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Post by mrsonde on Oct 6, 2019 6:03:12 GMT 1
Hmmm...quiet around here. Allow me to stoke the embers a little.
It seems that we’re coming to the End Days at last, so it’s worth I think repeating my outline from three or more years ago of what I think our negotiating strategy with the EU should have been from the start (we’d be completely out by now, and May would probably still have been in power: so it’s swings and roundabouts). Somewhat to my bewilderment, this strategy has never been pursued, and I’ve yet to see it even discussed, anywhere – though, reading between the lines, I think Boris and Frost are inching towards it (presumptious of me, no doubt, but noblesse oblige and I have managed to make him aware of it.)
Ma chere Mrs.Merkel, here’s what we propose:
1) The island of Ireland shall become a Special Economic Area, where the full zero-tariff zero-border check Free Trade Agreement we hope to eventually achieve Europe-wide shall apply. All goods and services regulations that currently pertain in the EU and the UK shall pertain across the whole island. At present this will make no difference at all; but in future, should our regulatory regimes diverge, and should no FTA have yet have been reached, the two regulations shall exist alongside each other as both equally valid. 2) This arrangement shall apply only on the island of Ireland, until such full FTA is achieved, and will apply only to valid EU or GB trade to the island of Ireland; and, from the island of Ireland to the EU and UK, only to goods and services of Irish origin. 3) This means that goods and services of British or mainland European origin can not be imported into Eire or N.Ireland for re-export to the EU or GB, without becoming subject to the full tariff and regulatory regimes of either. Standard WTO border checks shall be required to ensure this regime is not circumvented. This border is the coastline of the island of Ireland, and such checks shall be conducted at the ports of Eire and N.Ireland on egress. 4) The only difference between EU and UK law that shall apply on the island of Ireland concerns the Freedom of Movement of citizens principle: this will no longer apply, as between any other third countries. (This last to give them a face-saving something to horse-trade - N.)
Eh, voila. Yours, with or without an up, (a votre gout.)
Boris. PC, PM.
PS. Please note that this proposed arrangement shall require no border of any kind, beyond the one that already hazily exists, will disrupt trade on the island in no way whatsoever (it will in fact inevitably tremendously boost Irish prosperity by the obvious attraction to inward investment), will require no time-limited “backstop” or other disputatious quibbles such as the abjugation of sovereignty and the violation of anterior and superior international Treaty obligations, will not be objected to by the people of N.Ireland or Eire, and will in no way hinder the immediate progression onto our negotiations to an FTA (in which minor matters like goods labelling, mutual recognition of standards, etc. will of course be negotiated in the normal manner. Please also note that this arrangement is entirely in accord with WTO rules.) Please also note that the above proposal is now the policy of HM Government and will be applied, as according to HMG's obligations under International Law, unilaterally following the UK's withdrawal from the EU, with or without an agreement. (That is to say, any border controls or tariff impositions in the RoI will not be reciprocated, not directly anyway, hurrrumphhh: they will be entirely down to you, and will be, furthermore, as Mr.Varadkar and M.Barnier and M.Juncker have all previously asserted, in unilateral, unprovoked, and unjustifiable violation of the International Treaty of the Good Friday agreement of which both the RoI and the EU are co-guarantors.)
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Post by mrsonde on Oct 7, 2019 11:30:59 GMT 1
Barnier: Mais non! This is quite unacceptable, Prime Minister. Absolutement! Ireland can not be made to be another Andorra or Liechtenstein, half in and half out. The integrity of the Single Market is sacrosanct. Desole, mais c'est fini.
Boris: Oh well. Can't say we didn't try.
Barnier: Beh...alors?
Boris: Well, I guess you won't be giving us that Extension I just asked for, eh?
Barnier: But of course! We have no deal as it stands...
Boris: But, as you say, you won't give us one, and refuse to negotiate.
Barnier: Non, non, we have signed a deal with you already.
Boris: Democratically rejected I'm afraid, three times. It's null and void.
Barnier: In that case...
Boris: In that case we will have an Election, sooner or later. Not even the Liberals will keep insisting on more and more extensions, and not even Mr.Corbyn will keep refusing a General Election, for months and months and potentially years on end. And when that happens, the country will give its verdict on your refusal to negotiate.
Barnier: Our understanding, Monsieur Johnson, is that your government will be made to fall, and Monsieur Clarke or Speaker shall reign for a period, while we obtain a satisfactory deal. The UK shall remain in the Customs Union, and Social Europe. Desole.
