Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2012 6:42 pm Post subject:
Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by Mike Konopacki. Written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. An 8 minute video about how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don't want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren't so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land.
A Spanish journalist interviewed me on the Spanish language edition of The Global Minotaur. Her questions, however, gave me an opportunity to look retrospectively at the Global Crisis, its Eurozone offshoot and, of course, the worst aspect of the latter, the Greek calamity. In the process, I refer to what I call the ‘death of social democracy’, and its causes, the role of ethics and morality in all this, why Spain is becoming an Iberian Greece even though its public debt and deficit were less than those of Germany in 2008 etc. Read on:
What are the origins of your Global Minotaur theory?
It evolved over many years, beginning with an attempt to explain the manner in which America managed to do something remarkable: to be the first ‘Empire’ that extends its authority and increases its hegemony on the basis of ballooning deficits. The analysis began when, together with friend and colleague Joseph Halevi, we tried to elucidate the global surplus recycling mechanism that had taken over, without warning or international agreement, from the Bretton Woods system. And since the new mechanism, upon which global capitalism was now resting, was based on an incessant flow of tribute (in the form of huge capital inflows) from the Rest of the World to the hegemonic US, the idea came to me that we were living in the age of a new Global Minotaur, with the US deficits in the role of the beast and the rest of the world in the role of the Athenians who were feeding the beast in return for trade, growth and stability.
You claim that it all began in 1971, when USA decided increased its deficits and became a kind of Europe’s vacuum cleaner. Why didn’t anyone stop this action? Why did nobody realise that this system could break down?
There was no one with the power to stop it who also had an interest in stopping it. German and Japanese industrial capital were only too happy to see the emand for their manufactured goods burgeon. Governments in the surplus countries of Europe and Asia benefitted from the growth of their local multinationals. Banks and states in the deficit areas of Europe (from Greece to Spain and, indeed, to Ireland) saw a major influx of capital from Wall Street and the City of London, money that was seeking higher returns in hitherto under-financialised regions. As the Global Minotaur went from strength to strength, the potential instability that it was creating seemed, especially to those who were benefitting immensely from financialisation, like a Great Moderation; an era of permanently zero risk. This is what was so interesting and destructive about the Global Minotaur’s reign: the greater the instability that it was cultivating behind the scenes, the more convinced the elites were becoming that a crisis had become impossible.
Your theory resembles Griftopia (Matt Taibbi). It sounds like we woke to discover that we were robbed. Was it a system failure or an organised robbery?
There is no doubt that financiers went well over the line that demarcates corruption and graft. And that politicians aided and abetted them. But, all in all, I think that our experiences have the hallmarks of a major tragedy in which, just like in Sophocles and Shakespeare, the protagonists are not necessarily bad men and women. Each did what he or she thought was right, or necessary, at the moment when they are doing it. It is only when the catastrophe hit that they realised they were embroiled in a dynamic that could only lead to disaster. And even when they did recognise it, every attempt to escape the tragedy only immersed them further in it. Perhaps the worst crimes were committed afterwards, while trying to save themselves by pilling up the costs of these ‘bailouts’ on the shoulders of the people they had been defrauding for decades.
In his book, we can notice the economists’ incompetence (Why didn’t they notice the Crisis?, asked the Queen of England? The perversity. The naked greed. Does money fuel Evil?
It was not mere incompetence. It was much, much worse than that. At the time the Global Minotaur was taking over world capitalism, some time in the early to mid 1970s, the economics profession mirrored this development by lobotomizing itself; by ceasing to ask pertinent questions and by turning instead to pristine mathematical models which, by design, left no analytical room for real life phenomena like involuntary unemployment, financial sector implosions, recessions caused by ineffective demand. Economists’ careers became wholly dependent on whether they could ‘close’ (that is ‘solve’) their mathematical models. But to do this, they had to impose upon their models assumptions which ensured that these models, or theories, had nothing whatsoever to do with really existing capitalism. In this sense, the less the economists’ models had to say about capitalism the greater their academic and professional career. Furthermore, since their mathematical models contained no systematic probability of a crisis, they were perfectly suited to the needs of financiers who profited handsomely from economic models which ‘valued’ their cherished financial derivatives (thus enhancing their appeal to investors) as if no crisis, no credit crunch, was ever possible. In short, to answer you question directly, economists were coopted by the Global Minotaur, mostly unwittingly. They became, as a profession, and without realising it, the beast’s loyal servants.
You present an interesting theory about power gone: first, self-control is prevalent, second, success comes, third, naked greed appears, and then self-control is lost. How can we escape from this circle?
The only way that almost infinite power can be forced to exercise restraint is if it is forced to submit to democratic scrutiny. During the era of Bretton Woods, which I refer to as the Global Plan, the powers that be in Washington felt that they would rule the world without being accountable to it. Then, during the Global Minotaur era, it was the turn of the financial sector to feel a similar sense of endless power. We now live with the results. Democratic control of power is sine qua non.
You write a lot of Keynes. You say that Keynes was an imaginative and creative economist. It seems like we lost all this imagination in recent decades. Maybe we should recover it.
And Marx. And Robinson, Kalecki, Sweezy, Galbraith, even Hayek. As I explained above, the economics profession jettisoned its best thinkers. Economics students and politicians alike were trained by textbooks that purveyed a form of mathematized idiocy, rendering a whole generation economically illiterate and socially disastrous.
You write that this Crisis isn’t an economical crisis, but a political and social crisis. Is it not a ‘moral crisis’ too?
What I say is that it is not a debt crisis. That debt is merely a symptom of a deeper, systemic crisis which, like all serious crisis, has many different facet. It manifests itself in the realm of politics (e.g. the Nazis in Greek parliament), of finance (e.g. the banking debacle), in moral conduct (e.g. the sight of social democratic governments attacking the weaker members of society on behalf of bankers) etc.
The Global Minotaur thought that the market can survive alone, without rules. Now we realise that isn’t so. But, is it necessary to begin with a planned economy? Is it the ‘planned economy’ the solution?
One of the great fallacies of our era is that any economy can exist without a state; without a degree of planning. Take the US. It is, supposedly, the least statist, the most –free-market economy on the planet. And yet it is very much a planned economy. Without the military-industrial complex on the one hand and the whole gamut of federal planning authorities on the other hand, America’s economy would collapse tomorrow. More broadly, capitalism had its golden age after the war because Washington planned meticulously the world capitalist economy. So, the question is not whether there should be planning. The question is what kind of plan is implemented, who by, for whose benefit and with what effect. Currently, the banking sector is fully planned and relies entirely on social transfers and central bank operations. Planning is, therefore, used to prop up banks and to keep bankers in profit. What we need is some proper planning of labour markets so that workers’ labour is re-valued and power shifts from what I call today’s Bankruptocracy to society at large.
You worked with the president Papandreou before the ‘crash’. Did nobody see that the crisis coming? Did nobody make a comment about it?
No, they did not see and, moreover, they did not want to hear of it. Social democrats all over Europe, indeed the world, had come to the catastrophic conclusion that capitalism had been tamed, that crises were a thing of the past and that society’s interests were best served if the financial sector’s wizardry was never questioned. This is, if you want, the main reason why this Crisis has killed of European social democracy.
What do you think about the rise of the extreme right (Amanecer Dorado in Spain too)? Where do you think is the limit? Are we going to have a repeat of Germany in the thirties?
It is the inevitable repercussion of a chain reaction that begins with a Wall Street collapse, a massive real economy recession, a political system that tries to shift the crisis’ costs from the shoulders of those who caused it to the shoulders of the workers, the weak and the disenfranchised, a society that loses its faith in the democratic system and, finally, a serpent’s egg that begins to hatch, spawning little Nazi snakes everywhere.
What is it the solution for Greece? I heard that people are finding it hard to heat themselves in winter
Depression, poverty and deprivation abound. The only solution for Greece is to have a government that says NO to the inane agreements that Europe is forcing it to sign. Simply to say ‘no’ and sit it out while the rest of our European leaders fall over each other trying to find an alternative, a real, solution in place of the current strategy of waterboarding a whole nation.
In Athens it has been a lot of demos and protests, but it seems nothing changes. Why doesn’t civil actions work? Demos and strikes don’t change anything. Is it necessary it should be more violent?
