What Have Politicians Ever Done For Us?

What have politicians ever done for us? I don't quite know how to answer that. I certainly don't subscribe to the view that all politicians are bad, nor that everything Parliament does is selfish. Our political system, and those members of society we elect to run that system for us, are not perfect. I doubt you'll find many British people who would disagree with that. By the same token, our system is not the worst in the world, either. I think it's fair to describe us as "Good, but could do better."

We do indeed live in a wonderful society filled with abundance and convenience. I sit typing this with a full belly, with a roof over my head and safe drinking water just a few feet away. I'm hooked up to an electronic network that can connect me to my friend in New York for a frivolous natter or to a local emergency center should I be bleeding, under attack or on fire. There are a million different ways I can distract myself, from watching Laurel & Hardy reruns to reading the galaxy's greatest comic to getting pissed out of my tree to attending a God awful Enya concert. I used to love this world; being all wrapped in comfort, ease and privilege. It is an easy world to live in and an easy world to love. It is a powerful world, and it is our duty as part owners of that power to ensure it is wielded fairly and with humanity.

We eventually discover, as we grow and our outlook matures, that there are other countries in the world where people aren't as "lucky" as us. Countries where they have seemingly incessant wars, brutal genocides, blazing droughts and murderous famines. Because we know how lucky we are, we throw a few coppers in charity tins and maybe buy a CD of singers we don't like singing songs we detest using money that isn't ours in aid of a cause we don't fully understand. A lot of clever people swim in and out of focus, wafting like infoghosts across the chattering cyclops telling us that it's all about debt relief or local government corruption or tribal rivalries or shifting climate or the fact that they're all just stupid bloody savages with no concept of how to run a country properly or any one of a myriad other factors that might be to blame.

But you get the feeling that this is all bullshit and that, deep down, it's not just "bad luck" at all but really our fault for allowing Big Banking, Big Business and Big Politics to go raping other people's countries in order to keep us in the lap of luxury - because so long as we have nothing to complain about, those people we put in charge can just keep on getting away with whatever it is they're getting away with.

But the cause doesn't matter, really, does it? Look; pictures of people starving and covered in flies staring uncomprehendingly at the camera to the accompaniment of a rock ballad or bloody Enya. Throw a few coppers at the problem. Money always helps, doesn't it? We all know it's not as simple as that, of course. Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, give a man a fishing rod and he'll eat for life. Right on, man. Groovy cool beans. Don't give cash, give goods because cash just evaporates faster the nearer to the ground it gets.

Anyway, it's not our job to fix the world, is it? We've got our own problems: Crime. Global warming. Immigration. The credit crunch. Iraq. Unemployment. Afghanistan. Global cooling. Public health. Fuel prices. Mortgage rates. Tax. Bills. Speed cameras. Computer viruses. The European Union. A volcano. Enya.

I guess my point is that everyone knows that the world we've got isn't the world any of us would want, but it is the world we deserve. We spend so much time arguing, fucking each other over and listening to Enya that we've taken our eye off the ball. We have no vision for the future. We have become small. We have become a species of Scrooges, grubbing about in the dust and shit for coppers when we should be reaching for the stars.

Now, I bang on a lot about the banks being a vampire attached to the very hearts of many of our societies, bleeding us all just dry enough to keep us quiet. Many people don't believe this, and I understand that. I didn't believe it when I first heard it a couple of years ago. I thought the idea was just mad - as mad as thinking the Royal Family are really shape-shifting space lizards who live off the blood of new born babies and control our minds via CIA operated telepathic satellite transmissions of Enya songs. As I learned more, I didn't want to believe it because the very thought that bankers might actually be doing this for real was (and still is) terrifying to me. Politicians and bankers can't be that corrupt, can they? Somebody would have noticed by now if all this had been going on for as long as people said it had. Abraham Lincoln noticed. So did JFK. They both tried to do something about it and things did not end well for either of them. Luckily, I'm a nobody and not worth shooting (hopefully), but I do have to examine my courage every time I post something like this. Well, I'm sure you can imagine how afraid to speak out you might be if you believed what I believe. I don't talk about this shit for fun, you know.

There is still a part of me, even now, that sometimes tells me I'm being stupid and that this can't possibly be. Then I learn a little bit more (such as the fact that the Bank of England pays 25% of its post tax profits to HM Treasury every year, but there's no mention of what happens to the other 75%) and I am reluctantly reintroduced to what I see as a likely reality. I don't expect anybody to be convinced by me or to follow me or even to take me seriously. All I say is that I believe that this country which I love is being quietly sacked by a small band of powerful European and domestic families who own most of the world's central banks. Because they control the money supply, they are above the law. This is what Meyer Amschel Rothschild meant when he said “Give me control of a country’s money, and I care not who writes its laws.” If your bank tells you that your mortgage has gone up, you pay it or the bank takes your house off you. If your bank tells you it's altering the terms of your mortgage (due to paragraph 56, Heading 44c, Subsection F2, line 8 of the thing you signed fifteen years ago without reading properly) you comply or the bank takes your house off you. This is precisely the position governments have got themselves into with the central banks - if governments don't comply, the banks turn off the money supply. The way out of this is for governments around the world to boot out the central banks and start printing their own debt-free money again.

Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm completely and irredeemably cock-out-howling-at-the-moon-in-a-tinfoil-hat loopy, but so what? I exercise my right as a free man in a free country to express whichever views I so choose, be they right or be they wrong. I'm not the only person in the world who believes that the human race is being not only held back but brutally damaged by the banking vampires or corporape interests and I see more and more people waking up to the idea every day. I do not see myself as a revolutionary - Hell, I'm not even interested in politics, to be honest - but I do feel very strongly about this one subject. I see myself only as one insignificant human being pointing and saying "look at that." Whether you look or not is up to you. What you see when you look is also up to you, as is what you may want to do about it.

I could go on and on and on about this (er, and I think I just did), but I don't think that what I say is unreasonable or beyond the bounds of possibility. I am disappointed that none of my parliamentary candidates will even talk about the subject. Does this mean I should forget it and just pick a party that's near enough to my views on everything else except this, even though I firmly believe that unless we change the way our country prints money nothing else actually [i][b]can[/b][/i] change?

So, what have politicians ever done for us? A great deal, and nowhere near enough.