The Political Thread

[JOE SOAP]

Lady Thatcher certainly made mistakes in her administration (the Anglo-Irish Agreement easily the worst one), but her economic record stands by itself, what was Britain's economic health like in 1979 and what was it in 1990 when she stepped aside (after being knifed in the back by her cabinet, the b**tards!), and, lastly (no cheering in the aisles there), do I feel government has long held back industrialists and financiers with "damned state intervention", the answer is no, you need SOME amount of regulation to prevent exploitation and/or fraud, a good example being Canada, who were spared the worst of the credit crunch as they had strict banking regulations on the buying and selling of junk bonds and reckless mortgage-backed securities, so that proved to be a good thing, certainly for them.

There are no do-overs or quick take-backs in strategic economic policy, so Krugman's argument- that drastically changing course causes more lasting problems than the pressing exigencies it appears to address- has some bearing on the question of how to prevent our current stagnation turning into an irreversible decline.

I believe that's inevitable. It's how we respond to that inevitability that matters most.

Consider how world leaders have reacted to the ongoing implosion of the global economy, or any recent crisis you name: in each case, it's a broken record sequence of understanding the problem, trying to manage appearances, getting caught flat-footed by events, and struggling to load the blame for another round of failures onto anybody within reach. Rinse and repeat a few times and even the most die-hard of the status quo will be begging for some one who can demonstrate leadership. A dangerous time if you know history. Beware any revitalisation movements.



Growth is over, we over-shot our resource base, you can't get back from that. This is the basic lesson of history being ignored. Notions of the installation of a true free-market at this stage are laughable, the good times are over. Basic life-sustainability and less energy reliant infrastructure should be our main concern and unfortunately the money to do that still travels upwards for ever more useless speculation and uncertain investment strangling any chance at sustaining functional economies; another repeat of what happened before the great crash(es). Power makes people weak and that weakness leads to bad decisions for the rest of us.


Thatcher and Reagan ushered in an era of the greatest squandering of resources when they embraced short term politics at the expense of realistic preparations for the future. As result, we no longer have the resource base needed to stave off the normal trajectory of a society that overshoots its ecological limits - a trajectory of decline and fall. We need to learn how to live differently and probably without the help of our leaders.

[Frank]

I believe (decline is) inevitable. It's how we respond to that inevitability that matters most.

Consider how world leaders have reacted to the ongoing implosion of the global economy, or any recent crisis you name: in each case, it's a broken record sequence of understanding the problem, trying to manage appearances, getting caught flat-footed by events, and struggling to load the blame for another round of failures onto anybody within reach. Rinse and repeat a few times and even the most die-hard of the status quo will be begging for some one who can demonstrate leadership. A dangerous time if you know history. Beware any revitalisation movements.

You can't subvert Godwin's law with allusion. Mods, I must ask this court for a ruling.

Growth is over, we over-shot our resource base, you can't get back from that. This is the basic lesson of history being ignored. Notions of the installation of a true free-market at this stage are laughable, the good times are over. Basic life-sustainability and less energy reliant infrastructure should be our main concern ... We need to learn how to live differently and probably without the help of our leaders.

The aspiration toward eternal growth was the most easily falsifiable fantasy peddled by Western governments in the last forty years. You only have to consider the underpinnings of that concept, and how it could be achieved- given a finite world with finite resources- to see that it leads to something resembling the artificial conflicts between the two entrenched trading blocks of Eurasia and Oceania in 1984.

The push towards everlasting, ever-increasing growth is a corollary of the political system we've allowed to develop. Under our present electoral system, if one party want to wrest power from another, they have to convince the voter that (A) the incumbents have got it wrong, and (B) they can offer something better. The proposition that you should vote for a party who promise to do much the same as their opponents, but manage resources and streamline administration to increase efficiency, is never going to be the vote winner that offering to take less from you in tax and increase the easy availability of debt has proven for successive goverments.

Before we were seduced by the idea that replacing your telly every few years was more important than fixing your teeth or securing a decent pension, politics was the dry sexless preserve of the laughably uncool technocrat. We get the goverments and the politicians we (collectively) deserve, and we've only got ourselves to blame when a series of hucksters and wideboys flog us either a load of old rope, a pig in a poke, or down the figuratively-fucking-cliched river.

