Noam Chomsky: "On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.
That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee."
Why are we not able to watch, on the telly, Kettering and their Palestinian charity shirt sponsors against Egyptian-owned Fulham in the FA Cup next weekend?
Noam Chomsky: "The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes."
Why are FIFA taking action against Frédéric Kanouté for displaying the slogan "Palestina" in a recent Copa Del Rey match?
Noam Chomsky: "Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings were closed for the Sabbath. To honour the holy day, Palestinians at the edge of survival must be denied food and medicine, while hundreds can be slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters."
Why on earth would Kaká have left Milan for Abu Dhabi United?
Noam Chomsky: "The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little if any notice. That makes sense. In the annals of US-Israeli criminality, such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote. They are too familiar. To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as the site of terrible massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defence" Forces). The bombing hit the local hospital - the Gaza hospital -- and killed over 200 people, according to the eyewitness account of an American Middle East academic specialist. The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, proceeding with crucial US military and diplomatic support. That included vetoes of Security Council resolutions seeking to halt the criminal aggression that was undertaken, as scarcely concealed, to defend Israel from the threat of peaceful political settlement, contrary to many convenient fabrications about Israelis suffering under intense rocketing, a fantasy of apologists."
Why did the roof collapse, killing nine people, at Kaká's church, the Reborn in Christ Church, during his negotiations with Abu Dhabi United? Was it a Sign?
Noam Chomsky: "All of this is normal, and quite openly discussed by high Israeli officials. Thirty years ago Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur observed that since 1948, "we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities." As Israel's most prominent military analyst, Zeev Schiff, summarized his remarks, "the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously...the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets." The reasons were explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." The effect, as Eban well understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs of illegal expansion and harsh repression. Eban was commenting on a review of Labour government attacks against civilians by Prime Minister Begin, presenting a picture, Eban said, "of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I would dare to mention by name." Eban did not contest the facts that Begin reviewed, but criticized him for stating them publicly. Nor did it concern Eban, or his admirers, that his advocacy of massive state terror is also reminiscent of regimes he would not dare to mention by name."
Why are the mainstream media pretending that we have a January Transfer Market when, in Reality, we have an Abu Dhabi United Transfer Window?
Noam Chomsky: "Eban's justification for state terror is regarded as persuasive by respected authorities. As the current US-Israel assault raged, Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained that Israel's tactics both in the current attack and in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 are based on the sound principle of "trying to 'educate' Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." That makes sense on pragmatic grounds, as it did in Lebanon, where "the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians -- the families and employers of the militants -- to restrain Hezbollah in the future." And by similar logic, bin Laden's effort to "educate" Americans on 9/11 was highly praiseworthy, as were the Nazi attacks on Lidice and Oradour, Putin's destruction of Grozny, and other notable attempts at 'education'."
Why is Rafa so "disturbed" and full of "venom" over his historical revisionism?
Noam Chomsky: "Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that "What Israeli officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society." Hence when they carry out their plans to destroy Hamas's "social wing," they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society."
Why, even Fernando Torres does not agree with his manager...
Noam Chomsky: "Hamas is regularly described as "Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel." One will be hard put to find something like "democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus" -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable."
Why is Rafa cracking up?
Noam Chomsky: "Such details as those mentioned earlier, though minor, nevertheless teach us something about ourselves and our clients. So do others. To mention another one, as the latest US-Israeli assault on Gaza began, a small boat, the Dignity, was on its way from Cyprus to Gaza. The doctors and human rights activists aboard intended to violate Israel's criminal blockade and to bring medical supplies to the trapped population. The ship was intercepted in international waters by Israeli naval vessels, which rammed it severely, almost sinking it, though it managed to limp to Lebanon. Israel issued the routine lies, refuted by the journalists and passengers aboard, including CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul and former US representative and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney. That is a serious crime -- much worse, for example, than hijacking boats off the coast of Somalia. It passed with little notice. The tacit acceptance of such crimes reflects the understanding that Gaza is occupied territory, and that Israel is entitled to maintain its siege, even authorized by the guardians of international order to carry out crimes on the high seas to implement its programs of punishing the civilian population for disobedience to its commands - under pretexts to which we return, almost universally accepted but clearly untenable."
Why the satanic beard, Rafa?
Noam Chomsky: "Who cares, for example, if the editors of Lebanon's Daily Star, generally pro-Western, write that "Some 1.5 million people in Gaza are being subjected to the murderous ministrations of one of the world's most technologically advanced but morally regressive military machines. It is often suggested that the Palestinians have become to the Arab world what the Jews were to pre-World War II Europe, and there is some truth to this interpretation. How sickeningly appropriate, then, that just as Europeans and North Americans looked the other way when the Nazis were perpetrating the Holocaust, the Arabs are finding a way to do nothing as the Israelis slaughter Palestinian children." Perhaps the most shameful of the Arab regimes is the brutal Egyptian dictatorship, the beneficiary of most US military aid, apart from Israel."
Why does PGMOB official Stuart Attwell always cover his mouth when talking to senior referees?
Noam Chomsky: "The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category - except for the category of familiarity; I've just given several examples, and will return to others. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of "terrorism," but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called "aggression," because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes. In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Lords of the Land, Idit Zertal and Akiva Eldar point out that after Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in August 2005, the ruined territory was not released "for even a single day from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day... Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might" - exercised with extreme savagery, thanks to firm US support and participation."
Why has Steve Bennett officiated at five out of the last 28 Premiership matches?
Noam Chomsky: "The US-Israeli assault on Gaza escalated in January 2006, a few months after the formal withdrawal, when Palestinians committed a truly heinous crime: they voted "the wrong way" in a free election. Like others, Palestinians learned that one does not disobey with impunity the commands of the Master, who continues to prate of his "yearning for democracy," without eliciting ridicule from the educated classes, another impressive achievement."
Why were there three changes of referee in the Premiership last weekend when most leading European leagues see one such instance every five years or so?
Noam Chomsky: "Since the terms "aggression" and "terrorism" are inadequate, some new term is needed for the sadistic and cowardly torture of people caged with no possibility of escape, while they are being pounded to dust by the most sophisticated products of US military technology - used in violation of international and even US law, but for self-declared outlaw states that is just another minor technicality. Also a minor technicality is the fact that on December 31, while terrorized Gazans were desperately seeking shelter from the ruthless assault, Washington hired a German merchant ship to transport from Greece to Israel a huge shipment, 3000 tons, of unidentified "ammunition." The new shipment "follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip," Reuters reported. All of this is separate from the more than $21 billion in U.S. military aid provided by the Bush administration to Israel, almost all grants. "Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," said a briefing by the New America Foundation, which monitors the arms trade. The new shipment was hampered by the decision of the Greek government to bar the use of any port in Greece "for the supplying of the Israeli army."
