Showing posts with label banks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label banks. Show all posts

Thursday, April 18, 2013

The looming death of capitalism and the population explosion?


During my extreme left wing era (which probably lasted about two years until I realised they were exactly the same as the extreme right wing, but with a different colour) I used to hold the opinion that people should be marching for the right NOT to work. Work, in my emerging mind, was a form of slavery in which we were beholden to the slave masters; the capitalists.
Strangely enough, that idea of mine, (or did I read it somewhere in one of the plethora of left wing books and journals that I read, or even in the realm of science fiction, of which I was and still am, a huge fan? I'm not too sure.) has evolved into an idea that, at sometime in the future, we won't need to work as the mechanisation of the workplace will be doing the work for us.
There are now tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people who will never be in continuous employment during their lifetime, because of mechanisation. Millions of people have been thrown out of work because of computers. Many of the younger people reading this will not have experience of the armies of clerks that were needed to get the paperwork done. They have mostly all gone. They will not remember the huge swathes of the population who used to work in factories; robots have taken over their monotonous jobs. Times have changed. We, as a global society, do not need all these workers.
So what do we do with all of those people who are excess to requirements? In the past that question didn't arise because we lost so many people through disease, famine and wars that we needed the 'working and middle classes' to keep producing children to fill the gaps left by their premature deaths. The advance in medicine, new surgical techniques, better food production and treaties put paid to this sort of levelling. The advances in technology have put paid to the jobs which have only exasperated the situation. Do we then hold back medical care for sections of the population with the hope that more people will die off? Do we increase global tensions to the extent that massive wars take place again? Maybe we have a combination of both? We cannot un-invent technology so something will have to be done, mostly in first and second world countries, to address this situation. Or do we really need to?
The global society we live in now makes this a problem solely because we live in a global society of capitalisation and finance. Capitalism is not the cure; it is the problem. As a species we can feed, house, educate and give medical care to all the peoples of this small planet while still supporting the advancement of technology. So what is stopping us from doing that? The answer, sadly, is money. Take money out of the equation and there is no 'problem'. Let us remember that 'money' is just the authority to get something done. Money is the lubricant to enable the society to function. Take away the 'society' and we don't need the money. Ironically, the late Margaret Thatcher was right (I paraphrase) when she said that: 'There is no such things as society' but not in the terms that she envisioned. 'There are only people'.
Yet, if we do not feed, house, educate and give medical care to those people who will, increasingly, be unemployable then we will have a breakdown of order. We will have riots and disorder breaking out all over the world. That is not capitalism, which the leaders of this planet espouse, it is, instead, a form of communism. Remember that this is not just affecting the great unwashed of the 'working classes' but, increasingly, the aspirational 'middle classes'. How many university graduates are unemployed, in their chosen profession, looking for work with little prospect of gaining employment in their chosen field? That figure will only increase as technology takes large bites out of their prospective employment as it has already done with the 'working classes'?
There are troubled times ahead and, until we accept the unthinkable, the potential for disorder will only increase. Capitalism will have to go. It has no future within a peaceful society. Capitalism, in the near future, will not save us, it will destroy us.

Monday, January 2, 2012

The con of money


According to all the financial forecasts the western economy is in the deep poo poos because of a crises which started in the USA's banking industry; but is it? The first thing to realise is that money, nowadays, does not exist. To put it simple terms money is just the ability to give someone/institution the authority to do something, whatever that may be. Money doesn't actually do anything. You can't use money to build a house, or eat it. Ah, you say, but try and build a house without money. Really? Then how did we build houses before there was money? In the past houses/temples/granaries and all sorts of buildings were built because some big chief told his minions to do it. The minions would then use their slaves to do the manual work. No money was exchanged because there was no money. In the past, before there was money, services and commodities were traded in exchange for work and this worked reasonably well if you had a big enough army to stop your neighbours from stealing your service workers, slaves and commodities.
So what went wrong? The simple answer was banks which arose when the big chief couldn't afford the commodities needed to authorise his service workers to do the job he wanted them to do, and that big chief wasn't strong enough to go and steal what he wanted off his neighbours. So as system was invented where authority was subsumed to the idea of a ephemeral authority in which precious metals were used instead of commodities. This worked fairly well until it got to the stage where it started to become inconvenient to carry around kilos of precious metals to authorise work. Then someone came up with the idea that we can give precious metal coins in exchange for the services required until people started to nibble away at those coins until the value of the precious metal coins were verging on being worthless [which is why coins have milled edges nowadays] and the places that minted those coins were ordered to put less and less precious metals in those coins until the coins themselves were virtually worthless as a precious metal coin. Henry VIII of England did this and seriously undervalued the English gold coin of the time which was the real reason why he attacked the Catholic churches and monasteries in England to get to the wealth that they held. later on the big chiefs were forced into keeping masses of precious metals to prop up the value of their worthless coins. Why didn't they just put more precious metals in their coins? Because the big chiefs wanted to keep hold of the precious metal in case they needed it. That way they could always renege on their promise to back up the value of their coins. Does that ring a bell?
This gold standard began to be unwieldy, as gold still had to shipped between countries so they came up with another idea which was to issue promissory notes instead of precious metal [which had very little precious metals in them] coins. This idea was certainly a step forward as one could carry around a huge amount of precious metals in the form of a note, but this depended on the big chief of that country being able to back it up with the precious metals that everyone seemed to accept as an authority to give or receive services and commodities. So they came up with another idea because a country that has a huge mineral reserves of precious metals, like Russia and South Africa, can have a too big a say in how the financial systems work. Look what happened to Spain when it started to bring back from the Americas all those precious metals that they had stolen from the indigenous populations. Dump too much precious metals onto the market and the idea of precious metals as an authority to give services slumps. So, they dumped the gold standard and came up with the idea of using the money available in the country as a standard of the worth of the country, but, hold on, what backs up the authority of the big chief to say that his country's monetary worth is what he says it is? The answer is that we have to take their word for that and the monetary value of their currency is dependent , not upon the amount of precious metals that that country has in its bank, but on their word alone.
So, what has this got to do with today's banking crises? Well, let's look at the collapse of the banks in the USA. Remember when they said that the collapse of the banking industry was due to lending money to Americans to buy houses and those people who took out the mortgages couldn't afford to pay it? But the USA debt amounted to something like $15 trillion. That's $15,000,000,000,000 divided by the total population of the USA which equates to approx. $48,000 for every man, woman and child in the USA. But only 58% of the USA's population is over 18 therefore that figure now rises to approx. $83,000 for every man and woman in the USA. If you then assume that only one third actually own a house [and I'm being conservative here] then that figure then increases to approx. $250,000. Do you begin to see how stupid their excuse was?
Now let's look at the military expenditure of the USA. In 2010 their budget expenditure was approx. $800 billion. remember that's every year and we have to take their word for it that this is full figure; that's £0.8 trillion.
Now when you look at the growth of the far eastern countries economies and the drop of USA exports and the huge rise in imports you begin to see why the USA is in such a mess. So, how do they balance the budget? Easy, you rip off the rest of the banking world, with the help of the bankers themselves and the big chiefs in the countries that back your world police policy. Oh, they will say: "but you haven't taken into account M0, M1,M2 and M3 and all the other complicated systems that are in place in the anglo-saxon financial world?" It's rubbish! This was a blatant rip off to pay off the USA's debt and exactly the same happened over here in the UK. The UK banks have ripped us off as well and we are paying for it through higher taxes and mass unemployment.