critique of loon theories around banking/money creation/the federal reserve

[Greebo]

For all of you tempted to examine the minutia of phildwyer's nonsensical ramblings, wondering if perhaps there is a tiny nugget of truth or an atom of interest amongst the dross, the moment has clearly come for me to post this<snip>

If what Dwyer comes out with is indeed "a piece of shit", he still argues it a damn sight better than you do with what you claim to be a far more valid point.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

In fact what you describe LBJ is simply full-reserve banking without creation of new money.

No it isn't. What I describe is something that could theoretically be described as zero-reserve lending - banks making a loan, creating an equal deposit in the system by making that loan and then going off in search of a deposit from the system after having expanded the money supply. For as long as the loans it makes remain credible, they should have no trouble finding that finance to cover them. As soon as the loans lose credibility, they are in big trouble.

Now in terms of demonstrating the truth of this 'loan-first' system, I'd be interested to know how often the following happens:

Bank A grants a mortgage of £100k to Bill to buy a house from Angela. Bill is provided with Angela's bank details at Bank B to make the transfer.

A sensible way to operate here would be for Bank A to contact Bank B to tell them that this money is to be deposited and arrange for Bank B to lend Bank A £100k at exactly the same time that the mortgage is granted. Bank A charges Bill 5% interest, Bank A pays Bank B 3% interest, and Bank B pays Angela 1% interest. Margins for each bank along the line. Credit extended and money created. And at no point is the loan not covered in Bank A's accounts.

And having extended the loan, Bank A then goes off in search of deposits on which it can pay 1% to cover its loan. That way, it can pay back Bank B and increase its margins. This would certainly explain why banks expend so much more energy advertising their savings schemes than they do advertising their lending schemes. Borrowers will come to them, and savers must then be actively sought out.

However, for the loan-first system to be functional, all that is needed is for banks to be able to consider all transactions undertaken on the same day as having happened at the same time for their accounting purposes. That way, they can settle their accounts at the end of the day and borrow from other banks where necessary. Again, we're bashing up against the wall of my ignorance here - I'd like to know whether this, or something like it, is what actually happens. Certainly, on bank statements, only the date of a transaction is given, not the time of day.

The bit you're missing here is that only 3% of the bank's loans might be covered by cash, but that other 97% has to be covered by borrowing. This is simply a factually correct statement.

Also, you have a go at ld for having the understanding of an accountant, but understanding accounting procedures is crucial to understanding how the system works. For instance, for the loan-first model to be even theoretically correct, certain aspects of the accounting system must operate in certain ways.

 

[andysays]

If what Dwyer comes out with is indeed "a piece of shit", he still argues it a damn sight better than you do with what you claim to be a far more valid point.

I haven't seen any real "argument" at all, just an assertion with absolutely nothing to back it up.

The bourgeois lived from capital, the proletarian lived by labor. But since the Second World War, the vast majority of people in the post-industrial West do both.

If he expects that to be taken seriously, he has to back it up with statistics to demonstrate that since the Second World War, the vast majority of people in the post-industrial West do indeed live both from capital and by labour, and the relative proportions of those two sources of income. Unless and until he does that, it's bollocks and deserves to be dismissed as such with no further thought.

"Don't get caught up in that fevered, hyped, phony fucking debate about that Piece of Shit... You're just confused, you've forgotten how to judge correctly. Take a deep breath, look at it again. "Oh, it's a Piece of Shit!" Exactly, that's all it is. Piece of Shit. Walk away. "But is it ..." You're getting really baffled here: Piece of Shit, now walk away! That's all it is, it's nothing more!"

 

[Jazzz]

No it isn't. What I describe is something that could theoretically be described as zero-reserve lending - banks making a loan, creating an equal deposit in the system...

I'm a bit upset that you have not commented on the example I gave in my last post which demonstrates why banks do not need to borrow to cover their loans.

The bit you're missing here is that only 3% of the bank's loans might be covered by cash, but that other 97% has to be covered by borrowing. This is simply a factually correct statement.

NO IT IS NOT. It is quite incorrect. I am trying to think of the best angle by which I can explain this in a way I haven't already tried.

Perhaps for this post, let me point out that it simply doesn't make sense, because when banks borrow from banks, they are increasing their cash reserves. So you must realise that that would be full-reserve banking.

