The entire purpose of this blog is to ask you to think outside the box. It therefore cuts across the lines of dogma of any group, and is formed purely by my own independent thought. As I have frequently stated, if anybody agrees with every point I make, something is wrong.
This is going to annoy both left on Greece and right on banks, and my own party on the SNP and Labour. Here goes.
The citizens of the United Kingdom gave 45,000 pounds each, every man woman and child of them, direct to the bankers in bailouts. We will be paying off that money in taxes – with vast sums in interest to the same bankers, from whom we borrowed virtual money they did not have, to give to them as real money – for generations to come. Quantitive easing gives yet more money to the bankers, cash in place of risky bonds they wish to dump.
When you add it all together including interest, every man, woman and child in the UK will pay over 100,000 pounds each to the bankers, to bail out the bankers from the mess their own extreme greed had created. Indeed it is possible to argue rationally that the payment will be infinite, as the debt incurred will never be repaid but continually rolled over, and interest payments continue.
We did not have to do this. We could have let the bad banks go bust, started new ones, and boosted the economy by spending just 20% of the money we have given the banks on crucially needed public infrastructure works – railways, renewable energy, housing, insulation, hospitals, schools etc. But Gordon Brown and New Labour decided just to give money to the bankers instead.
In Greece, the people have actually given much less to the bankers for bailout than people in the UK. It is important to acknowledge that the causes of the Greek financial collapse are different. Greece was rather a recipient of bad lending, a country which received loans it could not possibly afford. Due to corrupt networks of elite collusion embracing both government and private sector, much of this money was simply siphoned out of the country into overseas accounts in London and Cyprus. The British people are suffering from the banking collapse through being forced to bail out the bankers. Greece is more in the position of somebody in a huge house who could not afford the mortgage – except for the vital distinction that all the people in Greece were paying the mortgage, but the large majority living in sheds behind the mansion.
I welcome Syriza’s victory as an indication that people are not content just to accept the narrative given them by the mainstream media and the parties in the pocket of corporations. I hope that they negotiate hard and force the banks to take a huge haircut on Greek sovereign debt. I acknowledge their commitment to social justice. But I do hope they will be realistic with both themselves and their people on the amount of blood, sweat and tears that is going to need to go in to building a productive Greek economy. An example of Keynesian stimulus is much needed by the rest of Europe.
Gordon Brown’s bank bailout was probably the biggest single gift any politician has ever given his corporate masters in the entire history of the world. It is worth reminding ourselves just how very right wing the Red Tories are. Not to mention the fact their front bench remains littered with war criminals. I therefore have grave reservations about Nicola Sturgeon’s weekend interview indication that the People of Scotland want a Labour Government with SNP support. I don’t. I am not going to elect somebody to represent me as chief bag carrier to a war criminal.
The SNP leadership remain infected by managerialism. It is easy to convince yourself you are doing good things while not changing anything fundamental, and at the same time building a very well paid career and a personal powerbase. I don’t want devo-max, I don’t want more powers, I don’t want something “as close to federalism as possible”. I want freedom for my country. I want independence. I want to live in a country which does not illegally invade other countries, collude in torture, carry out mass surveillance of its citizens, or possess nuclear weapons. The idea of running the Union a little bit better, making it a teeny bit more humane and competent, does not interest me. Nor does dulling the edge of austerity, when it is going to behead us anyway.
Besides which I am absolutely convinced the Tories will win the election, which will make all this jostling for position look rather foolish.
“But I do hope they will be realistic with both themselves and their people on the amount of blood, sweat and tears that is going to need to go in to building a productive Greek economy.”
This is well to the right of where I want to be. Relax Craig, enjoy it.
Don’t we secretly enjoy the pronunciations sound a little bit arrogant and stale, for once someone has been able to break from the old.
It’s made me rethink a lot that’s been said by intellectuals in the UK, there is this self important attitude that’s perhaps at the root of our inability to do anything as good. Because we have managed sod all. Let’s just be honest, maybe we should be learning and not pronouncing so much.
” I want freedom for my country. I want independence.”
I take it your talking about Scotland now, fine, but should it not be OUR country. Though TBH I don’t like this way of thinking about the place you live at all.
It seems to me part of this controlling attitude. That we must be important and significant. The centre of all things and they just don’t move forward otherwise.
Well they do all the time. It’s us who is stick in dysfunction. And it’s really not helped by this attitude.
Tristan
26 Jan, 2015 – 3:47 pm
The truth is you don’t know.