No, certainly not. Violence breeds violence and the only beneficiaries are the extreme right, the segments of the police that want to terrorise society, etc. What we need is European-wide protests, a realisation in Spain, in Italy but also in Germany and the Netherlands that we are all Greek now. That even if it does not look and fell like it yet, it is only a matter of time before Europeans north and south, west and east come to see that they have all become Greek.
There are people who say that the citizens have a responsibility in order to get into debt or not. Is it a perversion?
It is a half truth that becomes a perversion when repeated ad nauseum. Every loan requires, like tango, two parties. It is the responsibility of the debtor but equally of the lender to ensure that the loan is viable. And when it ceases to be viable, it is absurd, cruel and stupid to imagine that the responsibility is just that of the debtor’s. Especially when most loans originated during an era of predatory lending, of banks shoving loans down the throats of households and firms.
What are your solution for the crisis, and why does nobody adopt it?
Together with Stuart Holland, we have been proposing for three years now what we call a Modest Proposal for the Resolution of the Euro Crisis. Its great merit is that it would attack the crisis’ three facets simultaneously (debt, banking losses and the recession) without the need for Treaty changes, for Germany to be guaranteeing the loans of the Periphery, or for authoritarian transfers of sovereignty from national governments to the centre of Europe. Why have rational solutions like this not been adopted? I think it is a combination of two reasons that explains this: First, surplus countries need to undergo a gestalt shift; a change of midset that allows them to see that the Crisis is not due to the Greeks and the Spaniards having borrowed too much (that these debts are a symptom, not a cause of the problem). Secondly, surplus countries refuse to adopt policy changes that would make it impossible for them to get out of the Eurozone. While they do not want to get out of it, at the same time they do not want to give up the option of doing so because giving it up would diminish their bargaining power within Europe. And so the Crisis goes from strength to strength.
By the way, a recent measure has been the baking union. What do you think about that?
It would be great! Unfortunately, Europe is adopting the ‘language’ of a banking union in order to deny its substance. The point of the banking union ought to be to recapitalise directly the banks that have a chance of being salvaged (i.e. to give them funds from the ESM directly without them being counted as part of the national debt). Germany has insisted that this will not happen. So, the banking union has become an academic exercise that allows Europe to speak the words ‘banking’ and ‘union’ without effecting a genuine banking union. Another smokescreen, in other words, for covering up Europe’s organised idiocy.
You criticise Germany. In Spain Germany is criticised too. Could it cause a xenophobia’s feeling against German people?
It already has. And it is a tragedy because the majority of German people are suffering too as a result of our governments’ ill-conceived policies.
Do you think that Germany will change its economic policy?
No, I am afraid not.
In the case of Spain, we didn’t have a very high deficit in 2008, but then everything crashed. What happened?
The Periphery had exactly the same experience: huge capital flows rushed into our countries creating gigantic bubbles. In Greece, they inflated public debt as the government was borrowing on behalf of developers, who then went on to build expensive motorways, bridges, metro system extensions etc. In Spain and Ireland, the capital flowed directly into the banks which lent it to the same type of developers to build, primarily, expensive houses. When the financial sector collapsed in 2008, the capital that had flooded our countries either burnt down or escaped back to Frankfurt, London and New York. Thus, the bubbles burst. In Greece, the state (which had taken the debt onto its books directly) went bankrupt. In Ireland and Spain it was the developers that went bust first, then the banks that had lent them and, lastly, the governments which had to salvage the banks. So, in the end, there is no difference between countries like Greece and Spain, even though Spain had a very low level of public debt just before the crisis began. What matters is total debt. When it is large and funded by inflows from the financial centres, then a crises in the financial centres will give rise to a crash and a rapid rise in public debt in the Periphery.
Do you think that Spain could be a new ‘Greece’?
It already is. Unfortunately.
We have a right-wing party in the Spanish government, Partido Popular. It proposes austerity measures. The problem is that social democracy doesn’t offer a serious alternative. The citizens don’t see social democracy as a solution.
As I indicated above and elsewhere, social democracy is dead. The Crisis killed it off because, before the Crisis, social democrats (like PSOE, PASOK, Britain’s Labour Party) had abandoned their traditional agenda of taxing industrial capital in order to fund the welfare state and, instead, they had adopted the new strategy of siding with financial capital, allowing financial capital to do as it pleases, in the hope that financial capital would continue to earn trillions, of which the social demorats would get a small sum by which to fund the welfare state. In this sense, social democratic parties had become the lap dogs of the bankers. When, in 2008, the bankers went bust, the social democrats were cornered into consenting to the funding of the bankers using taxpayer-money and then passing the cost of these bank bailouts to labour and to the weaker members of society. It was inevitable that, soon after, society would turn against social democracy. This backlash has signalled social democracy’s death.
What’s Syriza doing in Greece? Is the party getting somehwere?
Syriza is struggling to mature. To turn itself from a party of protest, commanding 4% of the vote, to a party of government. Moreover, Syriza is particularly worried that by the time government falls in its lap, the Greek state will have lost all of its degrees of freedom, leaving Syriza in government but not in power.
In which classic tragedy are we right now?
My worry is that this may not even be a classic tragedy. Classic tragedies end, at some point, with catharsis. Calamities, on the other hand, do not end in catharsis. Europe is currently engineering a calamity with catharsis nowhere to be seen.
Well, to the end. Despite the tragedy, do we have reasons to be optimistic about the future?
As a friend of mine used to say, we have a moral duty to harbour infinite hope and plentiful opinions (about everything).
Since 2008 the United States has been in economic trouble. The current debate over the “fiscal cliff” has placed this economic distress and its origins back on the public radar. In retrospect, the origins of the housing bubble and Wall Street meltdown seem inevitable. There have been numerous financial meltdowns in the past that have their origins in even more bizarre and obviously flawed schemes. From ancient times to the present we seem to fall for economic schemes and the disasters that often result. This list takes a look, in chronological order, at some of the most intriguing economic collapses of history. We can feel a little better about our current situation as we consider the mistakes of our ancestors.
10
Diocletian Destroys Rome’s Economy
Fourth Century AD
The Roman Empire was in decay when Diocletian became emperor in the fourth century. The economy was in disarray from a series of costly wars and previous emperor’s building projects that left Rome near collapse. With Rome’s currency worthless, Diocletian introduced a new system of coinage. At many times in history countries have risked economic turmoil to artificially increase the value of their currency. The issue with Diocletian’s new money, however, was that it did the opposite. There was more gold in the coins than the face value stamped on them; the denomination on the coin lowered its value. In response to this insane idea most citizens melted the coins to make use of their higher scrap value. The result was rapid inflation within the Empire. Diocletian increased problems by placing a price ceiling on most goods to counter the inflation.
Diocletian’s policies caused so much confusion that many Roman territories simply refused to follow the emperor’s edicts. As matters worsened, Diocletian became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily leave the throne. His highly flawed economic policies weakened the cohesion of the empire and the status of emperor in addition to further damaging Rome’s ailing economy.
9
Pazzi Conspiracy and Medici Banking Collapse
1470s
The Medici family was one of the leading families of Renaissance Italy. They controlled the politics of Florence; served as popes and assisted the rise of Leonardo DaVinci. The source of the family’s wealth was rooted in the banking worldwide banking system they had founded in the late fourteenth century. Under the leadership of Cosimo de’ Medici, the bank rapidly expanded and found itself overstretched by the time of his death. At the same time as the Medici were stretched to the limit the Pazzi and Salviaiti banking families attempted to replace them as rulers of Florence. On April 26, 1478, two members of the Medici family were assaulted at Mass in Florence. Despite the failure of the plot, the Medici were unable to reassert complete control. The Medici bank was characterized by its dangerously low cash reserves, usually around 10% of assets.
As the Pazzi Conspiracy and various wars reduced the competitiveness of the bank, it approached insolvency. As a result Lorenzo de’ Medici taxed the citizens of Florence in the name of military defense to a near tyrannical level. Finally, in 1494 the bank collapsed due to this corruption, faulty investments, and incompetent management. After the bank collapsed, millions were lost from the Florentine economy and it took years for a complete recovery. Since the company had also defrauded the account of Charles VIII of France that paid for dowries the crisis had worldwide implications. ??
8
Spanish Inflation
1600s
Following Columbus’s discovery of the New World, Spain began the search for gold in the New World. For decades the rich resources of the Americas made Spain one of the wealthiest nations on earth and allowed it to create a great empire. By the second half of the sixteenth century, however, the Spanish had increased mining to unprecedented levels. Rather counter intuitively this influx of wealth nearly destroyed Spain. The high levels of freshly minted gold and silver in Europe drove down the value of money and lead to hyper-inflation across Europe.