Also, you have a go at ld for having the understanding of an accountant, but understanding accounting procedures is crucial to understanding how the system works.

Indeed it is all bookkeeping. But nevertheless accountants and even economists may not understand this.

 

[phildwyer]

God does not exist. Where is this so-called "God" they're going on about then, if it's so important? Show it to us.

So I guess if your crude/vulgar empiricism has achieved anything on its own terms, it's your admission of God's non existence after years of attempting to argue the opposite

Followed by:

He's well aware of the inherent contradiction he's got himself into with this - in that the foundation of his 'proof' for the fact that money doesn't exist, is exactly the same as he uses to 'prove' that god does exist.

In reality, the fetishisation of both religion & capital stem from the same process of alienation of human power/activity. And the externalising of that power through social processes & relationships, so that 'it' in turn stands above and in opposition to the human beings who provide the sole source of 'it's' power

So we can agree that money and God have no physical existence--only primitive idolators ascribe a physical existence to deity. We can agree that neither money nor God exist outside the human mind.

Presumably we can also agree that, despite existing only in the human mind, both money and God are objectively very powerful.

But none of this means that money and God are the same, or even similar. Money is a sign, for example, while God is a concept.

The psychological and practical implications of attributing objective power to a sign are very different from those of attributing objective power to a concept.

The former is superstitious, the latter rational.

And so it is not I who am the 'empiricist' here. To attribute power to signs is to be an empiricist, for it is to accept appearance as reality. That is what money makes us do.

But to attribute power to a concept, at least to a single concept as in Platonism and monotheism, is to assume a difference between appearance and reality. It is to assume that signs derive their significance from their referents, and ultimately from the referent of referents or logos.

That is why "you cannot serve God and Mammon" and so forth.

 

[phildwyer]

Still and all, if we do agree that money is merely a sign, then the debate about the "economy" begins to look very different.

The ethics and pragmatics of the rise to dominance of "leverage," "securitization," "derivatives" and the like can be acknowledged as questions of semiotics.

Such terms do not describe real events in the objective world. They describe changes in the relationships between various kinds of sign, or if you prefer a practical struggle concerning the nature of signs.

I shall return soon, but no-one should claim that I am neglecting to address their questions; wait at least until I've had my burrito.

 

[love detective]

So we can agree that money and God have no physical existence--only primitive idolators ascribe a physical existence to deity. We can agree that neither money nor God exist outside the human mind.

Presumably we can also agree that, despite existing only in the human mind, both money and God are objectively very powerful.

But none of this means that money and God are the same, or even similar. Money is a sign, for example, while God is a concept.

The psychological and practical implications of attributing objective power to a sign are very different from those of attributing objective power to a concept.

The former is superstitious, the latter rational.

And so it is not I who am the 'empiricist' here. To attribute power to signs is to be an empiricist, for it is to accept appearance as reality. That is what money makes us do.

But to attribute power to a concept, at least to a single concept as in Platonism and monotheism, is to assume a difference between appearance and reality. It is to assume that signs derive their significance from their referents, and ultimately from the referent of referents or logos.

That is why "you cannot serve God and Mammon" and so forth.

As you say, we can agree on your first two paragraphs

Even you don't believe however we can agree on the rest of your post though - hence the lack of any presumption of agreement on your part

And I'm sure you don't have any trouble in believing that I don't even believe you believe what you have written yourself in the rest of the post

All you've done is arbitrarily and a priori defined money and god as two different things so that you can maintain some kind of logical coherence in your claims that god exists but money doesn't or that they are different in some fundamental way (maintaining logical coherence on the basis of faulty premises however doesn't really achieve much)

The only things you've said which are objectively true are the first two sentences which put God & Money in the same conceptual category - both of which receive their power from the same objective source, human beings.

The psychological and practical implications of the attribution/alienation of this objective human power to a subjective non-human symbol are the same. The mechanics of, and results from, the fetishisation of god and capital are one and the same - the domination and control of the producers by that which they themselves have produced/reproduced.

And thing is, it's not me who attributes power to signs (money), it's you. You're always going on about how it can grow by doing nothing and i'm always pointing out that this is you falling for the 'ultimate fetish' as Marx called it. You say it can grow by just sitting there in a bank account. I say, no it may appear to do that but the reality is somewhat different and depends upon the whole series of social processes & relations that go on 'behind the backs of producers' that allow it to be used as capital to appropriate surplus value and then capture a share of that surplus value as interest which is then added back to the bank account which makes it looks like it has grown by just sitting there.

