This is a bold statement, but let’s analyse. First off, we have banks who seek profit. This is the root of all evil so to say, because what does it mean to make profit? It means you earn more than you need, even for your plans. Banks borrow money to citizen, and the less money citizen have, the more banks can borrow out, and so there is a double incentive for banks to make profit: If they do people need to borrow more!
But lets take the housing crisis, where does it come from? Well, banks taught poeple that if you buy a house its an investment. The price of the house will rise (apart from it becoming your property so being a savings account). Banks had the incentive to make this true so they could lend more. They lobbied for 1. lower rates 2. bigger lending share (so les smoney up front), creative instruments (once people started to believe their story, you got investment mortgages that where payed by the hous price rise), they made renting more expensive (in holland), they arranged special loans for ‘starters’ (which drove up prices), they reduced social housing by putting these cooperations into debt and forcing them to sell their real estate, the now have lobbied for a rule so that couples can lend more (1+1 = 3), and of course at the same time they reduced construction.
The result? People are stuck in their homes, they can’t move to job opportunities. New homes being build are all expensive. People are forced out of their cheap homes by semi-criminal investment groups who want those high prices. This leads to homelessness, crime, probably abuse and poverty. This is shown on TV, the sad man that could not find a place to rent, and if you don’t rent (or buy) you can’t get social security or a job. In the US we know houses where kept off the market, because for a while the opposite was true of what happens in Holland, anyone could buy a house. Why, because banks lowered their lending standards to create investment instruments (credit default swaps) and this resulted in what? Misery, the 2008 financial crash. Who suffered? so many.
How about medicine? That used to be a sad profession when you want to believe Celine (Voyage au Bout de la Nuit), but of course that all changed for the better with the discovery of Penicilline and other breakthrough, now it really is a vibrand industry that does incredible work, not to mention the incredible care given by nurses and staff, who have to constantly deal with their humanity and that of the patients.
But how about health care cost? How about insurance. Why do people in the US pay ten times as much as in the EU for the same healthcare. Why can pharamaceutical companies keep renewing patents or even repatent expired ones? How can a company Pfitzer sell a heart health pill for 10 years making hundreds of billions while its effect is a 1% improvement over placebo? This all happens because of the financial context created by banks, because shareholders need to see profit, and profit is unnecessary squeezing of customers (because profit is all you have after you payed all your cost, including reservations for your plans). So banks have lobbied for privatization, always looking for ways to make more money.
And what is the result? Suffering, early deaths, broken lives, time spend by political players like Obama to fight it, but guess what, the US electoral system is now based on how much cash you can collect from your voters, The US shows in extrema what total surrender to banks leads to. Still anyone in congress can trade with insider knowledge. Does that create a way to bribe? Of course! Who do that? People in the banks. The same who create the financial instruments that the whole economy crashes on.
Just to give this a break, what happens if a country is not financialized to the extend the US is. We mean poor countries. They can have good healthcare, good education (we will get to that) good housing all good, the only simple rule is that you make lending difficult, and of course you need energy sources. In poor countries that energy comes from manual labour. India and Brazil for a while didn’t care about patents. They rebelled and made medicine themselves, at much lower cost. This is now happening in Europe as well, companies are making rare and less demanded medicine themselves, and escape the normal pricing policies this way. Of course there is a lobby to stop that. Health should cost you all you have at the end of your life, so that your children will need to work for the same things all over again.
How about education? Holland tried the US system because we have had 9 years of US-lakey goverment and every trick tried in the US was also tried here, including prison labour. So students had to borrow money to study, and cost went through the roof, Universities liked it a lot, it caused a building and renovation boom which was a way for banks to capture the institutions because now how could the pay their debts if not by increasing cost of tuition etc. Luckily sanity is returning somewhat because we in the EU are more social, so it is likely this system will be reversed, but a least 10 generations of students are deep into debt and will be. For whom? THE BANKS.
The suffering this causes is not small, not only will you see people doing jobs they hate, jobs that are harmfull others, in an world where you need to pay, but of course some won’t make it and end up destitute and who knows kill themselves. Students don’t even protest anymore because of course they changed into a group of willing slaves that believe that if they work hard they will get a great job. But like in the US the courses proliferated, more students where allowed in, and many come out not knowing what they should be doing. Stuck in the homes of their parents (which should be fine by the way) not able to make enough to buy or rent.
Soo who else, farmers? Of course farmers have been in the news a lot lately because the EU decided Holland should limit its Nitrogen emissions. Builders, farmers, airports, cars all emit NOx and NH3/4 (which for the sake of confusion is being bunched together), and so all these have to reduce emissions. The farmers have been investing in intensive cattle farms, of which at least 3 burn down with all the souls in them every summer (or all animals die because the ventilation breaks down). Why these farms? Not for Holland, we only consume about 20% of the meat we produce. So its for export, for cashflow, from the Amazon soy fields, grains etc. back to the world. Dutch is a meat hub. The farmers have been allowed to borrow to grow their business, to such an extend that the businesses arn’t even profitable yet, they need to grow more. The banks allowed them to get started and did not do their due dilligence on what farmers where actually allowed to build. Now with the enforcement of the Nitrogen limit the farmers see their future destroyed, and they are payed by the feedstock suppliers and dominant meat exporter to disruptively protest this situation. Who is served by this? The banks. Who suffers? The farmers.
We can go on here about how banks have ruined everything. This constant need to compete, not on quality but on volume, this drive to automate and destroy jobs people enjoy, and replace them with jobs people hate. From income you can have a nice life off to income you can barely get by on. A key to the suffering is not only that banks want to make profit, but that the credit they give is consumed by buying fuels, energy. All the money ends up with the energy companies. No matter how low the interest rates, this system is causing ‘hypertension’ where we could all get along fine with a couple of companies like this and a couple like that. We actually see this in some sectors, like soda drinks, which in itself is a rediculous racket that generates such enormous amounts of cashflow for banks : Hauling sugared water half across the globe for the ephimeral superior experience or just for the sugar high.
Banks thus cause obesitas, banks ruined nice cities because they fund flights and they lobbied for plane fuels to be tax exempt. All because the supply of fuels was much bigger than demand, and people will spend at their destinations even if they are super crowded and expensive. Bank. Cashflow. Not human enjoyment. Monetization of everything ensures banks control everything.
So our claim is this : All problems we Face are caused by Banks
We have not even mentioned climate change, but you can easily see that selling more cars, more fuel, more plastic more food was all done to generate more profit to pay the loans of the banks. They have caused it, and it makes total sense, banks loan out carbon credit, credit that buys you fossil fuels, and thus their business is based on the expansion of fossil credit cashflow and as a consequence of carbon emissions. They have no alternative. They renamed fossil credit “Capital” which it isn’t.
We already wrote about how to beat this cancer to our societies, and this is by building renewable energy sources. They will allow for renewable energy credit to be distributed, not by banks but by the owners of those installations. Of course right now the ‘market’ is being developed such that you never own renewable energy installations and don’t easily think about this option because you have to repay your debt for your installation, but given time and price drops the fact that a renewable energy installation in your hands means you own production capacity, means you can distribute it through credit. And there will be more credit of this renewable kind than there ever was of the fossil kind. Hopefully then the suffering caused by banks will stop.