Power Is Self-Legitimating
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Power likes to walk on crooked legs"
On April 12th 2020 Maria Agyeiwaa Agyapong, 28, a nurse who worked at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital lost her life to covid-19.
She was pregnant and her baby was successfully delivered by caesarean section.
Two weeks earlier, Maria had also lost her father Stephen to coronavirus.
On the day of Maria's death, the Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson snorted: "Everyone is in total agreement we need an end to the season... with all of these sacrifices [extra restrictions and busy schedule]... everyone will be more than happy to go along with what it takes in order to get playing again as soon as possible."
But some sacrifices are bigger than others, Mr Hodgson.
In the aftermath, Palace club chairman Steve Parish was put forward as a spokesperson for Project Restart and crooned: "Football is one the most efficient tax-generating industries in Britain."
For a gentleman who has close liaisons with the benefits offered by offshore financial centres, this was a bit rich.
Here was the onset of Project Restart.
Market analytics suggested that Crystal Palace, who had nothing to play for, would have nine juicy insider trading events to bet in the underground South East Asian markets when the Premier League restarted - no benefits to the HMRC there.
Analytically, we already knew that six of these games were market-active i.e. fixed - the Palace elite cleared millions on these events.
We were witnessing blood money there.
And Palace players, with 50% of the squad BAME, were expected to take extra risks to energise these revenue streams for their elite...
... which is to be expected, of course, as Hodgson is a serial racist who broke the South African anti-apartheid sanctions to support a white power state in return for petty cash.
And so it was with Britain and covid-19.
Sonia Faleiro of the New York Times: "The British government has sent out a clear message "the work of ethnic minorities may be essential. But their lives are expendable"."
Everything goes back to the beginning.
During the pandemic, both capitalism and football suffered from the same triptych of existential externalities - corruption, climate catastrophe and covid-19.
Now, under normal circumstances, neo-liberals simply ignore these by-products of the system.
Crises create chaos and, into the void, stage right, strolls disaster capitalism - the exploitation of catastrophe for proprietary gain is a core competency, after all.
The Economist: "The covid-19 outbreak has so far sparked as much jostling for advantage as far-sighted magnanimity... In truth the Treasury has been looking for some time at how to raise revenue to pay the costs of an ageing population."
Enter covid-19 and herd immunity.
The pandemic unleashed multiple varieties of class war against the populace - privatised medical versus public health, dividends being paid to shareholders while workers are furloughed or sacked, the Premier League demanding preferential status while lower league clubs go to the wall, censorious 'science' being manipulated to ensure herd immunity abuses for the masses etc etc.
According to a report by Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, US billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic while the unemployment rate reached 15%.
Another parallel between abuses by the state and within football is the Stalinist redaction of information. The secrecy underpinning Project Restart was remarkable. The fan was completely removed from consideration while players were being coerced and threatened not to upset the monetary apple cart.
Money is the only consideration.
Opacity and propaganda define all strategies.
Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch: "When governments suppress the free flow of information, it is terrible for public health."
Very few governments performed as poorly as the UK conservatives over coronavirus.
The undercounting of deaths skewed the early data and hence the analytics and response both to the initial wave and the development of viable future strategies.
At the time of writing (June 2020), Britain has the worst data on covid-19 of any country anywhere.
We are witnessing a delegitimisation of the state in Britain.
The delayed introduction and early removal of very weak lockdown measures equated with a government policy of herd immunity.
Positive Money Report stated: "Vast majority of the public think we should worry more about people's health and well-being than economic growth."
We were in the initial period of a cyclical perfect storm - as lockdowns are eased and stupidity reigns, the intervals of new normality will be short or brutal. Covid-19 is known to travel on pollution particles and every time pollution increases, so will the number of cases.
And pandemics will keep arriving into the future on the conveyor belt of life.
The choice for our political and football hierarchies is simple - cyclical disaster or structural change.
Being psychopathic, they will select the former.
Project Restart was a corruption entity. The liaisons in coke-filled rooms, the manipulations of truth, the burying of science, the close association between neo-liberals at the Department of Culture Media & Sport and mafia entities, the leaking of lies, the 'persuasion' of the vulnerable, the fake analytics claiming that the EPL faced a £1 billion black hole if the season remained unfinished with leading clubs taking a £100 million hit each.
Even if this had been the case, somehow I think that the US, South East Asian, Russian and Middle East billionaires, oligarchs and sovereign wealth funds could have absorbed such a loss.
Even Frank Lampard noticed that Premier League players and hangers-on getting tested before NHS frontline workers was inappropriate while Newcastle United player Danny Rose on being told that football was being forced back for the good of the country responded with "fuck the nation's morale" and Watford captain Troy Deeney shone a light on Project Restart's racist idiocy with "I can't get a haircut until mid-July but I can go and get in a box with 19 people and go and jump for a header. I don't know how that works."
No matter which angle you perceive Project Restart it was rancid.
For instance, the Premier League refused to disclose whether it knew beforehand that Avi Lasarow, the chief executive of the firm supplying covid-19 testing kits to the league, had been fined £48,000 and been barred due to making deceptive health claims.
It wasn't a great image to be getting testing kits from a crook while people were dying through an absence of those same kits.
The British Medical Association had complained that "non-essential sectors" such as football should not get personal protective equipment (PPE) or testing ahead of NHS workers.
The choice for our political and football hierarchies is simple - cyclical disaster or structural change.
