The banking system is a parasite on the real economy.

Something has gone horribly wrong with our financial system. Since when did we give control of our money supply to a handful of private corporations? The banking system is a parasite on the real economy, and the cause of, not the solution to, the financial crisis.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqvKjsIxT_8&w=480&h=360]

https://think-left.org/2011/11/07/the-market-has-a-name-it-is-goldman-sachs/

Economics is easy to understand. Wealth comes from human beings. It’s as simple as that. It comes from human beings engaging with nature in an intelligent and productive way in order to make all of the things we want and need. It is work that makes wealth. This is so obvious an observation that it hardly needs commenting upon. All of the classical economists understood it: Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, as well as Karl Marx.

The reason that modern economics has become so complex is that it has attempted to obscure this simple fact behind a fog of distraction in order to hide the processes by which a very few people have become more and more obscenely wealthy, while the rest of us are being squeezed to the point of desperation.

We’ve been living under an illusion for the last 30 years or so. The illusion goes under the collective name of “Monetarism”. It is also sometimes known as “Thatcherism” or “Neoliberalism”. In the US it went under the name “Reaganomics”.

https://think-left.org/2011/07/23/we-do-the-work-someone-else-takes-the-wealth/

The Tory-LD ploy is to cynically trot out the lie, that over-spending on public services by the last Labour government caused ‘this mess’, and that they are ‘forced’ to clear it up by dismantling the welfare state, the NHS and our education system. The reality is that this Tory-LD government is governing on behalf of the banks and ‘what banks want is for the economic surplus to be paid out as interest, not used for rising living standards, public social spending or even for new capital investment.’

https://think-left.org/2011/12/21/gordon-brown-did-not-spend-all-the-money-the-banks-did/

15 thoughts on “The banking system is a parasite on the real economy.”

Yes indeed but how long before those who e not vested interests do something about it? The re-enactment of the usury laws has more appeal each day 😦

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syzygysue on December 29, 2011 at 10:37 am said:

I would hope that it is today, or even yesterday! There is a series of mini-lectures on the US machine which date the take-over back to 1913… the first is at:

The ruthless dismantling/asset-stripping of the NHS without either a completed Bill or proper mandate, says it all.

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Great article, as ever!

The financial class are amoral and irredeemably greedy. They decided some time ago that the returns on capital investment in manufacturing industry were insufficient to satisfy their greed. Besides consumers can choose not to spend on luxury goods/services or to spend less on non-essential items. So the greedsters have looked for other options… options which are difficult for ordinary people to avoid needing or using. Privatisations were targeted at the utilities : water, gas, electricity. Now, horrendously, the financiers target health, housing and welfare as sources of a more-than-handsome income stream. Privatisation has nothing to do with “efficiency” except for the ‘efficiency’ of maximising short-term financial returns for those who have money to ‘invest’. Of course, it’s not investment as we would know it; it’s merely a parasitic intrusion into what ought to be fully publicly owned.

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David Edward on December 29, 2011 at 2:10 pm said:

Agree completely1

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- syzygysue on December 30, 2011 at 2:34 am said:
  
  Me too!
  
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Oh dear. No, “monetarism” isn’t the same as “neoliberalism”. And it isn’t the notion that everything should be left to the markets and there is no role for government. On the contrary, actually. Monetarism proposes that governments should control the supply of money in the economy. It does not work because it is based upon a misunderstanding of our banking system: it believes that restricting the money supply will control lending, whereas in fact the only means governments have of restricting money supply is controlling lending. In other words monetarism believes the cart drags the horse. But it absolutely DOES envisage a crucial role for government in economic management. Neoliberalism does believe in free markets and rolling back the state, and quite a few monetarists are also neoliberals, But the actual economic theories are different.

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