You can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt

But it’s something that seems to escape the experts !

The Year Ahead For Positive Money
 
You can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt. That much is obvious to the average Joe, but it’s something that seems to escape the experts and policy makers who are so dramatically failing to solve the current crisis. As long as we have a system in which almost all money is created as debt by private banks, and allocated for their own benefit, we’ll have an economy that reflects the needs of the big banks, skewed towards speculation and property bubbles and away from real business and job creation. We’ll also force millions of people into debt, simply because the government has given banks a monopoly on supplying money to the public. 
 
The work we all did last year has started to have an effect. We’ve seen the first ever conference on monetary reform to be attended by two MPs from opposing parties, we’ve had meetups in over 20 towns and cities around the UK. We’ve also seen a larger number of journalists and policy makers catch on to the fact that the question of who creates money and how they create it might just be important! 
 
In 2012 we’re going to focus on getting as many people as possible to understand the mess we’re currently in. We’ve got a few exciting announcements to make over the next couple of months so watch out for these emails. 
 
 
Upcoming Events
 
Positive Money At Occupy London Economics Working Group – Sun 15th Jan, London
 
Talk On ‘Debt And Positive Money’ – Wed 18th Jan, Richmond (Yorkshire)
 
Talk: “Long Live The Credit Crunch!”- Thu 19th Jan, Dorset
 
 
Latest from the Blog
 
A Revisionist Critique Of Fractional Reserve Banking

If The Solution Is So Simple, Why Is It Not Being Done?

Disrupting Banking

Sing For Change In 2012 At “Occupy Bristol”

What The Public Does Not Know About Banking, Financial Times

Our Wish List For 2012

A Debt Based Monetary System, Export Warfare & Third World Debt

Steve Keen On Max Keiser Report

Common Misconceptions About Banking

How Exactly Can We Get Out Of Debt?

The Heart Of The Matter – Part I: The Endless Cycle

Vickers Proposal Does Not Separate Safe From Unsafe Bank Activities

A Flaw In Quantitative Easing
 

Selfish Mother

Dan’s story

Dan is a single dad to his son Carl, who’s nine. Carl has not seen his mum for five years.

“Carl’s mum got pregnant two months after we met. We were surprised but he was a wanted child. Me and his mum, we clicked, we had a good time for a while but the relationship didn’t last.

To complicate matters, I was ill with a hereditary condition, I’ve had major operations and a rough ride. For one of the operations there was only a 15% survival rate. I was in hospital for three months.

Carl’s mum never visited. I knew our relationship was over but I wanted a civil split for our son’s sake. Carl was five when his mum and I eventually separated. Carl was a daddy’s boy. His mum left and she didn’t fight for him. Carl wanted to be with me. I got full custody and she was only allowed to write.

Single dad

So I became a single dad. I’m not sure I realised quite what I had taken on. I surprise myself at times. My life is so different now to how it was ten years ago but I couldn’t imagine it any other way. My purpose in life is my son.

ROUGH RIDE

Jonathan has been single dad to his six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, since his ex-wife left the family two years ago.


When my son was nine months, my wife bought a ticket back to China and left us. Nobody knows what I’ve been through, it was hell.

I’ve had a rough ride. I was working full-time for the NHS and explained to my line manager that I needed to cut my hours. But she was abrupt and unsympathetic.

I was leaving work, rushing to pick up my son and daughter, give them their tea, they were tired and stressed, so was I. Also, my son got very ill, he was affected by breastfeeding stopping suddenly.

Eventually I took early retirement from my job, I  set up an electronic engineering business but again found it too much combining work and kids. Now I’m on income support and will be until my son starts school. It’s the first time I’ve ever lived on benefits.



I try to blend in but I am unusual, being a single dad in a small village. I sympathise with other single parents, keep your chin up, I say. I don’t have any family around me to help. But by now I’m used to pulling my socks up and getting on with it, so that’s what I do.



So young


My little boy needs a lot of attention, he’s still so young. With my daughter it is getting easier now she’s older. She washes and dresses herself now and is learning how to make breakfast for herself. I’m proud of her, she’s very independent. When my wife first left, my daughter cried when it was time for school and she was still shy and withdrawn this time last year. Now I wait at the school gates and she walks confidently into class.


Thirteen Year Old Son Depressed – in House Alone as Single Mother Works Like a Dog to Survive

joannafromwales

28 October 2010 08:52

I understand and support what Ann is saying. I have one 13 year old child and like Ann, have no support from family or my son’s father (although he expects support from me!!!) I conform to govt policy by doing 3 jobs, from 6.00 am to 6.45 pm every day to pay my mortgage and bills and keep out of debt.

I just called Parentline because I get exhausted/depressed to the point of being unable to go on because of the strain of trying to work/parent (13 year olds are hard work, not yet old enough not to need parents!).

