The Illusory Game of Exchange, the Giant Poker Table where our Realities are determined...
In the previous post in our seasonal triptych, by focusing on the gathering Depression from the perspective of hedge-funds, Dark Pools, Behaviouralism, Darwinism and climate change, we outlined some of the reasons why a Deep Depression is our future.
Only time and space prevented us from venturing further into this systemic murkiness, and in the week since the post, there have been numerous further disturbing pieces of news that, under normal circumstances, would be headline-grabbing.
For example, the Bank of England reducing interest rates (and thereby eliminating its monetary options) to 1.5% - the lowest rate since the central bank was established 315 years ago. This is a statement of extreme historical weakness.
Or, the US economy losing more jobs (2.6 million) in 2008 than in any year since the 2nd World War.
Or the relentless conveyor belt of major job losses and fraud exposures on a daily basis (Alcoa, Satyam etc).
To begin this article, we intend looking at some of the other areas of non-sustainability that will guarantee the Deep Depression.
The Hyperreality (continued)
* Price-earnings (p/e) ratios - Bottom feeders are claiming that longer term investors are able to find value in the current market climate by taking advantage of the low p/e ratios in the marketplace. As stock prices have plummeted, earnings have, until recently, not fallen so far, as companies employ various accounting shenanigans to hide the true carnage from the balance sheets.
But earnings are about to go through the floorboards as the feedback loops and economic contagion poison the entire global economy.
Prices will follow.
The whole efficacy of p/e ratios as a potential measure of value in the marketplace is based on historical analyses and data.
Economists always look to the past for solutions, yet no economic hyperreality is replicable, which renders such research as quite pointless.
In a Depression, p/e ratios become an outmoded yardstick - systemic and super-systemic risk sees to that.
For this reason, there is not one global asset that might be thought of as offering sustainable value - any rebound is nothing more than an example of a dead cat bouncing...
Spokesperson for the Bank of England: "The world economy appears to be undergoing an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn."
* Ratings Agencies - All investors rely on the ratings bodies for a measurement of the level of risk within an organisation or a sector. These ratings are always inflated as any journey through the companies who either went into liquidation or were saved by governmental handouts in 2008 would demonstrate.
This is a systemic enigma built into the fake structure.
As the Economist states: "Although ratings are relied on by investors and regulators as impartial measures, the Rating Agencies are paid by those they rate for their judgments."
Think advertising - no newspaper contains negative editorial against its advertisers.
Think ratings - no Ratings Agency will downgrade an entity that is, in effect, paying the wages.
Some of the AAA/Aaa nonsenses standing proud at Standard and Poors and Moody's today, will seem just a trifle optimistic in less than twelve months time.
Jean Baudrillard: "... all current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, the unnameable thing that you cannot get rid of."
* Private Equity - All the focus has been on the plight of the banks and the insurance companies, on the credit crunch and on the toxic assets, on targeting hedge-funds and on the state of the currency markets.
As attention has shifted to the 'real' economy (NB: it is our assessment that the ONLY Real economy is the informal one), the fake finance of private equity operations will come under increased scrutiny.
All firms under the yoke of private equity have been stripped of their assets and saddled with debt. With the current very real concerns about deflation this is very very bad news indeed.
When the Bank of England produced their Inflation Report on November 12th, the future spread of likely inflation rates projected negative values for the first time ever ie deflation.
Under a climate of deflation, indebted businesses (and households) will be more anxious to pay off loans and debts as soon as feasible.
How they are going to be able to achieve this is another problem entirely.
Jean Baudrillard: "The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange."
* Deflation - With the indebted desperately trying to pay off their financial millstones, a deflationary world is trouble as there will not be enough cash-rich entities to offset the activities of the indebted. This produces a deadly mix of falling prices and high leverage, leading to a debt deflation of the type first postulated by Irving Fisher in the 1930s.
And don't even get us started on the fine balance between deflation/stagflation tipping over into hyperinflation...
Jean Baudrillard: "Here and now, the whole edifice of value is exchangeable for Nothing."
* Moral Hazard - Moral hazard got us into this mess, and moral hazard is the template of choice to cement the Depression.
Excessive leverage, fake mathematics and accounting, all neatly wrapped in a regulatory-lite environment with no downside to the taking positions of excessive risk. Plus ça change...
Last week in the Financial Times, the war criminal called Blair admits to mistakes in his stewardship of the economy, but pleads for any reactive regulation to be as feeble as possible so that the innovation might be allowed to continue.
What innovation?
Credit default swaps? Derivatives generally? Ponzi schemes at hedge-funds? All very fucking innovative but of absolutely no value to anybody other than the psychos with their fingers in the till.
If such innovation had been put into Real research in medicine, science, rather than the myopic minutiae of available knowledges that are allowed to be marketed in this shareholder capitalist poker game, we would not be in this situation.
Still, its great to hear that the war criminal called Blair has earned £12 million from after-dinner speeches since he gave up his full-time post in applied genocide.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "One must push what is already collapsing."
* Emerging Economies - The new paradigmists, a particularly stupid breed of capitalist, reckoned that the emerging economies would rescue the US, the EU and Japan once the Recession began to bite. Yet all economies are declining in lock-step.
Furthermore, the shareholder capitalist model that has been foisted onto numerous gullible territories has been shown to be invalid.
So, for example, China needs to undertake some financial restructuring and recapitalisation. As the Economist states: "It would once have been easy to argue that a market-driven system served up by big western banks could do a better job of this than government. When virtually every such institution has been given state support to stay in business, that case is much harder to make."
George Soros: "If you need systemic change, you might as well go for something that is vastly superior."
* Credit Crisis - Although the record amounts of public money that has simply been handed over to the greed architects of this Depression has succeeded in freeing up some of lack of confidence in the financial system, the Real solidity so created is mainly an illusion. The Real economy will continue to suffer (British retailers experienced their worst xmas ever in 2008 and banks are refusing to pass on the interest rate cuts to businesses and customers) and banks will create a cycle of contagion whereby the businesses that they do support will be undermined by the complete collapse of the rest of the economy, with associated bad debts and further risk of toxicity. we should expect more hedge-funds and banks to go under this year.
Mark Twain: "Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
* Governmental, Regulatory and Central Bank Errors - It is now generally accepted that allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the ban on the short-selling of financial stocks was a short-sighted mistake.
It is now generally accepted that solely targeting the toxicity in the financial system was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the excessive financial support provided to insurance giant AIG was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the highly leveraged private equity model was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the lack of regulation in the free market was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the targeting of hedge-funds was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that giving the Bank of England control over the setting of interest rates was a mistake.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that interest rates have been slashed to historical lows.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that the financial industry is rushing to create secretive Dark Pools.
There are more mistakes to come from a financial elite (sic) who see the financial world solely through the prism of their own self-interest.
Satyajit Das: "Markets placed great faith in the volume of money available to support asset prices and assist in alleviating shortages of liquidity. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage as well as the structure of global capital flows. As the financial system deleverages, it is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that available capital is more limited than previously estimated."
Trust, Psychology, Psychopathy, Freemasonry and Freebie Bets
* Trust is one key component in the current crisis - nobody trusts the banks any longer no matter what their government-sponsored advertising campaigns may claim.
All analysts must judge the security of their investments, savings and cash, and correctly apportion their monies accordingly.
Taking sports brokerage as an example, we set a limit on the degree of trust that we place in our routes to market. Once a threshold has been set, we maintain our cash levels with the said institution below these levels AND we build into our financial projections the probabilities of brokers reneging on our agreements.
We are now at the point where we place banks at the same level of risk as our second tier brokers ie below the level of trust that we have in our primary level Asian brokers.
This breakdown in trust will not be easily repaired.
We don't know them and we don't trust them.
And we don't trust their system either.
As the Depression begins to bite in earnest, many more individuals are going to be reaching this same conclusion.
As Sigmund Freud once observed: "Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."
* The Trickledown Effect - One of the great fallacies of shareholder capitalism is the trickledown effect, an illusory piece of fake mathematics that is solely dependent on the imaginary hyperreality of purchasing power parity (PPP). There is no trickledown other than in misery and psychopathy.
In a Depression, this Real trickledown effect is a downward spiral in the fake pyramid selling scheme that is our system.
The greed, the psychopathy and the mistakes were made at the top.
Our representatives bailed them out with huge handouts.
Moral hazard determines that the same greed, the same psychopathy and the same mistakes will be made at the top.
Psychopaths are unemotional and irrational - these two factors must go together as research by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has shown.
