Goldman Sachs - Gaming The Recession #

In the coming hours, the largest ever transfer of money from labour to capital will become a Hyperreality.

Capitalism is dead.
Long live capitalism.

George Soros: "Paulson cannot be given a blank cheque."

Naomi Klein: "... nobody should believe the overblown claims that the market crisis signals the death of 'free market' ideology."

These two statements, and we love to use quotation-based evidence to supplement our arguments, are the key factors relating to the future of the financial system.

Paulson's pillage of this system is one of the reasons that we are in this mess, and it would seem an act of the utmost folly to trust that the architect of the oncoming Depression is somehow, miraculously, the very same person that we need to call upon now in order to save ourselves.

Even more importantly, while capitalism pleads for our rescue from their greed, the neo-financiers are already planning the next great disaster, with the formation of numerous Dark Pools, where the anonymous trading of colossal blocks of shares and other financial assets may take place away from regulator's eyes.

As ever, while begging with one hand, the capitalists are stealing with the other...

Soros: "The bill submitted to Congress... would exempt the [Treasury] secretary's decisions from review by any court or administrative agency - the ultimate fulfillment of the Bush administration's dream of a unitary executive... Mr Paulson's record does not inspire the confidence necessary to give him discretion over $700 billion... Mr Paulson’s proposal to purchase distressed mortgage-related securities poses a classic problem of asymmetric information. The securities are hard to value but the sellers know more about them than the buyer: in any auction process the Treasury would end up with the dregs."

For each of these reasons, this bailout is invalid.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and he has drawn up some progressive conditions for a bailout. These are split into the conditions for the bailout itself and for reforms to the financial system and are listed below:

Principles to Guide the Bailout

1) Financial institutions should be forced to endure the bulk of the losses with taxpayer funds only used where absolutely necessary to sustain the orderly operation of the financial system.
2) The bailout must be designed to minimise the opportunity for gaming.
3) The bailout should be designed to minimise moral hazard.
4) In the case of delinquent mortgages that come into the government's possession, there should be an effort to work out an arrangement that allows the homeowner to remain in her house as owner. If this proves impossible, then former homeowners should be allowed to remain in their homes as renters paying the market rent. This should be done even if it leads to losses to the government.
5) There should be serious efforts to severely restrict executive compensation at any companies that directly benefit from the bailout.

Principles for Restructuring the Financial System

1) Combating asset bubbles must be one of the Fed's key responsibilities.
2) The government should impose a modest financial transactions tax, comparable to the one in the United Kingdom. This can both restrain excessive trading and raise more than $100 billion a year in revenue.
3) Regulatory agencies should require that potentially tradable assets (e.g. credit default swaps) actually be traded on exchanges.
4) There should be strict limits on leverage for all regulated financial institutions.
5) Fannie and Freddie should remain fully public institutions, returning them to a status comparable to Fannie's prior to its privatization in 1968.
6) The Fed should be restructured so that all the key decision makers (e.g. the open market committee) are appointed by democratically elected officials. Its responsibility is to manage the economy in the interest of the general public, not the financial sector.

But there are many more weighty factors against continuing with this nonsense and these are detailed below together with some extra input to the views of Soros and Baker above.

Firstly, Paulson must not be allowed to continue #############################
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Secondly, all of the proposals on the table talk about the need for national regulation. This is misguided and, more importantly, virtually irrelevant.
Capital is global.
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Of course, a Utopian view would be for the complete destruction of the shareholder capitalist economy and its replacement with a bottom-up democracy, featuring negative growth and focusing on the informal economy.
But this is not going to happen, so we need to make it as difficult as possible for the psychopaths to game the system once again for proprietary advantage in the future.

Thirdly, and of massive importance, is that we prevent the opportunity for the next speculative destabilisation, the one that will be caused by Dark Pools - vast lakes of liquidity that prevent any external oversight and the opportunity for rampant insider trading and the gaming of markets for proprietary advantage.
This really will be a global poker table, but one at which the bidding will define all of our existences, as well as that of the future of the planet in its current equilibrium state.
Lehman Brothers was working with the London Stock Exchange to set up a Dark Pool called Baikal (the name of the world's biggest lake), prior to Paulson demolishing the investment bank earlier in the month.
And, even the industry has concerns about this new Hyperreality.
For example, Deutsche Bank are setting up a proprietary Dark Pool for institutional share trading, but they are worried about the lack of transparency.
You should expect to hear a lot more about shady entities like #############
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And, it is a scam, which brings us on to the fourth reason why any bailout is invalid, moral hazard.
If the captains of finance are able to fly their personal jets between their mansions and yachts, while the masses are being turfed out of their homes, this societal hierarchy will not encourage the said captains to be more risk averse the next time speculative bubbles come calling.
Moral hazard defines excessive risk if there is no need of rebound upon oneself.
Rebound elsewhere is irrelevant, of course.

The fifth reason that Tebbit-On-Coke should not be given $2300 for every human being (and republican) in the US, is that the man's focus is not on the correct loci.
Although the bailout is now being sold as something to save the common man/woman from the initial aspects of the Depression, Paulson's original proposal made no mention of normal human beings, focusing exclusively on bankers and wankers instead.
Unless Paulson's hands are straight-jacketed to his sides, the vast majority of this aid will go to his friends and enemies in the murky world of global finance.
We're even thinking of setting up a private market on ####################
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Sixthly, when we are dealing with systemic crises, some unsavoury characters and some even more unsavoury organisations require bailing out, unless our preference, as stated above, for a complete dismantling of the entire system is to come into effect.
But are some of the worst perpetrators the ones who should be primarily aided in any recovery package?
The FBI is looking into 26 cases of potential fraud with regard to the collapse of the US mortgage industry, including at Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG.
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These people would have been taking bets on the minutes to submergence if they had been on the deck of the Titanic.
The seventh reason that the bailout is merely an abusive redistribution of wealth to the bullies is that these bastards are taking no account of the systemic impacts of climate change.
Finding money so that the same bunch of psychopaths are able to distort the system to their own ends once again, when the cash is needed for slightly more important things, like the survival of our species, for instance, is extreme misallocation of capital.

The eighth reason that Congress should bin the bailout is demonstrated quite clearly by Warren Buffet's purchase of $5 billion worth of Goldman Sachs this week.
Berkshire Hathaway are renowned bottom buyers in the financial markets but this purchase is a double-whammy of profit for the astute Mr Buffet.
On the one hand, he's buying into a market leader at a low price, just prior to an inevitable fiscal stimulus which will lead ####################################
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On the other, he is buying into #######################################
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The final reason for this bailout being an invalid piece of hyperhighway robbery is probably the most important in the short term - the depth of the Depression.
By saving the financial system from collapse now, Paulson/Bernanke are merely ensuring that the impact of the Depression will be greater in the medium term.
Free markets do not function without intense global regulation.
This needs sorting out now, not when we stand on the cusps of the next crisis.

In Manchester the other day, I saw some children playing hopscotch on fallen gravestones.
Even the kids in Manchester mimic Mammon.
Excellent.

* We were originally going to publish this post towards the end of last week but we are trading many markets associated with this systemic uproar and we were not willing to jeopardise our market positions.
Indeed, we have had to withhold much content from this version of the post for the very same reason.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

When Is A 3rd Party Agreement Not A 3rd Party Agreement? - A Flashback

Every month, we provide a couple of Flashback posts for non-subscribers.

