Messages

I prefer the 1st suggestion shark. The question is : if the current system is so unpopular with it's participants (the masses), how has it survived so well, what sustains it?

I don't believe it's due the machinations of an elite few, but something more fundamental in the structure of the system.

It started off small and was easy to manage and use. For politicians it was sold as a great system by the bankers because they could borrow what they needed (initially just for big projects like wars and National Health Services) and pass on the repayments to the next government elected to office, forever passing the costs forward. But as the debt and interest on the debt gradually increased, the government was forced to find ever more ways to make up the shortfall. At first with minimal tax increases and gradually by selling off state run industries and cutting back on services. We just find ourselves to be part of the generation living as the system reaches maximum bloat. We are living at the End of the Line, as it were and, as with all dying things, the system is fighting as hard as it can to survive. Best to just euthenize it quietly because it's in pain, now, and causing us all distress. Think of it as a tumour that's been growing at the heart of government since the 1600s and has now reached the stage where it needs to be cut out.

Not at all Shark, I can just feel myself getting grumpy, and that's when it's time to do something else, rather than after the fact!

Heh, no stranger to grumpiness I. Don't stay away too long, Tordels - your posts here always make me think.

Get a room lads

We've got one - it's called the Rowdy Yates Block Citizens' Yap Shop and it's free for all to visit on a Wednesday night! (See the "Wednesday Night Chat" thread for details!) Courtesy of The Shameless Plug Department.

Who are the masters who are the servants? By today's standard the master is the one who orders the sewers cleaned --- the servants are the ones who go down to the sewers and get their hands dirty. The master is dependent on the servant to carry out this task for him --- anyone with a dependency, is figuratively speaking, a slave.

I think it's the coordinators who order the sewers cleaned and the workers who go down to the sewers and get their hands dirty. Both are perfectly valid and vital roles in our society. The masters are the ones who purchase the sewer system and then tell the coordinator and the worker that their jobs are being axed to increase 'efficiency' - or, more accurately, profits.

We are told what to do and how much we have to pay for the joy of doing it. What they dont like is when someone does something free but they should be paying for it then it becomes worse than rape, murder or assault

The first part of your statement I can broadly agree with however there has to be some limit on earnings which is reasonable, affordable and adequate. Under the present profit-driven system these criteria have been skewed by the murderous rush for ever increasing profits, which is driven largely by inflation.

If we were to adopt the first two of the suggestions I made earlier and allowed governments instead of private corporate banks to create the money, the problem of profits would be severely curtailed. In the case of the sewers it would work like this:

The government collates all the information it needs to properly devise a country-wide sewer upgrade and upkeep project. From this information it could work out how many coordinators and workers are needed, the costs of materials and equipment and so on and so forth. It then goes to the recently nationalized (in this example) Bank of England and gets it to create (from nothing) the amount of money needed to pay for this project. That money is then spent on the project, which could be to a single nationalized sewer department, several  private companies or a mixture of the two. The money is therefore spent into society on something that we all need. That money then starts circulating around society through normal channels - companies to workers to shops to banks to taxes etc and none of it needs paying back. The end result is a shiny new sewer system and an economy in which everyone is better off. (Under this system, taxes are used simply as a gauge of the economy and as a "pressure valve" to control the money circulating in the economy - if there's too much, taxes are raised and if there's too little, taxes are lowered. Under this system, inflation (and deflation) becomes a thing of the past as prices settle to an accurate gauge of a product or sevice's actual worth.)

Under the current system, everything happens in roughly the same manner except for one crucial and crippling difference: At present, the privatized Bank of England borrows the money from J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs (who create that money out of nothing, as the Bank of England would do in the previous example) and then that money is lent into society meaning that every penny of it, plus interest, has to be paid back to these private banks. The end result is a second-rate, cheap as possible sewer system that leaves us all with bigger tax bills and inflation. (Inflation is the hidden tax - as the wages the coordinators, workers and contractors earned was originally borrowed and has to be paid back, every penny of it plus interest, and this has the knock-on effect of raising prices across the board because we're all spending borrowed money, whether we've earned it claimed it or stolen it. Every penny of these wages has to be paid back to the banks who created the money out of nothing in the first place, plus interest. It is the interest that is the sole driver of inflation and the reason behind the desperate mantra of Growth at All Costs.)