There is a sufficiency of psychopathy among financial folk.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
* Freemasonry, the World Economic Forum, our Freebie Bets - We are in the middle of a Secular Bear Market which began in 1997 and which will last until around 2017, even ignoring the super-systemic risk of climate change. There are scenarios where the secular Bear Market becomes a Permanent Depression and, in that the same mistakes are repeatedly made until they cannot be made anymore, this scenario has a significant probability of coming to fruition.
Despite this Reality, we are about to experience another hyperreal inflating of asset bubbles. It should be remembered that two of the biggest bubbles of last century occurred in the years immediately following the 1929 slump.
At Davos this year, we should be expecting to hear numerous public statements as to the seeds of recovery and other such nonsenses. Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs has already started the ball rolling. The pyramid scheme is being talked up.
Furthermore, the few disaffected freemasons with whom I collaborate are informing me that there is an agenda for the deep state to buy back into the financial markets in the summer months, after the worst early year bankruptcies have been accommodated into the already illusory market prices.
In yesterday's post, we briefly discussed the lack of meritocracy in nepotism and cronyism, but this is nothing when compared to systemic control through secret societies.
Let's examine (again briefly) three of the inefficiencies brought to the financial system by the activities of the lodges. It is the remainder of society that pays for these inefficiencies.
For Freemasonry is a hyperreal heist.
Example 1 - When the Meadowhall Mall was being constructed in Sheffield, the tiling/ceramics contract was not a competitive tender. The contract was simply given to a masonic company in Rotherham. This is not meritocratic and it is not an example of a free market.
Example 2 - The biggest sixth form college in England required a new headmaster. A shortlist was drawn up. The chairman of governors objected that a catenian (catholic mason) who had applied was not on the shortlist and, even though he accepted that professionally this was the correct decision, he was duty bound to interview the man. The other candidate withdrew and the catenian was appointed. Two years later 90% of the board of governors at the school were composed of catenians from the same Knutsford lodge as that attended by the headmaster. The chair of governors retired and the new chair is the wife of a leading regional freemason. This is also not meritocratic.
Example 3 - Masons are given prior warning of changes in government regulation. So, when the government announced a change in the way that nursing homes could be operated in the Thatcherite free marketplace in the 80s, freemasons received the tip off of the market opportunity fully six months before the matter had even been discussed in parliament. Ah, democracy... This is neither meritocratic nor proof of the existence of free markets. It is more like Russia...
So, by the summer, the concerted efforts of the Davos brigade and the deep state apparatus will be driving market prices higher AGAINST the Real dynamic of the market which should, at best, be stagnant. Remember - markets are priced for a Recession, not a Depression, and most certainly not a Permanent Depression.
Selective buying into the markets is our Freebie bet for this year. For now, we restrict ourselves to suggesting a purchase of the systemic indices, but nearer the time we'll be more specific both with regard to the markets and the timing.
This is truly a contrarian Cynical Realist market position.
There is a risk in this position and the primary skill will be knowing when to close out - it is only in a fake hyperreality that one might make money out of opposing the true Reality. For, although an attempt will be made to drive a new collection of illusory bubbles, the state of the planet and the financial and economic systems may well determine that the bubbles will not be able to be inflated to any great extent.
Buttonwood in the Economist: "... low government-bond yields could lose their appeal and equities could rebound. Income-seeking investors seem unlikely to get much of a return from cash this year. An equity rally could occur even if the global economy is in for a prolonged period of weakness."
The other part of our Freebie Bet is for Dietrological Professional clients only and is ##################### to win the Premiership title.
* Conclusion - As the fallacious system runs on in its empty sameness, the illusion must be replaced by truth, otherwise there will not be eco-system in which to continue to peddle the propaganda and lies.
Satyajit Das: "In this current financial crisis, the quantum of available capital, the munificent resources of central banks and sovereign wealth funds, and the globalization of capital flows may be some of the accepted "facts" that are revealed to be grand illusions."
Michel Foucault: "There is a battle 'for truth'... It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science' and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'... 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth... The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses - or what's in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Friday, 9 January 2009
Thursday, 10 January 2008
A Particular System Of Objects
Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs) are a post-modernist artifice in which a traditional betting environment has had its modern objects liberated from their original function. This new infrastructure exists within the societal scam that is British bookmaking but the purpose of the modernity of the environment is to optimise the returns to the bookmakers by utilising a range of post-modernist and/or psychological devices.
"Consumption, insofar as it is meaningful, is the systematic act of the manipulation of signs". And, the LBOs offer a perfect environment to test and prove Baudrillard's differential reasoning. Originally, the bookmakers used primitive forms of psychopathic business strategies to maximise their returns from those with a gambling addiction. Proximity to pubs was one such ruse that remains valid to this day; delayed race start times gave the bookies an edge over the "blind" punter; the security door and the frosted glass psychologically defined the bettor as a societal loser, something to be hidden away; the creation of a chaotic environment made any attempt at pseudo-rationality in decision-making virtually impossible.
To my discredit, I once very briefly considered undertaking a consultancy project for one of the leading English bookmakers. The project aim was to maximise the amount of money that the addicts would hand over to the deserving cause of turf accountancy. The scope of the consultancy was pomo-in-extremis - the company wished to create the model interior to most suit their financial targets utilising colour, form, atmosphere, modular components together with excessive control of the informational flow and the preying on the psychological styles and disorders of the gathered group. We will assess these manipulations in turn.
The LBOs offer a major advantage to the bookmakers in comparison with the racecourse, the internet or the telephone. It is a controlled environment. Totally. Nothing has been left to chance. The positioning of the television screens in relation to the seating, the types of material in the seating, the location of standing places, solo locations and group areas, the disinformational matrix of un-data, the colours of the seats and tv backgrounds, the use of glass/daylight and advertising prompts suitably located, the quality of the images, the misuse of clocks and time etc etc. And, once one steps into this environment with its rarefied atmosphere of reality, the CCTV's ensure that the web performs optimally - the modular design style allowing a process of continuous improvement from the perspective of the abusive bookie.
The control of the information flow is a critical aspect of the reality-mix. Taking the un-sport of horseracing as an example, we are able to immediately conclude that the LBOs are the worst location for maximising the potentially valuable information which might be utilised to limit your losses and exposures. In front of an internet screen, you may access scores of firms and achieve preferable prices by referring to one of the numerous betting odds comparison sites. At the racecourse, one may read the tic-tac, monitor the rails and assess the meaning behind the major bookies returning money to the ring - are they offsetting liabilities by hedging or are they taking a proprietary angle? You can pay extra to monitor the body language of the corrupt trainers and jockeys and, in that it matters, assess the fitness of the poor beasts. When the likes of Toby Balding, Barry Hills, Paul Nicholls or Nicky Henderson, to name but a few, had a hot favourite, my staking level would always be augmented by my behavioural assessment of the key protagonists pre-race. The LBOs, in contrast, are a virtual price monopoly. Furthermore, the prices displayed together with their dynamics may not bear any resemblance either to the prices shown at other LBOs owned by the same company or to the prices available in the ring. Value is further reduced by the refusal of the LBOs to accept a decent size of bet together with outrageous overround percentages and, until recently, a highly regressive tax regime. The LBOs also enforce an obligation to buy - they utilise the psychology of need to create optimistic behavioural atmospheres that engender belief rather than disbelief. The LBOs consequently do not allow the option of trading against an occurrence and all professionals understand that contrarian trading is the first step on the road to investment riches. To quote Warren Buffett: "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful". Or Deleuze: "Sense depends on non-sense".
And this neatly brings us on to the behavioural aspects of the LBOs. We have no desire to spend too much time assessing the behavioural traits of irrationality that underpin the investment marketplace that are the LBOs. The psychological styles/disorders mentioned here are merely some of the most prevalent conditions which the bookmakers choose to address for profit maximisation. Punters are disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, cognitive dissonance is a factor as we cherish long-held "beliefs", anchoring leads to us being overly influenced by external suggestion (a core focus for LBOs), status quo bias is not actually a complete lack of musical good taste but the behavioural term for the chasing of losses (another key area for the psycho's), punters conceptualise without assessing the holistic overview of the reality being presented to them, gamblers are persistently over-confident due to representativeness heuristic, magical thinking takes the bettor even further from the loci of true reality, hindsight bias is another omnipresent feature which is closely linked to memory bias etc etc. The micro-control of this captive group psychology is a major area of research at all the large betting organisations. The serial conditioning of the group engenders learned helplessness and irrational group think as the voices one trusts plead with us to lose our cash by following the twisted logic of the disinformational talking head.