Being psychopathic, they will select the former.
Project Restart was a corruption entity. The liaisons in coke-filled rooms, the manipulations of truth, the burying of science, the close association between neo-liberals at the Department of Culture Media & Sport and mafia entities, the leaking of lies, the 'persuasion' of the vulnerable, the fake analytics claiming that the EPL faced a £1 billion black hole if the season remained unfinished with leading clubs taking a £100 million hit each.
Even if this had been the case, somehow I think that the US, South East Asian, Russian and Middle East billionaires, oligarchs and sovereign wealth funds could have absorbed such a loss.
Even Frank Lampard noticed that Premier League players and hangers-on getting tested before NHS frontline workers was inappropriate while Newcastle United player Danny Rose on being told that football was being forced back for the good of the country responded with "fuck the nation's morale" and Watford captain Troy Deeney shone a light on Project Restart's racist idiocy with "I can't get a haircut until mid-July but I can go and get in a box with 19 people and go and jump for a header. I don't know how that works."
No matter which angle you perceive Project Restart it was rancid.
For instance, the Premier League refused to disclose whether it knew beforehand that Avi Lasarow, the chief executive of the firm supplying covid-19 testing kits to the league, had been fined £48,000 and been barred due to making deceptive health claims.
It wasn't a great image to be getting testing kits from a crook while people were dying through an absence of those same kits.
The British Medical Association had complained that "non-essential sectors" such as football should not get personal protective equipment (PPE) or testing ahead of NHS workers.
Functioning democracies only provide preferential treatment to entities "critical to maintain national security" - it is not known how a fixed football match live on BBC between Bournemouth and Crystal Palace enhances the security of most people in the UK.
There are other infrastructural accommodations with regard to our national sport as the systemic corruption in football provides greater revenue to the Treasury than legitimacy would.
The 14 day quarantine period for foreign travellers didn't apply to footballers, there were continual attempts to reduce the two metre social distancing rule for the benefit of selected economic sectors (including football) while, from the onset, it was made clear that lockdown restrictions on the over-seventies didn't apply to black market operatives like the now 75 year-old Mr Hodgson.
Paul Mason on nationalist neo-liberals: "... they want chaos; chaos is their element; they're not running a country but a crime syndicate".
Covid-19 brought the corruption and structural weaknesses of state and football to public attention in the UK.
In the 2019 National Security Risk Assessment, the Government chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance signed off the report despite it highlighting the lack of PPE to deal with any pandemic and despite UK ministers being warned of the high risk of such an outbreak.
The report was also signed off (in redaction) by Sir Mark Sedwell (the national security adviser to the comedy prime minister).
Germany had its first coronavirus death on the same day as the UK but whereas the government scientific advisers in Britain are political appointments supportive of neo-liberal ideology, the Robert Koch Institute is a pure science entity.
And guess what, science slaughters ideology - strong institutions trump populist showmen deriding expertise.
The window of lockdown was, unsurprisingly, devalued by the UK's eugenicist-in-chief, Dominic Cummings.
The Economist: "Lockdowns have been sold as a way to "beat" covid-19. In fact, they reset the clock. Having failed to stop the disease taking hold, countries have bought themselves a chance to try again. But unless they act differently the virus will surge once more... Without a vaccine or therapeutic drugs, neither of which is guaranteed, countries... face a future of bouncing in and out of lockdown every few months, with infection rates ebbing and flowing in response. The result will be mounting death tolls, depressed economies and confidence-sapping uncertainty."
Any new normality will be fleeting.
Apart from at Crystal Palace.
Anthony Fauci (an expert on infectious diseases) stated that rushing to end lockdowns before the pandemic is finished would result in more "suffering and death" and do more economic harm in the long run.
And, apart from the short-term, this will also apply at Selhurst Park.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) expected covid-19 to be impactful for four to five years and the WHO director for Europe Dr Hans Kluge correctly predicted a deadly wave of covid-19 in winter 2019/20 coinciding with outbreaks of other infectious diseases due to collective immunity issues.
Meanwhile Bunker Boy, the former US President, refused to share data and research with the WHO, withdrew funding from the global body and regarded the hunt for a vaccine to be competitive and a profit source - exactly the same abhorrent imbalance as in the Premier League where death and health are insignificant inputs when there is opportunity to battle over turf and wealth.
Science saved the day by finding vaccines but that was never a certain outcome and, when the next pandemic strikes, as it surely will, the same antisocial idiocies will surface again from the free market zealots.
Project Restart was a Premier League power grab which resulted in numbers of lower league teams being taken over by EPL 'elite' operators and run as 'B' teams primarily to the advantage of profits from insider trading and matchfixing.
The UK government, to suit the herd immunity agenda, was passive throughout this pandemic. Blinkered 'science' from selected entities is acted upon while global scientific research is ignored.
This culpable manslaughter is truly gross.
The Economist: "The German press has been particularly scathing. Suddeutsche Zeitung concluded that unequal and unhealthy Britain made "a good breeding ground for the pandemic." Poland's government cites the UK as a case study of what not to do while Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, described herd immunity as a "death sentence".
Climate catastrophe will also demolish the global football model for growth.
In 2001, Bjorn Lomborg published 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' which allowed neo-liberal newspapers like the Economist to pretend that man-made climate change was not impactful enough to be addressed robustly and that naive cost-benefit analyses should be the foundation of the human reaction to impending climate catastrophe.