Which one would you prefer?

The second part of your statement, comparing freedom with murder and rape is a little harder to swallow. You see, the corporations have the mirror of the problem we do - if their profits don't continually rise, they'll go out of business and get swallowed up by an even bigger corporation or lose shareholders to more profitable companies. This is because of rising taxes and inflation - the very problems that afflict us lowly mortals. Yes, they're rabid profit-hunters and often go too far in their pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, but it's the system that forces them to go that way, just as the same system forces us to do what we have to do.

Corporations are not inherantly bad or evil but are forced to act in the ways they do due to the forces I've just described. Return the money creation and control to the governments, resulting in debt-free currency, and inflation will be cut to practically zero and corporate taxes dropped to as little as one or two percent. Taxes on earnings, VAT on basic essentials, property taxes, car taxes etc can be axed altogether. Corporations could then work in a far more equitable manner because everything would cost less, or cost more or less its true worth. (Imports would still be expensive, of course, but only until the rest of the world adopts the same system and throws off the tyranny of the private global banks. There is a counter to this, of course, as we wouldn't need to charge import/export duties - or levy only a nominal fee to cover administration - so it would become much more profitable for the UK to act as an "international distribution point" for goods.)

I'm officially out of this discussion. 

That's a shame, Tordels. I hope it wasn't something I said 

Yes it is.

tbh; dc

Good question.

I'd argue that nobody is served in the long run. The richer they get, the more they fear us. The poorer we get, the more we hate them.

The cycle must be broken and a more equitable solution found for everybody.

I'd suggest starting with 3 fairly easy steps:

1) Outlaw the private issuance and control of debt/currency and return that power to the people where it properly belongs.

2) Outlaw fractional reserve lending and use publically created money to back the high street lending banks with non debt-based currency.

3) Instigate a Truth and Reconcilliation process.

It's not just the 99% who are trapped in this Godawful situation, it's all of us.

And who could blame you if it was for that? He's a fine lookin' fella, after all...

Best opening scene ever?

"Yeah... That went well."

Do you ever dream about your characters or storylines in your sleep?

How much time do you spend staring off at nothing, just daydreaming? Does daydreaming help, or is it an impediment to actually getting things done?

Is the current paradigm of the Future Shock outdated? That is to say, do you think that demanding a FS MUST have a twist is deleterious to looking for a good story, well told - or is the ability to write a good twist essential for any aspiring comic writer?

Can you tell us a bit more about the 'organic UFOs' you once saw? How has that experience affected or influenced your work, if at all?

How would you fix the financial crisis either in fiction or for real?

Is humanity doomed or poised on the edge of a New Golden Age?

(Sorry about the last ones, I ran out of questions about comics...)

Some time ago I noticed something odd on a BBC report about the Occupy Movement in London. The piece began with the camera showing a lovely full moon in the sky above St Paul's Cathederal - the problem was that there wasn't a full moon that night. I can't prove this as I never took proper note of it.

It seems I may have been wrong about this, sorry:

I just get frustrated when people, like Sharky, compare the present situation in our islands with boat loads of people in chains being forcibly taken from their homelands and transported across the Atlantic to a life of living hell.

As I wrote:

We may not be trapped in the wild, transported to foreign lands and bought and sold as commodities, but we are exploited as a resource and bullied, brainwashed and sometimes even bribed into complying with the will of our self-appointed masters.

Of course you can't object to your rent or mortgage once you're in the property but, hopefully, you figure out before you move in whether you can afford the rent or mortgage.  If you can't afford it, you go somewhere that you can afford.

But, once you're in the property, what's to stop the landlord or bank from upping the money demanded of you irrespective of your ability to pay?

Specialisation requires compensation.

Why?