Today, we have elected to reprint our overview of the Carlos Tevez/ West Ham United affair, which was originally posted on August 4th last year.
We believe that our perspective remains valid.
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On Friday July 13th, Football Is Fixed posted that the Carlos Tevez transfer was a done deal with the only remaining obstacle being how to construct a "reality" that would accommodate the multifarious public stances taken by the protagonists. That the final resolution has taken until yesterday to complete was solely a result of further non-strategic foot dragging by the Premier League. The deceleration of this process has merely served to make both their posturing as an organisation and the incompetence of chief executive officer (CEO), Richard Scudamore, more apparent to more people, as the delay has merely produced more damning column inches that have allowed more individuals to discern the Premier League's truly Orwellian fabrication of crime and punishment.
Briefly looking at the overview of this blatant piece of spectacular society corruption, we'll take each of the key participants in turn.
We stated just a couple of days ago that Richard Scudamore has more than passed his sell-by date. His mismanagement of the English game both within the public arena and away from the prying eyes of probity has been abysmal. When one compares his decision making with the interests of the more crooked elements that are corrupting our game to its core, we find a far-too-revealing positive correlation (which obviously occurs entirely by chance). However, his psychic ability to parallel Premier League strategy with the black and grey market's agenda is one of those spooky coincidences that has to be resultant in unemployment if such individuals were accountable to watchdogs. But they're not. The Premier League's accountability axes lead to some rather unsavoury loci.
Scudamore has been the media face that has projected his and his organisation's incompetence onto the footballing public in the Carlos Tevez affair. They dug themselves into a hole and just kept digging when strategic oversight would have preferenced a negotiated settlement. In financial markets, a key behavioural factor is testosterone. The male-dominated marketplace repeatedly throws up instances of testosterone-driven individuals undertaking strategies that are to their own and their associates disadvantage rather than selecting alternative options that might produce a small gain for all. The Premier League have behaved similarly. One of the problems for the likes of Scudamore is when the spin gets out of control. The conjunction of a variety of separate media realities results in people getting cornered in nightmares of their own chaotic creation. So it is with Scudamore. Quest and bungs, the influence of Zahavi and Berezovsky, the takeovers by Shinawatra and Yeung, the Carlos Tevez transfer and the West Ham non-relegation, mismanagement or what? And this are only the tip of the iceberg that is available to public eyes. Insiders also are able to detect the other machinations that are totally undermining and destabilising the game to the financial advantage of a smallish number of very corrupt entities.
Specifically with regard to Tevez and West Ham. By clearing and, indeed, financially rewarding the Hammers for their corrupt practices related to third party agreements, the Premier League set in motion the very public decline of their executive authority. The crisis was spun from Day One as the Premier League sought to achieve their aims with an abusive template. The other parallel stories conspired to establish a typical damage limitation infrastructure where each of the options open to Scudamore's brigade was a losing position. The scenario whereby the third party contracts never existed legally would have been overturned in the High Court to the accompaniment of excessive public awareness of the Premier League's murkier activities = LOSE. Or the scenario where the third party agreements did exist and were legal calls into serious question how the Premier League could possibly not relegate West Ham = LOSE. Keeping the various plates spinning in a spectacular creation of endless contortions until the media loses interest = LOSE. Or, the choice that the Premier League eventually arrived at, reach an out-of-court settlement with all the parties. Despite the fact that this settlement is conclusive proof of the corruption undertaken by the Premier League on a range of different levels as they repeatedly break (and allow others to break) the rules that they are supposed to oversee, pretend that you are still in control of the process while avoiding any cross-referencing between the final solution and any of the executive decisions preceding it = LOSE.
In non-sophisticated sectors like football, the tone of the press releases following these type of tiffs are always revealing. The Premier League's entirely desperate attempt to paper over the chasms states: "The decision of the board, having received leading counsel's opinion, is that the agreement reached is compliant with the rules of the Premier League and consistent with the undertakings given by West Ham United to the Premier League board at various times since 27th April 2007".
No, the agreement is not compliant with the Premier League rules and what about undertakings given by West Ham United PRIOR to April 27th?
Sack the bastard...
When there is a very very big loser, there is usually more than one big winner. In this particular little scam, everybody wins big except the Premier League (who could not have played their hand less expertly) and Sheffield United. Disturbingly, two of the winners should, with judicial equivalence, actually be losers.
In the last two years, it is difficult to find any aspect of the business realities of West Ham United that have even approached the area of ethical behaviour. The illegal transfers of Tevez and Mascherano; the cosy ties with Brooking at the FA; the "interesting" choice of sector links - ask any market analyst; the takeover battle between MSI and Iceland's dodgiest businessman; the undermining of Pardew; the crowning of mr nice guy, Alan Curbishley; the £30 million payment as punishment; having the cheek to spend that money on transfers; accepting the £2 million pay-off from Manchester United that proves the illegality of their historical operations. And, yet, Magnusson's men march into the 2007/08 season in a very strong position with, approximately, £26.5 million worth of assets illegally gained. This is quite a weight advantage in the Premiership Handicap Chase 07/08.
As this tawdry affair has developed, there has been an ever-increasing amount of media flak thrown at the real winners of this confrontation, the really dodgy people - Joorabchian, Zahavi, Berezovsky, MSI Group Limited and Just Sport Inc (JSI). The Quest inquiry, the match fixing scandal at Corinthians and the money laundering charges in Brazil against Joorabchian and Berezovsky are all indicative of the sectors in which these people choose to operate. It is common practice in South America and Africa for slave-like contractual conditions to be the norm as players are tied to criminal operations. The fact that this particular operation has come to light is just another tip of just another iceberg. The football authorities, on the whole, accept this illegal trafficking in legally non-represented human beings - the contracts are heavily tilted in favour of the owners of the player's registrations. Looking at another iceberg - the one representing the financial gains to MSI and JSI - shows exactly how much these dodgy operators have profited from Tevez and Mascherano. Manchester United will pay £10 million to these people for loan playing rights for the next two seasons and then United will have an option to buy. MSI have consequently gained financially from these players at every step of their career entirely illegally and totally without internal policing within the game. And we won't even venture anywhere near the influence that these crooks have on the global football betting markets...
The only parties to have behaved with moral rectitude are Manchester United and Carlos Tevez, himself.
Throughout the process, Man Utd have remained as inside the legal boundaries as was feasible when one is dealing with a rotten edifice. Like Liverpool with Javier Mascherano in January, United have skillfully taken advantage of a slimy corruption to gain competitive advantage. The two year loan deal with an option on outright purchase is a gem of a deal. But, just a point, aren't Manchester United entering into an illegal third party agreement in establishing this loan deal? Just a point... We expect to see the hyper owners hovering around the corruptions, even those corruptions not directly under their influence, as a frequent backdrop to the future English Premiership.
Tevez is a bit of a hero. His life story from day one has entertained Maradona-esque escapades with his existence being anchored by his immense football talent. It is absolutely not only the financial terms of this deal which makes it so massive - Tevez is the business. He has already shown that he can hack it at speed in Argentina, at Corinthians (it is incredibly difficult for any Argentinian footballer to make an impact in Brazil both due to the difference in playing styles and their treatment from opponents, officials and, even, team-mates), for his country in the 2006 World Cup, for a relegation threatened bunch of scallies and, soon, no doubt on the premier footballing stages of Europe. This speedy adaptation to new and alien environments at great rapidity is the very hallmark of a top player. And, to achieve all this against a backdrop of corruption, uproar and criminality = astonishing... Tevez or Torres. Get a grip...
Unless the Premier League determines that another spectacular cataclysmic implosion might best serve their interests, the final word on this corruption should go to one of the biggest losers out of this affair, Neil Warnock. Following the High Court's decision to back the relegation of Sheffield United while acknowledging the efficacy of their legal position, Warnock stated: "so much for the integrity of the Premier League. So much for fairness and justice in English football". Fair dinkum...

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

ScudamoreWorld - A Narrative That May No Longer Be Told #

So.
Where is he hiding this morning?

And, more to the point, when will be tendering his resignation speech?

No, we are not talking about Gordon Brown, the man who created the financial template for the British Depression, but Richard Scudamore, the man who is in the process of destructing the game of football.

Scudamore has to go.
His position is untenable.
Presumably, this explains his silence.
There's not even one of those carefully crafted Premier League 'statements' explaining his/their view on one of his evolving Hyperrealities.

Why has the architect of a sport's demise gone to ground?

Listen up.
We've been banging on about Scudamore and his inappropriate ties (and I don't mean cravats) since time immemorial.
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Scudamore has a problem with strategy.
Short-term agendas are no problem. His autocratic power at the Premier League (PL) allows him to override any objections that might surface regarding his stewardship of the sport.
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The achievement of short-term 'goals' without a longer term strategy creates feedback loops and complex cause-and-effect linkages that move future Hyperrealities into different equilibrium states than the ones that are intended.
And, so it is with Mr Scudamore.

ScudamoreWorld's time as the theme park that defines postmodern English football is over.
There will be the tactics and the delays and the shouldering and parceling of blame, but, in years to come, Mr Scudamore will look back on Black Monday as the day that it all started to unravel big style.

For nearly two years, we have been informing readers that the real owner of Portsmouth FC is Arkadi Gaydamak and that, consequently, under the fit-and-proper-persons test (FPPT), Scudamore and the PL should take action against someone who, quite obviously, is not a fit-and-proper-person.
There were constant denials by both Portsmouth and the PL about this Reality, the repetitive statements being that Alexandre, Arkadi's son, was in control.
And now, the truth has outed.

Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Aharonot, has listed a 'personal declaration' of Arkadi's assets, as he is looking to sell some of them - we reported earlier in the year that Portsmouth were 'unofficially up for sale'. Among the many assets including a couple of yachts, a couple of executive aircraft, the usual sort of stuff, until you come to the section marked 'Soccer Abroad' where it indicates that the Real owner of Portsmouth FC is none other than one Arkadi Gaydamak.

In Israel, Arkadi is developing a political career for himself.
The self-styled "biggest man in Israel" has founded a far-right party and is running in the Jerusalem mayoral elections.
He also owns Beitar Jerusalem, the equally far-right club who have won the Israeli league in the last two seasons.
Fair enough, it is reasonable that some people should not evolve politically.
But there are bigger issues with Arkadi Gaydamak.
Much bigger.

Like the French arrest warrant relating to illegal arms dealing during the war in Angola.
Or the money laundering charges.
Or his #########################################################
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A Portsmouth spokesman this week stated that Arkadi had nothing to do with the club. "Alexandre Gaydamak is the 100% owner of the club and his father has never had any dealings with it," he said.
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When the Premier League investigate this matter, it will be a test to see whether the FPPT is ever likely to be implemented by Scudamore against any of the scourge of inappropriate owners who he so likes to cosy up to.

