a new Lees-on life is all we ask

If you read this story, you may decide that finance (banking) is the illness
that's going to wipe out or enslave most of the non-rich in the world,
and decide like I have to try desperately to keep your earnings away
from finance, and government, or you may decide to be brave and "do a Leeson."

You should look up the story of Nick Leeson.
He was a British guy of humble beginnings who ended up working for a
big British bank in the Far East, Barings.

His illegal/unwise (?) dealing went unchecked until the bank went bankrupt.

Now, I suppose he doesn't believe himself to part of the class war in the UK,
because there is one, but I place him right there.
I think he intended to give the system a kick, and he bided his time.
In fact, I'm thinking that his model of the sleeper spy (on behalf of the rest of us)
is about the only way (short of self-inflicted wounds of the oligarchs)
that we're going to get any change, however small,
in this banker oligarchy that we euphemistically call 'democracy'.
We're now watching the end-game roll out:

default, selling of national assets, permanent debt

Greece, Ireland, Portugal, the Euro countries, the US
and some other insignificant countries
because most of the rest of the world is already there,
under the jackboots of either the US, Europe, the IMF/WB

For proof, I've selected some of the most explosive comments
made by Dr Michael Hudson in a radio interview, transcribed on his website

michael-hudson.com

If you thought LSD or pot is a mind-blowing experience,
try to fully understand the implications of the words that Hudson uses.
I can barely make a comment, so here are the clips, with headings:

DOUBLE WHAMMY
Finance and food dependency achieve today what military invasion was required to achieve in centuries past.

THE ROLE OF OLIGARCHS
Q: I’ve always been a little mystified as to why everyone joins the IMF and the World Bank, why they don’t go it alone.
A: The question you’re asking is, who are they? Who is Argentina? Who is Brazil? It’s not as if the whole country makes the decision. These countries are very largely their own oligarchies.
... So if you have a country that’s run like Saudi Arabia is run, or other dictatorships, a client dictatorship run by a client oligarchy is kept in place by essentially the U.S. diplomacy against the domestic democracy. That’s why America backed dictators in Latin America for 50 years after World War II....
So the interest of the rentier oligarchy that’s floating on top of the economy, as Werner Sombart said, ‘like globules of fat on the soup of the economy’. They benefit from this while the economy as a whole suffers. This is the problem with neoliberal reform. It’s created oligarchies throughout the former Soviet countries. We can see this from the Baltics to Central Asia and what’s happened there.

THE PLAN TO DESTROY the U.S.
[I knew there had to be a bigger game going on. The obvious destruction of the US could not be explained by simple greed of politicians. The crash of the US dollar will bring on the new world currency, run by the bankers. But that's not the whole game. see below- Costick67]
We need a depression in order just to lower the wages of America and to have an excuse – of course, a depression is going to make the budget deficit even larger and the solution to the depression has already been written up just like the invasion of Iraq was all written up before 9/11. The solution is going to be that the government is going to sell off its land, whatever is in the public domain.
The American government is going to look just like Greece and just like Ireland. They’re going to be told, ‘The states can’t pay, there’s no federal revenue to share with Minnesota or Wisconsin or the city of Chicago. They’re going to have to sell off their roads, sell off their streets, sell off their infrastructure, sell off their public utilities, sell off their business. The government will sell whatever it has, the Postal Service, to essentially buyers who will now borrow the money from the banks making a huge new market for banks and investment bankers, in privatizing and cutting up what used to be the public domain and turning it over to the wealthiest 10 percent of the economy. So people realize yes, the class war’s back in business. We’re going into a depression.

OBAMA, WAR & the NOBEL PRIZE
even before he took office he won the Nobel War Prize so he knew that he was going to escalate wherever he could. That’s what the war prize is given for. That’s why it was given to Kissinger and to other people that go to war. And he wouldn’t be able to extend the war into Libya....

NEW DARK AGE
When you privatize a basic infrastructure it’s privatized on credit and so the new owners build in their interest charges and financial charges into the cost of doing business, they pay themselves enormous salaries, much higher than the public sector would pay, and they begin to treat their monopoly position as if they can put a toll booth on the roads, a toll booth on the water and sewers, a toll booth anywhere.
...WHOLE economy into rent extraction.