A hunter/gatherer is a specialist. The compensation he gets is that the other members of his tribe also specialize: The medicine man if he hurts himself when he's out hunting; the storyteller to entertain him around the fire at night after a long day wrestling with mammoths; the grandparents looking after his kids; the builder making him a hut; the brewer making him a cup of wine etc., etc. The other specialists are compensated by being allowed access to the food the hunter provides. This is the compensation afforded by being part of a society. Uh-oh, Communism!

If the hunter has a bad run, will the others exclude him from their specialized services? Well, so long as he isn't a crap hunter (in which case he'd admittedly be forced to find another way to make himself useful) he'd still have access to all the benefits of his society without penalty. If you miss a day's work today, however, you get penalized whether it's a one-off incident or not by having your salary docked (your chain shortened) and your access to the compensations of society curtailed.

The compensation you speak of here alludes to monetary payment dished out by those who have the money to dish out. Therefore those with the money decide whether you can afford to be a writer or not, whether you can afford to go on holiday or not, whether you can afford to eat good food or cheap crap, whether you get first, second or third rate public services or even the type of home you can live in and whether you can afford to improve it or not.

Your example of Alan Moore having to prostitute his beard because nobody pays him for his stories is true, yes, but only under the modern economic paradigm. In a freer world, such legitimate artists might not get paid for their works at all but instead be allowed access to all the things he reasonably needs through the bounty of society in return for gifting his works to the wider world. There are more than enough resources in this world for everyone to have a decent life and for society to look after everyone in it, even the Hairy Wizard. Yes, of course, some people will always abuse that if given the opportunity but that is what laws are for. Today, most of the resources of the country - YOUR country - have been tied up by the monied classes and it is they, not society's members, who decide who has access to what and at what level. This is slavery.

Of course most people in the Western world are not "economic slaves", Sharky, we have total freedom to choose the amount of mortgage we take out (based on the amount of money we can convince other people to pay us), or the amount of rent we pay (based on the demands of the property owner, employer and banks regardless of the type of home we require), whether to drive a car or not (based on whether we are gifted enough money to buy one and pay the associated taxes or not and whether we're allowed a license), how much we spend on clothes (which we are compelled to buy from 'reputable' manufacturers, some of whom rely on slavery to make them cheap and sell them expensive and also because nudity is illegal) , whether to eat cheese on toast or caviar (here you are correct - we all have the freedom to starve should we so desire), how much we want to spend on holidays (provided we can afford the transport and are allowed access to a passport by our masters), what schools/universities to go to (depending on where you live and what you can afford or graciously be lent), what career paths to follow (provided you don't get ideas above your station), where we live (provided we can pay enough to move), where we visit (provided you can pay the entrance fee and the place isn't restricted), etc. etc.  All that we have to do, to avoid becoming "economic slaves", is be responsible.  If people of sound mind take on debts that they can't afford to re-pay and never think of the possibility of a rainy day, that's their fault (except for governments and bankers, who can borrow willy-nilly and then come to us with a cap in one hand and a truncheon in the other when it all goes breasts aloft for them).  Of course, there are groups of people who through illness or disability lose the ability to be their own masters, but we are in a minority (so, as long as it's only a handful of damaged, economically inactive human beings who are robbed of their freedom through no fault of their own, that's okay? What would you say is the upper limit for people who it's all right to deprive of their freedom in this manner? 25? 100? Half a million?).  It's no comparison to real slavery at all. (You're right - it is no comparison, it's exactly the same thing.)

No they wouldn't regard you as a slave if you did that ,but as a criminal , it's true.

Here we get into the difference between Natural Law and Statute Law and how that has been subverted into another form of oppression and removal of freedom. We've all been brainwashed to think that these two are the same things when they are absolutely not. Did you know, for example, that nobody is required to pay a fixed penalty parking or speeding fine? That fixed penalty notice is not an order to pay (only a judge, after a trial, can order you to pay anything) but an invitation to pay? You actually have 72 hours to politely decline that offer. Similarly, a police officer cannot arrest you for anything other than a Common Law crime (causing actual harm or loss) unless you agree to being arrested. When a police officer reads you your rights and asks, at the end, if you understand - he's using the legal meaning of understand, which does not mean comprehend but 'stand-under' - i.e., "do you agree to be bound by the rights I have just read you and waive your Natural Common Law Rights?" As soon as you say yes, you've agreed to be arrested and accept any punishment the statutory system invites you to bear.

