At the risk of sounding like a broken record, here's my view on the situation.
In order to raise money, the Government sells bonds. A bond is really nothing more than an I.O.U. which is worth more than you pay for it. For example, you may purchase a £1,000 bond for which you will be paid £1,100 when the time comes to sell it back to the government. All well and good so far.
Once the government has sold the bonds, it has enough money to pay for itself, to pay for hospitals and roads and jails and all the other things governments must pay for. It all sounds innocent enough so far.
Then comes the time for honouring the bond promise and paying you back your £1,100. In order to do this, the government issues more bonds to raise the money to do so. It also needs to issue and sell even more bonds because as well as paying bond holders (mainly banks and similar financial institutions) it also must continue paying for all the other stuff governments need to pay for.
As you can see, the more bonds the government issues, the more bonds it needs to issue in a vicious circle of spiralling debt - we call this "inflation." To pay back the bond holders, taxes continue to rise. Your taxes all go into paying off bond holders. Every penny.
It strikes me, then, how truly abominable it is for the government to be bailing out the banks. To bail out the banks, the government needs to issue bonds to sell to the banks in order to raise money to give to the banks to help them out. Work that one out.
Of course, none of the money I've been talking about so far is real. It's all just created out of nothing - mere numbers on a screen. We are all, however, expected to pay real money into the system in order to pay off this unreal debt. This is how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it's a hideous system and I don't know why more people aren't up in arms about it.
The solution is simple. If a government can print bonds, then it can print money. If a government issued money instead of bonds, that money would be spent into society rather than lent into society. There would be nobody to pay back, no interest to find, no bankers with a stranglehold on our government. Taxes would fall dramatically for everyone and the standard of living for all would rise in equal measure. It would not cure all a society's ills, granted, but it would go a long way towards giving everyone a fair society and a decent standard of living.
Why do our politicians not remedy this situation?
Well, if you're one of the bankers who owns shares in the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England or any other of the central banks (such as a Rothschild, Schiff, Morgan etc), then you're going to be rich. I'm talking properly rich. Bill Gates isn't rich compared to these guys, he's just wealthy. When you have trillions of dollars in your bank (having used some of it to buy up as much of the world's gold, land, water and industry as you can) what could you not achieve? Say you have a promising young politician who's sympathetic to your business, you can fund him like mad. If, on the other hand, you have a promising young politician who's against you, then it's easy to destroy him with ruthless efficiency.
This is the main reason why our democracy is a sham. I am certain that most politicians begin their political careers actually wanting to do some good for the country, but once they find themselves inside the system they can't do much about it. If they try to do something about it they can soon be stopped by a 'phone call to a reporter alleging sexual misconduct, for example. If you're JFK (who himself tried to take the US out of the Federal Reserve's stranglehold by issuing government printed US Dollars backed by silver reserves), well...
I believe that we have to work together with our politicians to reclaim our parliament from the bankers and corporations who have hijacked it so ruthlessly. To simply blame the system of government or the politicians we have ended up with is too simplistic and presents a danger that we may be tempted to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is our fault too for not keeping a close enough eye on how things are working.
The idea from earlier in this thread about a jury-type arrangement is a good one, but I think that your "Parliamentary Service" should consist of a constantly changing bunch of randomly chosen civilians being ever present in ministerial meetings to ask questions, make suggestions and even vote on the things our politicians are trying to do. Oversight, I suppose would be the idea I'm wandering after on this one. I'd also like to see independent reporters assigned to every ministry and department, probably on a rotating schedule.
The government doesn't need smashing - it needs rescuing.