Yet.
Even then it was already probably too late to save the planetary equilibrium and most species.
Capitalism yields an Extinction Economy.
As the abusers and the acquiescent continued to destroy the ecosystem for private gain shielding themselves from the ecological disasters and degradations, the mass extinctions, the meteorological black swan weather realities and the like in their all-year-round-tan sort of post-imperialist swagger - collecting air miles like there was no tomorrow when there actually was no tomorrow...
The first academic papers to prove attribution of human input to climatic change were published in 2004 and that should have been the end of any argument.
But the stupid and the selfish decided otherwise.
Free market capitalism should have been terminated immediately with a new global economy based on sustainability rather than carcinogenic short-term pseudo-growth.
Lomborg's thesis is now seen as error strewn, incorrect and largely irrelevant, being deemed "scientifically dishonest" by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty.
Yet the Economist has barely moved - they now recognise the reality of human-influenced climate catastrophe but refuse to countenance the end of the neo-psychopathic system that has created this carnage via its addiction to growth.
In the 2019 Christmas edition, the neo-con Economist tried to integrate free-market psychopathy as a norm of behaviour rather than a personality disordered outlier.
The Economist still claim that an economy cannot be planned and - "a [free market] economy that cannot be predicted, cannot be controlled."
But an economy that cannot be controlled by necessity becomes sociopathic via a marginal gains race to the bottom of every barrel available in a mature marketplace.
And an economy that cannot be controlled doesn't account for externalities that should figure as costs and the unintended consequences of such ignorances are the feedback loops that mean that Australia being ranked bottom of the table for its reaction to climate catastrophe has allowed conditions for out-of-control firestorms that deposit ash onto New Zealand glaciers, causing them to melt, adding to the feedback loops of climatic disaster.
That is how climate catastrophe will 'evolve' - the planet will react to these feedback loops by finding a new equilibrium state, one incompatible with much of life as we know it.
The only other guarantees spewed out by neo-liberalism are massive income inequality, desperate global migrations of desperate people and the ever-present corruption template (both mafia and institutional) that maintains this new world order.
Free markets negate regulation and amplify disaster capitalism feedback loops.
Australia has become a state captured by psychopathic politicians obsessed with mineral rights and mining.
Australia is a mafia state.
In the same way that Malta was a mafia state under Joseph Muscat, and remains so despite a change in prime minister.
And with the same modular construct, much of the corruption and matchfixing underpinning UK football emanates from Malta.
Mining and mineral rights or mafia and matchfixing, it doesn't really matter.
But this financialisation of our existences neatly parallels our journey to oblivion, lethal mutations that we are.
Those who are systemically corrupting football are also systemically destroying the planet via rampant money laundering and tax evasion (emptying state coffers), mafia affiliations and behaviours (undermining legitimate businesses), excessive travel and private jet usage to transport corrupted entities around the world (CO2 polluting to irreversibility in climate catastrophe along the way), the extensive matchfixing and insider trading that destroys the integrity of the sport as well as the efficacies of both the betting and the transfer markets, while the original football fan, not the prawn sandwich fuckwits who grace the posh seats nowadays, is targeted via class warfare and the austerity policies of a neo-liberal fascist elite who facilitate and enable the corruption in British football.
Football is a problem because, of all sports, it contributes the most to man-made climate change.
If the sport were legitimate, there might be arguments in favour of the current structure of excessive numbers of sportspeople, supporters and various hangers-on private jetting / jetting around the world but the sport is mafia-controlled at all levels and the spectacle so created is dependent on the whims of institutional corruption and insider control of betting markets by entirely non-regulated agents.
And football's disastrous climate footprint expands...
... we currently have Visigoth Vox Vagabond Javier Tebas determined to stage La Liga games in the USA with the formation of the European Super League while Michel Platini decided to increase CO2 emissions a thousand-fold by electing that the Euro 2020/2021 Finals will be staged in 12 nations scattered all around the continent.
Mark Carney (former governor of the Bank of England): "... traditional drivers of value have been shaken, new ones will gain prominence... the [coronavirus] crisis is likely to accelerate the fragmentation of the global economy. Until a vaccine has been found and widely applied, travel restrictions will remain. Even afterwards, local resilience will be prized over global efficiency... debt will weigh on the capacity for growth... In this crisis, we know we need to act as an interdependent community not independent individuals, so that the values of economic dynamism and efficiency have been joined by those of solidarity, fairness, responsibility and compassion... The great test of whether this new hierarchy of values will prevail is climate change."
"Be impossible, demand reality."
Under normal circumstances, global power bases secrete their inappropriate performance by sleight of hand. This is much harder with climate catastrophe (where the data and the reality prove doubters imbecilic), covid-19 (where the numbers of deaths per million population is a real reality) and corruption in football (where betting markets reveal the presence of matchfixing before the game kicks off).
Feedback loops and previously ignored externalities apply to all three areas as they compete on the precipice of growth.
Data, analytics and markets pop the bubble of propaganda.
Piketty: "Proprietarianism has become capitalism. The end is near."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Plus Ca Change, Plus C'Est La Meme Chose
Daphne Caruana Galizia's final journalism prior to her assassination by the Maltese mafia state: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate"
Before focusing further on the impacts of corruption, covid-19 and climate change on football, society and government, we need to project ahead to the new templates of engagement.
