The Ascent Of Not Getting It

I’m reading The Ascent Of Money by Niall Ferguson. A few pages in he makes the mistake of referring to what we live in as, ahem, civilisation. Has he not read Roman historian Tacitus; “In their ignorance they call this civilisation, when in reality it’s but part of their servitude”? Ferguson refers to the Medicis (bankers, if you didn’t know) and their part in the Renaissance. That wasn’t civilisation, that was a prison culture. The Romans spread it all over Europe and encouraged the population to consider it civilisation so they’d be less trouble to handle. Who suceeded in subjugating the Britons where others failed? Agricola, because whereas his predecessors tried to enforce behaviour, creating resentment, he instead suggested modes of behaviour, encouraging it by competition. which took the place of compulsion. It fell apart when the Romans let it all slide in the early 5th century. When the Medicis helped bring about the Renaissance, it signalled a return of the same societal model, one where a ruling elite (formerly Romans, now bankers) ruled by virtue of effective monopoly of the money supply in a culture money-dependent. What happened in between, misnomered The Dark Ages, was probably in reality the Age of Light for Europe, we’re just schooled not to think of it that way because it suits the banks to have us consider our lives of indebted servitude to be the only civilised way of life.
I suspect I will find much in this book to dismay me…

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Brownian Motions

I see Gordon Brown has proposed something similar to the transaction tax that’s been recently floated by Turner, this at the G20. It was promptly said no to by Tim Giethner for the Americans.
This is just political posturing by Brown, I reckon he’s aware he can propose that the banks be hung drawn and quartered routinely every day before breakfast, making himself look good in the process, because of course in the American’s corner is Tim Geithner representing Government Sachs who will nay-say it. The American government pretty much IS the banking fraternity so Brown can suggest all manner of draconian measures secure in the knowledge they’ll all be vetoed by former Goldman Sachs’ man Geithner. Brown knows he will look good to the uneducated public but he also knows the educated bankers will guess what he’s up to and understand Labour is still the bankers’ friend. Brown’s suggestions amount to political theatre, nothing more.

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Bank Fraud

Where is it governments borrow money from? Nowhere at all. Instead, they ask the banks to create money, under license from themselves (the govt) which the banks will agree to as long as the banks are given in return an amount equal to the same amount they create, plus a whole lot more on top too. Governments, elected to serve our interests I’ll remind you, happily agree to this, rendering the electorate and their descendants liable for fulfilling these impossible obligations for centuries. Then those same governments retire and mysteriously surface in comfy retirement as consultants to – amazing, this – banks!
I think those who complain about immigration miss the point. It’s the money problem and the way banks and politicians between them stitch the rest of us up rotten that needs addressing. Many of these immigrants are economic migrants anyway. So will we be soon, I imagine, on our way to the boom economies of China and India with our begging bowls and our lucky heather.

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Narrow Banking, Narrow Thinking

OK, I got it. You have investment banks (casino banks) and you have the kind of banks we typically associate with the High Street where you make deposits and withdrawals and so on. Narrow banking means the two remain separate, see Glass-Steagal, an act bought in after the Great Depression to separate the two banking systems, recently repealed. This has greatly contributed to our current economic woes. If the casino banks are tied up with the high street banks, when the casino banks make a bad bet and they fail, because the’re tied in with our high street banking system they bring the entire economy down with them, hence the expression, too big to fail. Obviously it’s in the communal interest that Glass-Steagal or something similar be reinstated, which is why it won’t happen or even be discussed at any senior level. I keep trying to explain to people that what we live in isn’t run for our benefit any more than a battery farm is run for the benefit of the chickens inside it. Here’s yet more evidence to support my point of view.

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What Exactly Do Our Taxes Pay For?

