Tag Archives: Banking

The European Union is a banking cartel to impose undemocratic reform & debt.

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HURRAH for the British electorate who figured it out! Look at who else is NOT in the EU and you’ll see where the smart money is. Switzerland for one. What does that tell you?! Ironically London is the financial capitol of world usury. Let Londoners complain about BREXIT and the provincial “racism” that drove the UK to seek independance. It’s not xenophobia, it’s local autonomy! It’s what Greece should have done, it’s what Ireland should have done. Breaking with EU is the first step out of debt slavery and the “austerity” squeeze engineered to privatize public wealth. Now the Scotts who didn’t know enough to leave the parasitic UK are griping about being forced from the EU, doubling down on ignorance of their self interest. And Londoners are talking about seceding. The days of landed gentry and bankers carving out tax havens like Luxemburg and Lichtenstein are past. Hopefully the English peasant rebellion we’ve just witnessed will storm London next.
 
Addendum: John Pilger explains the BREXIT triumph nicely. Threats of dire financial consequences for leaving the EU are the work of extortionist. The pain will be real of course because that’s how extortionists rule.

MP Jo Cox was no humanitarian. She was shill for neoliberal banking & war.

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At best, murdered Member of Parliament Jo Cox was a humanitarian in the Hollywood celebrity mold. Syria, Darfur, etc. Her concerns for refugees or “pro-democracy” collateral ony promoted neoliberal interventionism. The British MP’s martyrdom while opposing the BREXIT was beautifully parlayed into a character assassination of its proponants. The corporate media was able to paint them as far right extremists, instead of a grassroots groundswell against continued subjugation to Europe’s banker class. MP Cox was a shill for the European Union mechanisms binding regional economies to unelected technocrats not representative governments. While the London establishment is morning the killing of their rising star, Jo Cox was no more than telegenic and young, a new face to sell their old same as the new world order.

So-called Fiscal Cliff is a Buffalo Jump

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Remember the “Financial Crisis” from out of nowhere when Obama first came to office? Now it’s Bank Heist, the Sequel, branded most assuredly with the assistance of Madison Avenue as a “Fiscal Cliff”, shall we call it FC2? This time instead of extorting a so-called “bank bailout”, the oligarchs want austerity concessions. Having looted the public treasury, they’re after the public wealth we call government’s primary social benefit to which the public thought it was “entitled”. So our herders are crying FISCAL CLIFF hoping to divert the public beast to a real cliff, another Buffalo Jump, in urban terms, a shakedown.

Nobel snubs Bradley Manning, given to banking theocracy EU, after Obama and traditional Western inhumanitarians

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The Nobel committee snubbed Bradley Manning and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the banking theocracy EUROPEAN UNION. And you thought President Obama was a reach. Actually the feudal ogre EU was the logical choice after a war monger and the traditional Western war criminals and inhumanitarians.

Real estate is not for you

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Here’s how real estate works, though not for you or me, or the millions of Americans losing their homes to foreclosure. The Gazette recorded real estate developer Lars Akerberg, reacting to the foreclosure of the Chidlaw Building which he bought in 1993 for $2 million. “It kind of hurts in a way.” Lars is actually defaulting on a 2006 loan for $14 million, only $1 million of it repaid. The article doesn’t mention how much of that went into the building, to whom it was paid, or the property’s current value, so Akerberg can probably say “It’s a little bit emotional, but what can you do?” because he’s losing $2 million but gets to keep an undisclosed part of the $13m. The Gazette article is a lesson in real estate, banking, and how the media obscures the swindles. Akerberg adds the salt, I think talking to you and me: “But that’s the way things are. You can’t help it.”

It’s not a recession, it’s a robbery.

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It's not a recession, it's a robberyThis image gets my vote for the KILLER APP of internet memes to explain what the “economic crisis” and its global banking “austerity measures” are really about: pure greed.
All the rich have ever wanted is everything. Damn the middle class, the working class and the poor. Economists are part of their getaway illusionist crew, if you want to understand Milton Friedman and the banking economy, call CSI.

Do we need to speak truth to power? The powerful already know the truth. They bank on it.

