I read this morning that Ian Duncan Smith has jumped on the criticisms of the Benefit Cap that will limit the amount available to the families of the un-employed. Claiming that the principle that it should always be more rewarding to work than claim benefit is one that everyone will support.

However it suggests that claimants are exercising a choice over whether to work or claim benefit, to in IDS’s words ‘work hard and commute long hours’ or presumably sit on their arse’s watching daytime TV. As if £35k jobs were in abundance! I’m sorry but it’s the same old nonsense and distraction that runs well in the tabloids. It sets people against each other to obscure what lays at the heart of the problem; how money is created.

The Benefit Cap is about moving the un-employed out of high value city centre properties to reduce costs as the house price bubble that has continued grow even in tough times shows no signs of shrinking and bringing relief to the government’s Housing Benefit burden. It is however a burden of their own making.

Why do property prices continue to rise when it’s plain that prices have moved beyond many people’s ability to buy? The answer has less to do with demand and more to do with where the money comes from in the first place.

The modern banking system has developed in such a way that 97% of all the money in the economy is created by Private Banks. You’d be wrong if you thought the Government or the Bank of England creates most of our money as the BoE prints around just a measly 3%.

What’s more banks don’t need to actually have the money you apply for to extend you a loan or a mortgage. The bank just creates digital money out of thin air for you to make your purchase albeit a car, holiday or a home. It’s simply a matter of creating numbers in your account.

As banks control how most of the money in the economy is used they inevitably choose the safest bet. Property for the banks is a no brainer… Simple, automated credit checks enable decisions to be made quickly and if in the end the borrower can’t meet the loan the bank can repossess. Consider for one moment the position of the bank in this scenario. The bank created the money for your mortgage out of thin air but if you can’t keep up the repayments they get the very real asset that was your home!

In the last decade the money supply created out of property debt has ballooned dwarfing the money available to the productive economy. While banks have fuelled a property price boom the money made available to businesses continues to be rationed.

For years we have been fed the myth that rising property prices are beneficial, creating wealth, jobs and a sense of wellbeing. Looking around it’s not hard to see why we’ve been robbed. As property prices rise, essential but marginal businesses start to disappear. When the value of the village bakery is distorted by what it could fetch as a country home it soon becomes history together with pubs, petrol stations and independent stores. In towns, workshops and small industries disappear along with anything else that is more valuable as residential or commercial property. Historic places of work like wharfs and canal side workshops become ‘waterfront properties.’ Rising property prices are as destructive of community as they are a sap on the productive economy stealing places to work and marshalling money away from the things that generate real prosperity and diversity.

In the past a blend of social and private housing ensured that even in cities there were necessary homes for key workers and the low paid who helped to fulfil necessary functions. Today, the Benefit Cap is just another step along the road that Margaret Thatcher began with the sale of Council Houses; from mixed communities of incomes, skills and backgrounds to segregation along the lines of ability to pay, to convenience for those with money and increasing commuting for those who can’t.

The power to create a nation’s money supply endows the Banks with tremendous power and it is clear that they influence many government decisions including financial regulation. The banks have acted in their own interest for too long and clearly in way that has created many distortions in the way things are valued. Government cannot scapegoat scroungers, the work shy unemployed, immigrants or whatever else they can dream up to cover the reality that they are complicit in a allowing private corporations to create our money.

There is an alternative way and I would urge you to begin to understand the monetary system… it’s not as complex as they would have you believe. For real change to come about depends on how much our current government has vested in maintaining the status quo … the level of privilege, wealth and connections in the current administration suggests that change won’t come easy!   Ken Finn

Read/View/More Info

http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/

http://www.neweconomics.org/

“Up Shit Creek Without a Paddle” is a saying which most of us are aware of, it describes a hopeless situation. The origin of the term may be disputed but I believe it refers to a human and environmental disaster from Victorian London. On the 3rd of September 1878 the Paddle Steamer The Princess Alice carrying around 750 day trippers returning from a day out collided with a heavy iron ship the Bywell Castle on the Thames below Barking Creek at Galleons Reach. In minutes over over 550 people perished in a foul mixture of Raw Sewage, Chemical Waste and river water in what is still the heaviest peacetime loss of life in the UK.

Just before the disaster struck a little up stream the Barking Creek sewage outfall had just discharged thousands of tons of sewage to be flushed out to sea on the tide and to make things worse this mixed with industrial waste from factories further up river which dumped their waste directly into the water. It was into this toxic brew that Victorian ladies in their finery floundered in their heavy frocks, kissed their children and sank. Records show that up to 550 men women and children drowned within 8 minutes.

The prospect that  flowers of Victorian society should perish in such filth was to outrage Parliament and new measures to deal with effluent were put in place and it could be said that this was the event that first moved government to introduce environmental legislation.