Greece's response to US-backed Israeli crimes is rather different from the craven performance of the leaders of most of Europe. The distinction reveals that Washington may have been quite realistic in regarding Greece as part of the Near East, not Europe, until the overthrow of its US-backed fascist dictatorship in 1974. Perhaps Greece is just too civilized to be part of Europe."
Why does Howard Webb get every major match and isn't this just a little too much power in one policeman's hands?
Noam Chomsky: "There are good reasons why the voting record is consistently unreported and dispatched deep into the memory hole by the media and conformist intellectuals. It would not be wise to reveal to the public what the record implies about their elected representatives. In the present case it would plainly be unhelpful to let the public know that US-Israeli rejectionism, barring the peaceful settlement long advocated by the world, reaches such an extreme as to deny Palestinians even the abstract right to self-determination."
Why has Keith Harris finally admitted that there is no possibility of any club being sold in the current global financial climate that was absolutely not caused, in any way whatsoever, by free market capitalist ideologues?
Noam Chomsky: "The figures for killed and wounded are surely an underestimate. And it is unlikely that there will be any inquiry into these atrocities. Crimes of official enemies are subjected to rigorous investigation, but our own are systematically ignored. General practice, again, and understandable on the part of the masters.
The Security Council Resolution called for stopping the flow of arms into Gaza. The US and Israel (Rice-Livni) soon reached an agreement on measures to ensure this result, concentrating on Iranian arms. There is no need to stop smuggling of US arms into Israel, because there is no smuggling: the huge flow of arms is quite public, even when not reported, as in the case of the arms shipment announced as the slaughter in Gaza was proceeding."
Why is Richard Scudamore keeping very very quiet at the moment? It surely would have nothing to do with the new televisions deals, would it?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel abandoned Gaza in September 2005. Rational Israeli hardliners, like Ariel Sharon, the patron saint of the settlers movement, understood that it was senseless to subsidize a few thousand illegal Israeli settlers in the ruins of Gaza, protected by the IDF while they used much of the land and scarce resources. It made more sense to turn Gaza into the world's largest prison and to transfer settlers to the West Bank, much more valuable territory, where Israel is quite explicit about its intentions, in word and more importantly in deed. One goal is to annex the arable land, water supplies, and pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that lie within the separation wall, irrelevantly declared illegal by the World Court. That includes a vastly expanded Jerusalem, in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years, also irrelevant. Israel has also been taking over the Jordan Valley, about one-third of the West Bank. What remains is therefore imprisoned, and, furthermore, broken into fragments by salients of Jewish settlement that trisect the territory: one to the east of Greater Jerusalem through the town of Ma'aleh Adumim, developed through the Clinton years to split the West Bank; and two to the north, through the towns of Ariel and Kedumim. What remains to Palestinians is segregated by hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints."
Why will the Premiership title race go to the very last game again this season?
Noam Chomsky: "The checkpoints have no relation to security of Israel, and if some are intended to safeguard settlers, they are flatly illegal, as the World Court ruled. In reality, their major goal is harass the Palestinian population and to fortify what Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control," designed to make life unbearable for the "two-legged beasts" who will be like "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" if they seek to remain in their homes and land. All of that is fair enough, because they are "like grasshoppers compared to us" so that their heads can be "smashed against the boulders and walls." The terminology is from the highest Israeli political and military leaders, in this case the revered "princes." And the attitudes shape policies."
Why is the Premiership now a handicapped event?
Noam Chomsky: "The plans that Olmert sketched in 2006 have since been abandoned as not sufficiently extreme. But what replaces the convergence programme, and the actions that proceed daily to implement it, are approximately the same in general conception. They trace back to the earliest days of the occupation, when Defence Minister Moshe Dayan explained poetically that "the situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against her will...You Palestinians, as a nation, don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you." You will "live like dogs, and whoever will leave, will leave," while we take what we want."
Why? Is it true that the Dalai Lama wishes an audience with Harry Redknapp?
Noam Chomsky: "As the crimes passed beyond what the carefully honed Israeli propaganda campaign was able to suppress, even confirmed Israeli hawks became concerned that the carnage is "Destroying [Israel's] soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, in the living rooms of the international community and most importantly, in Obama's America" (Ari Shavit). Shavit was particularly concerned about Israel's "shelling a United Nations facility...on the day when the UN secretary general is visiting Jerusalem," an act that is "beyond lunacy," he felt."
Why does Stevie G take such an interest in matters of the underworld variety?
Noam Chomsky: "Before, Israel had sensibly barred all journalists, even Israeli, while its crimes were proceeding in full fury. Israel's use of white phosphorus against Gaza civilians is "clear and undeniable," Amnesty International (AI) reported. Its repeated use in densely populated civilian areas "is a war crime," AI concluded. They found white phosphorus edges scattered around residential buildings, still burning, "further endangering the residents and their property," particularly children "drawn to the detritus of war and often unaware of the danger." Primary targets, they report, were the UNRWA compound, where the Israeli "white phosphorus landed next to some fuel trucks and caused a large fire which destroyed tons of humanitarian aid" after Israeli authorities "had given assurance that no further strikes would be launched on the compound." On the same day, "a white phosphorus shell landed in the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City also causing a fire which forced hospital staff to evacuate the patients... White phosphorus landing on skin can burn deep through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn unless deprived of oxygen." Purposely intended or beyond depraved indifference, such crimes are inevitable when this weapon is used in attacks on civilians."
Why is Thaksin Shinawatra still allowed to own 25% of Abu Dhabi United when the latest Amnesty International report accuses his government of "systematic" genocide against Muslims in the south of the country?
Noam Chomsky: "Aggression always has a pretext: in this case, that Israel's patience had "run out" in the face of Hamas rocket attacks, as Barak put it. The mantra that is endlessly repeated is that Israel has the right to use force to defend itself. The thesis is partially defensible. The rocketing is criminal, and it is true that a state has the right to defend itself against criminal attacks. But it does not follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. That goes far beyond any principle that we would or should accept. Nazi Germany had no right to use force to defend itself against the terrorism of the partisans. Kristallnacht is not justified by Herschel Grynszpan's assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris. The British were not justified in using force to defend themselves against the (very real) terror of the American colonists seeking independence, or to terrorize Irish Catholics in response to IRA terror - and when they finally turned to the sensible policy of addressing legitimate grievances, the terror ended. It is not a matter of "proportionality," but of choice of action in the first place: Is there an alternative to violence?"