Firstly, although the data lags the reality, we are firmly in a Depression - the boat has taken on water and is sinking but still remains partially afloat.
As has already occurred with the psychopathic Project Restart, we should expect more mafia, more corruption, more graft, a consolidation of economic power and less competition - big mafia and big corruption in the holistic, the general and the specific as both sport and state become increasingly regressive.
There are three ways in which mafia groups will enhance power as a result of the pandemic - higher unemployment produces a greater array of potential operatives, the gaming of government recovery schemes and taking over collapsing businesses to launder illicit gains.
The Economist: "Most worrying [according to Interpol] is the potential for covid-19 to create the ideal conditions for the spread of serious organised crime. The pandemic is encouraging organised criminals to put old skills to new use. The global economic depression that looks likely to follow will offer them a chance to extend their reach into the legitimate economy."
But this hysteresis will be self-harming and temporary.
There will be a U-turn against globalisation coupled with a move towards national self-sufficiency resulting in markedly slower economic growth.
But there will also be a new and strengthened oligarchical elite of well-connected anti-competitive control.
In future pandemics, in the desperation to put the economy ahead of health, expect to see the effective imprisonment of the vulnerable so that a variety of Ponzi schemes can continue without decelerating forces.
There will also be an acceleration of some of the trends that were already hitting global business prior to the pandemic.
Data analytics will be the basis of all future truth and lies.
And it is data-driven journalism that will be on hand to expose these future contortions of any claim to a social reality.
We wage a protracted war against corruption.
After the Black Death and Spanish Flu, economies quantum leaped to new foundations and were no longer constrained by Malthusian limits.
But with covid-19, these Malthusian limits will be the threshold that defines the horizons of all future state and mafia operation - climate catastrophe and pandemics are the real new normal.
There is a limit to corruption, to the degree of ecological destruction and climate abuse, to the naivety in dealing with pandemics.
But, at this stage, the free market neo-liberals are utilising a complete absence of regulation or flimsy pseudo self-regulation to allow criminal strategies to proceed unencumbered by any externalities or laws or rules of the game.
Project Restart took as its business model the abuses perpetrated throughout the Bourbon Restoration.
Piketty: "... only the wealthiest 1 percent of real estate owners enjoyed the right to vote. In other words, the fiscal rules favoured tranquil accumulation of capital while at the same time allowing those who benefited from that system to formulate the political rules that ensured they would continue to do so. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer illustration of the inegalitarian proprietarian regime."
Football is Fixed on Project Restart: "... only the Premier League club owners enjoyed the right to vote. In other words, the lack of rules favoured malicious accumulation of capital while at the same time allowing mafia entities who benefited from that system to formulate the hidden agendas that ensured they would continue to do so. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer illustration of systemic mafia-based corruption in sport."
If you scan the planet with precise care, it is feasible to discover idiocy greater than that behind Project Restart.
And we found it.
In determining that football must continue in Belarus due to the backhanders offered by the bookmaking industry, President Alexander Lukashenko claimed that the best way to combat coronavirus was to drink vodka and drive a tractor.
Let's hear it for pissed up ploughing.
_________________________________________________________________________________
If Everyone Starts Working Like This, What Kind Of Anarchy Will It Be?
Barney Ronay at the onset of covid-19: "During the years of plenty it became a habit to compare the Premier League wielding of power... to the structures of a mafia family... It is obvious no one in England should play professional football this summer. There isn't time to play the games. It's not medically safe"
Various fan groups protested about football returning behind closed doors.
But.
Fans are irrelevant and are seen as 'addicts' who will do whatever is necessary for their fix - mainlining the matchfixing when it shoots up the dropper's neck.
Even though things aren't quite the same, just pay your subscriptions to the void and shut up.
The Economist: "Any business that brings together crowds of people faces trouble."
Football's payment mechanisms were gummed up for a window.
Consequently, for Project Restart, the key battlegrounds were the players and club owners.
On the shady side of the mountain valley we had BT Sport, Sky Sports, a cartel of football agents, an array of bookmakers, and mafia entities (not otherwise included in this listing).
These entities destroy sport and destroy lives.
Take Liverpool FC.
In 2019, the club paid agents £44 million and the wage bill was £310 million yet the club initially furloughed all shop and administration workers due to the pandemic.
The UK furloughing scheme was set up for struggling companies not billionaires like Richard Branson or global entities like the Fenwick Sports Group which was then valued at $6.6 billion.
The first battle was over players taking wage cuts in support of other staff who were sacked or furloughed. Now football agents are genetically predisposed to avoid any financial negative so they fought tooth and nail to avoid a Premier League-wide agreement on wage reduction and left it up to the individual clubs to decide.
As a result, some players at some clubs have taken a 30% pay cut while others crash their cars during lockdown while pissed up but get sympathetic media coverage due to agent power.
In Spain, all Barcelona players accepted a 70% reduction in earnings.
In parallel, a ludicrous fake charity operation was established instead and Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson was portrayed as the mover and shaker who had made this happen. He wasn't. This was simply a ruse by the array of individuals who represent Henderson to use the pandemic to promote the status of their client at no cost to player nor agents - a little like the racist agent who demands that his BAME player take part in Project Restart despite the health risks while, at the same time, persuading him to take part in a Black Lives Matter protest over the outrageous police brutality and murder of George Floyd in order to enhance future market value.
Mafia agents play with racism for profit.
