"Common sense" or how we learn what they want us to learn

1. British diplomat comes on the radio and talks about countries in the middle east and complains that some of them show what he calls 'bad behaviour'. The interviewer accepts the terms of this conversation that someone representing a country that has meddled in the middle east for 200 years, setting up countries, knocking others down, siding with this or that group and then switch allegiances, leading up to the final and most terrible intervention of all, the Iraq War - all this is 'below the line', out of view, apparently not part of the equation in which this diplomat talks 'reasonably' about other people behaving badly!


2. In another interview, Lord 'Two brains' Willetts, now a supposedly important person in some quango or other 'explains' on the radio how perhaps it's OK for 'older workers' to subsidise 'younger workers' pay. The terms of this discussion are that the only money in the kitty of a country is that earned by workers. Profits, inherited wealth, the trillions sitting in tax havens - it's all out of view, not in the equation, not 'relevant'. Again, totally unchallenged by the interviewer. What Willetts was suggesting is apparently one reasonable 'solution' on the table.

Capitalism discovers something about low wages...

Capitalism discovers that low wages don't buy the stuff that capitalism sells. So capitalism lends money so that people can buy stuff that capitalism sells. Capitalism discovers that high debt is fine so long as people can afford to pay the interest on the debt. Capitalism finds that things might get tricky if people can't afford to pay the interest....

Young people are borrowing to cover basic living costs, warns City watchdog

FCA boss expresses fears over growing debt burden of young people saying more and more are being forced to borrow simply to pay day-to-day expenses

THEGUARDIAN.COM

Ed Balls on 'This Week'.

Just been watching This Week. Ed Balls has become an endangered species - not because he’s been hunted down but because the climate’s changed. He sits in the corner like a rhino that can’t stand up and issues long plaintive mutters that no one understands or even tries to understand. There must be a comfortable but useless stable for him somewhere: like becoming the chair of a small charity that deals with people who wish they were cats.