While it seems that we have progressed, our rivers and waterways have been restored and our countryside is protected our ‘out of site, out of mind’ mentality persists. The Victorians built parks and gardens and beautified London while pumping their effluent down river out of sight to pollute the lives of others. Now the developed nations do much the same. Our countryside is pristine while we export our waste to make ‘Shit Creeks’ of other less fortunate lands and expect the natural world to cope with the pollutants we pump into the atmosphere.
Just like our Victorian ancestors we are heading to towards another collision and another rude awakening. While nations argue who’s shit is causing the problem and even if shit is a problem anyway we drift inexorably towards catastrophe.
Even as the ice caps melt and the effects of our lifestyles are plain as the receding ice shelves and rising temperatures we choose to steam onwards.
If you care about your children and grandchildren then prepare a lifeboat for them now. Make sure they know how to grow their own food and give them practical skills for it may be too late to turn the boat about.
To underline what may be around the corner listen to the BBC’s ‘From our Own Correspondent’ Richard Wilson’s account (18 mins in) of a recent visit to Antarctica and how unexpected changes are hastening a major melt of ice that could increase sea levels dramatically and very quickly…

Ken Finn

George Monbiot reported on a tax heist by this government which was dissed by the BBC’s Robert Peston… The above is a good rebuttal

The original by George, ‘A Corporate Coup Detat’ is a compelling read – Read it Here

What if Gadaffi Survives?

If the Colonel looks to recent history he may take heart from the events of June 4th 1989 in Tiananmen Square. Slaughter on BBC News
The blood was hardly dry from the slaughter of nearly a thousand pro democracy protesters by the Chinese Army when Conservative Trade Minister Micheal Hesteltine headed the largest Western business delegation to ever visit Beijing. Then as always trade was promoted as the way to strengthen the liberal movement within the hard-line regime.

So what if Gadaffi wins back control in perhaps a short but bloody strike on the protesters? Will the Middle East Peace Envoy, Mr Blair be hugging the Colonel once more, will BP be lobbying for a return to business as usual?

The World’s leaders are lining up to condemn the man but in two years time will they be lining up to do business with him?

We await the latest round of climate negotiations to begin in Copenhagen as if some great contest is about to begin. Who will blink, who will win the advantage? How far will they go and what is politically possible?  Somehow the whole concept is like a bunch of people in a hot tub arguing over who gets to defecate in the water and with what regularity.

At the heart of problem is the belief that we are separate from one another, that as individuals we are islands of consciousness that operate in an environment that begins at the outer layer of our skin. What’s inside is self and what’s outside is other. To navigate this world of separateness we attach labels to everything even the intangibles like faith.

Inside our skin we have labels for our sensations and the feelings they invoke and we have a mental map of how our body works too. We  know that our beating heart is separate from the functioning of our bowel or the workings of the brain but there is an understanding that all this is connected and interdependent.

Inside the body as far as I know there are no negotiations going on; the brain needs blood and the heart delivers. It’s in our nature to understand the interdependence of the system, that without a functioning brain our heart would also die. This service the heart offers to the brain may described as a transaction but it comes without condition for benefit of mutual survival.

Outside our body it seems that we have lost sight of our part in a larger interdependent system.  As a species we spread across the earth evolving along the way to meet the conditions that we found, we developed language and cultures to make sense of it all but a human heart is still a human heart. We have accepted the borders placed upon us that create countries, nationalities and differences but with human ingenuity a white man’s heart can be made to beat within a black man.

As humans we depend on one another for all sorts of services and we have an elaborate way of conducting them and negotiating advantage has become the prime motivator. Creating profit is king and separateness allows this to system to function, winners and losers are just more labels.

When it comes to saving our planet, using a system based on seeking advantage through ‘negotiation’ for our mutual survival  is bound to fail. It might be possible for rich countries to continue pooing in the hotub for a little longer at the expense of the developing world but at this rate we’re set to join the Dodo. Its pretty clear that the only process bound to succeed is one where a safe level of global emissions is set and we all get a carbon allowance.

In times of peril our perceptions of differences diminish and in the past we have come together to pitch for a common cause.  Its at moments like this that we should see beyond the borders of label and country and touch our commonality, the hopes for our children and grandchildren and the future of our world. In Copenhagen we need leadership not prevarication; cooperation not negotiation.

I wonder just why it is that we don’t heed the warnings on climate change, why we don’t see the havoc we’re wreaking?

Perhaps it’s because most of us live on already dead parts of the planet. Surrounded by tarmac, concrete, brick and glass, dead stuff,  it’s difficult to see the important changes taking place in the living world.