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So that much hasn’t been made clear to you with Occupy Wall Street? Common citizens are coming together across the globe, without need to apprise each other about Capitalism’s ravages. Does anyone still doubt these crimes are fully premeditated? SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER may still be a laudable dare, but let’s not pretend it’s revelatory. Today netizens are being asked to petition congress to stand down its attack on Net Neutrality, because apparently the public’s freedom on the web might be something lawmakers are overlooking. Playing this speak-truth-to-power charade simply renders the public complicit in perpetuating untruth, that the actions of our corporate government, media and capital class are not absolutely, mendaciously callous and deliberate.

Every dollar wants to be free of the Fed

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US one dollar bill, circa 1963-presentIt might stretch credulity that the US Bureau of Engraving encrypted prophetic images of the Pentagon –and the not yet built WTC twin towers– in their iconic Reichstag Fire infamy, unto dollar bills folded just so. But who knows, they might have chosen to encode Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted but unheeded chiding to the American people: “Every generation needs a new revolution.” And don’t we especially want to ignore this one? “When injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”

HA! NYC FiDi is now Occupied Territory

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–by NYPD cops unfortunately, Wall the street remains barricaded from anti-banking demonstrators, but the broader NYC class-war zone remains contested as #OccupyWallStreet forces hold their protest beachhead for a fourth day. Violent arrests in Liberty Park have been made for wearing masks, trying to stay dry, holding signs, and defying the police commander’s belligerence; hashtags and emails have been censored by Twitter and Yahoo, but physics dictates an opposite reaction, and the physics of activism guarantee it will be greater than equal.

Temporarily embarrassed millionaires cursing guilty Casey Anthony, as theft of Social Security and Medicare begins

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Thinking about the Tea Party Poor:
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” — John Steinbeck
 
Think our judicial system is broke? It is, but not because it gave young Bad Mom Casey Anthony a chasmic benefit of the doubt. It’s broken because of Walmart, Citizens United, and all the corporatist, anti-democratic rulings that guarantee that ordinary Americans no longer have recourse in the courts.

IMF pick Christine Lagarde-Obamette updates beau mot Cherchez La Femme

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One of the boys, literally
IMF DSK replacement Christine Lagarde assumes leadership of the International Monetary Fund today, the world’s most powerful woman. Will she be the spoonful of sweetness to make austerity cuts go down? How’s your blood-sugar crashing on Obama? My guess is this fairy grandmother gambit will go down in Europe like an Obama Smurfette. To further my sexist analogy, imagine Lagarde the stereotypical bank loan officer, absolutely immovable. But Lagarde is personable, kindly, and maternal, and she’s willing to extend your loan, on the condition that you forfeit your house and all your possessions, and rent them from her. In the end you have nothing, but you don’t starve. By the way, the sheriff outside work for her. The IMF and the paramilitary riot police -that’s whose army. It’s a contract re-up you can’t refuse. That’s “austerity,” larceny with the improbably-legitimated veneer of usury, and it’s her last best offer.

Cherchez la femme or “get the woman”, used to be an investigative phrase meaning, find the extra-marital affair behind the political intrigue. The effect of this strategy was so absolute that it came to mean looking for the obvious. And so, isn’t the appointment of the silver-coiffed woman to front the severely PR-challenged, greed-saturated IMF, the obvious choice for a facelift?

Look at the IMF, an old boys network rivaled perhaps only by the World Bank. The solitary Lagarde is the next best thing to the superior exotic, one black man. They didn’t have one, and that novelty might be playing itself out already across the pond.

Augustin Carstens Fat BastardSpeaking of the New World, with Lagarde, the IMF avoided the challenger touted as the champion of emerging nations, Bank of Mexico nomineee and corpulence personified, Augustin Carstens. You might remember Carstens as the obesity-suited Fat Bastard from Austin Powers, who kept begging to be given Mini-Me for a snack.

What an unfortunately apt personification of the banking system Augusten Carstens would have been. Try to find a single photograph that wouldn’t have made the IMF aims plain: the bankers are licking their chops not only for your last penny, they want your ribs.

Mexicans have to brave illegal status in the United States to flee the economic policies enforced by their Fat Bastard.

Russian Copy Cat Capitalism to lend bankers a helping hand

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Vladimir Putin
All that ‘Marxist Leninist’ education that Putin had in his youth so that he could now do as Obama does, and hand out ‘stimuluses’ to bankers to protect them from pitchforks and hammers and sickles! Putin Says $90B Stimulus Plan to Ease Hard Year It’s been a ‘hard year’ for the poor elites of Russia, so get out your hankies, Putin and friends.

