Dear Kavy, Among the finest of journalists is Robert Parry and his site at https://consortiumnews.com/ .

He reports as honestly as possible, and, very differently from the right-wing, he attempts to understand facts that inform people and bring people together to solve very dangerous problems.

The government can create the money and spend it on social services, so no extra taxes required. The money gets its value when social workers, doctors, nurses, schoolteachers, university professors do work. They will then spend the money into the wider economy creating jobs and helping private businesses to prosper. We get low taxes, and high quality low cost social services and public provision. And the private sector gains to because there will be better infrastructure, a more educated workforce, and again lower taxes, and they will also have more customers because of the well paid public servants.

This is what the ruling class, the banking class, are hiding from the public. And they have got away with it. High taxes are blamed on the poor and so millions of people keep voting for the bankers party, the Tories. Our taxes are high because our government borrows the money from the private banks and we have to pay a shocking amount of money back as interest. Our government allows bankers to create our money supply out of thin air, when governments could do it themselves, tax free.

Some interesting stuff there, Bev. When I look around the net I might see all these videos about the fascist bankers and the facist corporations. And they seem like they might be good, so I might look at some of them, but then I realise that they are made by the Tea Party right.

They say the hate the elite for bringing about a government communist state. It’s bizarre? The New World Order is a Jewish banker’s communist plot (mega rich bankers who are communists? Eh!) These right wingers all look crazy to me, then they say that the elite intend to starve 5 billion people to death off the planet. Then they will talk about chemtrails where the government is spraying their land and the skies to slowly kill them off.

I read that the Right have been so powerful with their onslaught against the left since Reagan and Thatcher, that many leftwing academics did finally give up and wilt and just got back into their hobbies or academia. The ruling class pumped £millions into their propaganda machine, the onslaught was relentless, the majority of ordinary people fell the propaganda, we’re were outgunned. But now their economic system has collapsed, we can see their neoliberal model as the propaganda that it is.

Try this documentary by a British historian, called a JFK to 9/11 Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick. Did 60 million people die in WW2 because it was big business?

The libertarians say let the market decide, because the market knows best? They say that charity and government provision fails to adequately provide, but if left to the market, profits will unsure that the poor will get fed. It’s all propaganda of course?

But as war is one of the most profitable things there is, do we really want to leave everything to the market to decide?

JFK to 9/11 Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Qt6a-vaNM

People who have worked for my company for many years are on£15 per hour, but newcomers are on £8 an hour doing the same job. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the newcomers voted Tory in the last election.

My pension scheme is inflation linked, but my colleague who joined my company 25 years ago is not inflation linked. He missed out by only a few months to join my scheme . Because of his arthritis he would like to retire early, but he can’t afford it.

He is politically aware, but many ordinary people aren’t, and may read the Sun or the a Express, or the Star. Years ago lots of people had pension scheme like mine but now most people have pension schemes like my colleague. Lots of people vote Conservative and have no idea how much they have been scammed. I can afford to retire early on a reduced pension, but my friend can’t. And the banking class are richer than ever because of it.

Thanks so much Joe Taylor for the quotes and references above.

I thought I would add the free text of a book recommended by Joe Bongiovanni, from Frederick Soddy, a English Nobel winner in Chemistry, who got interested in the beneficial ideas surrounding a Public Debt-free money. The book is on-line, though until you get to the Preface, the formatting of the contents is a little more difficult than a regular Table of Contents.

https://archive.org/stream/roleofmoney032861mbp/roleofmoney032861mbp_djvu.txt

THE ROLE OF MONEY

WHAT IT SHOULD BE,
CONTRASTED WITH WHAT IT HAS BECOME

By FREDERICK SODDY

M.A. (Oxon) ; LL.D. (Glasgow) ; F.R.S. ; Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1921 ; Author of ” Science and Life ” ; ” Wealth, Virtual Wealth , and Debt ” ; ” Money versus Man ” ; etc.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-era-of-breakdown.html

& here is an old Orlov article that contains some useful tips:

http://energyskeptic.com/2014/dmitry-orlov-how-russians-survived-collapse/

Here are quotes from Chapter 2 ‘The Social Value of Labour and Its Representation by Money’ from David Harvey’s new book ‘Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism’.

This takes us on to the field of the second contradiction of capital. What is money?

Exchange value requires a measure of ‘how much’ commodities are worth relative to each other. This measure is called money. So what is this ‘money’ that we so unthinkingly use and reuse on a daily basis?

In the case of social labour, ‘value’ speaks to why shoes cost more than shirts, houses cost more than cars and wine costs more than water.

Being immaterial and invisible, value requires some material representation. This material representation is money.

This gap between money and the value it represents constitutes the second foundational contradiction of capital.

Whereas gold and silver are relatively scarce and of constant supply, the representation of money as numbers allows the quantity of money available to expand without any technical limit. We thus see the Federal Reserve in our time adding trillions of dollars to the economy at the drop of a hat through tactics like quantitative easing. There seems no limit to such possibilities except that imposed by state policies and regulation.

When the metallic basis of global moneys was totally abandoned in the 1970s, we indeed found ourselves in a potentially limitless world of money creation and accumulation.

The rise of credit moneys (beginning with the simple use of IOUs) places a great deal of money creation in the hands of individuals and the banks rather than in the hands of state institutions.

This calls forth regulatory impositions and interventions on the part of the state apparatus in what is often a desperate attempt to manage the monetary system.

Above all, we take something that is inherently social and represent it in such a way that it can be appropriated as a form of social power by private persons. This last contradiction has deep and in some ways devastating consequences for the contradictions of capital.

The fact that money permits social power to be appropriated and exclusively utilised by private persons places money at the centre of a wide range of noxious human behaviours – lust and greed for money power inevitably become central features in the body politic of capitalism.

When money takes the form of mere numbers, then its potential quantity is limitless. This permits the illusion to flourish that limitless and unending growth of capital in its money form is not only possible but desirable.

Even a casual examination shows that compounding growth for ever is impossible.

When the European Central Bank was formed to deal with the euro, its sole mandate was to control inflation and nothing else. That this played out disastrously when the sovereign debt crises hit several European countries after 2012 testifies to a chronic inability within the institutions that capital sets up to regulate its own excesses, to understand the contradictory logic embedded in the monetary form that capital now necessarily assumes.