I think I'll have to accept that 'slavery' has suffered the same fate as 'rape' in becoming severely devalued as a term.  For me, slavery will always mean being utterly deprived of agency in your own life, which is pretty much the worst thing I can think of.  The context I'm seeing it used here is having to do unpleasant work just to have food and a roof, or to play The Man's game.  Those are absolutely not the same thing AFAIC, but I'm happy to acknowldge that I'm out of touch with what the word now means.

I can agree that "slavery" is a strong word to apply in this case, but I won't stop using it. To me, it's like the difference between carefully murdering someone with a sniper's rifle and killing a pedestrian with a car whilst drunk. In the former example the murder is deliberate but in the latter it is a consequence. Either way, it's still murder.

Phew! My fingers are aching!

Not buying it.  I accept many of your observations in the global banking system and the other self-interested systems of control, but you're invoking a comparison with slavery, symbolic or otherwise - there's never been a slave who (knowing what the choice entailed) wouldn't swap being owned for a job and bank account.  Slavery is an indescribably obscene condition of being, and the ahistorical analogy diminishes the suffering of many millions of people, and in the process undermines your otherwise sensible points. 

Sorry to be a po-faced jerk, but this is one of my (howling troop of) pet bugbears, and invokes an involuntary 'you don't know you're born' reflex. 

I get what you're saying, Tordels, I really do - but I'm not talking about the whips and chains method of slavery, I'm talking about the lack of freedoms, rights and opportunities angle.

At least in historical times slaves were looked after (to a point - nobody wants crippled, starving slaves because no work would get done and no profits made). These days, you have to pay the banks for your own (adulterated) food and water, your own shelter, transport (people are now paying up to 1/5 of their income to pay for transport to and from work!), clothing, justice and, well, everything while you work to increase not your profits and freedoms, but the elite's. If you don't submit you don't get flogged but you do get evicted or imprisoned or excluded from society.

A chained slave had no option but to be a chained slave.
An economic slave (as we are) has no option but to be an economic slave.

Yes, our condition of slavery could be catagorized as "velvet slavery" but it is slavery nonetheless. We may not be trapped in the wild, transported to foreign lands and bought and sold as commodities, but we are exploited as a resource and bullied, brainwashed and sometimes even bribed into complying with the will of our self-appointed masters. If we don't play along, what happens to us? We have access to the aspects of our society that make life bearable removed by having our money cut off (our chains shortened). In this sense, every pound coin we own is a link in our own personal chains - the more links you have, the further you can go and the more you can do.

As I'm sure you're aware, the number of bonded ('classical') slaves in the world today remains as high as 12 million to 27 million - but are we not 'bonded' to the banks in a subtler but still thoroughly oppressive way?

And you're not "po-faced jerk", at all. It's good to air your views and argue with me. Hell, if I was right all the time I'd be even more of a tosser! As the esteemed Mr Godpleton once told me, "Shark, if you ever get religion you'll become truly insufferable." Even I can't argue with that!

Some time ago I noticed something odd on a BBC report about the Occupy Movement in London. The piece began with the camera showing a lovely full moon in the sky above St Paul's Cathederal - the problem was that there wasn't a full moon that night. I can't prove this as I never took proper note of it.

Found it: BBC News report, 17 October 2011
             Moon phase for 17 October 2011

Some time ago I noticed soething odd on a BBC report about the Occupy Movement in London. The piece began with the camera showing a lovely full moon in the sky above St Paul's Cathederal - the problem was that there wasn't a full moon that night. I can't prove this as I never took proper note of it.

Today I came across this: Channel 4 continuity announcers mispronounce The Simpsons .

Are the good people in the media (there are some - they're not all corporate vampires) trying to tell us that all is not as it seems? Or is it just a prank?