Why have Victor Chandler International decided to enter the spread betting sector at the onset of the Depression? Did they not learn when they last dipped their toes in the waters?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel. Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words."
Why are Victor Chandler International so concerned at the integrity of football?
Noam Chomsky: "After Israel broke the June 2008 ceasefire (such as it was) in November, the siege was tightened further, with even more disastrous consequences for the population. According to Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza, "On Nov. 5, Israel sealed all crossing points into Gaza, vastly reducing and at times denying food supplies, medicines, fuel, cooking gas, and parts for water and sanitation systems..." During November, an average of 4.6 trucks of food per day entered Gaza from Israel compared with an average of 123 trucks per day in October. Spare parts for the repair and maintenance of water-related equipment have been denied entry for over a year. The World Health Organization just reported that half of Gaza's ambulances are now out of order" - and the rest soon became targets for Israeli attack. Gaza's only power station was forced to suspend operation for lack of fuel, and could not be started up again because they needed spare parts, which had been sitting in the Israeli port of Ashdod for 8 months. Shortage of electricity led to a 300% increase in burn cases at Shifaa' hospital in the Gaza Strip, resulting from efforts to light wood fires. Israel barred shipment of Chlorine, so that by mid-December in Gaza City and the north access to water was limited to six hours every three days. The human consequences are not counted among Palestinian victims of Israeli terror."
Why did Alan Shearer rewrite Reality in his assessment of Mike Dean's comedic performance in allegedly refereeing the game between Sunderland and Aston Villa?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel's senior diplomatic correspondent Akiva Eldar reports that shortly before Israel launched its full-scale invasion on Saturday Dec. 27, "Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal announced on the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Web site that he was prepared not only for a 'cessation of aggression' - he proposed going back to the arrangement at the Rafah crossing as of 2005, before Hamas won the elections and later took over the region. That arrangement was for the crossing to be managed jointly by Egypt, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority presidency and Hamas," and as noted earlier, called for opening of the crossings to desperately needed supplies."
Why did Dave Whelan put all his ill-gotten gains into dodgy Icelandic banks?
Noam Chomsky: "Today, Israel could have security, normalization of relations, and integration into the region. But it very clearly prefers illegal expansion, conflict, and repeated exercise of violence, actions that are not only criminal, murderous and destructive but are also eroding its own long-term security. US military and Middle East specialist Andrew Cordesman writes that while Israel military force can surely crush defenseless Gaza, "neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces [a bitter] reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world, Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who said on January 6 that `The Bush administration has left [Obama] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza...Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza'.""
Why does Dave Whelan object to other's tilting markets for proprietary advantage when he employs such tactics himself?
Noam Chomsky: "One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory, "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.""
Why is the collapse of the BSkyB linkage with pubs going to be so key to the next tv deal, to the Premier League's financial detriment?
Noam Chomsky: "There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves "supporters of Israel" are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible."
Why was it so funny seeing psychopath Dick Cheney arriving for the inauguration of ObamaWorld - not "Renewing America" so much as "Rebranding America" - in his wheelchair? Why was this just so funny...?
Noam Chomsky: "Meanwhile we are quietly observing a rare event in history, what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called "politicide," the murder of a nation -- at our hands."
We are all Palestinians...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Friday, 9 January 2009
Polychrysos - The Illusory Game Of Exchange
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
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
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
Drugs In Football/ Gene Doping Is Not A Country And Western Singer - Two Flashbacks
What a kerfuffle!
UK Sport, which oversees anti-doping in the United Kingdom, wants to introduce a system under which a selected group of 30 footballers will be liable for testing five times a year, on any day and at any location, including their homes and holiday accommodation.
But Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA), said he felt the provisions envisaged by UK Sport were excessive.
"We feel that to invade the privacy of a player's home would be a step too far," Taylor said.
"If we complain about anything to do with drug-testing then people think we might have something to hide, but football's record is extremely good and there has been a virtual absence of any performance-enhancing drugs, and that goes back decades."
Really?
In this post, which is one of our twice monthly Flashback posts, we assess the validity of football's self-satisfaction with the alleged non-utilisation of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs).
We print two separate historical posts, inevitably with some crossover, in an attempt to demonstrate the realities with respect to PESs usage in football.
It is our proposition that PESs are very very widely used in football and we are able to back up our statement through the application of statistical analysis of match data over many years.
For example, it is easy to demonstrate when certain varieties of PESs are administered at Half Time or to determine when drug usage is utilised over a window of high importance matches.
The key area pharmaceutically, and it should be remembered that the majority of leading clubs have close links with this industry sector either via sponsorship, ownership or through their medical teams, is the development of masking substances to disguise the PESs being taken.
Furthermore, as the second post demonstrates, while football is still coming to terms with an historical PESs abuse that has existed for decades, the far more contemporary issue of Gene Doping is of greater concern.
Gordon Taylor is correct on one point.
Why should footballers have to submit to such testing?
The inquiries should be directed at the core of the issue rather than at the periphery.
Numerous Italian footballers, for example, took the pills or injections offered them as it was necessary to compete in a highly competitive environment.
There was/is systemic, hierarchical and peer group pressure to perform to one's maximum.
If UK Sport and WADA wish to target PESs abuse, target the abusers not the abused.
Remember cortisone?
_____________________________________________________________________________________
DRUGS IN FOOTBALL
There are certain stages of the season where the illegal usage of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) becomes more prevalent. It is evident that the late season is a key period to develop competitive advantage and, sure enough, PESs are more prevalent from February onwards.
Previous posts (including http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2006/12/doped-up-spanish-giants.html) have touched on this area but we intend to expand our overview in this post.
The key PESs is undoubtedly Erythropoietin (EPO). Having been utilised in cycling for years, the pharmaceutical companies have developed a whole range of masking substances to prevent detection. EPO is particularly sought after as it can improve the performance of a team over a considerable time window. We have developed extensive modelling to determine when a club is on EPO but the market-makers are on top of this potential edge nowadays and such information is in the price.
The authorities throughout Europe are aware of this issue - my favourite response remains that of La Liga authorities who test for EPO in urine when it may only be detected via blood samples!
Various types of amphetamine provide a shorter term buzz. Benzedrine, Methedrine and Dexedrine are typical of this class and some teams use amphetamines at half-time which can be particularly rewarding on a trading level if you are ahead of the market.
