Never having lived in a financial meltdown, it must be said it's a spectacular occurrence. Economic theoretical positions are being destroyed before our eyes. There is little agreement on which effects interventions by authorities are trying to control, or even what those interventions should be. Or even if there is any authority able to intervene, or should be making such intervention claims.
This last is more worrying because any regime with an authoritarian psychosis assumes that the regime can and should intervene in the lives of others and is welcoming this opening of fields of activity that individuals formerly played on.
What the forces of economics and failing institutions at national and international level will grind into history is going to happen - faster, slower, it has a geological inevitability. But what irresponsible and dishonest opportunism will ride on the shifts in power and control of resources is unveiling itself already. The loss of individual and private control over livelihood and life choices, currently making for a poor and restricted enjoyment of opportunity and potential, is becoming not consequential but ever more coercive.
Quite soon it may be difficult to withdraw deposits from any bank; formally made difficult by regime regulation in the name of maintaining confidence and orderly financial relations. It may become difficult to organise to obtain higher wages, and planned control of incomes will be centrally decided, though this will not be the same as the wage control policies of Wilson's day and other Labour former governments. Work itself will be reconceived not as the sale of labour for a given sum and in certain conditions, but as a way of qualifying for social existence and regime-surveilled and provided, 24/7 activity. In many ways it will be a revisiting of pre-capitalist feudal structures, with labour dues and fealty required by hierarchical local, and regional, power holders - known now as stake-holders, but carrying titles and centrally-awarded status and income in return for services rendered. They are in position today.
Freedom of movement, curtailed now, will become a sanctioned activity, rather than governed by cost and opportunity. Communications will need to be face to face for privacy to be ensured, so travel control (and the proposed national communications data base) will be of some regime urgency to install.
Choice will be the key propaganda concept masking the classing into consumption categories of the national population as their consumption behaviour is modelled and channelled into cost-effective provision for their category.
Watching the financial, and then economic earth quake is unnerving yet fascinating. Living its political aftermath needs mass involvement and assertion of individualism and effective control of governance and its growth and control agenda by defended and embedded state guarantees of freedom.
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The government should do as little as possible. We need to take it on the chin however bad it is and start again.
Not that this will happen of course...
Re a National Snooping Database.
My suggestion; most email clients allow you to add a "signature". This can be a message of any sort - I suggest ...
"Who is looking for the marijuana bombers?"
Two keywords that will alert the authorities. If 10 million of us have that signature, and email 10 times a day, that is 100 million emails with keywords A DAY.
That'll larn them. Drown them in data.
or it may just be chaos
to be honest, HG, I'm a bit doubtful that anyone or anything has the capability for executing the strategy you outline
bits and bobs of it, maybe; some of it already, even
but trying for totality & coherence has always eluded everyone - even the Church
Interesting (horrid) prognostications; your chief evidence re money, movement etc?
Little as possible isn't new Labour, is it tbr, except when it comes to doing everyday governance; rather they do initiatives, career advancement and cementing themselves in power.
How does that work with all the languages, including private languages, that are available Elby? Our children can be completely unintelligible to us using a fatal mix of Florence school slang in deepest Florentine dialect and accent and Brum dialect (actually, I think it might be Black Country but as it's impenetrable who knows).
So how would the key words technology work fo that? Or anyone could go to the Haddon library a choose themselves a language, or to SOAS, that might not exist any longer. Or is that just a kind of code vulnerable to other techniques? Swamping with data together with fantastical lying is always good though.
S, anecdotal, starting with us (though others too) trying to get our dollars out before the bad times rolled. We did it, but only when Mr HG, visiting another bank in Washington, turned up with every detail known to those familiar with obstructive bureaucracy and carried it off in cash (having had telephoned, and written instructions obstructed).
And then the experiences of Northern Rockers whether in their queues or having their internet access interrupted, while unplanned at first, was later planned and central instructions given for the simultaneous closure of all branches etc., that was reported in, I think, the Times. Those preparations will have been looked at closely by other shaky financials.
Also there is the long history of controls on the export of money, doubtless kept well up to date, and of the requirement for 'notice' of withdrawals that was commonplace particularly in building societies, etc. The arrangements are all there, all have been used before, and accepted when implemented.