Combined with the wars that Spain fought to protect its empire, the inflation damaged the economy beyond repair. Instead of reaping great wealth, Spain ended up defaulting on its debt several times. This economic turmoil pushed the Spanish Empire into decline and allowed the British to begin creating an empire of their own.
7
Bermuda’s Hog Money
1616-1624
Several powerful trading companies drove the spread of the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bermuda was colonized with the help of several of these companies. Once the colony was established the colonists were put to work making these companies money. The workers were paid in company credit instead of wages, similar to coal companies in the nineteenth century. When Daniel Tucker was appointed governor of Bermuda he abandoned the credit practiced and introduced his own coins minted from brass.
With the monetary system only worth what Tucker declared it to be, the colonists overthrew the governor. Complete economic ruin was only prevented by the fact that Bermuda was an island and isolated. With no monetary system, the colonists resorted to using tobacco as a form of currency.
6
Tipper and See-Saw
1621
When countries rapidly increase their debt to finance wars the result is never good. In the seventeenth century there was no way to insure effective taxation so the states of the Holy Roman Empire began to mint money to raise revenue for the Thirty Years Wars. To do this the empire removed coinage from circulation, melted them down and mixed them with lower value metals. The name of the crisis refers to the scales used to weigh the money before it was melted down. These debased coins were then spent in foreign territories, to limit the economic damage that might occur to the empire.
Eventually, the debased coins returned to territories of the Holy Roman Empire in the form of duties and taxes. As the public became aware of the practice there were riots, soldiers refused to accept the debased coinage as pay, and seditious pamphlets were distributed. The money eventually became so worthless children played with the coins in the streets. The resulting rise in prices also crippled the economies of many states within the empire.
5
Tulipmania Hits the Netherlands
1636-1637
Perhaps the most bizarre economic crisis on this list, Tulipmania holds the distinction of being the first recorded economic bubble. When the tulip flower was introduced to the Netherlands in the early 1600s it became instantly popular. In the first true “consumer craze” Dutch citizens simply had to have the latest tulip. Since tulips only grow at certain times of the year, the Dutch set up a future’s market. When tulips were not available consumers could purchase the rights to tulip bulbs when they became available.
Soon speculators began playing the future’s market and drove the bulb prices to shocking levels. At the height of the bubble some bulbs sold for the equivalent of an average worker’s ten years salary. The bubble burst in 1637 and the value of tulip bulbs fell back to previous levels. Just like the stock market crash in 2008, investors saw their money erased. The bizarre flower driven financial collapse erased many fortunes and left many investors penniless.
4
South Seas Bubble
1719-1720
The South Seas Bubble shows what can happen when speculators ignore several important limitations on their schemes. In the early eighteenth century, the British economy was suffering from government overspending. As a result, British investors were intrigued by the stories of plentiful gold in the Americas. To tap these riches, the South Seas Company was formed and the British monarchy granted it exclusive trading rights to South America. Despite the fact that Spain owned South America, making the British edict completely useless, investors flocked to the company.
The company, despite its obvious limitations, attracted so many investors that nearly a year’s worth of Britain’s GDP was invested. The stock skyrocketed on the British exchange. The company even investigated investing in the British national debt. Confidence was so high the Chancellor of the Exchequer had an investment account worth several hundred thousand pounds with the company. At the end of 1720, the South Seas Company stock was worth roughly 37 million pounds. Of course Spain refused to allow British adventures to remove their gold and the stock crashed. The resulting shockwave crippled the English economy and left many investors completely penniless. An entire generation of wealth was erased from the British economy.
3
Mississippi Bubble
1716-1720
Britain was not the only country to catch the speculation bug in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. When Louis XIV died, the French economy was completely exhausted from financing the wars that the Sun King had waged across Europe. The treasurer didn’t even have enough gold to mint new coins. John Law, a French government economist, proposed creating a bank that would print paper money. The government circulated so much paper money that it was valued at five times the wealth of France.
To deal with the issue before it destroyed the French economy, Law informed the French citizenry that the new colony of Louisiana was filled with gold and an excellent investment opportunity. He hoped that the investment would allow government to obtain more actual wealth to solve the problem of the worthless notes. When the promised mountains of gold failed to appear from Louisiana, the bubble burst in 1720 and shares were devalued. What followed was a bank run when the value of Law’s currency was halved and devastating inflation that crippled the French economy.
2
Confederacy Destroys its Economy
1860
During the US Civil War, a major goal of the Confederate army was to secure diplomatic recognition from European nations. Since cotton was essential to the economies of England, France, and other nations, they cut off cotton exports to force recognition. The Union blockaded Confederate ports but was never able to efficiently limit Confederate blockade running until late in the war.
Combined with this Union blockade the decision to cut off cotton exports virtually extinguished Confederate trade revenues. The two factors lead to rampant inflation that made Confederate currency virtually worthless. When the Civil War ended, the economy of the South was in complete ruins.
1
Railroads and Silver Cripple America
1893
The Panic of 1893 was the worst economic crisis in America until the Great Depression. As railroads became the dominant mode of transportation in the United States, speculators invested heavily in the technology. Many railroads simply overextended themselves and could not cover their expenses with revenues. In 1893, the giant Philadelphia and Reading Railroad collapsed under its own weight and declared bankruptcy.
EXCLUSIVE: #Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein & Icelandic president Olafur Grimsson. World views compared www.thisweek.org.uk _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
cheers _________________ If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it. - Edward Bernays
UPDATE: I thought it would be useful to update you on the story...
The video is useful for us in that it is prima facie evidence that force cannot be used during an eviction if it is objected to by the people on the land, as proved by the Police. I will be using the video evidence in my action against the bank in the Court of Appeal for unlawful eviction against me which occurred on three separate occasions before the bird eviction in the video. I am also using it in my action in the High Court against the Police for there misconduct against me in my evictions. In future, anyone who is facing an eviction, now knows the crimes they are committing, and if you want to resist them, all you have to do is force an error by making them use force. This gives you a Tortuous remedy, and the leverage to get back in your home.
In relation to the Bird family's struggle. The video was back in May 2012, and due to the major embarrassment we caused the court, they came back for a 2nd eviction some time later, which again we attended. Unfortunately, this time they brought the heavies; High Court Enforcement Officers, who are unabashed fascists. The Police were ordered to stand down, and Sgt Mo, had been ordered not to attend. The bailiffs used excessive violence to secure entry. But however, due to the video evidence, we have the grounds to prosecute and sue them for their tyrannical actions. The Bird family's struggle against the bank continues, as we prepare for the next round of action against the bank. The only time you truly lose your home is when you GIVE UP.
Stay tuned...
Every day, all over England & Wales the international bankers are unlawfully evicting
We the People from our homes, in what has to be one of the biggest scandals currently facing this country. In 2011 alone at least 36,000 repossessions were executed by the banks. However, as you will see, they do this based on a gigantic criminal scam.
On the 31st May 2012 in Potters Bar, England, the Bird Family were facing an eviction based upon deception, threats intimidation, and ultimately by way of crime, because if a man or woman peacefully objects to being evicted then the bankers must use unlawful force and commit a crime if they are to take possession. Something the have been getting away with for centuries...
So a small group of determined people decided to stand in solidarity with the Bird Family and resist the violence threatened against them.This film is a testament of
what can be achieved when we stand together...
The issue which has swept down the centuries and will have to be fought sooner or later is...The PEOPLE vs The BANKS - Lord Acton 1875[/quote] _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
While I also found this link unhelpful and scaremongering, the fact of the matter happens to be that the UK's finances are not too dissimilar to those of a banana republic.
No matter what the government says, the truth is that the game is rigged in favour of the banks for a very simple reason:
And, as we have been discussing here, we do depend on banks totally for injecting loans into the economy. Or there is no economy.
Which is why the government and the BoE are on their knees trying to get the banks to lend with various funny-money schemes (QE, funding for lending etc.), the impact of which nobody really understands.
Banks of course simply hoard the funny-money to repair their balance sheets. The funds never actually flow through to the economy as loans to SMEs etc.
The link of this situation to housing is that houses are collateral on banks' books.
Hence, if house prices were to fall, the banks would sustain huge losses.
Which would make them less willing to lend.
Which would put the economy in an even worse deflationary spiral.