Boris: You believe such a deal will somehow pass through our Parliament?
Barnier: Errrr...who knows? But if not...You will have another referendum, n'est pas? The deal with Monsieur Berkow, or Remain. Desole.
Boris: You underestimate the temper of the British stock, sir.
Barnier: Ahhh, desole. My regards to your...errr...well, n'importe quoi. Eh beh. Bon chance, mon ami!
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Post by mrsonde on Oct 8, 2019 7:41:13 GMT 1
Oh, hell, will this fiasco never end, ffs?
Cue Morrissey:
I've been dreaming of a time when The English are sick to death of Labour and Tories
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Post by mrsonde on Oct 8, 2019 11:12:52 GMT 1
So Merkel has finally come out and admitted it, what anyone with any savvy at all has seen with clarity from the start. Europe will never accept any deal that results in N.Ireland leaving the Customs Union. It's what Varadkar, Barnier and Verhofstadt have been saying over and over for three years at least. The only people who have been trying to deny it are Clark ("pooh pooh, it's sheer paranoid fantasy that the EU are planning to lock us in") and May, along with the rest of the Remainer (Vaisey) faction in the Tory party - yet they're not deaf or stupid people, especially; they merely believe the people are.
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Post by mrsonde on Oct 8, 2019 12:01:00 GMT 1
Which reminds me...and good stuff, irish heart english blood, and so on...the Secret History of the Troubles (all on iPlayer, I think) has been quite amazing, a real Ken Burns level landmark in history documentary making. Watching the last two episodes something fairly earth-shaking slowly dawned on me as a possibility, and the more I mull it over and let it sink in the more it makes sense. It seems to me possible - I would say now that I'd say it was more than likely, in fact - that Adams and McGuinness were...I won't say agents of MI5 or the RUC, and probably not direct informers, but I do now think they must have been "turned" against the provisional IRA, sometime in the early 80s (when they effectively pulled off a coup, took the organistaion over, and changed its overall strategic direction (away from military action towards political settlement.) Key decisions Adams then took eventually led to the IRA's effective neutering if not operational destruction. It's very hard to see how McGuinness could not have been aware of it if Adams had indeed decided to thus undermine the "war" (rather than just actually achieve it, unintentionally.) And this would make sense at last of a mystery that has always really stumped me - how Paisley could suddenly become best buddies with a blood-drenched sworn enemy like McGuinness. If true, this would surely be the most incredible intelligence coup of the 20th century - I knew MI5 were outstanding in that conflict, but this would be something else entirely - even more astonishing than if Wilson and Hollis really had been both paid agents of Moscow, for example (the jury's still out on that one, I think.)
No one on the programmes has actually had the nerve to say this heresy out loud. But the makers somehow managed to interview some very heavy-duty active service operatives from those days, and there's no question that they now have their deep suspicions, about Adams at least.
If so...if so...Well, I'm no longer in the least cross about the very soft and respectful ride the British Establishment gave McGuinness when he died. Or that both of them were so inexplicably allowed to wander about their murderous business so freely, when everyone knew beyond question they were senior IRA Army Council leaders. It would also explain perhaps the biggest mystery of all - why nothing came of the Castlereagh raid (except their effective surrender - or laying down of arms, to put it less emotively.)
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Post by mrsonde on Oct 10, 2019 7:33:19 GMT 1
And now Blair too feels emboldened enough to finally reveal his true colours. He doesn't want an Election, even after the extension goes through - he believes the risk of the people voting in the Tories and thereby Brexit going through is too high, given "the way our electoral system works". So he argues for a second Referendum instead - then and only then, when that issue is finally laid to rest, normal Democracy can be restored. Otherwise, because the anti-Brexit forces would be divided and thus diluted in a General Election, we might end up leaving even though the majority were against it.
But, Mr.Blair, this objection to our democratic system could be made about any issue at any time in any election period, Andrew Neil for some reason didn't say. I don't remember you campaigning for PR when the referendum on that issue was before the country. Neither did Neil object to Blair's next piece of sophistic chicanery, "I don't understand why this government is so against putting the issue to the people if they're so sure that No Deal is what they want." But Mr,Blair, your proposal is not to give the people that choice, is it, as you and others campaigning for a second referendum have argued very forcefully many times. You say that No Deal should not be an option on the ballot - that the choice will be between Mrs.May's deal, or whatever even softer Labour version might be negotiated, and Remain. It would be Remain, or Remain in all but name - that's the choice you want to offer the people, not a confirmation of any form of Brexit that anyone who voted to leave would recognise. For this piece of pointless theatre you want to suspend the ability of the people to elect the Government of this country. I put it to you Mr.Blair that this sort of undemocratic elitist trickery is precisely the reason the Leave side won the referendum in the first place.
