Why vote or pay tax if govt's shutting down?

This week's partial government shutdown in the US should sound a warning siren right across the Western world. It shows just how far power has shifted into the hands of private banks and corporations, and that our debt-ridden governments are dying.

This is what happens today when the people, through their democratic government, threaten the profits of a vast and wealthy industry. With the collusion of the banksters, the private healthcare lobby has ordered the dollar tap turned off. Despite America's universal healthcare scheme, Obamacare, being a major plank in the Democrats' election platform, as of this week it looks like it's dead in the water.

Britain's Tory politicians are like lemmings, all they seem able to do is import rusty old US policies like work for free, or Arbeit Macht Frei 'Workfare', polish them up a bit, and roll them out in Britain.

"No more something for nothing!" the slogan echoes around the Tory party conference hall this week to faint-hearted applause. The irony being that most members of Cameron's millionaires' cabinet have never done an honest day's work in their life.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is not referring to bankers, or landlords living off the backs of hard working people. Nor to the investors profiting from his increasingly thin-skinned asset bubble. No, in his sights are the poorest of the poor, those living on the minimum the law says they need to survive, and he's going to evict them and starve them, unless they work for nothing.

During the last fortnight of annual party conferences it is as though Britain's marionette leaders, as they float back and forth across the stage, are caught in a frightful magic spell. Mesmerized by a materialist mantra of tax cuts for their City of London funders. Deaf to desperate cries across the country for another 2 million jobs and a living wage. Blind to the misery they inflict by blaming then punishing the victims of their financial failures.

Workfare to the rescue! The poor will pay off Britain's 1.2-trillion-pound spiraling national debt by working for nothing! These blind guides are destroying lives, breaking families, while opening the throttle on a giddying course to US style bankruptcy. Won't someone break the spell?

Thankfully the double hex of personal agony and national train crash does have some commonsense fairy godmothers, waiting patiently on the starting blocks with their collective plans 'B'. Having shrewdly predicted the 2008 crash, built on reform traditions going back hundreds of years you'd think they would have managed at least to gate crash the national debate by now.

But no, the thorny-hedged palace of London media and feudal finance is invite-only and their name's not down, it's not on the list, they're not coming in. So who are they?

Monetary reform

Let's scotch the 'no one saw it coming' lie right here because the crooked accounting and bank insolvency that led to the disastrous 850-billion-pound 2008 bailout was predicted by several small but determined groups.

Warnings given by 'Prosperity', 'Sustainable Economics' magazine and the New Economics Foundation were ignored. The London press was and is under heavy manners not to 'spook' the markets. Even if those 'spooks' happened to be genuine alarm bells the door is still being firmly slammed in their face. Their prescriptions for the dying patient differ in detail but all agree on some basic principles.

The treasury must get tough with the city and stake out its territory, taking firm control of national finance. To immediately reinstitute controls over the flow of capital in and out of the country and ensure the Bank of England and nationalized banks such as Lloyds, RBS and NatWest are run by civil servants appointed directly by the treasury.

Civil Service auditors would then be appointed to all City institutions and the 'big four' financial services companies: KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers would come in for special attention with plenty of evidence of price fixing and having known to have signed off 2008 bankrupt banks as healthy.

The campaign 'Positive Money', while having little or no London press exposure, has a program for the Treasury to take over issuing money, prioritized not to the markets but to the needs and aspirations of the nation. Right now there is a desperate need for housing and welfare spending. That is where much of this new, government created money, would go.

Printing money, or Quantitative Easing (QE) has been artificially inflating an asset bubble ever since 2008, and without a sea change in policy this bubble is going to burst. It's being pumped up even further right now by Osborne's reckless Sub Prime 'Help to Buy' scheme.

Everyone who is not in denial about the bubble agrees we must deal with it sooner rather than later. The longer we keep kicking the can down the road the more ruinous the crash so governments must bite the bullet and issue debt-free money themselves, not franchise this power out to private banks.

The 1929 crash was mitigated by Roosevelt's 'New Deal' and by government spending, but a modern crash could be many times more catastrophic, with no money available for Western governments to borrow and spend their way out.

Land reform

The Diggers, The Chartists, The Crofters, The Irish Land League and today's criminalized squatters have been spoiling for a fight about the iniquity of eviction, landlessness and destitution for hundreds of years. Britain has a land-mass of around 65 million acres and around 65 million people, that's roughly a football pitch per person, or around three acres for the average family.

Britain was a free gift to its people, just as the Earth was to mankind. Back in medieval England most land was farmed collectively, few actually owned it but did have the right to a cottage, to stay, and to pass those rights down the generations. But the landowners' parliament instituted 17th- and 18th-century land privatization, enclosure, evicting hundreds of thousands. A vast factory workforce of destitute landless citizens was created, ripe for the dark satanic mills of England's industrial revolution.

Across the Irish Sea one million died between 1847 and 1851 in the Irish Famines and a further million were forced to emigrate. So in the late 1800s, with fire in their bellies, the Irish led the way in taking back the land, setting a precedent for today's solution.

Exploiting the balance of power in London, four laws were forced through delivering interest-free government loans. Penniless Irish tenants could now buy land and build new homes, repayments being far less than those crippling rents. It was one of history's most successful land reform programs to date.

Figures are hard to come by today but 40,000 'land millionaires', 0.05 percent of the population, now own around half of Britain, most of which they have never set foot on. A further 30 percent is owned by 1 percent of the population, and the remaining 20 percent is owned by banks, corporations and other institutions. Though many have 'bought their own home', actually the bank owns it until they pay off their mortgage.

This leaves around 50 percent of the population, or 30 million people, effectively landless, either with a big mortgage, renting or homeless. Britain today too carries the shame of roughly 200,000 homeless people, either overcrowded, sleeping on friends' floors or sofas, squatting or sleeping on the streets.

Back to the deckchair shufflers

At this week's Tory party conference the strings were embarrassingly visible during the keynote speech by Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. He announced that 'Britain is on the right track', and there was an excruciating pregnant pause before a hall full of party faithful realized: they were supposed to be applauding.

If we don't break this spell and get our so-called leaders to start talking seriously about both monetary and land reform our governments will be history, leaving banks and corporations as our new feudal overlords. Vast swathes of the population will be forced into indentured servitude, hamsters on treadmills of an abominable machine. The strangling of Obamacare is just the birth pangs of this New World Order.

Demanding free labor here in Britain will end in tears. The Tory party is playing with fire pulling away Britain's social security safety net because welfare payments to the landless millions are the least they deserve, pitiful compensation for their ancestors' stolen property.

The families of those 40,000 'land millionaires' have been living the life of Riley for the last 300 years. So they better not go crying to mummy when a battle group of 750 landless arrive to take their acres back.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.