And all of this corruption is dressed up in the illusion of freedom, the creative use of leisure time on the level playing field offered by the toss of a dice. "Free to be yourself" in fact means "...free to project one's desires onto produced goods; "Free to enjoy life" means free to regress and to be irrational and thus to adapt to a certain social organisation of our behaviour with regard to products. As a punter, the only manner to treat the environment offered by the LBOs is to partially invert Baudrillard's overview of "the way the rationality of objects comes to grips with the irrationality of needs" to become a cynical realistic: "the way the irrationality of needs of the gambler comes to grips with rationality of the irrationality of objects of the bookmakers".
The LBOs are a post-modern artifice, a subtle but base deception founded on trickery and greed. In the atmosphere of this artifice, identity, truth, reason and meaning are warped into equilibrium states of behavioural difference producing a herd-like response to the detriment of the gambler's assets.
According to Foucault, we have become our own prison guards and have learned to mould our behaviour in accordance with the needs of modern capitalism. This behaviour of self is augmented, in Lacan's words by "how human subjectivity is formed and shaped by institutions... We live in ideology, blinded by an 'imaginary' consciousness that prevents us from gaining access to objective truth". The object of the gambler's desire is a Baudrillardian "exchange based on nothing other than corruption".
And, what is the response of our guardians to this societal corruption? Gamcare and the Gambling Commission together with the government's free market attitude to gambling legislation/advertising/marketing and a refusal to address the corruption of the markets and our realities. That's the response... Despite the deceleration towards not-so-super-casinos, the public have been persuaded by the general consensus of "it matters more when there's money on it" and "what's yours worth?". And, as Lyotard says: "consensus is the ultimate form of totalitarianism". Those of us who choose to confront corruption as a core competency understand that the corruption generally remorphs itself into a new and equally invalid form, setting off the whole cyclical process of detection and readjustment to the new corrupted realities.
According to Lyotard, it is only the most major narratives that may be made narrative impossibilities - these are stories that can no longer be told as they no longer convince eg Auschwitz. It is a pity that gambling corruption is not yet anywhere near the reality of being a narrative impossibility.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
"Consumption, insofar as it is meaningful, is the systematic act of the manipulation of signs". And, the LBOs offer a perfect environment to test and prove Baudrillard's differential reasoning. Originally, the bookmakers used primitive forms of psychopathic business strategies to maximise their returns from those with a gambling addiction. Proximity to pubs was one such ruse that remains valid to this day; delayed race start times gave the bookies an edge over the "blind" punter; the security door and the frosted glass psychologically defined the bettor as a societal loser, something to be hidden away; the creation of a chaotic environment made any attempt at pseudo-rationality in decision-making virtually impossible.
To my discredit, I once very briefly considered undertaking a consultancy project for one of the leading English bookmakers. The project aim was to maximise the amount of money that the addicts would hand over to the deserving cause of turf accountancy. The scope of the consultancy was pomo-in-extremis - the company wished to create the model interior to most suit their financial targets utilising colour, form, atmosphere, modular components together with excessive control of the informational flow and the preying on the psychological styles and disorders of the gathered group. We will assess these manipulations in turn.
The LBOs offer a major advantage to the bookmakers in comparison with the racecourse, the internet or the telephone. It is a controlled environment. Totally. Nothing has been left to chance. The positioning of the television screens in relation to the seating, the types of material in the seating, the location of standing places, solo locations and group areas, the disinformational matrix of un-data, the colours of the seats and tv backgrounds, the use of glass/daylight and advertising prompts suitably located, the quality of the images, the misuse of clocks and time etc etc. And, once one steps into this environment with its rarefied atmosphere of reality, the CCTV's ensure that the web performs optimally - the modular design style allowing a process of continuous improvement from the perspective of the abusive bookie.
The control of the information flow is a critical aspect of the reality-mix. Taking the un-sport of horseracing as an example, we are able to immediately conclude that the LBOs are the worst location for maximising the potentially valuable information which might be utilised to limit your losses and exposures. In front of an internet screen, you may access scores of firms and achieve preferable prices by referring to one of the numerous betting odds comparison sites. At the racecourse, one may read the tic-tac, monitor the rails and assess the meaning behind the major bookies returning money to the ring - are they offsetting liabilities by hedging or are they taking a proprietary angle? You can pay extra to monitor the body language of the corrupt trainers and jockeys and, in that it matters, assess the fitness of the poor beasts. When the likes of Toby Balding, Barry Hills, Paul Nicholls or Nicky Henderson, to name but a few, had a hot favourite, my staking level would always be augmented by my behavioural assessment of the key protagonists pre-race. The LBOs, in contrast, are a virtual price monopoly. Furthermore, the prices displayed together with their dynamics may not bear any resemblance either to the prices shown at other LBOs owned by the same company or to the prices available in the ring. Value is further reduced by the refusal of the LBOs to accept a decent size of bet together with outrageous overround percentages and, until recently, a highly regressive tax regime. The LBOs also enforce an obligation to buy - they utilise the psychology of need to create optimistic behavioural atmospheres that engender belief rather than disbelief. The LBOs consequently do not allow the option of trading against an occurrence and all professionals understand that contrarian trading is the first step on the road to investment riches. To quote Warren Buffett: "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful". Or Deleuze: "Sense depends on non-sense".
And this neatly brings us on to the behavioural aspects of the LBOs. We have no desire to spend too much time assessing the behavioural traits of irrationality that underpin the investment marketplace that are the LBOs. The psychological styles/disorders mentioned here are merely some of the most prevalent conditions which the bookmakers choose to address for profit maximisation. Punters are disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, cognitive dissonance is a factor as we cherish long-held "beliefs", anchoring leads to us being overly influenced by external suggestion (a core focus for LBOs), status quo bias is not actually a complete lack of musical good taste but the behavioural term for the chasing of losses (another key area for the psycho's), punters conceptualise without assessing the holistic overview of the reality being presented to them, gamblers are persistently over-confident due to representativeness heuristic, magical thinking takes the bettor even further from the loci of true reality, hindsight bias is another omnipresent feature which is closely linked to memory bias etc etc. The micro-control of this captive group psychology is a major area of research at all the large betting organisations. The serial conditioning of the group engenders learned helplessness and irrational group think as the voices one trusts plead with us to lose our cash by following the twisted logic of the disinformational talking head.
And all of this corruption is dressed up in the illusion of freedom, the creative use of leisure time on the level playing field offered by the toss of a dice. "Free to be yourself" in fact means "...free to project one's desires onto produced goods; "Free to enjoy life" means free to regress and to be irrational and thus to adapt to a certain social organisation of our behaviour with regard to products. As a punter, the only manner to treat the environment offered by the LBOs is to partially invert Baudrillard's overview of "the way the rationality of objects comes to grips with the irrationality of needs" to become a cynical realistic: "the way the irrationality of needs of the gambler comes to grips with rationality of the irrationality of objects of the bookmakers".
The LBOs are a post-modern artifice, a subtle but base deception founded on trickery and greed. In the atmosphere of this artifice, identity, truth, reason and meaning are warped into equilibrium states of behavioural difference producing a herd-like response to the detriment of the gambler's assets.
According to Foucault, we have become our own prison guards and have learned to mould our behaviour in accordance with the needs of modern capitalism. This behaviour of self is augmented, in Lacan's words by "how human subjectivity is formed and shaped by institutions... We live in ideology, blinded by an 'imaginary' consciousness that prevents us from gaining access to objective truth". The object of the gambler's desire is a Baudrillardian "exchange based on nothing other than corruption".
And, what is the response of our guardians to this societal corruption? Gamcare and the Gambling Commission together with the government's free market attitude to gambling legislation/advertising/marketing and a refusal to address the corruption of the markets and our realities. That's the response... Despite the deceleration towards not-so-super-casinos, the public have been persuaded by the general consensus of "it matters more when there's money on it" and "what's yours worth?". And, as Lyotard says: "consensus is the ultimate form of totalitarianism". Those of us who choose to confront corruption as a core competency understand that the corruption generally remorphs itself into a new and equally invalid form, setting off the whole cyclical process of detection and readjustment to the new corrupted realities.
According to Lyotard, it is only the most major narratives that may be made narrative impossibilities - these are stories that can no longer be told as they no longer convince eg Auschwitz. It is a pity that gambling corruption is not yet anywhere near the reality of being a narrative impossibility.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Friday, 31 August 2007
Sinister Mafia-Linked Oligarch Buys Into Arsenal
We posted last Sunday that Arsenal were one of only two prominent Premiership teams that hadn't yet sold out to corrupt owners (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/08/arsnes-arsenal-about-to-go-arse-over.html).