The fact that this news story broke the day that we blogged about Portsmouth 'selling' their match at Manchester City, while all of your attentions were at Stamford Bridge, is entertaining timing.
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So, ################################################ = no problem.
So, ####################################################### = no problem.
So, if, on a television programme, bungs are revealed to be a transfer tactic of a certain person at a certain club = no problem.
So, ############################################## = no problem.
So, if a certain club is run by a money laundering illegal arms dealer = no problem.

This is ScudamoreWorld, after all.
But, for how long?

For Black Monday brought further bad news for the Slimey One.
Scudamore contorted himself in numerous knots over his determined misreading and misapplication of the rules over the Carlos Tevez affair.
Once again, we pointed out forcibly at the time that the manner in which the saga played out completely undermined the various stances taken by Scudamore during the Hyperreality.
The rationality and logistics of his, and therefore the PL's, posturing on the affair were conspicuous by their absence. Scudamore simply said what he had to say in a reactive manner as events spun out of his control.
Throughout, Kia Joorabchian has effectively had our Great Leader by the short-n-curly's. He knew that Scudamore's position was untenable, he has the documents to prove it, and Black Monday saw the thankful beginning of the end of this protracted nonsense.

An independent tribunal, chaired by Lord Griffiths, has found in favour of Sheffield United over the Carlos Tevez affair, and clearly have reached the conclusion that Tevez was illegally registered while helping West Ham avoid relegation.
The tribunal states: "We have no doubt that West Ham would have secured at least three fewer points over the 2006-07 season if Carlos Tevez had not been playing for the club."

Sheffield United are now in a position to claim up to £30 million in damages from West Ham United.
And, what nobody in the mainstream media has yet picked up on, this will fall back on Scudamore.
It was Scudamore's mis-management and chameleon-like behaviour that created this cesspit, and West Ham will undoubtedly have a claim against Scudamore and the PL should the Sheffield United claim prove successful.

We told readers over the summer that West Ham's financial plight was serious and that players were to be sold. The Icelandic banking system is among the most rotten in the credit crunch, and the funds to pay any fine are only feasible via the selling of assets.
Curbishley did well to walk away.

Of course, Scudamore is still in hiding over the shenanigans at Eastlands. His refusal to make any further comment about the FPPT with regard to His Excellency, The Honorary President at Manchester City is an outrage, ###########################
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And, all this occurs against a backdrop of further irregularities at Newcastle, where we are now informed that a Nigerian consortium are interested in buying the club.
As Mike Ashley is a liar, we think that this story is not true.
In fact, a little detective work shows it not to be true, for the price that the Nigerians are allegedly willing to pay is £100 million GREATER than Ashley is asking.
The lying liar's press release does not correlate with the instructions issued to Keith Harris, the man faced with finding a buyer for the Dysfunctional DisUnited.

Expect more rubbish in, rubbish out from the man who is able to down a pint in one, and, who is able to spend an evening drinking cocktails with Dennis Wise while his club falls to bits around him.
Now, these potential addictive issues might explain some of the man's lack of business acumen, perhaps...

There has been an interesting impact of the fall-out over the Shinawatra/FPPT scenario.
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This is a major groundshift.

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We believe that the FPPT needs to be rewritten with proper powers of enforcement.
It doesn't matter whether Shinawatra owns 25% of Manchester City or 100%, he is still a #####################################################
It doesn't matter what the complexities of Arkadi Gaydamak's ownership of Portsmouth are, he is most definitely the owner.
Have you checked out his son?
He couldn't organise a piss up in a shmaltz house.

And, while the FPPT is being given teeth, the PL might also introduce rules so that, in future, the role of chief executive does not fall into the grubby hands of murky operators like Scudamore.

Its time to go.
Do one, Scudamore...

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

A Premiership Betting Coup Plus Other Tales From The Murky World Of English Football #

Tacitus: "Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but audacity."

Audacious.
That's the word for it.

Over the last week, English football provided us with numerous examples of the different types of corruption that are destroying the game for the benefit of powerful insiders and the gambling industry.

* Manchester City v Portsmouth - A MASSIVE insider gamble on Manchester City emanating from #############################.
While there was idiot money against Manchester City, the really clever money was being spread around from market opening in a major insider coup.
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Still, great to see the Sheikh sitting alongside the Human Rights Abuser. The grin on His Excellency's face was undoubtedly broadened by the fact that his brother-in-law, Somchai Wongsawat, has just been made prime minister of Thailand.
Ah, democracy and the rule of law...

* Liverpool v Stoke City - Andre Marriner made a "MASSIVE mistake" in ruling out Steven Gerrard's 2nd minute goal for Liverpool, according to Rafa Benitez.
There was no contact, no offside decision, no nuffin'...
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* Bolton Wanderers v Arsenal - The first Arsenal goal was offside and Kevin Davies could have been Sent Off for his two-footed challenge on Gail Clichy.
Each of these decisions were potentially match altering and could have been solved with 15 seconds of the time of the 4th Official and video technology.

* Hull City v Everton - Did Everton's first goal cross the line?
Do we have the technology to inform us?
Then why isn't it being utilised?
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* Preston North End v Wolverhampton Wanderers - PGMOB official Martin Atkinson was given charge of this game and he produced an Elite Group Corker of a Performance.
Quoting a leading right-of-centre British broadsheet: "A hat-trick hero sent off for a seemingly non-existent butt, a manager sent off for applauding the referee, a goalkeeper sent off for a challenge that was made with two covering defenders, a handball on the goal-line ignored, a Preston goal disallowed because Jon Parkin is “a big lad” – it was an interesting performance by referee Martin Atkinson."

* Watford v Reading - Another PGMOB official was given the other major Championship game at the weekend, and not just any official, but the PGMOB's rising star, Stuart Attwell.
We've posted before that Attwell is being fast-tracked to offer a quarter of a century of input with the whistle. #################################
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Attwell had a 'mare at Vicarage Road on Saturday, but the PGMOB are trying to blame one of the assistants so that attention doesn't fall on The Rising Star.
He gave a goal when the ball was nowhere near the goalmouth.
"Probably the worst decision I've ever witnessed in football," was Stephen Hunt's damning verdict. "A strange one - I don't know what he was thinking," offered Hunt's brother and team-mate, Noel. "A monumental howler," was Aidy Boothroyd's contribution, while the Watford midfielder John Eustace weighed in with "shocking", "ridiculous" and "embarrassing".

* For the Champions League Group Phase First Round of matches, not one PGMOB team was selected to officiate at any of the sixteen events.
This follows constantly poor marks from the competing teams when the English referees were in control of games last season, together with the shady dealings around Howard Webb and that last minute penalty for Austria against Poland at Euro 2008.

* Liverpool v Manchester United - Howard Webb forgets that he has already given Nemanja Vidic a yellow card and has to be reminded to send him off by United player Ryan Giggs, with some prompting from Sami Hyypia.

* Manchester City v Chelsea - Mark Halsey sends off John Terry quite correctly within the rules of the game. The farcical nature of the Respect agenda towards match officials was then imploded by a spectacular PGMOB own goal.
When faced with the most powerful club in the country and a team of lawyers, despite the fact that such legal representation is illegal under the FA's rules, the FA/PGMOB simply buckled and rescinded Terry's red card.
To amplify the point being made, Mark Halsey was demoted and refereed a fourth tiered match between Chester City and Shrewsbury Town at the weekend.

* Meanwhile, leading official, Mark Clattenburg, remains banned from officiating until his off-field business affairs are brought into order. Being taken to court by his former business partner, Clattenburg ################################
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Outside of the game, there is still denial about corruption.
Inside the game, the conversations are about the machinations of the corruption rather than whether such corruption exists.
The Corruption Hyperreality has been the template for over a decade.

We are not only dealing with a sport here, although the utter loss of integrity of English football at the highest levels is an outrage.
Betting markets are liquid to hundreds of millions of pounds, some extravaganzas even gross a billion.
Major trading positions are dependent on getting some sense of Reality into the outcome.
And yet, there is no effort to import this Reality into the game.
Why can't we have video analysis of key match decisions by the 4th Official and the referee?
The industry prevents this technology under the fallacious argument that it is not yet 100% accurate.
Like Howard Webb and Stuart Attwell are?
There are no arguments for keeping technology out of the game, other than those of the manipulators who would rather game the match outcomes in favour of their proprietary trading positions in the global betting markets.
Furthermore, the ratings given to the match officials by the competing clubs should be made public, rather than being secreted away in the vaults of the FA/PGMOB.
Then, appointments may be made on merit.

Professional traders and analysts are able to see clear differentials between legitimate and rigged betting markets.
Inevitably, these differentials are presented to us on the field of play.
This is a problem for the manipulators.
Classifying a non-trier in horseracing is devilishly hard visually, although the analytical support might well be absolute.
Classifying a non-trier in football is simple.

For example, there is an individual at a major club in England who is involved in match rigging.
This information has only recently come to light, during Euro 2008, in fact.
By monitoring this players performances on the pitch, we have not only determined what the scam is, but we understand the structures and the mechanisms that define the relationship between the player and his controllers.
All future performances of this player will be defined by this template until, for any reason, the structure changes.
We understand that this particular player is not willingly involved in this operation but that coercion is the key dynamic.
This is a TOP player at a TOP club, an international, who is being pressured to perform to an external agenda.