Other substances eg narcotic analgesics allow athletes to play on through an injury (frequently creating further damage).
Nandrolone has been the most easy PESs for the authorities to detect of late although we believe that successful masking agents are now available.
Another point that is worthy of note. Illegal drug programmes tend to move with management teams from club to club.
We incorporate all of the above into our trading analysis but, occasionally, there is substance abuse that falls outside published science. In season 2001/02, Bayer Leverkusen were a team possessed. They reached the final of the Champions League where they narrowly lost to the beautiful Zidane - they had lost the final of the DFB-Pokal (German Cup) four days earlier putting out a reserve XI. Bayer were also pipped to the Bundesliga title by one point. A pretty successful season all in all for a team the size of Blackburn. The following year, Bayer escaped relegation only in a fixed game on the last day of the campaign and finished bottom of their Champions League second-phase group with zero points.
Analytically, we have never seen such a reversal from one season to the next. Leverkusen are owned by Bayer pharmaceutical company which is of no relevance whatsoever... obviously.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
GENE DOPING IS NOT A COUNTRY AND WESTERN SINGER
Nietzsche's Superman - the modern marketed paradigm of hyperreal humanity.
The Scene...
Nothing less than the leadership of the Free World (sic) is at stake.
Winning is Everything.
When the skewed incentives create such a competitive and nationalistic template, one may only be certain of one thing.
Cheating...
Firstly, a prediction.
Dietrological are trading massively on a private Olympic Games market in Asia.
Our position is a Buy.
We are of the opinion that a much higher number of World Records will be broken at these Olympics than is usually the case.
And, you know what, the reason that we think that this is a solid position (as well as being a one-parameter market!) is that Cheating is the Core Competitive Advantage in the modern Olympiad.
The cumulative impact of the incentives - personal, cultural, economic, political and national - are marked in Beijing.
Additionally, the incentives are in tandem - unlike, say, when the Black Power protests by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City extravaganza demonstrated the real feelings about living in the world's "only remaining primitive society".
The unipolar world is about to become bipolar.
Measured at purchasing power parity (PPP), Goldman Sachs reckon the Chinese will economically overtake the US of A this very year. In reality, 2028 is the projected date for the changeover in No 1 seed in the global economy - this second date is based on the modern concepts of mathematics and statistics, rather than the sleight of hand of a street magician used by proponents of PPP.
So, they're up for it.
Big style.
The People's Republic of China versus Team USA.
How spectacular do you wish for your sport to be?
Anyway.
Back to Cheating.
Herbert Marcuse: "...play is precisely a breaking off from labour and a recuperation for labour".
The Circularity of Play in the Political Economy is equivalent to the Circularity of Cheating in the 2008 Olympiad.
When the prize is so great on so many levels, Cheating will define the games.
This Cheating will, literally, exist on two different strata - Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) and Gene Doping.
Lets take these two in turn.
PESs - Remember Euro 2008? Remember how much energy Turkey and Russia possessed in a run of their respective games? Remember how tired the Russians looked in their abject Semi Final defeat to the Spanish? Remember how the Turks never stopped running, even in between matches?
PESs are now commonplace in all sports - the information is "in the price", so to speak. As an example of this, count how many of those super-energetic Turkish and Russian footballers have secured moves to the G14(18) teams following their overperformance at Euro 2008. We'll save you the trouble - the answer is zero. No top tier club makes an evaluation based on PESs.
The competitive advantage has turned away from the usage of erythropoietin (EPO), perfluorocarbon (PFC), blood doping, steroids, amphetamines etc, and to the development of masking substances instead.
Originally, the monitoring regimes were so lax that maskers weren't necessary. Indeed, a cynic might argue that the global regulation covering the illegal utilisation of PESs is suitably time-lagged to allow the next wave of 'innovation' to be initiated prior to more cumbersome regulations being developed for earlier forms of Creative Cheating.
But, in spite of this, PESs are secondary in impact to the Next Big Thing.
Gene Doping will distort outcomes at the Beijing Olympics.
Do you need to know the science?
Okay, here's a bit...
This physiological advancement (sic) is based on introducing extra copies of particular genes into the body (transgenes). EPO is the prime transgene target. It was the biotechnology industry that introduced EPO in the late-eighties and an EPO transgene would not be detectable using any technique.
The Perfect Crime.
Repoxygen is already freely available in the sorts of locations where you can purchase guns and things. Other Big Pharma advances include IGF-1 (which is muscle specific - think javelin or tennis), vascular endothelial, Switching Genes that act as an on/off device, advanced endorphins for pain control etc etc.
The specificity of these designer doping genes allows particular products to be aimed at particular sports. One can even game the detection regime via the use of Switching Genes.
Now, when the leadership of the Free World is at stake, surely the unknown health risks to a few athletes are not worth worrying about?
Cortisone? Who cares?
And, in a parallel pharma-verse, notice how quickly Vioxx has disappeared from the hyperreality?
As The Economist correctly states, the decision on Gene Doping should be based on safety and fairness.
However, the right wing libertarians then proceed by totally ignoring the former (profit over people) while producing illogical, unscientific and selective arguments in support of the latter.
The Economist think that Gene Doping is a Good Thing.
Over their column inches, even the name changes.
Gene Doping, with its nightmare-state images of Frankenstein-athletes...
...becomes Gene Therapy, with an altogether more comfortable-couch-with-caring-counsellor sort of image.
If we are going to be objecting to the hunger merchants of the next millennium imposing genetically modified foods on us, we must be equally assertive in our objection to genetically modified athletes.
The Economist uses the case of Eero Mantyranta to promote their case. This Finnish athlete was fortunate. His body produced large amounts of EPO entirely naturally. He won a couple of Olympic Golds in those bizarre sports that involve snow and rifles and forests and things.
So what?
Sport is about natural ability.
That is the point.
Fairness.
No corruption or advantage through PESs, Gene Doping, control of match officials or whatever.
The list of negatives to The Economists' arguments are extensive, too extensive for my working day.
But here are a few points worthy of input (in random order):
* If natural ability is to be artificially equalised using Gene Doping then some of the most beautiful things that we have ever witnessed will never happen again.
Maradona, Tiger Woods, Don Bradman, Gary Sobers would all have just merged into the crowd of heightened mediocrity. The incentives would make it imperative that all athletes partake in Gene Doping - what chance in outrunning or outjumping an android without becoming one yourself?
* In the end, it will still probably be natural ability that provides some edge but not before Big Pharma has made extensive profits out of gullible and desperate athletes equalising their gene intake. The profits of the pharmaceutical industry are one of the foundational bases of this ruse.
