The $100 bill and how much it is costing you.

So let’s begin at the start....where all of this austerity arising from boom and bust actually came from.  Only then can we begin to come up with a superior system to replace it before it kills of our economy, our future generations and our entire planet.

There is an apocryphal tale upon which the entire Western economic/financial system is based.  It goes like something like this...

A stranger stopped in town and went into a small old hotel to check in. He asked to go check out the rooms first so, in good faith, he left a $100 bill—a deposit of sorts—with the hotel owner. The hotel owner immediately ran next door to pay his grocery bill. The grocer ran it across the street to pay one of his suppliers. The supplier used it to pay off his co-op bill. The co-op guy ran it back across the street to pay the local hooker who had taken up residence in the aforementioned hotel. The hooker ran it downstairs to pay her hotel bill just ahead of the returning traveller, who picked the $100 bill off the desk and left saying that the rooms were not satisfactory.

Each of these people have somehow managed to pay their debts with money they only had possession of for a very short time.  The actual possessor of the bill was unaware of the utility they made of his money and he left none the poorer for it.

The basic idea is that money can be used more than once and even at the same time; the face value of $100 could be multiplied again and again given the opportunity if the holder is not aware of the use or allows it without compensation.

That’s the principle of ‘Hot Money’.  This is what every single bank does with the money you deposit with them. They trade it in various ways, they use it as leverage to buy shares in properties and commodities to be sold at a profit later, they invest it in a hedge funds to game the stock, international bond, and even currency markets, they invest it with political parties or other decision makers to ensure they get the result they want at the budget and they even give it to the likes of you and me as debts.  Mostly they do all of this at the same time with the same amount.

However, as the story illustrates, these transactions have to be very fast because the original bearer, the possessor of the money, will inevitably want to make use of it. Banks and serious investment houses now make electronic transactions all over the world at a rate of millions per nanosecond.  A nanosecond is one millionth of a millionth of a second (Joanna Lumley told me that in an 80’s BT advert – Joanna Lumley doesn’t lie.)  Do you really believe this amazing electronic infrastructure called the internet was given to you so you could share ‘selfies’ and kitten videos?

No.  What started as a US doomsday project in the 70’s to safeguard the information and communications of the West in the event of a catastrophic nuclear war was, over time, privatized so that the financial industry could dope their stock market trading.  Seeing the excellent utility of this state-bought infrastructure, the new private owners also saw it as a means to liquidate some of their assets and make a killing.

An international trade used to take three days to complete from stock market offer, interbank confirmation of the trade and then reconciliation of receipt for every single trade. I used to work in a reconciliations office in the mid 80’s and I can assure you it was a laborious and eye killing process of chits and printouts. My job no longer exists. With this internet thingy they could turn those back office duties into a simple electronic handshake and move onto the next trade instantly.

So the money which, by the way, nobody owns as it is merely a promissory note and the property of the issuer (more on that later); whizzes around offering its utility for brief periods of time ensuring that the lender can make money on the period of utility (possession) by charging interest.  We already have moved away from the cosy story of the one whore town because we have inserted the concept of interest.

A bright spark in the financial world came up with the idea of letting the general public get into on the action by issuing us with bank cards. Take one out now.  Read what’s on the back.  Every card you possess is not yours but the property of the issuing bank.  Your PIN is not yours but the property of the issuing bank.  And, once installed under their roof your Euros, even a transfer of credit sent electronically to the bank account issued to you is not yours but.....you get the picture.  You only enjoy utility by their leave.

Starting in the late 70s and continuing into the eighties, the concept of the credit card was relentlessly inserted into the public sphere.  Money was no longer the only way to make purchases. By the time I escaped the school system the drinklink, the store card, the debit card, and the Amex gold card had landed. But we hung on to our notes and our coins because the technology hadn’t matured and people still insisted on actual money payment for small transactions.  Even now an electronic transaction is refused for amounts under 10€ in many shops because each card transaction comes with a charge. Remember our $100 bill in the story didn’t have a charge. Who makes that money?  Where does it come from? You have to play this story in slo-mo to get that answer. If each transaction was charged at 10c then the hotel keeper is up 10c he got from the grocer, who is now charging 20c to make back the ten he gave to get the $100 bill and so on until we get to the poor hooker who has to pay out 40c for all the previous transactions. in real terms, however, the hotel manager is down on her rent.  Hookers make great bankers and the reverse is also true.