If we can think it, ND, then we can look about for means and obstructions. The notable characteristic of the UK, as Sackerson remarked, is there is nothing to stop the Executive, and in particular the prime minister I would add, from doing anything they like, and again I would add before we get to the level of violence not associated usually with an advanced capitalist country.
While the economy and even more so financial services are open, the political system is almost an autarky - hence the tensions with the EU over loss of control. Having abandoned the spirit in which our state is operated, the country is undefended against the use of powers dormant since great external threat like war, or the losing of empire, needed them. We don't need to use them now, but this regime is playing with all the toys, and with all the moral judgement of children.
Chaos was what happened after the Black Death, and after the great migration into industrialised centres in the nineteenth century. Both resulted in widespread war, breaking out repeatedly over most of Europe. I don't believe for a moment that will be repeated; but the violence within societies, rather than between them, does seem to have arrived and the reassertion of civil peace might take the form of a new feudalism, rather than pluralist democracy, unless there is mass resistence in defence of individualism.
You are right about the Church, after it lost its economic base in England it lost against the state; but they have done well with their switch to a 'hearts and minds' control strategy - their virtual empire is powerful and Benedict is ferocious in trading what he has for earthly powers. How much the Church will move votes in Glasgow has already shifted the parliamentary timetable.
True, HG, but it is a start. And of course, the snoopers will have to snoop for every language, and - well, I don't think they are up to it frankly. Nevertheless, it is our bounden duty to give them as hard a time as possible. I am currently investigating various internet secrecy projects, such as TOR, with a view to anonymising my internet presence (http://www.torproject.org), and one can use anonymous proxies to hide your whereabouts, though they are highly variable in performance and efficacy, the more so the more Internet protocols (web, mail, news, blogs, etc. etc.) that one uses.
BUT - I do think the geeks will always be one step ahead of the authorities; and here in the free West ha ha ha we will see increased attempts to control the net.
All this makes very interesting reading HG, including the comments.
There is little much I can add only that....NuLab will be catapulted into obscurity, come the Revolution....Oops I mean't to say Come the impending General Election...
Since taking early retirement ten years ago, our hard earned and saved cash and investments, for our future, (no State hand-outs for us!), are disappearing as fast as Brown and his vile co-horts can get their greedy, corrupt, grasping, Socialist hands on them, to line their own pockets.
God they make me sick!
If there was such a thing as Socialism the World would be Eutopia.....
Who said 'All men are equal, but some are more equal than others' ? How true that is.
Brown and most of his chums have never done a real days work
in their lives.
Harumph!
Di.
Revolutions aren't us at all really Trubes. Revolutionaries are quite sly and good at pushing others to the front. Going honest and trustworthy into revolution would be a bad move.
Not being a good geek Elby, Angels will be swept up in the first pass.
I think the totalitarian regime you speak of is still quite a few turnings away.
Perhaps after a revolution ? Yes - but not quite yet.
What I do acknowledge is that all the requisite controlling technologies for a Big Brother State are rapidly falling into place.
What WOULD be highly dangerous is a backlash by the silent majority who are utterly fed up with lawlessness, depravity, cheating, sloth and falling standards.
The present batch of politicos are small-time amateur dictators - the real ones are yet to emerge.
What could take their place during an upheavel are REAL military men (hardened in war), REAL gangsters(breezing through lax border controls) and REAL Stasi (disaffected and angry productive men).
This period of economic woe will lead to such disaffection that the usurpation of the benevolent system of governance could well be innevitable.
After all ...
The promise of discipline, clean streets free of feral scum and the promise to reinvigorate our industries (however false) has much appeal about it in exchange for the duty to stay schtuum - bear in mind, especially that our freedom of speech is being taken away from us anyhow.
What is preferable ? A slide towards anarchy & barbarism or a slide towards some form of structured governance that delivers however dictatorial ?
So well done, Nu Labour. Not only have you squandered a golden economic legacy, you've also fragmented a moderate and well integrated society and turned it into one at risk of Nazism should this economic downturn become something worse than predicted.
A disturbing footnote here.
I rarely talk politics at work. The discussion among ten of us in the mess room, utterly fed up with the way our society is going, concluded with us agreeing that we all want machine guns and uniforms.
None of us are egoists, racialists, mysoginists or in any way nasty or impolite.
Now I'm taking two weeks off blogging to purge myself of all this negativity.
(I loved Elby's idea here.)
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