If one wants to look at the root cause of this horrible mess, one should look at the power we have given to commercial banks to generate our entire money supply.
This is the core issue here.
We have given immense power to banks and we depend on them absolutely.
Indebtedness to whom and for what? To private banks for interest on money created from thin air and accruing more interest over decades. It is not really something of any real value owed to them at all and Iceland has the answer. Tell them to get stuffed and take their "debt" with them. Or give them a bit of pretty paper with whatever amount they say is owed printed on it and say we are square now. Then have the government create its (our!) own money.
Indebtedness to whom and for what? To private banks for interest on money created from thin air and accruing more interest over decades. It is not really something of any real value owed to them at all and Iceland has the answer. Tell them to get stuffed and take their "debt" with them. Or give them a bit of pretty paper with whatever amount they say is owed printed on it and say we are square now. Then have the government create its (our!) own money.
The 600% of GDP figure is about the indebtedness of the UK financial sector.
In other words, this is money owed by the UK financial sector to investors.
Quite simply, the UK banks are insolvent.
And they would have taken the whole ship down with them if it hadn't been for the hundreds of billions thrown at them via the QE program. _________________ Summary of 9/11 scepticism: http://tinyurl.com/27ngaw6 and www.911summary.com
Off the TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4szU19bQVE
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed. (Nassim Taleb)
www.moneyasdebt.net http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/
Europe has found a way to attack the UK that is sure to be favoured by much of the British public
The sound of heated discussion rises from three members of parliament in the Strangers’ Bar of the UK House of Commons.
“It is preposterous,” bellows a Conservative, a known eurosceptic. “How dare this jumped-up European pseudo-parliament set pay in the City of London and so damage our most valuable industry? The French and Germans are jealous of the City. Now they plan to destroy it.”
His neighbour, a Labour moderate, chortles. “You think David Cameron and George Osborne should wage war in defence of bankers? I hope they do. These members of the European Parliament are cleverer than you expected. They have found a way to attack the UK that is sure to be favoured by much of the British public. Many voters, even Tories, now see the bonus culture as standing for ‘heads I win and tails you lose’. Why defend this excess?”
“Yes,” interjects the third in the group, a hopeful young Liberal Democrat with a good degree in economics. “Bonuses create perverse incentives. Banks are ultra-leveraged businesses whose failures always fall on the public: directly, via huge bailouts, and indirectly, via terrible recessions. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has estimated the median economic cost of a financial crisis at 60 per cent of annual gross domestic product. We cannot afford another.”
“So what?” the Tory interrupts brusquely. “We are going to solve those problems by ringfencing retail banks from investment banks and imposing clawbacks on bonuses. But this plan will make the pay structures of a cyclical business too rigid. Worse, it will drive mobile banking out of the EU. That’s crazy.”
“Not so fast,” responds the Liberal Democrat. “We, too, support the recommendations of the Vickers Commission. But the problem of bonuses is not so easily dealt with. Banks tend to earn attractive returns almost all the time, offset by infrequent catastrophic losses. For someone earning performance-related bonuses, it pays to follow strategies like these. They then have a good chance of being rewarded for playing the odds successfully, rather than for true skill. Their upside is huge, while, if they are unlucky, they lose outstanding bonuses or maybe their jobs. Naturally, they bet the bank.”
“It is the job of shareholders to stop that,” responds the Tory.
“That’s absurd,” answers his colleague. “Shareholders don’t have a clue. Also, with leverage of 30 to one, the equity needed to shield the public from the ‘tail risks’ is just not there. Management have the same upside-slanted returns as subordinate bonus recipients. So the public has a right to intervene. I do sympathise with the European Parliament.”
“You would,” splutters the Tory. “If only Cameron went for exit from the EU. Then we would win in 2015 and see the back of you. Down with this horrible coalition!”
“Keep this up and we will be back, instead,” interjects the Labour member. “Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s executive director for financial stability, estimated the average annual subsidy for the top five UK banks at more than £50bn between 2007 and 2009 – which is roughly equal to UK banks’ annual profits before the crisis. If something is subsidised, too much of it will be provided. That is fine market logic. So regulation must offset it. What is the realistic alternative?”
“Partnerships,” responds the Tory. “I am that old-fashioned. I agree that a very long holding period before payouts makes sense. But you are ignoring the cost of what are likely to be very high salaries: they will be just as offensive to the public as bonuses, turn bankers into functionaries and be rigid, as I have already said. Is that what you want?
“Limiting bonuses in relation to salary is also probably unworkable. The FT’s Lex column has already offered a clever wheeze to escape the cap. And if the bankers cannot get around the cap, they will probably just flee the EU, taking the tax revenue and income with them. Is that what you pinkos want – to kill a world-beating industry?”
“Hold on a minute,” responds the Labour member. “All of these bad things cannot be true. If they can evade the cap, as you say, they need not leave London. I agree it may well be impossible to get away with a full offset for lost bonuses in higher salaries. I also agree some activities may leave. Yet how valuable to us are businesses capable of inflicting such terrible economic damage? Are not far too many of our economic eggs now in the City’s basket? We believed in the City, too, alas. But the crisis now looks like bequeathing us a lost decade.
“As to turning bankers into functionaries – well, they are, aren’t they? We know bank debt is implicit government debt. So bankers have to be civil servants. It is just a matter of setting reasonable pay for them.”
“And,” interrupts the Liberal Democrat, “what does it mean to be world-beating if an industry is heavily subsidised by the state’s supply of underpriced insurance? Any industry can be made a world-beater if subsidised enough.
“I agree this is a simplistic regulation. It would be far better to impose much higher capital requirements and allow bonuses but insist they be paid in the debt of the beneficiaries’ bank and be held for 10-15 years before being turned into cash. I agree, too, that there is a limit to what Europeans can do on their own. But I don’t see how anybody can be happy with the incentives operating in this industry.
“Anyway, you can’t complain if the Europeans are so uncompromising. You Tories have gone out of your way to offend them. Think of the prime minister’s veto of a fiscal treaty in 2011 or your withdrawal from the European People’s party. As you sow so shall you reap.”
“No,” responds the Tory, “you are wrong. You will reap. We are going to leave the EU. Just you wait and see. Then we will not have to bear such interference any more. These continentals must get their tanks out of our City. I am sure the public will see it that way.”
“You’re wrong,” reply the others with glee. “Defending bankers, even against Brussels, is a bad bet.”
Humourous, but spot on the money.. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
An important point about our current system: since money is debt, getting out of debt (fancy term: deleveraging) shrinks the economy.
Quote:
How money gets destroyed (new video)
Wed, 13th Mar 2013
by Positive Money
Remember how new money is created when a bank makes a loan? Well, when someone repays the loan, the opposite process happens, and money is actually destroyed. It effectively disappears from the economy entirely.
Osborne seems to want to inflate house prices by creating the UK version of Fannie Mae.
In whose interest would that be I wonder...
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And, as we have been discussing here, we do depend on banks totally for injecting loans into the economy. Or there is no economy.
Which is why the government and the BoE are on their knees trying to get the banks to lend with various funny-money schemes (QE, funding for lending etc.), the impact of which nobody really understands.
Banks of course simply hoard the funny-money to repair their balance sheets. The funds never actually flow through to the economy as loans to SMEs etc.
The link of this situation to housing is that houses are collateral on banks' books.
Hence, if house prices were to fall, the banks would sustain huge losses.
Which would make them less willing to lend.
Which would put the economy in an even worse deflationary spiral.
George Osborne is edging Britain closer to an American-style government-backed mortgage market by promising to underwrite £130bn of new home loans over the next three years.
Mr Osborne’s advisers insist that the new “Help to Buy” scheme will not lay the foundations for a UK-style Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Yet there are striking parallels to the way that the former was set up by FD Roosevelt at the height of the Great Depression, underwriting about one in five US mortgages during its early years.
The two entities enjoyed implicit government backing for 50 years, and were nationalised during the financial crisis of 2008. At that time they were blamed for fuelling the sub-prime loan for relaxing lending criteria to low-income groups under pressure from the Clinton government.
By stepping up government involvement in the UK housing market and helping to bring back high loan-to-value mortgages, Mr Osborne has left himself open to charges that he has not learnt the lessons of the credit crunch.
Janan Ganesh, the FT political commentator, described the move as “foolhardy”. Our comment editor John McDermott described it as a new “Right to Default” policy. An economist called Erik Britton told the Times: “They are building a sub-prime mortgage sector just as they did in the US – we all know how that plays out.”