Yesterday, that situation changed in the most disturbing way imaginable. Former Arsenal vice-chairman (the word "vice" being particularly meaningful here) David Dein sold his 14.58% stake in Arsenal to Red And White Holdings (R&WH) - an investment vehicle owned by Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov. Aside from the reward of pocketing £75 million ($150 million) on a stake that originally cost him just £300,000, Dein will become chairman of R&WH. Dein will head up the R&WH's attempts to increase their stake in the Gunners, but the firm insist they have no immediate plans to mount a takeover. Dein was forced off Arsenal's board in April after falling out with his fellow directors over their failure to support his plan to back a takeover by American businessman Stanley Kroenke. There are now fears that R&WH will team up with Kroenke to launch a hostile bid for Arsenal.
So far so similar to standard capitalist business practice worldwide. What sets this deal apart from the norm is Mr Alisher Usmanov.
Usmanov is 278th on the Forbes Rich List and is Russia's 18th richest man with assets totalling £2.75 billion. His prime business interests include being sole proprietor of Gallagher Holdings Ltd, owner of the Kommersant newspaper and Gazmetall steel and mining empire, he owns half of Metalloinvest and is a director of Gazprominvestholding which manages the debts of Russian monopolistic gas giant, Gazprom. The man also owns a mobile phone company, a couple of television stations and is very interested in the diamond trade.
These are the bits of his life, alongside his interest in fencing, that Mr Usmanov wishes for the world to see. Inevitably in the world of Russia's oligarchs, there is an awful lot more below the surface that Uzbek Usmanov wishes to hide from prying eyes.
Usmanov is "a typical oligarch with a very murky past" which leaves him open to pressure from the Kremlin (see: http://russophobe.blogspot.com/2006/10/editor-of-kommersant-out.html). Last year, Usmanov bought Kommersant (a leading Russian business journal that was, at the time, critical of Putin) at the Kremlin's request. The newspaper was formerly owned by Boris Berezovsky - a man who is no stranger to controversial football corruptions as we have posted previously and who has been recently implicated in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Usmanov himself stated after the purchase: "no-one asked me to buy the publisher, although I should say that my purchase of it was not against the wishes of the authorities". In today's Russia, this is a clear indication that Usmanov enjoys Putin's approval. After taking over Kommersant, the editor-in-chief was immediately sacked while the defence correspondent, Igor Safranov, mysteriously fell to his death from a Moscow window three months later. The new editor of Kommersant is Andrei Vasilyev who is a close collaborator of Berezovsky and the word on the street in Moscow is that Usmanov is plate-spinning trying to keep well-in with both Putin and Berezovsky so that he may retain his power bases no matter which route Russia moves along in the near future. Usmanov also shares close links to Roman Abramovich via their shared links to the metals sector.
In the grey world of Russian oligarchy, there are two ways to assess an individuals past and current hidden agendas - their previous/current business and political links and the views of those who have come into close contact with the operator historically.
Described widely as "the hard man of Russia" which, when one considers the other hard men of the country, is a pretty disturbing motif, the Mail On Sunday calls Usmanov a "sinister...oligarch". Usmanov has very close links to fellow Uzbek, Gafor Rakhimov - in Uzbekistan, when people utter Rakhimov's name, they prefer to say it quietly. Rakhimov is Uzbekistan's richest self-made businessman and The Observer has labelled him "a major figure in Uzbekistan's booming heroin trade". Rakhimov is also accused of conspiracy and rampant involvement in organised crime and he is close to the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov as, indeed, through his friendship with his daughter, is Usmanov. Rakhimov cooperates with Usmanov via Gazprom which is a channel for massive slush funds and linkages to offshore financial centres (OFCs). Gazprom's Sergei Kuprianov states: "he [Usmanov] devises vehicles for handling our most difficult and sensitive transactions". In support of this view, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, states that Usmanov "was in charge of Gazprom's bribery and slush funds" and, in his book "Murder In Samarkand" describes human rights abuses including boiling people to death. Reports have claimed that Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service was monitoring Usmanov for alleged links to suspected mafia figures and a report by Lena Smirnova entitled "Uzbekistan: The Disappeared" suggests that cute and cuddly Mr Usmanov is linked to the abduction of Uzbek dissidents living abroad - a view that is supported by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
All in all, in the warped world of Richard Scudamore (the chief executive of the Premier League), Alisher Usmanov is evidently a fit and proper person for potential future ownership of one of the big four English football teams!
Dein has encouraged Arsène Wenger to sign a new contract and claims that the pair will work together again in the future. Wenger was known to be disappointed about the manner of Dein's departure but has remained silent, in public at least, about his views on the developing takeover battle at the Emirates although he is known to be disconcerted about the manner in which English clubs are being bought up by global inappropriates. We await Wenger's views.
Kroenke and R&WH now own 26.77% of the shares in Arsenal which, if they combine forces, would make them the largest single shareholder in the club. It also would put them close to the 29.9% benchmark that would require a takeover bid to be launched.
The battle for the soul of Arsenal is only just beginning.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Yesterday, that situation changed in the most disturbing way imaginable. Former Arsenal vice-chairman (the word "vice" being particularly meaningful here) David Dein sold his 14.58% stake in Arsenal to Red And White Holdings (R&WH) - an investment vehicle owned by Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov. Aside from the reward of pocketing £75 million ($150 million) on a stake that originally cost him just £300,000, Dein will become chairman of R&WH. Dein will head up the R&WH's attempts to increase their stake in the Gunners, but the firm insist they have no immediate plans to mount a takeover. Dein was forced off Arsenal's board in April after falling out with his fellow directors over their failure to support his plan to back a takeover by American businessman Stanley Kroenke. There are now fears that R&WH will team up with Kroenke to launch a hostile bid for Arsenal.
So far so similar to standard capitalist business practice worldwide. What sets this deal apart from the norm is Mr Alisher Usmanov.
Usmanov is 278th on the Forbes Rich List and is Russia's 18th richest man with assets totalling £2.75 billion. His prime business interests include being sole proprietor of Gallagher Holdings Ltd, owner of the Kommersant newspaper and Gazmetall steel and mining empire, he owns half of Metalloinvest and is a director of Gazprominvestholding which manages the debts of Russian monopolistic gas giant, Gazprom. The man also owns a mobile phone company, a couple of television stations and is very interested in the diamond trade.
These are the bits of his life, alongside his interest in fencing, that Mr Usmanov wishes for the world to see. Inevitably in the world of Russia's oligarchs, there is an awful lot more below the surface that Uzbek Usmanov wishes to hide from prying eyes.
Usmanov is "a typical oligarch with a very murky past" which leaves him open to pressure from the Kremlin (see: http://russophobe.blogspot.com/2006/10/editor-of-kommersant-out.html). Last year, Usmanov bought Kommersant (a leading Russian business journal that was, at the time, critical of Putin) at the Kremlin's request. The newspaper was formerly owned by Boris Berezovsky - a man who is no stranger to controversial football corruptions as we have posted previously and who has been recently implicated in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Usmanov himself stated after the purchase: "no-one asked me to buy the publisher, although I should say that my purchase of it was not against the wishes of the authorities". In today's Russia, this is a clear indication that Usmanov enjoys Putin's approval. After taking over Kommersant, the editor-in-chief was immediately sacked while the defence correspondent, Igor Safranov, mysteriously fell to his death from a Moscow window three months later. The new editor of Kommersant is Andrei Vasilyev who is a close collaborator of Berezovsky and the word on the street in Moscow is that Usmanov is plate-spinning trying to keep well-in with both Putin and Berezovsky so that he may retain his power bases no matter which route Russia moves along in the near future. Usmanov also shares close links to Roman Abramovich via their shared links to the metals sector.
In the grey world of Russian oligarchy, there are two ways to assess an individuals past and current hidden agendas - their previous/current business and political links and the views of those who have come into close contact with the operator historically.
