The Political Thread

[Steven Denton]

Can't find the post but you posted a quote that was from a book full of made up quotes to back up polemic. but as the first fact checking of the book I found online was from an expert in economics/banking you dismissed that as biased.

your argument If I recall correctly was that debt is an illusion created by banks to collect interest and ultimately assets from people. Which I disagreed with. 

Banking is quite complicated. The gold standard broke down in part because of the first world war and in part because of the problems with raped economic expansion being pinned to a rare metal. current banking creates money to represent physical assists and potential earnings. (both or individuals and company's). this creates an issue with liquidity. quantitative easing (which can seem like money created out of nothing) is a gamble intended to improve liquidity in the short term thus stimulate the economy by helping (banks need to lend business money but in hard times they become more hesitant to issue debt as more of their over al value being held in non-liquid assets increases the chance or a run and a collapse) but quantitative easing is debt that will have to be repaid, unless the economy expands to cover the debt.

This banking system is still relatively new and open to abuse, like in china recently where lots of company's inflated their assets and intentionally exaggerated their future growth to drive up their share prices. Which then tumbled when they were found out. I believe in our historic conversation. Lying about your assets is fraud and an inherent problem with humans not a system.

[Steven Denton]

Thanks, Steve. I refer you to my former point of how you deal with being wrong.

The article is not 'proof' that banks create money out of nothing, that's your interpretation of the article, and as I said on Facebook all those months ago my problem isn't so much with the things you say but the way that you argue.

[The Legendary Shark]

Banking is not complicated, it's made to seem so in order to conceal its basic fraud.
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This fraud initially started very small. A bank would accept people's gold, deposits, for safe keeping, because people didn't want to keep it in their own homes in case they got robbed. As the banks had strong safes and guards, it made sense for people to store their gold there.  In return, they would issue bank notes to represent that gold.
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In time, people began using the bank notes themselves in trade because they were 'as good as gold' and easier to manage than the gold itself.
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The banks began to realise that only a very few people ever came in to exchange their bank notes for gold. So they hit upon a cunning plan - they could issue more notes than they had gold. They introduced these new notes in the form of loans. People, believing these notes represented actual gold, were happy to borrow them and to pay interest for the privilege. If the person couldn't pay, the banks seized their assets and sold them for real gold. The banks rapidly grew very rich and were soon in a position to start lending, both real gold and created bank notes, to royalty and governments.
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They would frequently lend to both parties in a war, with the stipulation that even the loser would have to repay their debts - reparations.
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Over time, this practice of creating bank notes with nothing to back them up became institutionalised and given a fancy name - fractional reserve lending.
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This method led to many banking crashes throughout history, as before centralised banking local banks issued their own bank notes. In the normal course of events, few people went to the banks to exchange their notes for gold and the system worked quite well. However, occasionally, through outside events, too many people would want to exchange their notes for gold at once.
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Then the whole scam was exposed. There would not be enough gold to cover all the notes, banks would go out of business and people would lose all their savings.
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In order to prevent this, the bankers decided not to stop fractional reserve lending but to centralise the banking system in the hope that bank runs would be prevented by increasing the scale of their operations.
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This happened most notably in the United States. The bankers tried and failed in the 1880s (I think) to create the Bank of America, modelled on the Bank of England (which was created in around 1695 when Scottish businessman William Patterson and his partners formed a private company to lend the king £2,000,000 to rebuild his navy). The people rejected the idea, being more savvy about such things than we are today. The Bank of America, a private bank owned by domestic and European bankers) did come into existence for a while but was eventually abolished by President Andrew Jackson, who ran for his second term of office on the slogan "Jackson and no Bank."
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The bankers had been foiled but not defeated. In about 1908, several of the richest bankers in the world, including JP Morgan and others whose names escape me for the moment; Rockerfeller, Rothschild and the like, met aboard the private train carriage of a Senator Aldritch. They repaired to an exclusive private club on Jekyl Island, off the coast of Georgia, I think. There they wrote legislation to recreate the Bank of America, using recent bank runs as an excuse to argue for its necessity. Sanator Aldritch proposed the legislation and it was voted down.
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The bankers, foiled again, engineered more bank runs and re-wrote the legislation. They picked a more popular, more trusted politician (whose name again escapes me) to re-present the legislation, this time calling it the Federal Reserve Act and containing the provision that this entity would assume the right to issue the nation's currency. Thus it was that, in around 1915, the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank was born and fractional reserve lending really began to take off. So much so that it became increasingly difficult to justify the sheer scale of lending against the miniscule amount of gold owned by the banks. So, again instead of ditching the fractional reserve system, the Gold Standard was abandoned, which really took the brakes off.
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Cut to recent times and the fractional reserve system has got too big. Only around 3% of money is backed by anything tangible. Repaying all the false debt, and the interest too, becomes impossible. So, again, instead of abandoning the fractional reserve lending system, the bankers come up with quantitive easing. Basically, this is how it works:
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The banks don't have enough money to keep circulating around the economy, so they go to the "government" with this problem. "If we stop circulating money, the economy will collapse and everyone will starve." The "government" is persuaded to print bonds, which are promises to use your taxes to pay back debts, and sell them to the banks. The banks create money out of nothing to purchase these bonds and then the government gives that money back to the banks to use to "boulster the economy."
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But the banks do not use this money in that way. If they lent it to the public as loans and mortgages and suchlike, they'd have to wait years for a return. It makes more sense to them to keep it in savings accounts, earning a tiny bit of "safe" interest. Thus, QE does not work and the banks go back to the "government" again with the same deal. It is a disgusting, circular process which exists outside society and the economy as a whole. As a consequence of this madness, which is based on a fundamental fraud, remember, there are children as yet unborn who are in debt. They are leveraging our very future to enrich themselves and hide the central fraud - or flaw, if you want to be kind.
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That's how banking works.