So let’s get back to the question of ownership:  Who ACTUALLY owns that money?

The answer is quite startling. In the US the issuer of dollars is the Federal Reserve.  In the UK it is the Bank of England.  In Ireland it used to be the Central Bank of Ireland but we entered the Euro mechanism so now our currency is the property of the European Central Bank.  They own our money and so they believe they also own our prosperity.

If you don’t believe me, try burning a large amount of money in public and you will face charges if you are in the US, Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand.  The executor of a will cannot be instructed to burn the dead person’s money as it is personal property not his or her own; nor is it truly the property of the deceased.  The government reserves the right to take any monies not resolved by the legal process of probate upon the death of a possessor of monies and shares.

So, the coins and the notes in your pocket weren’t, aren’t and never will be your money.  

Remember I said that. 

It seems a small point but it’s profound one. Ireland has been instructed to burn or destroy many hundreds of millions of Euros in circulation by the ECB and it must comply. The ECB is replacing this physical money with virtual electronic credit.

To the central bankers and the economists this is a ‘like for like’ swap but it’s not like for like; it is an aggressive attack against the poor. The poor cannot access credit; they can barely access a bank account if they have a temporary address. There is absolutely no chance for anyone without a home address to touch or receive the utility of this new virtual money.  They are simply not part of the system.  In France it is a human right to have a bank account, the post office offers one for free to anyone who fills in the forms. What’s happening to the post offices here and in the UK?  Just today new forms have been introduced urging people taking welfare payments to take them via their BANK accounts.

This is not an honest oversight or system limitation. This is a measure of control which will ultimately drive many thousands of our families into the social welfare system and into the living hell of workfare and pointless training courses.  The cost of these new training courses and subsidised jobs is paid by whom? 

Why, the tax payer of course!  You.  Me. You and you and you.

And we will be encouraged to view our fellow citizens as scroungers and parasites when they are in fact the victims of the real parasites: the architects of Neo Liberalism.  As this fraud continues less and less usable money will be within our grasp and more and more taxation will be loaded upon us until we are left dependent on handouts from our overstretched government.  

And then, one dark and rainy night, the handouts will stop and we are left impoverished tenants on our own soil.   What is happening in Greece, the US, Northern England, will soon happen here.  It is illegal to feed a homeless person in many states of the US as we speak and only this week Westminster Council introduced a similar ordinance. Compassion, solidarity, the natural instinct for care and social good will soon be a crime.

They talk about waging a war on poverty but, in fact, they wage a genocide against the poor.  They speak of waging a war on Terror whereas they are, in fact, investors and controllers of terrorist groups.  They, who are they?

It’s a fluid thing ‘They’, ‘The powers that be’, ‘The Establishment’ – We read about them every weekend in newspapers left handily for us as free copies in every restaurant, pub, hotel, college cafe and train station. Newspapers paid for by adverts and large subsidy from our government.  We see their smiling faces at this opening or at that golf classic, always the same faces, always the same family names.  Who are they?  They are our new ascendancy, our new connected; they are our ruthless and determined opposition. 

Now how can I be so confident that the people who just happen to be on the gossip pages of a trashy sunday newspaper are our opponents?  Because we scare the shit out of them! We have ten years’ working experience on our CVs.  We’re recognised professionals in our field with decades of using our critical faculties.  We have experience outside of the Kildare Street bubble where all the real work is actually done by the Civil Service.  We’re a party of people who are credible, responsible, courageous and worst of all, we’re electable.

You see, it’s all very well coming up with an utopian economic system where everybody is rich but such a thing is as much as a pipe dream as our $100 bill story because the money we would give out is NOT ours to give in the first place.

There are particular piseógí that we all share: We believe that the pillars of the EU are somehow answerable to our democratic whim.  We believe that, if we protest enough and make life hard enough for our representatives in Dáil Éireann they will capitulate to our demands and end austerity.  We believe the European Commission is charged to improve the lives of the European people . Most naively, we believe that the ECB exists to regulate our economies and ensure that our wealth is safeguarded. 