Grania Long, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, said the government would have to monitor the impact of the policies carefully to ensure they were increasing new supply and not “simply stoking up house prices”.
Mr Osborne told the Commons that home ownership was now out of reach for many in a “blow to the most human of aspirations”. The schemes he unveiled in the Budget to solve this, badged “Help to Buy”, have two elements.
The first is a new shared-equity scheme where the government will put in up to 20 per cent of the value of a new-build home worth up to £600,000. That is different from the existing FirstBuy scheme where homebuilders and government each put in a small slice of equity.
The even bigger element, however – with echoes of Fannie Mae – is a mortgage guarantee to be offered to almost anyone buying a new or existing property, again up to a cap of £600,000.
The Treasury believes it will support up to 190,000 mortgages a year, marking a huge state intervention in the property market. Interest-only loans and buy-to-let will both be excluded.
“We think the financial system has been impaired and as a result the availability of high loan-to-value mortgages has gone down,” said a Treasury aide. “We want to deal with that.”
The solution will attract comparisons with the American system of state backing for mortgages, although the two are not exactly the same: the US bodies underwrite entire loans rather than just a small portion. The Treasury is at pains to insist that support will be temporary.
Then again, the US government made similar assertions in 2008 when it bailed out Fannie Mae. Five years later, there is no sign of the pair returning to private ownership – and close to 90 per cent of US mortgages are now underwritten by quasi-state bodies.
The British mortgage support scheme will be administered through the existing Northern Rock Asset Management, a wing of the Treasury that controls the nationalised Newcastle lender. Banks will pay a small fee for each mortgage guarantee.
Although £130bn of mortgages could be backed in this way, the government is only in effect guaranteeing an estimated £12bn.
Both elements of “Help to Buy” will allow people to buy homes with deposits of just 5 per cent, which could be a vote-winner.
The government emphasised that this would not be a return to the “bad days of 125 per cent mortgages” of the type offered by Northern Rock.
But there will still be questions of “moral hazard” in terms of encouraging people to buy homes with high loan-to-value ratios in historic terms.
The Treasury says lenders will not be “incentivised to originate poor quality loans” – but they will only have to take a relatively small 5 per cent share of net losses above an 80 per cent threshold.
Some are bound to point out the irony of a government which has forced banks to tighten their lending criteria now enabling a relaxation of mortgage lending terms, with taxpayers potentially on the hook.
One coalition aide captured that dilemma as he argued: “There was too much borrowing before the crash . . . that doesn’t mean no one should be able to borrow money again.”
Nick Pearce, director of the IPPR, a left-leaning think-tank, suggested that lessons from the housing bubble had not been learnt. “For individuals and families looking to buy this scheme will make it easier. However, it continues a strategy based on propping up – indeed inflating prices – rather than getting additional homes built.”
I know a lot of Jesse's 'Conspiracy Theory' programmes are rubbish, but this is a good one (and Jesse Ventura is always spot on when being interviewed about 9/11):
In this episode of 'Conspiracy Theory', it is revealed that a Bullion dealer and his wife were injured in London in a 'hit-&-run' ''accident'' (sure!!!) the day after his name was revealed as the whistleblower in a Bullion scam: here's brief 'wickipeadia' entry:
Hit and run
Maguire and his wife were injured in London in a hit-and-run accident on March 26, 2010,[10] the day after Maguire's name came to light during a CFTC hearing on limiting gold and silver positions held by large market participants in order to prevent manipulation.[11][12] Maguire believes the accident was an attempt on his life.[13] The driver of the other vehicle was apprehended after a police chase, both on the ground and from the air in helicopters, but his name has not been released.[12] Maguire said, "We got hit in the side at full acceleration and tried to corral the cars in a gas station, including the guy who hit us with a commercial vehicle." The assailant then sped away, hitting at least two more cars.[12] Maguire said the police told him the assailant was known to them, but he has been unable to get further information about the case.[13] The assailant was reportedly given a slap on the wrist.[10]
(10). ^ a b c d e f William D. Cohan, "A Conspiracy With a Silver Lining" The New York Times (March 2, 2011). Retrieved May 7, 2011)
NY Times:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/a-conspiracy-with-a-si lver-lining/
'Trying to unravel the mysterious rise in silver’s price is a conspiracy theorist’s dream, replete with powerful bankers, informants, suspicious car accidents and a now a squeeze on short sellers. Most intriguingly, however, much of the speculation seems highly plausible...'
'..He was also unhappy over not being invited to a commission hearing on position limits scheduled for March 25. Then came the cloak and dagger element: the day after the hearing, Maguire was involved in a bizarre car accident in London. As he was at a gas station, a car came out of a side street and barreled into his car and two others; London police, using helicopters and chase cars, eventually nabbed the hit-and-run driver. Reports that the perpetrator was given a slap on the wrist inflamed the online crowds that had become captivated by Maguire’s odd story...'
'What’s more, Chilton said in an interview last week, that “one participant” in the silver market still controlled 35 percent of the silver market as recently as a few months ago, “enough to move prices,” he said, and well above the 10 percent “position limits” the commission has proposed to comply with Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Since that law’s passage last summer, the commodities exchanges have issued waivers permitting the ownership of silver positions above the limits the C.F.T.C. has proposed, and which were supposed to be in place by January of this year. Yet the waivers remain in place, and the big traders have not been penalized, much to Chilton’s frustration And the mystery deepens: last Thursday, the price of silver fell $1.50 per ounce in less than an hour before recovering. “This was robbery at its most obvious and most vindictive,” wrote Richard Guthrie, a London-based trader, in an e-mail to Chilton. “How many investors lost money and positions to the financial benefit of an elite few?”
It’s getting harder and harder to continue to brush off Andrew Maguire’s claims as the rantings of a rogue trader with a nutty online following. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission should immediately release the files from its investigation into the supposed manipulation of the silver market so the public can determine whether JPMorganChase and HSBC did anything illegal, with or without the help of the Fed. In addition, the commission should start enforcing the 10 percent threshold on silver positions it has proposed to comply with Dodd-Frank law. Basically, the other commissioners must join with Bart Chilton to do the job they are required to do: Protecting the sanctity of the markets and preventing the sorts of manipulation we’ve seen all too often....'
'A London-based precious-metals trader who had accused JPMorgan Chase of manipulating the gold and silver markets was involved in a bizarre weekend car accident that triggered a police chase before the suspect was nabbed.
Andrew Maguire, a metals trader at the London Bullion Market Association, and his wife were traveling in their car when a second car coming out of a side street struck their vehicle. That car then hit two more vehicles before fleeing.
London cops using helicopters and patrol cars chased the hit-and-run driver before nabbing that person, whose name has not been released by authorities....'
On March 25, Murphy disclosed Maguire’s charges in a public hearing before the CFTC, a clip of which can be viewed on YouTube.
Attempted murder?
Maguire and his wife were involved in a bizarre car accident in London, the New York Post reported March 29.
Maguire told WND he reluctantly has come to believe the car accident was an attempt on his life.
“We got hit in the side at full acceleration and tried to corral the cars in a gas station, including the guy who hit us with a commercial vehicle,” Maguire explained.
The assailant then got in his car and accelerated, hitting a number of cars as he escaped from the gas station, making the event into a hit-and-run situation.
“The police told us the assailant was known to them and even that they arrested him,” Maguire said. “But recently the police won’t say anything, and I haven’t been able to learn anything about the assailant.”
Now where have I heard that before, the police telling a victim they know who the perpetrator is, but won't say anything more? Oh, yes, when a person 'known to the police' rained AK 47 slugs into the milking shed of farmer Mark Purdey, while he was inside.
The police told his pregnant wife, 'we can't do anything unless he is shot'.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2010/05/153953/#vUsFGUQMOP77D4Hb.99 _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Apart from the acceptance of 'Blowback' as being the cause of 9/11, a good video on the money system & the Federal Reserve. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Did you know that only 3% of the benefits budget goes to people seeking work? 53% is pensions and other related old age benefits, 18% is Housing Benefit (which currently goes directly to landlords) 18% is wo...rking tax credits, and the rest disabled benefits and other bits and bobs. (And by the way, the Government figures say the fraud rate for disabled benefits is 0.3%)
In fact, the majority of folks claiming housing and council tax benefit ARE IN WORK.
