The Palestinian Nightmare Is About To Get Worse

Any peace agreement between Israel and Hamas that does not offer the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank a viable future is paving the way for the Palestinian holocaust in the next few years. That such a peace agreement is highly unlikely means saving the Palestinian people from annihilation as a people is now the responsibility of us all.

What has become crystal clear over the last month is that the US, the UK and other Western governments are unprepared to stand in the way of Israeli aggression towards Palestinians in the occupied territories. It would be nice to think that the western governments were shocked to realise the limit of their policy options, but it is probably less naive to assume that in practice the long term future of the Palestinians has already been sacrificed in the interests of strategy.

Israel is thoroughly intertwined with the Western powers, in a way that no other country in the world is, including the United States. Israel and its friends in the Jewish diaspora are highly involved with the politics of Western countries. The Israeli software industry is critical to the functioning of Western economies. Israeli military equipment companies provide critical components used by Western armed and security forces. Israel is a key part of Western military intelligence systems. Israel is a key part of the financial secrecy jurisdiction system and its financial institutions are closely integrated with the Western banking system. Israel has made itself such a useful friend, it is not an enemy any Western country is willing to make and they know it.

In this sense, the failure of Western governments to stand up for the Palestinians in Gaza as Israel commits what can only rightly be described as genocide, is just a reflection of the power reality in play. The easiest thing now is for the politicians in the US, the UK and in Europe to back whatever peace agreement Hamas and Israel are prepared to accept and just hope for a miracle. That miracle though is highly unlikely.

What is far more likely is that Israel will continue to leave the people of Gaza festering in impossible conditions, but will allow sufficient weapons into Gaza to enable some resistance next time they make a major provocation. This then will be the excuse to force the 1.8 million people of the Gaza strip into refugee camps in the Egyptian Sinai, followed by the total demolition of everything in the Gaza strip and its annexation into Israel. Any reaction in the West Bank will then be used as a justification to push the Palestinians there into Jordan, followed by the annexation of the West Bank. As a humanitarian gesture, sufficient Palestinians as Israel needs as cheap labour will be given Israeli citizenship on condition of complete servility.

When this happens, the West, with its relationships with Israel in their current form, will do absolutely nothing. Concurrently the Islamic State or its successor may have been used to redraw the map of the Middle East, opening the way to a carve up Jordan and the creation of Palestine on the East Bank. Lebanon may become part of Assyria with Iraq shrinking to its Shia south and Kurdistan expanding as an independent state. It is hard to guess the strategies being considered.

As tidy and as tempting as such a solution to current problems may be, what this actually contemplates is a humanitarian disaster, as awful and as dangerous as the grand plans of Nazi Germany. Millions of people have already been displaced and face an uncertain future. The future for the occupied territories described above adds millions more to the regional catastrophe.

At stake here is far more than the lives and welfare of the Palestinians; it is the integrity and values of our civilisation. If cynical expediency is our governing principle as we enter into the most dangerous period of human history, we can all expect to be crushed like ants by the tyranny of great power as we face existential constraints. Between us and that horror there is a thin line of mediocre politicians. If we can force them to stand up for Palestine, we might be able to hold back the growing tyranny. Should we lose this battle, it is uncertain where the forces of compassion will ever regroup.



  

In A Very Modern Genocide

In the standard model genocide, the perpetrators have the tendency to behave guilty, like mugging street gangs. They dress up like baddies and make outrageous statements in a kind of language only they can really understand. They know they are breaking the law, but do it anyway. In a sort of way there is something very honest about this. The people who supply them with weapons do it very secretively and try to pretend they are nothing to do with it. Often genocidal governments don't even bother to justify what they are doing, but deny anything is going on, or create some group of out of control bandits who do the killing for them. Israel sees all that as far too old fashioned.