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Post by fascinating on Nov 13, 2019 8:45:01 GMT 1
Boris has come back with a deal that is, if anything, worse than the one Theresa May got (we still have to pay £39 billion, and there will now be an effective border between Ulster and Britain).
So much for the idea that the EU would be falling over themselves to strike a deal that is favourable to us.
The whole thing is a colossal waste of time.
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 14, 2019 15:45:57 GMT 1
Boris has come back with a deal that is, if anything, worse than the one Theresa May got Not at all. The whole objection - the principal, decisive one at any rate - to May's deal is that we would not have been leaving the EU at all. We would not legally be able to - unless, that is, N.Ireland had a plebiscite one day and decided to leave the UK, whereupon we would be allowed to go. Supposedly that is what we owe. That was never going to be renegotiable. Inevitably, one way or another. The only question was what sort of border it would be (as there is one of sorts now.) This is the least painful possibility, for both sides. I don't think anyone ever had an idea that fanciful, or expressed it. On the other hand, they will be keen to strike a deal that promoted free trade and unfettered access to our market as much as possible. Oh no. The whole thing was essential, the sine qua non for the future survival of this country as a political entity. Many people don't care about that much: they believe if they think about it at all that the United States of Europe will somehow preserve the values and principles that have been painfully forged in this country over centuries. All the evidence points in the opposite direction, and even a cursory knowledge of history - even merely 20th Century history - should tell anyone that such a naively optimistic prayer is a sleepwalking act not only of the greatest criminal foolhardiness but of the deepest possible betrayal of what this country is. Personally, I would have greatly preferred to have left on a No Deal basis, given the EU's intransigence. To address the issue of nanny's hand: I strongly believe that it would have resulted in much stronger economic prosperity within a few years - that is, I completely reject the models used by the Treasury and OECD and World Bank and the multinationals that all so profit from the neoliberal orthodoxy that now (temporarily, by force majeur) dominates such projections. They're wrong, deeply misguided - and Jimmy Goldsmith, who pointed all this out way back in the 80s, was wholly correct, and has been proven to be.
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Post by fascinating on Nov 16, 2019 9:02:30 GMT 1
Liam Fox said that 'Coming to a free trade agreement with the EU should be "one of the easiest in human history" because our rules and laws are already the same, the international trade secretary has said. ' www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-40667879/eu-trade-deal-easiest-in-human-historyNobody mentioned, before June 2016, that we would have to stump up £39 billion to leave, did they? You may well know more about such things than I do. All I can see at the moment is the distinct possibility of Ulster ceasing to become part of the UK, and quite possibly Scotland leaving too. We joined the EU in 1973, can you please explain how we have remained as a political entity for nearly half a century, as members, yet it is now essential for our survival to leave? I know you want a no deal brexit, but the 5 major business organisations have been begging and pleading with the government to avoid no deal.