Watch the average politician talk about the necessity for taxation on the tv and there’ll be lots of hand-wringing and talk of schools and hospitals… nothing about where an increasing amountof it really goes, paying back non-existent ‘loans’ from banks that are really just accounting entries for money they never had in the first place. There’s so much that the average punter will never see or hear discussed or read about in the mainstream media, much of the point of which seems to be no more than misdirection these days. Where would we be without the internet?

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The BNP Economics Policy

The BNP’s Larry Nunn is probably better equipped to articulately explain the BNP’s economics policy (which I understand involves reintroducing full reserve banking and dumping the fractional reserve banking we are now saddled with) than Nick Griffin ever will be. I doubt we’ll be seeing Larry on the telly for precisely that reason. Some elements of banking simply aren’t discussed in the media; not in print, not on air. It’s at least arguable that the whole point of having a prominent BNP figure on a national tv show and then not letting him get a word in about actual BNP policies was to stop him drawing any attention to the existing banking system. It’s a taboo subject. In the media you’ll see nothing but the very briefest of mentions of money being created by banks. If that idea ever got out and became more widely understood I suspect it would mean the end of law and order as we’ve known it. Now I’m familiar with the subject I’d have to say rightly so.
Don’t expect to be seeing The Bill Kruse Show anytime soon either!

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Local Banks Closing To Be Replaced With What Exactly?

Local branches of the big banks are closing all over the country, leaving the locals with no banking facilities. This is regarded as lamentable by many.

Bring it on, I say. The existing banking system is broken beyond repair anyway, having debts that might be regarded as infinite and so are insolvent. The sooner people realise that the existing system’s useless and we have to walk away from it then the sooner alternatives will start being seriously discussed. The idea of alternative banking might seem to be the exclusive province of the weirdie and the beardie but the ongoing cuts in local banking facilities will force more perfectly normal folk to start taking these things more seriously. None of this is before time, IMHO. 

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Brooksley Born

They bilk us; information found regarding internal communications back in 1993 when Proctor & Gamble sued their bank for selling duff products highlights this. It’s the rest of us versus the banks, and sadly the politicans seem to be more on their side than ours. One woman who fought for regulation, essentially for civilisation against lawlessness, was the CTFC’s Brooksley Born. Her story’s here in video;

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23787.htm

Educating and frightening in equal parts.

It suggests to me that since the OTC derivatives entire process is dark, there’s only one realistic approach when it goes wrong; walk away.

You can’t fix what you can’t see.

I know this means walking away from the existing banking system, so to what exactly? Ellen Brown seems to be pointing the way;

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/reviving-the-local-economy-with-publicly-owned-banks/

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Nick Griffin And The BBC

Firstly, if I was Nick Griffin I’d have absolutely made sure there were riots outside the BBC centre if I knew I was going to be on Question Time. It’ll be interesting if it turns out that at least some of the protesters against his presence there turned out to BNP members bigging up the occasion.

The real significance of the occasion for me was that he was there in the first place anyway. A representative of a fringe party, regarded by most as cranks a few short years ago, now here they are on a highly-regarded mainstream political program, albeit from what I gather (didn’t watch it) he wasn’t asked any decent questions. What would have seemed impossible, unimaginable even a few short years ago is now becoming commonplace and even respectable.

Who are they going to have on next week, the Druids?

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An Expanding Monetary Base & Inflation…

don’t always follow each other. I know it used to be that way but these are times without precedent. People keep talking about in recession (booooo!) or out of recession (yaaaay!) as if they’re bad or good things but really nowadays they’re irrelevant things. It’s as if money has taken a life of its own, spun off into some cyberFrankenverse where old rules simply don’t apply any longer. All the quantitative easing the governments are indulging in is expanding the monetary base but not this one, not the one that you live in and I live in. It simply adds volume to the monster in cyberspace. That doesn’t affect us here in the real world. Very few people seem to get that this is an entirely new game in some regards. We never had this cyber aspect before, there wasn’t the facility to create electronic money. There may be inflation at some future date but it’s by no means inevitable.