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Before juxtaposing the U.S. and alternative responses to the corona virus’s economic effects,[1]WHEN CHINA SNEEZES: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Implications, Edited by Cynthia McKinney, Chapter 9, Economic Impact. I would like to step back in time to show how the pandemic has revealed a deep underlying problem. We are seeing the consequences of Western societies painting themselves into a debt corner by their creditor-oriented philosophy of law. Neoliberal anti-government (or more accurately, anti-democratic) ideology has centralized social planning and state power in “the market,” meaning specifically the financial market on Wall Street and in other financial centers.
At issue is who will lose when employment and business activity are disrupted. Will it be creditors and landlords at the top of the economic scale, or debtors and renters at the bottom? This age-old confrontation over how to deal with the unpaid rents, mortgages and other debt service is at the heart of today’s virus pandemic as large and small businesses, farms, restaurants and neighborhood stores have fallen into arrears, leaving businesses and households – along with their employees who have no wage income to pay these carrying charges that accrue each month.
This is an age-old problem. It was solved in the ancient Near East simply by annulling these debt and rent charges. But the West, shaped as it still is by the legacy of the Roman Empire, has left itself prone to the massive unemployment, business closedowns and resulting arrears for these basic costs of living and doing business.
Western civilization distinguishes itself from its Near Eastern predecessors in the way it has responded to “acts of God” that disrupt the means of support and leave debts in their wake. The United States has taken the lead in rejecting the path by which China, and even social democratic European nations have prevented the corona virus from causing widespread insolvency and polarizing their economies. The U.S. corona virus lockdown is turning rent and debt arrears into an opportunity to impoverish the indebted economy and transfer mortgaged property and its income to creditors.
There is no inherent material need for this fate to occur. But it seems so natural and even inevitable that, as Margaret Thatcher would say, There Is No Alternative.
But of course there is, and always has been. However, resilience in the face of economic disruption always has required a central authority to override “market forces” to restore economic balance from “above.”
Individualistic economies cannot do that. To the extent that they have a strong state, they are not democratic but oligarchic, controlled by the financial sector in its own interest, in tandem with its symbiotic real estate sector and monopolized infrastructure. That is why every successful society since the Bronze Age has been a mixed economy. The determining factor in whether or not an economic disruption leaves a crippled economy in its wake turns out to be whether its financial sector is a public utility or is privatized from the debt-strapped public domain as a means to enrich bankers and money-lenders at the expense of debtors and overall economic balance.
China is using an age-old policy common ever since Hammurabi and other Bronze Age rulers promoted economic resilience in the face of “acts of God.” Unless personal debts, rents and taxes that cannot be paid are annulled, the result will be widespread bankruptcy, impoverishment and homelessness. In contrast to America’s financialized economy, China has shown how natural it is for society simply to acknowledge that debts, rents, taxes and other carrying charges of living and doing business cannot resume until economic normalcy is able to resume.
Near Eastern protection of economic resilience in the face of Acts of God
Ancient societies had a different logic from those of modern capitalist economies. Their logic – and the Jewish Mosaic Law of Leviticus 25, as well as classical Greek and Roman advocates of democratic reform – was similar to modern socialism. The basic principle at work was to subordinate market relations to the needs of society at large, not to enrich a financial rentier class of creditors and absentee landowners. More specifically, the basic principle was to cancel debts that could not normally be paid, and prevent creditors from foreclosing on the land of debtors.
All economies operate on credit. In modern economies bills for basic expenses are paid monthly or quarterly. Ancient economies operated on credit during the crop year, with payment falling due when the harvest was in – typically on the threshing floor. This cycle normally provided a flow of crops and corvée labor to the palace, and covered the cultivator’s spending during the crop year. Interest typically was owed only when payment was late.
But bad harvests, military conflict or simply the normal hardships of life frequently prevented this buildup of debt from being paid. Mesopotamian palaces had to decide who would bear the loss when drought, flooding, infestation, disease or military attack prevented the payment of debts, rents and taxes. Seeing that this was an unavoidable fact of life, rulers proclaimed amnesties for taxes and these various obligations incurred during the crop year. That saved smallholders from having to work off their debts in personal bondage to their creditors and ultimately to lose their land.
For these palatial economies, resilience meant stabilization of fiscal revenue. Letting private creditors (often officials in the palace’s own bureaucracy) demand payment out of future production threatened to deprive rulers of crop surpluses and other taxes, and corvée labor or even service in the military. But for thousands of years, Near Eastern rulers restored fiscal viability for their economies by writing down debts, not only in emergencies but more or less regularly to relieve the normal creeping backlog of debts.
These Clean Slates extended from Sumer and Babylonia in the 3rd millennium BC to classical antiquity, including the neo-Assyrian, neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires. They restored normal economic relations by rolling back the consequences of debts personal and agrarian debts – bondage to creditors, and loss of land and its crop yield. From the palace’s point of view as tax collector and seller of many key goods and services, the alternative would have been for debtors to owe their crops, labor and even liberty to their creditors, not to the palace. So cancelling debts to restore normalcy was simply pragmatic, not utopian idealism as was once thought.
The pedigree for “act-of-God” rules specifying what obligations need not be paid when serious disruptions occur goes back to the laws of Hammurabi c. 1750 BC. Their aim was to restore economic normalcy after major disruptions. §48 of Hammurabi’s laws proclaim a debt and tax amnesty for cultivators if Adad the Storm God has flooded their fields, or if their crops fail as a result of pests or drought. Crops owed as rent or fiscal payments were freed from having to be paid. So were consumer debts run up during the crop year, including tabs at the local ale house and advances or loans from individual creditors. The ale woman likewise was freed from having to pay for the ale she had received from palace or temples for sale during the crop year.
Whoever leased an animal that died by an act of god was freed from liability to its owner (§266). A typical such amnesty occurred if the lamb, ox or ass was eaten by a lion, or if an epidemic broke out. Likewise, traveling merchants who were robbed while on commercial business were cleared of liability if they swore an oath that they were not responsible for the loss (§103).
It was realized that hardship was so inevitable that debts tended to accrue even under normal conditions. Every ruler of Hammurabi’s dynasty proclaimed a Clean Slate cancelling personal agrarian debts (but left normal commercial business loans intact) upon taking the throne, and when military or other disruptions occurred during their reign. Hammurabi did this on four occasions.2
Bronze Age rulers could not afford to let such bondage and concentration of property and wealth to become chronic. Labor was the scarcest resource, so a precondition for survival was to prevent creditors from using debt leverage to obtain the labor of debtors and appropriate their land. Rulers therefore acted to prevent creditors from becoming a wealthy class seeking gains by impoverishing debtors and taking crop yields and land for themselves.
By rejecting such alleviations of debts resulting from economic disruption, the U.S. economy is subjecting itself to depression, homelessness and economic polarization. It is saving stockholders and bondholders instead of the economy at large. That is because today’s rentier interests take the economic surplus in the form of debt service, holding labor and also corporate industry in bondage. Mortgage debt is the price of obtaining a home of one’s own. Student debt is the price of getting an education to get a job. Automobile debt is needed to buy a car to drive to the job, and credit-card debt must be run up to pay for living costs beyond what one is able to earn. This deep indebtedness makes workers afraid to go on strike or even to protect working conditions, because being fired is to lose the ability to pay debts and rents. So the rising debt overhead serves the business and financial sector by lowering wage levels while extracting more interest, financial fees, rent and insurance out of their take-home pay.
Debt deflation and the transition from finance capitalism to an Austerity Economy
By injecting $10 trillion into the financial markets (when Federal Reserve credit is added to U.S. Treasury allocation), the CARES act enabled the stock market to recover all of its 34 percent drop (as measured by the S&P 500 stocks) by June 9, even as the economy’s GDP was still plunging. The government’s new money creation was not spent to revive the real economy of production and consumption, but at least the financial One Percent was saved from loss. It was as if prosperity and living standards would somehow return to normal in a V-shaped recovery.
But what is “normal” these days? For 95 percent of the population, their share of GDP already had been falling ever since the Obama Depression began with the bank bailout in 2009, leaving an enormous bad-debt overhead in place. The economy’s long upswing since World War II was already grinding to an end as it struggled to carry its debt burden, rising housing costs, health care and related monthly “nut.”3
This is not what was expected 75 years ago. World War II ended with families and businesses rife with savings and with little debt, as there had been little to buy during the wartime years. But ever since, each business cycle recovery has started with a higher ratio of debt to income, diverting more revenue from business, households and governments to pay banks and bondholders. This debt burden raises the economy’s cost of living and doing business, while leaving less wage income and profit to be spent on goods and services.
The virus pandemic has merely acted as a catalyst ending of the long postwar boom. Yet even as the U.S. and other Western economies begin to buckle under their debt overhead, little thought has been given to how to extricate them from the debts and defaults that have accelerated as a result of the broad economic disruption.
The “business as usual” approach is to let creditors foreclose and draw all the income and wealth over subsistence needs into their own hands. Economies have reached the point where debts can be paid only by shrinking production and consumption, leaving them as strapped as Greece has been since 2015. Rejecting debt writedowns to restore social balance was implanted at the outset of modern Western civilization. Ever since Roman times it has become normal for creditors to use social misfortune as an opportunity to gain property and income at the expense of families falling into debt. Blocking the emergence of democratic civic regimes empowered to protect debtors, creditor interests have promoted laws that force debtors to lose their land or other means of livelihood to foreclosing creditors or sell it under distress conditions and have to work off their debts.
In times of a general economic disruption, giving priority to creditor claims leads to widespread bankruptcy. Yet it violates most peoples’ ideas of fairness and distributive justice to evict debtors from their homes and take whatever property they have if they cannot pay their rent arrears and other charges that have accrued through no fault of their own. Bankruptcy proceedings will force many businesses and farms to forfeit what they have invested to much wealthier buyers. Many small businesses, especially in urban minority neighborhoods, will see yeas of saving and investment wiped out. The lockdown also forces U.S. cities and states to cope with plunging sales- and income-tax revenue by slashing social services and depleting their pension funds savings to pay bondholders. Balancing their budgets by privatizing hitherto public services will create monopoly rents and new corporate empires
These outcomes are not necessary. They also are inequitable, and instead of being a survival of the fittest and most efficient economic solutions, they are a victory for the most successfully predatory. Yet such results are the product of a long-pedigreed legal and financial philosophy promoted by banks and bondholders, landlords and insurance companies reject economy-wide debt relief. They depict writing down debts and rents owed to them as unthinkable. Banks claim that forgiving personal and business rents would lead absentee landlords to default on their mortgages, threatening bank solvency. Insurance companies claim that to make their policy holders whole would bankrupt them.4 So something has to give: either the population’s broad economic interests, or the vested interests insisting that labor, industry and the government must bear the cost of arrears that have built up during the economic shutdown.
As in oligarchic Rome, financial interests in today’s world have gained control of governments and captured the political and regulatory agencies, leaving democratic reformers powerless to suspend debt service, rent arrears, evictions and depression. The West is becoming a highly centrally planned economy, but its planning center is Wall Street, not Washington or state and local governments.
Rising real estate arrears prompt a mortgage bailout
Canada and many European governments are subsidizing businesses to pay up to 80 percent of employee wages even though many must stay home. But for the 40 million Americans who haven’t been employed during the closedown, the prospect is for homelessness and desperation. Already before the crisis about half of Americans reported that they were living paycheck to paycheck and could not raise $400 in an emergency. When the paychecks stopped, rents could not be paid, nor could other normal monthly living expenses.
America is seeing the end of the home ownership boom that endowed its middle class with property steadily rising in price. For buyers, the price was rising mortgage debt, as bank credit was the major factor in raising property prices. (A home is worth however much a bank will lend against it.) For non-whites, to be sure, neighborhoods were redlined against racial minorities. By the early 2000s, banks began to make loans to black and Hispanic buyers, but usually at extortionately high interest rates and stiffer debt terms. America’s white home buyers now face a fate similar to that which they have long imposed on minorities: Debt-inflated purchase prices for homes so high that they leave buyers strapped by mortgage and compulsory insurance payments, with declining public services in their neighborhoods.
When mortgages can’t be paid, foreclosures follow. That causes declines in the proportion of Americans that own their own homes. That home ownership rate already had dropped from about 58 percent in 2008 to about 51 percent at the start of 2020. Since the 2008 mortgage-fraud crisis and President Obama’s mass foreclosure program that hit minorities and low-income buyers especially hard, a more landlord-ridden economy has emerged as a result of foreclosed properties and companies bought by speculators and vast absentee-owner companies like Blackstone.
Many businesses that closed down did not pay the landlords. Realizing that if they are held responsible for paying full rents that accrued during the shutdown, it would take them over a year to make up the payment, leaving no net earnings for their efforts. That was especially the case for restaurants with compulsory limited “distance” seating and other stores obliged to restrict the density of their customers. Many restaurants and other neighborhood stores decided to go out of business. For hotels standing largely empty, some 19 percent of mortgage loans had fallen into arrears already by May, along with about 10 percent of retail stores.5
The commercial real estate sector owes $2.4 trillion in mortgage debt. About 40 percent of tenants did not pay their rents for March, April and May, from restaurants and storefronts to large national retail markets. A moratorium on evictions put them off until August or September 2020. But in the interim, quarterly state and local property taxes were due in June, which also was when the annual federal income-tax payment was owed for the year 2019, having been postponed from April in the face of the shutdown.
The prospective break in the chain of payments of landlords to their banks may be bailed out by the Federal Reserve, but nobody can come up with a scenario whereby the debts owed by non-elites can be paid out of their own resources, any more than they were rescued from the junk-mortgage frauds that left over-mortgaged homes (mainly for low-income victims) in the wake of Obama’s decision to support the banks and mortgage brokers instead of their victims. In fact, it takes a radical scenario to see how state and local debt can be paid as public budgets are thrown into limbo by the virus pandemic.
The fiscal squeeze forces governments to privatize public services and assets
Since 1945, the normal Keynesian response to an economic slowdown has been for governments to run budget deficits to revive the economy and employment. But that can’t happen in the wake of the 2020 pandemic. For one thing, tax revenue is falling. Governments can create domestic money, of course, but the U.S. government quickly ran up a $2 trillion deficit by June 2020 simply to support Wall Street’s financial and corporate markets, leaving a fiscal squeeze when it came to public spending into the real economy. Many U.S. states and cities have laws obliging them to balance their budgets. So public spending into the real economy (instead of just into the financial and corporate markets) had to be cut back.
Sales taxes from restaurants and hotels, income taxes, and property taxes from landlords not receiving rents. U.S. states and localities are having a huge tax shortfall that is forcing them to cut back basic social services and infrastructure. New York City mayor de Blasio has warned that schools, the police and public transportation may have to be cut back unless the city is given $7 billion. The CARES act passed by the Democratic Party in control of the House of Representatives made no attempt to allocate a single dollar to make up the widening fiscal gap. As for the Trump administration, it was unwilling to give money to states voting Democratic in the presidential or governorship elections.
The irony is that just at the time when a pandemic calls for public health care, political pressure for that abruptly stopped. Logically, it might have been expected the virus to have become a major catalyst for single-payer public health care, not least to prevent a wave of personal bankruptcy resulting from high medical bills. But hopes were dashed when the leading torch bearer for socialized medicine, Senator Bernie Sanders, threw his support behind Joe Biden and other opponents for the presidential nomination instead of focusing the primary elections on what the future of the Democratic Party would be. It decided to focus the 2020 U.S. election merely on the personality of which candidate would impose neoliberal policy: Republican Donald Trump, or his opponent running simply on a platform of “I am not Trump.”
