The Way the Money System Works

The Way the Money System Works

The banks need, as they have done throughout history, to earn money to pay their bills and have some left over for dividends in order to attract capital for a bit of reasonable expansion. We need the banks to keep our money safe, grow it a little for our old age and facilitate some borrowing so we can conduct business, pay for goods and the means to make them, in advance of making sales and collecting income. So the banks make loans to people and businesses at competitive interest rates, to earn the money they need to stay in business.

That’s how they used to operate. But now, since the mathematicians and the economists got into the act, the banks have discovered that making small loans to facilitate trade is for chumps. They make huge loans to each other and their friends in finance, to help them move billions of dollars around in pure gambling operations, betting on small changes in interest at the chip window of the central banks who print the money, but don’t ever give it to any but the rich in the financial game. Small business goes nowhere, employment that they would generate never happens, the economy, the real economy stagnates, and the rich stay in their gated communities worrying the mob may soon come howling for blood. A mob they have created through their greed and inability to control their consumption of products, housing, cars, travel, of no use once they pass the age of 60+. And their bodies rot out just as fast, if not faster, than those of the other 99% not so befriended by the government and banking system. So the 99% get to pay the medical costs of the rich and to educate the children of them too, but have increasingly less access either to education, or effective medical care.

Note that universal education started in the 1700’s in response to the need of the industrial revolution merchants for workers with minimum skills in reading and writing. Now that that work can be done by electronic gadgetry, educating the masses is no longer a priority, so governments and all those with large pension plan incomes, treat it as a cost to be minimized. Whereas, medical care of the elderly rich, is a priority, especially massively expensive research into means of palliating their illnesses caused by their careless and profligate lifestyle addictions...

Long ago. there wasn’t much money in circulation, and there were a lot of poor, only able to find hard laboring work as virtual slaves, not able to get enough money to start small businesses and begin to employ more people more regularly. The rich didn’t take much part in the cash expense economy either, their cash was all tied up in land, from which they got rents. Or in buying government bonds, having lent money to the government, collecting rent on that as interest. To make money, for survival and a pension, people worked for wages, or collected rents on land or money, or gambled by buying low and selling high, in goods, or slaves, or whatever. So merchants are basically gamblers....Banksters and the financially rich, the landowners, the owners of stocks and bonds, are renters, and the 99% are wage slaves, at the mercy of those who can use the army to control the ownership of resources.

In the distant past, the relation between armies, thousands willing to die to support a few rich, and the poverty of the masses (who supplied their bodies for a pittance as cannon fodder), was not so apparent as today, when even governments do the bidding of our vast armies and armaments factories, the military -industrial complex, which supplies welfare in the form of wages and directly maintains the control of the rich over all resources, land, mineral, now water, and coming, to a place near you, the air (Drones anyone?)

Donato Mar. 6  2013