U.S. FINANCIAL WAR on EUROPE
We’ve placed big bets that these governments are going to pay, there won’t be a debt write-down, so you have to keep Irish labor on the hook, you have to keep the Irish taxpayer on the hook, you have to make Ireland pay.’ Same thing in Greece. It’s said that Geithner again told the Europeans, ‘The American banks have made a big gamble on Greece, the Greek people will be defeated, that the oligarchy will win, that the oligarchy will succeed in pushing them into depression and you’ve got to save American banks from losing on this gamble by destroying yourselves. Destroy Greece, destroy yourselves because otherwise our banks would lose money and we’re not willing to lose a dollar. We’d rather you lose a trillion dollars than us lose one dollar because I represent the American banks, not you.’ So one can say, ‘Shame on Mr. Obama for putting a Treasury secretary that has such a dysfunctional, almost sociopathic, personality and psychology to be willing to do this.’ Europe’s response is to say, ‘Who put Mr. Geithner in power over the European government, impoverishing us? Who put the American Treasury in a position to demand that we go into depression?’[I don't see any Eurocrats standing up to defend the EU. Sorry: Backbone required- Costick67]

GET RID OF FINANCE- IT’ S AN ILLNESS
Q: You describe a class war of banks against all the rest of society which cuts across the notion of left or right in political terms. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
A: This is probably the hardest issue to get across because finance really isn’t a class. Surprisingly enough, the first discussion of this came in the 1970s and ’80s in Russia. Stalin – actually, it was already in the ’60s. Stalin had asked a leading thereologists and ancient historians to look at the class conflict in antiquity..... And he said finance really isn’t a class because everybody’s a creditor. In America, employees save money, they have Social Security. Everybody is a creditor to somebody as well as being a debtor, and the financial classes are debtors. So it’s not really a class. He said it’s a legal estate. And if you look at all of the discussions in the 19th century about class warfare it was always, what was the class? The class was the owner of capital or the people that they hired. It was labor and industrial capital. Those were the two classes. There was also a land-owning class, the rentiers, but nobody ever thought of finance as being a class of people. Bankers were supposed to be intermediaries, they were supposed to provide credit for the wheels of commerce but most people thought of wealth as being land or stock ownership or securities. They didn’t think of finance as being a class. So I use the term very loosely, not in the classical meaning of the word class.
So there’s a financial dynamic of compound interest, a financial dynamic of banks and the financial sector getting the rest of society into debt that now can be created on a computer keyboard without limit, and then essentially getting rich by pushing the rest of society into debt up to the point where the entire economic surplus is being used not to raise living standards, not to invest in tangible industrial capital formation, not to pay taxes to government, but to pay interest and financial fees to the financial sector. So I guess instead of a class I should refer to what national income economists call the FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate. And it’s a symbiotic sector that’s emerged to become the characteristic central planners of the economic. [the only solution for the rest of us is, when in a FIRE, go for the EXIT door. Neither a lender nor a borrower be- Costick67]

A REASON FOR MONSANTO TO KEEP GOING
Q: So you’re saying that the United States uses the World Bank and the IMF to force other countries to import our agriculture.
A: That’s been the explicit aim and I’ve described that in my book, Super Imperialism, how the mainstay of the U.S. balance of payments for the last 50 years has been agriculture, not industry. And in addition to agriculture, of course, military exports to the oil exporting countries so that they’re permitted to charge as much as they want for their oil as long as they agree to spending it on buying American airplanes. Saudi Arabia’s now buying tanks to use against its population. The idea is to arm the countries to prevent their domestic populations from bringing about a democratic government. That’s what’s creating the Arab Spring and the reactions against the governments – wasting their economic surplus on buying American arms and agreeing not to promote agriculture but to buy American food to essentially finance dependency on the United States.
... And that’s how the Americans basically are impoverishing the Third World countries, by insisting – for instance through the World bank and IMF – that they will only give loans if other countries do not feed themselves and depend on American grain. Now that America’s using the grain to make alcohol and gasoline there’s no more grain available to feed these people so the result is African starvation as official American policy.