Payment protection insurance (PPI)

Think Tank That is
You & I.- Banksy.

Or to us regular folk Public Perception Index. This is an index where institutions, commercial & political, use to gauge the "feel" before doing stuff.
So if the index is high, you go for it. If it is low, it will be a no-go. The beauty of it is that it works flawlessly. Once the premise has been identified. The sale pitch begins & something that may not have been reality or even of significance starts becoming fact. PPI starts rising. Yeee-Peee!! It relies on the simple fact that people, in general, only read the headline; hardly ever get past the first paragraph. We are an instinctively territorial & lazy species. I mean when was the last time anyone read a handbook for a single appliance to see how the damn thing works.

This whole thing started way back in the very early days of News & Media last century. They had people going around photographing & recording their behaviour at bus stops, supermarkets etc. Of course all done manually. No Databases as we know today. Paper mountains were created. Miles of footage recorded and for who, one may ask? For the establishment, me & you. This establishment is not the government, the Royalty, the media, the military or the civil service. It is the sum total of all. The fully converted, true believers. It is pretty much all of us because we love this. Don't we? Our shit rocks, right?

The best thing about PPI is the get-out clause when it goes wrong and messed up decisions are made. Expect these type of answers:

a) We made the correct decision at the time based on what we had at the time.

b) With the benefit of hindsight we would, of course, have done things differently & so on.

c) The past mistakes were the result of a small misguided minority and are not the views of this Public Company/Government

Basically, PPI is there to mislead and can have devastating repercussions on us as a species. The most grotesque PPI in my opinion was prior to the start of the Second World War. Jews & all non-whites were somehow perceived to be the cause of all the problems facing Central Europe and its bankrupt economies. The argument was so convincing that a lunatic like Hitler managed to get elected over this; the German Nation followed him blindly and we all know the end result. What was not admitted or demonstrated is the real reason why Central European economies were bankrupt. That would have led to a catastrophic re-examination of the whole. No one was up for that. So we got to kill one another, murder millions of people in the name of an incredible falsehood. Effectively PPI is a subtle manipulation of the public mind. Convincing the populous about something they would not necessarily go along with.

There are a whole bunch of these going on right now. Let's look at Islam as another example. This is an Abrahamic religion. Which fully acknowledges & respects other Abrahamic faiths such as Judaism & Christianity. But a high PPI dictates that the public needs an enemy. It must live in fear. This way our guys get to spend billions on arms and a disgusting stockpile of weapons. The current perception being that Muslims across the world have developed a problem and want to constantly blow themselves up to kill others. Sure enough an obscene & insane act. But again it fails to try and examine why someone would want to do that. Is it possible that this tiny minority uses the opportunity to justify their murderous acts because there are an awful lot of Western armies in an awful lot of Muslim Nations, which is then fed through as proof that the West wants to kill Muslims and destroy their religion; therefore, we must fight back? This is what I call a double PPI. Two sides being misled simultaneously. Both enjoying very high PPI but opposing ones. The net result, in the case of Middle East would be, dead Muslim & Jewish kids. Personally, I can not tell the difference when I look at either one. Kids are kids.

The commercial aspect of PPI is best demonstrated in the property market. You create an illusion. A perceived demand. Trickery at its best. Bullshit & lies in reality.

So a house that was worth £200,000.00 last year is now valued at £320,000.00 this year by the same Agent. Gordon Brown called it "the ingenuity of the market". I prefer calling it legalised theft. We all end up worshipping the market forces and not once a single one of us tries to question or challenge the market. We will cough up. Pay the price as dictated by the Agent in the cheap suit, albeit with a nice accent. Because we know, that next year our £320,000.00 is going to be £420,000.00. No questions asked.

Then things start crumbling and bits begin to fall off. The insane mortgages become "Structured Investment Vehicles" and the more obvious dodgy deals become "Collateral Debt Obligation Funds". "Quantitative Easing" becomes the new trendy catch phrase. You bundle them all together and lend some more. Remember, the house was only £200,000.00 two years previous. But we must continue. Not question. But continue.

In this scenario I do not necessarily blame the establishment. I think we are all largely to blame. The establishment is telling us what we want to hear. They are feeding us so we feed them. A semi-parasitic-come-symbiotic relationship. We need to have fear. We must have enemies. It was the Jewish people 60 years ago, the fear then became the big bad Russian Red Commie bastards up to 20 years ago. The current fear is Palestinians & Muslims and more specifically an idiot who they tell us is living in a mountain, Osama what ever his name is. With fear in the background you are slowly becoming a believer. The justification for what ever is taking place grows. Standards and morality reduced. Unjustified Anti-terror laws and infringements of personal liberty are given away to compensate for the gain of perceived security & not-real security. Human right abuses become the flavour of the day by the same societies who owe their success to individual human liberties. You & I then become a kidnapping target when travelling abroad. We are forced to pay more & more for whatever it is that we have, such as a house or a pint of beer. Marks & Spencer's starts giving it all extra-large and Eco-Friendly by not giving you a bag to put your damn shopping in, whilst their plastic packaging from one of their packs of Cumberland sausages can give you over 50 high density bags. Meanwhile Lady GaGa is number one pretending to be doing music!

Essentially, Public Perception is the most deadly force. It changes governments, spells success or disaster for commercial entities retention or loss of your house, and of course, it can ultimately be responsible for death of thousands. All we have to do is to read & understand the full picture before our fears of the unknown are identified & exploited for other agendas.

K. Savage

March 2010

PPI