I could write a bloody essay on this because I deal with it everyday. Our benefits budget is not out of control. According to the OECD Britain's benefit bill per head is nowhere near as generous as half the countries in Europe. (And unemployment benefit is particularly stingy compared to most)
The vast majority of folks just want to get on but minimum wage jobs are not paying enough. (This might explain why at work we're seeing working people going to bloody foodbanks every week.)
This * government is turning people against each other. And it's totally unwarranted. Yes, welfare needs reforming but you don't do that by kicking people out of their homes, stigmatising them so that they get spat at in the street and driving them to suicide. - these have all happened so far.
In the last two years 80% of people applying for housing benefit were all working. We can reform welfare by bringing in a living wage so that people don't have to claim benefits to get by. At the moment the welfare budget is subsidising low pay and private landlords on a grand scale.
When you see a post that puts the boot into benefit claimants, think twice before you like it because let me tell you, we are ALL only three mortgage payments away from disaster.
(If anyone wants the sources of the figures I have quoted, I will only be too happy to provide them)
I've attached a pie chart from 2011 to give you an idea. Figures will have changed a bit. _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
Uploaded on 12 Mar 2011
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WAKE UP!!! America and the worlds true enemy the news never mentions is the phony money Revelation 2:9 zionist banksters @ the federal reserve/world bank/imf who continue to hide behind the American flag and the false state of Israel and rape our planet, divide us on matters of no importance and hold us back as a human family....come to the truth, come to God, come to knowledge of self......Revelation 2:2 I know all the things you do. I have seen your hard work and your patient endurance. I know you don't tolerate evil people. You have examined the claims of those who say they are apostles but are not. You have discovered they are liars.....ENDING LOANS WITH INTEREST IS THE SOLUTION TO 90% OF OUR PLANETS PROBLEMS, EVEN JESUS WHIPPED THE MONEYCHANGERS... John 2:15 Jesus made a whip from some ropes and chased them all out of the Temple. He drove out the sheep and cattle, scattered the money changers' coins over the floor, and turned over their tables. ...WHY??? = Ezekiel 18:13 If anyone lends money with interest, shall he then live? he shall not live: he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him.....WAKE UP SO CALLED CHRISTIANS! Most of you support the Rev 2:9 bankers and the so called jews in the false state of Israel who don't believe in Jesus therefore you support the anti-christ: 1 John 2:22 whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist ....1 John 2:18 and as you have heard that antichrist shall come, even NOW are there many antichrists........the bible clearly states GOD will return us to the REAL land of Israel and when he does peace will be established, has there been peace in Israel since 1948 when the zionist bankers with the help of the UN robbed the palestinians of thier land??? ....there is a reason they stole a SMALL part of the land of Israel(Palestine) in 1948, it is bcuz they knew misguided christians who do not understand scripture would support them and thier evil actions of raping our planet and holding us back as a human race...and bcuz most christians do not understand the bible and the scriptures of the TRUE REAL RETURN of the Israelites/Jews(ZECHARIAH 8:7-8, Isaiah 2:4, Isaiah 43:5-6) NOTHING will change in our world until christians/America wake up to this, and IF U THINK JOHN 3:16 IS ALL U NEED U ARE ALREADY DEAD....Hebrews 10:26 If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left.....IF JOHN 3:16 IS ALL U NEED, WHY WOULD JESUS SAY THIS??? Matthew 7:21-22 Jesus said "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name. Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Get away from me. I never knew you......THE LAWS OF GOD IS OUR SAFETY AND REFUGE AND NO JESUS DID NOT DO AWAY WITH THE LAWS OF GOD....Matthew 5:17-20.....Yeshua(Jesus) did not fulfill all prophecies yet and that's why he told to keep laws until all fulfilled... The Bible says that he will:A. Build the Third Temple (Ezekiel 37:26-2.B. Gather all Jews back to the Land of Israel (Isaiah 43:5-6).C. Usher in an era of world peace, and end all hatred, oppression, suffering and disease. As it says: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall man learn war anymore." (Isaiah 2:4)D. Spread universal knowledge of the God of Israel, which will unite humanity as one. As it says: (Zechariah 14:9)......Mark 7:6 Jesus said "you hypocrites, These people honor me with their lips, You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions. "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!"....EVEN PAUL SAID: Romans 3:31 .....1 LUV THRU PEACE LOVE AND JUSTICE, KnowTheTruthTV...
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_________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
On the evening of Thursday 4th April, I was privileged to address an audience at the Friends' Meeting House in Manchester. The topic of my presentation, for which I have to thank Phil Duval, both for the invitation and the theme, was '...How the banks are stealing your children's future...'
I didn't realise it before I got to the venue, but it stands literally a stone's throw away from the site of the Peterloo Massacre, (or the Battle of Peterloo) which occurred at St Peter's Field, Manchester on 16 August 1819, when local mounted yeomanry charged into a crowd of 60,00080,000 people, gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation and electoral enfranchisement..
The soldiers were local territorial volunteers, not regular army cavalrymen, and the local Yeomanry were given the 'privilege' of arresting the speakers. They were led by Captain Hugh Birley, (Birley owned a large textile factory in Oxford Road, Manchester. He had developed a reputation as an arrogant industrialist with highly reactionary political opinions); and Major Thomas Trafford, (Sir Thomas Joseph de Trafford, 1st Baronet) and were essentially a paramilitary force drawn from the ranks of the local mill and shop owners, coupled with the local landed elites, who had active interests in suppressing popular local reform demands, despite the great distress of the ordinary working people in their community.
The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had resulted in periods of great famine and chronic unemployment, exacerbated by the introduction of the first of the Corn Laws, legislation which had been introduced to ensure that British landowners reaped all the financial profits from farming. The corn laws (which imposed steep import duties on cheaper foreign grain) made it too expensive for anyone to import grain from other countries, and thus maintained food prices at an artificially high level, even when the people of Great Britain and Ireland were literally starving, and needed the food.
Then, as now, the rich elites ensured their own hegemony at the expense of the poor and the working class, in a similar way to which the Tory-voting banksters today manipulate the financial markets through criminal activity and steal vast sums from their clients, while paying themselves vast salaries and obscene bonuses. At the same time, George Osborne and Iain Duncan-Smith cut working people's benefits, blaming the poor and those on benefits for the desperate financial situation the country faces, and set working class people in conflict against each other, while routinely ignoring the crimes of the rich and powerful.
By the beginning of 1819 the pressure generated by poor economic conditions, coupled with the lack of suffrage in Northern England, had enhanced the appeal of political radicalism, and In response, the Manchester Patriotic Union, a group agitating for parliamentary reform, organised a demonstration to be addressed by the well-known radical orator Henry Hunt..
Shortly after the meeting began, local magistrates called on the military authorities to arrest Hunt, and to disperse the crowd. The Yeomanry charged into the crowd with sabres drawn, and in the ensuing confusion, 15 people were killed and 400700 were injured. The massacre was given the name Peterloo in ironic comparison to the Battle of Waterloo, which had taken place four years earlier.
I was fascinated to have the privilege to address an informed local audience in such a setting, and I felt a strong sense of historical synergy as I talked about the crimes of the powerful today and the way they were impacting on the financial interests of ordinary people and how the crimes committed by the banksters would leave a legacy which our children and indeed our grandchildren would still be paying for in years to come.
The day had started well with the news that the three main protagonists in the HBOS collapse had been impugned in a scathing report by the Parliamentary Banking Commission which had said that "toxic" misjudgements led to the bank's downfall and the need for a £20.5bn bailout by the taxpayer at the height of the financial crisis.
The report concluded: "The primary responsibility for the downfall of HBOS should rest with Sir James Crosby, architect of the strategy that set the course for disaster, with Andy Hornby, who proved unable or unwilling to change course, and Lord Stevenson, who presided over the bank's board from its birth to its death."
There can be no escaping from the realisation that the UK is in terrible financial trouble. Putting it at its simplest, the main High Street banks are to all intents and purposes, frankly bankrupt, and Government is vainly seeking to enforce higher levels of capital adequacy in order to give them sufficient capital in depth in order to be able to withstand another (the next) major financial crisis.
How we got into this desperate situation is an appalling story of arrogance, hubris, bullying and incompetence, a toxic mal-administration of both the banking sector, and its functions. It was orchestrated by a group of men, Bob Diamond, Fred Goodwin, James Crosby, among many others, men who had reached levels of power from which it was virtually impossible to unseat them, and whose arrogance was blinding them to the reality of their actions.