Described widely as "the hard man of Russia" which, when one considers the other hard men of the country, is a pretty disturbing motif, the Mail On Sunday calls Usmanov a "sinister...oligarch". Usmanov has very close links to fellow Uzbek, Gafor Rakhimov - in Uzbekistan, when people utter Rakhimov's name, they prefer to say it quietly. Rakhimov is Uzbekistan's richest self-made businessman and The Observer has labelled him "a major figure in Uzbekistan's booming heroin trade". Rakhimov is also accused of conspiracy and rampant involvement in organised crime and he is close to the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov as, indeed, through his friendship with his daughter, is Usmanov. Rakhimov cooperates with Usmanov via Gazprom which is a channel for massive slush funds and linkages to offshore financial centres (OFCs). Gazprom's Sergei Kuprianov states: "he [Usmanov] devises vehicles for handling our most difficult and sensitive transactions". In support of this view, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, states that Usmanov "was in charge of Gazprom's bribery and slush funds" and, in his book "Murder In Samarkand" describes human rights abuses including boiling people to death. Reports have claimed that Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service was monitoring Usmanov for alleged links to suspected mafia figures and a report by Lena Smirnova entitled "Uzbekistan: The Disappeared" suggests that cute and cuddly Mr Usmanov is linked to the abduction of Uzbek dissidents living abroad - a view that is supported by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
All in all, in the warped world of Richard Scudamore (the chief executive of the Premier League), Alisher Usmanov is evidently a fit and proper person for potential future ownership of one of the big four English football teams!
Dein has encouraged Arsène Wenger to sign a new contract and claims that the pair will work together again in the future. Wenger was known to be disappointed about the manner of Dein's departure but has remained silent, in public at least, about his views on the developing takeover battle at the Emirates although he is known to be disconcerted about the manner in which English clubs are being bought up by global inappropriates. We await Wenger's views.
Kroenke and R&WH now own 26.77% of the shares in Arsenal which, if they combine forces, would make them the largest single shareholder in the club. It also would put them close to the 29.9% benchmark that would require a takeover bid to be launched.
The battle for the soul of Arsenal is only just beginning.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Saturday, 23 June 2007
Propaganda And The Peripheral Press
Busy lives result in many of us having to depend on a variety of externalised sources for our societal information. The previous post suggested that such a dependency is inappropriate and that we are not able to rely on the media to act as an independent channel to the truth. One of the prime ways that media achieves this sleight of hand is via the reframing of an argument, reality or news story. A spectrum of tactics is utilised to divert our attention from where we should be looking to an altogether safer environment where the global elite and the media barons wish for us to look. The media undertakes a critical role in the filtering of information and in the subject matter that is allowed to pass editorial control. As an example, lets look at how media in the west has dealt with the continuing crisis in the Middle East both with respect to the war of terror and the Palestinian crisis.
Firstly, a little background...
The coalition of the willing is active throughout the Middle East with the publicised aim of bringing democracy to the region. The initial spin around the illegal occupation of Iraq was that the west was out to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people while unearthing Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and bringing the former rulers to summary justice. All of these publicised factors were a veil behind which the reality of the west's agenda lurked - this alleged process of democratisation never mentioned oil or the west's long-term strategic geopolitical agenda in the region.
The USA have not utilised the winning of hearts and minds as a military backcloth since Vietnam. The shock and awe tactics developed against the Vietcong have been the strategy of choice in the intervening years and Iraq is no different. Instead of trying to win popular support, the US has instead approached conflict on a behavioural level whereby tactics are developed that bludgeon the population into an acceptance of western democracy - think Fallujah, for example. Baudrillard famously claimed, quite correctly, that the first Iraq war never actually took place as the armed forces of the protagonists never actually fought each other face to face - as good an example of the triumph of shock and awe over hearts and minds as one is likely to find! The shock and awe mentality has spread through to the gross violations of the Geneva Convention that are represented by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. The torture techniques that were successfully utilised against the US in Vietnam have formed the bedrock of America's own tactics in extracting (flawed) information from prisoners in the current phase of the American's imperial agenda. Many of the forms of torture are highly behavioural in style and, yet, are very successful in breaking the wills of the alleged enemy combatants - 24/7 heavy metal music, waterboarding, the use of wild dogs and sexual humiliation have the same collated impact as more physical forms of abuse.
Since the 2nd World War, the US has intervened repeatedly across the planet under the flag of freedom. Initially, it was freedom from communism that allowed the butchery and starvation of many Greek people, for example, to be justified on the grounds that a few starving children were of no relevance when compared with the good fight against the commies. At this time, the CIA was globally active destabilising democratically elected regimes in furtherance of America's imperial aims. As an example, compare how CIA agent Larry Devlin was sent to the Congo to poison the government leader Patrice Lumumba with the huge fuss over the poisoning of some minor Russian recently in London. Lumumba was eventually kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1961 with the acquiescence of the Belgians and Americans. The number of column inches relating to these two news items is revealing.
Bringing the argument up to date, I intend to focus on the attitude of the powers that be to the democratic election of Hamas to rule Palestine. The coalition of the willing are big on democracy (apart from the US 2000 election, that is) and one might have thought that a non-rigged election might be applauded. Don't be soft. Global sanctions were the first tactic to be introduced, followed by the imprisoning of over half the Hamas MPs in Israeli jails. When this failed and a peace deal was reached between Hamas and Fatah that promised the hope of a better future for all Palestinians, the coalition got serious. In February, Condoleeza Rice held meetings with Fatah, Israel and pliant Arab leaders. A strategy was established to provide arms and training to Fatah with the prime purpose of overthrowing a democratically elected government through the tried and tested tactic of divide and rule. Israel loosened their vice-like grip just enough to allow the weapons into the territories with the inevitable result of yet more bloodshed. The Americans also backed the attempted coup against Venezuelan hardman Hugo Chávez in 2003 in an attempt to undermine the man's Bolívarian revolution and we could itemise numerous other recent examples where the coalition of the willing have clearly demonstrated an aversion to democracy when such democracy does not serve their strategic agenda.
So how does our free press deal with this sixty year old global agenda? Quite simply, it doesn't. All coverage of the militaristic agendas of the world's sole superpower is conspicuous by it's absence. For example, look at assassination. The deaths of Litvinenko (the unfortunate Russian) and Rafik Hariri are an omnipresent factor in all news coverage of Russia and our glorious war. But, where is the press coverage for the murders of Yasser Arafat or Savimbi? Or look at the warping of the arguments. The coalition line goes that there can be no accommodation of Hamas until the group recognises Israel's right to exist. Where is the press coverage regarding Likud's lack of recognition of the right of a Palestinian state to exist? The press also wishes for us to perceive these wars in isolation rather than combining them as an ongoing campaign to achieve prescribed military aims.
The conflicts in the Middle East only make full sense when one views the agendas that have been implemented over the last half century in an holistic manner. Look at a map of the region with oil deposits highlighted and all the incremental wars and invasions start to make sense. Oil pipelines, control of the region from Europe through Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Afghanistan are the key factors. Democracy, weapons of mass destruction and alleged assassinations were simply so much spin. The US allows Israel illegally held nuclear weapons but threatens more armageddon if Iran go down the same route. The whole agenda is kneejerkingly simplistic and reactive. By targeting Islam as a whole, America has missed out on a more creative tactic of setting the Shias against the Sunnis at America's bidding and vice versa. Any moral high ground that may have acted as a persuasion to the myopic masses has been totally undermined by illegal war, torture, terror and rabidly non-democratic processes.
Arthur Schlesinger established that the global agenda moves in a series of fits and starts. Every 40 years or so, there is a new climax of psychopathic behaviour that reaches such a crescendo that the elite have to take notice of the masses and, consequently, decelerate. This law is based on the valid premise that most people just wish for an easy life but that when societal, business, governmental and military psychopathy reaches a zenith, the cry goes up that enough is enough and we are all rewarded with a window of pseudo-social living until the next generation can be bought off through their lack of political memory. The last two zeniths were represented by the Depression and the aftermath of Vietnam. Our current cycle began with the nadir of the imposition of shareholder capitalism in the early eighties and the increase in enlightened cynicism is suggestive of an imminent new zenith.
It is by no means certain that the planet will be able to survive the next wave of psychopathy unless considerable restructuring is undertaken in the near future.
And what may we expect from our free press? It is to all of our disadvantages that our present media does not inform us about geopolitical realities and corruptions but chooses to focus instead on propaganda and the periphery. Even in France, 75% of the media is in the possession of just two military defence companies. We cannot expect such organisations to take a neutral line.
In the words of Bertrand Russell: "the authorities no longer have sufficient belief in the justice of their cause to think that it can survive the ordeal of free discussion." Expect more of the same ad nauseum...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Firstly, a little background...
The coalition of the willing is active throughout the Middle East with the publicised aim of bringing democracy to the region. The initial spin around the illegal occupation of Iraq was that the west was out to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people while unearthing Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and bringing the former rulers to summary justice. All of these publicised factors were a veil behind which the reality of the west's agenda lurked - this alleged process of democratisation never mentioned oil or the west's long-term strategic geopolitical agenda in the region.
