The Main Burrito, Barack Obama, says that the great BP -- which is desecrating the planet with its oil spill -- may cancel dividend payouts to shareholders and put an initial US$20 billion payment into an independently supervised escrow account to pay for the clean-up needed as well as compensation for livelihoods affected.

But, unsurprisingly, some media reports are claiming that BP sources assert that the company is unlikely to cancel dividend payouts but only delay them, as the dividends are valued at a hefty US$10.5 billion annually.

Nothing has been said about whether top honchos of BP will give up bonuses due to the mishandling of the oil spill.

And as expected, Britain's Big Cheese David Cameron is already under pressure by the money bags there to do more to protect such a hallowed company like BP that accounts for apparently 12 per cent of all dividends paid by British companies.

Meanwhile, British Treasury Enchilada George Osborne further confirms his government's plans for a tax on banks stating that they will see to it that there are also further restraints on pay and bonuses of bankers.

The bank tax is a paltry attempt to get something back for citizens for the billions criminally wasted on bank bailouts using the taxpayers' money.

The UK government is additionally supposed to establish an independent commission to study whether big banks should be broken up and their investment and retail arms separated.

But in the end, all this credit and escrow accounts come to naught because the value of the money and how it is created is what needs to be looked at in all seriousness. The world is still being held hostage by fiat currencies that can be just printed to pay for anything.

The money we use is not worth the paper it is printed on as it has no backing by gold or precious metals.

This is aggravated by the dishonest fractional reserve banking system that is a blight upon the world economy. This scam in banking allows banks to keep 10 per cent of a deposit with it as ready cash payment for withdrawals while loaning out the remaining 90 per cent to others until in effect each deposit generates 9 times the amount of itself. The money thus generated is a form of phantom credit money that circulates as the money in our wallets etc.

The whole financial crisis in the first place is largely a side effect of the fiat currency system coupled with the fractional reserve banking system, and until that changes the problems will only get worse until we bring back some form of the gold standard as well as eradicate fractional -- or rather -- fictional reserve banking.

The world monetary system today is a bubble wrapped inside a fraud hidden within the heart of greed.

Here's an extract I had written but did not use for publication elsewhere, but it seems appropriate to use here:

“Towards the end of 2007, it was apparent that things were going wrong badly in the world financial scene. The test case for this was the collapse of the sub-prime speculative bubble in the US housing market. With the swiftly collapsing sub-prime market, banks started calling in loans. When banks start to call in loans they are not just calling in a fixed amount of money. They are calling in inflated amounts of sums of credit with interest to boot. Given the fractional reserve banking system throughout most of the world what this means is that if, as was supposedly the case at end 2007 in the US, banks called in US$200 billion of money they loaned out in terms of their principal sum: they would in effect be calling in just under US$2 trillion from the economy, that is, 9 times the amount loaned out. So it is no surprise at the fiasco that ensued when such vast sums were called in and they were no where to be found.

That in essence is fractional reserve banking and the calling in of loans from the volatile sub prime market. But this is a simplification as the nature of the sub prime market is more complicated. The US sub prime market involved lending money to low income people to buy homes. These are people who due to lack of collateral would not normally be given loans for home purchase. These poor people are given loans that may be interest free at first but require payment over time with rates of interest much higher than rates on loans to people who can usually repay a standard housing loan. The reason for such a precarious arrangement is because banks and financial firms believe they must have something in return for the risk they are taking in making out loans to people who have difficulty repaying them.

This is similar to credit card companies handing out cards to people to buy things on credit without sufficient income, then asking them to make payments and then charging heavy interest rates if they cannot do so.

But in the case of the sub prime market, the debt owed by poor people is in turn made into a speculative market where you can in effect buy and sell these IOUs as part of a speculative enterprise. When the term for repayment arrives, the person who owns the IOU asks the person who took the loan to repay it.

However, the person who took the loan now says they cannot repay it, and so their home is repossessed. There are now homeless people in debt because even after repossession of their homes they still owe money for their other debts. This could also mean that they may have to be declared bankrupt. And speculators are left with empty IOUs in their hands. When the speculative bubble of such IOUs and loans burst because no one can pay anymore, and people who had kept money in financial institutions involved in such activity start to pull their money out, a panic starts.

The banks start pulling in all loans to recoup deposits of clients who want their money back.

Similarly, where does the almost US2$ trillion phantom money come from to repay the actual US$200 billion of deposits? Everyone involved in this pyramid scheme of banking and loans gets burnt, declared bankrupt or is left out on the streets. This a simplified summary of what took place and is only the tip of the iceberg. And all of this because of a system based on risk, speculation and money obsession.”

Perhaps these two clips will help make things a little clearer:

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a gigantic disaster which is facing such an ineffective response to resolve it that the whole thing seems surreal. This is already the largest oil spill in American history with well over 200 000 gallons of oil spurting out each day. 

Apart from the entire planet's ecosystem who else pays for this corporate incompetence? The taxpayers, of course. In fact, the environmental damage will have clocked up to trillions of dollars before long. While BP may claim it will handle the costs of the cleanup, there is no guarantee this will ever happen.

It is well known that many of the victimes of the infamous Exxon Valdez spill that happened years ago have yet to be compensated. All that will happen is BP will bring in its lawyers to minimise any accountability of its actions for the current spill. Which is why the term corporate social responsibility is a contradiction in terms. The big firms always try to gain maximum benefit for themselves irrespective of whatever damage they do to everyone else.

As James Thompson writes in People's World:

"If the refineries and oil rigs were owned by our government, adequate safety standards could be maintained so that worker's lives could be saved. Instead of the profits being neatly stowed away in some large banks, they could be used to clean up the mess, compensate workers and their families and provide funds for research into green energy sources. The money could also be used to build state of the art levees such as they have in Europe to protect New Orleans from the next major Hurricane. Texas City is unbelievably polluted and money could be spent to clean up the environment there and make the area more livable for the many residents.

The U.S. military is assisting this foreign company in cleaning up the mess they have made in our backyard. The question facing our nation is, "Who is going to pay the bill?" Will it be the working people of this country? Will it be the villains responsible for this catastrophe? People of the Gulf Coast need answers to these questions now."

What is also needed are new measurement indicators of what constitues growth in a country like the ones already in use. These would include the GPI as a new way to measure progress. This will give an accurate account of what a nation's GDP growth really entails: disasters to the planet do not add to 'growth' as a decent human being would have it.

Moreover, some countries like Norway and Venezuela have privatized big oil. There is nothing new in this. Some recent reports on this matter have highlighted other examples like the 1953 one in which Guatemala's President Jacobo Arbenz took over some of the land owned by the United Fruit Company which was then subsequently given to farmers.

And in the early 1950s, President Mohammad Mosaddeq of Iran nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

But guess what, both these men were conveniently overthrown by US backed interests which  installed in their place puppets that would 'kow tow' to big businesses and banks.

It was specifically the the ousting of Arbenz by corporate interests that helped instigate a young man named Ernesto "Che" Guevara to finally hook up with another guy called Fidel Castro; and they also had some issues with the United Fruit Company in Cuba, to put it mildly.

They are far from perfect men, but we know what a pain the two of them could be for certain big interests.

One wonders if men like "Che" would have ever turned out to be who they were if it were not for the unbridled greed of big business. Perhaps he would have ended up strictly as a medical doctor and would never have written these words: "Man truly reaches his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by physical necessity to sell himself as a commodity."