[Campaignforrealdemocracy] A Pair of Beauties

[Robin Smith]

Dont forget the property owners too. Millions of em

On 12 December 2011 22:10, Mark Barrett <marknbarrett at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Thanks to Occupy's sharp eyes saw this (below) along this:
> Tom Hodgkinson: 'Boris ought to know his Plato'
> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/tom-hodgkinson-boris-ought-to-know-his-plato-6273528.html
> and thought they were both rather good ;)
>
> Opinion |  Bankers are the dictators of the West
>
> Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than
> any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I
> have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the
> world financial crisis.
>
> But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the
> collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East
> cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions
> and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal
> disaster.
>
> Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal
> distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle
> East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western
> capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the
> disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book,
> how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been
> "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in
> Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.
>
> The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters,
> so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to
> ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to
> disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up
> on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What
> drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the
> streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to
> accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries.
> The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of
> the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property
> rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to
> Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The
> Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries
> belonged to their own people.
>
> And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed
> against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against
> "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in
> the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy:
> they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic
> mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the
> rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie
> of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain
> the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive
> financial con trick foisted on the voters.
>
> The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West.
> Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe –
> they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have
> – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as
> the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to
> anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank
> of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each
> gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their
> vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab
> dictator-brothers could imagine.
>
> I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it
> helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are
> interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank
> and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who
> AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their
> poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by
> threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations
> which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I
> believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are
> these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French
> than Rommel did in 1940?
>
> Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and
> CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as
> unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job
> started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me
> so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the
> Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an
> army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking"
> in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are
> "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".
>
> The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall
> Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social
> "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and
> Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the
> West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs,
> we can't touch them.
>
> The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that
> they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves.
> They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to
> blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And
> our reporters, too?
>
>
>
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