President Obama having formally declared The Queue open, The Slog looks at where the queue might lead.
It seems that if Britain leaves the EU, that will speed up the European disintegration process, “and engulf Britain” said Yanis Varoufakis last night. But if we stay, the costs of economic standstill, mindless austerity, East European rebellion, extreme politics and TTIP corporatocracy, er, won’t.
It’s an intriguing piece of logic, and one matched by the fact that, as Barclays announces an intention to sell its loss making French business, the “French recovery” has not as yet shown up in the employment data. Given there hasn’t been one, it wouldn’t.
I’ve spent the last week (in idle moments) checking how the main “positive” corporate results got through the tape. Not much point doing this in the banking business, as everyone there is haemhorraging money; but elsewhere the answer is obviously fourfold: accountancy, cutting back R&D, borrowing and firing people. They’re not doing it through sales – Apple’s Iphone sales actually dropped in volume this quarter, a first – but the phrase “borrowing to pay a dividend” is being breezily bandied around as if it was accepted practice.
Australia’s currency is weakening. At last it’s dawned on the Aussies that they have a one-client export policy, and that client being China, things are looking bleak. New euphemisms are being invented to ‘explain’ this “unexpected” turn of events: thus, Oz is temporarily in a ‘slowed inflation environment’.
Given that everything’s going so well, talk of ‘helicopter money’ is returning. Jens Weidmann at the Bundesbank – an unyielding chap, but one who talks more sense than most of the Eunatics – told a news conference earlier today, “the idea should be put back in the economic theory drawer where it belongs”, but it’s clearly what all those decisive markets out there want: because they don’t care about sane business – just a continuation of returns come what may. If you’ve ever managed a bourse-quoted company, that’s what it’s all about: come what may, we want the munnneeee. Hence “borrowing to pay dividends”.
We need the helicopter money, it seems, because there is ‘pent-up’ demand. Actually, it’s spent-up credit, but that’s non violent extremism and Unfriedmanlike behaviour – what are you huh – some kinda comm’nist?
Anyway, this is the oxygen-enriched spheroid on which we all have to live for now, so let’s tot up all the logical thought above, tie up those loose ends, and give the consumption serfs a clearer view of the future.
I mean, it’s quite simple really. We must go global because any other policy would be crazy. That why we need TTIP or, if you’re a Corbynista, international worker solidarity with all its rights and influence restored. If we stay in the EU, we get TTIP – a trade deal with the world’s biggest superpower. They’re already 14% of our exports (good) but we import half a billion more from the US every month (bad). The US Board of Commerce says EU membership actually holds back UK exports to the US….so there we are, held back at the back of The Queue. If we leave the EU, we go even further back. Or not. It’s that clear.
And should we invent the elixir of life, neither the EU nor the US – not China, Russia, India nor Australia, not Brazil, not Chile – is going to buy it off us.
So there we are, starving and so far back we aren’t even in The Queue; but when we were in the queue, our manufacturing exports shrank 30% in six years. So obviously, the problem is the need to be in The Queue. So we can sell more to countries like France, Italy and Greece who don’t have the money to pay off debt let alone buy exports. And compete on a level playing field with Poland, where the cost of living is 37% lower than ours. We have to be in The Queue you see, to keep on getting that record trade imbalance of £23.6bn we notched up with the EU in Q1 2016….and pay our £18bn membership fee each and every year.
Can you see now why we need helicopter money? It’s obvious: we spend so much time in The Queue eating sandwiches to pass the time, they cost more than the hourly rate on that 6 hours a week sales assistant job we just fought tooth and nail to get. Then to pay a dividend for the benefit of the 3%, the employer needs to fire us. And when we Brexit, President Obama points that boney finger towards the end of The Queue. That’s the one we need to be in just to lose money. Try to keep up here, it’s not rocket science.
Back at the end of The Queue, we’re still hungry, but the Doshcopter arrived just in time. Banknotes shower down, and because inflation is slowing down, it’ll last longer. Of course, with the banks all losing money, they’re not the cash donors. And as all the companies had to borrow money and fire employees to make the quarterly numbers, it won’t be coming from them either. So, um…
The Government! Of course – the Central Banks have a licence to print money….why didn’t I think of that? Except of course, that’ll speed up inflation. So even as the marines are chucking the money down towards us, the more they chuck, the more worthless it becomes. And still we’re at the back of The Queue.
Our demand for sandwiches is still pent up, and they’re now twenty bucks a pop. And call me wacky, but this queue is getting longer. And much, much wider. Now they’re using a fleet of drones to drop the money, because the people in The Queue keep shooting down the helicopters to stop them from debasing the currency which makes everything too expensive to satiate all that pent up starvation. And unworkingness. And desperation.
I have seen the future, where nothing and nobody works. Where the weight of banknotes per drone is unsustainable, and so cash has been abolished in favour of Consumption Cards. Where fire-hoses have become by far the most effective method of keeping the homeless clean, tear gas is primarily used to disguise the tears falling in profusion without it, privatised education focuses on obedience electric shock therapy, all health treatment waiting times have disappeared because 54 million people can’t afford the insurance, a paramilitary Anti-NVE Youth Corps has been established to give workshy yobs a sense of purpose, the Government has introduced a pay-to-work scheme, and the the Home Office has been rebranded the Citizen Reassessment Overview Centre (CROC). People sell their bodies to get out of the CROC queue, because there’s a lot of what Whitehall has started to call ‘churn’ involved.
It has at last become a truly global economy, because the queue to join in stretches right around the planet. It never moves, because the start in the Wannsee district of Berlin meets the end as it tags on across the park in Glienicker. One big whopping queue where there is zero tolerance of migrants, because that would be queue-jumping.
Scuffles and riots break out on a daily basis. Drones fly over and drop mobile phones crammed with downloaded action movies as a distraction. When that fails, out come the Molotov cocktails….to, if nothing else, whittle down that petrol glut for which, one day, there will be demand again. Fire hoses have been banned since Putinania redirected the Don water supply three years ago.
In the European Parliament, a heated debate is going in the Upper House between the Apple Coke Amazon McDonKing Alliance Party and the so-called ‘oily rags’ – The Saudi Texas Norway Plastics Front – about a new TTIP Bill making it illegal for any junk food supplier to use non STNP cups and wrappers. Sales of the McDonKing slowed last quarter to six WhopMacs – down from the previous quarter’s eight.
In the Lower Citizens’ Chamber, the International Socialist Anti-Mutilation League for the Liberation of Socialist Anti-Mutilationists called for a europetition to condemn the rising practice of churn-eating. The ruling No Turning Back Party said it would consider a public enquiry, but doubted if this would be well-attended as almost all the public is in The Queue.
In the EU Court of Human Rights, Hillary Clinton was found guilty of strangling the Middle East to death, but cleared on all charges of murder. She had fled to the EU in order to “be sure of getting a fair trial”. US Life President Donald Trump ordered The Queue to go round his 40-million acre estate as it was “a symptom of European decadence that makes me wanna puke”. In London, the Earl of Arcadia completed his purchase of the Russian Navy, and former pensions adviser Ros Altmann’s heart finally lost its titanic struggle against the weight of her jewellery. Boris Johnson mourned her death as “yet another example of the politics of envy destroying the blameless life of a minority”.
The Slog 