Woolworthless

Generations of British children got their first psychedelic technicolour shopping experience inside one of F.W.Woolworth's art-deco emporia. Amid the scent of castor sugar and salted peanuts, many got their first warm hit of consumerism. Generations of spotty saturday teenagers grunted their way through their duties there to subsidise their night on the lash . Their unemployed friends would come in to gloat and browse and shoplift and get some more giggling photos done in the booth.
So many people have deep attachment to the name. It reminds them of their childhood, there are vague architectural associations with that other art-deco haven of youth, The Odeon, where, amid the unique scent of popcorn, Silk Cut and fish, generations of Britons discovered sex.
These memories have helped lull the British, at least, into a sense that Woolworths was more a maternal national institution than a business. Something the rates paid for, or the National Trust. And now it's to vanish from British high streets. A victim of the notion that as long as rubbish is cheap enough, someone will buy it.
This must be what a recession feels like. It will for the 30,000 or so who lose their jobs.

BUY FOR VICTORY! Says Darling

You too can do your bit to support our gallant boys at The Front by going out immediately and spending every penny you've got on the most useless rubbish you can possibly find, anything to put money in the accounts of businesses so that the thing that works the spring that turns the thingumebob can keep working until the next Big Push. Buy For Victory!
The message from Andrew Darling in today's apparently historic attempt to keep us out of the soup kitchens, with its 2.5% cut in VAT and its promise to fight the next election on a manifesto of tax increases, is basically Let Your Shopping Help Our Shipping, or Combined Operations Includes You. Who knows, perhaps Darling was trying to say that:

this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Since the last ten years have been the history of pointless spending, it seemed sensible in these unprecedented times to carry on exactly as before. We are being told by the telly pundits that this 'throws out the rulebook' and other flamboyances, but the solution is still to buy and sell garbage we don't need, only more so, if possible. The opposite of everything which the slogans of the 1940's urged, but then, times change. Capitalism is always making such great strides in these matters. Take The Squander Bug when You Go Shopping!
It is therefore our duty to put our shoulders to the wheel, our backs to The Front and our noses to the grindstone, and bunker down to spend all our money as fast as our entrepreneurial superiors need us to.
As we were told on July 6th 2005, our courage, cheerfulness and resolution will bring us Victory. And then, after the next election, and the one after that, we will still cheerfully and resolutely be paying the price of rescuing capitalism from itself. So that even if the Cameron and Boy Wonder win the next election, they will be saddled with such an ideologically intolerable burden of debt that they might be better off losing, and let Gordon Brown pick up the pieces. If they win, it will only be for one term.
Whatever the intentions of today's desperate Darling Day landings, or how much histrionic adrenalin pumped through George Osbourne's veins while he tried to placate his own back benches from the dispatch box, or whether either tactic are likely to succeed, Osborne is no Nye Bevan, and the tories are now faced with the prospect of offering the electorate a range of public service cuts or more public service cuts in their next manifesto. And there wasn't much else in it to begin with.
There was no mention of any measures to recover some of the money we lent to the banking system last month - by plugging tax loopholes, for instance. Nor any mention of breaking the banker's credit strike. Winston knew what to do with essential workers on strike in a crisis. Perhaps we might even see the employment of Darling Boys; keen young accountants and business studies graduates drafted in to the banks to help maintain productivity. Some might call them blacklegs, but those who live by the blackleg can die by the blackleg.
No doubt the swots at the FT will point out this omission in due course.
bank strike

War Against Recession

This report puts into words what many are thinking.
The RAND Corporation recently presented a shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession.
Now there's a surprise. Massive demand and instant consumption at the same time.
It was only a matter of time. So countless lives will be lost. That is the price of free trade, apparently.
Whatever the RAND corps may or may not have done, anyone with a speck of historical and economic sense can put two and two together in a Depression and come up with 1939.
Colin Powell's bizarre outburst doesn't make things any clearer.

"Colin Powell appeared on Meet The Press and stated
“There’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.”

We don't know what we don't know.

Sohu.com article.
Prison Planet
Pakistan Daily

recession

Merry Monday.

Phew!
After a weekend's frantic international dealing and shinanegans, and a £35 billion buyout of key British banks, the stock market breathed a sigh of relief and recorded gains.
 People are naturally angry that their money is being spent on rescuing the banks, but the more businesses go bust, the cheaper they will be when the government buys them. So the choice facing capitalism is stop sulking and get back to work, or risk being an ex-company in a planned economy, bought at the global bargain basement bankruptcy sale. When the going gets tough, the rich go shopping. And at times of extreme crisis, only the nation state is rich enough. Any renounciation of power, any return to the days of the poisonous free market experiment, will then be seen as an act of charity which the electorates of most countries will not allow their governments to indulge in.
 Politics has a chance to redeem itself and get back to the job its voters want it do: provide them with security and the conditions to make a life worth living; not force them onto a lifelong hamster-wheel of debt, consumption, promotion-backstabbing, training, bonding, image-building, networking, property-worship and suspicion of everyone except their nearest family, while they last.
 And as the worst is far from over, any failure of the political classes we choose to take the reins from the money-men and give them back to the people will end up with us all carrying guns to the soup-kitchens. So we have to elect the right politicians.
crash08

IT'S WAR!

