“I promise to pay the bearer” is what it says on all paper money printed up by the Central banks for our governments.
But it is not the government nor even the Central Banks making that promise. They print the notes and decide on the number of notes in circulation, but the promise is ours. That promise, which gives the notes their value, only has substance because of you and me – the people. Without us there is no promise. There can be no currency. We, the people, are the only real guarantee that the paper has the value that is printed on it. The entire value of our money is based upon one thing only. That we allow our governments to tax us.
Paper money is based upon taxes. Without taxes and the labour upon which tax itself is based there is no government, no government power, no military power. There is NOTHING at all without the consent of the people to be taxed.
I think our governments have forgotten this.
I think they have forgotten that they do not actually have any power, do not own anything and have no wealth or credit except what they derive from being our representatives. And what does it mean to be our representatives? It means they represent our desires and our will. The power they wield is ours not theirs. They are required to do OUR will not theirs or their friend’s.
I think it is time all our governments were reminded of this fact. Because it seems to me they have begun to act as if they had power and wealth of their own. They have become so used to passing laws that we must obey that they have begun to mistake themselves for ‘rulers’ when they are in fact servants – public servants.
It is time they were reminded.
Our rulers have begun to forget that they are neither above the law nor us, the people. They have begun to think, however, that by declaring states of emergency, political, military and financial that they can set themselves and their actions above the laws and us. This must be stopped.
Democratic governments who set aside the rule of law, even in the name of some emergency, imperil the democracy they claim to serve. Our democracies are in mortal peril. Not from the enemies without but from within. Our own governments have become the enemies of democracy.
Nowhere has this been more dangerously evident than in the actions our governments have taken in this debt crisis.
By bailing out the banks, our governments have used the power they have on loan from us, to further the wealth and position of themselves and their friends and have done so at our expense. This is, to my mind, treason. Treason is not against ‘the state’ which is too easily confused with the government of the day, but against the people.
The fact of the last two years is that without the cast iron promise written in our name on our bank notes there would be no banks and no banking system. All the promises of the ‘smartest men in the room’, that they knew best, that the market knew best, that a ‘light touch regulation’ was best and that the promises to pay written on their securities were reliable – all those promises were shown to be less than smoke. They were lies and fraud.
The last two years have been about replacing those broken private bankers’ promises with money inscribed with our promise. Our governments have used the promise of our future labour and their ability to tax it, to bail out the worthless paper promises of the bankers. And they have pushed our promise to the point of debasing it. Exactly as the bankers already debased the promises of their debt-backed currency.
Our leaders have colluded with the bankers to push our promise to labour and pay taxes out for decades into the future. All just in order to pay back the money borrowed to bail out the venal, corrupt and worthless bankers.
And yet, at the same time that our promise to labour and pay taxes has been used to save the personal fortunes of the bankers, those same people, have sounded a chorus of calls for us to ALSO face cut backs and hardship. It is not enough that our promise has been used to save those who use, impoverish and despise us. Those people are concerned that we be held to this promise that was made for us by our leaders without a word of debate or consultation.
For taxes, like the labour they are based on, do not run out. And that is what the financial class covet. The financial class want to use our promise for themselves. The ONLY reason our governments can issue thirty year debts and pay so little interest is because everyone believes we will keep working and paying our taxes for them to spend with out murmur or question. The bankers now have use of that promise, that you and I will keep working, keep paying. And will now do so to pay their debts, the debts of the super rich. Our government’s job is now to hold us to that promise.
The bankers have been quick to claim that the financial world, specifically the bond holders, who it turns out are very often the bankers themselves – they must be given priority when it comes to being protected from losses.
We, the people whose promise is all that stands between them and deserved self inflicted ruin, we are being told we are bottom of the heap. We are lowly share holders in UK plc or America plc or Ireland plc or even lower, just the people who work here – just the employees. We are seen as workers who have no more claim to our country than an employee has upon the capital of the company he works for.
Our labour is what makes money work. NOTHING, precisely NOTHING else does or can do this job.
AND yet, such is the arrogance of our leaders and the financial class to whom they grovel and fawn, that they have forgotten from where their power comes. They think they are a the masters. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.
We have let the scions of the wealthy live such lives of uncontested privilege and wealth, that they have come to think it is theirs by right and birth. The verminous little lions of Westminster preen and condescend and think themselves noble and caring that they take any care at all to let a crumb or two drop from their table to the common ground.
This must end. There is no other power save that which is stolen from us. The police may be turned against us as may the army. But without our labour and our tax they will go as hungry as us. The politicians power is ours by right, it becomes theirs only by limited and temporary sufferance. While the bankers have NO CLAIM AT ALL, to our labour or our taxes.
