Janet Daley Hits Nail On The Head

It appears that Janet is on the verge of a major revelation.

The globalist Free Market Capitalists are the Neo-Conservatives whilst the Globalist World Government Fabians are the Neo-Trotskyites.

Both despise nationalism.

The Neo-Cons devastated the global economy in order to pave the way for the Neo-Trots.

The answer is a return to nationalist economics = BRITAIN FIRST - if we are to recover, not Marxist Globalism instead of Capitalist Globalism.



When Barack Obama and Gordon Brown see 'opportunity', we really do have a crisis
The Left is threatening our freedom by using the downturn to bolster the power of the state, says Janet Daley.

Last Updated: 7:37PM GMT 08 Mar 2009

Comments 4 | Comment on this article

The story so far: some capitalists behaved very badly. While this was going on, the socialists didn't ask questions because they were too busy spending the receipts that flowed from that behaviour. Now, the socialists – who were happy to look the other way during the good times or even to delude themselves into thinking that they were responsible for them – want to use the ignominy of the capitalists to seize the kind of power they thought they had lost forever.

You may quibble at my use of the word "socialist" to describe people who generally present themselves as friends of the free market, and who have repudiated full-scale nationalisation (even of the banks at a moment when that option might have appeared irresistible). So, as someone who spent her formative years on the Left, let me make clear that I am using the word to designate those who accept the primary tenet of Marxist ideology: that the economy can and should be controlled by the state.

In the hard version of this creed, it is acceptable for government to become totalitarian in order to accomplish such control. The softer version – which prevailed in much of Western Europe and Britain – was committed to achieving this through democratic means. By the end of the 1980s, the hard version had collapsed and the soft version was discredited.

Then, suddenly – a miracle! Free-market economics, which seemed to have won the historical argument hands down, is imploding. Now the very people who had embraced it as, at the very least, a milch cow for public-spending adventurism, can see an "opportunity". Yes, that is the word that both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama have taken to using to describe the current economic apocalypse.

In Gordon Brown's fantasy, this is an "opportunity" to exercise control over the whole world. Not just stricter regulation by national governments of their own economic institutions, but a wondrous new level of international regulation by supranational functionaries – to be appointed by whom? A World Government agency accountable to no electorate and with no democratic mandate from the populations over whom it will wield such power? Trotskyists used to say that Stalinist Russia had failed to achieve Utopia because it had embraced "socialism in one country" rather than going for "world revolution". Now, we are being told that Labour's market-led social justice programme failed because it opted for "regulation in one country" instead of understanding the need for "world regulation".

Maybe being an ex-Marxist is a bit like being a lapsed Catholic: you never quite get rid of the old thought patterns.

In the more overheated renditions of the Brown theme, there is talk of a "global vision for fairness", in which the very poverty that is being visited upon all the developed economies will somehow make it possible to redistribute wealth to the developing world.

Is he quite mad? Does he actually believe that the economic failure of rich countries will do anything but impoverish poor countries even further? Or that the moral righteousness of the intention to cure world poverty will, in itself, constitute some kind of cure for the banking collapse?

Meanwhile, Mr Obama – who gives the impression of being considerably out of his depth in the economic maelstrom – talks of an "opportunity" to "reorganise our priorities". He gave a major speech last week in which he actually seemed to suggest that the present crisis had been caused by America's failure to develop a universal health care system and to attend to the impending environmental disaster of global warming ("we made the wrong choices"), and that by focusing on these matters a way can be found out of the country's economic problems.

Is he quite mad? Does he really believe that the banking crisis and the recession were some kind of divine retribution for the absence of universal health care, and excessive carbon emissions? Or is he suggesting that a practical solution lies in spending money on health care and the development of alternative energy sources?

If it is the latter, then he is making a pitch for old-fashioned Roosevelt-style government-expenditure programmes which take money out of the productive part of the economy and bring state intervention into play in new dimensions of national life. It did not work for Roosevelt and it will not work now.

But maybe sentimental mythology matters more than historical reality: what Obama and Brown are both trying to do is to put themselves on the benevolent, morally attractive side of the argument by saying: we – your government – will act, intervene, take positive steps to help you. We will not stand by and let the hurricane winds of the economy blow you down. (Mr Brown has actually used the word "hurricane" to describe the crisis, as if it were a natural disaster which no one could have prevented.)

What neither the Prime Minister nor the President can admit is what is becoming more obvious every day (and which has been admitted by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key): there is precious little that any politician can do to resolve the present economic problems. The values of assets and property are simply going to have to fall from the grossly inflated points they reached under the debt bubble to what are generally accepted to be realistic levels. Then people will start to do business again – as eventually they must – and confidence will gradually return.

So are these politicians pretending that they have answers out of wilful deceit – out of the need to keep playing the game for partisan advantage? Or are they simply attempting to maintain some degree of public optimism about the future? (After all, an "opportunity" sounds better than a "debacle".)

Well, I grew up with the Left and what this looks like to me is a power grab: a seizing of the moment by the forces which always believed in state domination. The Left sees an opening here, first for telling a critical lie about the historical origins of this crisis, which was propelled as much by the Left-liberal determination to spread prosperity through easy credit to the poor, as by the greed of bankers. And then, out of the wreckage, to restructure the economy along the lines that it always wanted, complete with central controls over the pay levels in private financial institutions.

We are being led to believe that public debate should be all about economic mechanics when it should really be about political principle: just how many freedoms do we want to lose while governments pretend that they are the solution?