Both candidates – and indeed, both parties behind them –sought to downsize government and privatize as much of the public sector as possible, leaving administration to financial managers. Past government policy would have restored prosperity by public spending programs to to rebuild the roads and bridges, trains and subways that have fallen apart. But the fiscal squeeze caused by the economic shutdown has created pressure to Thatcherize America’s crumbling transportation and urban infrastructure – and also to sell off land and public enterprises, basic urban health, schools – and at the national level, the post office. Fiscal budgets are to be balanced by selling off this infrastructure, in lucrative Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) with financial firms.
The neoliberal rent-extractive plan is for private capital to buy monopoly rights to repair the nation’s bridges by turning them into toll bridges, to repair the nation’s roads and highways by making the toll roads, to repair sewer systems by privatizing them. Schools, prisons, hospitals and other traditionally public functions. Even the police are to be privately owned security-guard agencies and managed for profit – on terms that will provide interest and capital gains for the financial sector. It is a New Enclosures movement seeking monopoly rent much as landlords extract land rent.
Having given $10 trillion dollars to support financial and mortgage markets, neoliberals in both the Republican and Democratic parties announced that the government had created so large a budget deficit as a result of bailing out the banking and landlord class that it lacked any more room for money creation for actual social spending programs. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell advised states to solve their budget squeeze by raiding their pension funds to pay their bondholders.
For many decades, public employees accepted low wage growth in exchange for pensions. Their patient choice was to defer demands for wage increases in order to secure good pensions for their retirement. But now that they have worked at stagnant wages for many years, the money ostensibly saved for their pensions is to be given to bondholders. Likewise at the federal level, pressure was renewed by both parties to cut back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with Obama’s 2010 Simpson-Bowles Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to reduce the deficit at the expense of retirees and the poor.
In sum, money is being created to fuel the financial sector and its stock and bond markets, not to increase the economy’s solvency, employment and living standards. The corona virus pandemic did not create this shift, but it catalyzed and accelerated the power grab, not least by pushing public-sector budgets into crisis.
It doesn’t have to be this way
Every successful economy has been a mixed public/private economy with checks on the financial sector’s power to indebt society in ways that impoverish it. Always at issue, however, is who will control the government. As American and European industry becomes more debt ridden, will they be oligarchic or democratic?
A socialist government such as China’s can keep its industry going simply by simply writing down debts when they can’t be paid without forcing a closedown and bankruptcy and loss of assets and employment. The world thus has two options: a basically productive public financial system in China, or a predatory financial system in the United States.
China can recover financially and fiscally from the virus disruption because most debts ultimately are owned to the government-based banking system. Money can be created to finance the material economy, labor and industry, construction and agriculture. When a company is unable to pay its bills and rent, the government doesn’t stand by and let it be closed down and sold at a distressed price to a vulture investor.
China has an option that Western economies do not: It is in a position to do what Hammurabi and other ancient Near Eastern palatial economies did for thousands of years: write down debts so as to keep the economy resilient and functioning. It can suspend scheduled debt service, taxes, rents and public fees from having to be paid by troubled areas of its economy, because China’s government is the ultimate creditor. It need not contend with politically powerful bankers who insist that the economy at large must lose, not themselves. The government can write down the debt to keep companies in business, and also their employees. That’s what socialist governments do.
The underlying problem is finance capitalism. Its roots lie at the heart of Western civilization itself, rejecting the “circular time” permitting economic renewal by Clean Slates in favor of “linear time” in which debts are permanent and irreversible, without public oversight to manage finance and credit in the economy’s overall long-term interest.
It often is easier to get rich in such times of disaster and need than in times of normal prosperity. While the U.S. economy polarizes between creditors and debtors, the stock market anticipates fortunes being made quickly from the insolvency of business with assets and property to be grabbed. Coupled with the Federal Reserve’s credit creation to support the financial and real estate markets, asset prices are soaring (as of June 2020) for companies that expect to get even richer from the widespread distress to come in autumn 2020 when evictions and foreclosures ae scheduled to begin again.
In that respect, the corona virus’s effect has been to help defeat the financial sector’s enemy, governments strong enough to regulate it. The fiscal squeeze resulting from widespread unemployment, business closedowns, rent and tax arrears is being seized upon as a means of dismantling and privatizing government at the federal, state and local levels, at the expense of the citizenry at large.
Notes
[1] WHEN CHINA SNEEZES: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Implications, Edited by Cynthia McKinney, Chapter 9, Economic Impact.
[2] I provide a detailed history of Clean Slate acts from the Bronze Age down through Biblical times and the Byzantine Empire in “… and forgive them their debts” (ISLET 2018).
[3] I provide the details in Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy ((SLET, 2015).
[4] Lawsuits are exploding over the role of insurance companies supposed to protect business from such interruptions. See Julia Jacobs, “Arts Groups Fight Their Insurers Over Coverage on Virus Losses,” The New York Times, May 6, 2020, reports that “insurance companies have issued a torrent of denials, prompting lawsuits across the country and legislative efforts on the state and federal levels to force insurers to make payments. The insurance industry has argued that … fulfilling all of these requests would bankrupt the industry.”
[5] Conor Dougherty and Peter Eavis, “In Commercial Real Estate, the Domino Effect Escalates,” The New York Times, June 9, 2020.
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Huh? There’s no Act of God here. This has been a controlled demolition which was associated with a putative pandemic. The economic disruption was not a result of structural or systemic flaws in the economic or financial system; it was a result of the decision to force the economic disruption.
Certainly there are structural and systemic flaws in the current economic and financial systems, but to this point those flaws haven’t caused any economic or financial catastrophes or disasters. Except in the obvious sense that the levers of power in the systems are controlled by deeply flawed people.
Covid and government and corporate response to it was not an act of God. Covid is an Act of Fraud.
Covid and government, medical community, and corporate response to it was not an act of God. Covid is an Act of Fraud.
Those guilty of fraud must be charged and imprisoned for their frauds. No economy can succeed with fraud as a business model, that also employs fraud as a solution to the problems of the fraudulent business models.
Linear time allows for indentured debt servitude ad infinitum. Why would creditors ever want to willingly reduce their greed quotient YoY?
Greed is the real virus here whereas SARS-2-nCoV-19 is just the USA BSL-4 produced deadly man made Pandemic Pathogen that has facilitated the Controlled Demolition of Wall Street Retail and Commercial sector banking.
What they want on Wall Street is the ability to borrow unlimited amounts of cash for near zero interest rate cost. Wall Street knows it is not backed by sound money systems of gold bullion so their next ploy is to switch to Modern Monetary Theory and blockchain technology so that they can get free electronic money in perpetuity with ruffling the prevailing Keynesian Macroeconomic logic, or ethos.
Governments have borrow beyond their ability to pay debts for at minimum of half a century continuously. Greenspan’s Put culture prevails and the monetary heroin junkies of Wall Street are going to get their heroin from Dr. Feelgood at the Federal Reserve or they will join the rioters for the next planned iteration of Occupy Wall Street and the White House/Pentagon/Congress.
Wall Street elites have two choices here. They can write down debts and provide venture capital or they can leave their palatial homes and run for their very lives as the masses invade their homes and decide to cook their pets on the newly available barbeque with relish.
Wall Street and the politicians are not going to shake the masses down again, Professor Hudson.
This time the masses are going to shake the politicians and bankers down to global insolvency worldwide. And then we will put their heads on sticks and hang them all from their ankles just like Mussolini.
RW
I love the phrase “Act of Fraud.” But they stole it fair and square. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, “When insurance companies do it, it’s no crime.” It’s systemic.
The fake virus has been planned for years and is a revamped follow up to the other fake viruses such as H1N1, H5N1, SARS, Bird flu, Swine flu and the AIDS epidemic (see Peter Duesburg on this). It was sprung now as a cover for another massive theft by the banking cartel of trillions as in 08-09. The staged riots are for the same purpose. Governments love to generate war and fake pathogens because both lead to big money and more control.
This problem cannot be solved by more government regulation. That was what they said all the way back to the time of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The big monopolists are the ones behind the increased regulation or we should say government intervention because that is the only way in a free market they can keep out competition – by using the government. As the founder of Moody’s Bond Co. revealed in the late 1800’s, after the Anti-Trust legislation The Rockefeller’s of Standard Oil and other big Corp. interests of the S.P. 500 had even more control.
That is why the big meat packers were really the ones behind Upton Sinclair’s “expose” so they could raise the barrier for entry to potential competitors. Same thing for the recent cigarette settlement with the states. The lawyers and the states got a payoff and the same big tobacco co’s keep a monopoly on a low tech. industry that would normally be crowded with low price competition.
When you have big government you have big corruption. Had we stayed on course with the founders plan for a Constitutional Republic of sovereign States with a very limited national government and with a free market of gold and silver currency the crony corporate monopoly capitalism would have not gotten hold because they have to use the power of government in order to maintain a monopoly. With a very limited gov. that was not constantly fomenting wars for Israel and that had not thrown 15 trillion dollars since the Zionist LBJ’s great society to “fight poverty” and the other transfer programs and gigantic bureaucracy, taxes would be so low that they would not really be an issue.
One of the reasons for the creation of the banking cartel’s central bank was to instigate the indirect tax of depreciation (inflation) that in effect transfers the wealth to the elite at the top while funding the huge crony gov. along with military expansion and permanent war while at the same time getting rid of the Zionists biggest problem, the middle class.
The racket with the coming flu vaccines is another good example. Big Pharma backed by the gov. criminals at The WHO and CDC have made billions of the fake vaccines while maiming and killing thousands all over the world.
Jewmerica has maintained a rate of currency depreciation (inflation) of right at 50% every 17 years since the banking cartel installed their banking monopoly in 1913. This enables ever bigger crony government and permanent wars for Israel through an indirect tax that most goyim never figure out. It will get worse now that trillions more have been stolen by the sovereign bankers with the full approval of our shabbos goy congress.
The Zionist big government shake down is going to get a lot worse They are now doing the Big mob type shake down. In 09 we had the bailout for billionaire program to pay off those rich guaranteed bondholders and now it is really just an outright theft for their Wall St. buddies under cover of the fake virus and staged riots.
In order for Jewmerica to be more comfortably merged with 3rd world countries its economy and standard of living must be reduced. Millions more people and businesses have been bankrupted and now as in 08-09 lots of property will be picked up by the elite vulture investors such as the Jew run and crony government connected Black Rock.
The masses of cucked idiots are so stupid most of them just believe whatever the Jew MSM tells them. Thats why they are going around wearing face diapers and sucking their own waste products back into their lungs while the Zionists are herding them right on down the path to Agenda 2030-21. Well at least they can make that critical decision to vote for Zionist shabbos goy puppet actor Trump or Zionist shabbos goy puppet actor Biden.
Excruciatingly to the point. Hudson never crosses the invisible line. The “pandemic” is unique for it´s global scope, for both China and the West, other peripheral actors(presumably most did not fully realize the plan (rickety Belgium)), went for desired disruption …on sane premises: consumerism, financial capitalism based on it, needed a game shift, since external actors to the human “economics” could no longer be contoured and cheated on. The elites were ‘eating’ resources, polluting and toxifying, saw the coming of obsolescense of war and foreign policies using military capitalist tools, to the point they scared themself sh**less. The face of how the world is ruled, how cities and hinterlands will look, is open mostly, there is a lot of improvisations going on. Most consequences are not “micro” predictable, but the intention is clear. The elites are sailing on a different tac.
Must be mentioned, BLM, setting up minority groups in a confused “battle” to let of steam, to rally and co-opt as needed is part of this intended scheme. In the end it adds credibility to one party or another in power, while none had still credibility. Skepticism was creeping and gnawing at the bones of the elites. Well to mention, it was corrupting the “faith” of the middle classes in media, politics and finance.
Thanks for your comment, I hope it stays there in first position, #1, as a necessary premise to the article. Your scope of viewpoint is global as to the article, …and needed far less wording. I am only trying to look at things as they are from a slightly different angle, in the face of explaining the obvious.
Dr Hudson has written another excellent article, exposing how the virus has been used – similar to the Obama years – to shift ever more billions to the elite 1%.
There seem to be no realistic answers to the compounding problem of US Oligarchy. Short of complete collapse, US elites will give no ground. Wall street, creditors & their government tools will continue until they can’t.
If Dr Hudson is correct — & I believe he is — at the moment further social decay seems baked in for the US.
US Capitalism — all Capitalism ? — is toxic. US Imperialism is an attempt to infect any country resistant to neoliberalism. The US needs to hold together its dollar hegemony — the foundation stone of its corrupt financialised “capitalism”. It also needs to hold together all the post-war institutions it controls such as the World Bank, IMF, NATO … & 800 odd foreign military bases & half a dozen carrier groups. Thus, its rabid attitudes towards China, Russia & Iran.
Unable, given its own inherent contradictions, to fix its own problems, the US will likely further turn to Imperialism as a means of papering over its unsolvable issues.
“….resilience in the face of economic disruption always has required a central authority to override “market forces” to restore economic balance from “above.” “
Translation : the ongoing worldwide economic destruction that is the direct result [ie “in your face”] of governments ongoing worldwide idiotic “cures” for their scamdemic, i.e. nationwide lockdowns, mandatory masks, state -approved medical procedures that kill etc. etc., can only be fixed by the exact same entities that caused all of the economic problems in the first place … the government. Yeah, right.
Brilliant er, “logic” Mr Hudson, but then again, what did I expect from a “government solutions work best” infatuated Marxist, anyway?
Truth be told, I expected exactly what you delivered, yet another paean to the imagined glories of government. You and your ilk make me sick. Really.
“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure” Robert LeFevere
“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic” H.L.Mencken
“Why Government Doesn’t Work” [pdf available here]:
https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Why_Government_Doesn%27t_Work
No regards, onebornfree
Speaking of the legacy of the Roman Empire, it was also a tradition in hard times for an incoming emperor to forgive debts owed to the state. When Hadrian took office he publicly burned in the forum obligations totaling nine hundred million sesterces (when four sesterces was a fair day’s wage). Generous annual donatives to the Roman people of grain and silver were a long standing tradition as well. There were also frequent reductions or abolition of various sorts of taxation, as conditions required.
In the absence of newspapers, coins struck to commemorate current events rapidly spread news of the government’s policies across the great empire. Hadrian’s largesse can be seen memorialized in orichalcum here https://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=212189
Brilliant.
Most interesting article by Pr Hudson, one of a handful of economists who have the integrity of naming the giant elephant in the room; i.e. the utterly destructive weight accumulating debt puts on the real economy.
At the opposite side of the spectrum, mainstream economists are no better than mainstream journalists: mercenary proxies to the financial cartels destroying entire people and nation.
It is interesting to read that even mainstream economic analysts are realizing how the Covid pandemic has laid bare the West’s failure and unequalitarian nature.
Here is a panicked John Micklethwait CBE, Bloomberg’s Chief editor, former chief editor of the Economist, ringing the alarm bells. Although he carefully avoids mentioning the underlying economic root causes of Britain’s failure, his statement of facts remains correct and are another wake up call the financial oligarchy will not listen to, for fear of losing their privileges.
Instead, we can expect more baseless accusations against China and more self-inflicted blindness about our future.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8675517/How-West-lost-JOHN-MICKLETHWAIT-reveals-coronavirus-making-China-powerful-again.html
“For non-whites, to be sure, neighborhoods were redlined against racial minorities. By the early 2000s, banks began to make loans to black and Hispanic buyers, but usually at extortionately high interest rates and stiffer debt terms. America’s white home buyers now face a fate similar to that which they have long imposed on minorities: Debt-inflated purchase prices for homes so high that they leave buyers strapped by mortgage and compulsory insurance payments, with declining public services in their neighborhoods.”
