Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned
I rescind my claim then. I guess it is just about the US and you're not showing double standards.
I hope you're being sarcastic. There is an element of truth in what Xei says, Americans, are by and large, too lazy to really think through, much less act on the problem (it may even be a blessing in disguise that they don't act) . On the other hand you are correct that the same situation prevails in Europe, and calling that realization, that America's problems don't exist in a vacuum, nationalist is a sad failure of critical thinking skills. I hope the smiley in Xei's post means she knows that's ludicrous.
But read John Lanchester's "IOU -Why Everyone owes everyone and no one can pay." He shows that the UK is one of the epicenters of the credit crisis, where bankers have committed open crimes against people who don't even know how to organize and fight back. There is a definite plan to decrease the number of home owners in Britain so that the wealthiest investors can rent to the masses. This is not "conspiracy theory" because it needs no shadowy groups nor does it claim to explain everything as one grand conspiracy. We simply need to trace the actions of players like Goldman Sachs, Barclay's, Lloyds, Duetsche Bank, etc and see that these people want to rent us resources that they own rather than have the average citizen be empowered to own land for themselves.
Britain's role in this is highly relevant to the thread and only a fool would deny that. British bankers perfected the method of loaning more money to third world nations than they could ever pay back and then demanding ownership of natural resources and infrastructure as payment on this odious debt. It is America that pioneered the idea of odious debt (and once long ago, fought against it, e.g. Cuba's debt to Spain) , where first world nations loan money to rich rulers of third world nations only to demand payback from the commoners of the third world country, even though they never agreed to the loans and never benefitted. Since the US took over defending the Anglo-Empire, it is also preying on nations though British financial practices. (Read Confessions of an Economic Hitman) Now the first world nations are finding it harder to extract profits from the third world and are doing the same things to each other e.g. the "PIIGS". Only Iceland has said FU to the bankers and is doing quite nicely despite threats from Britain's parasites.
To say this is about people who just took on too much debt and can't pay back their credit cards is sheer ignorance. It is about banking practices of creating credit electronically and loaning more money than can ever be paid back, then seizing the assets of the borrower and since the previous loans have inflated prices, the economy cannot survive without new infusions of credit, so the banks get bailed out to reimburse them for loaning money which they didn't have in the first place and for which they received tangible assets in the foreclosure process. For example: yes, its true that a fool who borrows money for a yacht and can't afford payment gets what he deserves. But now the bank gets to seize the yacht and claim that since it is not a liquid asset, they most have a bailout for the money they "lost" in the process, even though they did not ever need to have money to create the loan on their books. That is what we are dealing with, a government that makes private losses public, in effect taking from the poor to give to the rich. It is the banks fault they made foolish loans just as it is the borrowers fault for getting too deep in debt.
Of course nobody actually feels like a debt slave, private banks need you to keep consuming. But the reason you see arts and music being slashed from your schools, the reason you see less police and more cameras (especially in the UK), the reason you see London riots, the reason you see less spending on public infrastructure is because the colonial financial practices are now being turned on the governments of first world nations. Wealthy investors prevent states from financing their own operations by buying off the most powerful politicians in any given party, the same way the colonial British bought off kings and princes of yesteryear. Instead the wealthy investors loan money to the state and later demand "austerity" so that they can buy up state resources at bargain prices (Read Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine"). When people complain they trot out the feeble line, meant to dupe the gullible, about "What are you complaining about, its so much worse in Afghanistan, Egypt, ...insert colonized country... and nevermind that the reason they are so screwed up is because we already did to them what we want to do to you."
The only real solution is the formation of local, state-owned banks that can finance public projects without sinking government into debt. Check out North Dakota, which does this quite nicely. Banking does not need to be privately owned, because it is providing a public service of allocating credit, and is wholly dependent on government regulation anyway in order to make a profit. It produces nothing tangible and does not need to be technologically innovative to function best. In fact it needs to be stable and predictable in order for industry and agriculture to innovate. Marx failed to see that the real revolution is not in taking control of the means of production but rather the means of exchange and placing banking in public hands. Marx was Eurocentric and biased by Industrial Era thinking. A number of America's founding fathers realized that a state bank would be a positive and Benjamin Franklin even said that the real reason for the revolution was because America wanted to create its own currency but parasitic British bankers refused because they wanted to loan America money to finance its economy so they could collect interest from America. In one sense America's existence as a free country is a result of it doing more to solve these problems than Britain ever would or could. Nevertheless, as America grew, it naturally attracted the same kind of predatory lending practices that had crippled continental Europe for centuries. The real problem facing the US is whether it will fall back into the same economic system it fought to be free of. Read Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt" and you can learn that America's early leaders were already way ahead of Marx in terms of their understanding of how the state could benefit the public interest and still leave private property rights intact.
It simply bolls down to public banking, which allows the state to allocate credit wisely, and earn interest to finance its operations. That scares the elites more than "communism" which they can safely manage and even profit from. That is why bankers in every country buy off the top politicians and leaders. It happens in the US, it happens in Britain. Watch what would happen to any British politician who advocated public banking. That's the real reason we hate China so much, because the state allocates credit. Last time I checked, their economy is doing better than ours. Hugo Chavez threatened to nationalize his banks and the US and Britain immediately painted him as the devil incarnate.
Ok i'll shutup now... I could go on and on. The point made by these cartoons, especially the last one is globally relevant, clearly not only referring to America. How anyone could say otherwise is unfathomable ignorance.
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