Thomas Hobbes recognized that a people who become aware of themselves as a collective entity become something new, something hugely powerful eclipsing all other power. Hobbes and others more radical saw our power was greater and more incontestable even than that of the King and God.
Our name is Leviathan.
My dream, as my wife is no doubt tired of hearing, is for every worker to just not got to work on the first Monday of each month. Won't be long before we all get what we want.
And of course such pie in the sky bullshit won't ever happen. Due both to the fundamentally conservative nature of the working class (at least here in America) and because most people are incapable or unwilling to put themselves in other people's shoes.
As you can see, I am not enamored of my fellow humans, and expect little from them until their backs are up against the proverbial wall. Revolutions, much less massive social change, don't usually happen unless people have nothing left to lose, or are at least close to it. It's the people most put upon who must begin/lead the fightback. And I don't see it happening.
While the American economy is in trouble, and unemployment is around 20%, we still have an awfully long way to fall before reaching the standards the neoliberals have in mind for us. Until then I don't expect much to change. It certainly isn't going to happen via our wonderful 2-party system.
You've hit a rich seam lately, Golem……….a seam that takes us deep into the belly of the beast. This is the fundamental level that serves as the foundation to the whole stinking pile above it. Win the argument here – and the rest falls.
Just wanted to reassure Golem that I've been in no way put off by the back-and-forth here.
And so, to re-engage, I'd like to press Golem on the figure of the Sovereign that haunts this post. Hobbes, contentiously, claimed that unruled humanity was so cruel by its own nature that there had been at some ur-historical point a consensual decision to relinquish our individual sovereignty over ourselves, to be placed in the sovereign – and this handing over of power included the power of the sovereign to take human life. Strong stuff, and political philosophers have been arguing over Hobbes ever since.
So invoking Hobbes in the name of popular resistance is problematic to say the least, tho' Hardt & Negri did precisely that in their book Empire. They, however, had an explicit politics in the Marxist tradition – and they made explicit the way they were applying Hobbes. I'm not sure what Golem thinks about sovereignty, especially when he calls upon the figure of monarch again by suggesting that the bankers are guilty of 'treason'.
All best, as ever.
Hello Benek99,
glad you're with us.
Yes, I'm not really using Hobbes in a very deep way at all. I was simply and only using him as one fo the most recognized of those who were clear that there is a collective power in the people themselves. I was thinking especially of the famous drawing on the cover of the book.
As you say, he took a dim view of people's nature, and of the people's ability to govern themselves. I do not agree with his dismal assessment of either. So I am not calling upon any monarch nor aligning myself with his view of human nature.
The sovereign, for me, is the sovereign power of the people themselves. I am keen for people to go back and remember that they are a collective power in their own right. It seems to me, to be perhaps the most delbilitating aspect of individualism, that it tends towards isolating us as lone and powerless individuals. We can come to think that the only power we have is our solitary vote cast in isolation and secrecy.
Individualism has neutered the once prevalent idea that we have a collective power. Today 'collective power' is too often characterized as 'the mob' or 'mob rule'. Which it is not.
Those with political and financial power over us are, I think, very happy that we should see ourtselves exclusively as individuals and to distrust the very idea of collective power.
My idea of soverignty is tied up with the idea of culture. I defend the idea that we have a culture, it embodies important things about our history, our traditions, our notions of who we think we are and who we aspire to be. These are all vague notions but being vague does not lessen their power or their reality.
Since Wittgenstein's we have had the ready proof that dictionary definitioins of words fall apart on close inspection. But he and all since have recgonized that this does not mean 'we don't know' what a chair is', nor that because we can't define them accurately, that this means 'chairs don't exist'. Just because we can't define what it is to feel or be English, or Scottish or Irish or French does not mean that we aren't importantly defined and motivated by those concepts.
I do realize that I use terms which have become tainted and mistrusted. Part of my personal purpose is to re-claim those terms. I refuse to be bound by definitions which serve other people whose purposes I regard as malign. The terms I use are mine and I regard myself as free to use them as I will. I risk being misunderstood, I know. Which just makes it incumbent upon me to try to explain myself better.
I do not believe we will extricate ourselves from our current powerlessness unless we reclaim the vocabulary we need and the concepts we want. Hobbes is seen now as a reactionary. But if you are talking about conceptions of power and the idea that power resides in and flows from the people then Hobbes is a landmark. The Royalists were not at all sure about him. Neither were the Parliamentarians. To suggest that the power of the moarch flowed from the people rather than from God was a powerful insight.