By overseeing a campaign of institutionalised financial crime (PPI fraud, LIBOR manipulation, as well as other offences of downright criminality such as drug money laundering), and coupled with a campaign of debt-creation on a scale unimaginable only a few years ago, these men oversaw institutions in which all the ordinary rules of prudent commercial engagement were thrown to the wolves and trampled underfoot.
A report into Barclays bank has blamed "cultural shortcomings" at the bank for problems that led to the Libor-rigging scandal last year. The report said there was a sense that senior management did not want to hear bad news. As a result, the bank had become too focused on profit and bonuses rather than the interests of customers. Barclays' rapid expansion in the years leading up to the financial crisis produced "cultural challenges" at the bank. "The result of this growth was that Barclays became too complex to manage, tending to develop silos with different values and cultures," it said.
The bank became increasingly dominated by the investment banking business, which possessed a strong culture of winning. This meant there was an "over-emphasis" on short-term financial performance, reinforced by a bonus and pay culture that rewarded money-making over serving the interests of customers and clients.
In these few short paragraphs, the poisonous cocktail of mismanagement practices are laid bare; an over-emphasis on short-term profits, resulting in vast bonuses being paid to a small group of elites; the over-complexity of structure, leading to a focus on micro-management of specific profit centres, to the detriment of the wider institution, benefiting a small group of elites again; and finally the over-emphasis on investment banking (or casino banking, identified by gambling with other people's money), yet again, benefiting a small group of elites.
Reading between the lines, Barclays Bank, and indeed many other banks within the UK financial construct, had become the private playthings of a small group of spivs and chancers who were willing to put the rest of the banking structure at risk, all the time they were making vast profits and bonuses for themselves.
They were happily undermining the entire underlying banking structure on which UK plc depended for its future development and the continued maintenance of its complex democracy and social infrastructure, for their own personal benefit and gain. They were mortgaging the future of the entire British community by engineering fictitious money out of thin air, secured on the deposits of their customers, to be spread around in highly risky securitised lending to every Tom, Dick and Harriet who knew enough to be able to find their way to a bank.
As they wrote and re-wrote loans running into billions of pounds, they spread the risk around to other risk takers - who took the chance to sell the risk on to third and fourth party risk takers, who in turn played the zero sum game by balancing their exposures to risk by hastily structured credit default swaps. It didn't seem to matter how many times you turned the money-making handle, the profits poured out, the salesmen's commissions flowed and the banks made more and more money.
The City entered into a Faustian pact with the Labour Government of Blair and Gordon Brown, who, bedazzled by the profits being declared and the taxes being paid on these vast fortunes, (Brown never once stopped to consider that these banks were only declaring a very small percentage of their vast profits for tax purposes) the rest was being quietly stashed away in off-shore branches of their institutions and moved on to other tax shelters. That is why Barclays and other banks provided departments that focused on tax-restructuring (or evasion on a massive scale).
All the time Brown was believing the falsified figures, he could be prevailed upon to soft-pedal on the compliance brake, and insist that the regulators cut the boys in the banks some slack, while they were making all this money.
His Mansion House speech in 2002 is a masterpiece of hubris, the words of a man who had been taken for the biggest idiot in Christendom, and was the living proof of the greater fool theory.
"...And, as you, Lord Mayor, have indicated this evening, the importance that the city attaches to integrity and the highest standards in the provision of financial services is the enduring means by which London's reputation as one of the world's leading financial centres is secured, and indeed enhanced..."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yada, yada, yada, whatever!
And this nonsense is still openly subscribed to by politicians and citizens alike, so much so that the banking sector feels capable of holding the country to ransom with the threat that if they are brought to heel, they will simply leave and go elsewhere. The fact is they won't, but no-one seems willing to call their bluff. They believed it so much they poured tax-payers' money into shoring up the whole rotting edifice, and there is no doubt the banksters will need more recourse to tax-payer's funding before too long.
And thereby the seeds of the next harvest of damaging civil unrest are sown!
None of our political parties have the balls or the guts to take on the banks, because they still labour under the same misapprehension that banks aren't really organised criminal enterprises.
They still want to be fooled into thinking that the crimes being committed daily by the banks are merely a minor aberration committed by a tiny minority of people who are misguided. They have simply failed to grasp the full implications of the ways in which a committed cadre of organised criminals have run the British banking industry into the ground, and literally stolen its assets through the simple expedient of organised criminality and paying themselves their insane salaries, their obscene bonuses and above all their bloated pension funds.
James Crosby alone, the now disgraced former boss of Halifax Bank of Scotland is sitting on a pension pot worth up to £25 million despite his central role in the mortgage giant’s collapse.
This calculates his annual retirement earnings from the failed lender is estimated to worth around £700,000 a year, according to the Sunday Times. No other citizen of this country would be able to run a major bank into the ground, be publicly humiliated for being a total and utter incompetent, and still be allowed to hang on to sums of money of this value.
It is now clear that if you are a friend of the Tory Government, you can organise and run frauds in the City realising multi-billion pound losses; you can manipulate the world's leading interest-rate setting mechanism to your own financial advantage and you can launder billions of dollars worth of drug money, all of which are straight-forward crimes, and no-one will do a damn thing to prosecute you.
Ironically, this would not have been a true state of affairs under Margaret Thatcher's control. The death of the former Prime Minister has just been announced, and I am reminded of the time just before her second election, when she too wanted to take on the welfare benefit issue as part of her election campaign.
She was reminded by Cecil Parkinson that if the Tories wanted to go up against the benefit culture, in order to be seen to be fair and maintain their working-class vote at the same time, they would have to do something about the plethora of City Fraud which was fast becoming a national scandal.
Her response was somehow typical of her;
'Well. we'd better get the handcuffs on, Cecil!
Later that day, Ernest Saunders was arrested coming out of his solicitor's offices, and the Guinness prosecution was set in train!
Under Cameron's administration and with Osborne riding shotgun on the financial sector, things are very different. You don't have to be an outright crook however, if you are just irredeemably incompetent and you destroy a once-proud bank through your own outright stupidity and arrogance, you can still be allowed to keep all the loot your have squirreled away!
But God help you if you are a single mother on benefits, and your boyfriend chooses to stay over for the night; if you are suffering from serious health issues and are unable to work. Don't try to get a loan to build your business if you are an SME, and don't ask for a pay rise, because there are none coming, and don't get ill because the Health Service we once respected is now run by accountants, not doctors.
The real issue here is not what the politicians choose to tell us, it is what the people who are affected by the changes believe for themselves. As one commentator said to me in Manchester last week, 'It's not too bad for you down in London, in some places there it's hard to appreciate there is a recession, but up here in Manchester, there are many, many, areas where there is real hardship, and where the anger on the estates and run-down housing ghettoes is growing by the day.
People may choose to believe that what Cameron and Osborne are doing is in the best interests of the country, but until they start demonstrating a reality about all being in it together, and taking away from the banksters the proceeds of their rotten games, and locking up those who have committed financial crimes, then no-one, but no-one is going to believe that the austerity programme is 'fair'.
This is the word that Cameron keeps parroting, that it is fair to attack the culture of benefit dependency, but if he really wants ordinary people to believe him, then he has got to start demonstrating that we live in 2013 and not 1819, because my evening in Manchester demonstrated to me that many in my audience believe that violent social unrest and street violence aimed at the elites is only just a stone's throw away.
Next time, it won't be the hit and run tactics used in Tottenham and copied elsewhere in the country, with gangs of young people just smashing shop windows and stealing designer accessories. Next time, the rioters will be standing their ground, and trading blows with the police, with everything to hand at their disposal. There is a real, tangible visceral hatred of the police in Manchester among the poor and the underclass, and some of the observations made to me about this dislike are very scaring.
Cameron and Osborne have got to demonstrate that there is only one law for all the people, not just the poor and working class, all the while their friends in the elites get away scot free, but that is what is happening. Their bankster friends have already effectively stolen our children's future, and there is a sizeable number of young and dispossessed people who are just waiting for the day to go and steal some of it back.
Peters' Fields are quiet today, but it will not take too much to see them filled with rioters again, fighting for much the same thing as their forebears fought for, 200 odd years ago. That was the right to be electorally enfranchised - to be treated as equal citizens and guaranteed fairness in their social treatment, a fairness which is being swiftly eroded, by the way in which the elites are being allowed to commit financial crimes with impunity. I predict these events because for many working class people, they have nothing to lose, and a man who has nothing to lose, has everything to gain from his actions.