The USA have not utilised the winning of hearts and minds as a military backcloth since Vietnam. The shock and awe tactics developed against the Vietcong have been the strategy of choice in the intervening years and Iraq is no different. Instead of trying to win popular support, the US has instead approached conflict on a behavioural level whereby tactics are developed that bludgeon the population into an acceptance of western democracy - think Fallujah, for example. Baudrillard famously claimed, quite correctly, that the first Iraq war never actually took place as the armed forces of the protagonists never actually fought each other face to face - as good an example of the triumph of shock and awe over hearts and minds as one is likely to find! The shock and awe mentality has spread through to the gross violations of the Geneva Convention that are represented by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. The torture techniques that were successfully utilised against the US in Vietnam have formed the bedrock of America's own tactics in extracting (flawed) information from prisoners in the current phase of the American's imperial agenda. Many of the forms of torture are highly behavioural in style and, yet, are very successful in breaking the wills of the alleged enemy combatants - 24/7 heavy metal music, waterboarding, the use of wild dogs and sexual humiliation have the same collated impact as more physical forms of abuse.
Since the 2nd World War, the US has intervened repeatedly across the planet under the flag of freedom. Initially, it was freedom from communism that allowed the butchery and starvation of many Greek people, for example, to be justified on the grounds that a few starving children were of no relevance when compared with the good fight against the commies. At this time, the CIA was globally active destabilising democratically elected regimes in furtherance of America's imperial aims. As an example, compare how CIA agent Larry Devlin was sent to the Congo to poison the government leader Patrice Lumumba with the huge fuss over the poisoning of some minor Russian recently in London. Lumumba was eventually kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1961 with the acquiescence of the Belgians and Americans. The number of column inches relating to these two news items is revealing.
Bringing the argument up to date, I intend to focus on the attitude of the powers that be to the democratic election of Hamas to rule Palestine. The coalition of the willing are big on democracy (apart from the US 2000 election, that is) and one might have thought that a non-rigged election might be applauded. Don't be soft. Global sanctions were the first tactic to be introduced, followed by the imprisoning of over half the Hamas MPs in Israeli jails. When this failed and a peace deal was reached between Hamas and Fatah that promised the hope of a better future for all Palestinians, the coalition got serious. In February, Condoleeza Rice held meetings with Fatah, Israel and pliant Arab leaders. A strategy was established to provide arms and training to Fatah with the prime purpose of overthrowing a democratically elected government through the tried and tested tactic of divide and rule. Israel loosened their vice-like grip just enough to allow the weapons into the territories with the inevitable result of yet more bloodshed. The Americans also backed the attempted coup against Venezuelan hardman Hugo Chávez in 2003 in an attempt to undermine the man's Bolívarian revolution and we could itemise numerous other recent examples where the coalition of the willing have clearly demonstrated an aversion to democracy when such democracy does not serve their strategic agenda.
So how does our free press deal with this sixty year old global agenda? Quite simply, it doesn't. All coverage of the militaristic agendas of the world's sole superpower is conspicuous by it's absence. For example, look at assassination. The deaths of Litvinenko (the unfortunate Russian) and Rafik Hariri are an omnipresent factor in all news coverage of Russia and our glorious war. But, where is the press coverage for the murders of Yasser Arafat or Savimbi? Or look at the warping of the arguments. The coalition line goes that there can be no accommodation of Hamas until the group recognises Israel's right to exist. Where is the press coverage regarding Likud's lack of recognition of the right of a Palestinian state to exist? The press also wishes for us to perceive these wars in isolation rather than combining them as an ongoing campaign to achieve prescribed military aims.
The conflicts in the Middle East only make full sense when one views the agendas that have been implemented over the last half century in an holistic manner. Look at a map of the region with oil deposits highlighted and all the incremental wars and invasions start to make sense. Oil pipelines, control of the region from Europe through Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Afghanistan are the key factors. Democracy, weapons of mass destruction and alleged assassinations were simply so much spin. The US allows Israel illegally held nuclear weapons but threatens more armageddon if Iran go down the same route. The whole agenda is kneejerkingly simplistic and reactive. By targeting Islam as a whole, America has missed out on a more creative tactic of setting the Shias against the Sunnis at America's bidding and vice versa. Any moral high ground that may have acted as a persuasion to the myopic masses has been totally undermined by illegal war, torture, terror and rabidly non-democratic processes.
Arthur Schlesinger established that the global agenda moves in a series of fits and starts. Every 40 years or so, there is a new climax of psychopathic behaviour that reaches such a crescendo that the elite have to take notice of the masses and, consequently, decelerate. This law is based on the valid premise that most people just wish for an easy life but that when societal, business, governmental and military psychopathy reaches a zenith, the cry goes up that enough is enough and we are all rewarded with a window of pseudo-social living until the next generation can be bought off through their lack of political memory. The last two zeniths were represented by the Depression and the aftermath of Vietnam. Our current cycle began with the nadir of the imposition of shareholder capitalism in the early eighties and the increase in enlightened cynicism is suggestive of an imminent new zenith.
It is by no means certain that the planet will be able to survive the next wave of psychopathy unless considerable restructuring is undertaken in the near future.
And what may we expect from our free press? It is to all of our disadvantages that our present media does not inform us about geopolitical realities and corruptions but chooses to focus instead on propaganda and the periphery. Even in France, 75% of the media is in the possession of just two military defence companies. We cannot expect such organisations to take a neutral line.
In the words of Bertrand Russell: "the authorities no longer have sufficient belief in the justice of their cause to think that it can survive the ordeal of free discussion." Expect more of the same ad nauseum...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Monday, 14 May 2007
The Freakonomics Of English Premiership Football
Never again will Mr Graham Poll referee a Premiership football game unless the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) and the Premiership are able to develop some random reason to provide Poll with another season of experimental officiating. We always expected that Poll would go out with a bang but his selection for Portsmouth's end of season earner with Arsenal (which also existed on a secondary and tertiary level as a match to determine Portsmouth's UEFA Cup qualification and Arsenal's bid for 3rd place) was a good final fling for the Thing from Tring. The match did not exist as a truly competitive event - if either club was really focused on the potential gains of a victory, they would not have been resting half their respective teams. Also, there might have been a booking or two. The dominant structure on the match was the late betting market in both Asia and Europe as a massive late gamble (one of the largest of the season) cascaded on Portsmouth. Graham Poll is a master of control of such events and his Asian links will be sorely missed on an impact level for the powers-that-be in the Premiership. The timeline of events relating to Portsmouth's disallowed goal are revealing:
Portsmouth score; Poll gives goal; assistant referee signals goal; assistant referee changes his mind; Poll changes his mind; no goal. Perhaps the PGMOB could release the communications from the miked up officials (both on and off the pitch). We confidently expect that Mr Poll, a year's extension notwithstanding, will achieve significant hierarchical achievement elsewhere within the game of global football. The PGMOB will also be glad to see the back of Dermot Gallagher (who also retires at the end of the season) and we share their pleasure although we expect a conveyor belt of suitably obedient individuals to replace these reptiles.
Elsewhere, the bookmakers ensured that the final round of matches of the 2006/07 season filled their satchels to bursting. In the English Premiership, the unlikely happens regularly.
The matches at Liverpool and Chelsea were standard template end of season agreed draws and a draw is virtually always good news for the layers. Indeed six of the last round of games of minimal or no significance finished with a level scoreline.
The other major news (from press coverage, far more significant than the genocide in Darfur or the deteriorating situations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been the soap played out in East London. We have previously stated our views on the West Ham United abuse of power in several posts (most recently, see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/magnussens-millions-save-day.html). We have remained silent over the season's conclusion as we had no desire to impact upon our proprietary trading activities but, now that the season is over, there are a few extra pertinent points that need to be raised regarding club power in the Premiership. As we stated in the previous post, the reasons provided for the non-deduction of points as punishment for undertaking business dealings with Media Sports Investment (MSI) were selective and spurious. The only justice-based sentence would have seen the Hammers relegated (having "great" fans and the season's late stage being rather flippant justifications, really). The degree of external support, aside from that given by the FA Premier League Disciplinary Panel, has been extensive. So confident were William Hill bookmakers that Manchester United wouldn't win their final match of the season against West Ham that they offered new customers a "free" bet on Man Utd at Even money - the actual market odds were around 8/13 (1.62). We do not believe that such an offer would have been made on one of the biggest betting days of the year without confidence in an outcome that was virtually absolute in it's corrupt structure. I have no desire to go into details but Manchester United were never going to win this game and Atkinson's penalty refusal against O'Shea was only the last of a run of favourable decisions that have fallen in the Hammer's favour in the season run in (remember the ludicrous "goal", penalty and sending off given in their favour by Howard Webb at Blackburn, for example). So, eventually, with the help of the FA, the FA Premier League Disciplinary Panel, the PGMOB and some of their opponents, West Ham United have survived in the Premiership.