Indeed that is very true… Many of the racists refuse to believe that was the case and what helped dampen minority wealth in the US compared to white wealth. The added interest paid made a HUGE difference – when they could get the loan…
You also make a good point about Leviticus and the cancellation of debt and how that was a feature in ancient societies
I wish I knew why Michael continues to write the same article over and over again. It’s been at least 20 times now I’ve read about the ancient Clean Slate practices over 2,000 years ago. As well as what happened when Roman practices changed all that. As well as what happened in the late 1800s, early 1900s when the rentiers triumphed over economics. AS well as into the rise of the Neo-libereals of Chicago in the 70s.
Hudson describes this over and over and over and over again. But he never ever offers any solution. No future alternative to the horror that seems to be coming. He apparently believes we are doomed to a thousand years of dark ages just so a few rentierss can remain wealthy. That appears to be the least possible route the future will take. But since hardly anyone knows what the real problem is (and it’s sure not systemic racism), it’s more likely to become a place uninhabitable even to a wealthy rentier.
I wish Michael Hudson was more like Ellen Brown, who does have suggestions that could be implemented now and in the future that would steer humanity back from the brink.
But then too I wish that both Ellen and Michael would go on The Kaiser Report and explain (once again) to Max what MMT really is. Recently Max has had about 5 “guests” say unchallenged that we are right now in the midst of MMT, as if printing money, but not giving it to people is MMT. It is maddening to hear this libel sailing right over Keiser’s head..
Michael, at least if you re not going to offer any vision of the future other than a dystopian hell, you could set the record straight countering the disinformation coming from the influential Kaiser Report.
You do realize that epidemics and pandemics have been around for thousands of years right?
Many people also don’t see the pernicious hand of the “tech companies” in trying to push everyone to work from home more permanently. It gives them more control over the economy. Despite the fact that it is less productive and will increase social ills (domestic abuse and suicide and mental health issues) because human beings are made for social contact with others…
The most “liberal” commentators in the mid-20th century sense (establishment but in favor of civil liberties and some downwards redistribution of wealth and power), particularly the two Michaels, Hudson and Whitney, on Unz.com seem to attack the battiest commentators. I haven’t figured out why that is the case.
I covered much ground similar to that of Michael Hudson in a 20,000 word essay published here at Unz Review just one week ago. Entitled “Lockdowns, Coronavirus, and Banking: Follow the Money,” I too attempt to put concepts of debt and usury in historical perspective with special reference to the intervention of the Federal Reserve in the events of 9/11, the so-called bailout of 2008-09, and the manufactured assault on the global economy initiated by the lockdowns in response to the WHO’s misnamed “pandemic.” The lockdowns are the key to understanding the genesis of our current economic debacle just as the mandatory injections coming at us at warp speed are bound to be the instigators of much future pandemonium in the arena of global public health.
https://www.unz.com/article/lockdowns-coronavirus-and-banks-following-the-money-2/
The essence of the economic reset being pushed on us in the name of fighting the celebrity virus is a monstrous regime of robotizing almost everything. This robotization of all kinds of procedures, large and small, includes future onslaughts of attack on human consciousness and independent thought. These attacks will take place in coordination with the design and implementation of myriad forms of Artificial Intelligence. The AI systems being secretly contemplated, tested and implemented in the name of “national security,” include industrialized systems for injecting nano biotechnology into human persons. With the help of 5G and the forthcoming 6G, the diabolical plan is to force digital interfaces into human beings so that it becomes possible to institute forms of enslavement far more radical than anything known in history so far.
My new essay in Unz Review, was published originally at American Herald Tribune. It is not a repeat of old essays although in does draw on the concluding chapter of my volume, Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism published at McGill-Queen’s University Press.
https://www.mqup.ca/earth-into-property-products-9780773531222.php
While Prof. Hudson identifies “a New Enclosure movement” brought forward in the name of neoliberalism, this old and many-faceted process embodies but one aspect of a larger phenomenon I identify as “privatization since 1492.” The break up and acquisition of the commons is manifest on a hemispheric scale in the ongoing process that began with Europe’s colonization of the Americas following the initial trans-Atlantic voyage of Christopher Columbus.
https://www.mqup.ca/earth-into-property-products-9780773531222.php
I wrote the final chapter of Earth into Property based on my study of the then-unfolding bailouts of 2008-09. These bailouts were deemed necessary because of the devastation caused by the huge accumulation of derivative bets held especially by the Wall Street share holders of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In conducting my research back then I paid special attention to the role of a Wall Street leviathan known as BlackRock in administering the bailouts through three Maiden Lane Companies. The name of the three prototypical entities created by the NY Fed is derived from its Manhattan address on Maiden Lane. BlackRock emerged in the late 1980s from a Deep State company known as Blackstone. The two companies remain to this day allied competitors with a merger somewhere down the road a distinct possibility.
The Chair of Blackstone was Peter G. Peterson. Peterson followed David Rockefeller as Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations, a position the Blackstone co-founder retained between 1985 and 2007. Peterson was Commerce Secretary under Nixon and Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York throughout the period between 2000 to 2004 when Wall Street was deeply involved with several aspects of the 9/11 debacle. Earlier in his career, Peterson was Chair of Lehman Brothers, Kuhn Loeb, companies that have been major players in the founding and genesis of the Federal Reserve.
Peterson and Blackstone were partners with Larry Silverstein in securing the mortgage for WTC 7 and in the leasing of the Twin Towers. After 2007 the sovereign wealth fund of the People’s Republic of China briefly owned 12.5 % of the equity in Blackstone.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackstone-group-cic-idUSKCN1GQ09T
As I detail in my Unz Review essay, BlackRock presented the basic outlines of the current US federal strategy for dealing with this financial fiasco back at a conference of central bankers who met in Jackson Hole Wyoming in Aug. of 2019. This date, of course, was several months before the celebrity virus embarked upon its official and heavily hyped career as the basis for what is now being openly advertised by the people at the World Economic Forum as a “global reset.” At Jackson Hole BlackRock’s main presenter was Stanley Fischer, former Governor of the Bank of Israel and former Federal Reserve Vice-Chair.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-15/blackrock-s-ex-central-bankers-have-bold-vision-to-beat-recession
I have followed the work of Ellen Brown with much appreciation over the last decade or so. I agree with restless94110 that she offers useful and pragmatic suggestions for what to do in the face of the kind of financial terrorism we are now facing from the international financial mafia that has coalesced around the US Fed over more than a century. A major part of my most recent essay involves contrasting the career of the system that coalesced around the US Fed with the career of the system that took shape around the Bank of Canada. Between 1938 and 1974 Parliament empowered the Bank of Canada to create no-interest or very low-interest loans for Canadian infrastructure projects during a period of substantial national growth.
During this period Canada’s entire national debt went only to about $20 billion. Then in 1974 the Bank of Canada system was overturned by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau when he opted to join instead the Bank of International Settlements, the so-called central bank for central bankers. As a result of this decision the Canadian national debt has grown in 2020 to $700 billion.
I argue that the Bank of Canada’s example between 1938 and 1974 should serve as an encouragement for the governments of many countries simply to leave the lock hold of private bankers on systems of usury that privatize the means for creating national debts and setting interest rates. Sovereign legislatures all over the world have the power to repatriate the current process for creating money and lending it according to processes that will re-empower peoples saved from debt enslavement by our collective resort to the instruments of genuine national self-determination.
Sorry to inform you, “restless 94110” but there IS NO SOLUTION. Why? Well, because these evil, demonic Oligarchs in the US could care less if millions of Americans die of starvation.
They have manifested their power from the height of the Federal govt. all the way down to the little
city halls of small towns.
And if that’s bad, the worst problem is the society of 300 MILLION citizens who are so illiterate and ignorant of these Oligarchic criminals………..they actually believe either The Democrat Party or the Republican Party will save them. Hardly likely. Those two parties are ALL bought off by these Oligarchs.
In the meantime, if you read Hudson’s article, he was telling the readers that IF Only our Neo-Feudal Lords & the govt. would cancel all debt as they did during Ancient Times. NOT gonna happen.
Ellen Brown is big on “Public Banks.” Really? With a society unable to use critical thinking skills, or to stand up to these Oligarchs…….are they really going to gather as a massive group to initiate Public Banks? NO.
In many regards, the millions of unenlightened citizens deserve their fate: SERVITUDE!
By criticizing Hudson, I was not looking for a competing or supplementary essay on what is going on. Why what is going on is going on is in the end really unimportant. And with all due respect, your reply is TL:DR partly because of that reason.
You may need to get more current with Brown’s writing. She writes frequently on the state bank of South Dakota (or is it North Dakota?) and has been writing on the recent California law allowing bank creation, which has led to Los Angeles beginning the creation of a state bank.
Furthermore, she writes that the USPS should be used as a banking outlet (and others have proposed using the USPS for a national social media outlet as well, which would force Free Speech). She does not really get into any secret or non secret theories about the Fed, only that, quite correctly, the Fed doesn’t work for most people and for the Nation as a whole.
And that’s really all you need to know. You do not need to formulate grandiose theories about it. Neither does it serve anyone any good to say there is some plot to turn everyone into an automaton slave. That makes no sense, really. Even globalists would not be ok living in such a world.
And as certain as you or others may be that such a world is possible to construct, it is very clear that the nature of mankind makes it so it will be very difficult more probably impossible to successfully achieve such a dystopian result.
By trying to explain so much, you explain little and to no useful end.
I do not agree.
If there is no solution why are you still living? If people are all except for (maybe) you so stupid, what exactly is worth you going on?
All of this phrasing (e.g., New Federal Lords) is really nonsense talk. Why don’t you wait until it ever does come true before you write things like that. Because we ain’t there e yet.
Oligarchic societies destroy themselves from within. They make a country weak and feeble. You can easily see it right now:
Try to imagine the black rioting and race hatred and the white rioters doing so during the America of the 50s, when almost everyone had a job and a future and it was simple for the average person to have a house and raise a family. You have to make sure that there are fewer losers in society or there is no society, and then there is no country. Other countries see this and will take advantage.
And while it might be true that such a cave in can take some time to completely self-destruct, in the modern era, we appear to be telescoping time: how many centuries did it take for Rome to completely fall? And how many decades did it take for the USSR to fail? Chances are it will take mere years for the current idiocy to completely destroy the nation.
Saying there is no solution? Perhaps. But then again,why even say that at all? Just go to a corner of your kitchen, sit in the corner, and wring your hands and weep. For eternity.
No thanks. And Michael Hudson should know better than to write the same article over and over and over again. It makes him look stupid. And I don’t believe he is stupid. But I could be wrong about that.
Bioweapons manufactured in Biosecurity Level Four laboratories have only been around for about half a century to date. The CIA has become a real epidemic, I agree. And now that they have deployed bioweapons to enable biometric control of the masses via bio-informatics we can all start investing in BIG Pharmacology patents like they were oil wells fueling Petrodollar U$D supremacy worldwide.
BIG Tobacco, BIG Oil, BIG Pharmacology!
BIG Money!
BIG Revolution!
RW
The old ways are the best ways. We have a depression and a plague upon us. In these times we need to sacrifice our failed leaders to the gods by throwing the biggest bankers into an active volcano, one each day. Amazingly, if you start at the top and work your way down after not many days the situation corrects itself. Always works but only if you start at the very top.
If an accident can be called an act of god, then the release of this bioweapon from the Wuhan Institute of Virology can be considered an act of god, or simply monumental human incompetence. But who can prove it? A prima facie case is compelling. There is no case at all for a “controlled demolition”, however. This is malignant fantasy. The pandemic is not merely putative, it is a stone cold fact, although at this point not so severe as the flu of 1918. Hang around, friend, you ain’t seen nothing yet. I do hope g8way gets a dose of it. It will clarify his outlook somewhat and he will probably recover easily since he is young.
This writer seems to think the current economic collapse is not a systemic failure, but the activity of “deeply flawed” people, or perhaps global conspirators with their agenda of “controlled demolition”. Are these the same critters who carried out 911? He seems to have forgotten 2008 when 10 million people had their homes stolen by the owner/operators of this system of financialized capitalism. He’s missing the entire point of Hudson’s essay.
This economic disaster is not the result of the nefarious intentions of a cabal of evil-doers, it is a collapse of financial capitalism. It happens on a regular basis, every 7 to 14 years approximately, but this is the worst systemic failure since 1929. Failure of capitalism. Deep systemic change is need for the survival of the US. Hudson is showing the way to prevent societal collapse.
Excellent suggestion!
It is a courtesy to Michael Hudson and other contributors to respond to their essays. Using the comment section to blow your own horn is tacky. Reminds me of Trump.
Michael Hudson is framing our current events in an historical context not available to us from any other source I’m aware of in the academic domain of economics. All knowledge is politicized by the “winners” and we are taught to understand economic realities from the point of view of the creditor class which has won the battle for political control. “Socialism” is evil, destroyer of individual liberty, unlienable rights, and innovation. We have run down a cul de sac and there appears to be no way out, as we bear witness to systemic collapse, which is the illusion produced by rigid ideology. Hudson is here to frame our situation with a new perspective that is actually ancient. With a correct understanding of the dire straights we’re in, we have the possibility of building something new from the rubble.
Not only raising the barrier to potential competitors, but also eliminating competition wholesale. Don’t forget “Prohibition,” Teddy Roosevelt’s (another fraud), trust “busting,” the wars against Germany, and the rise of “Communism,” which eliminated competition under catchy slogans such as we’re witnessing today with the fraud known as BLM. Note that the three Rittenhouse dealt with were not only white, not black, but apparently criminals to boot as was the cold blooded crackpot who executed the Trump supporter on the street.
“It is a New Enclosures movement seeking monopoly rent much as landlords extract land rent.”
Employers are demanding that certain employees work from home, and provide office space, and services.
Employers are reaching right into peoples homes and grabbing space and services. It is a new enclosures strategy, more expropriation. This will reduce costs to employers for buildings and services, and the costs go on workers.
Act of thug.
The pandemic is damaging nothing.
The reaction to a virus with marginally more lethality than seasonal flu is hurting the average person financially and not protecting them from the virus.
Be patient. The pandemic will eventually touch you and yours and make a believer out of you. The reaction to the virus is hurting the average person financially because the our financial system has never passed a stress test and never will. It is not capable of protecting the people because it only works to enrich the few at the expense of the many. If this were a more rapacious pandemic, we would currently be subjected to marshal law. Quarantine breakers, curfew violators, and anti-maskers would be shot dead. The pandemic we now experience of which you are so skeptical (183,000 dead doesn’t impress you) is only a dress rehearsal. You haven’t understood what Michael Hudson is saying at all. Why comment if you haven’t read and understood what the author is saying?
L Blankfein does god’s work, too. Fleecing Job over again in disasterisms. God’s dice and Words are loaded and He Wants to gamble with His imaginary friend ,the devil, over you (original hedgie). Dr. Hudson has remarked on historical under-dog oligarchs being involved in resets. Is there some-one we could split the Rockerfella Foundation and Open Soc. with (60/40)? Those trust-funders and irreligious charities picking themselves up by their gucci laces for the first time would cause me tears of joy maybe…. Pacific potlatches were a way of redistibution. Every one then had too agree it was a great party, good giftbags, and the host was nice; and occasionally the potlatch would be remembered as exceptional (during starvation, eg.). To be remembered well… “the good oft inter’ed with the bones”. Dentalium shells also were local, like a Wampum money mine. Thank you Michael.
“Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented. A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues. Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. “
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
“By the early 2000s, banks began to make loans to black and Hispanic buyers, but usually at extortionately high interest rates and stiffer debt terms.”
