getting real sick of the word ‘austerity’

‘austere’ implies moral rectitude, self-discipline, spiritual focus

no - you’re inflicting poverty, suffering and death on people

it’s not for their own good or the betterment of their character, it’s for your own greed

and another thing, it’s not a ‘haircut’ if you steal people’s money from their bank accounts

the money doesn’t grow back in a couple of months free of charge, it’s gone

when the hairdresser cuts your hair they don’t then keep the hair in a little bag and use it to gamble on the financial markets

and then there’s ‘tightening our belts’. which ties in to the whole bullshit weight loss = health = better person discourse (which ties in with the moral discipline spiel of ‘austerity’)

if anyone has to tighten their belts as a result of government cuts, it’s probably because you’re doing your damnedest to make sure they starve to death

‘bail out’ implies the banks were like sinking ships, damaged and sinking under powers beyond their control, and that they’re all about to die

when the fact is it’s their system, they intended it this way, and they’re making out like bandits

I don’t even know wtf ‘quantitative easing’ is supposed to mean

but ‘easing’ it is most certainly not

and it’s not a ‘recession’

a recess is a small indentation ie in a wall

which you’ll notice could also be described as a ‘depression’ in the wall

what part of ‘millions of people are suffering and dying’ makes you think of uneven wall surfaces

This particularly applies to banks and financial institutions.

Until it becomes widely known that under the current fractional reserve banking system, private banks are able to create money out of thin air and charge interest on it, they will continue to remain undetected parasites.

(Basically, the trick is that they only have to keep a tiny fraction of each deposit ‘in reserve’, typically about 3%. So if you deposit £100 at a bank, they can then loan out £97. That £97 is then deposited at a bank, which again keeps 3% on reserve and can then loan out approx £94 .That £94 is then deposited, 97% of it is loaned out and so on. So from the initial £100 deposit, after this happens 200 odd times, you eventually end up with more than £3000 - there’s a calculator here you can mess around with to get an idea of this process).

^ All of which is interest-bearing debt, and all of which ultimately means that people have to work to pay off that debt+interest, while private banks can magically make money from doing fuck all.

(click here for some quotes/documentation from bankers and economists to back this up)

All of this while the poor (who, as Ron Paul types never point out, are disproportionately not white/able-bodied/cishet men) are blamed not only for their own poverty, but for the failures of the entire system. Which is just ridiculous. Even if the disgusting propaganda were somehow true and the poor were lazy, workshy and lacking in personal responsibility, how exactly could that ever have more influence on the economic system than the fact that some people are able to MAGICALLY CREATE MONEY OUT OF NOTHING FOR THEMSELVES AND THEN CHARGE INTEREST ON IT. And that this money then constitutes the vast majority of money in the system.

(Source: redpilldoses)

about 5 years ago I registered on a gold trading website where they gave you 1g free, which iirc equated to around £17. I don’t think I logged in again since (what with having no money to actually invest)

well I just checked and my 1g has now doubled in worth to £34. which is nice I guess, although tbh I’m not entirely sure how I sell/redeem it

what bothers me is that if I’d had, say, a spare £100m lying around at the time, it would have made me another £100m by now

from doing fuck all of any value to anyone

from gambling on the relative values of currencies

and this is how the system works

CAPITALISM

You really need to read this. I’ll quote a bit from the New Scientist article and put a link to the actual study at the bottom for anyone who can understand complex mathematics:

[…] From a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 transnational corporations and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the “real” economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. 

article details:

The network of global corporate control, 2011,PLoS One, Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (pdf)

• Gross Domestic Product of USA: $15 trillion
• Total publicly held national debt of USA (according to US Treasury Dept.): $16.3 trillion
• Amount of money secretly loaned by US Federal Reserve to various international banks & corporations since Dec 1st 2007: $16 trillion (source: US Govt. Accountability Office - Congressional Report, July 2011. PDF available from gao.gov here)

Henry Ford

(protip: it’s not hard to understand)

Yes, in the 3 months up to June they only made a paltry $962m profit.

Right now, in a gated community somewhere, a Goldman Sachs exec is looking mournfully over his bonus package and sighing. His eyes lift from the page, briefly lingering on the recently commissioned 60-foot marble statue of himself, and finally come to rest on the Heavens above. Why me? he asks, as a single tear makes its way down his cheek. Why do you hate me so, God? He decides to go for a walk through the topiary garden to calm down. 

Then he has to give Karen and the kids the bad news: they’ll only be getting two private jets (each) this Christmas. Worse, they may have to go with the mid-range option. I KNOW THEY DON’T HAVE THE IN-FLIGHT JACUZZI KAREN BUT THESE ARE TOUGH TIMES.

We all have to cut our cloth accordingly etc.

Really though we do have to keep the bankers super happy otherwise they’ll all bugger off to other countries and then where would we be?

US inflation since the creation of the ‘Federal’ Reserve in 1913.

Those central banks do such a good job of creating controlling inflation. Wherever would we be without them?

Man in advertising claims he was “working from a photograph of a real live model”…

Actually just traced poster for Hitler Youth.

(I like my plagiarism with unintentional social commentary).

I don’t particularly like Bill Maher, nor do I approve of some of his jokes/language choices here, but I defy you to think of a better metaphor for trickle-down neoliberalism than a piñata of benevolence.