You are conflating appearance & reality (in relation to money) by attributing the appearance with the reality - that's your empiricism.

You'll have to make a more convincing attempt than the above i'm afraid.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

And thing is, it's not me who attributes power to signs (money), it's you. You're always going on about how it can grow by doing nothing and i'm always pointing out that this is you falling for the 'ultimate fetish' as Marx called it.

Good point. Phil and Jazzz, you fetishise money more than any of the rest of us. Ironic, really.

 

[love detective]

In some ways it's 'natural' to fetishise money in this way - Marx was at pains to point out how mystifying and fetish like it appeared to be, and that

The relations of capital assume their most externalised and most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital....

....Capital appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interest — the source of its own increase. The thing (money, commodity, value) is now capital even as a mere thing, and capital appears as a mere thing. The result of the entire process of reproduction appears as a property inherent in the thing itself. In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, are brought out in their pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself. Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital, we see here only form without content.

...Thus we get the fetish form of capital and the conception of fetish capital. In M — M' we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree, the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its own process of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or of a commodity, to expand its own value independently of reproduction — which is a mystification of capital in its most flagrant form.

...As interest-bearing capital, and particularly in its direct form of interest-bearing money-capital capital assumes its pure fetish form...

...Now, the concept of capital as a fetish reaches its height in interest-bearing capital, being a conception which attributes to the accumulated product of labour, and at that in the fixed form of money, the inherent secret power, as an automaton, of creating surplus-value in geometrical progression, so that the accumulated product of labour, as the Economist thinks, has long discounted all the wealth of the world for all time as belonging to it and rightfully coming to it. The product of past labour, the past labour itself, is here pregnant in itself with a portion of present or future living surplus-labour. We know, however, that in reality the preservation, and to that extent also the reproduction of the value of products of past labour is only the result of their contact with living labour; and secondly, that the domination of the products of past labour over living surplus-labour lasts only as long as the relations of capital, which rest on those particular social relations in which past labour independently and overwhelmingly dominates over living labour.

 

[Jazzz]

Good point. Phil and Jazzz, you fetishise money more than any of the rest of us. Ironic, really.

The nature of money and banking affects utterly dominates our lives. It is really worth having a think about it. At the moment we have this thread about money compared to thirty threads about an old woman who recently died. If you understand money you understand that should be the other way around.

And such an interest in the topic has nothing to do with desiring personal riches let's be very clear about that.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Thing is, I think I have a pretty good handle on what money is and how it is produced. I've attempted to outline my understanding of it in this thread.

And I think you neglect to consider that which the symbol symbolises. You look at the symbol and try to work out how that symbol is manipulated without considering the reason the symbol exists in the first place. Banks extend lines of credit in response to demand for loans. Examining this bit - how and why that demand is created - is utterly crucial. It anchors your analysis to the real world and shows you the real-world causes and consequences of the manipulation of money.

 

[Jazzz]

Thing is, I think I have a pretty good handle on what money is and how it is produced. I've attempted to outline my understanding of it in this thread.

And I've proved your understanding to be incorrect, by noting that when banks borrow from each other, they are borrowing 'cash'. Neither you nor love-detective has denied this. What you believe is happening is full-reserve banking.

And I think you neglect to consider that which the symbol symbolises. You look at the symbol and try to work out how that symbol is manipulated without considering the reason the symbol exists in the first place. Banks extend lines of credit in response to demand for loans. Examining this bit - how and why that demand is created - is utterly crucial. It anchors your analysis to the real world and shows you the real-world causes and consequences of the manipulation of money.

Without new loans providing broad money our money supply contracts as existing loans are repaid. i.e., we run out of money. So of course there's a demand for more debt.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I don't think it's as simple as 'of course'. Economies can run with hugely different levels of debt - ranging from around 50 percent gdp in many places to 400 percent in many of the richest industrialised countries. And those debt levels can go up or down, can be concentrated at the state, household or private business level.

So what does it mean for a country to have huge debt levels? And how is it that huge debt levels can be maintained without this causing inflation? That has to do with the nature of the loans being taken out - in particular, their time duration - which in turn is an expression of the kinds of promises that are being made within the economy.

