A RENT-SEEKERS NIRVANA

By Martin Hutchinson

Goldman Sachs’ income from trading and principal investment rose 90% in the third quarter, while allocated remuneration per employee soared 46% to $527,000 in the first nine months of 2009. Good luck to them, but it shows once again that they and to a lesser extent the rest of Wall Street, are currently playing a different game to the rest of us. The question is, how best to restore the operation of a competitive free market.

Investment banking has changed radically over the last 30 years, and it’s not clear that either regulators or the market fully understand the modern sources of its income. Trading, a fairly peripheral activity 30 years ago, has come to dominate the investment banking income statement, with income arising for investment banks both through acting as intermediary and through “proprietary trading” for their own account.

The immense and unstoppable proliferation of derivatives is the principal factor that has brought this about. After all, total outstanding derivatives contracts at the end of 2008 had a nominal principal amount of $514 trillion, more than ten times Gross World Product. You don’t need to skim very much off the top of a pot of cream that size to make your practitioners very rich indeed. A decade ago, defenders of the derivatives revolution could reasonably claim that the economic value and risk of those contracts was a tiny fraction of the total outstanding. Today, when we have seen multiple examples of credit default swaps paying close to 100% on billions of dollars of obligations, that claim has become laughable; the fraction of risk involved in that $514 trillion isn’t as tiny as all that.

The intellectually curious must wonder what purpose all this activity serves. Defenders of derivatives and trading in general mutter the magic words “hedging” and “liquidity” and expect their questioners to fall back abashed. However there aren’t $514 trillion of exposures to hedge; indeed in a $50 trillion world economy there aren’t even $50 trillion of exposures to hedge. Hence at a very conservative estimate 90% of all derivatives activity serves nobody beyond the dealer community.

READ MORE...

The curious and unnecessary legal action that John Wadham and the EHRC took against the BNP is washing through the media now, and will soon disappear into the mist.  Much of the coverage is disarmingly silly.  Which tends to suggest that the entire endeavour was impetuous and ill-considered, and offers the Fourth Estate nothing to go at.

The party will hold its conference next month, change its constitution, say thank you for the publicity and gird its loins for the election in May - where it will suffer from David Cameron’s Conservative revival. 

Inside the party nothing will really change.  There will be no huge influx of dark faces.  Those that do join and attend branch meetings will be politely patronised at best or sent to Coventry at worst.  They won’t be able to vote for two years, anyway, or - I believe - stand for office for four.  They will, by their presence, refute the party’s crazed anti-racist critics.  The UAF fanatics will become frustrated and confused, and the anti-BNP hate-fest will become more difficult to sustain.

Meanwhile, the Tories will big win in May.  But the honeymoon period will fade into memory and the polls will turn bad, as they always do.  Labour will re-invent itself under its new leader.  If they are not too Jewish, Cameron’s little circle of advisors may even ponder quietly whether it isn’t actually quite a good idea to relax all that mad-keen anti-racism of the opposition years.  The BNP could make a mighty useful anti-Labour tool in the latter’s northern heartlands.  And if too many people start voting for it, a little touch of the Sarko tiller will always sort it out.

The BNP, meanwhile, will have a new puzzle to solve.  How does it fight a party of the middle-class right?  Should it continue to build its power base in the white working-class north?  For the first time the people who have said all along that it must be a party of the entire country, appealing to the educated middle-class (which is also the political class), will be listened to.  The van-driver blokishness will moderate.  Bright people, untainted by the ill-repute of the past, will materialise.  Ideas, finally, will circulate.  The old party servants, men of good instinct and true heart who bore the wild hatred of the world upon their shoulders with real dignity during all the years of weakness, will be asked to perform one more service.  They must make way unselfishly.

Nationalism will cease to be a vague patriotic impulse signified by flags and army veterans, except to those who can only think in such confines.  It will have come of age in Britain - in time, one hopes, for the general election of October 2014 and the vital breakthrough to representation at Westminster.

And the wiser members will look back and thank John Wadham for getting it so very wrong.  Or so I believe.

by David Hamilton

The patricians’ view ... “The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man” by Jan Brueghel the elder and Peter Paul Ruebens 

We are led to believe that mass immigration is a blessing to us and that only Enoch Powell and a few narrow-minded and prejudiced people have ever seen danger in it. All decent folk of good will, we are told, have embraced this break in our national continuity as a sign of enlightenment, with people progressing to a higher state of civilisation - that of a one-world utopia made up of coffee-coloured persons.

It has also been presented as an ideological battle between left and right.  But, actually, it is between people of common sense and utopian idealists.

Most ordinary people relate to the world by common sense.  We who wish to preserve our traditional way of life know how human nature works from our experience of how peoples treat with one another and what they are capable of.  We have learned from history how different ethnic groups vie with one another for power and territory.  Looking at the world around us, we see that in practice immigration is not assimilation, but the colonisation of our territory.