I also think my son is depressed, he is on his own in the house most of the time inc. school holidays and when I get home I am too tired to do anything except go to sleep.

Ann is right, one person can only keep on going so long without being ill and without serious knock-on effect for the children. There isn’t a solution; my son is, as I say, 13 so I go to work. But good luck to Ann and anyone else in her position, the future is very tough for single parents and children and most of the time life doesn’t seem worth living.

Light bulbs and the idiots in the EU

The full ghastliness of the amazingly stupid ‘long life’ ‘energy saving’ poisonous mercury filled light bulbs imposed on us by the control freaks in the ’European Union’ has just hit home.

I had always been dismayed and irritated at reading newspaper reports about how decent light bulbs were being banned by EU law, but had mostly still been able to continue buying the incandescent bulbs (those old fashioned ones that actually work properly ) until now, that is.

I have just moved into a one of those shabby, nauseatingly unpleasant ‘buy to let’ wonder boxes so beloved of the greedy banks desperate to lend as much money as they possibly can. The grubby little place is infested with low wattage, dim ‘energy saving’ light bulbs and I cannot buy decent incandescent ones anywhere any more.

So, how do I definitely know there is something very, very wrong about these silly mercury vapour filled energy saving, low wattage, dim light bulbs ?

Why, quite simply I couldn’t actually see properly when I was sewing up the black school trousers my son needed shortening for school tomorrow. The trouser material was jet black and so was soaking up all the light. The thread was black too, and no matter how hard I tried, there simply wasn’t enough light to see what I was doing.

It was grim.

Well done you Europrats for dreaming up so many different ways of making life unpleasant for us all.

Frankly, I can’t wait for the whole rotten edifice of political deceit and artifice to crumble along with the rip-off Euro currency.

Good riddance to the lot of you meddling Euro-fools is what I say.

New Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury ‘on brink of financial collapse’

Thursday, September 22, 2011,  
 
 
 
The paint is barely dry on the sparkling new Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury, but this morning (September 22, 2011) it has been included in a list of 60 named hospitals across the UK who are in serious difficulties because of the private finance initiatives (PFI) taken out to pay for them.

The new hospital came in at around £230 million, costing Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust around £17 million annually for 30 years from 2012 – a figure that will increase alongside inflation.

But today, the health secretary Andrew Lansley has today named the 22 hospital trusts whose “financial clinical and financial stability” is threatened by their PFI debts – and ours in Tunbridge Wells is on the list.

60 hospitals managed by these 22 trusts are “on the brink of financial collapse” because of these costly private finance initiative schemes, and there is already evidence that waiting lists for non–urgent operations have begun to rise as hospitals delay treatment to save money. Adding to this are growing fears over the impact of the financial crisis on care this winter.

Under the PFI deals, a private contractor builds a hospital or school. It owns the building for up to 35 years, and during this period the public sector must pay interest and repay the cost of construction, as well as paying the contractor to maintain the building.

However, the total cost of the deals is often far more than the value of the assets. As a result, Mr Lansley says, the 22 trusts “cannot afford” to pay for their schemes, which in total are worth more than £5.4billion, because the required payments have risen sharply in the wake of the recession.

He said hospitals would not be allowed to collapse financially. Over the next few weeks, Department of Health officials and executives at the 22 trusts will develop detailed plans for dealing with the crisis. Their proposals are expected to include significant cost–cutting and the renegotiation of PFI contracts.

Reading about this PFI rip-off nonsense suddenly made me realise it is just like the experiences of homeowners with the the sub-prime mortgage scam which methodically robs people of their homes.

A typical example is SPML Ltd, a dishonest sub-prime mortgage lending subsidiary of fraudsters, liars and thieves Lehmans Bros who caused the Global economic crisis, and are currently being investigated by the Financial Services Authority for their financial scams and general dishonesty.

PFI or Public Finance Initiatives are just bigger and better versions of the sub-prime mortgage scam really. Rotten financiers just weasil people into incomprehensible schemes designed to make the bankers rich and deprive property owners of their property. In this case the Taxpayer or Public Purse.

Nasty really !

Exactly the same principles apply. Simply put, the fraudulent financiers use the methods of confidence tricksters to lure the victim (Health Trust in this PFI case and ordinary householders in the case of the sub-prime domestic mortgages) into a false belief of affordability etc etc.

But the unsuspecting victim always finds a bit further down the line that the whole deal has been set up as giant scam which is inevitably unaffordable and is almost certain to end in re-possession by the fraudsters who lured their victims so cunningly with doublethink and garbage logic.

The new Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury was fully opened in September when the A&E department transferred to the site. The old Kent & Sussex Hospital premises were finally locked having served the community since the 1930′s.