This is because the loans made to black and Hispanic buyers have a higher risk of default. They lose their jobs more frequently, and the property they borrow to buy is usually less marketable. Therefore, a higher rate of interest is in order. Higher risk, higher rates.
You are living in a dream world.
When has the government ever told the truth? Why trust what they say, when they lie all the time?
Whether its wars, economics or science, you never get the truth from the government.
Hudson and you are merely sniveling boot lickers of tyranny.
“Act of God Pandemic Is Destroying the West”
Viruses have been around for thousands of years, and human beings keep living longer and longer. Never needed shutdowns or compulsory vaccines in the past. 350 million people live in the US alone. The over inflated death counts are minuscule as a percentage of the total population.
Only the propagandists perpetuate this lie that this the covid pandemic. If anything, its a casedemic. So many cases because the tests are designed to be very sensitive so to bring about a positive result. Their results are meaningless.
This phony virus and the policies it has spawned are killing the west. It is not the virus.
… The fiscal squeeze resulting from widespread unemployment, business closedowns, rent and tax arrears is being seized upon as a means of dismantling and privatizing government at the federal, state and local levels, at the expense of the citizenry at large.
It appears, at least in some cases – especially the Minneapolis riots – that specific areas are being targeted for looting/burning/destruction by BLM/Antifa (as noted by a study on Solari.com) for the purpose of decreasing property values for the ultimate purpose of benefiting vulture real estate developers. As noted there, these areas were largely (or at least a good part) minority owned businesses not having the resources to execute a formal demolition (not covered by potential Federal grant/low cost loans under an emergency declaration), and therefore with little recourse but to sell out.
I really don’t get it. Sure, this is a benefit for a few entities with financial resources, but the resultant and cumulative [financial] wide-ranging suffering is against supposedly ‘Christian values’ on which our government and policy is based (… or perhaps propagandized), but perhaps ‘Christians’ are being corralled to perform the bidding of other groups. This is knowable, but probably not actionable.
The obvious end-game seems to be that without industry, and the consequent destruction of the American industrial workforce, the US is essentially an agrarian country with a military (… or a military with an agrarian country, to be more accurate).
“Act of God”, my ass.
This latest round of evil bullshit was cooked up by the Satanic Global Elites.
May they suffer for all eternity in the depths of Hell with their father.
“Act of God” is code for CIA/U.S. Army.
RW
Anecdotally – I can’t honestly recall anyone I know dying from a flu… I know of 5 people who died from covid… I also know 2 people who survived – and even though they are “back to normal” it took a toll and them and you can see… But I also know 4 others who got it and survived and there are no lasting effects that they can tell. And i’m sure others had it and never knew at all.
“Never needed lockdowns”??? Absolute nonsense. Go read what happened in the 1918 pandemic.
Wtf is “marshal law”?
Is that when Marshal Matt Dillon calls the shots?
You there! Without your Covid mask! Halt or I’ll shoot!
LOL
It’s martial law, goofy.
I’ll bet you’re a “college graduate” too.
You are an idiot. The Romans would make fun of you for pronouncing their word “martialis” without a hard t. Since marshal is closer to the English bastardized pronunciation, and since the meaning of “marshal” is actually a more accurate descriptor of the condition of “martial law”, marshal is definitely the better word to use.
In fact, the term “marshal law” has deeper roots than “martial law” in the English language, and notion that it is an error by today’s mentally retarded and ethnically alien grammarists is, in fact, an error. There are multiple court documents from the 2nd millennium in which these terms are used on equal footing.
From Foedera, conventiones, literae, Thomas Rymer:
https://books.google.com/books?id=0MtOAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA480
From An impartial collection of the great affairs of State: from the beginning of the Scotch rebellion in the year 1639 to the murther of King Charles I., John Nalson:
https://books.google.com/books?id=litDAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA586
From Brief Animadversions on Amendments Of, & Additional Explanatory Records To, the Fourth Part of the Institvtes of the Lawes of England, William Prynne:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ietIAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PP7
From Grundlage zu einer Hessischen Gelehrten, Volume 20, Otto Gerland
https://books.google.com/books?id=WMtbAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA197
As you can see, “marshal law” was the original term from middle English used by the aristocracy; people who use “martial” today immediately strike me as non-old stock, post 1700s Americans, and peasants from Southern England. Rootless wetbacks, probably with lots of ethnik admixture, who we should never have allowed in to this country.
That’s a very entertaining and interesting bit of bullshit, but I’m afraid there is no such term as “marshal law” Leftard.
mar·tial law
/ˈˌmärSHəl ˈlô/
noun
military government, involving the suspension of ordinary law.
Now kindly stfu.
The article is an excellent explanation of why people are getting angry and reaching for the pitchforks.
The rich, oblivious to the danger, are continuing to scoop up money and assets while the getting us good.
It’s notable that the Roman Empire, which Michael Hudson points out is the source of this “creditor always beats debtor” inhuman logic, also apparently produced the following piece of logic in action:
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion#Society_and_law .
Hudson has been making the same mistake for so long it’s difficult to believe he is sincere.
Paragraph 9: “…and the Jewish Mosaic Law of Leviticus 25,”
The above confuses the words Moses and Jews.
“Jew” is short for Judean, a person from Judea. The name Judea was derived from the tribe of Judah which inhabited the area of the Holy Land which later became the southern kingdom, the Kingdom of Judah. My reading of the Bible indicates the word Jew was not used until after the return from the Babylonian exile, a full millenium after Moses. So if Hudson is suggesting Moses was a Jew he is quite wrong.
If Mr Hudson is suggesting there is a connection between Mosaic Law and modern Judaism he is wrong again. “The Talmud Tested” by 19th century hebraist and missionary to the Jews Alexander McCaul discusses 60 important examples where the Talmud contradicts the religion of Moses.
Religious science fiction…..
This is more magical thinking that an unrealistic and unnatural system- a private global credit monopoly enforced by war, bribery and assassination- can right itself with a simpleton’s adjustments like the socialists, Chinese and Mesopotamians knew of. The essence of debt jubilee is negation of the natural laws of capital to eliminate the equity in a middle class of productive people. Burden the people with an unjust monopoly on credit, and they begin to go broke in the way Jefferson foretold, homeless on the land of their birth. Next sabotage their staggering economy with a selective lockdown and mind control the subjects to believe it’s all virtuous, while great strides are being made in social justice. The slaves will compete to outdo each other in displays of madness. Then wipe out their debt like a validation of their madness, and allow the same credit monopoly to run another cycle, until each nation is finished. The mid tier landlords (whose savings compete with the credit monopoly as capital) get wiped out by the washing machine, but lenders of last resort are left whole and at the reins, exactly by the script.
The Chinese and Mesopotamian dynasties encountered natural crises by doing what unchecked empires always do, exceeding their natural limits and destroying natural capital. Their lands suffered due to the very intensifications that were viewed as miraculous solutions to cultural impaction. The Chinese at one point in famine sold their children and bought their neighbors’. Sumeria ruined their topsoils by irrigating.
Magical thinking is fine for a vacation but capillary action in soils works around the clock.
Excellent comment, Mark!
I agree 1000%.
This!! 👇🏽👇🏽
THIS!! 👆🏽👆🏽
I can’t frigging stand cucks or simps either. Same thing in my book: all sheep with no BALLS!
This is the current “mentality” we have today in the West – cucks, simps & FemiNazis.
I keep saying the DemoPublican Party are all one & the same. They have mastered the art of Political Charades down to a science where the electorate (mostly cucks) from both side of the aisle should know better. But they don’t.
Hence I believe the US is either heading for Civil War 2 or secession because the cucked (majority) masses are too skeered to beat down on their (minority) Deep State/Zionist/NWO/globalist masters. And they do deserve a serious beat down for all the treachery they have unleashed on the world.
Yet the alleged pro-2A “CONservative patriots” seem comfy enough to sit back & take it up the ass from their Deep State oppressors. Do you think they would be so comfy if the Deep State was controlled & influenced by people with black skin?
No. Fucking. Way!! They’d be coming out guns a’blazing to share some lead. And this is why most of them are either frauds or hypocrites.
I haven’t heard Mr. Hudson’s opinion on this idea: establish a public bank, as so ably advocated by Ellen Brown, and lend directly to the people. Refinance all their debts at zero percent interest, charging at most a nominal application/processing fee.
Interest-free refinancing by a Public Bank or the US Treasury cuts off the private creditors’ ability to continue racking up obscene profits from interest.
It would also allow many millions of Americans to avoid the home foreclosures, business foreclosures and insolvencies, and vehicle repossessions that are soon to crash down on us — devastation that is probably a fully intended consequence of these utterly disproportionate and medically unjustified lockdowns.
This stops far short of an outright debt jubilee, in that it gives the creditors back their principal. But it prevents those creditors from adding to their already disgusting profits at the expense of the mass of people.
Moreover, the same filthy-rich people and banks who are raping us with interest would not be able to swoop in and buy up our homes and businesses at bargain-basement prices.
Finally, using a Public Bank or our own Treasury would go some way towards removing the (non-)Federal Reserve from its undeserved position of power over us and “our” government.
The behemoth serial felon banks have Federally Insured Deposit Corporation-FDIC insurance so that the hamster wheel of debt continues at double digit interest rates whilst the bankers get free Federal Reserve spigot money fresh from the tap at near zero interest rates.
If they were to opt for your deal they would have to take hits on the FDIC insured mortgages and a hit on the uninsured mortgages too. Serial felon marquee banks are not interested in making deals for dollars when they can simply hold the entire market up for ransom by claiming 100% on the dollar for their Non-performing loans which government guarantees because they are FDIC insured, but the government also cares about the uninsured subprime off-exchange private dealer/broker mortgage specialist because if that off-exchange area crashes it will topple the FDIC insured banks too.
That’s why Professor Hudson’s proposal will never fly, or be proposed.
Bankers only take write-downs when they are forced to. They only accept haircuts for their underlings and they are not about to lose shareholder value in markets that are overtly overvalued. The race to the top is also a race to the bottom when it comes to unparalleled greed and avarice on Wall Street.
Kill or be killed is the motto. Be nice and benevolent is Professor Hudson’s motto because he is a wealthy Economist academician.
RW
“… 183,000 dead doesn’t impress you …”
Can you provide any hard evidence from unbiased sources for this holocaustic death count of 183,000?
“Why would creditors ever want to willingly reduce their greed quotient YoY?”
Maybe if the alternative was a short trial followed by being taken out and shot.
“The essence of debt jubilee is negation of the natural laws of capital to eliminate the equity in a middle class of productive people”.
There are no “natural laws of capital”.
Newton’s Laws of Motion, if you like, are natural laws. As are Einstein’s Theories of Relativity.
What people think of as “natural laws of capital” are the mathematically inevitable consequences of certain social and legal arrangements.
Change the arrangements – to something more like what China has – and the “natural laws” will change too. If we have democracy, than we the people can make such changes NOW. If we do not have democracy, we should use what the downtrodden have used throughout history against tyrants: ropes and pitchforks. We are many, they are few.
Only a callous rich person could say that it is a “natural law” that people like them should get ever richer, while the poor – who deserve to be crushed because they are “losers” – should have nothing.
Oddly enough, since the present arrangements in the USA and the West generally are leading to catastrophe, they cannot be justified on a practical basis – so their advocates try to justify them morally. They twist Darwin’s ideas until they are quite unrecognisable, to argue that it is right and proper that the rich should get richer and the poor should die.
Yet this “moral” argument is the exact opposite of everything that Jesus Christ said, according to the New Testament.
The Romans were logical, although not very kind. They would have reasoned that this law would encourage slaves to prevent any of their number from attacking their master.
Indeed change financial system, cancel debts.
1 -Cancel the national debt, only save small investors $200k.
2- End the FED private banking. The treasury creates money debt-free for public spending.
3- Assetstrip Billionaires down to 100 M. per capita. This prevents the rule of Billionaires, like now in US.
Sheldon Adelson, Soros, Saban, Singer, Koch’s determine both parties: RNC =DNC = Wallstreet fascism of eternal NATO wars.
China´s government debt has been exploding in the last 20 years, in both absolute and relative terms. So when Hudson points to their success in softening shocks to the overall economy, the question still needs to be asked “who pays at the end?” and “can a debt laden government still forgive debts”. China can easily become Argentina down the road under certain circumstances. Money is always owed to someone, that someone will have to bite the bullet and depending on real power terms either accept or refuse to do so.
Second huge point i miss with Hudsons logic is the moral hazard and incentives created by debt cancellations.
Jamie Dimon is not going to give up making outsized returns via investment portfolio just because a bunch of Occupy Wall Street activists threaten to hang him by his ankles like Mussolini. Heck, JPMorgan Chase works directly with NYPD in terms of surveillance. They also work with the FBI, and CIA, NSA, DARPA, U.S. Army, et cetera.
And if threatened don’t forget what General Smedley Butler said alongside Dwight D. Eisenhower’s retirement speech of yesteryear.
JPMorgan Chase is exactly like Al Capone except Henry Paulson actually owns Al Capone’s old infamous hand gun that he displays on the wall of his office to impress the sycophants that patronize him, and his Ayn Randian greed run amok to allow him to get drunk on the souls of the poor.
The only way to eliminate the elitist one per cent predator Finance Capitalists is to eliminate their fortress from within just as Eisenhower suggested in his retirement speech.
RW
If you have money in a checking account or savings account, you are a creditor to the bank; the bank is a debtor to you. How would you feel if your debt with the bank was canceled, and the bank no longer was required to pay its debt to you? Are you willing to forgive banks of their debt to you? Since the largest debtors in the country are banks and governments, voiding debts benefit them the most. The prudent and fugal are harmed the most. If people obeyed Micawber’s Law (to live within one’s means is the secret of happiness, and to live beyond them is the secret of misery), debt would seldom be a problem.
Moreover, the lockdown is not “an act of God.” It and the resulting economic problems were caused by governmental officials — these problems are manmade. The people who caused the economic crisis ought to be held responsible out of their own estate. The governors and mayors are responsible for the loss of tax revenue — not creditors. So why cause creditors, which include those with deposits in banks, pay for the lost?
Pension plans are large holders of bonds; they are bondholders. If debts are canceled, the issuers of bonds are no longer obligated to pay off their bonds. Thus, pensions lose their assets to pay the pensioners, and the pensioners lose most, if not all, their pensions.
Ample evidence the unique virus was intentionally created and released, starting with the work of Czech scientist Sona Pekova. NWO is a loosely knit collection of elite in nations worldwide attempting to achieve their objectives and not a single nation. The NWO can and will continue to release this virus or other more potent bio/chemical weapons, space attacks, IT attacks, etc as often as they wish unless stopped.
Where to begin on this disquisition on the concepts of debt jubilees, forgiveness, etc., China praise, etc. and Lord knows what else? Just to note that much of those debt instruments in the US are owned by pension funds of unions, municipalities, etc.–enough so that the term “pension fund socialism” has been used. Seeing the sudden bouncing of a pension check is an unnerving experience for recipients. Those ancient empires you mentioned favorably “worked” so well because they had many slaves and other coercive powers–and no “books” survived from their eras so we don’t know how successful they really were–and the fact ALL of them fell eventually may be very revealing. (Note that Athenian Democracy “worked” with about one third of the population enslaved.) Further I note the author’s fulsome praise of China, right now busily engaged in doing away with its Moslem Uighers similarly to the way Nazi Germany eventually dealt with its “Deplorable” Jews, Gypsies, and other social “undesirables”. Leaving aside that and barely mentioning the results of the “one child” delusion the Maoists were under, Chinese rule then resembled the ancient empires and their resort to coercion. We DON’T know if it really works–shoddy construction shows up all over, first in the high-speed railways and lately in the Three Gorges Dam which is being carefully watched. See-through office buildings and deserted unused projects reportedly abound. Again, no one has access to China’s books to check how they’re really doing. You should notice that these debt forgiveness regimes had frequent revolts.