* Big Pharma will also game the sector. Generic Gene Doping will be available off-the-shelf, in a manner of speaking, for the poorer participants. The G8(12) will have proprietary Gene Doping established with particular pharmaceutical giants - Team Pfizer USA. This will help maintain the most psychopathic nations at the top of the Medal Table.
* Longer-term health risk is the biggest issue. Corners will be cut in pursuit of glory. The real impacts may only become evident in future decades when the athletes are well away from the lens of the spectacle. And the athletes take on the Total Risk ie Life. The profiteers simply count the cash...
* Numerous unnecessary industries will benefit from the introduction of Gene Doping - advertisers, sponsors, the media, merchandisers, sportswear firms, bookmakers etc etc etc.
For example, lets look at bookmaking.
Natural ability is very annoying to bookmakers.
As we hopefully demonstrated in our recent post at http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-bookmakers-hate-olympics.html, the layers do not appreciate competitions where the incentive to win is considerably greater than the incentive to cheat.
Gene Doping will solve this.
And then some...
As only the leading nations will be able to take advantage of Gene Doping, and as the leading nations have very mature betting industries, the inevitable linking of the Dopers and the Layers will produce internally controlled betting markets on currently dangerous spectacles such as the Olympic Games.
Take the 100 metres.
This is a flagship event.
Of the top ten competitors in the betting markets, 3 are Jamaican, 3 are Trinidadian, 1 is from the Bahamas and the other three are from Team Pfizer.
In a world where the bookmaking and pharmaceutical industries cosied up to one another for mutual advantage, and oodles of insider trading opportunites - all industries love those off-balance sheet little grey and black market earners - the possibilities of gaming the 100 metres outcome for proprietary trading advantage is obvious.
For example, inside knowledge of the use of Switching Genes would be valuable both with respect to historical 'form' and real-time hyperrealities in the race.
The worst two industries, apart from all the others, are pharmaceuticals and bookmaking, and their collusion is not an edifying sight.
The Economist dresses up the whole argument regarding Gene Doping on the basis of fairness. Apparently, it is unfair that the likes of Eero Mantyranta have natural ability providing natural advantage. It would be much fairer, claim a tongue-in-cheeked Economist leader, if rich countries could develop an unnatural advantage for themselves through drugs and doping.
"Why should others be denied the chance to remedy ...[their] deficiency?" argues The Economist.
Aside from all the above (and more), the winners of the prizes should be the individuals who have natural talents, have selected the correct sports in which to demonstrate those talents, have trained while their peers partied and who avoid the competitive advantages bestowed by PESs, Gene Doping or linking to the bookmaking industry.
Exactly the sort of individuals who will not be winning Gold Medals in Beijing, in fact...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
UK Sport, which oversees anti-doping in the United Kingdom, wants to introduce a system under which a selected group of 30 footballers will be liable for testing five times a year, on any day and at any location, including their homes and holiday accommodation.
But Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA), said he felt the provisions envisaged by UK Sport were excessive.
"We feel that to invade the privacy of a player's home would be a step too far," Taylor said.
"If we complain about anything to do with drug-testing then people think we might have something to hide, but football's record is extremely good and there has been a virtual absence of any performance-enhancing drugs, and that goes back decades."
Really?
In this post, which is one of our twice monthly Flashback posts, we assess the validity of football's self-satisfaction with the alleged non-utilisation of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs).
We print two separate historical posts, inevitably with some crossover, in an attempt to demonstrate the realities with respect to PESs usage in football.
It is our proposition that PESs are very very widely used in football and we are able to back up our statement through the application of statistical analysis of match data over many years.
For example, it is easy to demonstrate when certain varieties of PESs are administered at Half Time or to determine when drug usage is utilised over a window of high importance matches.
The key area pharmaceutically, and it should be remembered that the majority of leading clubs have close links with this industry sector either via sponsorship, ownership or through their medical teams, is the development of masking substances to disguise the PESs being taken.
Furthermore, as the second post demonstrates, while football is still coming to terms with an historical PESs abuse that has existed for decades, the far more contemporary issue of Gene Doping is of greater concern.
Gordon Taylor is correct on one point.
Why should footballers have to submit to such testing?
The inquiries should be directed at the core of the issue rather than at the periphery.
Numerous Italian footballers, for example, took the pills or injections offered them as it was necessary to compete in a highly competitive environment.
There was/is systemic, hierarchical and peer group pressure to perform to one's maximum.
If UK Sport and WADA wish to target PESs abuse, target the abusers not the abused.
Remember cortisone?
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DRUGS IN FOOTBALL
There are certain stages of the season where the illegal usage of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) becomes more prevalent. It is evident that the late season is a key period to develop competitive advantage and, sure enough, PESs are more prevalent from February onwards.
Previous posts (including http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2006/12/doped-up-spanish-giants.html) have touched on this area but we intend to expand our overview in this post.
The key PESs is undoubtedly Erythropoietin (EPO). Having been utilised in cycling for years, the pharmaceutical companies have developed a whole range of masking substances to prevent detection. EPO is particularly sought after as it can improve the performance of a team over a considerable time window. We have developed extensive modelling to determine when a club is on EPO but the market-makers are on top of this potential edge nowadays and such information is in the price.
The authorities throughout Europe are aware of this issue - my favourite response remains that of La Liga authorities who test for EPO in urine when it may only be detected via blood samples!
Various types of amphetamine provide a shorter term buzz. Benzedrine, Methedrine and Dexedrine are typical of this class and some teams use amphetamines at half-time which can be particularly rewarding on a trading level if you are ahead of the market.
Other substances eg narcotic analgesics allow athletes to play on through an injury (frequently creating further damage).
Nandrolone has been the most easy PESs for the authorities to detect of late although we believe that successful masking agents are now available.
Another point that is worthy of note. Illegal drug programmes tend to move with management teams from club to club.
We incorporate all of the above into our trading analysis but, occasionally, there is substance abuse that falls outside published science. In season 2001/02, Bayer Leverkusen were a team possessed. They reached the final of the Champions League where they narrowly lost to the beautiful Zidane - they had lost the final of the DFB-Pokal (German Cup) four days earlier putting out a reserve XI. Bayer were also pipped to the Bundesliga title by one point. A pretty successful season all in all for a team the size of Blackburn. The following year, Bayer escaped relegation only in a fixed game on the last day of the campaign and finished bottom of their Champions League second-phase group with zero points.
Analytically, we have never seen such a reversal from one season to the next. Leverkusen are owned by Bayer pharmaceutical company which is of no relevance whatsoever... obviously.
