MONOPOLY was invented by an anarchist who wanted to demonstrate the folly of capitalism. She called it The Landlord's Game. Virtually unchanged, Parker Brothers' Monopoly still teaches that the land grab end game always results in a monopoly. Players don't consider such an outcome objectionable because board games need a single winner, and since everyone starts at square one, all have a chance to drive the rest of humanity bankrupt. You don't have to tweak Monopoly much to render a perfect forecast of a child's prospects in the real economy. Start the game with all the properties fully populated with hotels and houses, all owned by the player who won last time. Now go. Just kidding. But dispense with the New World homesteading delusion. Unless you're planning fresh conquest and genocide, land ownership today is sewn up. Fully populate the properties and distribute them in advance, to one or all of the players, it doesn't really matter. The real monopoly lies with the bank. The banker in this tweaked version of Monopoly doesn't play at all, as far as rolling the dice to progress around the board. The banker's token doesn't need the wage earned by passing "GO", nor does he need to risk going to jail. Yes the banker is a white male. The banker's token lies idle wherever it wants on the board, while the bank doles out the money and reposesses the properties whose owners go bankrupt. Actually in the tweaked mode, the banker doesn't distribute the money, he lends it. Every $200 to pass GO, he keeps a share. Every property and building is actually on loan, so he collects interest. What's lent and what's collected are secretly recalculated every round to leave the bare minimum which players need to keep circulating the board. That's the game. Enjoy! If it doesn't sound fun to you, too bad. Keeping a player's interest in an unfair game is unimportant because monopoly is compulsory.
Tag: Usury
The Fed’s Janet Yellen says economy healthy enough for usurers to start bleeding it again
That's essentially what the Federal Reserve does, it monitors public wealth to regulate how much surplus production can be skimmed off the top. Usually all of it. But someone has to determine how much that is to prevent the banking vampires from sucking the public to death.
The European Union is a banking cartel to impose undemocratic reform & debt.
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.
Support the Rich, Work Harder
Class Warfare? It's about fucking time.
Capital strikes again and again…
This is completely off the wall (street) but I had to laugh at it anyway. There's one of those K-Tel type commercials, if you don't remember K-Tel then go ask your mommy, kiddo. Now it's "As Seen On TV" or, as I like to call it, a warehouse in New Jersey where they keep the money they freeze on your debit card, something like a hundred dollars if you order twenty dollars worth of crap (plus shipping+handling but that's another story) and collect interest on your money for a month until they decide to finally process your order and take the hold off your account. All very legal and ethical if you have the morals of George Bush on crack. This newest product is something called Slim Away Belt or something really lame like that. It's... a corset. An invention that was first marketed during the Dark Ages when torture was considered fun of some kind. So they take a thousand year old device to keep women from enjoying life, changed the laces out for zippers et voila ici, it's still a corset. It would come in handy as a back brace in case you ever do real work. But when they talk about getting in shape without any effort you realize... never mind. It does show a guy using it during exercise in order to sweat off water weight which somehow gives him sculpted muscles. Sorry, it just brings out my Inner Snotnose when I see what looks like an elaborate joke but costs money if you actually buy into it. Aside from the moral tie in to the rest of Capital, which is an equal scam mechanism, like auctions which cost money even if you don't buy anything
IMF pick Christine Lagarde-Obamette updates beau mot Cherchez La Femme
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. Speaking 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.
Say’s Law and undemocratic monetarism
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