Noel Ignatiev's Blog

Scrooge Accepts Nobel Peace Prize

By Richard Greeman
Posted by Noel Ignatiev

Brussels, Christmas Eve, 2012. From our Special Correspondent.
Reactions were sharply divided here in Euroland to Stockholm’s award
of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union (EU) in
recognition of its efforts to promote the moral values of fiscal
discipline and responsibility through the Euro.

Receiving the award on behalf of the Euro was Dr. Ebenezer von
Scrooge of the Bundesbank, whose acceptance speech stressed the
importance of prompt and complete payment of debts as the central
moral value on which European society is based. Dr. von Scrooge
delivered a timely admonition to those Spaniards and Greeks who
reportedly were still planning to exchange holiday gifts this season:
“What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without
money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour
richer?”

Informed that « many thousands are in want of common necessaries;
hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts,” as the result
of the EU’s austerity policies, Dr. von Scrooge replied : “Are there
no prisons, no workhouses, no deportation centers? I help to support
the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who
are badly off must go there.” — “Many can’t go there; and many would
rather die,” critics objected. “If they would rather die,” replied
Dr. von Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus
population.”

Although financial markets reacted positively to the Nobel Committee’s
quasi-religious sanctification of the European common currency as a
universal moral standard, housewives in Thessalonica, Greece reportedly
rent their garments and poured ashes on their heads in stunned
disbelief.  On the other hand, the news of the EU Peace Prize drove
European armament and aero-space stocks sharply upward on the Paris
Bourse (the EU is the largest arms exporter after the US and Russia)
despite some indignant grumbling about Nobel’s original intentions by
the usual boring pacifists. Some Euroland analysts speculated that
increased arms production might raise employment figures and help
reduce what Dr. Scrooge infelicitously termed ‘the surplus
population.’

One thing is clear, however: the Nobel’s sanctification of the Euro
cemented the essential moral pillar of the European political class:
THE DEBT MUST BE PAID or the world will come to an end, as predicted
by the Mayan calendar. This is an article of faith as sacred in
Euroland as is the U.S. Fiscal Cliff, at the foot of which Americans
must dutifully bow down and relinquish their Social Security checks to
a High Power. But what if these millenial fears were had no firmer
basis than those of the ancient Mayans?

What is Debt?

What exactly IS this holy ‘Debt’ for which we must sacrifice?  And
why is such a fetish is being made of it at this time? The answer is
simple. The debt consists of accumulated interest. That is to say
accumulated bank profits. And if the bankers, the media and their
political accomplices in Stockholm didn’t make a fetish of it,
reasonable people would at some point be tempted to renegotiate it or
even walk away from it in times of economic hardship.

The ‘national debt’ (which Marx quipped was the only part of the
nation the common people actually owned) consists mostly of
accumulated interest to be paid to banks from which the government has
at one time borrowed money. Often (as in the case of Greece) the
taxpayer is paying interest on outstanding interest of previously
unpaid loans, that is to say quite simply bankers’ profits piled on
top of bankers’ profits far exceeding the original face value of the
loan. (In Canada, for example, accumulated interest represents 90% of
the total debt).

In any case, there is no reason on earth for the government, which
‘prints’ money by lending it to banks at near-zero interest, should
ever need to borrow money at interest from these same banks. In other
words, the real purpose of the Debt is to keep re-inflating the
‘too-big-to-fail’ banks. This is the message 12-year-old Victoria
Grant delivered to the Public Banking in America Conference, and her
video went viral. Her 10-minute presentation demonstrates that the
Debt is a conspiracy between government and the banking industry to
defraud the public. No adult economists have succeeded in answering
her.

Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx5Sc3vWefE&feature=youtube

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