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 16, 2019 11:55:27 GMT 1
Quite so, and it's quite true. That's not at all the same idea as the one you expressed, is it? It's not to leave. It's supposedly already legally entailed debt obligations - projects committed to, pension costs, blah blah. Now I have no doubt that this figure is far too high, and any impartial court would come up with less than half such a legitimate debt, but May and Robbins having agreed to it, there's no way the EU side were ever going to allow that negotiation to be reopened. If we'd left with No Deal, then we could have had fun with it. Huh? Well, look - that's going to happen anyway, it's nothing to do with this Brexit malarkey: it's simply inevitable, given demographic change over the next twenty years. And jolly good thing too, isn't it? A large majority of people in the UK certainly think so, never mind Ireland. Well, that's another issue. If they want to leave, good luck to them. If they think they'll be allowed to join the EU - without adopting the Euro, and like Greece drastically slashing their profligate public spending - they've got another think coming. For the English, of course, it'll be an enormous increase in prosperity overnight - bigger even than finally being rid of Northern Ireland. We joined the EEC in 1973 (after Heath was forced to make it a resigning issue, incidentally - plus ca change.) Even then prescient voices - people as politically diverse as Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, incidentally, to show this is not a matter of left-or-right - were clearly pointing out that it was a betrayal, a surrender of sovereignty to an undemocratic body that would never stop growing, irresistably putting out its tentacles to grab ever more power. Now, after half a dozen more treaties getting ever closer to full federal control, the abilities of its individual "members" to act independently in terms of their social policies, foreign policies, tax policies, immigration policies, even to set their own internal budgets, have almost entirely gone. We've acted as something of a brake on this inexorable process, and Merkel has belatedly somewhat ineffectually been trying to resist, but you've only to see who they've appointed to replace Juncker and Tusk to realise that nothing's going to deter them from pursuing their drive to full political integration, least of all the democratic will of their peoples. Given the entirely predictable EU intransigence, I said. Obviously, that wasn't the ideal outcome - but it should most definitely have been our opening negotiating strategy. In reality, I mean, not just as a Maybot soundbite. As I said, they profit from neoliberal globalisation very nicely, thankyou. They're very content to see large surplus pools of labour prepared to work for low wages, to be able to source supplies from countries able to manufacture in virtually feudal conditions, to be able to shift their capital around so no particular government has a right to tax it wherever it's actually earned. They have no loyalty or sense of obligation to any particular society - their interest is in how much money they personally can extract from their corporate concerns, and their only constraint is in doing so they have to ensure their shareholders get some sort of return too. I'm afraid more or less the same sort of logic goes for the wonks in the Treasury and all the IMF clones (and by the grease of revolving doors it's the same sort of people staffing and running them. People like, for example, Mark Carney and Christine Lagarde, both of whom have been found guilty of financial crimes that if any normal person had committed would have put them in eternal obloquy after at least five years in jail.) There is a rationale, of course, generating this logic, these projections of doom and gloom - and I daresay that most of them actually genuinely have faith in it. But examined closely and in any depth that rationale doesn't make sense - not even economic sense, never mind moral or social or philosophical. When I did my Economics A Level in the mid 70s the ideas that undeerpin these projections were on the lunatic fringe - they were openly called fascist, when people actually still understood what that term really meant.
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 16, 2019 18:33:12 GMT 1
But as a general aside I think it's a curious thing, that people give so much weight to what "business organisations" say is or is not good for the health of the nation - even its economic health. We would never have abolished slavery or the Corn Laws or child labour or extended the franchise or introduced inheritance duties or allowed unions if that was really the determining voice of how we should govern the country. It's the same principle as the first question anyone - especially any journalist - should ask these multi-millionaires like Grieve or Soubry or Clark or Heseltine, who are all so stricken by principled anxiety about the future economic "catastrophe" of leaving the EU: how much of your personal wealth relies on us remaining in, of the status quo continuing unabated? That much, really? That being so - can your opinion be that objective? Should you in fact be allowed to have any influence on this country's political policy on the matter? Shouldn't you resile from the issue? If you own slaves, or if you're just invested in the sugar or cotton industries, should you be allowed to determine whether we abolish the practice of owning people?
The issue of the prognostications of the Treasury, Bank of England, IMF and so on, is slightly more complicated, and admittedly deserving of more consideration. But, given their dismal failure to be anywhere near accurate in their predictions generally, not by much. You think things will go downhill given this alteration, if other things remain equal (i.e. don't change), do you? But things will change, won't they - have you calculated what people will do in these new circumstances? No, you can't, because you don't have a crystal ball, and being civil servants know fuck all about how real people operate, and how real livings are actually earned? Why are you pretending otherwise then?
Well, we are very very clever people and have first class degrees in Economics or PPE, I would remind you, and have a detailed analytical understanding of how the economy works...
It has been virtually impossible to get a significant post or receive any research grant in any university in the Western world since the mid-80s if you were not a signed-up proponent of the neo-liberal Economics orthodoxy. This politically-correct strangulation - probably more severe than in any other academic field save Women's Studies - has even affected the few remaining Marxist economists still clinging to their academic posts, which is why even the far-Left like the Corbynistas have swallowed it all. Everything comes down to the magic numbers of volume of trade, growth in GDP, and hence tax revenues. The fact that over half of GDP is now accounted for by consumption and government expenditure means that the most important factor for guiding policy is to ensure your population grows - never mind what costs might be incurred: that's irrelevant. Your tax revenues and your necessary spending will rise - the rest is down to social policy, which is nothing to do with us. The same with Trade theory - as long as it's increasing, economic wealth is growing, never mind what sort of trade, and who exactly is benefiting from it. It used to be the case that for the national account what mattered was the balance of trade - if you sold less than you were buying you were going to get poorer, and the more you continued this trade pattern the more this was going to be so. Well - I don't think this humble little domestic truth has really changed any - it was true in the 60s and 70s and it's true now. The only difference is that Nixon took us off the Gold Standard and so governments no longer fall because of it - we can hide it in the general floating currency money-printing inexorable inflationary confusion - while working people get comparatively poorer in real terms, bought off from seeing this stark truth with subsistence stipends like "tax credits", and housing benefit, and people with the capital get comparatively very much richer.
