A Tangled (And Uninformative) Web We Weave

I’ve been noticing for a while that events of significance for the UK are sometimes ignored in the UK press until after they’ve been widely covered in the US press and vice versa. It’s difficult to hide things from the public in an internet-enabled world. However, I believe most people are still largely in the dark about the state of the economy as no country I know of reports in any depth on it in the mainstream. Fractional reserve banking is still a complete mystery to many, discussion of it being almost completely absent. I’ve read nothing at all in the UK press, for example, about banks being sued for selling sub-prime finance under the banner of an entirely unjustified triple-A rating, yet I understand from the brief mentions it has in the American press it is indeed happening. I suspect this is a case of media content being dictated by its advertisers, as many of the larger more powerful banks wouldn’t like to see their adverts carried next to a story about their being sued for either incompetence, dishonesty or both. This renders the media irrelevant for news-gathering, a fact which seems to have escaped many. I use the web myself, favouring Twitter.

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The Budget At The End Of The Universe

Budget day but I’m not at all excited. We don’t need a budget to do this or to do that, we need something now that’s utterly beyond the scope of any budget. The environment in which any kind of budget would make a perceivable difference is gone now. No-one seems to be addressing this, probably because they’ve got no idea what to do – witness both main parties accusing the other of lack of detail in their policies on how to deal with the deficit. The pretence is that it’s business as usual, but it isn’t, and I doubt it ever will be again. Buy your tickets now for the end of the world… as we’ve known it…

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