Kieran Burke

Adverts for Montefiore's 'The Cauldron' all over the net and the media. Saturation. I've just read this excerpt in which he claims that early Zionist settlers in Palestine dreamt of socialist partnerships with Arab farmers until the Arabs turned round and started shouting "kill the Jews". Nothing about the eviction of Arab tenant farmers when land was bought from these absentee landlords, or schemes like Kibbush Ha'avoda ("Conquest of Labor") or Avoda Ivrit ("Hebrew Labor"), which saw Arab farmworkers dismissed with no other sources of income. For decades we have allowed the likes of Montefiore to distort and rewrite history. As a young man I was taught that the very idea of the predominance and relentless promotion of the Zionist narrative is an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But that's the core of the narrative.

That's the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel. Allow me to summarise what I've been saying in one post and explain what's going on here. We need a clean energy system, our water systems, schools and hospitals are struggling, roads are crumbling and we're facing serious welfare cuts. We're told that we can't use public investment - unless it's on the military, of course - to fix all this because it'll "cause inflation" and "increase borrowing costs". Two huge lies - in fact the principal cause of inflation is rising energy costs and currency-issuing governments with central banks don't need to borrow money from parasitic 'bond markets'. Debt trouble occurs when nations with weak currencies - such as Argentina - owe debts payable only in a foreign currency, i.e. $ US. We are not in that situation. Government bonds (called 'gilts' in the UK) are savings accounts giving big capital free money, nothing more - they don't fund our public spending. They're a relic from the age when the gold exchange system limited the money supply - this was abandoned between 1971 and 1978 when governments worldwide adopted fiat money systems. Just because bond traders jack up yields in the secondary market doesn't mean that governments need to increase yields in the primary auction. The problem is, as @JLMelenchon has just told the French, supine bought-off politicians and central bankers conforming to fiscal spending rules imposed on us by global money markets - the 'bond vigilantes'. We're told that we should limit public spending because governments are wasteful and don't allocate capital properly - in other words utilities, schools, hospitals, infrastructure maintenance and other goods and services we really need don't make huge profits. Private investors allocate capital more efficiently and ensure progress - huge lie #3. Look below - private investors are wasting $ trillions on a huge AI bubble that'll inevitably burst. Tulip mania revisited. The 'animal spirits' of greedy, excitable private investors never learn. But, to keep us in the dark, the investment elite - the wealthy corporations, banks and individuals who live off the free money we pay them as 'interest', 'yields' and 'returns' - won't let us see it burst. In the quite likely event that Western governments initially refuse to bail out the $4.2 trillion - yes, trillion - AI shortfall, there are contractual IPO (Initial Public Offering) mandates for compulsory 'public offerings' to fall back on. To cut a long story short, stupid pension, insurance fund, hedge fund, private equity and sovereign wealth fund managers, when they were told AI would be a bonanza, signed contracts to fund any bailout needed after 2030 and keep the AI shitshow on the road. We'll be paying for the system that steals our data, spies on us, give us the wrong answers to questions on ChatGPT, churns out cheat essays for students, ruins human creativity, and makes a mess of our NHS accounts etc. for the foreseeable future. In other words, the geniuses who look after our savings and pensions are contracted to flush them down the toilet. But there's more. These private investment grifters do this thing called 'leveraging' - in other words, they use your savings and insurance premiums as derisking collateral to borrow loads more investment money at cheap preferential rate from their pals in the commercial banks. When the bubble bursts and threatens commercial bank liquidity, the central banks, like they did in 2008, will issue loads of public money as QE (Quantitative Easing). Yes indeed, the same public money we're told causes inflation and inefficiency when spent on utilities, hospitals, schools etc. will be shoved in the commercial banks' reserve accounts. Then the bond market will jack up yields, the governments and central bankers will conform and we'll pay them more interest for doing absolutely nothing constructive. While all this is going on, China is still growing on the back of huge injections of public investment at 5% per annum with 1% inflation. This 300 year old loan-shark racket we call 'the market economy' in the West is finished. Melenchon is right.