Israel plans its genocide with the help of international law experts. The law says you should warn the civilians that they are in a place where you are going to kill people, so, no problem, warning phone calls and leaflets are provided. The law says self defence is ok, so you make sure the people you are going to kill have some ineffective weapons and are angry and desperate enough that they will try to use them. The law says force must be proportionate. Well this is a matter of opinion, so you need a busy public relations department that keeps telling everyone that any massacres and wholesale terror is proportionate and in self defence.

All spokesmen have to speak the same way as the people around the world that you are trying to convince. Where the business of the mass killing of children can seem indefensible, phrases that help to distract judgement are carefully prepared and repeated. Specifically it is vital to make out that the people you are killing and terrorising are actually the people terrorising and killing your people. This does not need to be true, just keep saying it is.  Here there is a clear advantage if your people look the same as the people around the world that you are trying to convince that you are the nice guys. Nice clean modern houses, streets, clothes, shops and so on will help western people identify with you. By contrast, western people will not identify with women wearing scarves, standing in rubble and crying to the heavens. They may be upset by the dead bodies of brown children, but they wont identify with them as strongly as with some minor damage to a neighbourhood that looks like somewhere people like them might live.

Buying friends in high places in western democracies is cheap and exceptionally good value for money. Western politicians have two big concerns: raising enough money to get voted in and once voted in being able to maintain the energy supplies necessary to keep their economies going. Here Israel and its friends can do the double wammy. The people in democracies don't like paying for politicians and if they do they tend to want something in return, like having their countries run for the benefit of their own people. This is a serious constraint on a politicians career and can seriously undermine access to lucrative directorships and consultancy work later in life. Israel and its network of friends offers the modern western politician a sound deal: "We arrange some nice big donations to party funds for all electable parties; all we ask is that you sell us weapons, oppose any sanctions against us, stick up for us in public, denounce our enemies and if you want to go the whole hog, give us some of your taxpayers money. In return we will sit in the Middle East as your contract security force, ensuring that those bolshy Arabs never turn off the oil."

Despite very effective PR, genocide is messy and calls for a "ceasefire" are inevitable. Its vital not to be seen to be in a hurry to get all your killing done in one go. Remember, direct killing is only one tool in the genocide tool kit. Terror, starvation, economic destruction, disease, withholding medical supplies, destruction of infrastructure and places of worship all help to undermine the viability of the people you are trying to destroy. To avoid being the bad guy, always attend 'peace talks'. Its not necessary to actually comply with ceasefires: normally some act of everyday viciousness will be enough to get some aggression in return and this will excuse a resumption of killing. If further killing seems likely to be counter-productive, back off for a few years, using other genocide strategies and then give it another go. 

And then there is the matter of the weapons supplies. For any mass killing operation, to be seen as the good guys its very important to have very modern killing equipment. This helps claims of "surgical" killing and perhaps more importantly it makes the killing system look like the killing system of a modern western democracy. Now of course some of this killing equipment must be imported. Don't be secretive; its important that suppliers share in the guilt of war crimes.. However, to protect suppliers from any future litigation, don't get upset if weapons are supplied with a disclaimer: "The contents of this box are supplied on the condition that they will not be used for any illegal purpose". This means that if by some outrageous act of international treachery, Israel's friends turn on them and decide that bullshit is bullshit and that Israel is in fact just a bunch of genocidal lunatics, the shit wont stick to them. Well who ever said genocide was easy.

Ukraine: The Real Power Games

As Russia consolidates its hold on Crimea, there are some very odd features to the response to the crisis by the West. On the one hand they are trying to use the established forums to push Russia into an uncomfortable position, while probing for the response to Russia that does not look like climb down and which doesn't cause financial and economic disruption. On the other hand they are proceeding with a takeover of Ukraine, taking advantage of the countries weak position to tie it to the West. However the real objective of the West's moves is probably part of another chess game.

The West is ultimately concerned about the unknown implications of a powerful, rich and well organised China. The US is the sponsor for a number of Pacific rim countries with residual disputes with China. An emergent and confident China will want to resolve these disputes in its favour, but if it does, it will show the West to be weak, opening the way for China to push the West to obtain better access to trade and natural resources. It is this chess board that is dictating the choice of games the West is choosing to play at a more local level. The results for many countries and their people are often awful.