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Post by fascinating on Nov 20, 2019 9:49:55 GMT 1
So why has it taken 3 years to not get a free trade agreement with the EU?
You will say that, by staying in, we would have to pay something like that amount, and more, in the many years of contributions going forward. But the promise of the leavers was that we would have £350 million a week extra in our pockets on leaving. Nobody said "once we have paid off the tens of billions that we owe". If they had, I don't think people would have voted to leave.
After writing about the necessity of leaving for the "future survival of this country as a political entity. " you appear to be extremely cavalier about the loss to the UK of Ulster and Scotland, leaving only a rump of a political entity that was the UK.
Throughout over 4 decades of membership, we have been able to set our own social policies, foreign policies, have our own currency and set our own budgets, and kept our nation together.
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 21, 2019 10:46:08 GMT 1
Because of Theresa May's complete incompetence, deliberate or not (her conducting of an undermining negotiation in secret behind her official ministerial one suggests the former). If she'd done as I'd outlined at the outset we would have been out long ago, conducting completely free trade while negotiations for a full settlement trundle on with complete public indifference, as these things do. She allowed herself -this country, the whole Leave prospectus - to be neutered by this Irish border question, when it was entirely in our hands to completely defuse it from the start, putting all the pressure on them instead.
The truth is I believe she never wanted to leave at all, and with her little cabal from the Treasury cobbled together a scheme which if she could get passed in Parliament would mean that we never would. But she couldn't - again, because of her complete incompetence as a political leader.
Thus, we never actually got around to negotiating a trade deal. You do understand that is the case, don't you? We haven't even started haggling about such an agreement?
No, I would say that according to the EU, and May and Robbins apparently, we would have to pay that much whatever we did. The contributions going forward would be on top. I would merely point out that if in fact this figure is accurate, the true cost of our membership has always been well over twice the official headline figure, and always has been, as observers like Goldsmith and Farage have always pointed out.
If such a "promise" had in fact ever been made, it would have been quite true (an underestimate by at least a half, if by some perverse reason you can give the EU any accounting credibility at all) - though I don't understand why you don't call it a "pledge", in line with current approved propaganda protocol.
Actually, the issue of settling our debts was discussed - at that point the EU was claiming the figure was more than a hundred billion. But what you Remainers have never come close to grasping - which is why you lost the vote - is that for Leavers there were and are much more important issues than money, or even the wider economic impacts. To the extent that it was worthy of any consideration most people are fully conscious that such economic projections and "promises" are complete pie-in-the-sky.
I admit I'm indifferent about the prospect - disinterested, anyway. The reunification of Ireland would please me very much, to be frank - a long overdue correction to a deeply shaming historical injustice. As a democrat and a libertarian I would also be happy to see Scotland becoming independent, if that's what the majority of its people choose to be, and the same goes for Wales - or, as with the Catalan situation, any other part of the UK. I strongly believe in the nation state, you see, if it serves as the guarantor of liberty and justice and the enabler of democratically determined law and power. The problems of Ulster and Scotland derive from the deficits in the provision of these values, resulting from the historical circumstances by which they became part of "the UK" in the first place, and the recalcitrant tardiness of the English in redressing them - I do not have the time to recount all that, I'm afraid. I would only point out that the reasons the Scots and Irish Republicans are able to argue so successfully their case are the self-same reasons that the majority of English wish to leave the EU. I would go further and say that the apparent paradoxical wish of the Scots and Irish to stay in the EU is explained principally by their intuition that it's a route by which they satisfy, however partially, their desire to escape the suzerainty of England.
You do understand that the EEC was not the same animal as the EC or the EU, don't you? That the treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon to name just the two most important were not cobbled together just for the fun of it?