And this brings us to the other change necessary if football is to have any chance in the future.
Once meritocratic refereeing appointments and video technology are in the game, the only requirement still needed to save the sport will be the introduction of global regulation restraining the betting industry.
The markets must not be able to define the Hyperreality.
And that applies to International Financial Markets too.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

The Worst Week For Capitalism Since 1929 #

The Financial Times: "The panic in the world credit markets reached historic intensity [on Wednesday] prompting a flight to safety of the type not seen since the 2nd World War."

Why aren't any of the agents of capitalism attempting to justify their noxious belief in "free markets" now?

There is no such concept in Reality as a free market, there never has been and there never will be.
The allegedly free market is, in fact, a state-based economic system whether one chooses to look at the US, Britain, Japan, Germany, Russia or China, or, indeed, anywhere else.
And any supposed freedom in the marketplace is limited to the market makers, other insiders and those who speculate in a booming market.
Woe betide those who speculate in a bear market!

This week has been one of the most momentous weeks in international finance in the last century - the cyclical trail of disaster and misguided rescue plan has been repeated throughout the week, set against markets experiencing the utmost volatility.

Over the weekend, when most Morecambe and Wise Show decisions are made nowadays so that market reaction may be delayed, Bernanke/Paulson announced that Lehman Brothers was being allowed to go under.
This sent shockwaves through the markets as investors suddenly realised that the public purse is not deep enough to support all the wrecks of capitalism's plight.
Additionally, it was announced on Sunday that Merrill Lynch, another distraught investment bank, was being taken over by Bank of America.
The markets were unimpressed and slalomed downhill.
But, as usual, Paulson ##############################################

For he announced on Tuesday (##########################################) the biggest bailout in US financial history - fully $85 billion to rescue AIG.
The selection of AIG over Lehman Brothers was key.
Firstly and most importantly, ##################################################
Secondly, ##############################################################
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Thirdly, it was indicative of the systemic risk, already great, that would be markedly magnified if the insurance sector was to follow the banking sector into deep crisis. The tentacles of impact would then be undermining the entire capitalist edifice.

Despite this input, the markets continued to fall.

At 5000, the FTSE reached a key threshold. #####################################
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Additionally, #######################################################
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On Wednesday, Gold saw its biggest ever one day gain (in $ terms) as major investors sought a safe haven for their ill-begotten assets in a turbulent marketplace.

Also on Wednesday, the Russian bourse halted trading for the second successive day. The Russians haven't learned that it is not seen as good form to simply halt trading because the market is not behaving as one might wish it to.
The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has a more integrated strategy.
When financial shenanigans were afoot after Morecambe and Wise's bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the LSE simply collapsed, allegedly for technical reasons, missing seven hours of trading on one of the most important trading days of recent times. Several other European bourses were affected in a domino fashion.

Also, on Wednesday, lending between banks effectively completely seized up, stopped, terminated...
This is serious.
If banks cannot raise money from each other, and if there is no more money in the public coffers so that the social may support the capital, and if mergers and acquisitions (M&A) continue to be rare (apart from those made in desperation) in the recession, then banks are dependent EITHER on proprietary trading in a market cornered by Goldman Sachs OR on attracting new customers at the retail end of the operation.
Consequently, a very simple rule of thumb is worthy of note.
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Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of the idiotic advice given by The Guardian financial journalist, Phillip Inman.
Idiot Inman is an Insider.
The Guardian must specialise in disinformation in finance as well as football, it would seem...
Idiot tells readers to "######################################" before going on to tell us that "it is hard to see how the government could let any bank go bust and allow savers to lose out. It saved Northern Rock, after all."
And, the US government saved Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae but had still allowed one of the most venerable (if such a word is appropriate in finance) names in investment banking to go to that great credit-default-swap in the sky.
This had occured three days earlier.
Idiot.

Thursday morning brought news that Lloyds was buying out HBOS in the biggest British banking deal ever.
But there were shenanigans here too.
Normally the monopolies people would be all over the Lloyds/HBOS deal like a rash.
But, it has been waved through with scarcely a glance, by an increasingly desperate government, that has called off the competition authorities so long as Lloyds promise to maintain first-time buyer lending - free markets again!

Late on Thursday came a further form of straight market manipulation. All rational people objected when Morecambe and Wise prevented the selling of stocks in a score of financial institutions in July. This was a blatant rigging of the market.
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) mimicked the comedians in America last night when they announced a ban on the short selling of bank stocks until January 16th 2009 and even this date isn't necessarily a threshold for a return to a less corrupted market structure, #######################################################
####################################################
Can't wait...

This is straight market manipulation.
Within minutes of the announcement, British banking stocks had soared 10% on Wall St with Barclays gaining over 20% in 4 minutes!!!
Additionally, #######################################################
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Why is it that when speculators are undertaking speculative behaviour that is causing a market to boom, all is fine and dandy.
But when speculators are undertaking speculative behaviour that is causing a market to fall, they are banned from doing so.

Why are deep-state insiders allowed to rig the markets in this fashion without any public scrutiny?

And there are rumours pre-opening of the LSE this morning that Morecambe and Wise are going to announce a major banking package later today, presumably just in time for the opening of Wall St.

So, with the rampant use of taxpayers money, the banning of short-selling, the rigging of the markets, the arbitrary application of regulation, governments acting as guarantors of the last degree, a selective policy of intervention and the media support of heads of government, the FTSE has recovered to within 250 points of last Friday's close.
As I said, Morecambe and Wise...

This second banning of short selling in financial stock will make #########
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The short-termism in the banning of short-selling is telling.
Although the share prices of financial institutions will be falsely inflated in the immediate term, the downsides to this rigging are two-fold.
Firstly, the intervention will reduce the likelihood of inter-bank lending restarting anytime soon and, secondly, these short-term crutches for a falling market are only enhancing the eventual impact of this Depression.
They are deferring, but magnifying the future misery.

Many commentators and analysts have compared this week to 1929, having failed to find a single instance of such magnitude in the 79 years in between.

There are many losers from this capitalist cock-up - we're talking Third World here rather than unemployed commodities traders - and there are going to be a whole load more before this crunch has finished crunching.
And, as ever, we always have to add the systemic proviso that the negative impacts on any adaptation to climate change is left out of our gloomy assessment.
When you include climate change, the prognosis is terminal.

But one particular fact has impressed us most over Paulson's reign, the speed of US government financial intervention in crises of capital and property.
If only such behaviour had been replicated in New Orleans in their crisis of the social.
And still the city waits for the release of various US government grants and funding to continue with the pitiful attempts at rebuilding the city.

And every so often, up pops the strange idiot child from Texas, to inform us that he has total faith in the financial markets, with that preppy sneer-grin that has been perfected through all those weird weekends of pseudo-klan behaviour dressed up as frivolous, fraternal fun.
"The markets are safe, trust me..."
This is likely to reassure who exactly?
The strange idiot child, who does war crimes when in tantrum mode and hides underground when scared, the man who gave Goldman Sachs control of the global economy and the global recession, and he wants our trust.
Fuck Bush.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Why Are Catholics Better At Football? #

While trying to determine how the Glasgow Rangers website could possibly attempt to give any justification for the singing of "The Famine Song" by their fans at the recent match with Celtic, a Cavern of Reality appeared before my eyes.
Its because 'we' are better at footie than them.
That's what it is...
Ha!
Sorted :)

"The Famine's over, why don't you fuck off home" rang out the mustachioed hordes as their team were thrashing the Bhoys last week.
Oh, how we laughed at the Hyperreality.
A team, once the pride of the immigrant Irish community, but now managed by a dodgy bookmaker, a war criminal, a neo-capitalist and with an allegedly racist manager was playing the British team, now the plaything of a failing property developer whose business is in the process of exploring the peripheries of the global credit crunch, and a team with a capacity for, shall we say, influencing events on the field of play.
Singing songs of, not yesteryear, but yester-century seems to be quite the perfect backdrop for something that bears no linkage with Reality.
It is offensive.
But, so is what is happening to football.
So, the two things would seem to dovetail to me.
Just like playing the flute and undertaking paramilitary marching in front of Celtic fans.
We can take a joke.
No problem.

Its a power thing in Scotland.
Rangers could never abide the fact that we were better than them at football.
So they rig it.
They've always rigged it.
The fact that we are anywhere near their inflated total of league titles is testimony in itself to our superiority at football.

From the position of power, songs and sentiments are those of oppression - "Up To Our Knees In Fenian Blood" and "We Are The Billy Goats".
From the position of being oppressed, songs and sentiments take on an altogether more defensive note with the spirit of resistance and rebellion as a statement of often reluctant aggression - "The Fields Of Athenry", "Joe McDonnell", "The Men Behind The Wire", "Four Green Fields" and the like.

So, we'll qualify our original question:
"Excluding the Trophy Totalisation Hyperrealities of Scotland and Northern Regions of the Emerald Isle, Why are Catholics Better at Football?"

Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France (to a large extent), Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Poland, Germany (arguably) and Eire (with Jamaica, the very foundation of the English national team in recent years)...
Every single World Cup has been won by a nominally Catholic country apart from the one donated to this Sceptred Isle by a dodgy Russian linesperson in '66.
Other countries import the global Catholic underworld and rearrange their nationalities to suit the Hyperreality.
So, Poles Klose and Podolski lead the German attack rather than the Polish.
And, there are Brazilians in most second and third tier national teams plus some higher level ones like Croatia and Japan.

Having escaped Catholicism in youth, have I been blind to the fact that, despite all the weird guilt stuff and the vision that it is quite reasonable for "forty year old virgins in dresses to beat young boys on the backside with wooden sticks", Catholicism has brought something good to the world - Proper Football?

And while I was contemplating this very thought, a stream of consciousness flowed with more questions about the world in which we find ourselves...

Unfortunately, the remainder of this post and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Time For Revolutionary Partying And Mass Mockery #

A threshold has been crossed.
New Horizons.

In Manchester, we should have been anticipating this weekend more than any other - the newly crowned richest club in the world versus the second richest club in the world AND Red Scouse against Red Manc.
But IT didn't happen.
During the Anfield game, we had the sound turned down while we concentrated on analysis of other markets in other countries.
As for the 'keenly anticipated' Eastlands Extravaganza, a cycle round the deserted streets of the city was infinitely preferable.
Barcelona v Santander? Even though we were trading on it, a rewatching of the movie "What The Fuck Do We Know" was far more tempting.
I did watch the First Half of the Stoke match because I felt like I should pay some attention to their long-throw strategy as it impacts upon player evaluations in our Holistic Sabermetrics Model. As soon as the Half Time whistle sounded, Shimano shoes and another couple of hours on the bike.

Even the events that could be described as a spectacle - Real Madrid's 4-3 win over Numancia and Dortmund's pull back from 0-3 down in one of the bitterest derbies, for example - just did not have any impact.
So what?
Who cares?
You do your work.
You trade your markets.
You send out information to clients.
You issue instructions to colleagues for the in-running trading.
You work on near-future profits.
You switch off.

It has finally reached the stage where none of this matters anymore.
And not just to myself and my Trading Team.
This is a global effect.

The demise of football is irrelevant.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the dramatic last-minute saving of Merrill Lynch - there are now only two independent investment banks (are monopolies an issue when the said monopoly is caused by the deconstruction of the entire capitalist edifice?) - is also irrelevant. It is simply the next step on the road to the Recession/Depression that awaits.

The fact that the Evil Empire has 730 military bases around the world and the further fact that fully 42% of the tax base in the US is spent by the Pentagon - its the cost of all those guns donated to the Georgians prior to the invasion of Ossetia, plus the additional expense of utilising US private security firms to lead the invasion, that sort of thing - is also sadly irrelevant.

On a personal level, my work life has never been so rewarding or exciting. This is equally irrelevant.

In the September 6th issue of The Economist, the Science and Technology section was entirely given over to climate change and geo-engineering.
Five years ago, The Economist claimed that any climatic change was not caused by mankind.
They have moved their position considerably.
A full U-turn, in fact.
"...human produced climate change is very real indeed" we are now informed.

Unfortunately, the remainder of this post and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Time For Revolutionary Partying And Mass Mockery

A threshold has been crossed.
New Horizons.

In Manchester, we should have been anticipating this weekend more than any other - the newly crowned richest club in the world versus the second richest club in the world AND Red Scouse against Red Manc.
But IT didn't happen.
During the Anfield game, we had the sound turned down while we concentrated on analysis of other markets in other countries.
As for the 'keenly anticipated' Eastlands Extravaganza, a cycle round the deserted streets of the city was infinitely preferable.
Barcelona v Santander? Even though we were trading on it, a rewatching of the movie "What The Fuck Do We Know" was far more tempting.
I did watch the First Half of the Stoke match because I felt like I should pay some attention to their long-throw strategy as it impacts upon player evaluations in our Holistic Sabermetrics Model. As soon as the Half Time whistle sounded, Shimano shoes and another couple of hours on the bike.

Even the events that could be described as a spectacle - Real Madrid's 4-3 win over Numancia and Dortmund's pull back from 0-3 down in one of the bitterest derbies, for example - just did not have any impact.
So what?
Who cares?
You do your work.
You trade your markets.
You send out information to clients.
You issue instructions to colleagues for the in-running trading.
You work on near-future profits.
You switch off.

It has finally reached the stage where none of this matters anymore.
And not just to myself and my Trading Team.
This is a global effect.

The demise of football is irrelevant.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the dramatic last-minute saving of Merrill Lynch - there are now only two independent investment banks (are monopolies an issue when the said monopoly is caused by the deconstruction of the entire capitalist edifice?) - is also irrelevant. It is simply the next step on the road to the Recession/Depression that awaits.

The fact that the Evil Empire has 730 military bases around the world and the further fact that fully 42% of the tax base in the US is spent by the Pentagon - its the cost of all those guns donated to the Georgians prior to the invasion of Ossetia, plus the additional expense of utilising US private security firms to lead the invasion, that sort of thing - is also sadly irrelevant.

On a personal level, my work life has never been so rewarding or exciting. This is equally irrelevant.

In the September 6th issue of The Economist, the Science and Technology section was entirely given over to climate change and geo-engineering.
Five years ago, The Economist claimed that any climatic change was not caused by mankind.
They have moved their position considerably.
A full U-turn, in fact.
"...human produced climate change is very real indeed" we are now informed.

There are two points to this dire situation.
By far the most important is the issue of climate change and geo-engineering, but, secondarily, I have a strong personal anger about the laissez faire attitudes that have led to the probable termination of the Planet Earth in its current equilibrium state.
That would be the one which is sustainable for the lives of ours and others species.

I'll start with the latter because it allows a chronological perspective to be given to today's little blog story.

30 years ago, myself and a whole bunch of people like me were doing naughty things.
'We' broke into vivisection laboratories, destroyed equipment, found homes for the animals.
'We' infiltrated hunts and mass-released the hounds to homes away from bloodsports.
'We' sank sealing and whaling boats.
'We' broke into intensive farming units with the same game plan as we used for the vivi labs.
'We' were highly motivated and trained.
'We' focused specifically on one area of the broad spectrum of negative impacts on the climate - the meat industry.
'We' could see then that the growing population, the need for more land to produce more meat, the refusal to switch to non-meat diets that allow a more efficient use of the land, the resultant deforestation for yet more cattle, the human health issues relating to the intensive farming techniques learnt at Auschwitz.
'We' could see then that climate change was real - in 1978, Sweden was the first country to ban aerosols in response to the depletion of the ozone layer.

And, what was our reward for our altruism and prescience?
Well, the least annoying aspect was the criminal records for our various 'misdemeanours'.
Like we hadn't thought of the personal impact of our actions...!
Only in my darkest moments have I felt twinges of regret at being unable to train in law or accountancy due to the theft of, for example, some battery hens :)
Our reward at the time was pretty much non-existent.
Apart from the feeling that comes from knowing that you are doing the right thing.
Many people judged us as criminals.
I lost friendships and jobs.

Some of my former colleagues lost much more than that.
The very last time that I was nabbed by the powers-that-be, there were eight of us in our cell.
Of the others, one served 14 years in prison for totally destroying a laboratory using the medium of fire.
One experienced a dreadful breakdown brought about by the extreme stresses of being in a Class 'A' 'terrorist' organisation - the nutty English government thought that we were as dangerous as the IRA.
Two others live on a commune entertaining a heroin addiction.
Another two also had breakdowns.
And one other is, remarkably, fairly sorted in a public-sector-keep-your-head-down-and-concentrate-on-the-mortgage sort of way.
'We' may not have done anything like enough, but at least we did something...

These are serious personal costs.
And it is now, 30 years later, when 'We' find that geo-engineering is probably the only chance left to save the planet, that these sacrifices deserve to be remembered with some belated respect.

Okay so, 'We' crazily thought of ourselves as Anarchists and we had idealist Utopian goals once the world had been saved from a man-made self-harming spiral that 'We' could see was leading to planetary suicide.
'We' even looked odd - 1977 and all that...

But, while the rest of you were focusing on generating your fake cash towards your fake security for your fake realities in your fake system, 'We' were fucking demolishing ourselves on your behalf.

And, even now, the vast majority of people are simply paying lip service to the approaching armageddon, there are even those delusionals who fondly anticipate such an event as a release from their earthly reality (if that is what such an existence may be called).
You put out your plastic into little plastic bags, while placing all The Guardian newspapers, aptly, in another rubbish bag, the bottles and tins have their own segments. You've even decided not to purchase an SUV. Free range and organic options may even be considered from time to time.
You feel good. You get that warm glow that comes with the feeling of knowing that you are doing your bit.

It is all totally fucking irrelevant.
You drive your cars, you take your flights, you work in a system that is the cause of the crisis, you breed, you exploit, you consume the products, you contribute nothing of consequence to anything.
But, at least you are feeling good.
I'm pleased.

As the section below demonstrates, geo-engineering is the probable final stage of the journey of homo sapiens.
It is far too late to do anything about it.
Governments will not take the necessary strategies as such changes would lead to a massive global Depression. They have trusted in innovation. They are idiotic. Innovation is trumped by Malthusian Limits.