Finally, we already have debt forgiveness, of sorts, the bankruptcy process. To see how it worked in antique times (i.e. 1909) I highly recommend “Railroad Reorganization” by Stuart Daggett. Yes, it is a quaint antique, but it will be useful after many an economic fatuity has been forgotten, for a characteristic of law in America is that the railroad MUST run for public necessity so something and someone(s) have to give. From reading what is in the author’s piece I don’t know if I should bother with Michael Hudson’s books for he appears to miss the obvious consequences of things. Perhaps in the spirit of debt jubilee I should perhaps steal a copy–after all, Prof. Hudson is a rich professor and I’m not. My Dad just died leaving me one third his large estate–but maybe Professor Hudson wants to steal that so maybe I should steal his books first!
1- more landlord-ridden economy has emerged as a result of foreclosed properties and companies bought by speculators and vast absentee-owner companies like Blackstone”
Chinese are not allowed to buy certain industries and now run certain services . The argument offered is this – it’s for national security interest. Same arguments should be used against the practices of ” Blackstone”-variety entities’s buying houses ,nursing homes and manufacturing charter school .
2 Its time to find out who was involved in promoting the sales of Medallion ( yellow cab license ) in New York city while sitting with coconspirators from Chicago Hollywood and New York gubernatorial
offices how to roll out the Uber on the street . Then look at the possibility of electric chairs for all of them . Suicide as an option can be offered to them .
3
Chinese are killing Uighur is heard from 2 sources . One of them is a hard core Evangelical donkey whose career in hard core donkey business goes back 30 years starting against socialism communism and being busy offering his own ass for the neo Nazi movement to ride on to glory with US funding .
Other is a Chinese organization created and funded by USA who interviewed 8 people out of 80 million Uighur as evidence of torture of Uighur to the Congress .
4 Debt jubilees are in effect in USA ,alive very much . The rescue package offered to corporations and ,loan shark type organizations in 2000, in 2008-20013, and 2019 to 2020 debt cancellation and making the companies whole again . Those bills if rolled and connected could have created a 7 lanes highway from the globe to the moon.
5 Repeatedly rescuing the property owners in the harms way of the fires and hurricanes by the government ’s money infrastructure and services can also be considered Debt cancellation . Like Covid these are natural events At least Covid 19 victim can claim that he or she never had similar experience and absolutely no government provided rescue before .
I have listened GOP supporters railing against the pension ,double dipping ,and social security and medicare being abuse by lazy back workers by immigrants by latinos . But have not heard them saying one thing against the police and firefighters ( often GOP voters ) enjoying the generous pensions . Neither I have heard medicare being refused by any whites. “Free money “ for me and not for you is a racial construct that GOP lives by but is also a shrewd linguistic cover selectively used by the Corporations . It’s “free “ when referred to poor. It is s hard- earned, pro- business, pro -job creation, pro -growth and , maintaining the competitive edge when applied to the big commercial houses .
What is the real risk for ledger credit entry? Bank credit pops into being from nothing.
If the negro doesn’t pay, then you get his house.
Heads I win tails you lose.
Hudson is correct, it is bigger systemic issues, where labor is not able to create wealth. The game is rigged for rentiers.
Think of it like a tumor, and not muscle and bone. The tumor is making a loan to black and hispanic at higher rates. The tumor wants its life secured at the expense of others.
.
Hudson was talking about how an economy polarizes toward creditors.
The rescue package went toward corporations which in turn are tied to the “credit system.” The big banks, wall street, and large corporations are tied together.
The rescue package bailed out the big fish, leaving the little fish high and dry. The big fish will then take their “cash” and buy up everything at distressed prices.
Polarization increases.
Jubilees are to return civilization to balance.
When you take out a loan at a bank, you sign a new debt instrument. The debt instrument transfers to the banker and becomes his asset. The money the banker creates in proportion to the debt instrument, is the banks liability.
The reverse is true for you the debtor. Your new bank credit is your asset, and your new debt instrument is your liability.
You are creditor to the bank only insofar as you hypothecated yourself with a new debt instrument, which in turn the bank holds as an asset.
Your savings are not the banks asset. Your savings are the banks liability.
If you doubt this, here is Werner:
Video Link
With regards to a modern Jubilee, one way is to nationalize the banks during the next crises. Then the ledgers are examined to find out which bond-holders are making out-sized claims. Those bond-holders who are polarizing the earth to themselves get busted by erasing their claims against the future. Outsized claims are also those who have already been paid, and are wanting to be paid 2 or 3 times more.
I was also wondering about Hudson and his position on state banks. When he talked about this, my ears perked up, which is why I remember it.
To paraphrase, Ellen thinks we need state banks (individual states) rather than converting the FED to being sovereign. She thinks that there is no way monetary reform can get through congress, and she is probably right. So, Hudson’s is rational and is not tilting at windmills.
Hudson’s academic position is that the money power belongs to the “king” or some sort of sovereign authority. This idea is fully crystallized in his latest book, and “forgive them their debts.” The study of ancient near east palatial economies were one of a God-King protecting his population from predatory creditors. The money power was fully in control by the King and Palace authority (which were closely aligned …god king).
As a practical matter, Ellen’s approach is more do-able, since Congress is bought out.
The god-kings of the ancient near east could take on vested interests, to then prevent civilization from polarizing into a feudal oligarchy.
Not all money that people deposit in banks are from loans. Many paychecks and social security checks are directly deposit in banks and are debts (liabilities) that the bank owes the depositors, who have become creditors of the banks. You are correct: Money in a savings account or checking account are the banks liability (a debt owed to the depositor) and the depositors’ assets.
A loan is an exchange of credit. The borrower exchanges his credit for the bank’s credit. The borrower’s credit becomes the bank’s asset and the borrower’s liability, and the bank’s credit becomes the borrower’s asset and the bank’s liability.
I am surprised that governments have not already declared a Jubilee and erased all their debts plus all the debts of banks and corporations. Jubilee would be a great benefit to the big boys, who owe a great deal more money than the wee people. Jubilee would also wipe out all pension plans. Moreover, with Jubilee, all money would cease to exist because today all moneys are debt instruments; thus, money is an obligation that someone owes its holder. Here are some things to consider when promoting Jubilee: https://tcallenco.blogspot.com/2009/05/jubilee.html
Thanks to QE to i8nfinity and beyond our pension funds are backed by
government gilts
effectively we owe our pension to ourselves via the taxation system
It would not have been possible without the modern edukashun system followed by Main Scream Media supplying free higherr edukashun to the zommbys
If it were not so funny it would be seen as a tragedy
Thanks to QE to i8nfinity and beyond our pension funds are backed by
government gilts
effectively we owe our pension to ourselves via the taxation system
It would not have been possible without the modern edukashun system followed by Main Scream Media supplying free higherr edukashun to the zommbys
were it not so funny it would be seen as a tragedy
Thanks bto the magic money tree pollysees the morewe oweourseves thericher we are
Good stuff as always from Hudson. Meanwhile we got these antifa and alt right Brawndo drinking tards out there fighting over whos the bigger racist, or which of the two puppets to “vote” for. Both even being the center of attention in the “debate” last night. Sad!
Again, the right wingers think the lockdown itself is the problem. It ain’t the lockdown. Its the intentional failure of “government” to support anyone other than Jeff Bezos during the lockdown
Yep. Trump and Biden even going out of their way last night to bash Bernie the cuck. Both making it clear that neither have any intention of helping anyone other than themselves and their owners. Fuck both. Anyone that still believes voting or asking nicely will change anything at all, deserves what is coming their way.
Capitalism is a death cult, the Republicrat uniparty is a death cult, both need to be abolished. Both have reached the dead end, their only solution is more theft, more war, more death. Ending all this corruption, poverty, homelessness, ending the wars, the mass murder and famine, ending the rackets that are bankrupting us all are not profitable to capitalists, which is why that will never happen under this system.
The system has failed! Life expectancy is going down, prices are going up. Something gotta give eventually, won’t be no good for anyone.
https://www.dailyposter.com/p/billionaire-gop-donors-firm-reports
Watched this short documentary last night, is pretty good:
Video Link
To forgive debt is a stupidity it can never happen.
Interest rates must go down to close to zero.
Government must nationalize all private investment that is outside of the country.
Government must nationalize all Banks.
Otherwise US will never recover.
Don’t forget to add an eclipse of the Sun , on the opening day – that way you can tell Enemy #1 – see what we can do – too. Then throw his ass and thousands more behind him down the shoot. lol Good Post .
Why would Hudson ever respond to this when it’s obvious that you didn’t even read what he wrote; he already outlined(quite convincingly) that the U.S. government is not in control of the U.S economy – Wall Street is.
The US is quickly becoming Brazil, only with a mega-rich, financial parasite class, with pretensions of ruling the world…
In fact it has been on this road for a long time, since the mid 1970s…
Some commenters here wonder why Prof Hudson is seemingly repeating the debt forgiveness story…but the underlying mechanics of this process are what is important…
Here is how that works…the ‘Palatial’ authority to wipe the slate clean for the masses of ordinary working folks is what kept the balance and kept ALL of society prosperous…it seems there was always, and will always be a certain class of chiselers that gravitate to the easy money of rent-taking and interest lending…when left to their own devices they will rapaciously eat the very underpinnings of the society itself…eating the seed grain, as it were, which is the mass of working folks at the bottom, on whom, in the final analysis, everyone depends…
Even industrialists like Henry Ford realized this, and the idea of ‘Welfare Capitalism’ is well established…you cannot impoverish the wide and broad stratum of society at the bottom without making the country poor and weak…
But this is exactly what has been happening for nearly the past five decades…only it has been a kind of boiling frog scenario where nobody has noticed the temperature rising…
An interesting working paper from Rand that is currently under peer review shows this trend quite plainly…
–Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018
We see clearly that in those golden postwar decades and into the seventies, everybody was sharing in the full swing of a mighty industrial economy…but then the bottom quintiles [anything below the top five percent really] started to fall behind…so that’s basically the bottom 60 percent…and even the top fifth, in light blue, has lagged, if we break out the top five percent within that quintile, as they have done here.
But in fact, even this picture doesn’t tell the whole story, because within that top five percent are embedded the absolutely massive gains of the mega wealthy…according to Forbes, the three wealthiest INDIVIDUALS hold more wealth than HALF of the population…
So here is what’s going on in the big picture…yesterday it was the poor folks that got fleeced by the financial parasite class…then in the last little while, as we can see from the above graph, even the moderately well off in the top quintile and even top five percent started to be knocked down a peg or two…
Notice the interesting plunge in 2001 to 2007 of the top quintile and the top five percent…this is when a lot of middle class folks got wiped out with the so-called ‘dot com’ bubble…I know lots of folks that literally lost their shirts…I was lucky and decided to hop off the speeding train a few months before the crash…
Was this an engineered takedown of the so-called ‘retail investor’…?…of course it was…and there will be more such fleecings to come, as these supposedly wild ‘corrections’ or even ‘acts of God’ occasionally plow the little folks under, while the parasites make off with the gravy…
And this is how that frog boiling game plays out over the long run, as we can see from these graphs…first they come for the poor guy, and next thing you know they come for you…even though you may have worked your ass off all your life to become a professional or a small business owner…
And if we look into the data with even higher resolution we see this very interesting fact that even among the top one percent, the people in the bottom of that group have been consistently losing ground also…
This was detailed in an excellent study by Saez and Zucman, which gained a lot of awareness last year because Liz Warren hired these guys on as advisers to her campaign…
Here we see exactly what the Rand study also tells us, that things changed abruptly in the mid to late 1970s and from there the super wealthy took over completely…
–Wealth Inequality in the United States, Saez and Zucman
But here is the very interesting part of how even the lower strata of the one percent club have got the shaft also, again from S & Z…
Notice that the lowest segment, the top 1 to 0.5 percenters has tanked, while the highest, the 0.01 percenters have skyrocketed…
So all of this confirms the experience of anyone who has been around to see all of this play out long term…I was in high school in the 1970s and college in the eighties…in the early eighties I spent a year in East Germany as an exchange student, just as my own family back home was struggling with the 20 percent mortgage rates that came by way of that big ‘adjustment’ by then Fed chairman Volcker, to supposedly combat ‘stagflation’…
Of course this mythical ‘stagflation’ turned out to be extremely profitable for the financial oligarchy, which has since displaced industry and sucked the life out of ordinary folks who no longer have ladders of upward mobility, especially the young generation of today, which is fully under the thumb of the financial tyranny, but with less ability to escape than any previous generation…
I remember thinking how I would gladly trade places with that wonderful German family with whom I was billeted…they had zero worries about the roof over their head, their job security, health security, food security etc…they certainly did not live luxuriously by any means, despite being a highly qualified professional couple, but it was a comfortable and fulfilling life…and oh the sense of security and peace of mind…their two children were both in university, without the worries that I faced about how to pay for it…
Now it turned out that the strictly state controlled economy proved deficient also, it was not capable of fulfilling the full productive potential of its people as a whole…but that is why Prof Hudson is stressing the fact that there has to be a mix…there has to be an authority at the top that is going to WORK ON BEHALF OF THE PEOPLE…
That is what those ancient near eastern ‘palatial’ authorities did, and that is what China is doing today…they are keeping the financial parasites in check, while allowing enough business initiative for the small go-getter to succeed…
So the key takeaway here is that that solid base at the bottom of the income ladder is in fact the foundation, just as Henry Ford preached back in the day…what we have seen in the past four decades is exactly how things go downhill when you let the grubbers and moneychangers have their way…you destroy that foundation and everything goes down…and as it does, the layers of prosperity keep peeling off, until there is only a tiny class of super wealthy scumbags…Brazil…
The Chinese aren’t letting that happen…they are obviously quite well aware that the foundation is everything…
The Chinese authorities are like Hammurabi, working to keep the foundation intact…they are in control of the MONEY MACHINE, not the other way round…and they are using that money machine to lift people out of poverty and into prosperity, not to enrich an ever shrinking class of obscenely rich flim flam artists…
That is exactly the point of Prof Hudson’s preaching about these ancient wisdoms and systems of governance…but this is never going to happen in the west…the oligarchy is now too strong…they own the political machinery lock, stock and barrel…
At the head of this Oligarchic monster is of course the financial ‘sector’…and they made the choice back in the seventies that they were going to keep themselves in gravy, at the expense of everyone else, including even what you would consider the quite prosperous folks in that lower stratum of the one percent…as we see from the S & Z breakdown above…
That is the game here…when a system begins to not work, then it becomes about saving yourself at the expense of others…
Was there a realization back in the seventies that the Capitalist system was also not working…?…did this cause the money elite to then circle the wagons and decide to save themselves at the expense of everybody else…?
Perhaps…but this point we are in Titanic waters…and the rats are going to do nothing but abandon ship with all the loot they can carry…we, on the other hand will all sink…in a generation, there will hardly be any decent life even for highly skilled professionals, who would otherwise be dearly valued and appropriately compensated…able to enjoy the fruits of their life’s labors…
And that is why the US is sharply falling behind in key technical domains that require highly educated people and a skilled workforce…there is no brain power anymore and nothing of consequence is going to come from here to advance the road of human progress…
Counterintuitive, but maybe right. Less material goods and less risks, but with the exception of a mortgage (which is really a better alternative then paying rent).