Other questions might arise from examining places with lower debt levels, and so a smaller quantity of money in the system. How often does that money change hands? Money can change hands without new debt being taken out, or it can change hands with new debt being taken out - but the underlying event in the real economy may be identical. So the way money is used is also crucial to understanding the workings of an economy.


As for what you say about 'borrowing cash', you appear to be stuck on this point. If you lend me £10 by handing me a £10 note, I am 'borrowing cash' from you. So I give that note to someone else in return for something - 'spend it' - but after I've done that, I'm left with my £10 debt to you, my 'liability'. This is what is happening when banks 'borrow cash' from other banks. As with all debt, it is only ever taken out by someone wishing to spend it instantly.

 

[Jazzz]

As for what you say about 'borrowing cash', you appear to be stuck on this point. If you lend me £10 by handing me a £10 note, I am 'borrowing cash' from you. So I give that note to someone else in return for something - 'spend it' - but after I've done that, I'm left with my £10 debt to you, my 'liability'. This is what is happening when banks 'borrow cash' from other banks. As with all debt, it is only ever taken out by someone wishing to spend it instantly.

I am a bit puzzled as to what point you are making.

Suppose I lent you £100 for safekeeping (you give me the receipt, i.e. equivalent to demand IOU). Now you have a friend who is in trouble and wants the £100, he will give you back £150 in a week's time if you do. So you gamble and lend him the £100, hoping that I won't call in my money. It works, and in a week you are fine and can pay yourself a hefty bonus. You have just operated as a fractional reserve bank. They are all, essentially, continually making this gamble on a much bigger scale.

Also note, when banks make loans, they might very well be drawn on to pay someone else with an account at the same bank in which case no cash moves anywhere.

 

[Jazzz]

And again I draw your attention to a symmetry argument. The high st banks are all doing the same thing. They are all loaning out more than their cash. And at any time, in the interbank lending, one bank is a net creditor to the others. So that bank has loaned out far more than it has in cash, and it hasn't borrowed a penny from the other banks to do it.

Again disproving your statement

The bit you're missing here is that only 3% of the bank's loans might be covered by cash, but that other 97% has to be covered by borrowing. This is simply a factually correct statement.

 

[Blagsta]

I am a bit puzzled as to what point you are making.

Suppose I lent you £100 for safekeeping (you give me the receipt, i.e. equivalent to demand IOU). Now you have a friend who is in trouble and wants the £100, he will give you back £150 in a week's time if you do. So you gamble and lend him the £100, hoping that I won't call in my money. It works, and in a week you are fine and can pay yourself a hefty bonus. You have just operated as a fractional reserve bank. They are all, essentially, continually making this gamble on a much bigger scale.

Also note, when banks make loans, they might very well be drawn on to pay someone else with an account at the same bank in which case no cash moves anywhere.

You've just torpedoed your own argument.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You have the process backwards. My friend comes to me and asks me for £100, promising to pay me back £150 in a week. So I come to you with the following proposal: if you lend me £100, I'll pay you back £110 a week later. I explain the deal my friend has offered to me. I've done this kind of thing many times before, and it's always worked out well, so you agree, and give me the £100, which I then pass on immediately to my friend.

More realistically, my friend promises to pay me £10 per week for 15 weeks. I borrow the initial £100 from ten people, £10 each, promising to pay them £0.20 per week in interest, but I don't require any of them to leave the money there for the full 15 weeks - in theory, they can withdraw it at any time. As long as my friend is paying me the £10 per week, I can cover the odd person demanding some of their money back, but I'm in trouble if they all come for their money at the same time. And I have data from the past that allows me to predict the behaviour of a large group of savers with a reasonable degree of confidence.

More realistically still, I borrow according to a mix of promises, borrowing one lot of £10 for the full 15 weeks, and paying £0.50 per week in interest for that promise. That gives me more leeway in covering the other £90 that I borrow in an on-instant-demand way.

This is what banks do. It is how they make their money. Get the mix wrong, and they are in trouble. Have lenders lose confidence in the ability of borrowers to pay back their loans, and they are in trouble. Have lenders lose confidence in the value of assets put up as security for long-term loans, and they are in trouble.