None of the pressing issues jostling with the results show of BGT for our attention are so complex that they require a special breed of professional politicians to understand them or balance the importance of their sometimes competing demands. No-one who can hold thirty-odd years of Dredd continuity in their heads needs more than a few hours study to be able to judge whether the choices presented to us by the political classes are real solutions to the problems that really matter, or the kind of ponzi economics that'll deliver us into the hands of the kind of people alluded to by Soap.

[The Legendary Shark]

If you want to know how to get our governments out from under the bankers and back into the hands of the people, just have a look at what Iceland did to try and solve its financial crisis.

The only way we can begin to make progress both socially and economically is to remove the bankers' control of our governments and our lives.

"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ...The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."  Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild.

[JOE SOAP]

Under our present electoral system, if one party want to wrest power from another, they have to convince the voter that (A) the incumbents have got it wrong, and (B) they can offer something better. The proposition that you should vote for a party who promise to do much the same as their opponents, but manage resources and streamline administration to increase efficiency, is never going to be the vote winner that offering to take less from you in tax and increase the easy availability of debt has proven for successive goverments.

Same situation round the same time Socrates was murdered after the coup in ancient Athens before it all came apart: a corrupt two party system were people only voted on issues.

[JOE SOAP]

If you want to know how to get our governments out from under the bankers and back into the hands of the people, just have a look at what Iceland did to try and solve its financial crisis.

The only way we can begin to make progress both socially and economically is to remove the bankers' control of our governments and our lives.

"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ...The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."  Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild.

It's the progress myth bit we have to dump, the unrealistic promise of a better, more comfortable and easy future with ever growing prosperity ahead but no reduction in living standards or suffering (and nowadays no damage to the environment) is what they've been selling us for 200 years since the industrial revolution. Only decency and common sense can crack that nut.


The rich will always have their money and their armies and power but it'll be harder to maintain with dwindling resources and overstretch; expect them to break-away or control their own fiefdoms and resources -the Bush family didn't buy a large province of Paraguay to build flats on- so they can maintain maximum comfort while the rest of us go about living.

[JOE SOAP]

None of the pressing issues jostling with the results show of BGT for our attention are so complex that they require a special breed of professional politicians to understand them or balance the importance of their sometimes competing demands. No-one who can hold thirty-odd years of Dredd continuity in their heads needs more than a few hours study to be able to judge whether the choices presented to us by the political classes are real solutions to the problems that really matter, or the kind of ponzi economics that'll deliver us into the hands of the kind of people alluded to by Soap.

Where there's a problem there's a solution but our culture, political and popular, does not display the conviction nor the will to solve these problems, we're 5 years into this depression -after a prelude of a 30 year splurge and inflation- and nothing's changed. You can't break the holding pattern narrative of promised linear progress without properly facing the reality of the situtation and do you think a culture that thrives on X-Factor is willing to consider the notion of one day not having that reactive/emotional crutch to rely on, do you think any politician will ever tell them that?

[Frank]

If you want to know how to get our governments out from under the bankers and back into the hands of the people, just have a look at what Iceland did to try and solve its financial crisis.

The only way we can begin to make progress both socially and economically is to remove the bankers' control of our governments and our lives.

"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ...The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."  Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild.

I certainly don't hold any grudge against either spectacularly wealthy individuals or institutions, but the only way to save them from the kind of inevitable and ruinous hubris your quote embodies is to mitigate against the accumulation of such obscene sums by individuals or corporations.

To be fair to the pointlessly rich, many of them (Carnegie being the most obvious example) have already tried their best to redistribute their useless billions more equitably through their personal efforts, but that's never going to have the same effect as the properly co-ordinated and impartially regulated operations of the institutions of democratically elected goverments.

The same principle I mentioned with reference to governmental power holds true here as well, though; the further removed from the centre of power (in this case financial power) you happen to be, the less say you tend to have in decision making. If the solution to the democratic deficit that obviously pertains today is to de-centralise and devolve decision making out toward individuals, community groups and local authorities; then the same holds true for the de-centralising of wealth away from concentration in the hands of either a single individual or privately owned, unaccountable institutions.

There's a finite supply of wealth and resources, seeing them distributed more equitably doesn't make anyone any better or worse off.

[The Legendary Shark]

The aspiration toward eternal growth was the most easily falsifiable fantasy peddled by Western governments in the last forty years.

The push towards everlasting, ever-increasing growth is a corollary of the political system we've allowed to develop.