Today legendary trader Jim Sinclair told King World News that the elites plan to use the coming financial chaos and destruction to control the masses. Sinclair spoke about the “Great Unwind,” what this means for gold, and how investors can protect themselves from what is in front of us. Below is what Sinclair, who was once called on by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker to assist during a Wall Street crisis, had to say in this remarkable interview.
Sinclair: “The enormous violence in the markets is obscuring a very clear message. The message from Cyprus, that has also been written in various white papers and signed by central banks, the FDIC, Bank of England, and the BIS, is to get out of the system.
What happens to readers around the world is of primary importance to King World News and to myself. The meetings that I have already had, and future meetings still to take place around the world, have been for the purpose of keeping investors from having large portions of their wealth destroyed or stolen from them.
People have to understand that going forward large deposits by ‘non-insiders’ are no longer going to be permitted. The goal of this pre-arranged wealth destruction is to equalize the ‘new rich’ and the ‘upper middle-class.’ Those not on the inside, with the right families and the right companies, are not going to be tolerated in the ‘New Paradigm’ of currency and metal that we are now moving into.
So the only means of being able to protect yourself will be to understand the answer to the question, ‘What is the final end game for the most powerful families that are in fact running countries and markets?’....
Continue reading the Jim Sinclair piece below...
“Take into consideration that the recent and violent drop in the gold price, especially if followed by an equally violent recovery, was primarily for the transfer of physical gold from financial and other entities to the families that are running the Western governments and financial world.
In my opinion that’s exactly what has just happened. A very strong and immediate recovery, that is sustained, makes the message clear that gold is an ingredient for these wealthy families to maintain their wealth and power, not simply over a generation, but over multiple generations.
We are coming very close to a point where the manufacturing of unprecedented amounts of fiat currency has to have a global impact. You simply can’t increase the amount of currency as violently as what been done without having to face the consequences, one of which is the collapse of the purchasing power of those fiat currencies.
The massive and ongoing currency war the world has been witnessing may come to a head much sooner than any of us realize. So investors must have an understanding of how the system will be preserved, and eventually reset, in order to survive the coming wealth destruction.
Maintaining significant deposits inside banks in the current financial system is setting up that portion of your wealth to be destroyed or stolen from you. Whereas maintaining physical gold inside a private storage, outside of the banking system, is one of the ways you can survive what is coming.
Physical gold will be the primary beneficiary of the ‘Great Unwind’ that is still in front of us. This is why the latest attempt to smash gold in the paper market was met with one of the most ferocious physical buying sprees the world has ever seen.
Owners of physical gold may end up being the quality non-North American gold companies, as well as individuals which move out of fiat money and into physical gold while the price is cheap. From now on every dip you see in paper gold will be met by a corresponding move by savvy investors around the world to trade in their fiat money for physical gold.
The time to get out of the system is immediately in order not to be destroyed by the ‘Great Equalization’ that is about to take place. This phase will serve to bring humanity to its knees. It is going to be about control of the masses, for the benefit of the few.
Derivatives will be a primary tool for the destroyers of wealth, and bank deposits all over the Western hemisphere will be invaded. So investors must get out of the system and have physical gold and gold related investments in order to survive what is still to come.”
Eric King: “Talk about what this will this mean for the price of gold going forward.”
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed May 01, 2013 1:36 am Post subject: Santander chief Alfredo Sáenz resigns
Santander chief Alfredo Sáenz resigns
This is quite an interesting story from various view points,
1) straight after and even during the big crisis, when most banks were screaming for a bailout Santander were busy buying up other banks, including two in Britain.
2) So presumably they were unaffected by "the crisis" in fact they actually appear to have flourished during it..
3) They were involved in the MPS (siena) scandal. They sold the Antonventa bank to the MPS. This criminal conviction story is no big deal but it is a good excuse to put these people into the frame .. The ABN Ambro first bought the Antonventa, first Italian bank to be bought by a foreign bank. The MPS pays nearly double and with attached Derivatives that would eventually strangle the bank (MPS).. As you can imagine it was an inside job ..
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed May 01, 2013 2:24 am Post subject:
Am I right that if everybody boycotted the banks & stopped paying back their mortgages the economy would begin to recover again?
acrobat74 wrote:
An important point about our current system: since money is debt, getting out of debt (fancy term: deleveraging) shrinks the economy.
Quote:
How money gets destroyed (new video)
Wed, 13th Mar 2013
by Positive Money
Remember how new money is created when a bank makes a loan? Well, when someone repays the loan, the opposite process happens, and money is actually destroyed. It effectively disappears from the economy entirely.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Wed May 01, 2013 8:43 am Post subject:
This Santander stuff sounds very much like what Roberto Calvi was up to in Italy, heavily involving the Vatican Bank (see 'In God's Name' by David Yallop).
He ended up hanging under Blackfriars Bridge, in a typicaly Masonic ritual murder, originally judged 'suicide' by the heavily Masonic City of London police. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Am I right that if everybody boycotted the banks & stopped paying back their mortgages the economy would begin to recover again?
acrobat74 wrote:
An important point about our current system: since money is debt, getting out of debt (fancy term: deleveraging) shrinks the economy.
Quote:
How money gets destroyed (new video)
Wed, 13th Mar 2013
by Positive Money
Remember how new money is created when a bank makes a loan? Well, when someone repays the loan, the opposite process happens, and money is actually destroyed. It effectively disappears from the economy entirely.
"Debate "Banking reform or Abolition of capitalism?"
The debate took place in London on 5th Sept 2012. Adam Buick of Socialist Party of Great Britain and Ben Dyson of Positive Money."
--
I found the video both interesting and frustrating.
Ben Dyson (Positive Money) explains away the role of the bank of England etc and puts the blame on high street banks. (very suspicious.)
Adam Buick (Socialist Party of Great Britain) says he wants to do away with banks altogether (even money and profit motives,) but wants every thing ( land too) held in common ownership.
Ben Dyson does a really poor job really on the role of "banks" and Adam Buick looks as though he's won the debate.
But its like I have always said about "Socialist Party" [ some peoples idea of Marxism] why collect it all to the sate or all in common, if the intention is to share it out. It can get to the bureaucratic point where individuals don't have a say in the use of anything for their own use and needs.
Many of them seem genuine about the inequality of wealth and you wouldn't think it would be as hard as it is to get through that most of us want the same in major issues.
Land is the most important, but a fair monetary system can be achieved if certain principles are followed.
A fault I also find with Adam Buick "Socialist Party" is he / they also talk about voluntarism too.
But I've heard this scenario.
"what if someone volunteered 10 times more than someone else...at which point would there be resentment or other emotions. It doesn't provide for people who choose to work harder and gain from the work they do (without exploiting others.)" And the "voluntarism system" grinds to a halt.
The Law of Gleaning (in the Bible) is a much better way to achieve the needs of people unable to take care of themselves or in some difficulty (a part of the grafting in.)
--
Copy pasted from a thread and forum (Bill Still's) that I wrote a week or so ago. When asked about "Henry George-ism?"
"The Law of "Gleaning" is for the free sharing (mentioned but not fully explained in previous post; nor here) Any excess should be freely given and decided on by the individuals whom its given to rather than taken by bureaucratic agencies (rather than go to waste.) [It's often the case that there is much wasted with the "futures market of commodities" to manipulate prices.] And is not oppressive like "George-ism" ( land tax.)"
"land value tax" I see that as unnecessary and a form of communism (a collective.) Where a minority make decisions and steal (money; a means of exchange,) even line their own pockets and spend it on what they want. It can get to the point where the majority of people don't even have a say on the use of anything, even for their own needs.
When people have (should have) the right to use (a portion of land for their own needs, for example; for free.) So long as they don't cause harm, loss or injury to others (just to keep it simple.)"
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.B. Gather all Jews back to the Land of Israel (Isaiah 43:5-6).C. Usher in an era of world peace, and end all hatred, oppression, suffering and disease. As it says: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall man learn war anymore." (Isaiah 2:4)D. Spread universal knowledge of the God of Israel, which will unite humanity as one. As it says: (Zechariah 14:9)......Mark 7:6 Jesus said "you hypocrites, These people honor me with their lips, You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions. "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!"....EVEN PAUL SAID: Romans 3:31 .....1 LUV THRU PEACE LOVE AND JUSTICE, KnowTheTruthTV...