This is not in any way full-reserve banking. At any one time, the bank does not have anything near the cash to cover its liabilities, but it knows that as long as the economy is functioning reasonably well, the numbers of people withdrawing their money will be relatively low. People do withdraw their money eventually, of course, which means that banks must constantly be looking to replace lost deposits. It is an ongoing process - at the start of a day, you have £100 in deposits, during that day, two people withdraw £10 and two other people deposit £10, so at the end of the day you still have £100 in deposits.

But this brings us right back to the sticking point, the point of fact that you don't accept: at all times, assets must be backed by equal deposits. And a loan from another bank is just that - a loan. It isn't a benevolent transfer of cash reserves.

 

[Jazzz]

You have the process backwards. My friend comes to me and asks me for £100, promising to pay me back £150 in a week. So I come to you with the following proposal: if you lend me £100, I'll pay you back £110 a week later. I explain the deal my friend has offered to me. I've done this kind of thing many times before, and it's always worked out well, so you agree, and give me the £100, which I then pass on immediately to my friend.

This is full-reserve banking. There is no additional money in circulation. You are able to meet your liabilities as they fall due. Your friend's deposit is a time deposit.

More realistically, my friend promises to pay me £10 per week for 15 weeks. I borrow the initial £100 from ten people, £10 each, promising to pay them £0.20 per week in interest, but I don't require any of them to leave the money there for the full 15 weeks - in theory, they can withdraw it at any time. As long as my friend is paying me the £10 per week, I can cover the odd person demanding some of their money back, but I'm in trouble if they all come for their money at the same time. And I have data from the past that allows me to predict the behaviour of a large group of savers with a reasonable degree of confidence.

More realistically still, I borrow according to a mix of promises, borrowing one lot of £10 for the full 15 weeks, and paying £0.50 per week in interest for that promise. That gives me more leeway in covering the other £90 that I borrow in an on-instant-demand way.

This is what banks do. It is how they make their money. Get the mix wrong, and they are in trouble. Have lenders lose confidence in the ability of borrowers to pay back their loans, and they are in trouble. Have lenders lose confidence in the value of assets put up as security for long-term loans, and they are in trouble.

This is not in any way full-reserve banking. At any one time, the bank does not have anything near the cash to cover its liabilities, but it knows that as long as the economy is functioning reasonably well, the numbers of people withdrawing their money will be relatively low. People do withdraw their money eventually, of course, which means that banks must constantly be looking to replace lost deposits. It is an ongoing process - at the start of a day, you have £100 in deposits, during that day, two people withdraw £10 and two other people deposit £10, so at the end of the day you still have £100 in deposits.

Indeed, these examples are not full-reserve banking. In each case, you are not able to meet your liabilities as they fall due. You are trading while insolvent, and if it was any other business than a bank, you could rightly be wound up. As I have already said, the banks are continually gambling that 'the run' will not occur. In this they are helped enormously by the guarantees given by the government to depositors. These guarantees are worth fantastic amounts of money to the banks.

Although these are examples of fractional reserve behaviour, they mask the full reality, which is really that banks create money out of thin air. If you wish to take the model of a deposit being loaned and reloaned out as it circulates around the banking system - as described in modern money mechanics - then please note that after a few rounds, it has multiplied into several demand deposits, crucially all of which can and may well circulate simultaneously; whereas it is just not possible for your ten-pound note to pay five people at the same time. I say it is far more accurate to simply regard the new loan - the new demand deposit - as new (broad) money which has been created.

And this is how banks make their money. They are getting a cut of pretty much every pound in circulation!

But this brings us right back to the sticking point, the point of fact that you don't accept: at all times, assets must be backed by equal deposits. And a loan from another bank is just that - a loan. It isn't a benevolent transfer of cash reserves.

I am genuinely puzzled as to what you are saying in the first part or what the point is in the second.

 

[yield]

...they mask the full reality, which is really that banks create money out of thin air.

