When you read the news these days, what you get is pointless drivel. What they should be doing is providing a service, informing us about the challenges of tomorrow, and investigating the events of today, trying to explain why they are happening and what we could do. However, if you take a glance at any newspaper, or mainstream news website, what you will see is more of what you already know. If there is snow where you live, you may find out that there is also snow where somebody else lives, and what a surprise, the airports are shut, because you can't take of in snow and ice. They can keep the useful bits about travel in, and ditch the rest, because quite frankly, telling people it's snowing when they already know is such a waste of money. The "Royal Wedding" story has also created a huge buzz in the news recently, but I highly doubt that most people actually give a damn. Of course, there are the royalists, and the patriots, who believe that it is right and proper that two otherwise irrelevant aristocrats should get an enormous amount of recognition for getting married, as if this was important to anybody else.
It is rather cruel that we are forced to pay huge license fees to the BBC if we want to watch their news, and then they spend the money on covering stuff that isn't even news. If we want entertaining, then we can chose to pay for it on a case by case basis by purchasing whatever magazine etc that suites our interests. If the BBC need to make efficiency savings, which they are going to have to, they can start off by ditching the bulls**t.
Most people hold this preconceived idea, a paradigm, that journalists are fascinated by what they report, and they go to every length to make sure that their coverage is as rigorous and as intellectually ruthless as possible. Yet the reality couldn't be further from this cosy, idealistic interpretation of how the news is produced. I can say with some confidence - I have met countless individuals from the media industry, who after a few drinks at the dinner party tend to open up about what really goes on in the workplace - that many of them are actively disinterested in what they report. This is why they find it obligatory to find extreme stereotypes to portray what they need to cover, because it is the easiest way they can do their job. I have been interviewed countless times, yet I have always noticed that journalists are highly selective with their shorthand. They will cease writing when you drift off into anything that is too truthful to be entertaining, and resume as soon as the buzzwords and soundbites resume.
The truth is that if people actually knew the truth about how the world works, they would be deeply depressed. This is why I can understand it when the media actively ignore anybody who seeks to break their veil of misinformation. It is not a conspiracy that the news media fails in its most fundamental responsibilities, it is simply that the truth is so bad, nobody would ever stay in the job to publish it- so it gets ignored. That is why independent blogs like this are so important. I believe that it is only right to tell people about something when you know it, even when the truth is so outta whack, so sad.
If you think about the main stories that have dominated the headlines of the last year of so, we have had the Financial Crisis, the BP oil spill, the Eurozone Debt crisis, the Government Deficit, and so the list continues; but really, all these stories are just branches of one big crisis. If you haven't realized by now, our economy, and thus our society, is slowly breaking down. The media help the politicians in their quest to peddle utterly ridiculous excuses for each new cock up that happens, and when you know the facts, it is easy to understand that everything that has been reported about the economy recently is absolute bunkum, it's just all nonsense.
Firstly, anything to do with debt is dishonest. This can be explained with a simple understanding of what debt is. In the modern banking system, debt is not, contrary to popular understand, money that is lent. It is actually invented money, that it lent. If you think about how money is lent, it is obvious that no real paper money is required- at least hardly any. Nearly all newly created money (credit) is used digitally, think credit cards, cheques, overdrafts, not very much of this is ever turned back into paper. This is called fractional reserve banking. In the past, banks would actually lend out a fraction of there reserves, which had the effect of inflating the money supply. Therefore by regulating interest rates government's could control the affordability of new money (in fact REALLOCATED MONEY). Banks new that it was unlikely that everyone would want to withdraw cash at any one time, so they could lend out most of the money to generate a profit- interest (money that doesn't actually exist, so the rate of circulation must speed up to pay the banks- which is why credit drives growth). These days, since most money is virtual, banks just create it on top of existing cash reserves. There is no limit on how much banks can create. (In the UK the "reserve requirement" is 0%), although there are guidelines. So when you know that banks can simply create money, their is no such thing as a shortage of money to lend, because they don't actually lend money at all, they just generate virtual credits, which must be repayed with real money. This is where the problem arises, because eventually there will be demand for physical cash to pay off the debt. However, this is solved by extending more credit to pay of old debts, meaning that real money is never needed. The rampant expansion of credit is OK as long as the economy can keep growing so that all the new money has purchasing power. Obviously infinite economic growth is not possible, because resources are finite, so eventually it is inevitable that debtors will default on repayments- or the banks will simply have to keep lending even more money to pay of existing debt (a PONZI SCHEME in effect), even when the economy contracts, which leads to hyper inflation.
Now once you understand this, you begin to realize that the recent economic turmoil fits nicely into the predictions I have just made. Firstly, the Eurozone Crisis, and the sub prime mortgage crisis in the US are evidence of the "default" stage. In the Eurozone, we have not let credit collapse, we have opted for bailouts, which means more new money has been created. Notice that economic growth has also slowed, plus we are seeing a repeat of 2008 with the oil price- it is quickly shooting up again, and inflation is rising. A quick Google search will deliver countless stories to demonstrate any of the claims I have just made. The "growth in money supply" figure in the Eurozone is about 12%- which gives an indication of where inflation is headed in economic growth does not pick up. Inflation actually measures the relationship between effective demand and supply in the economy, so if demand falls as the economy contracts, the situation may not be so bad, but we may be trapped, because if growth does pick up, aggregate demand will rise, so we are likely to see higher inflation. Since inflation erodes the purchasing power of money, we are likely to become poorer.
Don't you think it is wrong that the news media didn't tell you about all of that? Get you letter paper out and start complaining.
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