It’s the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World

I wanted to share this article with the Group as I think it is very important to current events and, I believe, helps to clarify the ongoing problems we are suffering from in the US and around the world (with exceptions). It also supports the idea that the bulk of 'blame' or 'fault' lies with big business rather than government as big business has this 'Interest' hold over our governments and politicians but that is not the point of the article.

Basicly the article says that 35 - 40 % of every dollar we spend (we as individuals and as governing bodies) goes directly to interest payments. Even a completely balanced budget (personal or governmental) without debt would still be paying this rate. Interest payments are growing every day, debt is growing everyday and not because people are taking out more credit (which most aren't so much).

This puts to the coals those 'live within your own means' and 'austerity now' types, it just wouldn't make a difference - we still pay these high rates through the prices we pay for things.

This is a great article and worth a patient and thorough reading.

The author does present public banking as a partial solution to this increasing spiral of interest debt.

In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money released last week, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of “Wall Street greed” but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.

This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that if they pay their credit card bills on time and don’t take out loans, they aren’t paying interest. This, says Dr. Kennedy, is not true. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay their bills. They must pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell and before the end buyer pays for the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are passed on to the ultimate consumer. Dr. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging from 12% for garbage collection, to 38% for drinking water to, 77% for rent in public housing in her native Germany.

www.globalresearch.ca...

I've been wanting to post this for some time but wanted to thoroughly read the article first. I came across it at Alternet.com late last year and saved it for future reference. Now Alternet is quite a liberal outfit so I looked for other place it may have turned up and I found it all over the place:

Here: www.dailypaul.com...
Here: truth-out.org...

Here is some commentary on the article by Thom Hartmann and Sam Sachs:
occupywallst.org...

a short quote:

Now put the Monopoly game board away and consider this: Researchers in Zurich, Switzerland have found that there are roughly 43,000 transnational corporations that dominate the global economy. Of those, there are about 1,300 companies that control 80% of all the global revenues for all the transnational corporations on the planet. Now let’s take it a step further. Of those 1,300 core companies, only 147 companies, which all happen to own each other in some way, control 40% - or nearly half – of all the wealth in the entire transnational corporate network. That means 1% of transnationals own 40% of all the world’s business wealth.

So as you can see this has gotten wide coverage.

I bring it up now because it impacts on two current threads:

1) Talk of USA collapse going mainstream! www.abovetopsecret.com...
2) Venezuela Launches First Nuke In Currency Wars, Devalues Currency By 46% www.abovetopsecret.com...