In our man-made environment much seems the same year in, year out.  For instance, apart from the predominance of replacement plastic windows the road I grew up on 50 years ago remains largely unchanged. We’re more likely to notice a new shop front than the changes to our urban trees which, are already under attack from alien insects migrating Northward with the warmer temperatures.  From this aspect it’s easy to see how the ‘climate change skeptics’ can make plausible assertions that the whole global warming thing is a conspiracy by government to create Green taxes.

Yet our existence here in our dead zones relies entirely on the remaining living world, the great forests, oceans and last wildernesses. Whilst we very rarely and in some cases never see them we have them to thank  for moderating our excesses and for the air we breath.

In the coming days for the G20 our government will mobilise great numbers of police to protect ‘property’ in the dead zone, they will commit all the funds needed to ensure that edifices that represent a failed system are safe. Yet while the attention of the world’s press is focused on the ‘anarchists’ anarchy prevails in the living world. Chainsaws  untroubled by such attention will continue their destructive business as usual, unwatched the oceans will be plundered and the earth ripped for minerals.

* I feel angry that our governments can find money for banks but little to save our precious planet. *  See http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Yes we do have to act quickly but the financial meltdown is Not the most pressing issue our leaders must address. Another meltdown and which now seems certain is far more important.

Nicholas Stern, the man Gordon Brown hired to put a cost on climate change has cast doubt  on our ability to pin a 2 degree rise in global temperatures, a rise not without consequence but something future generations could adapt to. We have missed our chance.  He joins Scientists who have been reluctant up until now to loudly voice their concerns, many who are saying that rises of 4 or more degrees are now unavoidable. Irreversible changes to the eco-systems that support our life are likely to be subject to major shock, many will not survive. LINK

So while they run to the support of the financial system the eco-system can burn

We must demand that our leaders look into the eyes of their children… of all our children to see that we cannot deny them a future. This really is the last chance to preserve something that is worth handing on. If they can find billions of pounds and dollars to support a system that is unsustainable then they must find the funds to build a sustainable way of living in our world.

I feel sad when I see little babies and worry about what what kind of planet we will leave them

For many years having been of the school of loonies…of the Lunatic Left, the Loony Enviro Faction or just the plain Misguided and Unrealistic the last few weeks have been quietly satisfying.

Not because I take any pleasure in observing the turmoil striking the financial community but because perhaps right now ‘the system’ that is based on continued growth looks … well, unrealistic.

I even have some sympathy for the traders who are at this time the focus for so much anger. The market just does what it does and the germ of this particular crash was in the crash of the twin towers. It was then that with the global economy on the brink following 9-11 that the US government pumped in heaps of cash and said to a shocked America ‘go shopping!’

With the wholesale cost of money cheap and bundles of it sloshing around the markets just looked for innovative ways to sell it. While the gravy train rolled along Bush, Blair, Brown and the rest were happy to look like masters of the Universe.  Now that the inevitable bubble has burst their solution is offer the same remedy; to pump more borrowed money into the system. To perpetuate the notion that business as usual is sustainable or even possible.

Now for some time many of us have maintained that continued growth in the global economy is just not possible. The environmental constraints that having only one planet places upon the system makes a bigger crunch inevitable. Economies like the US, Britain and the developed world consume the potential of 3 planets to sustain their lifestyles so we’re already in deep debt to the world’s poor and the ecosystem as whole. As the competition for the earth’s resources like oil, timber, fish and even water and soil becomes focused on diminishing returns then the holes in the free market system will become un-pluggable with more monetary debt. There is no buy back on extinction.

In the coming weeks much will be talked about the economy and much less about the environment. In fact there is something of a trend to say that in these times of troubled finances we can less afford to make the environment a priority. We ignore the signs of an imminent collapse in the ability of the earth to support our way of life with peril. And the signs are writ large.

It’s time to ask, just who is running the asylum!

Three years ago I wrote on this blog about a bizarre twist to the Lockerbie Crash Link.

On Sunday 28th August at 7:00 pm 2005 the BBC Main TV News run a report that stated that the CIA had admitted planted incriminating evidence at the scene of the 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am crash site.

It referred to a piece of printed circuit board alleged to be part of the bomb timing device that blew up the Pan Am jet over Scotland. It was a crucial part of evidence that put Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi away for life for most murderous act of terrorism on British Soil. That the CIA should admit to planting this pivotal piece of evidence was breathtaking and I remember turning to the others in the room to confirm that I was hearing this news bulletin for real.
That evening I searched the BBC website for the news item and it was nowhere to be found. It was if it had never been broadcast. Somebody somewhere within the establishment killed the story.
I was then really interested to see that the BBC included the Lockerbie Crash in it’s ‘Conspiracy Files’ Series. I was as keen to hear anything about that news report as anything else but I guess I wasn’t surprised that they made no mention of it.

So the conspiracy theory continues!

Note I have sent this blog to the BBC I await their comment – Samantha Anstiss was Executive Producer