‘Using Bridgewater’s public disclosures, Breakout Point calculated that the Connecticut-based fund has bet against 21 European companies so far this week, in sectors ranging from finance to energy.’
The above quote is from the Daily Express of 17th June 2022.
And of course, there is nothing like a headline such as-
EU issued MAJOR financial warning as biggest hedge fund makes £5.9BN bet against Eurozone
to create a self-fulling prophecy, which was what the Express ran with. The story was also covered by the Telegraph..
Today, Martina Andretta reports on the news site ‘OpenDemocracy.net ‘
‘In the last decade, corporate-funded right-wing think tanks who do not declare their donors have been steadily increasing their connections to the heart of government, securing more than 100 meetings with ministers. More than a dozen of their former staff have joined Boris Johnson’s government as special advisers.
http://www.opendemocracy.net
‘Our investigation revealed that just five influential UK think tanks had received $9m in US ‘dark money’ in the last decade. Funders included US donors who have contributed to climate change denial groups.’
She identifies the donors as climate deniers.
It would appear, that communist philosophers such as Marx and Lenin, although rejected by modern political thinkers, are actually well respected in right-wing circles. Right wing think tanks embrace the need to increase exploitation to maintain profit return.
As capitalism finds it more difficult to turn the profit it expects, it increases the exploitation of the system. For Marx, the system was the working classes, but today the system is more widespread. Climate deniers and oil companies not playing their part in reducing global warming, car manufacturers selling products such as heavy SUVs, giving advances in technology back to the driver in increased performance, instead of reduced pollution during construction and usage etc. are part of the increased exploitation to maintain profit. Of course, working people are least protected from their excesses. The latest scandal, underreported, is the underfunding of the Environment Agency, so they don’t have the capacity to prosecute water companies poisoning our waterways.
And of course, capitalism has invented hedge funds, whose managers are little more than race-course spivs, taking bets on our livelihoods.
Marx and Keynes pointed out the need to pay workers enough to consume. Marx said capitalism would never match supply and demand well enough to create security, and would need wars to smooth booms and slumps.
Paying proper wages is old hat, now. Instead we have a credit race, where banks lend to risky clients so that they can keep spending and thereby maintain the growth percentage. When the system readjusts, the savers pay the price by facing decades of low interest rates and zero or negative standard of living shifts.
We are somewhere in the middle of such a crisis, right now.
And there is the next crisis which is an absolute taboo in right-wing circles.
2% growth now, is a much bigger number than 2% fifty years ago. Capitalism has created an unstable expanding economy which is unsustainable, so they dump climate aims. Marx’s crystal ball didn’t flag that one up, but who knew?.
Nor did Marx predict that capitalism would create dark money to influence voters in a democracy, so that they vote for their own poverty, but he didn’t live in a social democracy, so how could he know? In the 19th century, such activity wasn’t hidden.
We will see if reckless capitalists are successful in destroying the planet while creating ever harsher working conditions, but their newest tool, Boris Johnson, doesn’t have the subtlety needed to keep fooling all the people, all the time.
For stats and analysis go to Michael Roberts
Clive and Eva La Pensée 