There is something small we could do that would be nice, campaign to return the significant cultural heritage that belongs to that country.
Sorry, you’ll have to help me out here – what am I supposed to be disagreeing with? (It’s not as if I haven’t disagreed with you in the past, but I’m at a loss as to the dispute in this instance.)
Hang on, I’ve got something – the gift from Brown to the banksters wasn’t the largest in the history of the world:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/secret-fed-loans-undisclosed-to-congress-gave-banks-13-billion-in-income.html
@Robert Crawford: Could you state how many businesses you run, and how much money you made last year? Because I’m not sure how seriously to take your comments without knowing. I’m sure you understand.
Craig, you are an honourable man, do the honourable thing and form your own party.
I’ve never understood how people are supposed to repay debt by working less. Common sense would be that you have to work more. So policies that create huge unemployment can hardly be a solution. Lets hope that this will be the start of some sensible policies in the Euro area.
Elections bring to power professional politicians whose primary loyalty is to their own careers. We need to follow the example of ancient Athens, and start choosing our representatives by lot.
Clearly, they don’t need their marbles back.
I do hope they give Germany and the EU something to think about. My feeling is it should no go on without significant change of behaviour. That’s long overdue in the EU.
“I’ve never understood how people are supposed to repay debt by working less.”
Who’s debt?
Why should people work to repay money robbed from them in a criminal system of distribution. It’s this whole accepted victim mindset that’s wrong. And that all that matters is money, or slaving away for the capitalists who have riches beyond imagining, that’s wrong.
But no, we must all slave away at the coalface. Sweat and burn you scum.
Bloody thatcher, embedded in your head.
This system is a crime against humanity. I find it actually offenceve to tell Greece, after all they have been though, that they need to buckle down.
MBC
“I wish I knew more about Greece. What I want to know is who controls the army and the police. Resistance to austerity has so far avoided mass disorder. Why is that? Anyway, I commend the Greeks for their restraint in seeking a peaceful democratic route.
As long as the bankers don’t control private armies they can go stuff themselves as far as I’m concerned. If Greece refuses to pay, what can they do about it? Syriza is not refusing to pay, just to renegotiate.”
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Feel free to ask me about the Greek reality (both past and present), I’ bee delighted to help of I can.
Let’s start off with your second para and say where Greece stands at present.
Greece recently went into a small primary(ie, taking no account of debt repayment) budget surplus. This was due – following (only partially so far) the terms of the Troika bail-outs) – to the raising of new govt revenues (eg, the various property taxes and the effort to enhance tax collection through changes in personal and company tax laws) on the one hand and the cutting of govt expenditure (eg through pruning employment in the public sector, reducing state pensions, benefits and pensions on the other. The objective was, and is still, to in part use the primary budget surpluses (assuming they continue) to reduce govt debt over time*.
Now, the point is that many of SYRIZA’s promises (eg restore salaries, benefits and pensions to their previous levels, start re-hiring in the public sector),if carried out, will be to reverse the recent trend in govt expenditure, which will again increase. The risk, therefore, is that the primary surplus will disappear and the govt will again have to start borrowing to finance its expenditure.
This is where your “if Greece refuses to pay, what can they (ie, the lenders)do about it” comes in. You are right that the lenders will not be able to do much about it. But there is something they can do and that is not to lend in the future except at a risk premium in the form of an interest rate which Greece would be entirely unable to sustain.
Hence: SYRIZA’s announced policies, if carried out, will lead again to increasing govt primary budget deficits which the Greek state will be unable to “finance” through borrowing. And writing off even the entirety of what Greece owns to its foreign creditors is, in the last resort, neither here nor there.
{Bear in mind also that the Greek debt-to-GNP ratio did not suddenly pop up out of nowhere and certainly did not start with Greek entry into the Euro. The started a long time before that and accelerated after the election of the PASOK govt. in 1981 – a govt which came into power on the back of promises – which it carried out in large part – remarkably similar to those made by Mr Tsipras in the run-up to Sunday’s election}
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* There is of course a school of thought, perhaps not incorrect, which says that Greek debt is so large that it can never be brought down by any realistically estimated primary budget surpluses in the future (it’s akin to the phenomenon we know in other countries of people repaying personal credit card debt by only paying back the monthly minimum amount required). But this is essentially of no relevance to the facts I’ve set out above.