And why not extend the idea to government. That’s not to say that borrowing is necessarily bad. In the same way as a business, the question is how the borrowed money is used – productively or wastefully. For example, in 19th and 20th century USA it speeded up the opening of the West (railroads), the development of the automobile industry, electrification, communications etc. – all good investments returning a profit, and paying interest on the borrowing. This is in contrast to late 20th and 21st century QE credit going into ME wars and Wall St speculative bubbles (or bailouts).
Like Steve Penfield says in his recent article https://www.unz.com/article/financial-fraud-lord-keynes-the-new-deal-and-stimulus-mania/
I would also include non-average participants like Henry Ford, and to allow them to get the odds right on their calculated risks, political power needs to be returned to the states under close public supervision (citizen participation).
Act of God??? You mean an act of god – Satan the god of this world.
Fraud is our God.
Ron is whipsawing his audience.
Ron Unz publishes lolbertarian junk author Penfield:
https://www.unz.com/article/financial-fraud-lord-keynes-the-new-deal-and-stimulus-mania/
Then he publishes Hudson, who is the voice of reason, in this article.
In a debt money system, the debt instrument holders will demand payment like clockwork. The arrears Hudson talks about are something like baseband power, it has to be available every month, on time, or you will be punished by late payment fees, or worse, your property will be foreclosed.
The pay-me debt clock ticks away on a time basis, something like an excel sheet function.
The real world doesn’t work like an excel sheet, it cycles with the seasons, and SOMETIMES, there are disasters manmade or otherwise. The real world cannot pay exponential expanding claims demanded by a debt money system.
Creditor claims have always led to creation of oligarchy. We are in that world now, where finance is “taking” rents and unearned income.
Too bad that concept isn’t often applied to banks and corporations with good connections but evil intentions. Continuing to bail out the failures fuels a concept known as moral hazard. Look it up.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/moralhazard.asp
Basic point that the ZioGlob government doesn’t care about the welfare of the people. Their concern is only that the general public are becoming aware of this fact.
Hence the need to dispense with Democracy and introduce their “Social Justice” dictatorship (Woke, open frontiers, anti-“White Supremacy”, Antifa, multicultural, BLM, LGBT etc.). Their Covid-19, wars with China or Russia or whatever else they need to bring it on before the imminent collapse of their vast credit bubble.
More than 97% of the money we use in endogenous, created by private banks.
This statement is just flat out wrong.
The bank credit behind paychecks and social security checks at source, were created by private banks.
People are not creditors to banks – that is a fallacy.
After a bank loan is created, the bank creates new bank credit as its liability. The bank credit is posted in your account as your asset.
You need to think in terms of liabilities and assets.
After the bank loan is created the bank has your asset (the debt instrument you signed) and you have a new liability (paying off the debt instrument).
Your credits and debts mirror the banks credits and debts.
The only time you transfer an asset to a bank is when you are harvested and transfer your house or real asset to pay off a loan. You are also harvested for your life energy, especially for a house, which may cost 3X the principle over time.
One can never expect to get the truth from the owners of government either.
I appreciate the analysis loop that links todays events to principles employed in ancient times.
While Leviticus 25 is mentioned how about II Timothy 2, 6 & 7
” 6 The farmer who labors must be the first partaker of the suits. 7 Consider what I say and the lord giveth thee understanding in all things.”
This was done and the problem solved 1942 when the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act was finally put into proper practice: 90% of Parity Price Floors for Agricultural Raw Materials with no production quotas (for destruction of wealth to serve markets which was FDR’s mistake)
World War II could not be fought if farmers were put out of business.
Parity provided adequate Earned Income for Agriculture to purchase goods and services from manufacturing and Service Sectors.
Statistics demonstrated that ever dollar earned on the farm multiplied through the rest of the economy by a factor of Seven (7)…sounds prophetic and is true…until
Until 1952 when General Motors and ‘the interests whose interest is interest’ lobbied Congress to disobey the law, 7 USC Sec 602, abandoning Parity, to force people to borrow money to buy cars…
This Chart tells the whole story….and our coming starvation…..but heed the letter that comes after the chart for what a real President must do! Farmers are only getting a 30cent dollar!
http://www.normeconomics.org/parity_table_45-16eb.pdf
Who needs nonfraudulent business models, when there’s the Talmud? Lie, cheat and steal, what larger economy? All money, every last cent, belongs in Talmudist pockets. Just ask Bernanke. Is Mnuchin a repeat?
“People are not creditors to banks” The courts and law have declared that bank depositors are creditors of the bank. If they are not creditors, why do banks consider deposits a liability (something owed, a debt) and depositors consider their deposits an asset (something owned or due to them)? You are talking about loans; I am referring to money that one takes out of his pocket and deposited in the bank. That money may have originated from a loan, but when it is transferred to another via a paycheck, etc., it becomes the recipient’s asset, and it remains his asset when he deposits it in the bank. Thus, he is a creditor of the bank because the bank owes him the money in his account.
Someone had to say it.
And isn’t bankruptcy a type of debt cancellation?
You are completely mistaken. The post-war boom peaked around 1969 and plateaued through about 2001.
The iPhone and Facebook, both initiated in 2007 , were the last innovative achievements to have widespread impact.
Comparing and contrasting this economy with that of 3000 years ago is beyond absurd.
Which would make you not a college graduate. High-school?
What we are witnessing is the final showdown
Scrapitallism v Comuseumism
sustained by little interest
When central BANKSTER government overides market forces using QE TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
Then
Capitalism is turned into Marxist Commuseumism with FANGS
DeBlasio is having the police give anyone not wearing a mask a citation. The evidence of health problems created by masks is overwheleming, which is hardly surprising for anyone forced to restrict oxygen intake, increase CO2 intake, and wear bacteria traps that force the recirculation of bacteria that one’s own biological functioning is trying to rid the body of for its own survival.
NY dentists have confirmed a 50% increase in gum disease and cavities from wearing masks. Individuals with gum disease are at a 50% higher risk for stroke. Since wearing masks restricts the free flow of oxgen intake, some individuals have labored breathing and breath through their mouths to try to compensate for reduced oxygen intake which has resulted in bacterial recirculation causing gum disease and cavities.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/masks-causing-decaying-teeth-receding-gum-lines-sour-breath-reports-ny-dentists/5725623
Unfortunately, it is not just DeBlasio that is forcing people to self-destruct for his benefit.
Andrea Iravani
You speak the irrefutable truth:
Just as God Incarnate Jesus did saying to (((their ancestors))) at John 8:44:
,
The ancient Greeks, mostly a collection of city states which traded with and competed with each other in good times and joined together in War, constantly debated which government was best, and agreed different governments performed better depending on needs and circumstances. Generally they preferred one strong “good” leader, whose interest extended beyond his own family to help the city state. Tyrants were the downside. In turbulent “act of gods” times, democracy was often tried, as a resetting and redressing of serious perceived ills, but usually it was a temporary fix until a “good” ruler could be found. Mob rule was the worst case, and was associated with less productivity and depleting of value. Generally the worst government was agreed to be oligarchy. One ruler could only steal so much for his family and friends, but 50 or so, the typical aristocracy could steal everything, avoid taxes and waste much effort and treasure in internecine oligarchical scheming and fighting. Interestingly, our Founding Fathers studied Greek government ideals and tried to put the best man in charge (Washington was a “good” man), avoided mob rule of a real democracy, avoided long-lived corporations, but could not stop the inevitable entropic rise of our present oligarchy.
That is correct because the US is controlled for and by the Deep State.
Excellent points.
This is no act of god, it is a carefully planned psyop unleashed on the world as part of great reset. And that statement is no conspiracy theory, as it comes out of the mouth of James Bullard, President of the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Debt has reached a limit, and now they are crashing the system on purpose, and transferring the wealth to the financial sector, Wall Street Banks, hedge funds, Rothschild, and the State of Israel and anyone else on the receiving end of Jerome Powell’s money spigot.
This is the biggest crime in history, and it is how the insane system of Keynsian debt ends. It is given clever names like the “great unwind” or the “greater depression” but what it really is the greatest screw job in the history of mankind. They are lining their pockets in a system of crony capitalism while the rest of us get food lines and socialist communism.
Thank you for this extremely helpful comment illuminating in intellectual detail trends well known from grass roots experience.
About to quote one part which distills the entire history every bit as accurately as the article’s subtitle states the current reality of the P(((L*)))ANDEMIC HOAX:
And because you very appropriately repeat mention of Henry Ford who made unparalleled in our nation’s history efforts to protect the masses from the financial parasites, the triple parens are used as indicator within the ollowing quote just as italics were used above
so as to NAME THE JEW out of respect for how selflessly and courageously Mr. Ford did so.
* “L” stands for LIES as per the twelve months a year JewLies of John 8:44.
Joonomics is a modern form of Alchemy……converting something of little value (fiat paper and ersatz bits/bytes) into something of great value (real estate, commodities, productive businesses, gold/silver, etc.). Create money and credit out of thin air and then ladle it out to your friends, relatives, fellow tribalists, and various useful gentile idiots. If the masses of fat asses get unruly, helicopter drop $1200 bills on them so they can scurry down to the nearest walmart and load up on more chips and beer….maybe buy a flatscreen to keep up on the latest most important election ever between Tweedlebum and Tweedlescum. The jooies must be laughing their asses off……it’s all just too easy.
You are the only one I look for in the comments section when I really want to get a grounded take of the topic at hand. Your comments on SEAD operations clearly explained in lay man terms what is actually happening back then in Syria. Of course Michael is a brilliant mind when it comes to economics.
I wrote to congratulate you on your always useful inputs, with this one being part of that said useful input. The financial class has always been the destroyer of economies with the Abrahamic religions categorically denouncing usury combined with the debt jubilees. Thanks for your input, much appreciated.
Covid-19 does not exist, it is a scam, a lie, a psyop by the zionists and forced on the world by their UN Agenda 2030, in a plan to destroy the economies and the lives of the average people worldwide and bring on a draconian, demonic, one world zionist government.
To see the truth of this zionist scam go to thetruthseeker.co.uk, henrymakow.com, davidicke.com, globalresearch.ca and thedollarvigilante.com.
Anti’-government forces did all this? The Fed is anti-government? Congress is anti-government? The folks at Treasury are anti-government? The federal courts are anti-government? Every president since Nixon is anti-government?
The US government has been the creature and tool of the class you decry since it’s inception. To be truly anti-government is merely to be well educated and well disposed towards your fellow man, in light of the obvious fact of the carnage government inevitably causes.
So much knowledge, so little wisdom. Or is it willful ignorance?
So COVID is a natural event? Seems a stretch at this point. TPTB give the CCP a pass?
Long in the tooth Michael Hudson, you to be my expert witness, not allowed. I applaud your gene of altruism, verve too! I am a pessimist in the time that is, was already really bad now to very horrible. One nano at a nano these days. Wonderful to see you here, Unz! Thanks Ron!!
For sure.
Marxism was always just a highfalutin pretext for subduing goy capitalism in the interest of non-goy gangster capitalism.
There has not been a shred of any commie-capitalist dichotomy for quite some time.
No, we are seeing the results of Western societies being taken over by Judeo-Zionist gangsters and psychopaths by way of the Fed, which has resulted in anti-democratic ideology of centralized social planning and state power in “the market” to serve the Zionist interest.
Yes, it’s a simple as that. No need for a 4,400 word essay.
The Mosaic Law is not Jewish but Hebraic, which today’s converted Jews are not.
http://biblicisminstitute.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/the-word-jew-is-not-in-the-bible/
You should help make a government you can trust.
Until shown evidence, we all gotta go Occam’s Razor on the issue of the pandemic.
As in, the simplest explanation accounting for the known facts is a natural occurrence.
Now, if evidence shows up at some point, we can revisit the issue.
You never did make much sense but went over the top with this stupid post,your one of the fools that thinks that government plays no part in society as 75% of all bankruptcies are due to medical cost, but hey that’s what parasitic capitalism is all about and that’s why we are headed into a depression which may evolve into a revolution.1111
Huh? $26 Trillion gov debt & $75 Trillion total debt. Money printing, bailouts and unaccountability worse than any banana republic – be it communist or otherwise. Red tape redder than communism. Monopolies in finance and media and virtually no other industry. STASI style police & surveillance state. Complete and unopposed censorship. Prosecution, persecution, job & income deprivation for thought crimes. Brown-black-red shirts control the streets, protected by police. Self defense is de facto outlawed. Insane redistribution… Etc, etc…
You call this capita;ism? This is much closer to a feudal communism in the process of permanent cultural revolution & bailouts exactly as Marx and Trotsky wanted it.
The article we are commenting on, is praising China although the Chinese and US bailouts are of comparable size and have the same goal – killing the opposition to the oligarchy. Where is Hong Kong now? The Feudal Communism, proposed as a solution by this article, is more of the same. What we actually need is sane financial regulation – since Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, we’ve had bailouts every 10 years, for many trillions of dollars… A stronger version of G-S would do wanders.
The FRA & the welfare state aren’t “capitalism” they’ve never been, they are the elephants in room which articles like this one are trying to hide.
This one of the better articles I’ve read on this site. Hudson material here* shows why the trump regime deliberately engaged policy that would exasperate the the spread of COVID-19 into a serious epidemic, which would bring on a depression which in turn the financial mafia would use to increase and further solidify their control of everything.
*Though he doesn’t actually state the epidemic was planned.
Forgiving debts was pragmatic, the author says.
I think he is right.
Find pragma and you solve the problem.
If you don’T?
Well your’e….
History can only go thus far, then it has to end.
Criminal politics cries to Heaven.
Soon it will all be solved.
But until then, for the creditors, I think they should listen to Michael Hudson.
Cancel the debts.
At least many of them, hold by the poorest.
All bank credit system wide is a liability to the bank. It is debtor’s asset system wide.
(And as an aside, the debt instruments are claiming MORE than the bank credit (money) that was created.)
The bank does not consider your deposit as an asset to them – only a liability.
The bank does not use your deposit to make loans.
The bank could care less about your deposit, only what you pay them in interest.
The bank does not use your deposited credit to make loans. The bank instead uses your debt instrument to make loans.
Any savings that you have in the bank are a loss they would rather not pay interest on.
Richard Werner explains it too. Make an effort.
Not quite sure you interpreted Leviticus 25 correctly regarding strangers in the land…you know, gentiles?…for while it does say a debt jubilee must be enforced regarding Israelites in debt after 50 years, the latter sections of Leviticus 25 seem to say gentile bond-persons and their families are bound forever. Leviticus 25:44-46 seems to make that claim….why do you think Talmudics actually believe they are “following God” by doing whatever they can…you know, Rothschilds? Warburgs? all those Jewish tech oligarchs?…to keep all of us gentiles in as much debt forever as they can? Maybe you should take some time off to read the Talmud!
The issue is the dishonest, hysterical, “lock-step”, power grab in guise of response to a health emergency.
They conflate this issue all the time to confuse and divide sensible people. Of course, there is a legitimate need for a society to adjust behavior as required to contain an epidemic.
What reasonable people expect is:
– inclusive input on the severity of the disease, and not just from Bill Gates and hired hands
– inclusive input on the required measures, and not just from Bill Gates and hired hands
– full transparency on all numbers published
– full transparency on testing methodology, including error characteristics (false negatives, false positives, etc.)
– full transparency on all financial interests in anything Covid-19 related by any vocal, e.g. Bill Gates, self-elected expert
– explicitly temporary alterations to our legal and governmental regime (such as suspension of human rights), and not the immediately announced “new normal”.
This list can go on. But to sum:
Issue is not whether there is or there is not a health crisis. The issue is the response. When you hear “Covid-19 Hoax”, the “Hoax” refers to the authoritarian response.
