You know fully well that if you are surviving on £102 per week tax cuts are not at all of interest. Chances are you are not paying much income tax, and let’s face it the Tory party are not proposing to abolish VAT. In fact on £102 per week you are probably not in favour of tax cuts at all because it might mean cutting some of those benefits you get from the state.

Come to think of it, it’s really only the rich who are interested in tax cuts. Wonder why that is?

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I have to congratulate you on picking up on the frustrating financial situation for many hardworking people in this country

myself and my husband spent a week in the summer hearing a little of how this is all rigged, so that the depth of creativity and resources of ordinary people is stifled, for the advantage of a few – who already have plenty of readies.

so I have taken the liberty of including a few paragraphs from the person we met in the summer, any one interested can find her book “It doesn’t have to be like this” available from the Iona Community, or the rest of the article

will shut up and introduce you to the fun loving Margaret Legum

http://www.newcurioshop.com/cloisters/index.htm

New Economics
4 CREATING NEW MONEY DEBT-FREE
by Margaret Legum

Old economics assumes that the current economy is pretty well inevitable. New economics seeks replacements for policies that produce malign results. Growing debt, for example. Is it inevitable – always with us, like the poor? In fact it is not inevitable, but a symptom of a distressed global system, and a danger to us all.

Lending money …
My friend Joe Bloggs just sold his house for R3.4 m. The buyers got a 100% bond (mortgage). They are paying the bank R40,000-odd a month in interest alone.

Let’s unpick that. Where did the bank get that money? From others’ deposits? Did the bank warn other customers not to use their money because it had been lent to Joe? No; the bank created the money out of nothing. They wrote an entry into an electronic ledger in Joe’s name, and told him to go forth and spend it. On the other side of the ledger they wrote, as collateral, the house he was about to buy, which would revert to the bank if he didn’t repay the money that it had just sucked out of its thumb – plus of course a rate of interest.

In that way the banks get, every day of every week, free lunches galore. There is a theoretical limit to that out-of-nothing money creation, but it is easily surmounted.

You might say, so what? Nice work if you can get it, and nothing malign about it. It oils the wheels of the economy. If there weren’t an expanding amount of money in the economy it would grind to a halt. Someone has to make it. So why not the banks?

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I mistook your contrasting Marxism and Stalinism for implying that fascism was inherent in Marxism and also jumped to the conclusion that you’d categorized me as a Guardian-style leftie, all Euston Manifesto and such. And, since I’d like to slap them with a red beret, obviously I hated that.

As for avoiding the boom and bust cycle, as a Canadian I’m a kneejerk Keynesian, but increasingly I’m wondering if the whole thing isn’t a charade dependant on offshoring poverty: moving manufacturing to China, importing an illegal and therefore not-technically-existant workforce, etc.

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Auntie Flo’ Aren’t you getting back your Soviet-style super-state with the EU?

How is it ‘my’ EU super-state? I detest the EU.

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Regarding Marx, I don’t believe that I jumped to any conclusions in respect of him either. My posting briefly summarised some of Marx’s views and ideals and contrasted these with the dreadful reality of Communist and pseudo-Communist States. The conclusions I’ve reached about Marx and his theories are the result of 4 years study of the man and his dialectical methodology while I was a student. I have great respect for much of Marx’s work, his theory of Commodity Fetishism, for example, is inspired. However, as with all other thinkers, there are inconsistencies and contradictions in Marx’s system. One of these inconsistencies is Marx’s view that the Working Class are the universal class of history who will usher in a totally just social system. Nothing in either past or recent history supports that view. Marx’s view that it was possible to develop a systematic and scientific theory of, highly complex, human society, one with predictive power was, in my view, unrealistic.

I agree with you that Marx would be horrified by many of the Communist States set up in his name – that’s what his ‘I am not a Marxist’ statement was all about. However, the gap between Marx’s Communist ideals and the reality of Communist States, in itself, raises the issue of the unachievability of Marx’s theories.

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Aren’t you getting back your Soviet-style super-state with the EU?

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You said that the problem was the boom and bust cycle; it’s a core part of market-based capitalism. So what’s your solution then, if not to reject market-based capitalism?

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I’m reminiscing about the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s again

Those courageous young people so cruelly wiped out on Tiananman Square. The frightened faces of young people who’d lost the freedom of speech whispering in corners in Rumania. A two week hunt to buy a can opener that I never did manage to track down – because ‘Russia has all of our metals’. Supermarkets filled with nothing – nothing – but row upon row of pickled gherkins. Mile upon mile of grey concrete terraces crammed into filthy ghettos. The palatial homes of fat cat Party members. The plasticised bodies and organ lottery of Chinese political ‘criminals’.

Where is your true communism, raincoaster? Over a 160 years since Marx in his Hegellian youth wrote his remarakbly perceptive Paris Manuscripts, yet it seems to me that his true Communism is nowhere and nowhen, except perhaps a few tribal societies.

Even the Bushpeople of the Kalahri have lost it now and are becoming Capitlists.

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