One thing you can be sure about is that you will NEVER fully understand a situation if you rely on the press for your information. Helping you understand things is not the role of the press.

The role of the press, one of its roles at any rate (another, by way of example, is to drive business down on the mental health industry by freaking everybody out), is to confuse and demoralize the citizenry by spreading alarm and dismay. That much is self evident because one can observe that that is what it does day in and day out. If someone does something day in and day out, it is fair to conclude that that is its purpose, is it not?

So you will never for instance fully understand the recession and our current economic plight by reading newspapers or watching television, just as you will never get a clear picture, to cite a couple of examples, of exactly why we wage war on the people of Afghanistan or Iraq or why people being treated for depression with anti-depressant drugs get depressed and kill themselves and other people. The press just ain’t gonna give you the straight dope. Apart from anything else it doesn’t HAVE the straight dope usually.

However, we can at least get a vague idea that something is going on even though the causes of it, those responsible, its exact extent and consequences are not going to be truthfully, accurately or thoroughly communicated.

Thus we can conclude that we are in a recession and this is a Bad Thing and this somehow is related to interest rates, which is the cost of borrowing and somehow the cost of borrowing from the bank relates to money supply. This Bad Thing somehow means we’re all a bit strapped and businesses will go bust. Suddenly the press is full of alarming horror stories of businesses going bust and every business that goes bust blames this mysterious invisible SATANIC FORCE called the Recession even when, one suspects, in some cases the cause might actually be bad business management.

We conclude too that for some reason the economy is very short of money – about £500 billion, apparently, for the British economy alone! This has some connection with the CREDIT CRUNCH, another Satanic Force that came about when the banks for some reason decided to stop lending the rest of us money because we had "borrowed too much."

All this appears to be out of anybody’s control. Presumably money comes to us through an Act of God and not, as we suspected, because human being print it. If it were a simple matter of a human being printing it, then the solution would be a simple one: have human beings print some more and get it into circulation FAST while we still have any industry left.

Evidently though, it’s not that simple: the whole thing is shrouded in a MYSTERY only comprehensible to a priesthood known as EXPERTS who comprehend the impenetrable script and sacred tongue of a quasi-science known as economics and it isn’t under anybody’s control in any case actually. The recession just sort of happened because some bankers, whose names we’ve already forgotten, did something or other confusing with some bank accounts and that evidently threatens to bring down global civilization.

Well how did we get into a situation where the greed of a few bank managers on one side of the planet can cause some honest Joe to lose his job or have his business repossessed on the other side of the planet?

How come a private business which is supposed, we are told, to look after people’s money, has so much influence on our fortunes, more apparently than our own government.

We would think it pretty strange if some other part of the private sector, such as greengrocers could affect everyone’s fortunes by mucking about with the price of vegetables.

We would think it even stranger if government then devoted itself at our expense to making sure that, at all costs, the greengrocers were looked after even if it meant a few of us going hungry.

What’s going on?

Well. Check out my blogs and I’ll tell you!