Stephen Cook : Blaming the Citizen
You have probably noticed that the media is full of dire warnings from the world’s Great Leaders and their bosses, the international banking cartels, that the economic system is facing meltdown.
Certainly the long-suffering citizenry faces an information meltdown that threatens to consume us all in a storm of gobbledegook, waffle and “explanations” from “experts” that make as much sense as the ramblings of a loon.
Can anybody honestly say that, having read the latest pronouncements from governments, economists, journalists and various “experts,” they actually have a clear picture of what is going on and why, in an age of unrivalled technological and productive capability in which millions of people are just itching to get busy and work (ie., create wealth), we are getting poorer?
The “information” we are given by those who purport to understand such things doesn’t leave us any the wiser. If anything, it leaves us more confused. Emerging from the latest newspaper article about the economic crisis with our head spinning and uncertain as to whom exactly we should be stringing up from lamp posts for turning our civilisation into a mismanaged mess, we get the idea that such things are beyond our ability to understand. Clearly we are a bit thick, so such matters must therefore be left to the experts who obviously know what they are talking about, even if we don’t.
Well, if the experts were so expert, the global economy would not be in such a mess would it? Failing economies, declining standards of living, squabbles over what should be done, differences of opinion as to who is responsible (except that it is always someone else) soaring taxes that pay for less and less service, lost pensions, riots and everyone and his cousin plunging into debt, are the marks of incompetent management aren’t they? Would you trust a mechanic who returned your car to you in worse condition every time he fixed it? I think not, especially if he then gave you incomprehensible waffle to explain why the oil change left it unable to start or the wheels fell off.
And even less, if he then blamed you for the decrepit condition of the hapless vehicle.
Have you noticed an insidious thread that runs through discussions of why we are in an economic mess: the thread that insinuates that it somehow the fault of the ordinary citizens of nations.
Only recently, for example, some government minister or other was blaming “the British people” for being “lazy” about borrowing.
Irish Prime Minister, Edna Kenny’s words of wisdom on the economic crisis that hit Ireland was that the Irish, "...simply went mad, borrowing.”
Okay, so it’s your fault for being too lazy or greedy and sort of going mad in a profligate frenzy, for trying to buy a house or use your credit card to supplement the inadequate spending power of your wage packet so you can buy frivolities such a food and clothing and it is your fault for hoping for a pension in your old age.
You went mad borrowing or no apparent reason. It had nothing to do with the fact that you were encouraged on every hand to do so and indeed left with little choice if you wanted to maintain your standard of living. It had nothing to do with the fact that the endless stream of interest payments on borrowing is how the usurers and money lenders of the modern world make their profits.
And I don’t just mean one or two of you. I mean almost everybody, as if we were suddenly consumed as nations with some sort of borrowing hysteria. Debt used to be something just a few people got into – isn’t it just a bit odd that now almost everybody on planet Earth is in debt?
So you are going to have to tighten your belts and spend less of the money that that you never had in the first place and which buys less in any case.
Of course, as soon as you spend less, you buy less of the goods and services on the market, so those in the business of producing those goods and services can’t sell those goods and services. So industry will have to cut back and lay off staff or ask people to work for fewer wages and will therefore distribute through wages into the economy less money with which people can buy its goods. And there you have the formula for steady economic contraction.
Of course, the problem is not one of a scarcity of goods, food, clothing, houses or automobiles. It is a scarcity of that which we use in order to acquire those goods and services: money. When money is in scarce supply, people do not have enough of it to offer for the goods and services that are there available. So the goods and services go unsold and stockpile in industry’s warehouses or rot in the fields or some such thing. Industry has an abundance of things to sell and, producing well below its potential, could produce a whole lot more than it does if we wanted it to and the consumer wants to buy them.
The producer cannot sell and the consumer cannot buy not because the goods don’t exist but because there is insufficient money in the pocket of the consumer with which to affect the exchange. There is a shortfall not of goods but of the spending power with which to acquire those goods.
In other words, the good exist or can be produced and they are being advertised to make sure you want them but you can’t have them, so there!
Thus, the poverty is not the consequence of some natural disaster beyond our control but entirely man-made: there is a shortfall of spending power, which is represented by that man-made thing we use as our means of exchange: money.
When money is in short supply, in order to obtain the goods and services that are right there just itching to be bought and used, we borrow from those who seem to have an unlimited supply of it: the banking sector.
But the banking sector has an unlimited supply of it because it creates it.
It creates it out of thin air (I kid you not) by a “stroke of the pen.” It does so because our governments in their wisdom long ago handed it the right and privilege to do so.
The banking sector creates the money supply, the means of exchange, and then gets it into circulation by lending it to you, me business and government. And it lends it at interest so that, for example, if it creates £5000 out of nothing and lends it to you, it adds (say) £500 in interest. So you now owe it £5500 which you must pay back. In other words, you now owe more money than was created in the first place.
This, simplified here, is the basic scam that you are carefully not being told about. When the economy’s money is created and circulated in this fashion, without borrowing there would be no money in circulation.
Remember that the next time we are told we are in an economic mess because we have borrowed too much.
The truth is that we are an economic mess because we have a money system that requires us to borrow and that requirement will not change unless and until we have a proper money system.
Remember too that this is the reason we get all that waffle and the reason why governments flounder around while telling us that the “only solution” to the crisis is for you to get poorer. This is the hidden spanner in the works that is being studiously not mentioned.
Why? Because this “right” to print money and lend it to governments and the citizenry at interest in order to get it into circulation, delivers to the banking cartels the power to turn on and off the tap of money supply, to engineer booms and depressions.
In other words, it renders the banking cartels an echelon senior to government, with the economic whip hand over it.
And that, by the way is why our democracies don’t feel very democratic. How can they be when a few moneyed aristocrats can make or break a government that is loaded with their proxies in any case?
Stephen Cook's book on the money hoax "The Worm in the Apple" is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/postulatepublishing