Ahh,
debt: One of my favourite subject matters to rant on!
Well, first things first: Can we speak of
debt without really understanding what it is, where it comes from and how it works? It sounds like trying to make an LED flash without even knowing what an LED is, how it works and what the Ohm's Law is --
if such a Law really exists, as the mass media would easily tell their gullible clients...
Debt is something that can
never be repaid back in full,
by design.
If, hypothetically, the whole society attempted as a single unit to pay back their debt, they would eventually discover that the very instant they would have managed to return the
Principal (the initial sum of money they borrowed from the banks), there would be no more money left in the money pool for them to pay the
Interest, which the banks asked for in the initial loaning deal. To add insult to injury, the money pool will be empty right after the payment of less than 3% of the principal sum, since more than 97% of the money in circulation are nor really money but mere entries in accounting book records of the banks; but this is another story... Anyway, the economy will collapse while the Interest will have not yet been redeemed; so the banks will proceed in confiscating whatever assets were pledged as collateral to the initial loans.
Isn't it brilliant? We lend them
printed paper symbols of value, they usually think of as
money that no one else has the right to print, and, in the end of the day, we end up with property of some real value (such as the land is) in our hands!
It is impossible for everyone to pay back the Principal PLUS the Interest because the Interest money will not yet be existing; the Interest money will be created by the banks (out of thin air, due to the "fractional reserve lending" legal scam) right after the next time someone will sign up for a new loan; for which he will be convinced to return the new loan principle plus more interest money that will not yet be in existence until the creation of an even newer loan...
Yes, I know, it sounds like every minute is born one --but this happens only because of their
cultivated ignorance...
For a crash-course on the Debt-Based Economy we all suffer from, I strongly recommend everyone to watch a lecture given by Gary Fielder at The University of Colorado School of Law on Dec. 4, 2008, called:
The gig is up: Money, the Federal Reserve and YouAnother excellent piece that should be taught at schools is an eye-opening documentary that exposes and explains the monetary mechanism of our civilization era, since the times of the ancient Rome: It is the famous, non-fictional, three and a half hours long historical documentary "
The Money Masters (1998)" written by Patrick S.J. Carmack in 1996: It is about how the private banks gained control of the global economy, step by step, as well as what happened to anyone who tried to oppose or to fight them. For anyone interested, it is available to be freely watched by video-sharing services, as I have already posted
here.
Additionally, for those who assume that these banking tricks are new (even though we actually have new banking crafty procedures, like the Predatory Lending with the Credit Derivatives, Complex Derivatives, etc), let me state that this model of usury has its roots not in ancient Rome but further back in time. Excavations in the Mesopotamian region have revealed ancient
clay tablets, most of them representing the very first archives of promissory notes, personal debt or other debt instruments or accounting lists, where several millenia ago the ancient Babylonian Priests were loaning gold to farmers who could not eventually pay back the loan they took plus the interest (which could be redeemed in gold ONLY and not in commercial products of the same or greater value), resulting in massive land confiscations and the enslavement (== being sold as slaves) of whole families, since those were the assets pledged as collateral to the initial loans. Unfortunately, the mercenaries "accidentally" destroyed all these archaeological sites in Afghanistan in 2003 plus its National Archeaological Museum. History Rewriting in Action? Probably...
So, property confiscation and personal enslavement by debt is not a new practice.
Want some more? Persia conquered Babylon in 536 BCE because they could not pay back their debt to the Babylonian priests, when the latter ones started loaning huge amounts of gold to the Persian state, a practice that led the Persian Empire in temporal prosperity and in further loans to pay back their previous and practically unredeemable debt. Please, keep in mind that the interest rate in those days was fixed at a yearly 33.3% rate and the interest was redeemable in gold only, which could not be found easily because the availability of gold was strictly controlled by the priesthood. Rings any bells?
Later on, during the Peloponnesian Wars in 404 BCE, Spartans were forced to attack, conquer and enslave the Athenian states because in 412 BCE Sparta took from Persia a loan of 5,000 talents of gold (the Attic talent, as a weight, was about 26 Kg or 57 lbs) in order to build a fleet; and seven years later Sparta's debt grew to the astronomical amount of 37,500 talents of gold, forcing them into wars to find the gold they did not have and to move the burden of redemption of their own debt to the enslaved states. During the next century, an unbearable debt of about 1.5 million talents was also the initial reason Alexander the Great attacked and conquered, in his turn, Persia, where he built a temple (== a bank) in every city he acquired. The very next offensive war was initiated by the heavily indebted Rome against her own creditor, the Greek Empire. And it went on and on, until the present day...
But this is just me,
repeating myself...
-George