Wednesday, May 20, 2009

ANGER - February 4, 2009

It is wonderful how much I can learn about the US by watching Britain go through similar problems. Right now, I am watching the tide of anger sweeping across Europe in the wake of the collapse of the world’s finance and banking systems, much of it attributed to the hanky-panky of irresponsible banking originating in the predatory security manipulations around the mortgages in the US. All arose as part of the entrusting of the management of credit And to top it off, the winnings have disappeared, probably into the maze of money-laundering that the plutocrats arranged for themselves as tax dodges, in places like Belize that use their sovereignty to guarantee anonymity to the depositors of their banks. This money-laundering racket is at the heart of what the British call financial services, which has become this nation’s bread and butter since they stopped bothering to manufacture any actual things that anyone wanted to buy. Now into the mix of vanishing jobs and collapsing economies, comes a continental company to grab up some of the few left, in the building of a refinery, while the British workers who could do the work are displaced by more desperate ones from Eastern and Southern Europe, who are easier to intimidate and who have none of the worker rights the Brits have built up for themselves in the course of the turbulent XX Century. When the Brits scream in pain over this loss, the party that has the gall to call itself by the name of Labour reads them the riot act, pointing out that the deal they have made with the continental powers guarantees employers the right to the cheapest and most docile workers they can find anywhere on this continent. It masquerades under the name of freedom of movement for workers, just as the Right to Work laws in US guarantee not the right to a job but the liberty for the employers to smash unions and hire scabs. And all this is covered by endlessly repeating the lie that the Depression was caused by protectionism. But it does not look like the British workers will sit still for this latest betrayal.

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