22nd of February 2016

... I almost forgot...

The biggest thing to come out of the late 2000s truth movement was the fact that our society was, and still is, built on debt.
Of course, this knowledge is centuries old.  Since the first bankers reared their ugly heads and offered us tokens in exchange for our gold or loaned out riches they didn't have people have been trying to warn us - especially the 18th century founding fathers of America.
The difference now is that we have the internet.  Ideas can spread like wild fire and we have the ability to put two and two together, and watch informative You Tube videos until our eyes crust over.  No wonder certain people want to put controls on it.

One cold night in March 2008 I headed to a lecture hall in central London to listen to a guy talk about Money as Debt.  In Zeitgeist, The Movie part three talks exclusively about the federal reserve system and how it is owned by a private company, rather than any national governmental body.  Apparently our whole economic system is based on debt so that a very few amount of people (that pesky 1%) can make money from the interest, even in the UK.  Rumour has it that these private banks actually bought the UK about two hundred years ago after the Napoleonic wars, so this is a pretty big deal.

When we pay our taxes what we're actually paying off is our national debt, which, in the UK very recently reached 1 trillion. 

After watching a complicated film that explained the situation we were asked to form groups to discuss the issue further.  Put off by small discussion groups I decided to pipe up and suggested that perhaps it would be better to stick to a whole group discussion as there were only about 30 or 40 of us.  A woman behind me agreed and so began a great discussion, not only on the issue at hand but also a discussion about all of the confusion and mystery that had exposed itself in the last few years.  It felt great to be surrounded by a room full of people who were on the same mission to discover and expose the 'truth'.  I can see now why divide and conquer is so vital to keep us small and unsure.  When one finds oneself in a group of people who are all thinking and asking the same questions it is truly a powerful experience.

After the discussion I hung around afterwards to hand out some Culture Jammers R Us cards and ended up talking with three other people about what had happened that evening.  The person who sticks out in my mind the most was a guy in his late 60's who described himself as a sovereign state.  In fact he was so sovereign that he defied social convention by doing huge fart while we were all talking.  No one commented; that's how powerful his sovereign state was.

I find it interesting that no one seems to talk very much about the banking system any more.  There were a few grumbles about the Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK being bailed out, but apart from that we seem to have shifted our attention back to the theatre of politics rather than the shadows standing in the wings whispering instructions. 

A few years ago a great little animation came out that explained the money system very well.  If you've got a spare half an hour it's worth a watch...