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GENE DOPING IS NOT A COUNTRY AND WESTERN SINGER
Nietzsche's Superman - the modern marketed paradigm of hyperreal humanity.
The Scene...
Nothing less than the leadership of the Free World (sic) is at stake.
Winning is Everything.
When the skewed incentives create such a competitive and nationalistic template, one may only be certain of one thing.
Cheating...
Firstly, a prediction.
Dietrological are trading massively on a private Olympic Games market in Asia.
Our position is a Buy.
We are of the opinion that a much higher number of World Records will be broken at these Olympics than is usually the case.
And, you know what, the reason that we think that this is a solid position (as well as being a one-parameter market!) is that Cheating is the Core Competitive Advantage in the modern Olympiad.
The cumulative impact of the incentives - personal, cultural, economic, political and national - are marked in Beijing.
Additionally, the incentives are in tandem - unlike, say, when the Black Power protests by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City extravaganza demonstrated the real feelings about living in the world's "only remaining primitive society".
The unipolar world is about to become bipolar.
Measured at purchasing power parity (PPP), Goldman Sachs reckon the Chinese will economically overtake the US of A this very year. In reality, 2028 is the projected date for the changeover in No 1 seed in the global economy - this second date is based on the modern concepts of mathematics and statistics, rather than the sleight of hand of a street magician used by proponents of PPP.
So, they're up for it.
Big style.
The People's Republic of China versus Team USA.
How spectacular do you wish for your sport to be?
Anyway.
Back to Cheating.
Herbert Marcuse: "...play is precisely a breaking off from labour and a recuperation for labour".
The Circularity of Play in the Political Economy is equivalent to the Circularity of Cheating in the 2008 Olympiad.
When the prize is so great on so many levels, Cheating will define the games.
This Cheating will, literally, exist on two different strata - Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) and Gene Doping.
Lets take these two in turn.
PESs - Remember Euro 2008? Remember how much energy Turkey and Russia possessed in a run of their respective games? Remember how tired the Russians looked in their abject Semi Final defeat to the Spanish? Remember how the Turks never stopped running, even in between matches?
PESs are now commonplace in all sports - the information is "in the price", so to speak. As an example of this, count how many of those super-energetic Turkish and Russian footballers have secured moves to the G14(18) teams following their overperformance at Euro 2008. We'll save you the trouble - the answer is zero. No top tier club makes an evaluation based on PESs.
The competitive advantage has turned away from the usage of erythropoietin (EPO), perfluorocarbon (PFC), blood doping, steroids, amphetamines etc, and to the development of masking substances instead.
Originally, the monitoring regimes were so lax that maskers weren't necessary. Indeed, a cynic might argue that the global regulation covering the illegal utilisation of PESs is suitably time-lagged to allow the next wave of 'innovation' to be initiated prior to more cumbersome regulations being developed for earlier forms of Creative Cheating.
But, in spite of this, PESs are secondary in impact to the Next Big Thing.
Gene Doping will distort outcomes at the Beijing Olympics.
Do you need to know the science?
Okay, here's a bit...
This physiological advancement (sic) is based on introducing extra copies of particular genes into the body (transgenes). EPO is the prime transgene target. It was the biotechnology industry that introduced EPO in the late-eighties and an EPO transgene would not be detectable using any technique.
The Perfect Crime.
Repoxygen is already freely available in the sorts of locations where you can purchase guns and things. Other Big Pharma advances include IGF-1 (which is muscle specific - think javelin or tennis), vascular endothelial, Switching Genes that act as an on/off device, advanced endorphins for pain control etc etc.
The specificity of these designer doping genes allows particular products to be aimed at particular sports. One can even game the detection regime via the use of Switching Genes.
Now, when the leadership of the Free World is at stake, surely the unknown health risks to a few athletes are not worth worrying about?
Cortisone? Who cares?
And, in a parallel pharma-verse, notice how quickly Vioxx has disappeared from the hyperreality?
As The Economist correctly states, the decision on Gene Doping should be based on safety and fairness.
However, the right wing libertarians then proceed by totally ignoring the former (profit over people) while producing illogical, unscientific and selective arguments in support of the latter.
The Economist think that Gene Doping is a Good Thing.
Over their column inches, even the name changes.
Gene Doping, with its nightmare-state images of Frankenstein-athletes...
...becomes Gene Therapy, with an altogether more comfortable-couch-with-caring-counsellor sort of image.
If we are going to be objecting to the hunger merchants of the next millennium imposing genetically modified foods on us, we must be equally assertive in our objection to genetically modified athletes.
The Economist uses the case of Eero Mantyranta to promote their case. This Finnish athlete was fortunate. His body produced large amounts of EPO entirely naturally. He won a couple of Olympic Golds in those bizarre sports that involve snow and rifles and forests and things.
So what?
Sport is about natural ability.
That is the point.
Fairness.
No corruption or advantage through PESs, Gene Doping, control of match officials or whatever.
The list of negatives to The Economists' arguments are extensive, too extensive for my working day.
But here are a few points worthy of input (in random order):
* If natural ability is to be artificially equalised using Gene Doping then some of the most beautiful things that we have ever witnessed will never happen again.
Maradona, Tiger Woods, Don Bradman, Gary Sobers would all have just merged into the crowd of heightened mediocrity. The incentives would make it imperative that all athletes partake in Gene Doping - what chance in outrunning or outjumping an android without becoming one yourself?
* In the end, it will still probably be natural ability that provides some edge but not before Big Pharma has made extensive profits out of gullible and desperate athletes equalising their gene intake. The profits of the pharmaceutical industry are one of the foundational bases of this ruse.
* Big Pharma will also game the sector. Generic Gene Doping will be available off-the-shelf, in a manner of speaking, for the poorer participants. The G8(12) will have proprietary Gene Doping established with particular pharmaceutical giants - Team Pfizer USA. This will help maintain the most psychopathic nations at the top of the Medal Table.
* Longer-term health risk is the biggest issue. Corners will be cut in pursuit of glory. The real impacts may only become evident in future decades when the athletes are well away from the lens of the spectacle. And the athletes take on the Total Risk ie Life. The profiteers simply count the cash...
* Numerous unnecessary industries will benefit from the introduction of Gene Doping - advertisers, sponsors, the media, merchandisers, sportswear firms, bookmakers etc etc etc.
For example, lets look at bookmaking.
Natural ability is very annoying to bookmakers.
