Def Con 2 - Confidence Is Low, I Repeat, Confidence IS Low

THIS RANT COMES TO YOU IN THREE PARTS.
PART "A" MIGHT BE CONSIDERED READABLE. PART "B" CONTAINS THE SAD RAMBLINGS OF AN ANGRY, MIDDLE-AGED MAN WHO NEVER HAD A JOHNNY SEVEN, NEVER GOT TO SCORE A GOAL IN THE CUP FINAL AT WEMBLEY AND NEVER GOT TO GO OUT WITH MARILYN MONROE. PART "C" IS ONLY OF VALUE TO A CRIMINAL PROFILER OR MY PSYCHIATRIST. IF YOU WANT TO SLEEP EASY - OR SLEEP AT ALL FOR THAT MATTER - PLEASE READ ONLY PART "A".

A.
Well, it's that time again. Yes, it's "Flee For The Hills Tuesday".

Traditionally, it's time to start stockpiling bones and bits of moss for food, to start running up imaginative outfits from pieces of carpet and curtain in your lounge and to leave the front door open for the bailiffs.

For the uninitiated, Flee For The Hills Tuesday follows Black Monday in the capitalists' fiscal calendar.
The last BM was in 1987. That led to red braces and filofaxes being piled high in the streets while Sterling fell to just below the value of the Wakoko Indian Naughty Nut and building societies suddenly decided that they wanted everyone's home back.
Before that we had the biggy - BM 1929. The corporate lizards who caused it did the decent thing by leaping from the top of skyscrapers but unfortunately the rest of us were left to endure four years of abject poverty, joblessness and despair. We were only saved when that nice Mr Hitler came up with a challenging way of getting everyone back to "work"!

Well, "they" decided it was time we had another Black Monday and yesterday was it. (Bush wanted to have it on Wednesday as he was due to have played golf yesterday but then Osama pulled out of the four-ball so he had a "window" in his diary).
By the time the final credits rolled on Countdown, Britain's top 100 companies found themselves £75 billion poorer than they had been during Songs of Praise. That's not £7,500, you notice. No, not even £75 million - but £75 BILLION!!

Now how, exactly, do you lose £75 billion? I mean, I've fallen asleep on the settee a few times and woken to find that the £3.28p which had been in my pocket was no longer there. Then again, I've always found it eventually, usually months later, stuffed down the back of one or more of the cushions. Is it possible, then, that BP or Tesco's nodded off during Sharpe on Sunday night and woke up yesterday a little light in the metaphorical trouser department?
Alternatively, there have been occasions when I've stuffed a few notes in the same pocket as my keys and, unbeknown to me, a fiver has tumbled out into the street when I've gone to unlock the car. Do you think British Telecom nipped out to the off-license during the ad break in The Street omnibus and there's a few million quid in a large wad currently lying outside KFC in the High Street?

To save you agonising over those two questions for hours I will give you the answers. They are "no" and "like fuck!" respectively. Shall I tell you how 100 British companies came to lose £75 billion overnight?...(Go on Reg, tell us, tell us, tell us do!!)...ok then, I will.

What actually happened was we were all pootling along quite nicely thank you, recessionless and watching Songs of Praise, Sharpe and The Street, when some shiny-suited, lounge lizards in London decided that we were all heading for a recession. We weren't but they had made their minds up that we were and they are never wrong**.
So, what did they do? Well, they reasoned that if there was a recession - which there wasn't - they would lose loads of dosh so they decided to "sell, sell, sell!" when their turn came round in that rich boys' board game which is the stocks and shares market.
Other corporate greed merchants saw what the lizards were doing and so thought there must be a recession coming, even though there wasn't, and so they too decided to cash in their chips.
The remaining capitalist crapmongers saw what both the lizards and the merchants were doing and so followed suit by dumping all their stocks and shares, even though they didn't know why because they had never had an original thought in their lives and just followed what the others did so that they wouldn't be alone if the shit hit the fan.
Guess what happened then? BINGO! We had a recession!!

** See, I told you they were always right!!

B.
Now comes the very boring bit, as forewarned.
Do you know what underpins this whole, lousy, disgusting, obscene, amoral capitalist system? It's "confidence". It's all about "confidence" - nothing else.
The reasoning behind this assertion is a little complicated but I'll try to explain it as simply as I can.