‘Putin also said he supported consolidation among the country’s 1,500 banks and warned lawmakers to support, rather than “attack,” bankers because they are vital to the economy.’

And to think that many in the US still think of him as a tough, old commie! He’s a pussy cat really, don’t you think? Everybody will be guaranteed their usual caviar, and not just party bosses in this New Brave Russia!

Yes, Russia’s working class, just like America’s, has never had to suffer like these poor managers of financial funds have had to, and Russia’s leaders, just like America’s, must come first. America first! Russia first!

That’s ‘patriotism’ no matter where these days? Certainly a noble value compared to that nasty idea of international solidarity among the working class, and other such backward, retrograde commie nonsense. It’s just wrong to run out and help the worker when a poor, wealthy unhealthy banker is wobbling along in the street half crippled and all. They might even turn to alcohol if Obama and Putin don’t get together and help these poor souls out? It’s been a ‘hard year’… Don’t let the rich drown themselves in vodka! Give them a helping hand.

Obama to bankers, ‘I’m saving you from the pitchforks!’

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pitchforks at the gateWell there you have it from the horse’s mouth, Obama is not trying to save you, me, and all the other poverty stricken louts! He’s trying to save the bankers from us coming at them with pitchforks! He’s willing to give them trillions of $$$, too, to help them out. Money that the louts will eventually be paying off for the bankers. See Inside the Obama-Bank CEO Meeting

Obama laughed along with the rest of the CEOs, before listening to Lewis get to his point: he wants to pay back Troubled Asset Relief Program funds.

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Obama said.

Protecting thieves is a criminal act, Mr. President. Helping drive the get away car is, too.

But in this case, it is the President of the US and US bank officials driving the car! This is the greatest bank robbery in history
and the liberal Democrats are letting them get away with it, too. They just don’t seem to have the smarts to figure out what’s going on? And they’re too busy pointing fingers at others as they’re led by their noses!

Gandhi possessions safe from defilement

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gandhi possessionsThe iconic personal possessions of Mahatma Gandhi were auctioned this week, and will remain in India. Gandhi’s poverty may have been largely symbolic, but his bowl and sandals remain unimpeachable representations of his ideals.
If there’s an upside to the banking collapse, it’s that some Wall Street or London financier was not able to purchase Mohandas’ bowl for the sole purpose of taking a shit in it.

Consumer confidence men

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Sam IsraelThe more I see pundits scoring Barack Obama’s performance based on Wall Street’s reaction, according to how much hope Obama is able to infuse into the public’s faltering confidence in the economy, I have to ponder the uncomfortable etymology of the term CON ARTIST. Con Man is short for Confidence Man, itself a now obscure euphemism for chiseler, defrauder, grifter, scammer, swindler, gouger, or fraud. But the term is still charmingly descriptive.

While even the disreputable economists now admit that Americans can expect much worse from our economy, Bill Clinton is publicly counseling President Obama to come across with more confidence about our nation’s financial prospects.

The ex-president formally known as Slick Willy is talking about your confidence to spend, without regard to whether you may lose your job, your home, your health, or your life savings.

It’s money that makes the world go round. They need everybody’s, including yours. All the better if you have to borrow it, because you really are of little use to a monetary system unless you take out a loan and pay interest.

Otherwise, with what is anybody going to laugh all the way to the bank?

The following are a few relevant dictionary definitions. Actually, I thought they were going to be more tangential:

consumer confidence
The degree of optimism that consumers are expressing for the state of the economy through their saving and spending activity.

con·fi·dence
Trust or faith in a person or thing.

confidence man
A swindler who exploits the confidence of his victim.

confidence game
A swindle in which the victim is defrauded after his or her confidence has been won.

confidence trick
A swindle in which you cheat at gambling or persuade a person to buy worthless property.

toxic asset
Not in the dictionary. Not even Orwell’s 1984. Could this be the balance sheet doppelganger to the “good-for-you liability?” Does it share the value of a “profit-net-loss” as n approaches zero? The meaning of toxic asset would be recognizably oxymoronic, if it weren’t for the fine suits worn by the FED’s confidence men. Literally, shouldn’t a carcinogenic nutrient translate, currency-exchange wise, into Funny Money?