[TordelBack]

Is it fraud if all parties are aware of the situation, as has surely been the case for some time now?

[The Legendary Shark]

That's a damned good question, Tordels. I can believe that most people, even most politicians, don't realise what fractional reserve lending is. The whole industry of banking is swathed in complex language and obfuscating gobbledegook, making it seem next to impenetrable. Experts on loans, taxation, regulations and so on are extremely knowledgeable about their own areas but tend not to look at the basics.
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I find it difficult to believe, however, that not one politician understands how it works at heart. The problem is that when one tries to explain the simplicity of the core problem it simply seems too simple.

[IAMTHESYSTEM]

Jeremy Corbyn elected as head of the Labour Party.

[Old Tankie]

Absolutely wonderful.

[IAMTHESYSTEM]

Absolutely wonderful.

I knew you'd say that!

[Steven Denton]

Jeremy Corbyn elected as head of the Labour Party.

Well now, this is going to be interesting.

[Tjm86]

Reed has just posted his resignation letter ( as shadow health minister ) on Twitter.  Reading it he comes across as a narcissist of the highest order.  Releasing it just as Corbyn is announced speaks volumes for the guy.  My thing is though, that this election campaign has really shown exactly how great a divide there now is between the general party membership and the Westminster party.  I'm not completely convinced that Corbyn is the best man to lead the party but he is emblematic of the need to reinvigorate debate about what the party should stand for and what it should be working towards. 

Blair drove the party off the ideological abyss and into the morass of self serving, power hungry politics.  The current generation of politicians really do not seem to understand the concept of service any more, except as an obligation on the part of others.  Reed really does seem to epitomise this mindset.

Mr Denton, I would agree with you wholeheartedly.  This is going to be very interesting.  Unfortunately if Reed is indicative of the future then we are all well and truly screwed.  The Tories will achieve in a very short space of time everything that they have been trying to.  Who was it that said "don't fall ill, don't grow old, don't grow needy?"

[Hawkmumbler]

Jeremy Corbyn elected as head of the Labour Party.

'Grabs popcorn'

Now to await the Daily Fail vitriol...

[Spikes]

Yes, wonderful.
And if im reading Old Tankie correctly, we both think so for different reasons.


A shake up was desperately needed. And for those leaving, I tempted to say 'good riddance'.

[JPMaybe]

Ah, JPM, you do make me sad. You have nothing to offer but vitriol with glitter in it. You think the world is perfect as it is and there's no need to change any of it, no point even trying, no point even thinking about it. You have zero faith in or trust of humanity and think the natural state of mankind is enslavement to others, living on our knees - and you're so consumed by your own anger that you can't even conceive of a world beyond one where everyone buttfucks everyone else for whatever they can get. You offer no solutions beyond "more of the same please, Master." I pity you, really. No, that's not entirely true. I pity the world that has people like you in it. People who refuse to turn their not inconsiderable intellects towards improving the world and instead choose to pour eloquent shit all over it and any ideas for improvement.

Ugh, yet again, that's the problem with debating you.  Anyone who doesn't agree with the nature of your desired changes doesn't want any change at all, so you can characterise them as witless servants of the status quo.  As I've said before, and as you know, I'm a republican and a socialist, leaning towards left-libertarianism for social issues, so you know that accusing me of not wanting any change is utterly, demonstrably false.  I could give you a loooong list: I want workers' co-ops and full scale democratic reform; complete abolition of drug laws and for drug-addiction to be treated as a sickness not a crime.  I don't even think all your ideas are completely off kilter- Jez Corbyn has, as you know, proposed something very similar to your favoured means of money production (with a state to actually back it up so it means a damn thing, however).

So really you can take your pity and constant, blatant strawmanning and misrepresentation of people who don't agree with your brand of hopelessly naive anarcho capitalism, and stick it.

[Professor Bear]

59% percent of the vote, with 50% of the Labour members's vote - that is not only a clear mandate from Labour supporters, but from its membership, thus scuppering any coups or internal resistance attempts before they've even started - they could still happen, of course, but the public will see it as little more than the right wing of the party trying to seize control and go against the wishes of the electorate.
The wind has drastically changed in the Labour party - even Tony Jesus Blair Christ only got 57% percent of the vote when he descended from Heaven upon a blanket of doves as a choir of angels wept in undisguised joy as he took the reins of the party in 1997.  Of course, I can't quite shake the feeling that what's really won this is the complacency of the right, both inside Labour and in the media, so long may their "a Corbyn win is a victory for us" crowing continue - hopefully for the next five years at least.

[JPMaybe]

Yeah, I'm well chuffed by the result, but terribly apprehensive as well.  This whole thing has revealed such a gulf between the parliamentary LP and the party rank-and-file that I worry terribly that he'll be paralysed by the Blairites.