Paul Wilson: "It's the money men who want games played behind closed doors and any restart would be both artificial and risky... The final league table will merit the biggest asterisk in history if teams are full of footballers who don't want to be on the pitch."
West Ham United manager David Moyes: "... there are a lot of people whose lives we could be putting at risk. We can't let that happen."
The bookmakers were desperate to take control of markets in UK football and horseracing as external markets who played on despite the pandemic e.g. the continuing football in Belarus and Nicaragua was harder to influence and attracted far less betting volume.
Even though Premier League club owners were confident that they wouldn't have to pay broadcasters over matches that would never be played, Project Restart chose to leak fake inputs to make out that there would be significant losses if the season were not to be completed.
At no point did the sociopathic individuals want you to focus on the Premier League ground full of deaths (65,000 and counting in early June 2020 and, with excess deaths, up to half a million by January 2023) nor the number of ex-players and managers who have died from covid-19. Death and the fix have been absented from media.
And some media were embarrassing in their output - evidence, if it were needed, that the football media in the UK is almost entirely captured and owned.
Prior to football being halted due to Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta testing positive for coronavirus, the manipulations were mutinous to the integrity of the game and the health of the nation.
The holistic was shocking - the Premier League displayed a robust yet irrational determination that games should proceed with fans present despite every other entity (UEFA excepted at that time) deciding to terminate games or to play behind closed doors, and despite all of the medical evidence and advice to the contrary.
Premier League chief executive Dick Masters and his puppetmasters knew best.
Moreover.
A birdie tells us.
█████ █████ █████ placed heavy pressure on █████ █████ of the Department of Culture Media & Sport (DCMS) to ensure that the Cheltenham Festival went ahead. The bookmakers yield a decent percentage of their annual profits at the meeting and the thousands of people who contracted covid-19 were an irrelevance to the layers.
On March 9th, Oliver Dowden of the DCMS slithered onto our screens telling us that sport will continue as no reason to cancel.
Project Restart was a Premier League power grab which resulted in numbers of lower league teams being taken over by EPL 'elite' operators and run as 'B' teams primarily to the advantage of profits from insider trading and matchfixing.
The UK government, to suit the herd immunity agenda, was passive throughout this pandemic. Blinkered 'science' from selected entities is acted upon while global scientific research is ignored.
This culpable manslaughter is truly gross.
The Economist: "The German press has been particularly scathing. Suddeutsche Zeitung concluded that unequal and unhealthy Britain made "a good breeding ground for the pandemic." Poland's government cites the UK as a case study of what not to do while Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, described herd immunity as a "death sentence".
Climate catastrophe will also demolish the global football model for growth.
In 2001, Bjorn Lomborg published 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' which allowed neo-liberal newspapers like the Economist to pretend that man-made climate change was not impactful enough to be addressed robustly and that naive cost-benefit analyses should be the foundation of the human reaction to impending climate catastrophe.
Yet.
Even then it was already probably too late to save the planetary equilibrium and most species.
Capitalism yields an Extinction Economy.
As the abusers and the acquiescent continued to destroy the ecosystem for private gain shielding themselves from the ecological disasters and degradations, the mass extinctions, the meteorological black swan weather realities and the like in their all-year-round-tan sort of post-imperialist swagger - collecting air miles like there was no tomorrow when there actually was no tomorrow...
The first academic papers to prove attribution of human input to climatic change were published in 2004 and that should have been the end of any argument.
But the stupid and the selfish decided otherwise.
Free market capitalism should have been terminated immediately with a new global economy based on sustainability rather than carcinogenic short-term pseudo-growth.
Lomborg's thesis is now seen as error strewn, incorrect and largely irrelevant, being deemed "scientifically dishonest" by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty.
Yet the Economist has barely moved - they now recognise the reality of human-influenced climate catastrophe but refuse to countenance the end of the neo-psychopathic system that has created this carnage via its addiction to growth.
In the 2019 Christmas edition, the neo-con Economist tried to integrate free-market psychopathy as a norm of behaviour rather than a personality disordered outlier.
The Economist still claim that an economy cannot be planned and - "a [free market] economy that cannot be predicted, cannot be controlled."
But an economy that cannot be controlled by necessity becomes sociopathic via a marginal gains race to the bottom of every barrel available in a mature marketplace.
And an economy that cannot be controlled doesn't account for externalities that should figure as costs and the unintended consequences of such ignorances are the feedback loops that mean that Australia being ranked bottom of the table for its reaction to climate catastrophe has allowed conditions for out-of-control firestorms that deposit ash onto New Zealand glaciers, causing them to melt, adding to the feedback loops of climatic disaster.
That is how climate catastrophe will 'evolve' - the planet will react to these feedback loops by finding a new equilibrium state, one incompatible with much of life as we know it.
The only other guarantees spewed out by neo-liberalism are massive income inequality, desperate global migrations of desperate people and the ever-present corruption template (both mafia and institutional) that maintains this new world order.
Free markets negate regulation and amplify disaster capitalism feedback loops.
Australia has become a state captured by psychopathic politicians obsessed with mineral rights and mining.
Australia is a mafia state.
In the same way that Malta was a mafia state under Joseph Muscat, and remains so despite a change in prime minister.
And with the same modular construct, much of the corruption and matchfixing underpinning UK football emanates from Malta.
Mining and mineral rights or mafia and matchfixing, it doesn't really matter.