Right, the underlying nonsense of capitalism is that it is not only based on money but on the principle that money itself can and must earn money. Now, there are two ways in which money has been made to make money.
The first is interest. The more charitable might say that the interest charged on loaned money is much like a hire charge put on a piece of borrowed equipment. There are systems in existence, however, which regard the charging of interest on loans as immoral (ref. Islam) and I have to say I favour that view.
The other way in which money can be made to make money is when it is speculated upon on the financial markets. This is the purest form of "money making money" and is, of course, undeniable bollocks - I mean, consider Jack the lumberjack (I am not using his real name to save his embarrassment). He is capable of both earning and losing money. Why? Because if Jack wakes up one day with two broken arms then it is safe to assume that he is not going to earn a great deal, if anything. If, on the other hand, he wakes in the best of health, having had a good meal the night before and a good sleep, his chances of earning a good living are greatly increased.
Likewise a field of corn. If there is a monsoon, followed by an attack of blight, followed by a drought, the efforts of the corn to grow and be harvested to earn money will most likely be thwarted. Given sunshine, adequate water and no disease, however, the corn will grow and produce money at harvest.
Money, on the other hand, is not a living entity. You can't break the arms of a £1 coin. It's not affected by blight. You can get it wet but, then again, in a drought it will simply dry out again. A good night's sleep or a decent meal have no effect on it. The fact is, when a new day greets a £1 coin that coin is, in the real world, worth....well....the £1 it was the night before.
How then can it be made to make money on the financial markets, as Capitalism decrees? Well, seeing as your £1 coin is basically a lazy little bastard (owing to its lack of life 'n' all) and won't actually DO anything to earn anything, a nonsense has to be dreamed up whereby it CAN and DOES. That nonsense is "confidence".
What happens is, for example, that someone, somewhere, decides one day that they are no longer confident in the ability of your one pound to be worth one pound. The result is that it is re-valued at, say, 99p. The day after that, however, someone, somewhere is full of confidence about your one pound and so decides to revalue it at, say, £1.02p. Da daaaaaaaa!!!! There you have it. By the simple application of a purely subjective and groundless state of mind, namely confidence, your pound can earn and lose money by doing nothing. All you have to do is decide on which day to sell and on which to buy. Think I'm being cynical? What do you think the Stock Exchange and Wall Street are for? They're there because if they weren't then all those otherwise indolent, greedy bastards who trade on unseen people's lives would get wet when it rains!
This reliance on "confidence" of course infects more than just currencies. It has spread to businesses themselves, products, commodities etc.

So, what exactly happened yesterday? In short, and truth be told, NOTHING fucking happened. General Motors' cars did not suddenly cease to work. Fields of wheat across the mid-West were not wiped out by locusts. Virgin Trains' trains did not all break down (only the usual 34 per cent of them broke down!). No, what happened was someone, somewhere just stopped being confident. Who is this mystery "someone"? He is called "the market", he is Thatcher, Blair and Bush's best mate, and he leads the mindless moneymen in one huge boardgame which decides how appalling everyone else's life is going to be.

If this latest jitter in the confidence stakes persists (remember, NOTHING else has changed) then millions of us around the world will have to suffer to varying degrees, from not having a holiday this year, losing our job or having our house reposessed to being denied access to any medical treatment or starving to death!!

C.
Isn't global capitalism wonderful? "Well, it's not perfect Reg, but it's the only one which works?" Is it? Is it really? Which other systems have we tried? Outside the likes of Sweden and Cuba (The Cubans are still surviving despite the attempts of the West to strangle them to death with embargoes for the last 60 years), no-one has really tried any form of Socialism. Why not? Because the only people who would lose out would be those currently deciding how confident they feel each day and they control the media and every other fucking thing and so are intent on rubbishing Socialism at every opportunity and physically stamping it out wherever it dares to rear its head in the world. Fuck 'em, I say!

We will never end this obscene, unequitable state of affairs until economies are much more mixed and there are more nationalised industries doing business alongside and in competition with the private sector - and governments should not just be left with those loss-making businesses while the privateers cherry-pick the rest. While we're at it, let's also scrap this Blair-inspired public-private sector partnership bollocks, shall we? I mean, I'm no business genius as you might know, but I think the taxpayers are getting a pretty raw deal by pumping billions into the rail network in subsidies and grants to keep the whole fucking thing going while the miriad privatised bits of it cream off all the profits.

If we have more public ownership then voters and not just private shareholders will get a say in how things are run (shareholders in reality being the corporate big-players). The fucking stocks and shares market should not govern our lives. The well-being of the consumers (i.e the vast majority of people and certainly not the most wealthy) should be of much more importance in decision making than it is now. I personally don't give a flying fuck if the Ftse has dropped three points but the Nasdaq has risen by an apple and a banana, or that sterling has gained half a point on the dollar coming up to the water jump, or whether confidence is fucking high, low or living in a cottage on the A624 just outside Glossop! (I've Googled it so don't bother fucking checking!) It's people who fucking count, not money or fucking numbers! We should be worried about making sure people's jobs are secure, that they are paid fair wages and that corporations are neither abusing their staff, nor their Third World suppliers, nor their customers in their efforts to make money.

"But Reg, the wealth makers provide us with jobs. If they don't make so much money there won't be so many jobs!" Believe that and you'll believe anything. Who do you think puts that fucking load of old cobblers about? That is the classic scare put about by the corporate tyrants who will throw thousands of jobs on the scrapheap in the blink of an eye just to notch profits up another percentage point (Isn't it an obscenity that a profitable company can sack thousands of workers merely to make even more profit, however small?). Remember the introduction of the minimum wage? It was going to spell the end for businesses in this country and we were all going to lose our jobs. What happened? Fuck all! - only exploited people became legally entitled at last to something approaching a living wage.

If you don't know what I'm sending to Grantham, I have no confidence in your ability to recognise a good rant when you read one!

P.S. To anyone who mistakes the USSR after the war, various African banana republics or modern China as anything other than Fascist dictatorships bearing no resemblance to Socialism whatsover - see me afterwards!