Janet Daley and Global Fabian Fascism

What the US and UK will seek to impose is not a national based corporate fascist state model, but an extension of the fabian international corporate fascist state.

Consumerism funds communism.

The business taxes fund The Servile State.

Political Correctness dominates the social sphere, consumerism dominates the private sphere.

We are trapped between the scylla of capitalism and the charybdis of communism.





http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/4903470/Is-a-form-of-state-capitalism-really-what-Gordon-Brown-wants.html


This has gone way beyond Lord Myners vs Sir Fred Goodwin. It has even gone beyond Government ministers vs private bankers. This is now an epic battle between Big Government and Big Business. The mud wrestling over who was responsible for the public relations catastrophe of one man's pension arrangements is not just a sideshow: it is a significant metaphor for the ideological struggle which will determine how the history of this economic cataclysm is written. And whichever side succeeds in composing the history will also win the right to run the world.

As Gordon Brown prepares for his first meeting with President Barack Obama this week, the political and economic order of the century is being fought over right now. On the one hand, there is some squalid and empty posturing (Mr Brown's threat to take legal action to confiscate the infamous Goodwin pension pot); on the other, a slew of wildly grandiose metaphysical references to good and evil.

Big Government is roaring back with a hubris and moral self-righteousness that would have seemed inconceivable even a year ago. Some of those architects of New Labour who had professed themselves enthusiastic converts to the idea that market forces were the only source of true prosperity are now reviving the old demonic rhetoric of the Eighties about private greed as the enemy of the public good.

Of course, all this noise is intended as a distraction from the Government's own culpability. But to grant that does not necessarily redress the damage being done to the cause of free markets in this war of attrition. To say that ministers failed only in the sense that they were not tough enough with this bunch of miscreants is to sell the pass. On this reading, Big Government was simply slipshod: ministers were "too soft" on capitalism and they failed in their duty to exercise proper control. So the good people were ineffective and sloppy and thus the bad people got away with their wicked intentions. For all their denial of any responsibility whatever, this is, in fact, the fairy story that the government hopes we will accept in the end.

So it is very, very important that we keep saying this: the economic crisis was not caused by the conscious malign intentions of bankers (given the choice, they would not actually have wished for the current disastrous outcome) but by catastrophic, systemic failures of judgment. In other words, by stupidity rather than malice. It was allowed to happen by governments, not simply because they slipped up in a happenstance sort of way. They were not just guilty of a "failure of regulation". Particularly in Britain (which is why we will be hit especially hard by the recession) government was directly implicated in the deluded belief that the economic cycle had been vanquished, that prosperity was now invincible (remember all Gordon Brown's proud talk of "entrenching stability") and that it was therefore acceptable to take unprecedented risks. This was not an oversight: it was actively connived at because the enormous wealth that was produced (or seemed to be produced) was a boon to Big Government. Did you ever wonder where all that money that Chancellor Brown was able to spend on the public services was coming from? Well now we know: from the tax revenues generated by the gross, over-inflated bubble that turned out to have been based on monstrous amounts of debt. It suited a high-spending government not to ask probing questions about the shedloads of wealth that were being made available to it – and that wild free ride helped to reinforce Mr Brown's absurd belief that he, alone in history, had found the alchemist's miracle: the secret solution to permanent economic growth.

So what does he do now that it has all gone so horribly wrong? He declares war. He refuses outright to accept any responsibility, not only for his government's obvious failure to understand what was going on in the markets, but for the sense in which he positively contributed to the idea that capitalism had now transcended the need to worry about risk. This is now, he wants us to believe, a straightforward fight between the lawless world of private finance and the beneficent protectors of the public interest – himself and his Big Government global allies.

In a speech last week, he laid it on the line: "Our task must be nothing less than to rebuild a financial system where it has failed, and then to create an economy in which banks are no longer serving themselves but are serving the public of this country." To create an economy? Well the "economy" is simply the sum total of people's wants and needs and the means of exchange that serve them. And banks (as opposed to individual bankers) must serve the public if they are to survive. These remarks of the Prime Minister's are simply nonsense. He went on to call for a new system of statutory international supervision and promised that there would be "no hiding place" for banks and firms that sought to evade the law. Well, there never has been. The current difficulties were caused by practices that were perfectly legal. Is he saying that excessive risk-taking will in future be criminalised? But successful capitalism relies on risk-taking – and how do we decide what is excessive except by using judgment and experience? Does Mr Brown plan to make good sense and sound decision-making legal obligations? If not, what exactly is he saying here? Is he out of his mind? Or is he knowingly spouting populist claptrap?

This week he will meet with Barack Obama – who is also talking Big Government vengeance. But Mr Obama, for all his threats to cap the pay of bankers, knows that the US Constitution will never allow him to take over the levers of private wealth creation, let alone entertain dreams of "creating an economy". So he can use the presidency as a bully pulpit without too much fear of having to take actual control of the country's financial institutions. But Mr Brown may find that, out of political desperation, he has talked himself (and us) into demanding that the state must actually run the economy. Clearly, this is not what he would want: even he does not believe that Whitehall mandarins would be capable of directing an entrepreneurial economy.

The danger is that he will be trapped by his own rhetoric and be forced to embrace a form of state capitalism (which is the technical definition of "fascism"). Those who worry about the loss of our traditional rights and freedoms might want to give that prospect a thought.