But this financialisation of our existences neatly parallels our journey to oblivion, lethal mutations that we are.
Those who are systemically corrupting football are also systemically destroying the planet via rampant money laundering and tax evasion (emptying state coffers), mafia affiliations and behaviours (undermining legitimate businesses), excessive travel and private jet usage to transport corrupted entities around the world (CO2 polluting to irreversibility in climate catastrophe along the way), the extensive matchfixing and insider trading that destroys the integrity of the sport as well as the efficacies of both the betting and the transfer markets, while the original football fan, not the prawn sandwich fuckwits who grace the posh seats nowadays, is targeted via class warfare and the austerity policies of a neo-liberal fascist elite who facilitate and enable the corruption in British football.
Football is a problem because, of all sports, it contributes the most to man-made climate change.
If the sport were legitimate, there might be arguments in favour of the current structure of excessive numbers of sportspeople, supporters and various hangers-on private jetting / jetting around the world but the sport is mafia-controlled at all levels and the spectacle so created is dependent on the whims of institutional corruption and insider control of betting markets by entirely non-regulated agents.
And football's disastrous climate footprint expands...
... we currently have Visigoth Vox Vagabond Javier Tebas determined to stage La Liga games in the USA with the formation of the European Super League while Michel Platini decided to increase CO2 emissions a thousand-fold by electing that the Euro 2020/2021 Finals will be staged in 12 nations scattered all around the continent.
Mark Carney (former governor of the Bank of England): "... traditional drivers of value have been shaken, new ones will gain prominence... the [coronavirus] crisis is likely to accelerate the fragmentation of the global economy. Until a vaccine has been found and widely applied, travel restrictions will remain. Even afterwards, local resilience will be prized over global efficiency... debt will weigh on the capacity for growth... In this crisis, we know we need to act as an interdependent community not independent individuals, so that the values of economic dynamism and efficiency have been joined by those of solidarity, fairness, responsibility and compassion... The great test of whether this new hierarchy of values will prevail is climate change."
"Be impossible, demand reality."
Under normal circumstances, global power bases secrete their inappropriate performance by sleight of hand. This is much harder with climate catastrophe (where the data and the reality prove doubters imbecilic), covid-19 (where the numbers of deaths per million population is a real reality) and corruption in football (where betting markets reveal the presence of matchfixing before the game kicks off).
Feedback loops and previously ignored externalities apply to all three areas as they compete on the precipice of growth.
Data, analytics and markets pop the bubble of propaganda.
Piketty: "Proprietarianism has become capitalism. The end is near."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Plus Ca Change, Plus C'Est La Meme Chose
Daphne Caruana Galizia's final journalism prior to her assassination by the Maltese mafia state: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate"
Before focusing further on the impacts of corruption, covid-19 and climate change on football, society and government, we need to project ahead to the new templates of engagement.
Firstly, although the data lags the reality, we are firmly in a Depression - the boat has taken on water and is sinking but still remains partially afloat.
As has already occurred with the psychopathic Project Restart, we should expect more mafia, more corruption, more graft, a consolidation of economic power and less competition - big mafia and big corruption in the holistic, the general and the specific as both sport and state become increasingly regressive.
There are three ways in which mafia groups will enhance power as a result of the pandemic - higher unemployment produces a greater array of potential operatives, the gaming of government recovery schemes and taking over collapsing businesses to launder illicit gains.
The Economist: "Most worrying [according to Interpol] is the potential for covid-19 to create the ideal conditions for the spread of serious organised crime. The pandemic is encouraging organised criminals to put old skills to new use. The global economic depression that looks likely to follow will offer them a chance to extend their reach into the legitimate economy."
But this hysteresis will be self-harming and temporary.
There will be a U-turn against globalisation coupled with a move towards national self-sufficiency resulting in markedly slower economic growth.
But there will also be a new and strengthened oligarchical elite of well-connected anti-competitive control.
In future pandemics, in the desperation to put the economy ahead of health, expect to see the effective imprisonment of the vulnerable so that a variety of Ponzi schemes can continue without decelerating forces.
There will also be an acceleration of some of the trends that were already hitting global business prior to the pandemic.
Data analytics will be the basis of all future truth and lies.
And it is data-driven journalism that will be on hand to expose these future contortions of any claim to a social reality.
We wage a protracted war against corruption.
After the Black Death and Spanish Flu, economies quantum leaped to new foundations and were no longer constrained by Malthusian limits.
But with covid-19, these Malthusian limits will be the threshold that defines the horizons of all future state and mafia operation - climate catastrophe and pandemics are the real new normal.
There is a limit to corruption, to the degree of ecological destruction and climate abuse, to the naivety in dealing with pandemics.
But, at this stage, the free market neo-liberals are utilising a complete absence of regulation or flimsy pseudo self-regulation to allow criminal strategies to proceed unencumbered by any externalities or laws or rules of the game.
Project Restart took as its business model the abuses perpetrated throughout the Bourbon Restoration.
Piketty: "... only the wealthiest 1 percent of real estate owners enjoyed the right to vote. In other words, the fiscal rules favoured tranquil accumulation of capital while at the same time allowing those who benefited from that system to formulate the political rules that ensured they would continue to do so. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer illustration of the inegalitarian proprietarian regime."