Dichotomous attention has been given to Wigan Athletic and they have been, by far, the most negatively targeted outfit in the top league (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/who-do-premiership-referees-really.html). This manipulation continued right to the final whistle of their match at Sheffield at the weekend. Dean did provide them with a penalty after having earlier denied them two other spotkicks but the decision he gave could only have been more blatant if Jagielka had caught the ball and run out of the penalty box in a rugby stylee! Still no equaliser for the Yorksiremen and with Wigan tiring, Dean harshly sent off McCulloch but the Latics held on and, deservedly, stay in the Premiership (despite a total of ten minutes injury time). Emile Heskey was omnipresent and showed his high quality which has been constantly publicly devalued since he was unfortunate enough to be Michael Owen's partner when the little man wasn't always putting everything into his game.
Sheffield's demotion will be fought through the courts and Wigan's Dave Whelan has promised backing. There are now known to be seven teams who are collaborating to confront the Premier League. Scudamore was scurrying around late last week utilising the standard English approach to a crisis - divide and rule and, if no luck there, bribe. By arranging meetings with some of these clubs and by the variable conversational constructs that are alleged to have been put forward by Scudamore in these meetings, the Premier League has merely given a vivid statement to the opposition with regard to the weakness of the Premier League's position which is not known to be a particularly successful legal practice. There was a desperation by English spectacular football society to keep the West Ham scandal out of the global gaze for the climax of the season - the latest Quest update was also delayed until after the season's end. Scudamore's shuttle diplomacy thinly veiled as bribery was a final desperate attempt to be able to market the Premiership as successful and clean as opposed to corrupt and tainted.
There are other peripheral affairs that have devalued both the title race and the relegation issues - the agreement between Man Utd and Everton over Tim Howard's non-appearance against his former club in a very massive game; the media and bookmaker's milking of a non-existent title race to bolster their profits; Fulham surviving through beating a pub team from the Wirral; agreed mutually beneficial results (preferably with a little bit of private betting activity on the side); the input of PGMOB referees etc etc.
And, we are supposed to see this as competitive level playing field. The Premiership and Serie A have many similar corrupt structures and the conclusion of this season's English league will provide us with a summer of fake intrigue as the authorities and the judiciary deal with the issues. Points deductions and potential punitive relegations have been exported from the Italian game and, by performing such non-viable contortions, the Premier League has ensured, just as in Italy, that every future disciplinary decision will be measured by the yardstick of West Ham United. As the authorities are, in reality, giving West Ham £45m as a punishment then we should expect similar arbitrariness throughout any processes in the future. The sole determinants of outcome will be power/money. Over the last year, the following Premiership clubs have had minimal or no punishment despite links to corruption via bungs or illegal gambling or breaking Premiership rules or more than one of these illegalities:
Bolton Wanderers; Charlton Athletic; Chelsea; Liverpool; Manchester United; Middlesbrough; Newcastle; Portsmouth; West Ham United.
Unsurprisingly, Bury, Rotherham United and, for that matter, Sheffield United have not been similarly fortunate.
The sooner that the English population at large accepts this corrupt edifice in it's full gory glory the better. This is the prime reason why we repeatedly provide you with examples and updates of earlier examples of the ruination of our game. In Italy, which mimics our corrupt infrastructure in many ways, society accepts the power machinations in sport and politics. Dietrologia is the Italian word for "the study of what is behind something" ie a study of corruption. No Italian dinner party is complete without a couple of hours of healthy dietrologia. It is a significantly preferable psychological profile to address one's reality than to blinker one's existential boundaries to what it suits one to believe. And, it is more fun. Watching Graham Poll's last hurrah was much more interesting than the random walk of the twenty two players and the ball. I'll miss him for that at least - he was better than a shit game of football...
Portsmouth score; Poll gives goal; assistant referee signals goal; assistant referee changes his mind; Poll changes his mind; no goal. Perhaps the PGMOB could release the communications from the miked up officials (both on and off the pitch). We confidently expect that Mr Poll, a year's extension notwithstanding, will achieve significant hierarchical achievement elsewhere within the game of global football. The PGMOB will also be glad to see the back of Dermot Gallagher (who also retires at the end of the season) and we share their pleasure although we expect a conveyor belt of suitably obedient individuals to replace these reptiles.
Elsewhere, the bookmakers ensured that the final round of matches of the 2006/07 season filled their satchels to bursting. In the English Premiership, the unlikely happens regularly.
The matches at Liverpool and Chelsea were standard template end of season agreed draws and a draw is virtually always good news for the layers. Indeed six of the last round of games of minimal or no significance finished with a level scoreline.
The other major news (from press coverage, far more significant than the genocide in Darfur or the deteriorating situations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been the soap played out in East London. We have previously stated our views on the West Ham United abuse of power in several posts (most recently, see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/magnussens-millions-save-day.html). We have remained silent over the season's conclusion as we had no desire to impact upon our proprietary trading activities but, now that the season is over, there are a few extra pertinent points that need to be raised regarding club power in the Premiership. As we stated in the previous post, the reasons provided for the non-deduction of points as punishment for undertaking business dealings with Media Sports Investment (MSI) were selective and spurious. The only justice-based sentence would have seen the Hammers relegated (having "great" fans and the season's late stage being rather flippant justifications, really). The degree of external support, aside from that given by the FA Premier League Disciplinary Panel, has been extensive. So confident were William Hill bookmakers that Manchester United wouldn't win their final match of the season against West Ham that they offered new customers a "free" bet on Man Utd at Even money - the actual market odds were around 8/13 (1.62). We do not believe that such an offer would have been made on one of the biggest betting days of the year without confidence in an outcome that was virtually absolute in it's corrupt structure. I have no desire to go into details but Manchester United were never going to win this game and Atkinson's penalty refusal against O'Shea was only the last of a run of favourable decisions that have fallen in the Hammer's favour in the season run in (remember the ludicrous "goal", penalty and sending off given in their favour by Howard Webb at Blackburn, for example). So, eventually, with the help of the FA, the FA Premier League Disciplinary Panel, the PGMOB and some of their opponents, West Ham United have survived in the Premiership.
Dichotomous attention has been given to Wigan Athletic and they have been, by far, the most negatively targeted outfit in the top league (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/who-do-premiership-referees-really.html). This manipulation continued right to the final whistle of their match at Sheffield at the weekend. Dean did provide them with a penalty after having earlier denied them two other spotkicks but the decision he gave could only have been more blatant if Jagielka had caught the ball and run out of the penalty box in a rugby stylee! Still no equaliser for the Yorksiremen and with Wigan tiring, Dean harshly sent off McCulloch but the Latics held on and, deservedly, stay in the Premiership (despite a total of ten minutes injury time). Emile Heskey was omnipresent and showed his high quality which has been constantly publicly devalued since he was unfortunate enough to be Michael Owen's partner when the little man wasn't always putting everything into his game.
Sheffield's demotion will be fought through the courts and Wigan's Dave Whelan has promised backing. There are now known to be seven teams who are collaborating to confront the Premier League. Scudamore was scurrying around late last week utilising the standard English approach to a crisis - divide and rule and, if no luck there, bribe. By arranging meetings with some of these clubs and by the variable conversational constructs that are alleged to have been put forward by Scudamore in these meetings, the Premier League has merely given a vivid statement to the opposition with regard to the weakness of the Premier League's position which is not known to be a particularly successful legal practice. There was a desperation by English spectacular football society to keep the West Ham scandal out of the global gaze for the climax of the season - the latest Quest update was also delayed until after the season's end. Scudamore's shuttle diplomacy thinly veiled as bribery was a final desperate attempt to be able to market the Premiership as successful and clean as opposed to corrupt and tainted.
There are other peripheral affairs that have devalued both the title race and the relegation issues - the agreement between Man Utd and Everton over Tim Howard's non-appearance against his former club in a very massive game; the media and bookmaker's milking of a non-existent title race to bolster their profits; Fulham surviving through beating a pub team from the Wirral; agreed mutually beneficial results (preferably with a little bit of private betting activity on the side); the input of PGMOB referees etc etc.