So, what should we do about it?
The current favourites in the office are revolutionary partying and mass mockery.
Until stated otherwise, the primary reason for the Football Is Fixed blog will now be this - revolutionary partying and mass mockery.

And, finally, before I truly depress you, when the Realisation dawns that Man (sic) Is Fucked, remember people like JP, RY, GD, DJ, DD, KD, WH, NS, DC who actually did something, at considerable personal cost, so that you might at least be able to view the end of the world from the comfort of the security conferred on you by fake wealth of the housing bubble.

Fucking disgraceful...

It was obvious to any schoolkid that the Earth could easily quantum into Venus - our nearest neighbour with its greenhouse gasses and sulphuric acid rainfall. When each of these factors started becoming an issue on our planet (remember Acid Rain?), a rational global leadership would have reacted.
Well, they did react. They introduced a no-holds-barred version of capitalism that encourages all participants to sink as low as possible to gain competitive advantage.
Inevitably resources were depleted and regulations by-passed.
Meanwhile the death spiral of chain reactions and feedback loops continued to cause-and-effect onwards.

The Economist: "... what is more worrying - and more real - is the idea that such planetary engineering [geo-engineering] may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future."

Geo-engineering (GE) is massive science regarding the world's oceans and atmosphere.
The scale of such projects result in very high systemic risk (ie end of the world) and these projects are "extraordinarily complex".
The Economist goes on: "... getting the world's population to give up fossil fuels, is proving exceedingly hard. GE... may be a way of buying time for the transition to a low-carbon economy to take place in an orderly manner."

Fuck off.
They will still be worrying about their ledgers and their price-earnings ratios and their exotics portfolio when the waters are lapping around their ankles.
The only chance is for a global acceptance of immediate negative growth with all the economic pain that will ensue.
To make the other choice is high risk lunacy.

How is it that the world position is one of carbon trading and emissions schemes and other such market nonsenses?
Stop running your industries and stop propelling your machines.
Otherwise, we are all fucked.

What sort of 'rational' mind makes the decision that it is better to risk immediate oblivion via the high risks associated with GE mega-projects, a risk taken on in order that an abusive world order MIGHT have the chance to continue, than it is to deconstruct the system and start again in a more sustainable manner and with a less psychopathic and self-destructive template?

Power is so key to the Power Psycho's that they would rather have THE END rather than risk losing control - "We Run It Or You Are Fucked, That Is Your Choice, This Is Your Democracy".

The research and the resultant papers on GE have been undertaken by the Royal Society, Britain's oldest scientific academy.
GE has two core objects - removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground.
I don't have the time to go into the different GE options in detail but I've broadly itemised the options below.

* Fertilise the oceans with iron. The risk here is that the carbon might not fall to the ocean floor, hence worsening the problem, and then some. Also, the feedback loops are unknown. Messing around with the bottom of the food chain is not generally a sensible course of action.
* Plant more trees. No risk, unless they choose the inevitable GM varieties that are faster growing. Some people never learn...
* Recycling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into fuel. Not energy efficient.
* Ejection of carbon dioxide from the poles using our planet's magnetic field. One scheme sees lasers utilised to ionise molecules of CO2, while radio waves get them to spin at the correct rate to spin away from the Earth. Yeah right - remember myxomatosis?
* Increasing the amount of pollution in the air to reduce the Earth's albedo. So, having spent 50 years trying to get Sulphur out of the atmosphere, the great and the good are now thinking of reintroducing it on a massive scale, just on the off chance that it might decelerate climate change long enough for Wall St to continue to exist.
They propose adding the Sulphur to aviation fuel and making 1 million extra flights per year to pollute the atmosphere in the middle of the stratosphere. These flights alone would use up half as much fuel as civil aviation now consumes. Rational thought?
* Messing around with cloud cover. Spraying clouds with seawater makes them more reflective and hence increases the Earth's albedo. The minor problem with this project is that it will require 1.4 billion tonnes of seawater to be converted into spray each year. The one benefit of this scheme is that it offers an instant switch off.
For each of these other crisis management schemes are irreversible, once the mass-projects have been initiated the planetary ecosystem takes over and determines its favoured equilibrium state.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has described GE as "largely speculative and unproven, and with the risk of unknown side-effects".
How apt.
Just like shareholder capitalism then...

As The Economist states: "... modifying the climate will have both physical and biological consequences. Some of these will be predictable and some of them may be worse than the harm they were intended to treat."

Another major concern is moral hazard. We are currently in recession because moral hazard prevented capitalists from assessing where the real risks lay. On a GE level, a misguided belief in mega-projects will simply provide an excuse for the polluters to carry on polluting.
They'll no doubt even develop a nascent market on the trading schemes so that they can make money out of each other as they bet away the future of our species.

King of Doublespeak, Psycho Branson, with his nice knitted sweaters and his Noel-Edmonds-beardie-weirdie shit, is offering a $25 million reward for anybody who comes up with a workable way of removing billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.

I claim my prize!
Firstly, fuck-face, you ground your fuckin' airplanes. Comprendez?
Then, you stop messing around with consumer spaceflight.
These personal advancements will need to be paralleled by a complete grounding of the entire global aircraft industry, the end of warfare, a vegan diet for all, planting more non-GM trees, promoting biodiversity, the destruction of all cars, the implementation of proper public transport systems, compulsory cycling, the end of the shareholder capitalist system, the end of financial speculation and the establishment of a bottom-up democracy.
Don't Trust Power, Trust People.
Right, now gimme me cash :)

Unfortunately, even now, the Pentagon are probably gaming the innovation to see how it might be utilised for geo-political advantage. It will be inevitable that any regulatory oversight of GE will be Swiss-cheesed with the necessary loopholes to ensure tilted markets for the benefit of a host of insiders. So, the GE brigades will have a carte blanche to experiment with whatever they wish to experiment with.
The US could significantly harm Russia by implementing schemes to cool the climate, for example. There are also plans for geo-specific implementation, whereby one specially chosen region would bear the brunt of the GE risk in much the same way as the natives of numerous islands were frazzled by the nuclear experiments of yesteryear.

New Crisis. Same Tactics.
Short Term Strategy, preferably with Victims, resulting in Profit.

The Economist concludes with a paragraph that, I think, describes the current state of affairs that the vast majority of the planet are carefully ignoring: "Global warming is such a threat that all the options deserve to be explored. It would be a big experiment, but it would at least be a planned one - unlike the equally big, but unplanned experiment that is now being conducted by motor cars, power stations, cement factories and logging companies all across the planet."

All of which puts Mike Ashley into perspective.

Welcome to the new Football Is Fixed.
Are we now nihilists?
No. We believe in revolutionary partying and mass mockery.
But...

"If being a nihilist is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a nihilist and terrorist in theory as others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence and not truth, is the only resource left open to us" - Jean Baudrillard.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Is "The Virgin Of Asia" The Final Straw? #

At times of crisis, you expect your leaders to show strength and courage, to be at the forefront of the action, arguing the good argument and fighting the just cause.
Which makes it all the more disappointing that our Great Leader, the arch self-publicist, Richard Scudamore, has been conspicuous by his total absence from the hyperrealities currently playing out on the stage of English football regarding the fit-and-proper-person's-test (FPPT).

But, our sources say that the man is seething at the reactions to recent events at Manchester City, West Ham United and Newcastle United.
You are even able to feel the anger in Scudamore's response to a speech by the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, Andy Burnham.
Well, actually, it is labelled as a Premier League Press Release but the uniqueness of Scudamore's carefully selected words resonate throughout the statement: "We have endeavoured to discuss with Mr Burnham the issues he raises. Instead, he has sought publicity rather than a meaningful policy discussion" said the man who seeks publicity rather than a meaningful policy discussion.

Being an autocracy, the Premier League (PL) don't do internal brainstorming - Mr Scudamore makes all the decisions ##########################################
###############################################################################
######### Then he sets his junior rottweiler, Sir Richards, off to soften up the opposition.

So, what was it that Burnham said that so ruffled our Great Leader?
Well, he warned that big money takeovers, a reliance on foreign imports and huge debts are in danger of destroying the game. He went on to say that football was at risk of losing its identity and core support. He also warns the Football Association (FA) that they must act more robustly to protect the integrity of the sport, expressing his concerns about the quality of the ownership.

Burnham: "We need to ask urgently what we want for the future of our game, before something precious is lost."

Burnham also calls on the FA to broaden FPPT to ensure that any prospective new owner has the club and community's best interest at heart.

We are able to see why Scudamore is so livid!
Burnham is a proper governmental representative for Real Football, after the disastrous previous ministers, seemingly chosen merely to accelerate the deconstruction of the Great Game.
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By addressing the core dynamics of Scudamore's ##############, Burnham is highlighting the Real Issues that underpin the future of the game - Integrity, FPPT, the Impact of the Underground and Dark Pool Betting Markets, Big Money Takeovers of Teams, the Quality of Ownership, the Loss of Core Support, Huge Debts.
The only item on which we disagree with Burnham is his point about the 'reliance on foreign imports'.
Although there clearly needs to be a limit of overseas players in a team, would you rather watch?
Carlos Tevez or Alan Smith?