Gold is no different from fiat currencies, it is essentially worthless, it only has value if enough people agree that it does or should have. Apart from tiny microscopic amounts used in integrated circuits, computer chips, trace amounts for connections between the external interfaces and internal connection points, and its relative inertness, there is not much it can be used for exclusively for which some far cheaper and more abundant metals or conductors could be used. Hoarding it, fetishising it, serves no purpose, for those uses there will always be enough new and recovered material to meet every possible need, and unless some new application with near limitless demand, say to transportation or power generation is found for which that material and nothing else whatsoever will do, which is unlikely, that situation is not likely to change, gold remains essentially so much scrap metal.
I read a while ago that the greatest part of Greek government indebtedness was to German and French banks for arms purchases on far from beneficial terms, but quite what has happened to specific high value items, or the bulk of what was supplied is unclear, if this is the case. Could it have found its way to Turkey (and thus from there to the ‘rebels’ destroying Syria) or even have ended up in Poroshenko’s Ukrainian bandits’ hands?
To me the SNP seem directionless – clear aims that give the people hope of disengaging from the outright descent into the abyss that remaining hitched to the artificial composite UK state as terms such as fascism, turbo-capitalism or even a death cult cannot adequately describe the abandonment of reason, even national self-interest gripping the UK stolen power and wealth elite this past century – are not being voiced, the issues are almost incomprehensible to the many and over-whelming in the shock this would deliver if even a small part of it was to strike home, boring straight through the settled sedimentary layers of propaganda and falsehood resulting from lifetimes of blizzard-like bull-shit bombardment.
It is all a question of whether the SNP is still the establishment’s enemy within and without, or have they sufficiently subverted that organisation for the deceptive role of replacing the Labour Party as majority party of choice in Scotland, weakly ‘opposing’ the actual and the masked Tories running the show, as the Greens might be cast for the same role in England. Since Thatcher, possibly since Heath, Labour had been small ‘c’ conservative, the Conservatives themselves became radical, disturbingly so, embracing the wildest and most destructive of social and economic policies and specious theories they could find and latch their inherent and proudly selfish and narcissistic tendencies on to. Nothing was ever their fault even when mostly it clearly was.
Slavery, black or white, never ended.
The DWP might be the new-right’s Gestapo, but they are after all only doing their job.
Glen.
Most of what you ask me for is “private and confidential”.
Whether you take me seriously or not is a “judgement call” for you to make, without me reading my shirt to you.
Thanks for the link to Molly Scott Cato’s piece in the NS, Neil, she is a very determined and knowledgeable woman who thinks outside the box and offers solutions. I have had many great discussions with her and her policy work for the Green Party’s financial policies is something to behold off.
If there is no tangible assets backing up a financial system then it becomes unsustainable. If chaotic weather patterns make futures a gamble, then futures have to be something of the past.
We have given birth to a chimera system that is led by pirates and bloodsuckers, TTIP will globalise this ever increasing noose, it will make tax hyst’s and increased costs to us, as normal as water runs downhill.
I increasingly think that Westminster will so pollute the SNP with its excesses and multiple lobbying/having lunch, baksheesh galore, that they fail to keep the goodwill of the Yes campaign together.
We shall see by the end of the year, if we’re still here.
Mr Goss
“As to Syriza and the debt it inherited, that debt is really owed by the bankers and financiers who have moved their money elsewhere. Greece’s solution is to start a New Drachma making the old-currencies worthless as a means of exchange, after paying Europe in old currency.”
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What do you mean by the “old currencies” and then, further on and more puzzingly, the “old currency”?
I suppose by “old currencies” you mean essentially the Euro but also the GBP, USD, Japanese yen and so on? But if that is the case, your sentence is meaningless because those latter currencies will still exist and Greece will still be billed in those currencies for its imports from the countries in question.
And, as I asked, what is the “old currency”?
Glenn
I did hear a small squib from someone called “Robert Crawford” yesterday at the tail-end of a programme on BBC Radio4 (it was around 4-5pm UK time, I think).
There is a chappie called “Robert Crawford”, born in 1959, who’s a poet and an academic at a Scottish university (first degree from Glasgow, DPhil from Oxford). If he and our friend on this blog are one and the same person then I think your question about any businesses he may have run is otiose.
Martin Jackson
“In international law, odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is a legal theory that holds that the national debt incurred by a regime for purposes that do not serve the best interests of the nation, should not be enforceable.”
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Let’s be clear, because your post as formulated “in international law..” might mislead the unwary reader: odious debt is nothing more than a theory in the field of international law, it is not part of international law. Some jurists support the idea, others dispute it.
