Ladies and gentlemen a few hard truths are in order today… (as to the truth of the following – please think about it and check it out if you wish).
We are all slaves and that is not stated trivially, it is the sad conclusion of a look at the financial way the world currently operates.
We are all familiar with loans and credit cards… Perhaps, here is an opportunity to set out the facts by stating that all such things are wrongly labelled in ways that offer clues to what is really going on. Strike the word ‘loan’ and replace it with the concept of simply selling you money. A loan is something you might get from a friend or relative at a time of financial crisis. It is often repayable in one lump or may be spread according to agreed terms but it would not normally accrue interest.
And there’s the rub. They don’t ‘loan’ you money, they lease it to you which is an entirely different thing. And what is unique about this money that we all borrow? It’s the simple fact that it doesn’t actually exist. Within the whole transaction the only ‘real’ money is that which is paid in interest.
Which means, of course, that banks and other financial institutions get real money from us in return for absolutely nothing. All else is merely the shuffling of paper.
Perhaps a little history is helpful here.
Once upon a time (after all this is a fantasy), we emerged from the strictures imposed by the second world war. This led eventually to the upsurge in consumerism that we enjoy (or suffer) today. The only problem with such consumerism is that it needed a driver. We are constantly told that the solution is never to print more money because that would devalue the currency… (for who exactly?). Pause and think for a moment, because devaluation would not necessarily make any difference to the pound in your pocket but it would mess up exchange rates and therefore create a raft of possible consequences. But who suffers from these consequences? Not you or me, and that’s a certainty. The only people who could possibly suffer under such a scheme would be those with ‘real’ money – suddenly their stash of gold bars would seem to diminish a little before their eyes.
So they’re left with a problem. They desperately wanted to sell us loads of new stuff – TV’s, record players, cars, ultimately DVD players, TIVO etc… but they were hemmed in by their own refusal to increase the money supply. So they needed to create new money without printing any. Welcome to the world of credit and the personal ‘loan’. That way they could push ahead with their agenda in a uniquely devious way by selling us – at huge premium rates – a big crock of nothing while taking real money back in return. If it wasn’t so crappy it would be genius.
Of course this in itself leads to problems for both sides of the equation. On one hand the people are left in hock to the moneymen who can take real things from you in return for your failure to pay a debt that actually never existed while, on the other, most people are now up to their eyeballs in debt leaving the rapacious bastards at the top trying to work out how to perpetuate their cash cow.
Oh look, here it comes… transfer from one credit card to another and you can have zero interest for a while – even on purchases – and therefore can be encouraged to make yet more profit for cats, so fat, they’re barely able to move. No thought or worry about the problem of what comes next even though it may well spell disaster for many of the people in the street.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) capitalism is a dead creed. I accept that you may have a little difficulty accepting that at this stage but I honestly believe that we are living (and dying) through the last throes of a philosophy currently raging wildly against the dying of the light. The problem we all share is whether there will be anything left by the time they’ve finished.
The time has perhaps come for us to rage against them. I know of no-one who regards the amount of interest payable on loans at present to be acceptable. Therefore, it would be interesting to create a situation where we all refused to make any further payments until such rates were renegotiated. And, why not? Surely that is an appropriate relationship between vendor and customer. Or maybe we could just mount a class action on the basis that as we weren’t actually loaned anything real in the first place then we have no obligation to pay extra for it.
It’s like everything else in this crazy, money driven, madhouse. As was pointed out to me yesterday when I was complaining about a pay TV service – They cock up the service all the time but they never forget to send you the bill.
That’s not an appropriate relationship between supplier and customer and it really needs to be re-balanced.
In some respects it is the implication in that idea that is so worrying. Capitalism no longer has any interest whatsoever in the customer. Instead it is quite literally raping the entire planet to grab whatever it can with no concern to what it may leave behind.
It almost looks as though they know they’ve been rumbled and their response is to grab everything before we wake up sufficiently to take it back. After all, the ‘it’ in question belongs to us in the first place.
We entered (not entirely with open eyes) into a weird form of ad-hoc relationship with capitalism some years ago. It went something like this – If we (as a workforce) gave up our traditional aspirations for an improvement in the common good through unionisation, collective action etc then they would offer us in return a gentler form of comfort based capitalism. The selfish gene which seems to permeate humanity found this an acceptable arrangement. A guaranteed level of comfort (the unspoken truth of this, of course, was that it required a section of society to be left behind, but, what the hell these people don’t vote anyway) was the price we exacted for our meek compliance. It was all ‘look the war is over… we all won,’ which looked reasonable to a lot of people for a lot of the time. But, you all forgot one thing. These people are extraordinarily greedy and although they laid out levels of what was good enough for us there were no such levels set for them and they have returned to type. i.e. they want it all, not just part of it, or even most of it. THEY WANT IT ALL.
So, your role now is to maintain your weak, individual and selfish position while they take your job, your money and whatever else they want if it isn’t immediately conducive to their own ambition. Hence those very same financial institutions that sold you none existent money so they can then take lots and lots more of your real cash in return will then take your job and send it overseas because it’s cheaper and we are warned that we have to compete if we wish to survive.
Wakey, wakey people. This is not acceptable. We have been lied to, conned and ripped off. If we don’t fight back soon then there will be nothing left to fight for. We don’t have to take this crap.
Thanks for reading and, please, join the fight… the world deserves better and if we want to look our children and grandchildren in the faces then we really ought to get our arses into gear or we will be shamed throughout whatever history we may have left.