The small scams that plague your life are only reflections of the big economic scams that shape your life for the worse. We have to stop being in thrall to the corporate scam merchants and demand an honest economy.
I'm ploughing through a giant backlog of emails now our crowd funder is over and one is an inquiry. It is simple so I fire over a quick reply. When I click send I instantly realise the email is a scam, something I'd usually have picked up if I'd not been chasing to clear a backlog. The fact that I spend so much time in a state of 'scam vigilance' annoys me.
So who do I blame for this? Whose fault is all this scamming? Let me offer you a counterintuitive suggestion – I blame Gordon Brown. How could this dour, unflashy son of the manse be behind phishing emails trying to con you into handing your bank details over to a suspiciously attract Russian woman who wants to have sex with you?
Well, he isn't. I have no doubt at all he is horrified by the modern economy. But he is still to blame, because he pioneered the OG scam, the original confidence trick that normalised the whole damned shitshow and showed us all the path to here. The original scam is PFI.
Of course this isn't really true; there were scams before. And I'm not actually going to fight too hard to argue this is even the first major example of what I'm talking about – leveraged buyouts, offshoring and downsizing all predated PFI. But Brown made them government policy.
So how is this a scam? It's very simple, because it looks exactly like a scam. The idea was that the private sector would invest in and build infrastructure and because they are the private sector they would do it very efficiently so save us more money than we had to pay them to build the infrastructure – with the added bonus that they would absorb all the risk.
No part of this was true. None of them invested their own money. They borrowed against revenue. Far from reallocating their capital into a productive output they simply turned the whole thing into another financial product that they traded. The money wasn't theirs, the debt soon wouldn't be theirs, it was all a house of cards.
Risk? Ha, they wrote their own contracts and made sure the risk was firmly with us – because the companies didn't really exist. They were what is known as 'special purpose vehicles'; they existed to do only this one, single scam. They were insulated from their beneficial owners. The owners therefore took all the money out at the start (they effectively borrowed it in advance and then paid themselves).
What was left was a valueless husk owning an over-priced hospital. If any risk arose, they could just walk away and let the vehicle go bankrupt because they'd already taken 30 years of profits out of it in one go. We were left with the husk, the cost – and the risk.
And this is the model for our whole economy now. See those 'vehicles' that were normalised by PFI? That's what those American Candy shops are, and the vape shops and the tanning salons. That's why when one burns down no-one knows who owns it. They're a scam inside a scam. Half of them are just money laundering for organised crime, the others are just property speculation.
There is no fundamental difference between these organised crime money laundering outfits and the ownership structure of the Scottish Police College (remember, a nest of 34 different owners spanning the globe via a plethora of tax havens). Both have the same purpose – insulate the owner from the consequences of ownership so they can extract without risk.
If I hear one more person tell me about all of Elon Musk's great investments I'll cry. He does not primarily invest his own money in business. He invests it in politics and racism but his business ventures are leveraged like everyone else's. PFI leveraged future guaranteed profits promised by Brown and co, Musk leverages investor credulity (they used to believe he was the messiah).
Scotland is probably (proportionately) the scam capital of Europe. It's not just the fact we still have these scam-ready Scottish Limited Partnerships (which seem to exist only to scam people), it's that a scam likes a mark and there is no bigger mark in Europe than the Scottish Government.
It signs deals at the drop of a hat without really investigating the deal at all. That is how it has managed to get into two entirely separate metal-based scandals. It gives money to Tata to save a steel plant then does nothing as the steel plant is stripped for copper by its owner. And copper isn't even the second metal scandal.
Gupta's imaginary aluminium factory got a half a billion guarantee from the Scottish Government and this cannot have happened on the basis of proper due diligence because it happened at a time when the UK Government had done due diligence and basically uncovered the whole Greensill Capital scandal.
The point about PFI being the start is that this is the point that official public policy fully embraced the scam culture of big business. And what is good enough for the oligarch is good enough for some kid trying to start a YouTube channel. They openly celebrate 'hustle culture' because they have been encouraged to. In fact, modern capitalism has trained them in it.
You can no longer count the scams because it is easier to count the not scams. In the medieval period making sausages with animal food and disguising it with artificial flavourings was one of the most serious crimes. That is now the business model of the entire Ultra Processed Food industry.
You didn't use to buy a film 'for life' to find a tiny footnote on your DVD that said 'we may simply take this away from you at any time we want because when we said for life we lied'. That's what it says in the terms and conditions for the digital products you buy 'for life'. It's all a lie.
