Oh to be UK Prime Minister George Osborne. Today we heard the happy news that thirty of the City’s leading lights had been kind enough to get in touch – how helpful, that in this time of global economic turmoil, a friendly troupe of business leaders knows exactly what’s to be done.
"An early removal of the temporary 50 per cent tax rate would attract wealth generators to the UK and support the entrepreneurs we need to help us grow the economy and provide jobs.”
Any statement that includes the notion "return to growth" is specious nonsense. The era of growth-model economics is over, due to resource constraints. Many hundreds of academic and lay articles have been written about "reaching limits to growth". It beggars belief that at least a significant proportion of the "city investor" types don't know this, therefore one must conclude that this constant hum of "return to growth" is merely "soft soap" to lull the public into complacency while the evil-doers carry on scheming.
The "scheme" if I may digress, is to convert the toilet-paper "assets" into real wealth -physical assets. The so-called "complex financial instruments" that represent the output of twenty years of deregulated banking have no more real worth than toy money. They used to have a "value" as the institutions traded them among themselves in their fantasy game in order to inflate the book-value of their businesses upon which their salaries were based, but now they are worthless. A child knows you can't take toy money to the shops and buy lollies, but for the bankers, the governments of the world are playing "toy-town bank" swopping their used toilet-paper for real spendable money and in turn running up unsustainable sovereign debt and the "promise to pay" of taxpayers for generations to come -no wonder nations credit ratings keep sliding! A happy result of this, for the bankers, is that the resulting sovereign debt creates the conditions for sell-offs of capital assets -Crown land, public utilities, water rights, proprietorship of which enables the new owner to collect rents. This is the planned perpetual meal-ticket for yesterdays "city investor" -being a neo-feudal overlord in a new dark age. splendour for the one per cent, squalour for the common herd.
Our choice? force the institutions to acknowledge the inherent worthlessness of their toxic assets -put the used toilet-paper into the appropriate hygenic disposal place. I am reminded of a very funny situation many years ago when a friend was carrying his two year-old daughter in his arms. She was grumpy with a cold and her nose was streaming with green snot. Her father had her blow her nose into a tissue, after which she screamed at him "Give me back my bogie"! The city financier types will just have to get over it like my friends daughter got over the loss of her bogie.
The present banking system can only function in a state of more-or-less permanent growth, That phase of human economic development is now over. We must institute a banking system not based on creation of money as interest-bearing debt, and properly regulated against speculative scheming, as detailed at the Positive Money Website so that banking can serve the economy, not the other way round. The G20 nations foolishly resolved in 2008 to back the banking sector to the bitter end with no significant concessions toward banking reform. It is now time to take heed of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement and its many spin-offs and reverse that folly to stop being complicit in our own enslavement.
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