Football is Fixed on Project Restart: "... only the Premier League club owners enjoyed the right to vote. In other words, the lack of rules favoured malicious accumulation of capital while at the same time allowing mafia entities who benefited from that system to formulate the hidden agendas that ensured they would continue to do so. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer illustration of systemic mafia-based corruption in sport."
If you scan the planet with precise care, it is feasible to discover idiocy greater than that behind Project Restart.
And we found it.
In determining that football must continue in Belarus due to the backhanders offered by the bookmaking industry, President Alexander Lukashenko claimed that the best way to combat coronavirus was to drink vodka and drive a tractor.
Let's hear it for pissed up ploughing.
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If Everyone Starts Working Like This, What Kind Of Anarchy Will It Be?
Barney Ronay at the onset of covid-19: "During the years of plenty it became a habit to compare the Premier League wielding of power... to the structures of a mafia family... It is obvious no one in England should play professional football this summer. There isn't time to play the games. It's not medically safe"
But.
Fans are irrelevant and are seen as 'addicts' who will do whatever is necessary for their fix - mainlining the matchfixing when it shoots up the dropper's neck.
Even though things aren't quite the same, just pay your subscriptions to the void and shut up.
The Economist: "Any business that brings together crowds of people faces trouble."
Football's payment mechanisms were gummed up for a window.
Consequently, for Project Restart, the key battlegrounds were the players and club owners.
On the shady side of the mountain valley we had BT Sport, Sky Sports, a cartel of football agents, an array of bookmakers, and mafia entities (not otherwise included in this listing).
These entities destroy sport and destroy lives.
Take Liverpool FC.
In 2019, the club paid agents £44 million and the wage bill was £310 million yet the club initially furloughed all shop and administration workers due to the pandemic.
The UK furloughing scheme was set up for struggling companies not billionaires like Richard Branson or global entities like the Fenwick Sports Group which was then valued at $6.6 billion.
The first battle was over players taking wage cuts in support of other staff who were sacked or furloughed. Now football agents are genetically predisposed to avoid any financial negative so they fought tooth and nail to avoid a Premier League-wide agreement on wage reduction and left it up to the individual clubs to decide.
As a result, some players at some clubs have taken a 30% pay cut while others crash their cars during lockdown while pissed up but get sympathetic media coverage due to agent power.
In Spain, all Barcelona players accepted a 70% reduction in earnings.
In parallel, a ludicrous fake charity operation was established instead and Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson was portrayed as the mover and shaker who had made this happen. He wasn't. This was simply a ruse by the array of individuals who represent Henderson to use the pandemic to promote the status of their client at no cost to player nor agents - a little like the racist agent who demands that his BAME player take part in Project Restart despite the health risks while, at the same time, persuading him to take part in a Black Lives Matter protest over the outrageous police brutality and murder of George Floyd in order to enhance future market value.
Mafia agents play with racism for profit.
Paul Wilson: "It's the money men who want games played behind closed doors and any restart would be both artificial and risky... The final league table will merit the biggest asterisk in history if teams are full of footballers who don't want to be on the pitch."
West Ham United manager David Moyes: "... there are a lot of people whose lives we could be putting at risk. We can't let that happen."
The bookmakers were desperate to take control of markets in UK football and horseracing as external markets who played on despite the pandemic e.g. the continuing football in Belarus and Nicaragua was harder to influence and attracted far less betting volume.
Even though Premier League club owners were confident that they wouldn't have to pay broadcasters over matches that would never be played, Project Restart chose to leak fake inputs to make out that there would be significant losses if the season were not to be completed.
At no point did the sociopathic individuals want you to focus on the Premier League ground full of deaths (65,000 and counting in early June 2020 and, with excess deaths, up to half a million by January 2023) nor the number of ex-players and managers who have died from covid-19. Death and the fix have been absented from media.
And some media were embarrassing in their output - evidence, if it were needed, that the football media in the UK is almost entirely captured and owned.
Prior to football being halted due to Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta testing positive for coronavirus, the manipulations were mutinous to the integrity of the game and the health of the nation.
The holistic was shocking - the Premier League displayed a robust yet irrational determination that games should proceed with fans present despite every other entity (UEFA excepted at that time) deciding to terminate games or to play behind closed doors, and despite all of the medical evidence and advice to the contrary.
Premier League chief executive Dick Masters and his puppetmasters knew best.
Moreover.
A birdie tells us.
█████ █████ █████ placed heavy pressure on █████ █████ of the Department of Culture Media & Sport (DCMS) to ensure that the Cheltenham Festival went ahead. The bookmakers yield a decent percentage of their annual profits at the meeting and the thousands of people who contracted covid-19 were an irrelevance to the layers.
On March 9th, Oliver Dowden of the DCMS slithered onto our screens telling us that sport will continue as no reason to cancel.
It is worth mentioning that the DCMS has form with bookmakers - current committee member Philip Davies MP (Chair of the Betting and Gaming All-Party Parliamentary Group) received over five grand from bookmakers in 2016 and 2017. For nothing of course. Last year, he received over £11,000 while in 2018, Tracey Crouch resigned as sports minister when Davies went above her head to create a delay in the curbs being placed on fixed odds betting terminals.
Since 2020, this snivelling little shit has also been one of four Vice-Chairs of the All-Party Group on Whistleblowing and not one anti-corruption or whistleblowing entity views this construct as anything other than an enemy operative.