Much as the banks want to disguise it, a Toxic asset sounds to me like Spilt Milk, an idiom for which we already know the recourse. A chorus of cries from Bernanke, Volcker, Paulson & Rubin would not then be able to convince us to put it back in the bottle and pay for it again.

the short end of the stick

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hazelwood tally stick It was one of the greatest heists in history. The scene? London, 1660. The perpetrator? England’s King Charles the II. The loot? All the gold he could con out of the country’s goldsmiths, bankers and businessmen. The tool?
 
A tally stick.

Tally sticks were a brilliant invention, but they were also insidious as they formed the foundation for the fiat currency systems we still have today. One where the root of a currency’s value is in a promise from a faceless institution, and not in the actual value of an object.

Put into use about a thousand years ago, they were a common sense solution for a young gold-and-goods economy where gold was scarce. By the time of the heist they were used in everyday transactions.

Here is how it worked. When a loan was made, the debt was carved in a standard fashion on the surface of a small (preferably hazelwood) stick, and then the stick was split in half through the center of the carving. The longer end of the IOU was given to the purchaser, and its handle was called the “stock” — the root of the word’s use in today’s markets.

Even a mostly illiterate public could read the amount scratched into the wood, and the stick would only fit perfectly with its original other half. That way, when the debtor returned with the money (or goods) owed, the sticks would be matched and the debt would be “tallied.”

In that fundamental use, they worked perfectly. But of course, as is governments’ way, the King was tempted to stretch those bounds.

Charles II ruled at a time when royal power was still based on a divine mandate. His government and institutions — and indeed he himself — saw the king as the Chosen One, which was a real shame for him because it bound him to the laws of Christendom. And Christianity at the time still forbade lending or borrowing with usury (interest). When financing several failing wars against neighboring countries depleted royal coffers, Charles II needed some quick cash to continue living in kingly fashion.

King Charles II turned to the trusted tally and the keen idea of selling his (government) tallies (debt) at a discount. That way he could allow his lenders to profit without charging interest — the basis for government debt being sold at a discount today.

And the King could issue advance tallies for emergency spending, an idea that proved all too tempting. He sold the tallies collected by his Exchequer (tax collector), essentially trading future tax receipts to the country’s goldsmiths (bankers) for quick cash.

The tallies were receipts for taxes to be paid later in the year. This is a crucial part of the story: they weren’t trading on the value of the objects being traded, but on the cost of waiting for a return and the government’s ability to collect taxes and stay honest. If the government is not honest, this is an outright Ponzi scheme, one where new debt issue could theoretically pay for passing bills. For a while.

The King realized that he’d stumbled onto something big. He could wage all the war he wanted and pay his bills with the gold he got for hazelwood. The King spent and spent, and the goldsmiths’ vaults filled up with more and more sticks.

Goldsmiths were handing out certificates for fractional gold reserves and inflating the young economy in a con all their own. And since the King played along with their early building of a banking system, they played along with the sticks-for-gold investment strategy.

Over time, the market got wise to the game. Buyers started attaching larger and larger discounts to the King’s debt to offset the perceived risk in loaning money to the King. The discounts prompted the King to issue even more tallies, promising out more future tax revenues just to meet his short-term spending desires. But remember only the discount was changing here. So the mountain of taxes to be redeemed in order to pay off his debts grew in comparison, soon overwhelming the King’s income.

By the time the whole Ponzi scheme came to an end, the King’s sticks were trading at a 10% discount (to put that into perspective, short-term T-Bills are currently trading with discounts of one-tenth of one percent or less). The payments on his newer issues trading at that discount soon outmatched all the Kingdom’s tax revenues, effectively bankrupting his Exchequer and threatening to put the monarchy in the poorhouse.

So with the stroke of a pen, the King simply declared those debts illegal and ceased payment.

With that single stroke he stole most of England’s gold — having already spent it — and forced the young economy to fall flat on its face. The King’s various creditors ended up on “the short end of the stick” and all credit in the country evaporated very nearly overnight.

Pretty scary, huh? I’m glad such a thing could never happen today.

The American dyslexia for economics

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The interest rate for banks is down to zero. B of A and Citibank are still charging 39%. What again does economic news have to do with me?
 
The biggest news on the economy was BREAKING NEWS a week ago: the US economy is in a recession, and has been for over a year. Can news a year old still be news? What news exactly are we getting from the experts, economists and other mesmerists paraded on the television every evening?