Not a bit of it.

The pillars of the EU are not answerable to us.  We are but one country among many and we are kept separate by the fragmentation of interests within that enormous population.  There will never be a mass movement of the people in Europe because we are conditioned to want different things by our appointed representatives. 

We could march Enda Kenny, Joan Burton, and every minister, backbencher, senator and even Michael D Higgins up to a guillotine and they wouldn’t end austerity.  Not because they are staunch believers but because they physically can’t end austerity, they legally can’t end austerity and they financially can’t end austerity.

The European Commission is not in the least bit interested in improving the lot of the man in the street, they are solely interested in controlling more and more resources through regulation in order to have the power to trade those resources with other superpowers.  They are planning to do this right now with the US (TTIP), and later they will trade our wealth and birth right with China and Russia. 

The ECB doesn’t exist to ensure Europe’s economy is robust and sound but for its own express mission....not to build flashy office blocks in Frankfurt, no; but to ensure the Euro is a global reserve currency. Remember the electronic transaction charges coming from yours and my pocket. Now multiply those charges by a factor of millions every nanosecond....do you understand?  That’s what a reserve currency earns, every single day.  

Neo Liberalism is the science of farming countries for wealth. It is a more subtle hegemony than imperialism.  There won’t be a standing army taking our food from our mouths brandishing guns like in the days of the potato famine.  They don’t need to.  The will enforce our capitulation using the twin controls of just-out-of-reach debt and the drip bleeding of our legal and social rights.

If this sounds like George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four” it should.  George Orwell originally called his dystopian novel “Nineteen Forty Eight” but the Lord Chamberlain insisted that he change the name because it was too close to the truth, even back then.  George Orwell didn’t write science fiction, it is political polemic and satire of what was already happening around him at the end of the Second World War.

One can get very disheartened looking at just how well we have been stitched up by this system.  We can be easily intimidated by these impressive, powerful and cruel establishments enjoying such control over our politics and our police.We can be crushed into submission to learn that soon our country can be sued by a multinational corporation for not rolling over and allowing them to despoil our territory to the tune of one half of our GDP.  It can be shaming to see so many of our children and our young facing a future bleaker than even our own recession blighted 80’s.

But take heart because you are reading a blog written by a member of the IDP.

Yeah baby!  We’re like the 300 Spartans!  Like the Spartans, we will stop them at a choke point and render their vast numbers and wealth null and void. That choke point?  TTIP.  That’s our battleground.  TTIP is the deal which will push Europe into a race to the bottom.

There is a solution, there is a superior system, we will kick off a golden age, not just in our own country but for the rest of Europe and then the world.  The four horsemen of Neo Conservatism, Neo Liberalism, Oligarchy and Clientelism will be dismissed with a simple sequence of events. 

We are not only going to successfully resist the European Commission’s dictats but we will work in tandem with the vast majority of European and US citizens to arrest the creeping resource and wealth fraud and then we will jail its architects and champions.  We will bring in a newer representative economic model which will reflect and adapt to the reality on the ground for each member state.  And the key to this miracle outcome is Participatory Democracy.

It’s essential to our new economic system that possession denotes legal ownership and that utility, commoditisation (burning notes for heat, melting down the coins for their metal) is a right. It is essential that the economic system reverses the trend of passive consumerism and returns us to active participant and innovator.  There is more to our money than the grim zero sum game of Capitalism versus Socialism.  An economic system for the 21st Century will do in reality what the apocryphal  $100 note did in that story but this time the utility is clear and obvious as opposed to deceitful and illegal, 

Just in case you were wondering about the apocryphal tale.....

The Hotel Keeper was guilty of paying money he did not legally possess in escrow.  He temporarily stole the visitor's money and, had the hooker charged more than $100 for her services, for instance, the entire town would have been tried as accessories to a compound theft.  

Our entire economic system is based on a story that is about as legitimate as those emails from Nigerian princes.  Time to change it for one that is based on reality and not a dodgy rubber note.

If you want to know what that new economic system might look like, contact your local Irish Democratic Party branch and have a hand in developing it with us.