This is no-where more true than for Syria. Syria is sponsored by Russia and the West wants to remove Russian sponsorship for states that oppose it. It has failed to use isolation and sanctions to bring down the governments in Iran and Syria, so now it is seeking to isolate their Russian sponsor. This is not a strong strategy as the Russian government already has a nationalist and despite appearances, isolationist remit. While Russian businessmen have invested around the world, they have done so in ways that have left the West more vulnerable to financial sanctions than Russia. Europe's dependence on Russian energy means that Russia has the freedom to run many isolationist strategies and policies (including on internal issues), without losing its major sources of revenue. Keeping Syria in a state of chaos is protection for the continued dependence of Europe for gas, as it prohibits the building of new gas pipelines through Syria to bring alternative supplies from the Gulf.

Similarly, the Russian support for Iran is enabling Iran to supply China with oil outside of the dollar trading system. This is exactly the kind of practice the US is keen to stop, as it undermines its economic stranglehold on the world's economies. 

So there is a convergence of interest between Europe's concerns regarding energy vulnerability and the US's concerns about growing Chinese power and its ability to clip the wings of US power, both in the far east and its hold on trade and finance. This has led to the US's other strategy: to bind its 'friends' into closer trading agreements that will in effect define the borders of the US Empire. Exploiting regional insecurity, the US is effectively subjugating both Europe and its Pacific allies. Creating insecurity in Eastern Europe will no doubt help doubting European governments consider this all to be necessary.

What is far from clear is if this strategy will actually work. While increasing the depth of US power might mean that China will not risk pushing its case on land disputes, equally it may make no difference. The likelihood that Russia and China will further explore common ground in how to thwart the West is very high. 

The longer term danger in all this is that the world becomes dominated by a number of big power blocks that are held in balance to each other, but are unable to reform themselves internally without becoming vulnerable to the others. It was this sort of structured instability that underlay the other causes of the First World War.

Ordinary people struggle to affect decisions on keeping a local hospital open. Helping our leaders not to plot the way to unavoidable conflict is something that would require a global movement with a clear vision for managing the world's affairs in the interests of us all. Now That's a tall order.

Family and Clan: Refuge from the Failed State

The failure of our civilisation is likely to be when it fails to address the challenges of working as one people to survive climate change, resource depletion and how to live sustainably when there are so many of us. As much as these are very difficult challenges, the failure will ultimately be due to our inability to work together and to avoid the invitations of the powerful to turn us all against each other. To avoid this failure, we need to look again at the role and potential of family and clan.

Family is the basic political unit of our society. It has an economy, a social and cultural purpose and a role in the defence of its members from disease, hunger and violence. Families have networks of related families and family friends, together forming clans, but beyond clan, this intimate political system has no existence.

It is the life that we each lead outside of family that feeds, forms and shapes the other political system. This is civilisation. We go to school, we work for companies or the state and in return companies and the state provide the resilience to disease, hunger and violence, enabling the family structure to change and more flexible roles to develop.

This has been enormously liberating. Men's lives are no longer committed to the physical protection of women, children and the elderly. Freed from the daily fending off of rampaging neighbours, men no longer qualify for a full-time unpaid nurse waiting at home. People who want same sex relationships are no longer weak links in the family. Priests can no longer call on family leaders offering God's protection for their charges. The creative energy of everyone has the potential to contribute to the greater good.

This places an enormous responsibility on the companies and the state. Not only must people believe that companies and the state can be trusted to act for the common good, they do have to act for the common good if the civilisation is not to fail. This is why symptoms of serious corruption and collusion against the common good are such a serious concern. Where family is still strong, the instinct is to use it to protect its members when civilisation is failing. Where family is weak the vulnerability of individuals to the failure of civilisation to protect is a betrayal. Inevitably this is felt most by the poor, many of whom have learned from bitter experience that companies and the state are always willing to betray them if they are failing.