And, we are supposed to see this as competitive level playing field. The Premiership and Serie A have many similar corrupt structures and the conclusion of this season's English league will provide us with a summer of fake intrigue as the authorities and the judiciary deal with the issues. Points deductions and potential punitive relegations have been exported from the Italian game and, by performing such non-viable contortions, the Premier League has ensured, just as in Italy, that every future disciplinary decision will be measured by the yardstick of West Ham United. As the authorities are, in reality, giving West Ham £45m as a punishment then we should expect similar arbitrariness throughout any processes in the future. The sole determinants of outcome will be power/money. Over the last year, the following Premiership clubs have had minimal or no punishment despite links to corruption via bungs or illegal gambling or breaking Premiership rules or more than one of these illegalities:
Bolton Wanderers; Charlton Athletic; Chelsea; Liverpool; Manchester United; Middlesbrough; Newcastle; Portsmouth; West Ham United.
Unsurprisingly, Bury, Rotherham United and, for that matter, Sheffield United have not been similarly fortunate.
The sooner that the English population at large accepts this corrupt edifice in it's full gory glory the better. This is the prime reason why we repeatedly provide you with examples and updates of earlier examples of the ruination of our game. In Italy, which mimics our corrupt infrastructure in many ways, society accepts the power machinations in sport and politics. Dietrologia is the Italian word for "the study of what is behind something" ie a study of corruption. No Italian dinner party is complete without a couple of hours of healthy dietrologia. It is a significantly preferable psychological profile to address one's reality than to blinker one's existential boundaries to what it suits one to believe. And, it is more fun. Watching Graham Poll's last hurrah was much more interesting than the random walk of the twenty two players and the ball. I'll miss him for that at least - he was better than a shit game of football...
Friday, 5 January 2007
20 Reasons Not To Bet On British Horseracing
British horseracing is riddled with corruption. 10 years ago, I undertook a PhD at The Centre for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at Salford University and my thesis was entitled "The Impact of Conspicuous Money on Outcome in British Horseracing Markets".
Via the catalyst of my tutor, Professor Neville Topham, I was able to meet with the powerbrokers of the industry sector in this country. One of the most fascinating series of encounters was with Rodney Brack - the Chief Executive of the British Horserace Betting Levy Board (BHBLB). In the initial interactions, we discussed the mechanisms that allow certain key operators within the sport to affect the outcome of races. Jokes were shared and there was a general air of good-natured bonhomie.
Prior to a later meeting at the BHBLB offices in London, Mr Brack had decided to do a background check on me. The Direct Action Movement, the Hunt Saboteurs and the Animal Liberation Front came up and, suddenly, we were at a very different race meeting! The CEO moved into duplicitous overdrive and everything that had been black was now white and vice versa. Corruption? Nonsense. Fixed races? You are biased. Previous discussions? Denials. I considered going public with my proof of the corruption in horseracing but eventually decided to utilise my knowledge in a more creative manner.
Below are the prime reasons why one shouldn't go anywhere near horserace betting markets unless you are muscled up with either inside information from the horse's mouth (as it were) or a state-of-the-art trading model.
1. For most races, the outcome is determined by betting patterns and liabilities. Form is virtually irrelevant. These betting patterns are not publicly available.
2. In football, we must endure corrupt players, referees and managers. The parallels in racing are jockeys, clerks of racecourses, trainers/owners. Corrupt bookmakers and industry sector officials are ubiquitous in both sports.
3. Never bet on the All Weather. These events are the most corrupted and randomised.
4. Many stables are betting stables and they employ proprietary trading strategies that can only be deciphered by a few select individuals. This adds volatility to the market.
5. Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) are used widely in the sport.
6. All sources of potentially valuable information are industry-owned and, consequently, cannot be trusted.
7. Gambling winnings are not enforceable under law. Very few bookmakers allow winning accounts.
8. It is cruel.
9. The watering of racecourses (ostensibly to soften the ground) is a very manipulative tool that significantly affects the results of races.
10. The jockeys are well paid but obedient and they carry out the instructions of the key market operators.
11. The Racing Post and The Sporting Life and ALL the mainstream media print the information that the betting industry wishes them to print. Disinformation is the norm.
12. The technology utilised for photo finishes is able to be manipulated.
13. On the few occasions when there is a certainty, nobody will lay you a decent sized bet without cropping your price.
14. Betting rings are full of criminals, psychopaths, posh totty and associated slime merchants - it is not a sophisticated office space with it's permanent stench of corruption. Most people are losing money and, subconciously, they understand that they are being taken for a ride.
15. It panders to the establishment and reinforces class issues. Your money allows the upper and upper-middle classes to give prizes to each other; it provides taxation for the government and profit for the bookies and their shareholders.
16. Some of the leading Saudi owners have very opaque strategies for the horses in their ownership. It can seem like the equivalent of deciphering OPEC at times.
17. The key traders place their bets in private very early or as late as possible on the rails. The big betting firms only play the ring in the period leading up to the race. One must maximise the information to be competitive in such corrupted markets and it is often difficult to get your money on late.
18. The handicapping of racehorses is manipulated in favour of insiders.
19. Like the gypsy musicians in Romania, Irish trainers and jockeys are given respect by the establishment in this country. But it is a lacklustre, sneering and condescending respect - these people still think Eire is part of the British empire.
20. It is not a sport. It is a rigged casino game transferred to the countryside. Only a small minority of horseraces in this country are totally clean.
Via the catalyst of my tutor, Professor Neville Topham, I was able to meet with the powerbrokers of the industry sector in this country. One of the most fascinating series of encounters was with Rodney Brack - the Chief Executive of the British Horserace Betting Levy Board (BHBLB). In the initial interactions, we discussed the mechanisms that allow certain key operators within the sport to affect the outcome of races. Jokes were shared and there was a general air of good-natured bonhomie.
Prior to a later meeting at the BHBLB offices in London, Mr Brack had decided to do a background check on me. The Direct Action Movement, the Hunt Saboteurs and the Animal Liberation Front came up and, suddenly, we were at a very different race meeting! The CEO moved into duplicitous overdrive and everything that had been black was now white and vice versa. Corruption? Nonsense. Fixed races? You are biased. Previous discussions? Denials. I considered going public with my proof of the corruption in horseracing but eventually decided to utilise my knowledge in a more creative manner.
Below are the prime reasons why one shouldn't go anywhere near horserace betting markets unless you are muscled up with either inside information from the horse's mouth (as it were) or a state-of-the-art trading model.
1. For most races, the outcome is determined by betting patterns and liabilities. Form is virtually irrelevant. These betting patterns are not publicly available.
2. In football, we must endure corrupt players, referees and managers. The parallels in racing are jockeys, clerks of racecourses, trainers/owners. Corrupt bookmakers and industry sector officials are ubiquitous in both sports.
3. Never bet on the All Weather. These events are the most corrupted and randomised.
4. Many stables are betting stables and they employ proprietary trading strategies that can only be deciphered by a few select individuals. This adds volatility to the market.
5. Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) are used widely in the sport.
6. All sources of potentially valuable information are industry-owned and, consequently, cannot be trusted.
7. Gambling winnings are not enforceable under law. Very few bookmakers allow winning accounts.
8. It is cruel.
9. The watering of racecourses (ostensibly to soften the ground) is a very manipulative tool that significantly affects the results of races.
10. The jockeys are well paid but obedient and they carry out the instructions of the key market operators.
11. The Racing Post and The Sporting Life and ALL the mainstream media print the information that the betting industry wishes them to print. Disinformation is the norm.
12. The technology utilised for photo finishes is able to be manipulated.
13. On the few occasions when there is a certainty, nobody will lay you a decent sized bet without cropping your price.
14. Betting rings are full of criminals, psychopaths, posh totty and associated slime merchants - it is not a sophisticated office space with it's permanent stench of corruption. Most people are losing money and, subconciously, they understand that they are being taken for a ride.
15. It panders to the establishment and reinforces class issues. Your money allows the upper and upper-middle classes to give prizes to each other; it provides taxation for the government and profit for the bookies and their shareholders.
16. Some of the leading Saudi owners have very opaque strategies for the horses in their ownership. It can seem like the equivalent of deciphering OPEC at times.
17. The key traders place their bets in private very early or as late as possible on the rails. The big betting firms only play the ring in the period leading up to the race. One must maximise the information to be competitive in such corrupted markets and it is often difficult to get your money on late.
18. The handicapping of racehorses is manipulated in favour of insiders.
19. Like the gypsy musicians in Romania, Irish trainers and jockeys are given respect by the establishment in this country. But it is a lacklustre, sneering and condescending respect - these people still think Eire is part of the British empire.
20. It is not a sport. It is a rigged casino game transferred to the countryside. Only a small minority of horseraces in this country are totally clean.
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