So the impracticable dream of a multiracial utopia has had to be socially-engineered, which required totalitarian methods.  The Utopians see immigrants as essentially good, and if we are nice to them they will be nice to us.  But this utopianism does not do away with human nature, and we perceive foreigners being brought in as cheap labour, with idealism just as a smokescreen.  If the high-minded ones are so benevolent and moral, why have their plans been underhand, we ask.  And why the public infamy for those who foresaw danger in just letting it happen?

READ MORE...

14th October marks five years since majorityrights.com hit the net.  I guess that it has been the most interesting and stimulating five years of my life - if I overlook the bits that have pretty women and rolling cars in them.  I’ve learned a truly immense amount about the greatest issues of our, or any other, European age.  I’ve learned more here about the world around me than ever I thought I might, and at times find myself standing at the very cutting edge – Søren’s bleeding edge, in fact – of thought about our collective future.  And all this I owe to my association here with an extraordinary group of independent and creative minds, not just those who wrote the main entries but the many extraordinary people who bring their perspectives to the comment threads.  It’s been a privilege for which I am truly grateful.

I began thinking about this post months ago, and had intended it as a reprise of my favourite posts.  But in the end I found it was the people, not the words, that I wanted to commemorate.  Some, like James and JWH, are ridiculously talented.  Many more of us have to work much harder at it.  But everyone has contributed, and I think it’s important to feature a good selection of them – which I thought I would do as a timeline.  I have deliberately weighted the selection in our earlier years so there is a good range of posts with which readers will now be pretty unfamiliar.

They are by no means all seminal moments.  Some are as memorable for the threads as for the original entries.  Some just bring back good memories, like when Alex Zeka led the charge at Perry de Hapless’s nest of viporous uber-libertarians and Svi introduced us to Mr Ziv, or when Johan provided the basis for a Sunday Times Magazine investigation of the Boer Genocide.  All bring me pleasure, many pride.

Here they are:

2004

November 14th: Johan Van Vlaams, Not just Flemish interest

2005

February 4th: Geoff Beck, The Pace Boys

February 22nd: Matt Nuenke, Animal Rights, Humanism, and Universal Altruism

April 21st: JW Holliday (91 contributions from JWH, but I chose the least of them and the most haunting) Since history repeats …

April 23rd: Matt Nuenke, Immigration, nationalism, and our fellow travelers.

May 5th: J Richards (legendary comment-magnate – here is his second post) The self-esteem of some non-white populations

June 26th: Johan Van Vlaams The Boer Genocide

October 10th: Geoff Beck, Immigration and Taxation Voting Patterns by Race

2006

March 7th: Alex Zeka, Samidioting

August 23rd: Svyatoslav Igorevich (with a JR addition) Oh for G-d’s sake: insane miscegenation propaganda

April 28th: Steve Edwards, Neo-nazis as government agents

November 28th: Matra The Quebecois are a nation

2007

March 7th: James Bowery, MajorityRadio interview, Drew Fraser Part 2

March 29th: James Bowery, Genetic structure and Outbreeding Depression

2008

January 15th:  Søren Renner, J’AIME LE NUIF

July 2nd: Alex, Crimes that our grandchildren will see

2009

March 1st: Robert Reis, The Fundamental Flaws of the Holocaust Cult

March 14th: The Narrator, Going Home Again

March 30th: PF, What is always with us?

August 4th: Dasein, Sowing the Seeds: Powder Keg on the Baltic

September 23rd: Dan Dare, The Immigration Industry tacks into the wind

To all those not featured on the list, I had to stop somewhere!  And you’re in good company.  The most influential of JWH’s pieces on genetic interests, the most comment-inducing of JR’s work on beauty are not here.  James’ series on Ocean Frontier Fertility is not here.  Svi’s encyclopaedic cataloguing of the Duke Lacrosse flap is not here.  Søren’s classical Saturdays ...

But maybe the commentariat will rectify that.

For me, it’s time to look ahead to the next five years in which we must do more for our cause, for we have not yet done nearly enough.

Mehdi Hasan is the senior political editor of New Statesman, which is an organ of the British left Establishment.  You can read an email he sent Simon Darby here and, in Britain, listen to a BBC i-player recording of Mehdi’s aggressive anti-BNP views.

Failing that, here’s a post he put up at New Statesman which offers the same rationale:

Yesterday I took part in a Radio 4 discussion about the BBC’s coverage of the BNP with the corporation’s chief adviser on politics, Ric Bailey. You can listen to it here.

Bailey seemed to me to be a decent and intelligent man performing a delicate and difficult balancing act in a high-pressure job. But I was alarmed to hear him repeat, again and again, in response to my question (“Does the BBC consider the BNP to be a normal party?”), that the BNP is a “legal, elected party”.

So? Hitler was elected.

It’s my contention that the BBC, and various other media organisations, are contributing to the “normalisation” of the BNP through soft, context-free, fact-free interviews and through the corporate and editorial repetition of this nauseating mantra: “The BNP is a legal, elected party”.