We should be thinking of setting up a private market (a market between traders where current hyperrealities are assessed and traded - a sort of intranet version of Intrade) on the number of months that Burnham will stay in office.

Although, this market is only a solid sell if evaluated on the systemic risk that Gordon Brown is dead in the water. For, there are other voices who are questioning the direction that the PL is heading under the piloting of our Great Leader.

For example, Lord Triesman, Scudamore's equivalent at the FA: "I am not sure that the regulatory system is any longer adequate".
We're not convinced that Scudamore is any longer adequate, in that he ever was...

Warnings on the integrity of sport have also been sounded in Dave Zirin's "A People's History of Sports in the United States".
Zirin warns that sport is "hyperindividualistic and completely absent of context. In other words... a lot like history... the other problem is that much of it is based on lies. Once again, this is a lot like history..."

It was also unfortunate for Scudamore that a major uproar is taking place in Germany after the publishing of Declan Hill's book "The Fix" - the book is not yet published in Britain. By exposing further links between owners, match officials, other insiders and the betting markets, Hill's book brings the true Reality of the game to a wider readership.
The very very last thing that our Great Leader requires ########################### #######################################################################

Similarly totally unreported in the mainstream English press, seemingly focused solely on the bipolar performances of the Schweintruppe, is the unrest among match officials.
We continue to bring you quotes about how the referees are feeling about the direction the PL are taking the sport.
A major topic of discussion at the moment is PC Howard Webb.
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And yet, on our calculations, Webb was the second worst referee last season.

################################: "[Graeme] Poll came back after making a clown of himself at the 2006 World Cup and was given just about every decent appointment in the coming months as if Hackett/the FA were trying to defend him and justify his existence. I fear that after Howard Webb's less than outstanding Euro 2008 we are in danger of seeing a repeat."
Fair comment.
And a fair point is this: "Despite the rampant defence of Webb in the English press after his decision to award Austria a fake penalty for shirt-pulling in injury time of their Euro 2008 match against Poland, on how many occasions since then have we seen a penalty given for such a 'foul'?
Shirt-pulling mustn't be happening, then...

Also absent from the English media is any focus on the plight of banned ref, and the only official who is actually worse than Webb at our reckoning, Mark 'Full Head Of Hair' Clattenburg. All that money spent on hair implants must seem rather wasted now that his baldness no longer shines out under the Premiership floodlights.
Despite his ban while some outstanding financial matters are investigated, Clattenburg was given the Belgium v Estonia World Cup 2010 Qualifier last weekend.
Understandably, there were some concerns about this appointment.
Is it a statement of the severity of the potential charges against Clattenburg that he was pulled from the Belgium match, even though, historically, a national ban has only prevented FIFA and UEFA representation once the issue has passed through court?

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It is interesting, in many ways, that the takeover that has possibly proved to be one takeover too far is the potential purchase of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour's sovereign-wealth fund (SWF).
All the takeovers have had a cultural dimension to them so there is no need for Arab money to be regarded any differently than Russian, American, Israeli or Thai.
Yet, the sources of the SWF investment kitty ##################################### ###########################################################################
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It is surely the size of the new Hyperreality Shift that is causing the widespread concern that Scudamore has gone too far.
Of course, some might say that we went too far over the Carlos Tevez/ relegation of West Ham United affair. Others point to his promotion of the 39th Game. Still others question how a man of integrity is able to be so chummy with His Excellency, the Honorary President, the Doctor Thaksin Shinawatra.

And, once again, it is this individual who defines the argument.
Sure, the scale of the City takeover is indecent in magnitude.
But, the key factor is the issue that a fraudster with blood on his hands, a man who looted his country for proprietary gain, a former-policeman-turned-criminal who is now on the run from the law, is able to maintain 25% ownership of the new HyperEntity simply because the outdated rules allow for such a gaming of the system.
The FPPT was only reluctantly introduced in the first place and the whole document is full of loopholes to such an extent that this can only be regarded as a deliberate strategy to undermine any validity of the rules.

There is another level of concern as to the Manchester City takeover however.
SWFs are very opaque.
In a recent survey of 34 such investment vehicles, 10 issued no annual reports and 12 were not subject to audit. Such a structure encourages financial shenanigans of the very type that have landed the former owner, His Excellency, in his current mires.

The other level that must be a concern in the game is the issue of the gambling markets.
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And, it is our belief that this is the prime reasoning behind Scudamore's continued defence of His Excellency. If necessary, the rules of the game will be rewritten in order that the project for which Scudamore is a driving force reaches full fruition.

And Full Fruition = Fucked Football.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the post and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Fake It #

Jean Baudrillard: "...the modern is prey to a systematic delirium."

Jean Baudrillard: "The economy exhibits, in the most striking fashion, the domination of the imaginary at all levels."

Jean Baudrillard: "Your rights, your destitution, your freedom, interest us!"

The Silly Season has slipped into September this year.
How else could it have been after the Transfer Deadline Day reached a footballing 9.3 on the Richter scale?

Football Is Fixed.
Economics Is Fixed.
Politics Is Fixed.

It seems that the decent people are jumping overboard from New Football, their decency being relative, of course.

"If I am walking away from this job, just imagine how bad it is" stated Alan Curbishley as he resigned at dysfunctional West Ham.

Unfortunately, the remainder of this post and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

England Are A Schweintruppe #

Yesterday's Andorra versus England game was a fix.

Later in this post, we detail for our subscribers how the fix was perpetrated, minute by minute on the field of 'play'.
As for the rest of you freeloaders, at least you know that the match was rigged.

Yesterday's Andorra versus England game was a fix.

On only three occasions in their last 23 Internationals have the Mighty Andorra been able to go in at Half Time with the scores level - two of those occasions have been against the Three Lions of England.

Yesterday's Andorra versus England game was a fix.

By involving themselves in a rigged event just one day after reports in the German press implied that the England versus Ecuador 2006 World Cup match was fixed (it was, by the way - we traded it), the participants in the scam were pushing their luck somewhat. They surely knew that they would be under close sousveillance...

Yesterday's Andorra versus England game was a fix.

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Yesterday's Andorra versus England game was a fix.

On Friday in The Guardian, Dan Roebuck of Ladbrokes Radio came out with the following dross: "Such outcomes [Draw at HT, England to Win at Full Time], though, are rare as Andorra have been level at half time only twice in their last 22 fixtures". The lying liar then went on to advise the gullible that "one bet that could prove profitable is a buy of the bookings index at 44". Well, it certainly proved to be profitable for the bookies - the make-up was 20. Buying bookings in non-competitive matches is a sure route to bankruptcy.
A classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication.

Yesterday's Andorra versus England game was a fix.

The bookmakers very frequently use the HT Draw/ Full Time England Win template in International matches where England are short odds-on. Greedy punters are renowned for ignoring the 1.02 (1/50) on an England victory to get a greater return by backing England to be ahead at Half Time and at Full Time. We've lost count of the number of occasions where this template has been employed.

Yesterday's Andorra versus England game was a fix.

* The remainder of this post is available to subscribers only.
It explores how the game was fixed, which individuals we should be asking questions of, which data reveals the scam plus the mechanics of deliberately underperforming for 45 minutes against a pub team of amateurs.
It takes quite a lot of doing to avoid a shot on target for the entire First Half against such a team.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

England World Cup Match Was Fixed! #

In a week when the whole of the world is available for Manchester City to buy, the whole of the Newcastle and West Ham teams were available for sale and the whole of the press published daily hypersoaps on these hyperreality television shows, formerly known as football clubs, there was something altogether murkier lurking in the background - match fixing.

England's World Cup 2006 match with Ecuador was fixed.

The Ecuadorean Football Federation (FEF) are demanding that FIFA open an inquiry in to the match after reports in German newspaper Bild claimed the outcome of the last-16 match, which Ecuador lost 1-0 to England following a David Beckham goal, had been influenced by a Paris-based Thai betting consortium.
FEF president Luis Chiriboga called for an "exhaustive inquiry" and totally rejected any accusations of involvement in match rigging, adding that it was now his responsibility to protect the players and coaches.
It should be remembered that it was this same FEF who gave us Byron Moreno, the match official who rigged the Italy versus South Korea World Cup match four years earlier.

Of course, you will not find many references to this major news story in the English media.
Particularly just before an international round of games for the 2010 World Cup.

The English national football team are, what is known in German as, a 'schweintruppe' - a dodgy team.

Unfortunately, the remainder of this post and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Will Father Timothy Flotsky Marry Corinne Tate? - A Flashback

The new subscription structure of Football Is Fixed includes provision for a couple of Flashback posts per month, in order that we may either demonstrate our prescience or allow for the continuation of the arguments set out in the original post.

The following post was published on April 21st 2008.
Given the shenanigans this week at Newcastle, Abu Dhabi United and West Ham, we must assume that all three clubs have simply morphed from football teams into Hyperreality TV Shows.
Hypersoaps in ScudamoreWorld.
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70's pseudo-soap, Soap, provided warped twists to reality while also treating the downright improbable as a standard daily occurrence.
In its own way, Soap was a postmodern entity in that the show paraded the interaction between two dysfunctional extended American families as a series of images precessing through the phases to a total simulation of a family's Real purpose, if any such purpose exists.
Marital infidelity has never been so enjoyable.

