This System Is Killing Us

by Robert Edwards

Published in ESA No 43

We continue to lurch towards further economic crises and there is no one in power with any idea of how to save us. The main political parties carry on the same old pantomime act of blaming each other for the nation’s continuing decline, with the excuse they ‘inherited’ all these problems from a previous government. A government that blames a previous government for over-borrowing now borrows more then ever. All governments have played a part in this slow, painful and agonising rot.  All of them are to blame. We can now add the Limp Democrats to this misbegotten bunch to whom the curse, be careful of what you wish for when you hunger for power at any price, applies so appropriately. No one gets let off the hook on that score.

What can you expect when we are ruled by spoilt-brat multi-millionaire toffs, most of whom have never done an honest day’s work in their lives? The worst of all are the old Etonians who were brought up in privileged circumstances and educated at schools for the very same privileged class where the curriculum included a doctrine of elitism drummed into them at a young age ... “You are born to rule and to rule over all others”.

I watched part of the Tory conference where the main clues were with the cameras panning the audience. If you are any good at reading faces, preferably at first sight as with physiognomy, then Toryism was expressed in the unfeeling arrogance and smugness on the faces that have long caricatured your average Tory delegate at conference. They are as much a social type as your average old school bellicose trade union leader ... albeit a different sort altogether. The hardened old faces of the polarised leaderships of the opposing social classes.

Before I am tempted to embark on a stormy voyage of class war polemic, I need to point out what I consider to be the worst and the best aspects of British politics. Here goes.

The worst is exemplified in the cold-blooded indifference to the suffering of others less fortunate, in the saying, “Because they failed so miserably at being as thrifty as we were”. Perhaps they were not given the opportunity to save on the poverty line. Struggling to survive does not offer the chance of acquiring such bourgeois virtues.

This reactionary treatment of the working class, now relegated to the position of an under class, is perhaps the biggest factor in dividing a nation. The British long ago made an art of it and it is little altered today. Class war is a two-sided coin, for sure, whether Left or Right.

The Tories are overwhelmingly concerned with ‘business’ and the workers regarded as secondary to this, merely attributed the role of serving business, which success is determined by the acceptance of the lowest wage possible. If the Englishman will not work for peanuts then they import foreigners who will ... the entire blame for this most ugly aspect of immigration being placed on the “lazy Englishman”. The import of cheap labour serves business and never the workers. Profits come first and the workers last.

No one attacks the bankers, who are entirely responsible for our continuing economic woes. The creation of money and its supply is entirely within the domain of private banking and the government is basically helpless there. Within the practice of lending with interest, the banks create money out of thin air, which is nothing more than phantom currency. Paid back, it disappears to nothing again. That’s right, it is a scam ... simply numbers on a computer’s database. A performing illusionist would understand the trick.

Yet the system is such that everything depends on the banks functioning as they do and we bail them out with taxpayers money while insisting the taxpayer lives in comparative poverty. Bankers can then award themselves massive bonuses without consulting anyone. At the same time, austerity is imposed upon the masses as a matter of government policy.

European Socialism is opposed to the money supply being exclusively under the control of private banking, which is a law unto itself. A private set-up that can withhold money from the system by simply ceasing to lend through alleged “lack of confidence” should not be tolerated in any country that calls itself democratic and ultimately answerable to the people.

Then there is the borrowing deficit and its urgent reduction, the beginning and end of Tory-led government policy. Cuts here and cuts there because the cartel of private banking, that rules over most economic systems in the world, says so. “Do what we say or you don’t get any more money”. So the millionaires that currently rule over us tighten the screws to please their banker chums. Everything becomes alarm and urgency when it comes to “reducing the deficit”. Why not simply underwrite the debt and start all over again? That would mean the end of debt slavery and the end of the rule of international banking and finance.

You have to ask yourselves what money is and what purpose it should serve. It is a means of exchange which the people should own. Its purpose should be to assist in the easy and secure exchange of goods.

Instead, it has been completely hi-jacked and used as a means of control. The result is that the greater part of the wealth in the world is in very few hands while the “prols”, the great majority, have very little. Is that morally right?

That, then, is the worst of British politics ... this total subservience to the Money Power. Banks love to loan to those who struggle to pay it back. Default on the loan and they will seize your goods and assets. This is all achieved by the act of borrowing on interest, the simple act that creates money out of thin air. They now do this to entire nations.