–
Thank you for pointing out the bigger picture that dr hudson seems to be missing. When ever i have attempted to discuss this subject with friends they always look at me like a deer in the headlights. It is such a frightening subject that it trips a mental circuit breaker. We have been programed, this subject is taboo.
“exasperate the the spread of COVID-19”
That didn’t go down as I intended. Meant expanded, facilitated, aided.
Mr Hudson. You would have a much larger audience if you didn’t just focus on the macro economy.
You need to focus on issues that your readers can relate.
As much as i dislike the current Leaders and System, I don’t see any evidence of “ controlled demolition” to force economic disruption, but simply sheer incompetence at all levels, from POTUS, to Congress, to CDC, FDA, Main stream media and all institutions Involved….
Never attribute to intent when sheer stupidity would explain things. The West is on an inexorable downward trend.
Agree with everything you wrote, Mr. White.
So the plutocrats need to get the message clearly, “Zero-percent public-bank refinancings are your best option. Other options include outright debt jubilee for US households below the top one percent in annual income, expropriation of ‘your’ property, life imprisonment, and more.”
Why?
Act of Red China, is more like it.
The whole story reeks of antisemitism. Thinly disguised attacks against Jewish people: ” China’s government is the ultimate creditor. It need not contend with politically powerful bankers who insist that the economy at large must lose, not themselves.” The implication that the USA is a giant fish clogged with parasites is antisemitism, pure and simple.
You nail it excellent analytics .
Can there be any change when they own the media and education and everything else? I hope so but without prayer and and reading the Bible on endtimes especially the Olivet Discourse Matthew 24, people really won’t see what is going on and what to do.
Video Link
https://www.hymnal.net/en/hymn/h/757
At even when the sun was set,
The sick, O Lord, around Thee lay;
O in what divers pains they met!
O with what joy they went away!
Once more ’tis eventide, and we
Oppressed with various ills draw near;
What if Thy form we cannot see?
We know and feel that Thou art here.
O Savior Christ, our woes dispel;
For some are sick, and some are sad,
And some have never loved Thee well
And some have lost the love they had;
And some are pressed with worldly care
And some are tried with sinful doubt
And some such grievious passions tear
That only Thou canst cast them out
And some have found the world is vain,
Yet from the world they break not free;
And some have friends who give them pain,
Yet have not sought a friend in Thee;
And none, O Lord, have perfect rest,
For none are wholly free from sin;
And they who fain would serve Thee best
Are conscious most of wrong within.
O Savior Christ, Thou too art Man;
Thou hast been troubled, tempted, tried;
Thy kind but searching glance can scan
The very wounds that shame would hide.
Thy touch has still its ancient power;
No word from Thee can fruitless fall;
Hear in this solemn evening hour,
And in Thy mercy heal us all.
It’s clear from reading some of the comments that a lot of folks have no clue how money lending works or why it’s a problem…
This is not surprising because the media is absolutely clueless, probably willfully so…considering their huge resources and manpower one might reasonably expect that they could provide a decent explanation of how things really work…
Try doing a search on say corporate and consumer debt for instance…you might find something like this from CNBC in June, which tells us that total debt is now $56 trillion…that is govt, corporate and consumer…
Just a few sentences in, we have this:
Now, how braindead do you have to be to actually write something this retarded…?
In my earlier comment above, I presented a striking graph of income growth over the last nearly eight decades…here it is again…
We see growth for this decade of ‘unprecedented expansion’ of under one percent per year…over ten years that works out to a lousy 10 percent expansion, by far the worst in the entire postwar history, as we easily see above…
So it’s no wonder that people don’t even know essential and basic facts of economic life…the reason that things are as bad as they are is because of the multitudes of clueless enablers of the current system of debt tyranny…we see that right here in this thread…
Some are making meaningless statements about how debt is ‘not a problem’ if people simply lived within their so-called ‘means’…of course we could say this about all of the financial parasites in our midst also, who have managed to hoard practically all of the wealth of the nation…and the wider world for that matter, since this thievery knows no national borders…
Who are those people in that top 0.01 percent…?…obviously this includes the well known billionaires, and of course many other less prominent business owners…but it turns out that the biggest slice of this demographic is from Wall Street and the Finance sector…
Obviously these hyenas don’t give a rat’s ass about ‘living within their means’…that’s just something that they want the rest of us to do…and, incredibly, many among us are just stupid enough to take this self-blaming to heart…
But let’s look at the actual mechanics of how lending works…let’s say you are a young person who has applied himself to his education and is now starting out in life with a solid profession…leaving aside the fact that you are saddled with a lifelong student debt [a STEM education costs about $200,000, much more than most families can afford]…you and your equally accomplished young wife are ready to buy a house and start a family…
Of course you are going to need to borrow money because nobody is going to give you a roof over your head for free…everybody alive has gone through this exact same life cycle…so it’s important to understand just where the problem is…
Think for a moment what would be the optimal solution to this universal, life-starting journey…the young family would get a loan interest free, or at most some small amount so that the loan can be paid off in say ten years…it’s plain to see that this is in the interest of society, and Henry Ford would surely agree…
And btw, I have been getting something like half a percent from the bank on my savings account for as long as I can remember, even while keeping nontrivial balances in the low six figure range…so why not the same conditions for the borrower too…?…In fact we will see in a moment exactly why this is in fact good and necessary…
But let’s just continue with our analogy…SOMEBODY in control at the top has to recognize that young families need to have a house that they can afford, so that they can continue to progress in life and bring forward the next generation on a solid heading etc…this is the banking model of a PUBLIC UTILITY that is advocated by researchers like Ellen Brown and others…
But alas, there is no such choice for anybody who has the misfortune to belong to this category of modern slave known as ‘consumer’…there is no alternative to the bank, nobody else is allowed to CREATE MONEY…not even the federal government…it is quite simply a monopoly of moneylenders…
But here is where it gets interesting…obviously moneylending is a business, so all of those that are in the profitable position of participating in this monopoly have ZERO incentive to do anything for your good, or the greater good, but merely for their own profit…
And the SECOND big issue here is incentive…obviously the money monopoly desires to create as much debt as possible…that is the ONLY way in which they can profit…
So let’s think about this for a second…we have a huge and seemingly ever-expanding level of indebtedness at all levels, government, corporate, consumer…yet it is somehow the borrowers who are to blame, not the moneylenders who have all the incentive in the world to literally drown the nation in debt…?
How does that make any sense…?
Of course it doesn’t…it’s not about the borrower, but about the lender…that lender, the bank, creates money out of literally thin air…so all they need is for someone, anyone, to walk through the door and ask for a loan…why do you think they spend billions on advertising to get those walk-ins…?
And is it just coincidence that the biggest debtor, the government, is the one that allows this system to operate the way it does…so who is actually in control, the government of the people [ostensibly], or the moneylenders…?
[Nominally, the bank must have 10 percent reserves for debts it creates, but this little loophole is easily fixed by any number of ways, such as going to the central bank and getting money to cover reserves, which in practice, with all the loopholes, ends up at even under five percent…]
So we have a situation where new money can be created ONLY WITH INTEREST ATTACHED…what happens next year, when the economy must have MORE money in it, in order to cover that interest…and then the year after that and so on…?
And here we get into the biggest structural problem, and where Prof Hudson has given the biggest insight…having to create more money every year just to pay an arbitrary rate of interest, means that the output of REAL GOODS must also increase in order to correspond to that amount of money…
After all, money by itself has ZERO VALUE…it is just a symbol that says there is some actual, real and physical object behind it…so what happens if the output of RE$AL GOODS cannot keep up with the yearly interest…?
This is where the economy collapses long-term, because obviously no living organism can continue to grow forever…the math behind this is called exponential growth, which is why the debt will continue to balloon and will in fact start accelerating even while the real economy falls behind more and more…
So we see that mathematically, lending at interest and the Ponzi Scheme are the exact same thing…the mirror image of each other…
This is what happened all throughout the ancient societies that Prof Hudson has studied, and is why they came up with the solution of simply wiping the debt slate clean…they had learned from experience that, left unchecked, this Ponzi spiral of exponential growth of debt will bring the society crashing down…
So we see here that not only does the HUGE financial ‘industry’ have all the incentives in the world to chain EVERYONE to a lifetime of debt that can never really be paid off, but they are allowed to wreck the REAL economy of actual goods and services by flooding the nation with money/debt, which then makes money worth less and less…again, they have learned to do this on the sly with the boiling frog strategy…[but it’s all plain to see in graphical form over the long run, as in the charts above…]
Think about the size of this so-called financial ‘industry’…it now accounts for something like a third of the GDP…but is this actually ADDING to the real economy, or is it TAKING AWAY…?
Prof Hudson and others have of course been pointing out that moneylending and rent-taking is purely EXTRACTIVE…it adds nothing, but takes a cut from everything and everybody…
The Great Thinker, Aristotle, called interest lending the ‘most unnatural’ way of creating wealth…’money giving birth to money’…
So here is the big surprise for everybody…YOU are literally paying a TAX of roughly 30 percent a year to the moneylending industry…because that is their share of GDP…it comes from you, the consumer slash debt slave and nobody else, because at the end of the day, you are responsible also for your government’s debt and your employer’s debt…since your employer will simply turf you out when it’s not profitable…and your government will collect taxes from you…end of story…
That’s bad enough, but there’s an even bigger problem…just like the Ponzi Scheme, the monelyending scheme is doomed to simply come crashing down…[in fact, this happens all the time as people wake up one day to find that the pensions they have been paying into in their company have simply evaporated overnight, as some vulture capitalist has simply pocketed all of your savings…]
The big problem right now is that this entire scam is supported by the very people who are victimized by it…who are easily swayed by meaningless jingles about ‘living within your means’…and such…
But what would happen if the people paying the freight for all of this DEMANDED that this whole stinking mess be thrown in the dumpster…?
That young couple buying their house could get a loan just like turning on the water tap, a public utility…instead of indebting themselves and hoping that their ‘wealth’ [what a ridiculous phraseology for the debt slave class] will slowly increase [hopefully before they shuffle off], mainly due to the manipulations of speculators who deal in the so-called real estate ‘market’…
Neglecting of course the simple fact that houses are meant to be lived in, and to be a place for raising the next generation of engineers and surgeons…not some monopoly game for flim flam artists that don’t want to bother getting an education and building real, productive skills to benefit society…
This is the rat’s maze we find ourselves in today…it is a completely contrived and artificial set piece that is purposely designed and architected to keep us merely as a mass of worker ants, toiling our entire lives to enrich the cockroaches at the center of the moneylending empire…nothing more than the ant farm that people used to buy for their young kids back in the day…
What’s “tacky” is some nitwit imposing their will on Tony Hall, who, by the way presented a point that you were asking for.
So here it is, thank you Tony Hall and I am confident that Michael Hudson would agree.
Thanks for your kind words…appreciate your feedback…
The footnotes seem to be missing.
Sorry. I meant that the footnote links don’t work.
The pandemic will eventually touch you and yours and make a believer out of you.
Stop lying! Where is your data?
Here are the deaths in Europe:
Pooled number of deaths by age group
Deaths for the elderly has been the same as previous years for the past 3 months. Deaths for the younger lower than previous years – despite many more suicides and drug overdoses due to the lockdowns.
Here is a picture showing protesters against Lukashenko. Not happy that he won a reputed 80% of the votes. They are also not happy because he did not lockdown Belarus. Notice how almost all the protesters are maskless. The photo was taken yesterday. Those jailed were the ringleaders and they will face court. This is not Portland. 🙂
Protesters parade through the streets during a rally demanding to free jailed activists of the opposition in Minsk on Oct. 4
Germany’s government is refusing to take responsibility for its own actions in response to the coronavirus and lockdown that it imposed on its citizenry and apparently confesses that the response was wrong, but they are not going to blame themselves for their behavior that has resulted in the destruction of the lives and livlihoods of many, they have decided to sue the PCR test manufacturers that nobody forced them to use.
Angela Merkel was a chemist by profession. I have been able to understand all of this and do not hold a high level degree, in a specialized fiend of study, yet, the German parliament has confessed that they were just too mentally incompetent to comprehend it, or ask chemist Angela Merkel to interpret it for them since it was just well beyond their mental capacity to comprehend the PCR tests and the inaccuarcies of the test results. In other words, Germany believes that it is perfectly justified in locking people in their homes and forcing them to get tests provided that the tests are accurate, even though covid is not fatal in over 99% of the individuals that contract it, or does someone need to explain that to them as well.
Why are such inept individuals in charge of setting policy? I simply refuse to believe that they could not comprehend this, and were opportunistically taking advantage of a crisis and are embarrassed and ashamed to confess that they were willing to jeopardize the lives of their citizens for political and monetary gains! Suing the test companies that they themselves mandated to be used is just wretched opportunism!
https://www.globalresearch.ca/germany-extra-parliamentary-corona-investigative-commission-launching-class-action-suit-against-corona-criminals/5725633
Andrea Iravani
Curious if there any Americans Layers that are willing to assist the Germans in filing Class Action Suits to bring those responsible for the Crimes against Humanity with Corona virus PlanedDemic Hoax?
Video Link
I really hope they nail Angela Merkel. She has caused untold problems for Germany. The ongoing destruction of their motor car industry is just one of them.
International Lawsuits Being Prepared Against the Corona Scam
Actually, the destruction that she has caused to all of Europe including Germany with the mandating of extremely weird policies in addition to economic measures and political measures that appear to be designed to destroy all countries in the EU is really a crime. I think that Merkel was so brain washed into submission which might be characteristic of a women of her post-Nazi era. Women are generally more prone to such tactics and the political environment within the political system itself is the most brutal environment for these control tactics. Collective narcissism is the norm in politics and those that do not toe the line are brow beaten into submission or they leave on their own accord. The EU was relatively new when Merkel took office. I thought and still think that it is a terrible idea as well as the Euro because Europe is filled with many cultures, languages, customs, economies, societies that have historically been at war with eachother long before America was ever even a country, which is why there are so many people in America of European descent. The Europeans are now blaming America for all of the world’s problems, but they forgot that we chose to leave Europe because of its problems. Trying to force people and countries that have been trigger happy to go to war into cooperating with eachother and then imposing harsh measures on those countries that find the rules to be in contrast to their best interests is asking for trouble. Since the EU is filled with many countries and many leaders all answerable to their citizens, it was a plan destined to fail from the start. The EU would be unlikely to ever have a single centralized fair source of government for all of Europe because it is unlikely that the leaders of nations would collectively agree to give up control and it is also unlikely that the citizens of European countries would ever agree to just have a single government for all of Europe. This is in stark contrast to the United States or Canada that have had centralized Federal governmemts with states or provinces that also have rights for hundreds of years as well as a unifying culture and history. Americans that support Brexit are being accused of trying to dis-empower Europe, rather than trying to empower the individual countries of the relatively new EU and the critics of Brexit act on the false premise that the EU is a long established institution.
Andrea Iravanni
The root of Germany’s planed destruction is that Angela Merkel’s Jewish Roots Confirmed
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Merkel in her Communist Party uniform
I found irrefutable proof that Angela Merkel has Jewish roots. The confirmation comes out of her own mouth. In the video she thanks the Knesset for allowing her to speak in her mother tongue which is not German but is the language in which Jews alone speak to one another.
These are the exact words which she uses: “Ich danke allen dass ich in meiner Muttersprache heute zu Ihnen sprechen darf.” It translates to: “I thank you all that I am allowed today to speak to you in my mothertongue.”
In the text beneath the video it states that Merkel also got an award from a Jewish Freemasonic Lodge which awards only Lodge members. Gerhard Schröder had similar roots and was a Lodge member of this same Lodge also it states. That Germany has been run by a shadow government ever since the war ended is apparent. This shadow government was never interested in the well being of the Germans nor did it ever have the best interests of Germans in mind.