Your Country Needs
YOUR ACCOUNTS

The first Crash War has broken out. Britain financially invaded Iceland yesterday in response to the treatment of the British financial enclave by the brutal Icelandic authorities. Financial nuns have been savaged on financial tables.
Key British assets have been destroyed by the bankruptcy of this new financial rogue state, and so we have retaliated against Icelandic assets in Britain to defend our national interest. War with suits and ethernet cards.
If the collapse of Lehman's was the shot in Sarajevo, this is something like the invasion of Gallant Little Belgium. If Iceland, like Serbia, decides to seek support from Russia - what larks! Across europe, nations will be fighting like rats for the last scraps of credit-credibility. Does this mean we now have to invent an insulting nickname for Icelanders? As I write, hundreds of ex-human beings at The Sun are trying to kill the English language in the hunt for the popular new hate-name. I bet.
The point is that giving bankers unrestricted access to the internet - the Big Bang - was like giving a three year old a candyfloss machine - or a machine gun.
After a decade of gluttony, the result is a diabetic, inert, obscenely bloated, lazy, corrupt teenager, now desperately trying to cope with the collapse of its health. Not unlike the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as was. The only difference we can hope for is that whereas the Imperial structure which collapsed in 1914 was suffering from geriatric problems, the problems of the new digital democracy are merely adolescent growing pains, self indulgence and tantrums.
The only benefit of war is absurdity.
Meanwhile the walls are running red with panic. Shares prices collapsing this morning along with shipping rates, commodity prices, even copper - which a few weeks ago gave us the urban legend of the penny in your pocket being worth more than its face value. Today, every copper penny in your pocket counts. Everyone is digging a financial bunker.
The Tehran stock market, however is apparently doing just fine. Which is nice for them. Buy Iranian preferred now to avoid disappointment - would seem to be the message. Or abandon the abominable hedonism of of usury. The Invisible Hand of the market writes; and, having writ, moves on indeed. The Market works in wondrous ways its good work to perform. It may look crazy to us, but trust them, the financial high priests know best, they will get us all out of this terrible mess if we let them. Exactly as they always have.
crash08

Paddy Power

Calls for concerted european approach to bank crisis. Otherwise:

Step 1. Ireland guarantees all deposits in major banks.
Step 2. Nervous money flows into Irish banks courtesy of the internet. Grand.
Step 3. Other countries have to do the same or risk a drain on deposits when the banks need them most.
Step 4. Countries now in full competition for nervous money.

And so it begins.
At the conference, Ireland argues that its' need is the greater, being in a deeper property recession than most. Spain supports it.
Germany argues that Ireland should have thought of that before getting involved. It wasn't as if they hadn't been warned etc etc.
Result, lengthy impotent bickering in the style of the League of Nations instead of the decisive co-operation which is needed.

Meanwhile, the class war continues in America. Wall Street is now paying a nice visit to America saying

'This is a nice society you have here. It would cause us much distress to learn that it had been destroyed by an economic depression or whatnot. And when you consider that for a reasonable trillion dollars to our welfare fund, you will have complete peace and mind for yourself and your family. We are sure you will make the responsible decision.
We will be back on friday for our donation. We are not used to disappointment.'

It's the American way.

crash08

From Crunchie to Crusty. The Value of Your Home Will Go Down.

The package of assistance for Crunchies at risk of repossession has naturally raised the old question of personal responsibility and the virtue of the modest, sustainable lifestyle; of living within your means and other subversive Dickensian notions - often in newspapers which exist because of the advertising they sell which urges people to get in as much debt as possible. This hilarious wave of anti-consumerist moralising from the crunch-crazed high priests of Consumerism entirely misses the point.
Whatever Alastair Darling announces, the object of the exercise is not to 'bail out' the individuals, however feckless or misled by the massed propaganda of the market, but to bail out the market itself. Rescuing individuals from eviction will deliver a new generation of healthy consumers again, and prevent them from dropping out of the cycle of work and spend, thereby feeding the market again in due course. A consumer saved is a consumer earned, after all. And we can't have them all turning into disillusioned crusties, can we? And it's a short step from Crunchie to Crusty.
An added bonus is that this 'getting and spending' lays waste their powers as it did to every other generation, smothering understanding under a routine of drudgery and gluttony.
Help for mortgagees about to be made homeless is not the mythical Nanny State of right-wing fantasy, mollycoddling the individual and creating a nation of children, but a purely pragmatic way of mollycoddling a market which has feasted not wisely but too well, so that it can keep on doing so. crash08