the Australian mining companies. Why Evangelos Venizelos has still not been indicted for expunging details from the Lagarde list. Why Mario Draghi has run roughshod over the Treaty of Lisbon twice, and subordinated lenders illegally, but remains as the head of the European Central Bank. And most odd of all, how banks get caught and then simply buy their way out of trouble by ‘setting aside’ fine monies….which they usually pay by scamming customers.

The news in general and political press releases in particular these days remind me of the pages of Izvestia when I was a student in the 1960s….full of bollocks about farming achievements and the certainty that Socialism would prevail in the end. Last Tuesday, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras did something startlingly similar to this, when he told fellow Cabinet members, “Indications show that the pace of unemployment has slowed down, and this indication will be verified within the next few months”. There are so many ferrets wriggling about in that bag, it could mean anything: but in reality, it means absolutely nothing beyond the possibility that Samaras is mad. Unemployment now stands at 27.6%, and an astonishing  59.3% among youth. In a population of only 11 million, 1.4 million people have no job….and this doesn’t include the self-employed – a large percentage of the Greek economy.

As I have been boffing on about for over eighteen months now, the biggest media lie of all involves the ‘strong’ stock markets. Their growth, in fact, is based on zero fundamentals: not one. The profits being made in this faux gold rush are being paid for with our tax monies, in the form of QE. But as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote two days ago, ‘A rash of weak manufacturing data from America, Europe and Asia has cast serious doubts on the strength of the global economy, and was starkly at odds with surging stock markets in the West.’ As for the US within this totality, since February 2012 I have been posting to say the US recovery was and remains a myth: it got Obama reelected, but it was complete bollocks based on deliberate misinterpretation of the payroll data – a truth that in private, I understand, Bernanke himself has called “dangerous”.

All this gapingly obvious evidence that a self-styled club of cheats has positioned itself above the Law (and is being aided and abetted in that mission by the police, judiciary, media and legislature) serves as a prism through which to view each day’s news. One continues to note the ‘business as usual’ apologism of  those media owned by antipodean monopolists, Russian oligarchs, pornographers, tax-avoiding Sarkopaths, and left-wing trusts.

Let’s take the Sarkonauts and observe a simple example from yesterday. Their inhouse bumboy political editor Robert Winnett observed in his column that ‘Jeremy Hunt will say “disastrous” changes to GPs’ working hours have led to an extra four million people attending hospitals annually, a situation he will demand is reversed.’ Two things here: Hunt hadn’t made the speech when Bobby wrote his article: this is simply Jezzer’s spin machine getting its ducks in a row. And these are the same GPs to whom Hunt and his predecessor Lansley gave more budgetary largesse after May 2010 in order to starve hospitals of funds.

This is the real story here: Secretary Hunt is spewing up sociopathic spin-bollocks masquerading as concerned anger. After the idiocy of New Labour shooting themselves in the foot by their own largesse in terms of GP pay rises and shorter hours, instead of correcting the imbalance to continue decent, cheap healthcare for all, the New Conservatives cynically use social democrat commercial naivety to shaft public health….thus moving us nearer to a private insurance model.

Sun headline, ‘BOTH PARTIES F**KING CRAP AT OFFERING BEST HEALTHCARE FOR CITIZEN’.

There is no national media voice printing balanced analysis (and arguing for the radical deregulation of a political monopoly) because all the ones that exist support the status quo. Therefore citizens will not be made more aware of what’s being done to them. There will be more cameras watching us ‘for our own protection’. Your money will be stolen ‘in the national interest’. Blogosphere revelations will be heavily controlled with the cooperation of the MSM ‘to protect private reputations’. Idiot ex-hack clowns will continue to be paid blood-money in an attempt to discredit pro-am blog journalism.

The ethic behind contemporary Western politics is a naively cynical attachment to desperate measures for desperate times. The pathetic inability of the Ed Miller Band (and Oppositions elsewhere) to critique how we got here – and then suggest a better alternative – will doom them in the medium-term future. The dangerous desire of this Government to deny the critique, and instead plough onwards (to a neocon nirvana where Anything Goes) will therefore continue until, hopefully, its own internal flaws cause it to implode disastrously.

In the Brave Neocon World, monopolies will serve shareholders, ISPs will serve national security agencies, two-speed internet news will stifle objectivity, middle incomes and wealth will be raped, truth will be inverted, and – in the end, if it’s allowed to get there – anything will be tolerated: child trafficking, slave labour, televised executions, Europe turned into Grossdeutschland, and Athens turned into an Ancient Greek theme-park for Chinese billionaires. The internet model of forced software updates will become the marketing norm: people will go to prison for not replacing their car more often – using special cheap loans from RBS, the money provided by Mr Carney and his printing machine. A home for every Briton will be provided on the same basis, until every last bit of horribly muddy countryside full of nasty foxhunters has been eradicated. Mario Draghi and Wolfgang Schäuble will respectively organise and bankroll a network of correction centres, where street-beggars are retrained as factory workers in return for bed and board.

Three weeks ago, I first spotted three trolls coming in to The Slog in relation to Cyprus. All of them trotted out a minor variation on Rehnthink – viz, “we need to remodel the Cypriot economy because it is dysfunctional, and in the end Cyprus will thank us”. Insert Hungary circa 1956 for Cyprus there, and you wouldn’t notice any difference. Of the three trolls, two sported ISP addresses based in Austria, the other in Belgium. Just fancy that. Professional trolling is another weapon in the truth suppression game, and it is getting to the point now where constant vigilance by bloggers is required. Yet I have never seen its growth discussed anywhere in the old media. Whether they like to admit it or not (and of course, they don’t) the MSM are complicit in the Orwellian mind-bending that’s going on throughout the world.

I passed a Communist Party poster in Chamberey yesterday. It said simply, “Et le dernier….quoi?’ Roughly translated, ‘What next?’ The answer from the social democrat Left would be “Politics is dead mate, it’s all about tactics now”. The Right’s response would consist of some knee-jerk drivel about not turning back and more of the same and lower taxes and the appointment of slave commissars to keep an eye on all those lazy GPs who are so desperate to become wealth-creating entrepreneurs.

I doubt very much if, in the end, things will reach the stage where Boris Johnson defends Bob Diamond against porcine bestiality charges on the grounds of his right to privacy in the face of left-wing blogosphere poppycock; but in truth, we are only talking about a matter of degree here. Those in charge will move all the goalposts, shoot the referee, send off the opposing team, and then take their ball home to help reach their objective. The spectators will thus be left with no game to watch, but the media gargoyle apologists will defend the action on the basis of the stadium having been sold to Chinese developers in order to reduce the national debt.

The words in that paragraph ‘help reach’ can also be pronounced “Hell preach”. And two words I saw in a comment thread last night – ‘it’s reasonable’ – suddenly jumped out at me as “is treasonable”. The ‘it’s reasonable’ nonsense was offered up as a rationale for hypocritical cruelty by one of a number of further trolls who have been sowing confusion and ill-feeling in the Slog’s threads for a couple of months now. They were quietly culled last night. It won’t make much difference, but it will make me feel better. In a tiny way, it’s allowing me to whisper into one small tunnel, “I know you’re in there, and I know your agenda. If nothing else, I will not let The Slog become just another place where black is white, up is down, bombs are good, everything’s pointless, and WTF are you on about anyway?”.

Earlier at The Slog: The eurozone reaches its Berlin Wall moment