It is the way of all movements, no matter how well-intentioned, to pass over time into self-serving corruption. Many years ago it was realised that without a common medium of exchange, the melon farmer would only be able to get shoes from a cobbler who wanted melons. Over time this basic concept of money as a necessary service for the functioning of society has too passed into self-serving corruption.
Here in the UK, at the Conservative Party Conference, Prime Minister David Cameron states that the only way out of a debt crisis is to pay off our debts. According to his speechwriters, the way for the UK to prosper is for households to pay off their credit cards and their overdrafts. How inspiring a message to the people – in this time of austerity and crisis, of uncertainty, the best idea our government has is that you should pay off debts to people who pay themselves in excess of 200 times the average national wage.
In Greece, another general strike is crippling the country. Riot police in faceless helmets stride the battlefield of central Athens, gassing and clubbing people who are their fellows in defence of an establishment which is cutting police wages and benefits as well.
The howling winds have quieted for the moment in Portugal and Italy, as Greece is watched closely by bankers and governments alike for signs of what is to come.
Meanwhile, for the first time in at least a generation, protesters have gathered in and around Wall Street, fed up with the blatant unwillingness of their government to crack down on the financial terrorism which is sweeping the globe from the nerve centre of lower Manhattan. This terrorism, at the root, is based on a Big Lie.
The clue to the Big Lie is in David Cameron’s speech just as it is in the false concern of the troika now watching Greece implode. The Big Lie is this: the debt can be repaid. Everything else about this situation, from the endless talk of bailouts and tranches to the austerity measures and “fiscal responsibility” of government ministers, is skin on baloney.
Austerity will never work. Bailouts and tranches will never work. Less benefits, less welfare, lower or later pensions will never work. The debt can never be repaid.
Since the ability to do work in this kind of system is based on the availability of money, and since money comes into existence through the creation of debt, there is less and less money in the system as the debt is repaid, meaning the only way to get more money into the system is to take out more debt. David Cameron has either been very badly advised or he is fronting for the worst kind of criminal fraud.
There are many ways in which financial wizards can explain this, but underneath the abstractions and models of the economic jiggery-pokery is the heart of the Big Lie:
– Money is created as debt by the banks.
– The money which is created is only the principal of the loan and not the interest owed on the debt.
– Therefore there will never be, under these conditions, enough money in the system to pay off the debt.
The bank creates £100 when I promise to pay it back at 5%, but in order to pay back £105, I have to get the extra £5 from somewhere else, because the bank did not create it. That £5 can only be gotten at the expense of someone else who also needs it. As I struggle to get that £5 at the expense of my fellows in society, the bank sits back and waits for the interest. Their only competition, at the upper level of this game, is not for money but for how much more money they can make than the other banks. In the trenches, it is me who is struggling to make money or not. The bank will never have that struggle under the current system. Why? The banks have an enforcer.
Who bestrides the world, making it safe for capital and enterprise, ensuring financial stability? The IMF. The IMF’s highest decision-making body is the Board of Governors. The Board of Governors is comprised of representatives from all the member-states, usually either the finance minister or the governor of the central bank. So as the IMF imposes rules and conditions on Greece, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister sits on the governing board of the IMF, ringing in the changes. Where does the IMF get its funding from? The member-states. So Greece is paying for the IMF to impose rules on it, and the finance minister of Greece is voting for the rules against the will of the people. This privilege cost Greece €1.3 billion last year alone.
In the UK, Parliament just voted to almost double the British contribution to the IMF. Why are the people of the world paying for the privilege of having rules imposed on them by an unelected extranational body? This article from an Irish perspective has some good commentary on this.
If this seems like a dizzying game of three-card monte, good. It is. Like three-card monte, the game is rigged.
On Wall Street right now, there are people trying to force the reforming of the government whose founding document guarantees the people the right to remove a government that has failed them. In Europe, the public is groaning under the weight of the unpayable debt mountain they have been forced to shoulder. There is talk of the euro fracturing as a currency or even the EU splitting up. There is the usual murmur about “instability”, “capital flight” and even war. However far-fetched these events may seem in our modern milieu, they are all possible and in some cases inevitable if the Big Lie is not publicly exposed and eradicated.
The only way to do that is to demolish the founding principle of the Big Lie, which is that money is a thing. Money is not a thing. It does not exist. It cannot be created, or destroyed, in any truly meaningful sense. Money is a service. It is a proxy for the energy involved in doing work.
The melon farmer needs shoes even if the cobbler doesn’t want melons. As long as the money holds commonly agreed value as a medium of exchange, the service of money can be provided. The cobbler knows that he can exchange the money for a hat even if the hatter doesn’t want shoes, and so forth. This is what money is for – it is a public service, not a thing to be created from nothing and accumulated by the few.
As long as money is a thing, it will be created by those who wish to manipulate it and accumulated by those who wish to use it to give them power over those with less of it. The time has come for money to be reinstated as a public service, a commonly agreed medium of exchange coined and circulated by the elected representatives of the people in order to facilitate the true productive work and wellbeing of the people themselves.
Let the banks and the politicians who shill for them pass into irrelevance and obsolescence. We do not need their games or their rationalisations. We must repudiate the Big Lie if we are to survive as a society of free individuals in community with shared aspirations. Otherwise, we will suffer the depredations of war and fear until we are all slaves to the debt which cannot be repaid, to the thing which is not a thing, to the substance and consequence of the Big Lie.
In Africa there is a proverb: “When two elephants fight, it is the grass which gets trampled.”
It is time for the grass to fight back.
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