How the BBC is misleading the public about the financial crisis ~ and how disabled people pay the price

You might ask why we’re posting these articles on economics and monetary reform on our disability rights website.

It’s because we believe that the monetary system is fundamentally rotten to the core and is at the root cause of the suffering of hundreds of millions of people in our world today, disabled people foremost among them!

We believe that the resources of our world and our financial system must be placed at the service of the 99% and not the other way around as now.

The DWP is the government agency that employs Atos as its agent in the wholesale attack on our fundamental human rights as disabled people, through the operation of the criminal ‘disability assessment’ régimes of the Work Capability Assessment and the new ‘Personal Independence Payment’ system based on the utterly discredited, fraudulent, ‘Biopsychosocial Model’ of illness and disability.

In the same way, we believe that the international banking and monetary system ’employs’ governments as their agents in perpetrating massive fraud on all our societies based upon the Fractional Reserve banking system where the private banks create 99% of money out of thin air on digital ledgers ‘issued’ against debt obligations incurred by civil society – the 99%.

Not only must we nationalise social care, welfare services and administration by bringing it back firmly under Statutory NHS control and kick Atos and other assorted corporate leeches and ‘academic’ poverty-pimps associated with and bankrolled by the international insurance industry in to touch: We need to nationalise our money supply and create a system of Full Reserve Banking that serves our communities and helps ensure a sustainable future for us, our children and our planet.

People all over the world are waking up to this fundamental truth that it is our monetary system and the banking cartels – not unemployed poor, sick and/or disabled people – that have caused this crisis. They are also beginning to understand how they have done so and to proffer sound ideas for change.

When policy papers for the IMF are advocating these ideas we can only hope that these solutions are finally beginning to gain traction and momentum. We are starting to dare hope that the ‘tipping point’ is near and we hope everyone will do their bit to educate their friends and neighbours by advocating for this momentous change to our economic system.

Let nobody accuse us in the disability rights movement of offering no solutions to the debt crisis!

We stand ready to debate with anyone at any time and in any place the righteousness of our arguments and the feasibility of our plans for socio-economic justice and a solid future for all people in a society that must evolve beyond the base barbarism that we see implemented as government social policy today in the UK.

We can’t wait for the ‘Labour’ Party to come rushing out to save us as disabled people. We, over and above everyone else in society are being hit the very hardest – as this post, aptly titled ‘The End of Our Illusions’, illustrates in simple facts and figures.

While members of the official opposition reads books on Islands in Greece and elsewhere this August and offer us no hope, solution or vision of a world without the sheer Hell of cuts and austerity for us as disabled people upon their return to the party conference season – let us be the ones at the vanguard of the fightback armed with the light and truth of our ideas as to why we are in this crisis and how we can exit it.

Please repost these articles often on your pages and around the net!  😉

Curse the darkness if you like but light up this candle of knowledge and pass the light on to others to share. It is essential that this knowledge becomes the ‘common currency’ of national debate if we are to win the war on austerity!

Power concedes nothing without a demand.

We must DEMAND the change.

“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Victor Hugo, poet, novelist, republican (1802-1885) 

This is an idea whose time has come – LET’S DEMAND IT!

~ Black Triangle Campaign

 

The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against “governments”. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people’s power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of “experts” from America’s top universities and “think tanks”, who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters…

But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don’t my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power?

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn’t it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

You can read the whole article here

Many people are angry at the banks, or individual bankers. But the truth is that it is the government who sets that ‘rules of play’, and successive governments have failed to reform the banking system at the right time.

The key flaw in our current banking system is that almost all money is now created by private banks as debt.

Money must become a  constitutional creation for the public good and no longer a privilege which our politicians have given to private banks.

Instead, after every crisis, the government and authorities focus on getting back to business as usual. They focus on ‘getting banks lending again’ without questioning why we are all so dependent on bank debt to keep the economy functioning.

So we should blame all those successive governments who have repeatedly failed to fix the banking system, but the pressing concern is to do something about it.

And we also need to make sure that they don’t make the same mistake again. We need to make sure everyone understands how the banking system really works, how money is created, and how we can fix the system.

And what the BBC news editors fail to inform the public

First Published Tuesday 7th Aug 2012

by Dr. Michael Reiss (guest author) 23 Comments

More than 99% of the general public think that money works as a system of tokens (real or electronic) that get passed from person to person as trade is carried out.