But it’s not a NORMAL party, is it?

I mean, which other political party has racist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi roots? Which other political party can be legitimately described as a “Nazi” party, as the Standard Boards of England ruled in 2005 - it is, the Board said, “within the normal and acceptable limits of political debate”? Which other political party has a leader who is a convicted criminal and a Holocaust denier? Which other political party includes local organizers who have convictions for gang rape or racist assaults? Which other political party has, among its former members, a terrorist and convicted murder and a man convicted under the Explosives Act? Which other political party has, as its MEP, a man who began his political career in England’s National Socialist party? Which other political party believes that Islam is a “cancer” and that Jews run the media?

Does it really breach the BBC’s impartiality guidelines to simply point this out to the viewers, listeners and readers of the corporation’s output? Or do we instead have to be treated to a fawning interview with a man, Mark Collett of the BNP, who has said, “Hitler will live forever, and maybe I will.”

Thankfully, as a colleague has pointed out to me, the BNP’s electoral triumphs remain limited - check out this result at a recent council by-election in Hertfordshire.

Now, in that radio interview Mehdi not only made the point that BNP representatives should not be entertained on the airwaves, but if by some chance they were, they must be “challenged”.  But with what?  What foundational argument does Mehdi have to counter the BNP’s?

So I thought I would invite Mehdi, or any other New Statesman folk, to tell us, and posted the following remarks there:

READ MORE...

Four women and one man, all Norwegians of course, have awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Barrack Obama from a field of 172 individuals and 33 organisations.  The citation reads “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

I must have missed them.  But, apparently, it’s to do with all the fluff about “change” and the “new era of responsibility” mentioned in his inauguration speech (which was written not by him, of course, but by Jon Favreau).  The committee’s announcement said:

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.  His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

I’d like to add my own voice to the Mass for Naivety which is “the world’s attention”, amending the committee’s words of wisdom thus:

“Only when the Big Money and the global media barons act together can an empty suit be raised up into a symbol for anything you like, frankly, including whatever people conceive of as progress.  The raising up of the Obamessiah was so successful, it is practically inconceivable that anyone else could be awarded any prize whatsoever.  Norwegians will never be thought of in the same way again.”

The last few days have been a fallow period at MR for me as for others.  But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been working away diligently elsewhere.  Aside from actively seeking material to post, I’ve planted the usual incendiary devices on various MSM threads.  Some made it on to the page, some were lifted quickly, some did not make it at all.  John Standing wrote a couple of letters to Waitrose (who, as a result of a campaign by supposed cusomers, pulled their advertising from Fox over the Beck/Obama affair).  Another Guardian ban has come my way.  It’s been, as Vinny Jones once said, emotional.

The main activity has been thread fighting at the Guardian’s CiF facility, which seems to be especially Judaised at the moment. 

During his leadership election David Cameron made a promise to the “right-wing” Cornerstone group of MPs that he would pull the party out of the federalist EPP grouping in the European Parliament.  Give him his due - he was true to his word, and entered an alliance with some pretty sturdy and loyal Poles, Czechs and Latvians in the European Conservatives and Reformists.  In the process Edward McMillan-Scott, who seems to have scarcely been a Tory at all, has wound up getting himself expelled from the party.

McMillan-Scott has been writing articles regularly about his hate-object in the ECR, Michal Kaminski of Poland’s Law and Order party.  By British political standards Kaminsky has a fine record.  In 2001 he distinguished himself by campaigning against the then left-wing Polish government’s apology for the fictional 1941 murder by Poles of a fictional number of Jews at Jedwabne.  McMillan Scott has been promiscuous in his use of the Jedwabne narrative in each missive, and I’ve tried to provide the counter-arguments in the threads.  But he isn’t the only journalistic shyster trying to nail Cameron by nailing Kaminsky.  There are at least four others at it and, on top of that, there is a second anti-Cameron front centred on the Latvians in the ECR (who, of course, are “SS apologists”, but we’ll come to that).

Today one Jonathan Friedman entered the attack on Kaminsky.  The following (now removed) comment of mine provides some background to the attack:

READ MORE...

One day last month I drove up to a Heathrow hotel to take Tom Sunic off the hands of two gentlemen from the National Front, the cinderella nationalists of British politics.  The previous day Tom had delivered a speech to the NF Party Conference in Bradford (you can find it here), and these gentlemen had driven Tom and another speaker all the way down from the Islamic Republic.

After the pair had taken their leave of us Tom made sure that I knew what good, solid people he had been among in Bradford.  I’ve not paid much attention to the NF for quite some time.  So I made a mental note to check out their website and see what they are up to.

My eye was caught by a statement written by veteran nationalist and poet Eddy Morrison.  It is titled The eight principles of White Nationalism – the foundation stones of NF ideology.  I wondered what you would make of it, and how you might compare it with the culturalist vision that Lee Barnes brought to MR a few days back.

READ MORE...