We consult them on a minute by minute basis, actually, on 24/7 cable news stations, for every hint of a whiff of where the weather vane might indicate the US economy is blowing. If the stock market doesn’t hang on their every diagnosis, it reacts to what unelected, self-made officials say. Now we’re led to understand all that spinning can flip-flop for a year-old contradictory study.

And who’s going to let America know when we’ve hit a full-on depression? Will we be told it before the decade is enshrined post-facto in a Time-Life retrospective? Are those in charge so cynical that they count on the public knowing the truth in spite of their lies, because it’s we who endure the effects in real time anyway? The media can lie about unemployment figures too –what could it possibly matter to the unemployed?

It’s not only ADD. Americans understand why too-sobering statistics are kept from us, lest a post-mortem induce pre. We are the great engine of consumerism, running on pure flattery. I think it’s the same self-defeating fatalism which fuels the life insurance scam. We bet against ourselves. We buy self-help books. We are eternally sick.

But does the economy really work so? Would an autopsy be self-fulfilling? Can an economy go sour due to one bad-apple-attitude, or would it be because of the lost jobs?

I’m guessing this is where the University of Chicago meets Euripides, or if it prefers, palmistry. There’s a global comeuppance in your future, you small fraction of Earth’s population who have expended the lion’s share of its resources. That’s what will introduce the American quality of life to harsh earthbound reality.

Keeping American consumers in debt is less a magician’s act of driving the economy, than it is a swindler’s function of distracting the poor dupe until he’s lost his shirt.

But this swindler is not planning to catch the next bus out of town.

This banking scam isn’t over until the shirtless victim is thrown out the saloon door and into the street, where’s he’s got no redress but to face line after line of well armed riot police.

Time to use the word DEPRESSION again

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One of the most ridiculous of the utterly false and phony positive thinking talking points used by the US’s Right Wing corporate daily press and the talking heads of their TV stations is their constant babble about whether we have entered into a ‘recession’ or not? The correct word to be used is depression, it ‘s an ECONOMIC DEPRESSION we have been entered into worldwide, and there is nothing left to debate about it either. It’s here. End of discussion. Go take a hike, Clowns@!

Today, stocks fell almost 7% and that now is a drop of about 25% from the DOW all time high just 2 years ago. That is a depression. Further, this Friday morning Japanese stocks have already fallen 11% of their value in just a few minutes of trading. That is an economic depression.

Let’s cut to the quick on this. Bush and his clown clones are through. They are out of here. This presidential election will turn out to be a rout of McCain/ Palin, because they are more of the same, and The Same just flushed itself down the toilet via a whole shitload of corruption finally coming home to roost. But there is yet more here than the rout of the neocon corruptionists that will occur. If we in America are fed up with this crew, the rest of the world is even more so.

Yes, the rest of the world is going down the drain with us and our stupid economy where thieves rule the rest of us. They are going to hate the US for the misery we have delivered them into. In fact, they already do. Afghanistan to Iraq to Somalia to Pakistan and flush, flush, flush. They can put it together, even if your dumb Republican neighbors can’t.

It’s time to use the word depression once again, because we alhough we all thought the thought that ‘communism’ self destructs, we had all but forgotten that capitalism does just that in an even much worse way. We have been entered into a worldwide economic depression by all those that fed us the total line of crap that it was all running so very smoothly. Pompous stupid, arrogant twits they were, and now the world has once again had its eyes opened to the dangers that capitalism constantly puts the human race into. The unemployment to come will soon see to that.

The rich everywhere will say that The Treasury has no money to stop it. You can bet your 401K retirement funds on it! And the whole world will correctly blame the US government, AND the stupid American people themselves, for what is being done to them. Get used to really being hated, My Friends. And we will be hated rightly so, for playing stupid so long.

Good luck, Democratic Party. Just because everybody holds the Republican Party to be hugely responsible for this mess, don’t think that they won’t also begin to see you as the Republican’s cohorts. Hell! That’s what you have always claimed to be actually, isn’t it? People played stupid though and didn’t take you people at your own word. You are now in a BIG, BIG, BIG… BIPARTISAN MESS. We got it. You earned it!

Yes, it’s time to once again use the word DEPRESSION once again. It will be hard on us all (save the Capitalist rich who always profit off human misery).