Similarly with the decision to go ahead with Liverpool versus Atletico Madrid in the Champions League 1/16 2nd Leg on March 11th 2019 - playing this match at all, never mind with a full stadium when the region around Madrid was known as the main European locus of covid-19 outside of Italy is simply unbelievable. Once again, Liverpudlians have died as a result of this game being played.
The determination to continue with the Premier League, Championship and the EFL, and the Cheltenham Festival, was pure bloody-minded psychopathy and malicious greed.
And the media were enrolled in the fake.
On March 9th, Jason Burt (the chief football correspondent at the Telegraph) was persuaded to write that "football has an obligation to continue... it is a glorious distraction in troubling times", and there followed an array of headlines in both the Telegraph and the Guardian drawing new battle-lines of fake hyperreality as the real reality of the pandemic took hold. David Conn's piece on the state of play was trumped within the hour by the WHO announcement of the upgrade to pandemic so a swiftly prepared and ghost-written Eni Aluko column appeared desperate to achieve a closed door solution to the eventually cancelled Round 30 of the Premier League 2019/20 season.
On March 12th, the Premier League announced at 21:30 GMT that Round 30 would go ahead with fans present. At that point every major and second tier league on the planet had been postponed for a month, and all other global sports - cricket, tennis, golf, rugby union, rugby league, motor racing, cycling etc - had been terminated but Dick Masters and the EPL strode boldly on.
Of course, we now recognise that this was just a part of our prime minister's attempt at eugenic genocide.
But still.
One hour after Masters baiting the fans with murderous intent, Mikel Arteta announced that he had the virus and on the morning of March 13th the EPL was finally dragged into the real world and all football was cancelled until April 3rd (apart from Non-League football as █████ █████ and the bookmakers persuaded the National League to continue on. A decision that created health issues as even at the lower levels of the BetVictor leagues, South Shields versus FC United of Manchester saw 3247 fans for their game prior to the league being cancelled).
Like airlines, travel firms and just-in-time supply line businesses, bookmakers were heavily impacted by this global pandemic. The pressure put on the DCMS not to postpone Cheltenham allowed the bookmakers to clean up at the meeting.
Of 16 favourites that had a starting price of 3/1 or shorter, only two won.
Willie Mullins had 7 winners with an average SP of 5/1; his 7 losing favourites average price was 17/10.
And there was a wonderful psychological flow to Mullins' runners - on day 1, all three favourites lost while he began day four with four straight winners.
Conspicuous money was lost at Cheltenham this year while the bookmakers stuffed their satchels and bitcoin accounts via a redistribution that looks illegitimate and absent of integrity.
As fans, we deserve to know why the Premier League put the safety of supporters, players and staff at risk just so insider trading positions, ante-post bets and PR revenue streams could be monetised to maximum effect.
The EPL isn't a private league for mafia and matchfixing and the creation of spectacles to the benefit of select agents.
It is supposed to be a sport.
British football is extensively rancid.
Perversion being a core competency - the dropping of the manslaughter charges against an originally unnamed man from North Yorkshire was leaked to the media two days ahead of the result of the investigation into the death of Emiliano Sala.
When the public were made aware on Friday 13th that the pilot wasn't qualified to be flying the plane, the story was buried under the coronavirus noise.
The Death of Emiliano Sala Did Not Take Place.
It is a story that cannot be told.
Leading anti-corruption activist Roberto Saviano sees the UK as the most corrupt nation on the planet which, although possibly a slight exaggeration, is certainly true in the arms trade, the associations between sport and betting, in areas of the City of London, and in the linkage of each of these sectors with Britain's global web of offshore financial centres.
And when one starts exploring Cambridge Analytica and CSL or Full Fact and Facebook or Premier League football and underground markets or Cheltenham and British bookies, the same marginal gains psychopathy matrices of corruption appear.
There is a template of corruption that replicates.
There are a lot of rotten things that are rotten to the core.
And, as Project Restart picked up momentum, the rotten media stepped up to the plate...
Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian: "Premier League critics should recognise football cannot wait forever."
Sam Wallace in the Telegraph: "Football's return may seem unpalatable but the survival of the game depends on it."
Jamie Carragher in the Telegraph: "Training grounds are the safest workplaces in the country. It is time to play football again."
Danny Ings in the Telegraph: "It's vital we try to find a way to play."
Oliver Brown in the Telegraph: "It is time to stop appeasing and play."
Elitist nonsense and outright lies.
What kickbacks do these writers and 'journalists' receive for this disingenuous propaganda?
Marc Overmars, the Ajax Amsterdam Technical Director: "The league is dead. Life is more important."
But not as important at illicit revenue streams flowing to money laundering islands around the globe via nudge and marginal gains and explicit corruption.
With both the Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid game and the Cheltenham Festival, the government and sport have shown that we cannot trust their assessments of our safety.
Anybody with half a brain knew at the time that these events should have been cancelled but it took until April 20th (six weeks after the fateful decisions) for Dame Angela McLean, the deputy chief scientific adviser to the government, to recognise that the related covid-19 deaths in Liverpool and around Cheltenham were an "interesting hypothesis".
What a dame.
Greg Clarke, the then chairman of the FA stated in April 2020 that it is hard to see supporters returning to grounds "any time soon... with social distancing in place for some time to come we do face substantial changes to the whole football ecosystem."
The Juice: "History is happening. Demand a people and planet recovery."
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Seamus Heaney:
History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
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© 2023 Football is Fixed
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