It is the Jews long term plan to put Germany into any predicament which they desire so that they can control the region and people forever!
Merkel has a Jewish passport and dual citizenship. Germans have for a long time wondered about her heritage which is now clear.
https://murderbymedia2.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/angela-merkels-jewish-roots-confirmed/
[IMG]
Good stuff, FB.
here in Canada young folks are spending up to 50% of family income to pay a mortgage. But, hey, houses are a good investment, right? Yeah, sure. When today’s young couples are ready to downsize in 30 or 40 years, who they gonna sell to? Canada’s fertility rate is well below replacement, which is not surprising when you consider the cost of a home. Ah, but no prob. We just import some people when we need ’em to protect the banks`mortgage collateral. Except there aren’t any surplus people. Well except in Africa where the fertility rate in most places is more than twice replacement. So there you are, Canadians will sell the country to Africans. Which is not to imply that Africans aren’t fine people, its just to say that Africans have got Africa, so what’s wrong with Canadians keeping Canadian for their own posterity.
Here’s a graph showing how US money lenders are diverting the wealth of nations into their own pockets. As of 2012, according this figure, US financial sector profits exceeded those of manufacturing, totaling over 30% of all corporate profits. And judging by the trend to 2012, the situation is worse — or better, depending on your point of view, today.
Exactly…the Ponzi moneylending system is unsustainable without importing PEOPLE every year, more and more…
This allows to keep the system afloat, which would otherwise collapse because the money needed to be created each year to cover previous years’ accruing interest would simply not be there if there were no NEW borrowers…just like the Ponzi scheme can run ONLY by hooking new suckers to keep buying in…no new people walking into the bank to ask for loans means the whole bubble simply explodes…
BUT…bringing in all those new people from offshore also has the ADDED effect of putting pressure on the job ‘market’…more people equals more competition for a job, the very necessity of existence…
This is what a lot of people don’t understand when they complain about immigration and changing demographics…they think it’s some scheme by so-called ‘liberals’ who simply like the idea of ‘replacing’ the population with colored folks…
This is quite asinine when one considers the REAL reason that you point out…the moneylenders absolutely NEED those people just like you and I need oxygen…and the employers don’t mind forcing our wages ever lower either…
But Canada has a solution for first time home buyers unable to afford a mortgage: some weird shared-equity government loan. Provinces have the same idea, to help home buyers jack up their indebtedness.
The idea of government limiting how much banks can lend home buyers relative to their income has been effectively abandoned. Hence Canadians are among the most indebted people in the world with household debt now over 100% of national GDP and rising.
German-American attorney, part of group of attorneys, suing WHO and other governments charging (Nuremberg-defined) Crimes Against Humanity
The Roman (Anglo-US) empire will BE UNABLE to keep America’s crumbling electric grid repaired and maintained properly. It’s too big, obsolete, and made of hundreds of independent power stations, often hard to interconnect for back-up when or several of them shut down.
The grid will continue to fall into obsolescence, given the current public-private partnerships, which don’t work very well. Definitely not with with insufficiently educated bachelors suffocated by debts and educated in sciences and maths as complex as those involved in electricity, with tele-education. That’s ridiculous.
It’s too late now.
When the millions die freezing in the dark in the Cloaqua Maxima, remember all the Gamers that played our life, jobs, and house while China was kissing the Titanic goodbye.
Remember all these pseudo – scientists of the Mac-Coit 19 and their politicians and media liars, when they need Imperial Watts to power their radio tx, tablets, cell phones, because of massive power shut-downs.
“The bank does not consider your deposit as an asset to them – only a liability.
The bank does not use your deposit to make loans.”
“Any savings that you have in the bank are a loss they would rather not pay interest on.”
And they don’t! interest rates payed by banks are minimal, they are collecting the spread.
Banks use peoples’ deposits to buy treasuries, to get more interest. Isn’t that right?
I perhaps should have used ‘used to’: QE, ZIRP and NIRP have resulted in banks taking IOER, and holding less treasuries, but they are still collecting the spread.
Well yea – terms get confused. The Hebrews indeed were from “the other side”. That other side being what we would not call Northern Iraq. The term “Jews” was meant to refer to the tribe of Judah. Most have no clue who that even is now…
I like Mr. Hudson’s description of the problem (I’ve read J is for Junk and Killing the Host, btw). But there seems to be something missing from the overall economic picture in the west that is somewhat disconcerting to us all.
Firstly, a common solution such as a debt jubilee seems to be somewhat elusive because there are different ‘groups/cabals’ operating in the west at cross purposes. Examples of these ‘groups’ are the self-proclaimed descendants of the founding fathers (the ‘People’ referred to in legalese) that control the ‘state’ structural systems (judiciary, representative govt/statutory bases, military, intelligence groups, education/indoctrination, etc.). Then there are the organized crime ‘groups’ that seem to not really care what the ‘People’ do, because while they set up legitimate businesses, they also have a ‘military/strong-arm/rule-by-force’ arm that allows them to permeate US society without regard to consequences (that is, undermine the social contract), moving from wealth location to wealth location (such as happened to CA, OR, and WA) so society can never have the resources to achieve well-being. Then there are tight-knit ethnic groups (operating similar to ‘organized crime’ groups) operating on various agendas with respect to [delusional] socio-religious or master-race objectives that again permeate societal structures in a way to game/defeat the legal/financial/sociological/educational-indoctrination aspects to obtain narrow objectives. Then there are groups/individuals who have accumulated a large amount of society’s wealth, have legally walled that wealth off from oversight, and are seemingly allowed to operate independent of the social contract to create whatever mayhem they [delusionally] consider for society’s benefit. Finally, there are groups/individuals from offshore who have accumulated large sums of wealth, and have a historical animosity toward the country or a specific [delusional] ideology and work to undermine the social contract to obtain their ‘legal right’ or ‘rule of God’ type belief systems.
When one looks at all these different groups, one common thread appears – each group is allowed to accumulate wealth in such a way that creates unrestrained ‘kingdoms’ with (loosely-termed) militaries or terrorist departments to enforce their ideologies/objectives. And of course everyone knows that having money makes one more intelligent, and the more money one has the more intelligent one becomes, and when that money is backed by force one can become virtually God-like – especially if one is [self-] isolated from the consequences of one’s actions. (/sarc). A corollary of this is the ‘God-granted’ power to decide what is best for humanity based on accumulation of ‘wealth’ and backup by force – if indeed humanity’s well-being/survival or the “group’s” well-being/survival be the goal.
And so, even with a debt jubilee this organizational structure (the real ‘swamp’) will still be at work, and no real societal progress will be made.
While there are too many people who are much more intelligent than I, it seems a good starting point for a country-wide recovery would have to start with some sort of enforced re-organization, while minimizing the antagonism of individual ‘stakeholders’. I have an opinion on what can be done, but other commenters assuredly also have. But the first principle seems to be to limit the accumulation of wealth to limit the destructive nature of wealth accumulation. Secondly, society has to have a goal in mind, a set of projects that will push the country in a [mostly] positive direction. One can observe that the post-WWII Japanese economy was guided in this way and produced fantastic results (only to have this system destroyed by Western financial experts [envy anyone?). I’ve always been impressed that the US Federal Reserve thinks that only supplying credit is a suitable replacement for actual planning to achieve a overall societal, short-term, and long-term economic [growth] plan [which is just stupid … (perhaps like me!)]. A final part of an overall correction plan is to arrange for a broader discussion on what is considered ‘philantropic’ and no monies can be spent on a ‘philanthropic endeavour’ unless there is overall approval of the benefit for the well-being of humanity/country as a whole.
Wolff has a similar view as Hudson here:
Made Public Sector the Fall Guy’: US Free Market Fetishism Drives Failure to Combat COVID-19
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202010081080712915-made-public-sector-the-fall-guy-us-free-market-fetishism-drives-failure-to-combat-covid-19/
“US Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the Trump administration’s effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, was tasked on Wednesday night with defending his work to Harris, whose ticket with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeks to displace him and Trump in the election next month. However, despite potentially easy pickings for Harris, she failed to present a real alternative program for limiting the spread of infections and deaths caused by the virus.
Richard Wolff, and economist and professor at New York’s New School and the author of “The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself,” told Radio Sputnik’s By Any Means Necessary on Thursday that like Trump and Pence, Biden and Harris look to the private sector to solve problems it has already proven incapable of solving.
Wolff noted the wildly huge disparity in deaths in the US from COVID-19 as compared to China. In the US, with a population of 328 million, some 210,000 people have died from the illness, but in China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, fewer than 5,000 people have perished from the disease.
“That’s beyond words of failure. America is 4.5% of the population of the world … but we have 25% of the world’s COVID cases and 25% of the world’s COVID deaths. We are a rich country with a well-developed medical system.”
“But then you have to come up with a really adequate solution to something that is so outstanding and so terrible a problem – and she didn’t,” Wolff told hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman.
“For example: we have tens of millions of unemployed people – why didn’t the government hire them and send them across this country to test everybody in the way that other countries are doing that could deal with this coronavirus? There’s no excuse for that except the ideology that the private sector is the way things should be done, and therefore if the private sector isn’t getting around to doing it, well then somehow it doesn’t get done,” Wolff said.
“Other countries don’t do that. If the private sector doesn’t function, the government steps in and takes care of it, because it has to get done. What happened in this country is that we’ve made the public sector the fall guy and made it a joke and made it an unwanted intrusion upon the private sector. But then you got to blame the private sector – which is more powerful in this country than any other on this planet. That private sector really failed us. It failed to maintain the public health. And what in the world could be a more basic obligation of any economic system than to secure our protection from the viruses that have been a problem for human beings for tens of thousands of years?”
“This is a proof for me that the capitalist economic system that we have isn’t adequate any more,” Wolff told Sputnik.
“We have no reason to hold onto it. It may be profitable for the people who play the stock market, for the 1% – I get that, it’s good for them. But for the mass of people, what we’re seeing – in the millions that are unemployed, in the 210,000 dead people from this virus that we didn’t manage the way other countries have – that’s a sign of a system that’s over, that’s dying, that’s declining and to which we should be saying a quick goodbye.”
Giving consideration to the current US financial infrastructure, one can make highly probably statements regarding the current US situation (COVID, election, etc.).
1. Given that that alpha-dog (the one receiving the lion’s share of the payoffs) are the descendants of the founding ‘People’, it is highly probable that the 2020 election is just for show (a PSYOP) and it has already been decided that Trump will be re-elected. A corollary to this would be that Trump (as was Obama) already has received a rather large ‘donation’ for his efforts and cooperation. In this case, no economic theory or corrective measures will be entertained.
2. Given that the current situation is a PSYOP and COVID is a real threat (I know, I’ve had it and think it is being sprayed using the rather obvious geoengineering effort – and that a ‘reservoir’ exists that can be used in any situation, e.g. spraying at a targeted group during a press conference), what’s really happening is in fact a massive eugenics effort to reduce the world population. This seems rather obvious considering the breadbasket of the country has essentially had no rain since mid-July and massive rainfall over China has essentially wiped out its food crops for this winter. Again, in this case, no economic theory or corrective measure will be entertained.
3. Compared to the main ‘groups/cabals’, the average person is expendable. It looks like normal rank-and-file people are being slowly heated in a pot not realizing they are being boiled. In this case, no economic theory will work because all societal support for the world’s people has already or is in the process of being removed. We will see more an more people die off in larger and larger numbers beginning this winter.
4. The only way to change the course of current events is for new external forces to be applied to the ‘groups/cabals’. My opinion is this is likely to happen (as Putin has already mentioned they are/have been developing weapons with no current analogs), because the Western weapons system are all based on electron flow in increasing complex patterns. New weapons systems taking advantage of the space-inherent properties to support electrons (and matter, in general) could easily defeat all Western weapons systems – even if the Schauberger style devices are in Western military hands. There will be no time for Western military analysts to counter this threat because the development timeline is too long. Again, no economic structural changes like a debt jubilee will be of use.
5. I’m going to go a bit into the woo-woo camp here, because even though I’m an engineer by training and experience, I’m also an experienced meditator and student of Qi Gong and Nei Gong (having been trained by masters during SE Asian assignments). If the average person would like to preserve himself (sorry ladies – masculine predominates in grammar as I was taught) then it would be necessary to start learning Qi Gong now following the Nei Gong path. About two-thirds way through the Nei Gong path, groups of approximately eight-to-ten practitioners sit in a circle of about 15-30 ft in diameter, hold their right hand up (upper arm parallel to the ground) and to the side palms facing the center of the circle, left hand facing, but not touching, the navel area, and with coordinated relaxed, soft concentration focus on a desired (positive/defensive/offensive – as needed) objective while projecting that toward the center of the circle as a group. Again, economic theories and constructs or corrective measure like a debt jubilee pales here because it’s a man-made construct and not inherently part of our universe. [An anyway, we as human beings are embedded in the universe and what makes up the universe comprises human being’s structural and conscious characteristics, and we therefore have the ability to directly affect the universe thereby. We are no separate mechanical objects in the universe.]
Given that you are an Engineer P.Eng it would seem reasonable to delineate via Quantum Mechanics or Quantum Physics IMHO.
I’m Mechanical Engineering and Experimental Psychology so I know both consciousness and Quantum Mechanics/Physics intuitively.
Eastern Mysticism is anathema to Christian nations like the USA.
RW
Redlining has to do with the neighborhood. The neighborhood had high default rates. So, on a map, you can draw a line around that area. So, loans made on those properties got less favorable terms especially when the borrowers also had financial circumstances that made it likely that they would have difficulty making the payments. A person of any ethnicity could be a high risk borrow such as this, but, yes, many were minorities.
It is kind of a chicken/ egg situation of what came first the borrowers financial problems or his loan default.
How many people under the age of 40 have died from covid?
How many people under the age of 40 died from the 1918 flu?
There is a massive difference between losing old sick people and losing young healthy people.
If a person dies at 65 of covid, his heirs end up with whatever his estate is. If he lives to 75, more likely he consumes his entire estate plus a ton of $$ from the public purse for medicare and ss. Covid meant more $$ went to regular folks rather than corporations. Everyone who died from covid cost less in medical care than had they lived longer on average. Covid doesn’t take years to kill you. No bypass surgery, no rehab, no nursing home, no chemo and other expensive stuff. Yes, lots of immediate costs, but lots of people who would have required far more expensive later care are now gone. It is sad if it is a person you loved, but economically not a disaster.
As usual, Dr. Michael Hudson is correct.
His observations especially focused on Americans citizen’s personal debt: 14.3 TRILLION DOLLARS. AKA:
car payments
credit card usage
mortgage payments
health care debt
student debt
Much of that debt has to do with increasingly low wages falling since the end of the US’s Industrial days: starting in the early 1970s when “Neo-liberal” thinking became the mantra.
Unlike parts of Southern European nations, it’s the millions of Americans who are the most vulnerable. Vulnerable to the vast riches of the top 5% wealthiest who have greatly benefited from America’s capitalist intentions.
In the EU, citizens are NOT allowed to go into debt. There’s a ceiling level that cuts off any citizens from spending being their means.
The opposite is found in America. Looked like an easy-ride to enrich citizens with tech toys, new cars, a bigger home, and nice vacations. Most of that “free lunch” stopped, especially with Covid tactics where we see large amounts of empty stores, markets, and highly constricted “public services” forced to cut down on costs with everything restructured using Big Tech.
And the worst part is that a huge majority of Americans, hugely ignorant of how Big Money and our Politicians operate.
You can see this vast ignorance in what many commenters here are saying. But those who think they understand, are gravely mistaken.
That’s what makes for the Great Tragedy for many millions of Americans.