Banking insider doing whose bidding?

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A French bank claims it has been defrauded of $7 BILLION by an employee trading beneath the radar. “In the interest of transparency” Societe Generale is seeking to rectify its banking methods, but will not reveal the name of the rogue trader. Can you imagine a crime of any magnitude where those responsible are not immediately identified? Why would some white collar criminals rate indemnity?

Up until now the Bank’s “one lone trader” (redundant emphasis, theirs) had accumulated the fortune betting that the international markets would weaken. When the errant speculator reversed his forecast to wager that futures would look brighter, the economy didn’t comply, and the losses exposed his schemes. While fingers are pointed at the mysterious “genius of fraud” and his unsanctioned profit motive, is anyone questioning whether his transactions were serving another purpose, to influence the movement of investments?

Auction houses of lesser repute use phony bidders regularly to drive bids upward. When those stand-ins accidentally get stuck with the purchase, the item finds itself back on the block in short order. Needless to say the auctioneers keep the identity of those house traders close to the vest, or sooner than later those conspirators would become useless. Likewise, if suddenly confronted by hostile auction-goers, the plant could easily incriminate his bosses in the scheme.

Say’s Law and undemocratic monetarism

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Richard C. Cook has written an excellent synthesis of C. H. Douglas, Keynes and Galbraith in Global Research repudiating the orthodox economics used to legitimate the Federal Reserve under which the world’s capitalist economies are enslaved.
 
Cook writes: “Overall, banks have served four main purposes—one legitimate, one dubious, one puzzling, and one deeply flawed.

1. Legitimate
“The first purpose—a legitimate one—is to facilitate commerce. It is often cheaper for a business to borrow capital from a bank than to stockpile cash itself. This was the purpose of the state banking system in the U.S. prior to the Civil War. The state-chartered banks existed to provide working capital for commercial transactions, such as stocking inventory, or for business expansion. Use of banking for these purposes was tied to specific commercial activities—the “real bills” doctrine. Of course credit used for this purpose has a cost which is factored into prices. When these loans are repaid, they are canceled at the bank which thus removes purchasing power from the economy. This is another area, besides retained corporate earnings, that contributes to the gap between prices and purchasing power identified by C.H. Douglas. But lending for commerce itself remains a legitimate activity.

2. Dubious
“The second use of banking—the dubious one—is for capital formation in the creation of new businesses, a function which overlaps with capital markets such as the stock exchanges. But this use very easily turns into lending for speculation by permitting investors to borrow money in order to buy stock on margin or to “leverage” investing by borrowing money in order to purchase whole companies. The costs of this borrowing also show up in consumer prices without introducing any new purchasing power into the system.

“This practice has mushroomed in recent decades starting with the buyout/merger/acquisition mania of the 1980s and has reached disastrous proportions through the creation and growth of equity and hedge funds. The use of bank borrowing for such speculative purposes is an obvious abuse that should not even be legal. It is actually a form of theft from the nation’s natural and normal store of credit that should be carefully administered by competent public authorities as a utility as critical to social health as the water supply.

3. Puzzling
“The third use of banking—the puzzling one—is for consumer credit. This includes borrowing for big purchases such as buying houses and automobiles, or small ones such as items bought with credit cards. Increasingly it includes purchasing even the necessities of life such groceries.

“Buying an object with a credit card often means that a person cannot afford to buy it at the present moment. So the person is gambling that he or she will be able to pay off this loan—including interest—at some point in the future. What is puzzling is that in the midst of what is claimed to be the most productive economy in the history of the world, why are most people so poor that they cannot buy what they need to live with the proceeds of their present earnings? This is the ultimate repudiation of Say’s Law and its derivatives—Libertarianism, supply-side economics, and the like.

4. Flawed
“The fourth use of banking—the one that is deeply flawed—is the financing of government inflation through purchase of public debt instruments which allow deficit financing of public activities, most particularly the waging of war. Banking for the purpose of financing war has a long pedigree, going back to the medieval times where kings were perpetually in hock to the money-lenders. Today we have the national debt, which has been used primarily for war, as well as for the Keynesian pump-priming described previously. A classic case of the use of banking for deficit financing of war is the borrowing by the federal government under the Bush/Cheney administration to raise the trillion dollars already spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”