"Banks create money out of nothing" - Guardian

and if they can create cash out of thin air why is it possible for bank's to even make losses in the first place

why do they have to go to the state for money when they can just conjure it up

how can a bank run out of something it can create from nothing out of thin air

why do interbank & wholesale lending markets exist if bank's can just create the money they need out of nothing

why can a bank get into a position where it cannot settle its liabilities when those liabilities are just invented in the first place, they don't really exist apparently

why would the state lend a bank £30bn in emergency funding so that it could meet its liabilities/obligations when those liabilities apparently aren't real and were just invented

why do bank's bother lending in the first place if they can just magic the money out of nothing - surely be much easier to just magic your money out of thin air than going to all that trouble of lending & borrowing

and finally, if according to jazz the accounting entries are the reality - this surely means that it is impossible for a bank's financial statements to not reflect reality. Why then are hundreds of millions of pounds spent each year by banks auditing their financial statements to ensure they reflect reality. Why do bank's continually have to retrospectively restate their accounts to correct them. If they are reality then surely it would be impossible for a bank's financial statements to not reflect reality, because they are reality - so there can be no disconnect according to Jazz. So even if a dog was made chief accountant in a bank and hammered all manner of nonsense into its ledger with its mucky paws, the accounts wouldn't be wrong, because the accounts are reality

and so on and so on......

It doesn't get much clearer than that.

Well?

 

[Jazzz]

Well?

These are really quite facile questions the essential point of which I have answered many times.

 

[Jazzz]

Result for Conrad Jones in getting the BBC to admit it's Robert Peston video on banking was nonsense:

How do banks work?, bbc.co.uk: Finding by the Editorial Complaints Unit

Complaint
The item was a video extract from a BBC3 programme directed at a young audience. In the video, the BBC’s Business Editor sought to explain, in appropriately simplified terms, the principles of banking and the role played by banking in relation to the global credit crunch. A viewer complained that it gave a misleading impression of the way banks work (by failing to note their role as creators of credit) and of the causes of the global financial crisis.

Outcome
Though highly simplified, the item did not give a misleading impression of the immediate causes of the global credit crunch (as distinct from the period of extensive lending which preceded it). In relation to the principles of banking, however, it was simplified to the point of suggesting that the amount a bank could lend was limited to the sum of its deposits. This left a misleading impression of how banks in fact work, and of the impact of the working of banks on the economy at large.

BBC admitted their video “How do Banks Work?” was misleading

 

[Blagsta]

Its not like Positive Money don't have form for selective quoting now is it.

 

[J Ed]

Zeitgeist conspiraloons infiltrating the student movement http://anticuts.com/2013/04/19/no-t...support-for-zeitgeist-at-nus-lgbt-conference/

 

[cesare]

Zeitgeist conspiraloons infiltrating the student movement http://anticuts.com/2013/04/19/no-t...support-for-zeitgeist-at-nus-lgbt-conference/

 

[frogwoman]

Zeitgeist conspiraloons infiltrating the student movement http://anticuts.com/2013/04/19/no-t...support-for-zeitgeist-at-nus-lgbt-conference/

fuck these cunts. fuck it all.

 

[frogwoman]

NUS what a fucking disgrace, completely in bed with management, many of them are just self serving bureaucrats trying to further their careers on a minimum of legitimacy (there was what about a hundred votes at one student election out of a population of over a thousand at my uni?)

 

[J Ed]

NUS what a fucking disgrace, completely in bed with management, many of them are just self serving bureaucrats trying to further their careers on a minimum of legitimacy (there was what about a hundred votes at one student election out of a population of over a thousand at my uni?)

I still can't believe that they voted in favour of not campaigning on tuition fees *and* EMA. Student politicians in the main are just awful, willing to sell out their principles (if they had any in the first place) in their early 20s for a whiff of a Labour safe seat.

 

[frogwoman]

I still can't believe that they voted in favour of not campaigning on tuition fees *and* EMA. Student politicians in the main are just awful, willing to sell out their principles (if they had any in the first place) in their early 20s for a whiff of a Labour safe seat.

yeah and perpetuating the organisation. sorry i'm really down on them in general they did absolutely nothing for me as a student and stopped my mate putting on any kind of decent music events, they're basically indistinguishable from management in a lot of unis.

 

[DotCommunist]

They are there

a) looks good on the CV for future

b) drinking club

c) rubber stamping stuff from on high, which chimes perfectly with point A


Their proudest boast down my one was getting our small campus fitted with a cashpoint. Vive la fuckin revolucion

 

[Favelado]

I still can't believe that they voted in favour of not campaigning on tuition fees *and* EMA. Student politicians in the main are just awful, willing to sell out their principles (if they had any in the first place) in their early 20s for a whiff of a Labour safe seat.

Is that true? They didn't campaign on either of those issues? Fucking hell. Just disband then.