Posts Tagged ‘mccain’

There is lots of people out there who do not understand what this crisis is all about. They have no idea what fractal reserve banking is, why banks can make billions of profits and all of a sudden be bankrupt one year later. Well, fractal reserve banking means the bank is not obliged to keep your money when you bring it to them but they can spend it. This usually means they will lend it out to someone else against a higher interest rate than they give you, and the difference is their profit.

However, when stuff got deregulated banks could not just lend out your money to someone else, they could also start to gamble with it on the stock markets. This is where things went wrong. Banks bought giant amounts of mortgage-packages that were promised to be good and they turned out to be bad mortgages that do not return any profit, at least not yet. They’re problematic. So they have spend lots and lots of our money on bad investments. This means that
the profit figures they have flaunted last years, based partly on these investments, were fake. They made it look like they were growing and growing, just to be able to cash in more money at the stock counter.

So now they’ve got called on, they have a huge cash flow problem. These bad debts are made of your money, and when too many people start asking their money back: euh, its just not there. In fractal reserve banking the bank keeps just a small amount of money inside to be able to pay direct transactions. For that reason they have put caps on daily withdrawal amounts too, too high caps would bring them into trouble.

That’s one side of the story: they wasted your money on bad loans and don’t know how to pay it back. But there is more to this crisis. The whole American economy and partly European economies and other economies are debt-based. The American national debt has risen in the last eight years from 5 trillion dollars to 10 trillion dollars. So it has doubled under the Bush administration. This is all borrowed money. It has to be paid back. And every time the amount gets higher, it gets harder to pay back because of the interest issue. So what we see here is a debt figure that has risen to such an astronomic amount it has become virtually impossible to pay it back, or maybe even to stop it from growing. This is the core phenomenon we are dealing with at the moment: Crisis which will return at accelerating speeds, like this debt money is accelerating in size all the time. The effect of this in the long term is an economy in perpetual crisis. There will no longer be good times, bad times, depressions or recessions. People who believe this is a returning pattern in our economies are right, but they forget that we already had a major crisis in this decade: this is the second one. The crisis is a circular pattern but its exponential: it will keep coming back at a faster and faster pace, because debt is an exponential phenomenon.

The American author Gore Vidal wrote a book called ‘Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace’. In it he suggests that America has to stay in a state of Perpetual war to afford their lifestyle – there is much true about that, and what we will now see is that the economy more and more will follow a Perpetual Crisis model: faster and faster will these Crisis return. Either that, or there will be a total collapse. I’m not sure which option is the worst one. In the long term a collapse might be much, much more healthy. The 700 dollar bailout plan is of course ridiculous: more debt, to keep ‘things running’.

There is no quick fix, this time around. It’s pretty hilarious to see McCain and Obama talk of nothing but tax cuts.

Martijn Benders, Dutch writer and Freelance Economist

I stayed up last night to watch this presidential debate. I thought it was a failure on all points, first and foremost because of the debating formula that was used. There was a guy asking the most bland of all questions and there were two guys allowed to spit out pre-studied speeches. The failure here is clear: there should be a third independant party present that can ask tough questions, not just some old man who reads questions from a paper a 7 year old boy could have thought up.

The US largely is a mytholomanic country: it operates on the presumption that if one repeats a lie often enough and with enough conviction it sooner or later becomes a truth. Both candidates essentially have the same policies, one wants to put more soldiers into Afghanistan for-this-reason and the other one wants to put more soldiers into Afghanistan for-that-reason. Nobody present to ask any tough questions, such as why Russia is supposedly evil for responding when its soldiers were attacked by Georgia but for us its okay to occupy two countries on the other end of the world for more than 8 years.

Frankly, I see very little difference between these candidates. Both try to be hawkish warmongers that want to attack people based on nothing but a fable, both are idiotic enough to suppose that we should expand Nato right to the Russian border, both are talking about giant tax cuts in a time where the US is completely bankrupt and both want to spend more on the military too.

It’s not hard to see that which such candidates the US is pretty much doomed. What we have here are two people who claim that more spending is the answer to enormous debt. They both want to give 700 Billion dollars to the banks and, guess what, on top of that want to introduce tax cuts for the tax payers. Well, that is pretty brilliant. So where is all that money going to come from again?

What we essentially see here is that elections have become a marketing event without any real difference of opinion. The basic solution both have to everything is: more war & more spending & less tax will solve everything. Obama totally blew the little credential he had left with me when he mindlessly repeated several blatant lies and even tried to be more hawkish than McCain was over Pakistan. How can anyone in the same breath be a finger pointing moralist about Russia and publicly exclaim we should attack Pakistan whenever we want if we see reason for it. The same old mindless propaganda, repeated over and over again and the worst thing is it will probably end up in our history books, because, as Mark Twain wrote once: history is nothing but our prejudices written down with blood. Both these candidates are essentially proponents of the ‘Might is Right’ doctrine: it is enough to have powerful convictions, we, the public, don’t need reasons anymore. We don’t need reasons as to why the Nato should be expanded, we don’t need reasons as to why the Taliban must be ‘stamped out’. It’s enough to hear some lunatics say with great conviction that we should. That’s what politics has come to the last decade, and sadly Europe is sheepishly following in its trails.

You can’t institutionalize change. I wrote an article about this last week in respect to dutch poetry. Renewal and change are protest movements. Once you institutionalize them they die. This is true for politics as well. In Holland we had countless politicians who ‘would change the existing elite’ and ‘change Den Hague’ and in reality they have always proven to be worse than the thing they pretend to be fighting. There is a reason for that. Change is a sacred phenomenon, a high and creative sort of energy. Once you stick something holy into a mudpool, the mudpool just looks much much worse.

Prior to the ‘change’ it looked just like what it was: an unpretentious mudpool. After the ‘change’ it looks like the same old mudpool, but with something you hold dear lying in the middle, all smudged up and dirty. That’s what happens when you institutionalize change. It will never work. Holy things and mudpools aren’t fit to be partners.

So McCain, Obama, the so called advocates of change: I would never ever vote for them. The only person I would perhaps vote for is the guy that would say he wouldn’t change a thing about this mudpool he’s going to manage. That you can expect the same kind of corrupt crap from him as from the others. Such honesty would likely win him my vote, and lose him the votes of all the idiots who believe that one can baptize turds.

These are not presidents, these are marketing products. Anything that answers exactly to the expectations of the mass consumers is suspect. The fact that people nowadays vote for marketing products is evidence that these products have no power whatsoever of their own. It’s the guys that paid the marketing agencies to come up with these products that are pulling the ropes. Sometimes it seems evident the same guys pay for both products. At any rate, the only real change would be an entirely different system. Obama isn’t interested in change. You won’t hear him say anything about the idiotic media circus, the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars on fake shows, the inherent flaws in the system he represents. It is the Janus-head dictatorship of the media, disguising as a popular democracy. Nothing will change, or, if it does, it will probably get worse.