A result of this is that families and clans living on the edge of our civilisation, herded into social housing estates, struggle to reconcile the rules, obligations and values of family and clan with those of a wider society that tenuously supports them, but offers no right to participation.

Faced with the consequences of years of growing corruption and conspiracy to enrich the few, David Cameron's government has in effect started pogroms against this marginalised minority. Companies and the state have failed to manage our country so that it can offer everyone meaningful work, good housing, good education, good health services, secure pensions and a general sense of secure prosperity. Their response has been to decrease wages while forcing people to work. The persecution of the marginalised poor has little to do with saving money, but everything to do with forcing others, who previously had access to better jobs to accept what ever they can get, rather than be unemployed.

For many individual people who would otherwise have been stuck in the world of the marginalised poor, this policy presents them with a more accessible society. Staying on the margins is no longer as viable and the needs and expectations of family and clan can have less hold. For the majority of the marginalised poor though, these are years of real hardship. They are socially vilified for their poverty and for their culture. If they are of immigrant decent they are vilified for that too. Not being one of them is more important than asking why our civilisation is being managed by a complacent, self-interested elite, at a time when the people of the world need leadership with intelligence, courage and compassion, committed to working with the great challenges we face.

It is tempting to think that reform of the state is what is required. Conviction that the election of a better group of people into the high offices of government could ensure the reforms needed, is the rational for participation in democratic processes. There is in fact very little reason to have any such conviction. No political party can be said in any sense to have a power base that is built from the ground up. They are funded by the rich and powerful for the most part. They do not have a role in our communities. They do not have a place in our clans. They do not know our families. It is up to each of us to join them as individuals. They are not of 'us', but we can be of 'them', on their terms, with their rules, their power system. However, even if the political parties did and could reflect our interests and concerns, do they have the power? The answer of course is that they can not in a world where we are one inter-dependent family, all facing climate change, resource depletion and the challenges of being so many in a finite world.

What we can do is to change our culture and our values to recognise both our shared reality and our need to address it together. We have a corrupt system of money, administration and international relations and although we depend on it, it is a threat to us. Our response needs to be to develop alternative ways of working together where the rules and values are ours. We must again look to family and clan, but with an open mind and an open heart, seeking to build a society of clans that reaches across the world in a spirit of mutual support and tolerance.

This means taking back a level of responsibility we have delegated. It is not OK to have friends and relatives who are sexist, racist and homophobic. Its not OK to have friends and relatives who work in corrupt organisations and the organisations that dis-empower us. If we have money and resources we should invest them to benefit family and clan, but only where we know our family and clan are committed to working for our common good. People think of family and clan as being a problem, but it is being closed that is the problem. It is developing meaningful relationships that reach into all areas of our lives that is a problem. It is not respecting the values and ways of others that is a problem. If we think that humans can ever survive our current challenges without dealing with these responsibilities, we have a problem. What we all need is the opportunity to participate, fully and meaningfully and without compromise, in making so that we each belongs to a participatory society committed to the common good. If we can't entrust this to companies and the state, we must work with who we know. 

This though should not be to abandon the kind of political processes we are familiar with, but rather should aim to see the emergence of a political party of the clans. This party should demand of its member clans a commitment to principles and values and in return give true representative power to the elected spokespersons for the clans. Such a party could never go to war without the consent of the clans. The party could never work for others against the interests of the clans. In turn the clans could not conspire against the interests of the families without appeal to the party. All this would of course make daily life highly political, but that is the cost of being in a responsible society. 

We Have a (rather big) Money Problem and Nothing Will Get Sorted Out Until We Sort It

How money works is probably the biggest, least understood, threat to our civilization 

There was never a more powerful myth than money. To build a complex society, ordered through rights and responsibilities, many strategies have been tried, and each has ultimately explored its limitations. In slave based societies, there was wealth created by those with responsibilities, but no rights, but such societies could only develop by the state creating money that could be taxed and for the state to command the responsibilities of the people. This created public works, large armies and temples: the artefacts of the ancient civilisations. As a system for engaging the talents and creativity of people it was limited. As a system for encouraging risky investments by individuals it was limited. Patronage commanded.

The innovation of double entry book keeping created an alternative source of money: private credit. There were now two money systems in operation. Money created by the state, recoverable as taxation, and money created by banks, recoverable as interest and the repayment of debt. In both instances the value of money lies in the demands associated by its creator.

This creates a balance of power between the state and private finance. If the state constrains the creation of private credit, it can become the commander of the economy. If it lifts constraints on credit then the banks and commerce assume greater power. 

When the state controls credit and expands the extent of public works, it can find itself responsible for economic activities unsuited to an organisation whose purpose is its own power. Democratic control of the state can help to bring a public benefit focus to the state's purpose, but equally it can corrupt its purpose as it panders to the electorate's short term desires. This can easily become a process of creating more money than there is an intent to tax, with the result that there is inflation. 

By contrast, when credit controls are lifted, the bank's assume the position of being the primary source of money. They too have a weakness, for the banks are taking a risk with every penny of credit and unlike the state can not enforce their debt collection by threat of incarceration. In consequence they each seek to gain the security of assets of stable value, such as land, property and government debt. Inevitably this leads to these assets being over-valued. Further assets are then invented by manipulation of the law, such as on intellectual property, or by manipulation of trade, such as in financial instruments. This enables the expansion of credit and in consequence, the money supply, but with a corresponding demand for money for the repayment of debt. Inevitably though, the credit created for the purposes of asset inflation is unable to repay the its debt, other than by increasing rent. Since rent is the cost of utilisation of an asset, this means that the yields on inflated asset prices, become in effect a tax by the banks on the productive economy. In combination, the impact of these consequences of uncontrolled credit are highly distorting on the behaviour of both the economy and society. 

As a greater proportion of money becomes associated with inflated asset prices, the potential for further increases in the money supply as credit becomes limited. The resulting decrease in the rate of increase of credit is of itself a cause for deflation. The state can not use interest rates to control credit, because credit is controlled by the lack of assets that can offer a sufficient return to be regarded as security. 

This puts the state into a bind. If the state increases interest rates to increase the return on savings and to encourage the utilization of assets, the resulting asset deflation would put the banks into default. This would give the state no alternative, but to create money to acquire the deflated assets and make them available for productive use. In the process it would destroy the countries financial infrastructure and would have to take responsibility for its reconstruction. 

If the state were to create money to replace the decreased liquidity arising from the decrease in the rate of increase of credit, it would then need to create a corresponding increase in taxation if it were to avoid inflation. However in an economy operating as part of a global free trade system with capital mobility this is not an option. There would be downward trading on the currency, resulting in a rise in the cost of imports, including energy. This in turn would result in a contraction of the economy, including a decreased ability to repay existing debts to the banks and a collapse in asset values.

The states only other direction for action is to put its own existing capacity to create money and demand tax for the provision of public works and services forward as an asset for further private credit creation. This is what privatisation is in effect. The government creates a monopoly as a contract to deliver a service to be paid for by money raised as taxation. This can then be used as security for further credit creation. In this way a wide range of services are transferred to the private sector, with the general benefit of pulling the economy away from deflation.

This however is just feeding the monster. Just as pushing house prices up to the lowest viable yield ratio is a one off action, so is the transfer of public services to the private sector. After that economic growth requires rent income from other sources. This could be from exports, or from theft. 

Theft in this sense goes far beyond the legal meaning of the word. It means taking from some population, their accustomed rights either at home or abroad,. In the UK this has meant an attack on the accustomed rights of the poor and the disabled to benefits and public services. It has meant denying to immigrants the rights normally accorded to everyone. It has meant sending soldiers to fight the American imperial wars to force weaker countries to surrender their resources. It has meant surrendering our sovereignty to trade agreements that steal our right to decide the values by which we shall live. The humiliation of these thefts is increased by the bonuses the bankers pay themselves and the wage rises our politicians vote themselves. 

This though is a doomed game. Theft of this sort breeds discord and rebellion. It causes people to turn on each other, breaking the compact that delivers a peaceful society. It destroys the culture of the weak, leaving them without hope or a sense of belong. It throws the educated into confusions of cognitive dissonance that can leave them vulnerable to tyrants. Above all though it is unsustainable. 

The value of money can not be vested in either taxation or debt repayments in a global society that needs to work towards a global social equity and environmental sustainability. Money given value by taxation will create the tyranny of the state and if the state produces excess money there will be inflation. Money created by private finance as debt, creates the tyranny of the corporations and if there is too much credit causes deflation. Nor is there a balance to be had between the two, when taxation is a function of nation states and credit is global. 

The late economist Richard Douthwaite proposed that there should be a global currency linked to the demand for fossil fuels, with the pollution rights allocated across the world per head of population to each nation. The demand for the currency would distribute wealth to the least energy consuming, with the depressive effects of limited supply falling on the demand for fossil energy. This would both destroy the competitive advantages of maintaining a trading currency (for which easily traded debt instruments are required) and enable individual nation states to develop currencies for internal purposes. 

Much more thought is needed on the question of currency reform, but we can see at the moment a terrible contradiction in our current arrangements. Our generally accepted ideas about the aims and values of a modern society call for greater power for individuals and communities. This is at odds with a state of ever growing power and at odds with the ever growing power of corporations and finance institutions. Even more it is at odds with a combined system that is unable to address the larger social and environmental issues that all of us on earth are facing.

In a complex society we use money to describe our rights and responsibilities. Either we must be creative in the ways we develop money to reflect what these rights and responsibilities need to mean, or we need to create an alternative to money. Sadly time is probably not on our side, so for all the failings of money it makes more sense to focus on the evolution of money than on inventing something else. What, however, we can not afford to do is to fail to understand how our political, social, cultural and economic dynamics are being shaped for both good and bad by the money system we are using. Every day this issue is being neglected is a day when the poor and the weak suffer and a day less to get our management of our affairs on a sane footing. 

The New Normal

After Russia conceded that its Soviet Empire could not sustain itself, the great espionage systems stood as lonely and as pointless as old second world war gun placements on forgotten shore lines. In that brief moment when history ended, a career at the cutting edge of global surveillance could neither beckon to the patriot nor the technical wizard hoping for unlimited budgets to fulfil undergraduate fantasies. From the pool of mathematical geniuses in Cambridge and MIT flowed a steady stream of inspired innovators into the great finance centres of London and New York, redefining the meaning and potential of uncontrolled global credit. Little noticed was that smaller stream, that steady trickle, who flowed from the same pool into the Cold War monsters of surveillance at GCHQ and the NSA.

Though now working in quite different worlds, these young people, together with others of that generation empowered a new, dark and secret search for wealth and power, with convictions born of cold calculation of the outcomes for a world choking on its vast consumption. The coming amorality of global systems failure, with the inevitability of war, mass starvation, pestilence and desperate migrations, became the justification for the ruthless amorality of wresting control of the levers of power from the fools that emanated from political process to govern nation states of diminishing meaning.

The conspiracy for this revolution was hardly spoken, but something understood. A pen drive in the post to an old friend's home address gives advanced warning of contracts to be signed and deals to be made. A minister of state, recently installed is briefed by a senior civil servant who makes clear that the minister's darkest secrets are safe with him. Regulators un-regulate. Judges make surprise judgements. Legislators vote against their voters interests. Monopolies and Mergers are un-hindered. News anchors collude to fold news seamlessly into public relations. New enemies are created, funded, given victories and defeats and at each turn the power of the money and the secrets grows, as ownership and control of true wealth flows into the dark corners where questions are not asked. Hedge Fund, Shell Company, Foundation, Trust, Private Equity, Shadow Banking, Sovereign Wealth Fund: the names we have for components of the unseen world, where the oligarchs and the lesser oligarchs conceal the meaning of their power.

And somehow, it all seems nearly normal. We vote. There is a government. Parliament debates the issues of the day. Criminals and perverts are sent to prison. The Christmas carnival and village fete proceed. Children go to school and pass exams, grown ups go to work and the rubbish is collected. There are cameras watching everywhere and Wikilealeaks and Snowden revelations, conspiracy blogs and arrests at protests, but everything is sort of normal. Doubting normal is just another product. Reasonable people debate reasonably. It is all very nearly normal, but not quite. Its the kind of normal that isn't normal described in films by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright just before the mayhem. Its just that things don't feel right. Politicians seem to be doing what they are told and saying what they are told to say. New appointments to key positions seem to go to the same sorts of people. Laws are passed that no-one wants. Hatreds are being stirred up. Important issues and ideas are excluded from public debate. The weak and vulnerable are blamed for being weak and vulnerable. This is not normal. It is the new normal that is not normal at all.

No Celebrations For "Recovery"!

Looking at the limp recovery in UK economic growth I can't help but have a sinking feeling. Its the same sort of sinking feeling I can imagine a powerless wife might feel when her husband finally gets the clapped out, big old family car going again, when she had been hoping he would have to give up and get a new small efficient one. She knows that keeping that old gas guzzler going will leave less for the house keeping and she will have to live on, expecting it to break down again.

The financial systems failure was a grand opportunity to change the way the economy works and over the last few years there have been some interesting ideas going round, together with some excellent analysis of what has been wrong. When it comes to economic management, tinkering with the detail is usually a sign that the folk pulling the leavers are trying to manage macro economics as if they were the finance director of a medium sized business, trying to survive the job by juggling the survival of the business, while directors and shareholders compete to pocket profits or chase pet projects. Macro economics is another skill set. It involves understanding the dynamics of the system, not of its parts. If the system is set up with the right rules, it can be left to run - at least until people start to find the way to manipulate them.

The current macro economic rules have been put in place by the finance industry itself. After the financial collapse of the early 1930's there was an attempt to contain the ability of the finance industry to shape macro economic policy, but because Keynes's vital concept of creating a shared global reserve currency (the Bancor) was shunned in favour of the supremacy of the dollar, the new system unravelled from the mid '50's onwards. The upshot was that governments have increasingly lost control of the creation of money, with money creation being dependent on the willingness of banks to risk lending. Much of the world as we know it is a direct result of this.

Banks prefer investment in assets and government debts and services to anything else. This has driven property price bubbles. It has driven privatisation of services and utilities. It has driven a preference for government debt growth over taxation. Banks also like short term arbitrage investments, where the borrower is making a quick killing by cashing in on differences in value. This has driven the transfer of jobs and industrial production to the far east. The expansion of banking and debts beyond the real levels of risk being incurred has been mediated through the derivatives markets, which have effectively been a means of shifting liability away from the banks that created the debts and towards weaker banks, pension funds, businesses and of course governments (tax payers and benefit recipients).

At the heart of this system has sat the US dollar. It is the international currency, backed by oil and protected by the US military. Most trades between countries are conducted in dollars. This means that there is a vast amount of dollars held around the world by non-Americans. These dollars are the power behind the banks' dominance over macro economic policy. They are the money in the tax havens, used for secret and unregulated purposes, undermining the ability of sovereign states to steer an independent course. The risks this money can afford to take, be it as hedge funds, private equity funds, private investments, sovereign wealth funds, or parked business money, is greater than can be taken by investors in transparent, regulated and taxed jurisdictions. The unfair competitive advantage this money has, means it can make profits from investments others would consider too risky or unprofitable after tax. It can also fund investments that are illegal or immoral, such as arms trades and vulture funds, where debts are bought at massive discounts and recovered through the courts. 