We have, very largely due to sheer good fortune and circumstantial chance, managed to stay out of the Eurozone, and Schengen, and we are only a semi-official signatory to the Stability Pact (though I very much doubt this anomalous status would give Corbyn or Swinson enough wriggle room to actually deliver on their manifesto borrowing programs - there'd certainly be a showdown with Brussels, and more decisively with Frankfurt, and neither of them have given the slightest indication that they have the steeliness to resist such pressure.) Now, these fortuitous escapes were not delivered as a matter of political policy, decided by democratic consent - on the contrary, to the extent that they were issues for electoral purview at all it was the policy of all the main parties to ASAP join them all. How long will Frankfurt allow this anomalous and "unfair" good fortune to continue? Who knows - who knows what the aftermath of the next economic collapse and consequent political rejigging might be. By any historical precedence, the result will either be a fragmentation, whereby the members will necessarily reclaim their national sovereignty as the only possible remedy to the failure of the Euro, or it will be an accelerated conglomeration, whereby the only source of wealth and stability enforces its rule and ekes out its largesse to quell the chaos (the Germans are quite efficient in quelling chaos, as we know - I leave it to you to make your own judgement about their largesse.) I have no idea which scenario will actually unfold - it largely depends, I suspect, on whether Boris or Corbyn manages to "win" this election. That is - to what extent will we have disentangled ourselves from the EU, and regained some economic and fiscal autonomy, and to what extent will Sterling still somehow retain any base respectability?
What I'm saying is, one, you like most Remainers under-appreciate the extent to which we have lost sovereignty already, and consequently have effectively zero democratic control or even influence on the body that imposes most of the laws that govern us; and two, my warning was explicitly about the future inevitable acceleration of this process - an impending future, if we don't leave, one that's just around the corner. You're aware that Deutsche bank is bankrupt, and almost certainly Goldman too - that the Fed have had to step in to fund the Repo (base money) market? That is - the next banking crisis is already here? That the banks no longer have the capital or the trust in each other, the global financial system, to lend to each other? The problem wasn't solved, it's just being hidden at the highest possible level (there is no further last-lender resort): in fact, there's nearly ten times as much unfunded systemic debt as there was in 2008 - the house of cards is even more grotesque and unbalanced and when it falls this time no amount of money-printing is going to maintain the illusion that it can still stand.
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 25, 2019 16:02:40 GMT 1
Here's a staggering fact, if you really think about it.
Michael Bloomberg's personal wealth after the 2008 crash was a little over 20 billion dollars. Well, it was a little less before the crash, just to be clear - no Warren Buffetts or Jamie Dimons throwing themselves out of Wall Street skyscrapers this time around, Obama and Gordon Brown saved the world and made sure of that: which is why Bloomberg has switched to the Democrats, presumably, in humble gratitude for their heroic sacrifice. Ten million people lost their homes and millions more lost their jobs in the States alone, fifty million saw their pensions ransacked, but they were just little people, who made "bad choices" - what was important was keeping the system afloat, right? And boy did they. So in the decade since, working people's income has remained stagnant - throughout the Western world pretty much - and the middle class has actually seen their's shrink, in real terms, but Michael Bloomberg, thank goodness, has seen his wealth more than double, to 58 billion dollars. It was a struggle, of course, times have been hard - can you imagine the labour and the amount of good choices demanded to actually earn 30 billion dollars in times of austerity? - but with his get up and go and intelligent decision taking, just like others of his mettle, role models to us all, he's managed to fend off poverty and actually improve his lot twice over.
Is it any wonder that all the leading politicians and economists and philosophers and media commentators are now advocating so clearly root and branch reforms of "the system"? No keep calm and carry on for them, no let's go back to the glorious days of tax borrow and spend and burgeoning States that largely got us all into this mess in the first place, no sirree.
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Post by fascinating on Nov 26, 2019 20:55:29 GMT 1
And Boris' deal (which is still not completed) is no better. So it hasn't easy to get a good deal has it, despite what was claimed?
Both Theresa and Boris have said that they have negotiated a deal.
I don't remember anyone in the leave camp asserting that.
I don't think it was discussed before the vote.
OK, you don't care about "the future survival of this country [the UK] as a political entity".
Thus we have maintained a large measure of independence in the EU.
I disagree with that.
No I'm not. I thought it was merging with another European bank. I think you predicted the demise of Deutshe bank, "within 4 months", 3 years ago.
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