The Political Thread

[Steven Denton]

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.

I seem to remember when banks first started using paper money, when they needed more they just printed more which caused a few crashes (a run on the back having to exchange what ever the paper money is issued against outstrips liquidity causing a crash) and I'm pretty sure when stock exchanges first opened the same kind of thing happened. fortunes being made and lost every day, company's shooting up in value then going bust. I can't remember the program I watched but the pattern of boom and crash was almost comical. The expansion into a global economy appears to me to be causing a re-peat of this pattern.

I interoperate this controlled chaos in a different way to you, as do many others. But that's not to say I don't find your view here interesting.  it's not that people can't see how it works, it not that no politician can see what you can see, it's most likely that people are interpreting things differently.

In this post you didn't accuse people who disagree with you of worshiping the false god of government, you didn't make dodgy analogies followed by moral appeal and I haven't done any fact checking but everything seems perfectly plausible so as a reader I'm perfectly happy to differ to your knowledge without a trip to Google. all of these things please me and my 'vitriol'

[TordelBack]

The Corbyn victory is fascinating stuff alright, hell of a media-based war coming: hope it isn't as one sided as I fear it will be. Speaking as an outsider, there hasn't been anything as immediately engaging in British internal party politics since John Smith.

[Steven Denton]

The Corbyn victory is fascinating stuff alright, hell of a media-based war coming: hope it isn't as one sided as I fear it will be. Speaking as an outsider, there hasn't been anything as immediately engaging in British internal party politics since John Smith.

Watching the Tory's under IDS was entertaining.

I give Corbyn 18 months before his first leadership challenge.

[Professor Bear]

The "upcoming media war" will be very interesting, because it will basically be the last chance for old media to prove they can take control of new media narratives.  They proved they were completely out of touch during the Labour leadership campaign, to the point that most think "oh no, they mustn't even have started yet" - except they have, it's just that they're a victim of an alternate narrative they created and which is now ingrained: the media cannot be trusted to tell the truth about Jeremy Corbyn.
I wouldn't underestimate the damage to the Guardian's reputation from their coverage, much as I wouldn't the damage to the BBC's after their Panorama episode about Corbyn was outed by one of their own staff members as being specifically commissioned as a "hatchet job", and the BBC have now refused to say how many complaints they received about it, citing that the complaint procedure was - I shit you not - inflitrated by entryists.

[Steven Denton]

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.

His least charming trait is the way he's recently taken to ascribing a series of beliefs to people who disagrees with him and then admonishing them for those beliefs. especially given his repeated assertion that he doesn't have any authority over anybody else.

I think that's what's wound me up recently, TSL has gone from a man politely but firmly refusing all arguments to the country of his ideas to a fairly rude crank who thinks nothing of calling you a foolish deluded religious fanatic for challenging him and will add the implied support of any number of transgressions (such as school yard bully or Nazi) to your list of offences for your troubles.

[The Legendary Shark]

"And I'm sorry for the name-calling. I feel bad about that now and wish I'd been more level-headed."

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Guess you missed that.

[Frank]

The Corbyn victory is fascinating stuff alright, hell of a media-based war coming: hope it isn't as one sided as I fear it will be. Speaking as an outsider, there hasn't been anything as immediately engaging in British internal party politics since John Smith.

Watching the Tory's under IDS was entertaining. I give Corbyn 18 months before his first leadership challenge.

I think they have to let this one play out, as they did with Miliband. If Corbyn crashes and burns at a general election in anything like as spectacular a fashion as Miliband did, the argument for that style of presentation is as dead as New Labour is after the 2015 fiasco.

Like you say, though, it'll be a laugh.

[ZenArcade]

Can't but agree with JP. Z

[CrazyFoxMachine]

I thought it was strange personally that given the news today I was like "I have to get on the political thread". You guys, despite your disparate views and multitudinous conflicts are the debate for me.

I trust ye. Ye of the cynical mind and the progbrain. Who have known odd shit.

Maybe find comfort or don't that the young (relatively) mind seeks your council. Madness is to come, and we are finally at the mercy of own lack of experience. Everything is new.

[Jimmy Baker's Assistant]

I think Corbyn is essentially going to have to purge the New Labour refuseniks who won't serve in his shadow cabinet.

It's not very inclusive,but those people are going to be chomping at the bit to depose him the second his honeymoon-period wears off. Besides, given they don't appear to share any particular beliefs with the Labour membership I suspect they're only in the Labour Party because it gives them a shot at achieving power and influence. Politicians like that have a natural home elsewhere. A blue home.

[Steven Denton]

I have seen a few people say 'now the Tory's have no credible opposition they will really cut loose.' That kind of backwards fuckup ant-logic fails to take into account that Labour weren't just a poor opposition they had turned into actively no opposition at all. And a government that's opposed at every turn finds it a lot harder to achieve anything. Labour doesn't even have to win to effect change they just have to show that there is a large voice for change in the country.

The point of a political party isn't to get power at any cost it's to represent a section of society. If you represent the largest section* (by convincing them though argument) then you are end up in charge.

Also the other 3 candidates were less use then obviously unelectable Ed Miliband.

*those who don't vote are not represented so although they number in the Millions, without data, they may in fact be many extremely small groups.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

I trust ye. Ye of the cynical mind and the progbrain. Who have known odd shit.

...do I win an award for least aggressive heavily drunkpost? lol 

[Jim_Campbell]

The point of a political party isn't to get power at any cost it's to represent a section of society. If you represent the largest section* (by convincing them though argument) then you are end up in charge.

This. Fucking THIS.

At some point in the last twenty years, the main political parties decided that rather than winning an argument, it was possible to achieve power by gaming the system. A parliamentary majority can be engineered from a tiny number of voters in a relatively small number of seats, so it was decided that the best tactic was to stand on the blandest, most focus-group friendly platform of policies imaginable (so as not to spook the 'herd') and target effort on the key marginals.

As a result, all three of the former main political parties ended up with largely interchangeable neo-lib platforms, distinguished only by a bit of window-dressing as a sop to their core demographics.

Enough of that. Leadership means having a coherent philosophy and arguing it well. You don't follow public opinion by worrying about the focus groups, you make a fucking argument and try to move public opinion.

Edit: as an aside to the above, I'm unclear why Nigel Farage's (supposed) separation from the bland, focus-group-defined political pack is often cited as one of his political advantages, but is somehow a crippling weakness in Corbyn.

Cheers

Jim

[Steven Denton]

I trust ye. Ye of the cynical mind and the progbrain. Who have known odd shit.

...do I win an award for least aggressive heavily drunkpost? lol 

Yes, Have a cider to celebrate.

[The Legendary Shark]

I just heard a quote by British playwright, William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty." It seems to me that this sentiment could be applied equally well to politics. (Not a criticism, an observation.)