The media output, news, stories, economies of truth, propaganda and disinformation of the last week in the world of Premiership football brought Soap back to mind, for that is what the beautiful game has become.
Firstly, Premiership football morphed into something that looked a little bit like football but somehow wasn't. Then Premiership football spent its time hiding the fact that it was, in fact, not really much to do with 23 men on a pitch with a ball at all anymore. Now Premiership football is entering the territory of the Hyperreal - Total Simulation.
Check out the crescendo of hype being decibelled up as we approach the solution to this year's version of the Crime.
A focus on the critical importance of maintaining an hysterical level of interest to the termination of this Crime is shared in a range of boardrooms - Sky, Setanta, the Premier League, the press, advertisers, the bookmakers and the clubs themselves (financially, at least).
Because we are also conditioned to spectacular climaxes, our whole lives having become just one long series of super-spectacles of dubious Reality, we too demand that the climax is orgasmic. The sense of deflation that would result if a Premiership premature ejaculation was the final scene would stop some viewers switching back on for the next series of the soap - Season 2008/2009.

To the plot so far...
"This is a story about two oligarchs, Roman Abramovich and Thaksin Shinawatra. This is Chelsea. And this is Manchester City, and this is SOAP.
"Chelsea are run by an oligarch, Roman, with close links to both Gazprom and the Kremlin.
"Arsenal are being slowly taken over by an oligarch, Alisher, who also has close links to both Gazprom and the Kremlin. Alisher has allegedly made money from the drug trade and is close to people who think that boiling babies is a bit of a hoot.
"Roman has upset Boris, another oligarch, who does not get on with Gazprom or the Kremlin at all but who gets on very well indeed with Alisher. Boris says Roman used 'threats and intimidation' to get his financial wont.
"Nikolai is a friend of Boris who was in jail in Russia. But Roman could get him out of jail. Boris now wants £2 billion off Roman. Meanwhile, an editor at Alisher's newspaper 'falls' to his death from a hotel window in Moscow.
"Roman's empire is managed by holocaust survivor, Avram, who is married to an Israeli tv presenter and who is very very upset with the press. In a bizarre press conference he told the journalists: 'You can write whatever you want and I can answer what I want'. Of course, the press absolutely do write whatever they want.
"'Chelsea cheat. That is how they win. Arsenal prefer integrity. That is why they lose'. These are not sentiments that might find a place in the mainstream media.
"Arsenal are managed by Arsène. He is angry with the Premier League, the referees and the media. After his team had suffered an outrageous, and highly predictable run of corruption against their interests, Arsène complained: 'This team has been punished in the last seven weeks more so than any team I have seen'.
"Arsenal are not helped by the fact that Jens hates Manuel - 'I know he hates me' - and Nicklas hates one of the Emmanuel's' too. Fans have now stopped going to watch Arsenal as the modern day fan demands spectacular prizes as a reward for spectacular corruption. Arsenal are thinking of suing the Premier League for corruption against their interests and the financial losses accruing thereof.
"Chelsea are fighting against Manchester United for the Crime's Big Prize. Or, rather, Chelsea Reserves are fighting Man Utd Reserves for the 2nd Biggest Prize. Manchester have already won but the scammers require our mock climax. Following Chelsea's failure to beat Wigan in an allegedly fixed match, it was necessary to prevent Manchester winning in Lancashire. No problem. Rob earned some more decking and garden furniture courtesy of Roman after denying the Reds two obvious penalties.
"The BBC remains the prime media for Premiership football - propaganda for the elite, as ever. Lawro works for the Premier League. Lawro reckoned that the two incorrect penalty decisions 'didn't spoil the game', presumably meaning that is suitably spoiled already. Ian and Lee work for bookmakers. Ian has left the BBC complaining that he is only allowed to tell jokes containing an innuendo about lines of coke when really he has been sacked. Meanwhile, Lee just keeps on lying but always looks guilty when he is doing it.
"The only competition that is real (in the Illusory sense) is the Champions League which, this year, sees one national champion out of the last four teams. Roman will surely attempt to buy a place in the Final in Moscow having already bought Russia a place in the Euro 2008 Finals which follow. Opponents, Liverpool, are allegedly in crisis with Tom not talking to George or Rafa, Rafa not too happy with Rick but moderately keen on George while David's moustache gets more luxuriant.
"Rafa is consulting his lawyers after Neil, from a crystal palace, suggested: 'Integrity, doing what is right for the game, comes way down Rafa's list of priorities'. Rafa continues to cultivate the inappropriate goatie.
"Birmingham, Newcastle and Portsmouth are currently under investigation by the City of London police for financial shenanigans like false accounting and money laundering. The Birmingham owners were questioned by police last week and had 'happily done so' while the Portsmouth manager, 'Arry, has launched a counterclaim against the police after he originally judged that the police had to arrest you in order to ask you questions in the first place. 'Arry remains on bail while Birmingham are being bought by a billionaire gambling tycoon who was but a barber as recently as 10 years ago.
"This background of financial impropriety has not stopped Portsmouth reaching the FA Cup Final with the considerable aid of the referees. Portsmouth are effectively owned by an arms dealer with outstanding arrest warrants in France for illegal traffiking. Portsmouth are also closely linked to #####################.
"This year's FA Cup Final will be refereed by randomiser-in-chief, Mike Dean - just a couple of years after he was banned from officiating for two months for being closely linked to an online tipster service, Arbitros Racing. Thoroughly deserved then...
"Another Roman runs Hearts and Roman of Hearts reckons that Scottish football is a fix which, of course, it is and always has been. Witness Rangers, also under City of London police investigation, and their assisted passage to the Cup Final against a Queen from the South (who will the 'Gers fans support?) and their presentation with the League title by the whistles of officialdom.
"The Premiership referees made 19 incorrect major calls between them over this last window of 10 games. 4 match outcomes were affected. Martin refereed two of these 10 games (at Everton on Thursday and Fulham on Saturday) before being the 4th official at Aston Villa on Sunday. On the internal PGMOB website, a FIFA accredited match official moaned: 'Why, oh why, has Martin got 3 games in 4 days when there are 10 or 11 other officials who would have been more suitable?'. We wonder why...
"Oligarchical Roman employs Frank. Frank employs 50 scouts globally searching for grassroots talent or enacting a modern day version of the slave trade, depending upon your point of view. Frank got Roman to employ Henk to undermine Avram, just as he had previously successfully poloniumated the atmosphere between Roman and José, a Special One. Frank's slaves assembled at a cost of over £6 million reached the Final of the Youth Cup but were beaten by a team largely comprising of inner city Mancunian youth which only went to show that those fifty scouts had been looking in the wrong locations all along.
"Manchester City, the winners of this Youth Reality, are owned by Thaksin. Thaksin doesn't like anyone very much although he is rather partial to the offshore baht and power. Policeman - prime minister - oligarch - robber - murderer - thief - political 'refugee' - black marketeer - football club owner. An unusual CV. Thaksin also believes himself to be the Last King of Thailand and refers to himself as 'His Excellency'. His excellency also hates human rights in a trigger happy sort of way. Thaksin doesn't like Sven either because Sven has failed in his task of special adviser to the king. The Reality of Manchester City Youth is one of the last of its type. Thaksin is busy importing substandard Thai youngsters, for political currency, and seeking highly marketable but overpriced prima donnas whose best days are surely behind them. The new players WILL, however, look rather Thai-chic descending down the airplane steps accompanying his excellency back into his empire.
"Thaksin is inappropriately close to Richard who runs the Hyperreality of Premiership football as a personal fiefdom on behalf of the bookmakers and Rupert's hyper-organisation. Thaksin helps Richard get what Richard wants and Richard helps Thaksin get what Thaksin wants. Rupert is omnipresent but not yet omnipotent".

"Will the Premiership title and relegation races go down to the wire? Does anyone really care? Will Pompey criminalise the FA Cup Final? Will 'Arry go to jail or will the police go to jail? Will the gambler buyout the pornographer and his moll at Birmingham? Will Dubai buy the Texas Reds? Is Thaksin going to jail or will he get his hands on the illicit treasure? Will Thaksin leave Richard? Will the French police catch Arkadi? Will he be linked to the killing of Savimbi by Mossad? Will the Kremlin get Arsenal? Are more babies to be boiled? Will the Kremlin get Euro 2008? Does the Kremlin intend increasing its portfolio of London soccer franchises further? Will we ever get used to autocratic power winning everything?"

"Confused? You soon will be. But all will be revealed in the next exciting episode of SOAP".

A Coda:
BBC: "A real pivotal week for you after so much work this season".
Wenger: "Yes, but I cannot blame the players because in both games [against Liverpool and United] we turned up, we played at our level but every single thing has turned against us since March. We have got a clear, clear message as well on many decisions which went against us. We understand it. We are not stupid".
BBC: "What do you mean by that?"
Wenger: "Nothing" [awkward silence for 10 seconds].
BBC: "Indeed. Well, let other people read into that comment shall we?"
Wenger: "You do what you want".

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological