Neil Irwin writes:
When you get past the details of the Scottish independence referendum Thursday, there is a broader story underway, one that is also playing out in other advanced nations.
It is a crisis of the elites. Scotland’s push for independence is driven by a conviction — one not ungrounded in reality — that the British ruling class has blundered through the last couple of decades. The same discontent applies to varying degrees in the United States and, especially, the eurozone. It is, in many ways, a defining feature of our time.
The rise of Catalan would-be secessionists in Spain, the rise of parties of the far right in European countries as diverse as Greece and Sweden, and the Tea Party in the United States are all rooted in a sense that, having been granted vast control over the levers of power, the political elite across the advanced world have made a mess of things.
The details of Scotland’s grievances are almost the diametrical opposite of those of, say, the Tea Party or Swedish right-wingers. They want more social welfare spending rather than less, and have a strongly pro-green, antinuclear environmental streak. (Scotland’s threatened secession is less the equivalent of Texas pulling out of the United States, in that sense, than of Massachusetts or Oregon doing the same.) But there are always people who have disagreements with the direction of policy in their nation; the whole point of a state is to have an apparatus that channels disparate preferences into one sound set of policy choices.
What distinguishes the current moment is that discontent with the way things have been going is so high as to test many people's tolerance for the governing institutions as they currently exist...
The choice that Scotland is making on Thursday is of whether the men and women who rule Britain messed things up so badly that they would rather go it alone. And so the results will ripple through world capitals from Athens to Washington: The way things are going currently isn’t good enough, and voters are getting angry enough to want to do something about it.
Elites in Europe the US (elsewhere) have overstepped, they have turned the mass citizenry into effective tax/debt surfs. The monetary debt system in place makes no sense, other than effective theft from those not engaged in it. This works for them with many(that have little understanding, or wish not to understand due to at present received transfer payments/benefits), but there are others that have a clue as to the game being played, and they want out. Think about this, in the U.S. you originally had 13 colonies that became states; thereafter you had additional territories that became states, so the question is when they became a state was it once a state always a state (contractual)? Did Lincoln’s civil war really answer this question? Will a time come when portions of the U.S. seek to go it alone, and other than military force what will be the rationale to not allow it? The jig is beginning to be up
ReplyDeleteWhile thats fine, there might be an easier explanation, that Scotland becoming independent (of a sort) will eliminate 40 south scottish seats from the control of the Labour Party guaranteeing a Conservative Government for years.
ReplyDeleteThe Tribute the World Pays to the Empire
ReplyDeleteSince August 1971, when the countries of the World ceased to have the option of receiving gold in payment of their favorable balances of trade, or of extending credit by receiving dollars, the quantity of monetary reserves in world central banks has grown monstrously. Since there was no more payment in gold, the world had no option but to grant credit while it waited for the real payment – which has not arrived, and never will arrive.
The bald truth is that $12 trillion dollars is the imperial tribute extracted from all the countries that do not issue a reserve currency, and delivered to the countries that issue the reserve currencies, in the course of the last 43 years. It cannot be anything other than imperial tribute, because those funds represent bonds that will never be paid. Exports exchanged for bonds that will never be paid are tribute which the exporting world has delivered to the United States and Europe.
When Caesar invaded Britain in 54 B.C. his legions had to cut to pieces several thousand Britons. After the Britons surrendered, he imposed upon Britain a yearly tribute or stipendia, to be delivered in the form of assorted valuable goods. This tribute the Britons paid for the next four hundred years. Tribute is what sustains and feeds an Empire.
However, never in history has there been any collection of imperial tribute on the scale of the present financial scheme, of paying for imports with bonds that will never be paid. The devilish thing about it is that hardly anyone understands it.
Only payment in gold can cancel international debts.
http://www.plata.com.mx/Mplata/articulos/articlesFilt.asp?fiidarticulo=249