Today we need to remember that Sovereignty is something that flows from the people not from the government. It is not tied to a flag nor even a parliament but to a culture.
I defend the idea of that I have a culture and this culture is central to what I am, what I think.
Did you watch Question Time on Thursday with Hedge Fund manager, Hugh Hendry? very telling, I thought, that his over-arching message was, "at the end of the day, politicians care what you think of them; we don't give a shit."
One can rail against these people and give up vast amounts of time protesting at their behaviour, but…it's pretty pointless really. Why not direct ones efforts where there's a chance somebody will be forced to listen?
Unclear,
I didn't. Hugh Hendry generally does not mince his words and speaks his mind clearly. I agree with what you say, he said. For me, it means we have to remind our governments who they are supposed to listen to. They are so frightened of and in thrall to the financial world they are listening to them not us.
I can think of several ways we could rivet the politician's attention back where it belongs – on us. They all require us to actually do something. But even before we get around to doing something concrete, it is already a good start if they (the politicians) start to realize that we are talking and changing our thinking in ways they do not control and may not like.
They know, MI5 knows very clearly, that the greatest 'danger' to public order is when ordinary people start to think in ways that are not 'guided' by those who would seek to control us.
"They are so frightened of and in thrall to the financial world they are listening to them not us."
In my opinion, what the political camps are frightened of is being at the helm during an economic meltdown with its attendant collapse in popularity. A meltdown which a) will happen if the banks are supported anyway, b) will not happen at all, or c) could be delayed until someone else is holding the grenade when it goes off.
If failure to support the banks detonates the grenade anyway, then there's no logical reason for any politician to stick it in their mouth and pull the pin; even if they believe a) to be a near certainty.
I believe a) to be a certainty and the effects will be much worse than if the banks and their liabilities were eradicated in an orderly manner. But for a politician? One form of electoral annihilation following an economic crisis is much like another.
So. How do we persuade our current batch of elected representatives to start chewing on that grenade?
For instance, should we be attacking austerity measures? Or should we be pleading with them to bring on the pain?
Keep up the good work, Unclear.
You'd never hear a polition say such pessimistic stuff 420, you should be ashamed! Think it but don't peddle it. Optimism is what we want. Andrew blake called the bankers out in 1832 nearly 200 years ago and so did other presidents of your country.
We as a race have been here before, many times. What makes this time different?
I think the fact we're all talking globally so quickly makes it different, some have said including myself we need focus. A goal. But what is the goal?
The goal for me as far as fiscal policy is simple in that it should be a closed loop, there should be no syphonong off of cash, milking the human race like cattle.
The infowars slogan is bang on -There's a war on for your minds.
When you engage with people they open up, it's harder than if you tap into the lizard brain like the politions and corporations using freebased thoughts.
Who is going to do such a thing i wonder? G has written a book( I wrote some songs but that's it 🙁 Money Flow . What else have us commentators done? Not much i guess otherwise we wouldn't be scratchung our heads would we now.
Ming the merciless and his buddies get up early every day and use every trick in the book. The whole world is set up for fear.
Capitalism is consumerism and the wiki definition is – The creation and fostering of desire.
I see it different myself in that consumerism is based on the creation and fostering of fear, the fear of standing out or looking like a fool in your out of date cr@p, not getting a mate etc etc etc. How do you fight against a worldwide smokescreen? With the only thing we have.
The Truth.
And how do we tell it to people?
Face to face.
Until we all make as much as an effort as G then there is no hope. I know i bang on about it but leaflets, logos, slogans, all the classic advertising is what we need, but advertising the truth, the option to open your mind.
Most people if given real evidence will see the light. But you've got to put it in their hand or through their front door or into their head via your voice (the last one can be forgotten, paper is physical and can be reproduced, spread).
Scarey eh? Actually making an effort.
None of us have come up with an ingenious way to make everybody listen because there isn't one. The bloodsuckers use everything in their means like the mafia to keep their racketeering going.
Be nice to RICO the clarts.
We have one real weapon which is better than strikes and better than Satyagraha and better than dressing up like ninjas and putting spanners in the works.
Filthy dirty money.
Getting everybody to boycott the banks, move accounts to (my knowlege grinds to a halt here) co-operatives or building societies. Let them play with their own money as ours is somewhere else. Give people a taste of affirmative action without marching or shouting and screaming. Give them a tase of what it's like to have the power.
Then after they've had a taste ask them to make a stand for the truth.
And their children.