It was these unaccountable dollars that stripped away the viability of the gold standard, by effectively creating new dollars outside the control of the US Federal Reserve. As the US government came to terms with this reality, it allowed the creation of the US as a tax haven, through the secret and low regulation company administration systems in Delaware and other states. This enabled the big US banks to fully benefit from the position of the dollar. With the connivance of the US Treasury and the World Trade Organisation, the ability of countries around the world to regulate banks effectively was undermined in the late 1990's, enabling the large US banks to export risk and accumulate profit and power.

Control of oil is essential to keeping the dollar's supremacy and it is this that has driven US policy in the Middle East. While creating profits for military and oil companies has been an added bonus, the priority has been to ensure that no major oil trades are conducted in currency that is not dollars or, less favourably  gold (which is itself traded in dollars).  For these purposes the Neo-Con agenda has been adapted, with its megalomaniac idea to keep the Middle East unstable rather than let Europe, China or any other emerging economy gain the ability to define any alternative to the dollar for oil trades.

This issue of the control of the trading currency was the cause of the two world wars of the last century. Initially Germany tried to challenge the pound, but was thwarted by the US, who understood that it would be harder for the dollar to unseat a currency backed by German manufacturing and the oil of the Ottoman Empire than to unseat the British Pound. Hitler's second attempt was based on the idea of combining a broader European Economy that included both Middle Eastern and Russian oil. Had his political power base not been the viciousness of the Nazi's, he might have succeeded, at least enough to ensure a more equitable post war settlement. As it was the US was able to gain years of advantage while the rest of the world struggled to recover from devastation, with the pound and the British Empire almost completely unseated.

The effective castration of the British finance system after the war was resisted by the Bank of England through the development of the off-shore banking system to use the dollars circulating outside the US to rebuild the City of London's position as a finance centre. With a web of tax havens around the old empire, London was able to suck in dollars, using its expertise in finance and investment to extend the use of the dollar beyond the imaginings or intentions of the US government. Progressively, after the end of the link between gold and the dollar, the US adapted to this reality, with the current model for a global economy emerging as a result and with the lead US banks in a dominant position. 

In the years since the 2008 financial crisis, these US banks have consolidated their position, vastly expanding their investments to include utilities and other secure assets. They were able to do this by exploiting the need of governments, particularly in the US, to stimulate economic activity even as the money supply was contracting as banks restricted lending. As governments created money through quantitative easing, the money was used by banks to buy assets, rather than to directly secure lending into the wider economy. Working closely with unregulated funds, the US banks were able to create further opportunities for asset acquisition, particularly in Europe, where the weaknesses of the Euro system was putting countries such as Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Italy into a debt stranglehold. 

One of the effects of this has been that countries like the UK and France, although not targeted for their vulnerability by the US banks, have had their sovereignty compromised and have to concede to the US trade and international policy agenda. It is no coincidence that it is these two countries that have been most willing to support the US government's drive to increase chaos in Syria. 

Meanwhile of course, around the world, ordinary people are suffering the consequences. The expansion of US power is describing the future of food production in much of the world, with the resulting threat to small farmers everywhere. North Africa and the Middle East are being kept in turmoil. Austerity grips the developed countries that had worked so hard to develop as social democracies. Throughout the democratic world, politicians are corrupted by those who have become super rich through the processes described. The dystopia of Jack London's Iron Heel appears to be becoming reality. Ruthless oligarchs rule with the support of mercenaries and minor oligarchs while society is divided into the oppressed and the crushed underclass.

Meanwhile the carbon clock ticks on ever faster toward midnight. The callous arrogance of the greedy and powerful excludes a change of direction and the sorry boasts of higher house prices and a nudge in the GDP figures occlude the prospect of a public clamour for real change. However all the recent events have given us a much better idea of the revolution needed. It is not so much a political revolution, but a revolution of ideas to overturn the tyranny of fractional reserve banking and all its fraudulent evolutions. It maybe that a change to 100% reserve banking and the creation of new money by a committee, combined with an international trading currency that is not any nations money, is all we need to gain our new smaller energy efficient car. First however we have to get rid of the clapped out old banger. That sadly, is looking a bit of a way off!