Under the current system of privately controlled debt-money creation, growth and inflation are both vital and unavoidable.

When a government needs money it prints bonds and gilts, which are basically I.O.U.s with fancy names. If a government needed £100, it would print a bond worth £110 and sell it to a bank (via the Bank of England) for £100 (or probably nearer £90 once the bank's finished adding charges and whatnot). Basically, the government is selling £90 for £110. Thus, there will always be a shortfall built-in. (This is a simplified example, in reality it's wreathed in technospeak and legalese to obscure this fundamental scam.) When the bond matures, the bank sells it back to the government for £110 (or probably nearer £120 once the bank's finished adding interest and whatnot) - every penny of which which comes from your taxes.

The bank that buys the £100 bond doesn't have the whole £100 available to purchase this bond, so it uses say £10 of 'real' money from its reserves and the other £90 it creates from nothing, most likely electronically. Just think about that for a minute. I wish I could lend non-existant money to governments and people at interest, I could make fortunes.

This means that for every £90 the government borrows, it has to pay back up to £120.

This is what drives inflation, for in order for the government to pay back the original £90 plus the £30 shortfall, it must raise taxes and find new ones and also make economies across all services. This is the major push behind the drive for growth - if the economy doesn't continually grow then the £30 shortfall becomes £31, then £32 and so on.

This banking scam is behind a huge chunk of the world's problems - from the false overpopulation story to the Global Warming myth (which has been politicised beyond all reason as an excuse to impose carbon taxes so that the world's governments can pay off their national debts and shortfalls) and from an overstretched NHS to crumbling roads.

The solution is, at its core, very simple. If your government needs £100, it creates £100. It then spends this into society with no need for interest or even for it all to be repaid. (And repaid to whom, by the way? Money, like water, is essential to society and therefore its creation and control belongs to society, not private individuals.) Taxes would under this system be very low and used as a pressure valve to keep the amount of money in the system at any one time at optimum levels so that nobody has too much and nobody has too little. The economy would boom due to cheap or virtually interest-free business loans that can be written-off with a minimal effect on the local or national economy. Which also means that people who give business a go and then legitimately fail don't end up losing their houses as well.

Under the current private-money system we use, our ship of state is sinking. The politicians, God loves 'em if we don't, are just as misinformed as the rest of society on this issue and are arguing over which type of bucket is best for bailing the ship out rather than plugging the hole in the hull.

[Frank]

The solution is, at its core, very simple. If your government needs £100, it creates £100. It then spends this into society with no need for interest or even for it all to be repaid. (And repaid to whom, by the way? Money, like water, is essential to society and therefore its creation and control belongs to society, not private individuals).

That money doesn't need to be repaid because it never existed in the first place.

My local authority's in a precarious position because they were gullible enough to grasp the illusory investment opportunities dangled in front of them by Landsbanki. Why should I be obliged to make real the entirely imaginary riches described to them by the fiction department of the Bank of Bjork?

At least the citizens of Reykjavík had the good sense to stick a full stop at the end of the international finance community's evolving free-form narrative riff on Jack and the Beanstalk.

[JOE SOAP]

Hang on and I'll write you some change.

[Frank]

Hang on and I'll write you some change.

Heh!

If the ability to write a load of nonsense translated into earthly riches, my personal harem of amazonian bodyguards would be holding Airwolf in a steady hover while I pished through the windows of your lifesize Disney Princess castle right now, Soap.

[The Legendary Shark]

Heh, wasn't Seagoon always trying to buy things/bribe people with drawings and photographs of five pound notes?

"Wait a minute... the five pound note in this photograph... It's a forgery!"

[Ancient Otter]

I'm not sure we should be looking at Canada as a model of stability - they are the currently the worlds biggest exporter of oil to the USA, at a very heavy environmental cost from tar and oil sands.

[Frank]

I'm not sure we should be looking at Canada as a model of stability - they are the currently the worlds biggest exporter of oil to the USA, at a very heavy environmental cost from tar and oil sands.

Canada's like the Mrs Gunderson of the international community. If even they're complicit in evil, we're all damned.

[JOE SOAP]

I'm not sure we should be looking at Canada as a model of stability - they are the currently the worlds biggest exporter of oil to the USA, at a very heavy environmental cost from tar and oil sands.

It'll only last about 15 years anyway.