As we hopefully demonstrated in our recent post at http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-bookmakers-hate-olympics.html, the layers do not appreciate competitions where the incentive to win is considerably greater than the incentive to cheat.
Gene Doping will solve this.
And then some...
As only the leading nations will be able to take advantage of Gene Doping, and as the leading nations have very mature betting industries, the inevitable linking of the Dopers and the Layers will produce internally controlled betting markets on currently dangerous spectacles such as the Olympic Games.
Take the 100 metres.
This is a flagship event.
Of the top ten competitors in the betting markets, 3 are Jamaican, 3 are Trinidadian, 1 is from the Bahamas and the other three are from Team Pfizer.
In a world where the bookmaking and pharmaceutical industries cosied up to one another for mutual advantage, and oodles of insider trading opportunites - all industries love those off-balance sheet little grey and black market earners - the possibilities of gaming the 100 metres outcome for proprietary trading advantage is obvious.
For example, inside knowledge of the use of Switching Genes would be valuable both with respect to historical 'form' and real-time hyperrealities in the race.
The worst two industries, apart from all the others, are pharmaceuticals and bookmaking, and their collusion is not an edifying sight.
The Economist dresses up the whole argument regarding Gene Doping on the basis of fairness. Apparently, it is unfair that the likes of Eero Mantyranta have natural ability providing natural advantage. It would be much fairer, claim a tongue-in-cheeked Economist leader, if rich countries could develop an unnatural advantage for themselves through drugs and doping.
"Why should others be denied the chance to remedy ...[their] deficiency?" argues The Economist.
Aside from all the above (and more), the winners of the prizes should be the individuals who have natural talents, have selected the correct sports in which to demonstrate those talents, have trained while their peers partied and who avoid the competitive advantages bestowed by PESs, Gene Doping or linking to the bookmaking industry.
Exactly the sort of individuals who will not be winning Gold Medals in Beijing, in fact...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Pouvoir-Savoir #
So...
Has capitalism been saved?
If you were to believe the hysterical coverage in the mainstream capitalist media, you would certainly think so.
After trillions of dollars have been simply handed over to the architects of the Crash, the markets bounced back slightly from the 40% losses that they have experienced in the last months.
After all of the previous efforts to create a safety net, the markets plummeted, yesterday, they merely stabilised.
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Quoting John Authers of the Financial Times: "Markets are good at bouncing; their course is naturally erratic and a move like this does not prove the trend has changed. After the 1929 crash, which prefaced disaster, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 18.8 per cent on the next two days. There was a two-day rally of 16.6 per cent after Black Monday in 1987... So the bounce is unsurprising, and sheds no light on where markets will go next... Furthermore, we need to look at what prompted the bounce. The latest actions to bolster the international banking system are extreme. Other actions that looked extreme at the time had no effect. It would have been alarming if they had not had a response now."
Markets are not free and prices are not Real.
Neo-classical economists would have us believe that markets are efficient ie all the information is in the price.
This is patently not the case.
Firstly, there is the impact of our behavioural irrationalities.
Markets are not economic mechanisms but psychological ones.
The prices are entirely fake, and are not based on either the economic fundamentals or the systemic Realities.
Behavioural mechanisms make the 'true' price an imaginary concept.
But, that is not all.
The rampant cornering and insider trading of markets for speculative gain further distorts the 'true' price so that the prices quoted on screens and by brokers are simply figments of the collective imaginations of a privileged grouping of market architects.
It is simply not feasible to build a sustainable system on such a Poker Reality.
Furthermore, as we posted yesterday, neither systemic risk nor externalities are factored into the market prices - we used the example of the car purchase price only representing one of the costs that such a purchase brings to the planet.
All financial markets demonstrate inflated values due to this refusal to accept systemic risk and costs into the price.
The market price is ALWAYS too high.
The combination of fake price and the attempts to create a fake investor psychology are the only levers left as we slump towards the deepest Depression in a century.
So, the US/UK have been in recession throughout 2008 and yet still the prediction markets price the probability of recession in the US in 2008 market at 80 on the indices (a make-up of 100 represents a recession).
Apparently, there is no recession in the US despite trillions of dollars failing to bolster the system, the foreclosure of 3.6 million homes, the fear of hyperinflation through the gaming of the markets via interest rate cuts, the disappearance of the investment banking sector, the biggest weekly Wall Street losses ever etc etc etc.
Quoting Joseph Stiglitz: "A unique combination of ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, bad economics, and sheer incompetence has brought us to our present condition... As America attempts to work its way out of the present crisis, the danger is that we will listen to the same people on Wall Street and in the economic establishment who got us into it. For them, our current predicament is another opportunity: if they can shape the government response appropriately, they stand to gain, or at least stand to lose less, and they may be willing to sacrifice the well-being of the economy for their own benefit - just as they did in the past."
We have repeatedly posted how Hank Paulson has been #####################
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The markets would have made a more ordered retreat if he had not deconstructed Lehman Brothers, and even this year's Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Paul Krugman, places responsibility at Paulson's door.
Throughout his tenure, Paulson's public machinations #############################
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But his hidden agendas are equivalent in strategy.
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So a private payment of taxpayers money was made to a group of investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, while, publicly, the Fed refused to state that the rescue came under the auspices of the Depression-era rescue package.
Several days later, the Fed were forced to mention such a Reality when, despite the transfer, Bear Stearns went out of business.
Under terms of the $700 bailout (remember how Paulson described this amount as being the absolute total required to save the system?), the Fed would have to publicise private use of public money as it took place.
But, guess what?
At the Fed's request, this information can be kept confidential!
So Paulson can provide backhanders and kickbacks to his financial friends without any of us being any the wiser.
And this type of template defines the infrastructure that will lead to the next wave of this Recession/Depression.
Just before Paulson allowed Lehman Brothers to be deconstructed, the investment bank was in the process of setting up a new business called Baikal with the London Stock Exchange.
Baikal was a Dark Pool.
Dark Pools are private exchanges where institutional investors are able to trade huge quantities of financial assets away from the regulators' or the public eye.
This infrastructure is primed for corruption.
Indeed, we are preparing an internal consultancy document assessing the different ways that the financial system can be gamed by these Dark Pools of massive liquidity.
These private underground markets are the absolute equivalent of the underground betting markets that are destroying the sporting world.
It is the final phase of capitalism, from the stakeholder to the shareholder to the psychopathic...
A key issue in this crisis has been the focus on the micro - interest rates, inflation, share prices, bond yields, market sentiment etc.
The Reality is, however, defined by the macro.
The systemic risks and externalities that are not factored into this strategy are, by a considerable distance, the more prevalent ones.