@Robert Crawford: I realise that, and was not – of course – expecting you to provide that information. But I did hope to make you reconsider how you’d rubbished a potential candidate as a representative, on account of his “only” owning a single barber’s shop.
*
@Tony: (wrt gold): “…gold remains essentially so much scrap metal.”
Surely you recognise that it does have some value as jewellery? It doesn’t rust or tarnish, is pliable enough to be worked with, it’s shiny and pretty. It therefore has quite some aesthetic value in its own right.
All money is debt and it must all be paid back with interest that does not yet exist but will be when we borrow more.
We need debt free currency and to kick the bankers into touch with thier debt based currency.
Nicola Sturgeon would most like to have a dinner date with Hitlery Clinton…says it all really!
Glen.
I was born during the Second World War before the NHS was started.
If I need a haircut I don’t go to a politician, I go to a barber.
What does an Occupational Therapist do?
Would he be experienced in legal matters to be a good Justice Minister?
“odious debt is nothing more than a theory in the field of international law, it is not part of international law. Some jurists support the idea, others dispute it.”
Surely odious debt is much the same as the concept of duress in contract law.
The peeps can argue that these debts were forced under duress.
http://www.inbrief.co.uk/contract-law/duress-undue-influence-in-contracts.htm
Richard
The banks customers needed to learn the lesson the hard way not to trust the banks. A national bank could easily have been capitalised and placed on a sound footing so that existing customers could have been re-imbursed.
Instead the same people, operating the same scams, were allowed to continue. Because they were allowed to continue, they were allowed to use the capital they stole to finance international war-crime, such as in Syria and Ukraine.
Brown refused to draw a line, and I find it very difficult to understand what a son of the manse means if it is not an understanding of the necessity to draw a line.
I don’t recognise that as a valid usage Glenn, pandering to human failings. A person is either good-looking, attractive or not and no amount of adornment +/- alters that. A tree is a finer sight in its natural state than dead and dripping with tinsel and garlands.
It is surprising however just how much of production capacity, human endeavour is wasted on such fripperies, pandering to vanity. Even at the height of the industrial revolution, a great part of capital and labour were engaged in meeting such whims. The poorer classes lusted after adornments of their persons and their abodes, mimicing their ‘betters’, in time the cheap copies became better than the originals, but the desires simply found new targets.
I’m not advocating austere presbyterianism or puritanism, but games of chance, gambling are of the same order of fruitlessness, so much of what we do serves no worthwhile end; still today so much is simply ephemeral to physical or spiritual necessity, so many are ’employed’ on things which we would overall be better off if they simply weren’t or were engaged in something else entirely more useful.
We have to change ourselves to affect change and laughing at mere materialism and ‘show’, consumerism and designed obsolescence is a start. It’s all a bit tangential though, and you’re free to disagree.
Odious debt would be like mis-sold PPI. There is no such thing as a financial product, but the closest thing to it is a second=hand mattress with worn springs and body-fluid stains being sold with new covers on as a discount bargain from the back of a van.
I suggest the problem the problem you are talking about,Craig,started well before Brown.
This is something you can really blame on Maggie. She deregulated the UK financial markets,and allowed and encouraged banks to enter the mortgage market. Prior to this it was very hard to get a mortgage (if anyone remembers),you had to be a saver with a building society before it would consider giving you a mortgage.
As more people were able to get mortgages prices went up,as prices went up people could borrow more,and therefore prices went up more. This also meant that people could borrow against their higher valued houses to spend,so people felt well off.
Brown first as chancellor just fuelled this boom by encouraging the banks to lend to those who shouldn’t borrow.
Brown’s party came to an end in 2008.
He should have let the banks go bust,but instead he decided the state should bail out the banks.
This is likely to lead to the state going bust,and pound notes being used as toilet paper as the Tories and Labour have no answer other to print money.
“The citizens of the United Kingdom gave 45,000 pounds each, every man woman and child of them, direct to the bankers in bailouts.”
How so? The bank bailouts were not “gifts”, but a mixture of loans (to address liquidity needs) and equity stakes (to provide capital). Nor were these sums provided to “bankers” – a mendacious term in this context- but to institutions.
We should, if that capability was possible, force our own government to renegotiate the dept they have got us into.
At this point the government is threatening to take away my possessions, for a dept I don’t owe, that’s not mine but forced upon me. And these things are critical for me to be able to make money.
It’s a madness.
What will they get for and old computer and some paints?
So Habbabkuk was involved with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
η ζωή είναι ωραία
I’ll tell you what they will get, another person dependent on handouts.