First of all, what are the defining characteristics of a government entity?
I would say, 'government' refers to a person or group arbitrarily given special power beyond their natural rights as a citizen by decree. This includes such entities as the military or police (given special powers to violate sovereignty of individuals deemed either hostile or criminal by the government), and other government roles such as the tax collector and financial regulators, whose special privileges are obvious.
(Note that I am not arguing over whether any or all of these special privileged roles are justifiable here, I'm merely providing a reasonable definition of what government is; from small tribes of cavemen to nations of untold millions, "the granting of special privilege above and beyond the sovereignty provided by natural law" is a universal, defining characteristic of government.)
Perhaps I'm being a little broad here. I mean, all sorts of people (not just government) declare themselves to have arbitrary special privileges; pimps, wife beaters, rapists, theives, gangsters, fraudsters...perhaps pondering this reality (the company government keeps) will provide you with the same epiphany it just provided me...
So, let us consider the 'wonders' of the modern banking system. While I may not be a PhD economist, I get the basics of how it works well enough to understand that the idea of 'complex financial systems you little people couldn't possibly understand' is part of the fraud, part of how the con works.
Anyone who's watched The Real Hustle before knows that the superficial aspect is the most important part of a successful con trick. Appearance is everything, and if someone's well dressed and is a smooth character then they can get away with anything. So the bankers and their paid shills strut around in suits and talk down to us about how "we're fixing things" "you couldn't possibly understand how important it is you give us all this money to bail out the derivatives market" and now "you couldn't possibly understand but the economy is being fixed by us". They don't have access to some great and wonderful knowledge, except the knowledge that they are scamming us for everything we have and then some more.
Being clear here, this scam is complex, but the root of the problem is, was and will be the creation of money from nothing by an unaccountable private banking cartel. Now, this cartel goes by many names, perhaps the Federal Reserve, or the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund or the Bank of International Settlements, but the change in names and locations is the only significant difference between these corporations.
Now, why is it that people say the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England are private companies, not part of the government? Basically, this boils down to them not being at all accountable to other parts of their respective governments. Many mainstream (and most likely paid off) economists proclaim the virtues of something called Central Bank Independence, in other words the policy of allowing unelected and unaccountable bankers and economists to control the creation of money and the setting of interest rates.
When these private bankers create credit, from where does it derive its value? The answer is, it steals a little of the value from all of the other units of currency in circulation. For example, if we have £1000 in circulation, and jolly Mr Bankster creates another £100 for himself (thanks to Central Bank Independence, however, there's nothing to stop him creating as much as he likes, of course) then the total in circulation just grew to £1100 without any increase in the value of what is produced in that economy. Therefore everyone's currency will decrease in value, in this case by 10%, as that was how much money we added.
This leads to a fundamental undertanding about the printing of money by unelected unaccountable banksters: Printing money is the ultimate 'stealth tax'. It hits the rich and the poor, everyone who is using that currency is taxed invisibly. In fact, you (especially if you're American, with reference to the Boston Tea Party) might call it Taxation Without Representation due to the fact that bankers do not represent you, i.e. they are not elected representatives.
So then, where were we? I was arguing that banks are the government, albeit a slightly less moral and accountable one compared to our regular government, and I know it's hard to beat the elected officials for unaccountability, criminality and opacity, but hey, the banks have done it.
One arbitrary power the banks hold is the creation of money. This is bad enough. But imagine if the currency they fraudulently created, each unit of which takes a little more of our prosperity, could be multiplied to the tune of ten or more times?
Well it does get multiplied. Thanks to a nice sounding process called Fractional Reserve, commercial banks can literally lend money that they don't have.
Suppose I have a brand new bank, and a customer deposits £100 in the first ever bank account in this bank. Then, someone else comes to me and asks for a loan of £100. What do I give them? You, I the author, and any sane and moral person would say "the money you were just given by the saver!" or perhaps if you were more conservative about it you might say "don't lend all that money you just received, because the saver might want it back".
So under the fractional reserve system, what can my bank do? Well, I have special privileges (hence why I say banks are of the government) to lend out 10 times as much money as I actually have. So not only can I create the £1oo for this loan out of thin air, I can go on to create a further £800 to loan out, to a total of £900 - all the while staying within the legal 10% reserve requirement mandated by the central bank.
Some may interject at this point and say "isn't it great we have central banks stopping those commercial bankers from having no reserve. Screw capitalism!" I would reply that yes, I suppose having a rule about 10% reserve is better than those banks creating money from nothing and lending as much as they want - BUT we already have laws covering people who print their own money, that practice is called countefeit when a 'civilian' does it (again showing the special governmental-style power afforded to the banks in our society today).
Now, here is where the banks get their profit from. You see, they lend out all this money as if it is hard to get, when actually the banker just pushed a button on a computer and 'created' it. But YOU, the corporate slave, have to pay interest on whatever you borrow, as you don't have the special power to print your own money - they do!
Debt is a weapon of slavery. The IMF knows this, which is why they like making 'generous' loans to third world countries (using money they fraudulently created from nothing, no doubt). Heavy debt, compounded annually, is very hard to pay off. Hence, debt is used to stop a people from developing and rising to compete with the banking oligarchs in the marketplace. Debt is the ultimate weapon to control societies. (I should point out that this isn't a critique of free trade; often the third world governments who accept these big IMF loans are paid off to take them, then run away leaving the huge debt on the heads of their people.)
We are all in debt, and so we are all subordinate to our real government, the banks. This debt has of course grown massively due to government spending. And where did government get its money from to spend? Why, the central bank, of course! The central bank created it from nothing, government spent it and didn't care, passing on the payment and subsequent interest payments to you the taxpayer.
We are truly under the government of banks. Maybe this dictatorial, unaccountable banking government, rather than the free market, is the problem?
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Talking points based on this:
To a left winger - It wasn't capitalism that failed; the current debt-based system of economic slave-and-master is what is failing.
Our elected officials cannot be trusted to regulate the economy and keep big businesses in check when they are corrupted by the oligarchs that rule this system. There is already oversight of the banks - the overseers are either watching the theft, turning a blind eye, or are in on it!
To a right winger - yes, socialism is bad; though what we have right now isn't a free market, it's a command economy controlled by bankers and based on massive spending and debt.
Central Bank Independence is NOT a free market policy, it is having bankers control the economy for their own ends and it's about stifling economic freedom.
The Communist Manifesto calls for having a central bank, because the Communists knew that this helps collapse economies into a top-down controlled system.
To all - Teach the history of central banking in the US - the fight by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, among others, to keep the Land of the Free, free from bankster control.
"Give me control of a nation's money, and I care not who makes its laws" - Meyer Amschel Rothschild (described by libertytree.ca as the 'godfather of the Rothschild banking cartel')
You should read "Whatever Happened to Penny Candy".
ReplyDeleteI've just searched this on Google Books, and am looking over it now, sounds interesting :)
ReplyDeleteDamn, it's not free. lol
ReplyDeleteI might buy it :O :D
ReplyDelete