“The biggest mark in all of this is politics - our politicians are the ones who take the kicking because people are unhappy with the economy but they don’t believe they can do anything becausae they themselves have been groomed.”
It truly, genuinely turns my stomach. Scamming is bad people taking advantage of vulnerable people. A good con trick at least targets the wealthy; computers have allowed us to automate and industrialise the scam. You don't need a high value mark any more, just thousands of little people not paying attention and clicking a link they shouldn't.
Isn't this all disgraceful? Shouldn't someone do something about it? Well sure, but right now your options are 'live with this' or 'bring down western capitalism'. I'm serious, it's all a scam – at least it is in the terms people growing up in the 20th century would see it. You literally can't make people invest with their own, real money any more because the system wouldn't work.
You can't make them account honestly because their businesses would look insolvent. You can't force them into coherent ownership structures because that would force them to undertake honest accounting. Ireland would go bankrupt overnight given that it is a whole economy based on scamming where digital sales are made and where they are banked.
But this is all really, deeply corrosive. It's not just the wealth extraction, its that this model doesn't make things or do things, it fiddles things. Why is Western productivity so poor? Because being productive pays less than fiddling the finances. We outsourced our productivity to China, India and Bangladesh. Our industries are largely vehicles which commission them and sell the result.
And even those companies often make as much money from 'stock buy-backs' (trading and fiddling their own ownership as more assets to pump and extract) than from production and trade.
So what do we do about it? This is where I return again to the web of interlinked articles I've been writing this year. For a kick-off we need to be able to identify this when it happens. That means learning about the Dark Triad, because scam-onomics is the dark triad in business regulation form.
This I can't get over enough – our economy has been designed by the worst people in their own image. Let me repeat – willing to harm others without compunction, willingness to manipulate and control people against their own interests, need to be celebrated and seen all the time? Sure that's Machiavellian narcissistic sociopath – but that's also Wall Street and every corporation you can name.
To dismantle scam-onomics we need to learn that the scammers are manipulating us even as they justify their scams. They say things like 'but we need to ensure investment flows through the economy' when they are just inventing the money and risking nothing. They print money and either cash in (if the scam works) or walk way (if it doesn't). We have to stop letting them tell us this is a good idea.
Really, freeing ourselves from this plague starts with freeing ourselves from deference to the originators of this plague. And then, free from that, we can start to challenge some of their tenets. This takes me back to another piece I wrote recently on the need to simplify structures.
Scams are always, always based on over-complication. She really wants to have sex with you right now but she's got this complex visa issue... Or we'd like to clean your hospital but there is a problem because the contract you signed (that we wrote) is ambiguous on the cleaning issue so we'll need to go to court.
Changing accounting rules to prevent nesting of companies isn't radical. Nor is 'clean accounting'. And nor is regulating leveraged buyouts. And nor (as I pointed out a few weeks ago) is cracking down on monopoly. These are all known practices that are well understood, regularly deployed and make perfect sense. It was getting rid of these practices that was radical. And stupid.
But on top of this, we need to take much more control of the financial system altogether. We need to prevent 'dependence scams' where the bad guys get you hooked on a product you can't escape from. That means no more 'too big to fail banks' by creating a national mutual bank that retains solid financial services in a crisis. The others can fail.
And like I wrote early on this year, it now means we need to stop borrowing our national debt from bond markets and instead go to the central bank. But that bank can't be the scam-master it is (see my whole thing about Inflation Madness and how they are working for the scammers and against the rest of us in what is one big central bank scam).
Obviously I could go on. This whole article stemmed from a chat at our team meeting about proposed changes to bankruptcy laws in Scotland. These are the end point of many of these scams. See that hollow husk that forms the bedrock of the scam? It is a special purchase vehicle or a nest of valueless companies or some other chicanery? Well bankruptcy is their end game. That is how the close down their debts and walk away with the money they extracted.
So naturally the Scottish Government wants to relax the rules, like creating more scams is the goal. But the conversation could have started with influencers, or data centres (which are just the latest carbon copy of the last scam. And the one before that. And the one before that.) The biggest mark in all of this is politics. Our politicians are the ones who take the kicking because people are unhappy with the economy but they don't believe they can do anything becausae they themselves have been groomed. They're passing on their credit card details to Olga as we speak.
And yet they could genuinely turn this around if they wanted. The US showed the way (because last week's article is part of this too). We're all sick of scam-onomics. Someone will do something about it eventually. And they'll be lauded a hero when they do.