The best is yet to come. There is another kind of politics that is in revolt. Tightening the austerity screw in countries like Spain and Greece has  produced such a movement that identifies the International Monetary Fund as the tyranny that kills. Oh, yes ... pensioners in these countries are now committing suicide as a consequence of severe austerity measures imposed upon the people by the money-lenders. What a shame and disgrace.

They call it a “bail-out” as if it were some kind of altruistic service. It is nothing of the kind. It is, in reality, more of the same debt slavery with terms that can never be realised because austerity measures imposed destroy businesses and jobs, thereby preventing any form of meaningful growth. Italy had to sell off its state-owned companies on defaulting, Greece had to sell off all its unpopulated small islands on defaulting ... and so on. This scam is nothing more than highway robbery on a massive scale.

The movement in revolt is in preparation and appears on the streets of some countries suffering under severe debt slavery. It is a movement that is neither left nor right but cuts right across the political spectrum. Neither the far-left nor the far-right can lay claim to this movement in revolt because neither of these opposite polar political extremes have ever identified the real enemy in the terms of the new revolt. The enemy is the global economic order in the hands of a few. All the rest is a mere bagatelle. It deflects from the only real important issue which is the life and death struggle we all face today and being another reason that nationalism is part of the problem. Divide and rule ... the rulers being international finance.

So how do you get out of this situation and on to the road to recovery? Well, it will not be by remaining as small, isolated countries pulling up the drawbridge. They will simply pick you off one by one. A veteran British nationalist gave a talk to The London Forum recently, hosted by the affable Jez Turner, where he rambled on about the entire world being ‘bankrupt’. He blamed the Saudis and the Chinese for this. At the end of his ramble he offered his solution, which was to revive British industry, produce only what we need and not to live beyond our means. He called it ‘economic nationalism’. In other words, old fashioned autarky, ... meaning more austerity.

The problem with such a policy is that you end up surrounded by the rest of the world pulling in an opposite direction. You could never compete successfully on world markets to sell your goods, so tiny little Albion, a small set of islands out in the North Sea, is going to supply everything that a population of fifty-odd million requires. It would not work.

You need a large enough area with room for expansion and, of course, every foodstuff and raw material that we require for a good standard of life. “To do great things in a great way”, is an old Mosley maxim.

Oswald Mosley offered a solution to the rule of money in the 1960s. He said it could be achieved with existing European governments if they had the will. He said all they had to do in order to be rid of debt slavery was to agree to meet at an appointed hour. They had to do this in unison. All these heads of European governments would then declare their own system, united in common purpose, with complete control of the money supply out of private hands and under the control and direction of European government. All previous debt would be null and void. Our own banking system, under new guide lines, would then serve the European people in a constructive way without the curse of usury, which is lending at interest.

All politicians today are obsessed with the ‘debt crisis’. They live with debt and they think of little else. In other words, everything is subservient to meeting this ever-present borrowing deficit.

It has become a new religion, little different to pagan worship when the angry god must be placated with more human sacrifices. The World Bank and the IMF are the new pagan gods of global politics ... and they want to see more suffering before they are finished.

It is happening now with pensioners dying, not just in Greece in acts of suicide, but here, too, every Winter, as fuel prices rise beyond the means of ordinary old folk. That’s another issue, while privatised utility companies provide massive riches for the Fat Cats, our people struggle as never before. These essential utilities should all be back in public ownership with a fair deal for all. An end to this culture of privatisation and greed. It works for the rich but not for the poor.

Europe a Nation would be very different to the United States. The United States is based on greed. Kenneth Clark, in his BBC series Civilisation, when referring  to ‘heroic materialism’, he said, in relation to America, “It’s godless, it’s brutal, it’s violent”. America is the ‘spiritual’ home of a soulless materialism where big money rules. Watch Presidential elections.

Our Europe would have the steady foundations of social responsibility with real opportunity for all. It will be the essence of European Socialism. The Americans hate socialism, somehow equating it with communism, to the point they really do believe in the survival of the fittest, that if you can not afford medical care then you can damned well die in pain and agony. They do not care. They love their guns more than their fellow man.

Our National Health Service is a beacon of light amid so much darkness in the world. In a world without predatory banking and the grip of usury, we can organise a society where nothing can impede growth and ‘austerity’ was just a bad dream. Organising within a self-sufficient European system, with the lead of European government, science and labour will lift us up through their own efforts ... and money will simply be a means of exchange.