They assume that the total amount of it would remain constant were it not for occasional money printing by government. Money could indeed work this way had governments chosen such a system, but in reality it works completely differently. Bear this in mind as when you read the following.Here I present two tables, the first contains things the BBC say that are either false or misleading, and the second is a table of important things they don’t say but should.

What the BBC say How the public perceive this information Why this is wrong There is a “credit crunch” There is a problem specifically for those people who want to borrow money. There is no impact on the money supply.  Because “credit” is money (technically “broad money”). When you buy something with a debit card, what you are spending is (97%)    “credit” even if you personally have not borrowed any money. A “credit crunch” is in fact a money crunch. See here for more info. Contagion is due to “interconnectedness”. Some kind of financial disaster may happen because of “interconnectedness”. The contagion effect has very little to do with “interconnectedness” and everything to with our highly leveraged monetary system. See here. QE is “printing money” The money supply must therefore be going up. Without QE the money supply would be falling fast. QE is being done to slow down its rate of fall. In all the years of this crisis I have only heard this on the BBC once.The money supply, even after QE, is falling. See Mervyn King confirm what I’m saying here. QE is “printing money” More money is created, and that’s the end of the story. Because it is compulsory that the money created through QE is extracted from the economy in the future. This will be painful. It is “kicking the can down the road”. QE is “printing money” QE is “printing money” Money printing is in fact against EU regulations. Let’s listen to esteemed mainstream economist X This economist understands the crisis. Mainstream economics spectacularly failed to foresee the crisis. Economist X doesn’t have a clue why its happening. If this was football, this economist has just been relegated to the Vauxhall conference league and yet the BBC will talk to him/her with reverence and won’t even ask them to explain why they missed the crisis. Let’s listen to a non-mainstream “controversial” economist Steve Keen. Lets not take him too seriously. If this was football, this guy has just won the premiership. Yet the BBC didn’t have him on until years after the crisis began. “Only the Bank of England can create money in the UK.” “Only the Bank of England can create money in the UK.” This is flat out wrong. Private banks create almost all of the money supply, the BOE only create a tiny proportion. See here.

So start to de-code your news…

What the BBC don’t say	Why they should
The money supply can shrink	More than 99% of the population are unaware that it is even possible for the money supply to shrink. They have no idea that this possibility has anything to do with the financial crisis, yet this phenomena is at the heart of it. No wonder the population at large do not understand the crisis. See here for more info.
Anything about Irving Fisher	During the great depression in the 30’s… famous economist Irving Fisher developed an alternative monetary system known as Full Reserve Banking (in which the money supply can not shrink). The plan was endorsed by hundreds of academic economists and was probably the most significant economic idea to arise from the depression. Sadly the (tiny number of) people in government that had the power to implement the plan at the time, didn’t have the courage to do so. Then the war broke out and the plan was mothballed.This financial crisis is an almost exact repeat of the depression of the 30’s and yet there is no discussion of him or his plan on the BBC. See THIS POST
Banks behaving better shrinks money supply. And makes banks go bust or need more bailouts.	This is a tragedy not mentioned on the BBC. See here for details.
People taking economics at university are either not taught about the monetary system at all, or are taught an oversimplified and FALSE model of it.	For proof of this, look no further than this quote from Professor Charles Goodhart, who describes standard university teaching of our monetary system as “…such an incomplete way of describing the process of the determination of the stock of money that it amounts to misinstruction”. So anyone reading this who has a degree in economics – please note that your understanding of the way our monetary system works is probably wrong.
Over 90% of bank lending in the past years has been for the purchase of non-productive assets.	The BBC are constantly referring to investing in “risky assets”. But the public has little idea of what this term means. They may think that it means investing in businesses that make products that may or may not sell. But it actually means non-productive assets. Not “businesses” of any kind.Sadly the suppression of this kind of lending shrinks the money supply for the rest of us – so it would be a disaster to suppress it so long as we keep our current “fractional reserve” monetary system.

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What the Public Does Not Know about Banking, Financial Times

The Independent: Massive Financial Con Trick Foisted on the Voters

An Extraordinarily Misleading View of the Role of Banks

Financial Crisis Is Worst the World Has Ever Had

Are we heading for a second global financial crisis?

 

 

 

About the Author

After gaining a degree in physics and PhD in neural networks, Michael Reiss went on to a successful career as in artificial intelligence programming. After the crash of 2007/8 he switched his attention to economics and monetary systems in particular. His research culminated in writing the book What Went Wrong with Economics. It considers how various aspects of the economy are damaged by fractional reserve banking and how things would be improved with full reserves. Michael maintains the website FullReserveBanking.com

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