The autistic focus on the micro is defining the fruition of the massive negative impacts of the macro.
The fake figures that are being traded simply ignore the systemic risk of climate change, for example.
Some of these trillions of pounds and dollars could have been used for the social - universal healthcare in the US comes out at $50 billion per year, for example.
For years to come, there will be real reductions in the amount of money available for healthcare, education, the social, as we cannot expect that the US/UK imperial war adventures are going to be curtailed.
We are not angry enough about this audacious robbery.
After Paulson had bailed out insurance giant, AIG, with $85 billion of taxpayer's money, the executives of AIG threw a spa party to celebrate.
The cost?
$500,000.
Just weeks later, AIG were back to receive a further $38.5 billion off Paulson.
The cost of Grade A Cocaine is obviously inflating in the Crash.
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Has capitalism been saved?
If you were to believe the hysterical coverage in the mainstream capitalist media, you would certainly think so.
After trillions of dollars have been simply handed over to the architects of the Crash, the markets bounced back slightly from the 40% losses that they have experienced in the last months.
After all of the previous efforts to create a safety net, the markets plummeted, yesterday, they merely stabilised.
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###############################################################################
Quoting John Authers of the Financial Times: "Markets are good at bouncing; their course is naturally erratic and a move like this does not prove the trend has changed. After the 1929 crash, which prefaced disaster, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 18.8 per cent on the next two days. There was a two-day rally of 16.6 per cent after Black Monday in 1987... So the bounce is unsurprising, and sheds no light on where markets will go next... Furthermore, we need to look at what prompted the bounce. The latest actions to bolster the international banking system are extreme. Other actions that looked extreme at the time had no effect. It would have been alarming if they had not had a response now."
Markets are not free and prices are not Real.
Neo-classical economists would have us believe that markets are efficient ie all the information is in the price.
This is patently not the case.
Firstly, there is the impact of our behavioural irrationalities.
Markets are not economic mechanisms but psychological ones.
The prices are entirely fake, and are not based on either the economic fundamentals or the systemic Realities.
Behavioural mechanisms make the 'true' price an imaginary concept.
But, that is not all.
The rampant cornering and insider trading of markets for speculative gain further distorts the 'true' price so that the prices quoted on screens and by brokers are simply figments of the collective imaginations of a privileged grouping of market architects.
It is simply not feasible to build a sustainable system on such a Poker Reality.
Furthermore, as we posted yesterday, neither systemic risk nor externalities are factored into the market prices - we used the example of the car purchase price only representing one of the costs that such a purchase brings to the planet.
All financial markets demonstrate inflated values due to this refusal to accept systemic risk and costs into the price.
The market price is ALWAYS too high.
The combination of fake price and the attempts to create a fake investor psychology are the only levers left as we slump towards the deepest Depression in a century.
So, the US/UK have been in recession throughout 2008 and yet still the prediction markets price the probability of recession in the US in 2008 market at 80 on the indices (a make-up of 100 represents a recession).
Apparently, there is no recession in the US despite trillions of dollars failing to bolster the system, the foreclosure of 3.6 million homes, the fear of hyperinflation through the gaming of the markets via interest rate cuts, the disappearance of the investment banking sector, the biggest weekly Wall Street losses ever etc etc etc.
Quoting Joseph Stiglitz: "A unique combination of ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, bad economics, and sheer incompetence has brought us to our present condition... As America attempts to work its way out of the present crisis, the danger is that we will listen to the same people on Wall Street and in the economic establishment who got us into it. For them, our current predicament is another opportunity: if they can shape the government response appropriately, they stand to gain, or at least stand to lose less, and they may be willing to sacrifice the well-being of the economy for their own benefit - just as they did in the past."
We have repeatedly posted how Hank Paulson has been #####################
#####################################################################
####################################################################
####################################################
#########################################################################
The markets would have made a more ordered retreat if he had not deconstructed Lehman Brothers, and even this year's Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Paul Krugman, places responsibility at Paulson's door.
Throughout his tenure, Paulson's public machinations #############################
################################################################
############################################################
#########################################################################
But his hidden agendas are equivalent in strategy.
################################################################################
#########################################################################
####################################################################################
##############################
################################################################################
#####################################################################
#####################################################################
So a private payment of taxpayers money was made to a group of investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, while, publicly, the Fed refused to state that the rescue came under the auspices of the Depression-era rescue package.
Several days later, the Fed were forced to mention such a Reality when, despite the transfer, Bear Stearns went out of business.
Under terms of the $700 bailout (remember how Paulson described this amount as being the absolute total required to save the system?), the Fed would have to publicise private use of public money as it took place.
But, guess what?
At the Fed's request, this information can be kept confidential!
So Paulson can provide backhanders and kickbacks to his financial friends without any of us being any the wiser.
And this type of template defines the infrastructure that will lead to the next wave of this Recession/Depression.
Just before Paulson allowed Lehman Brothers to be deconstructed, the investment bank was in the process of setting up a new business called Baikal with the London Stock Exchange.
Baikal was a Dark Pool.
Dark Pools are private exchanges where institutional investors are able to trade huge quantities of financial assets away from the regulators' or the public eye.
This infrastructure is primed for corruption.
Indeed, we are preparing an internal consultancy document assessing the different ways that the financial system can be gamed by these Dark Pools of massive liquidity.
These private underground markets are the absolute equivalent of the underground betting markets that are destroying the sporting world.
It is the final phase of capitalism, from the stakeholder to the shareholder to the psychopathic...
A key issue in this crisis has been the focus on the micro - interest rates, inflation, share prices, bond yields, market sentiment etc.
The Reality is, however, defined by the macro.
The systemic risks and externalities that are not factored into this strategy are, by a considerable distance, the more prevalent ones.
The autistic focus on the micro is defining the fruition of the massive negative impacts of the macro.
The fake figures that are being traded simply ignore the systemic risk of climate change, for example.
Some of these trillions of pounds and dollars could have been used for the social - universal healthcare in the US comes out at $50 billion per year, for example.
For years to come, there will be real reductions in the amount of money available for healthcare, education, the social, as we cannot expect that the US/UK imperial war adventures are going to be curtailed.
We are not angry enough about this audacious robbery.
After Paulson had bailed out insurance giant, AIG, with $85 billion of taxpayer's money, the executives of AIG threw a spa party to celebrate.
The cost?
$500,000.
Just weeks later, AIG were back to receive a further $38.5 billion off Paulson.
The cost of Grade A Cocaine is obviously inflating in the Crash.
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
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...
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