Newspeak New Year

The Year of Our Lord MMX was a very special year. Since I have inherited the Tolkienist habit of naming years, I decided to call this year the "Year of Newspeak". This is because of the absolutely staggering amount of strange language I have seen appearing in the last 12 months. Granted, the trend of creating Newspeak has existed for many years now. I will also grant that I am hypersensitive to this as any fan of the late George Carlin would be. I do, however, see that people in today's world mostly take Newspeak at its face value. People are totally unsuspicious of the ruling class. Back in the day nobles used to oppose kings, and merchants oppose the nobles. In communist regimes the public never believed a word that came out of the mouths of their oppressors. But here and now, in the Western world, this tendency of suspicion is gone. The politicians are, of course, very happy at this! Indeed they promote it! The latest campaign slogan for the Polish President (this is the post Soviet/EU apparatchik who actually got elected, Mr. Komorowski) was "Zgoda Buduje" i.e. "Unity Builds". Builds what, might I ask? A machine of corruption, exploitation, and crony capitalism? I don't want that kind of building going on anywhere...
In honor of this great trend I now present some real 2010 classics:
- Quantitative Easing - Printing Money. This phenomenon originated in the US Federal Reserve. Whenever the Fed wants to print money to buy up excess mortgage debt or US government bonds, or to "create liquidity" they engage in "quantitative easing". In order to do this Mr. Bernanke orders billions of dollars (which did not exist before in any way, shape, or form, and are not backed by any tangible assets) to be printed or electronically transferred to the banks in question.
- Liquidity - People being able to buy stuff. Usually this means the ability of people to shift goods and services by purchasing them; it is a term which defines potential asset shifts without excess transaction costs. Nowadays it is the ability of people to fork out money which they don't have and buy a lot of things they don't need in order to "drive the economy".
- Investing - People spending money. Nowadays deflation prevents so-called "investing" because it causes people to save. This is exactly flipping the economic theory upside down. People who spend cause interest rates to go up and thus make investments harder to finance. People who save make the interest rates go down thus allowing investing to take place. A classic 180 degree Newspeak switch!
And then there is the all-time classic which I have talked about extensively on this blog:
- Freedom - Having the right to do exactly what the government says you should do. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Crazy TSA airport searches, wiretaps in homes, tracking devices on cars, assassinations of own citizens by governments. All done in the name of new freedom.

Maybe 2010 should really be called the real 1984? Remember those words in that great novel, where Orwell writes "Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"
He was onto something, wasn't he?