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Paul Craig Roberts Warns "The US Economy Is A House Of Cards"
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
The US economy is a house of cards. Every aspect of it is fraudulent, and the illusion of recovery is created with fraudulent statistics.
American capitalism itself is an illusion. All financial markets are rigged. Massive liquidity poured into financial markets by the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing inflates stock and bond prices and drives interest rates, which are supposed to be a measure of the cost of capital, to zero or negative, with the implication that capital is so abundant that its cost is zero and can be had for free. Large enterprises, such as mega-banks and auto manufacturers, that go bankrupt are not permitted to fail. Instead, public debt and money creation are used to cover private losses and keep corporations “too big to fail” afloat at the expense not of shareholders but of people who do not own the shares of the corporations.
Profits are no longer a measure that social welfare is being served by capitalism’s efficient use of resources when profits are achieved by substituting cheaper foreign labor for domestic labor, with resultant decline in consumer purchasing power and rise in income and wealth inequality. In the 21st century, the era of jobs offshoring, the US has experienced an unprecedented explosion in income and wealth inequality. I have made reference to this hard evidence of the failure of capitalism to provide for the social welfare in the traditional economic sense in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, and Thomas Piketty’s just published book, Capital in the 21st Century, has brought an alarming picture of reality to insouciant economists, such as Paul Krugman. As worrisome as Piketty’s picture is of inequality, I agree with Michael Hudson that the situation is worse than Piketty describes. http://michael-hudson.com/2014/04/pikettys-wealth-gap-wake-up/
Capitalism has been transformed by powerful private interests whose control over governments, courts, and regulatory agencies has turned capitalism into a looting mechanism. Wall Street no longer performs any positive function. Wall Street is a looting mechanism, a deadweight loss to society. Wall Street makes profits by front-running trades with fast computers, by selling fraudulent financial instruments that it is betting against as investment grade securities, by leveraging equity to unprecedented heights, making bets that cannot be covered, and by rigging all commodity markets.
The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury’s “Plunge Protection Team” aid the looting by supporting the stock market with purchases of stock futures, and protect the dollar from the extraordinary money-printing by selling naked shorts into the Comex gold futures market.
The US economy no longer is based on education, hard work, free market prices and the accountability that real free markets impose. Instead, the US economy is based on manipulation of prices, speculative control of commodities, support of the dollar by Washington’s puppet states, manipulated and falsified official statistics, propaganda from the financial media, and inertia by countries, such as Russia and China, who are directly harmed, both economically and politically, by the dollar payments system.
As the governments in most of the rest of the world are incompetent, Washington’s incompetence doesn’t stand out, and this is Washington’s salvation.
But it is not a salvation for Americans who live under Washington’s rule. As all statistical evidence makes completely clear, the share of income and wealth going to the bulk of the US population is declining. This decline means the end of the consumer market that has been the mainstay of the US economy. Now that the mega-rich have even more disproportionate shares of the income and wealth, what happens to an economy based on selling imports and off-shored production of goods and services to a domestic consumer market? How do the vast majority of Americans purchase more when their incomes have not grown for years and have even declined and they are too impoverished to borrow more from banks that won’t lend?
The America in which I grew up was self-sufficient. Foreign trade was a small part of the economy. When I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the US still had a trade surplus except for oil. Offshoring of America’s jobs had not begun, and US earnings on its foreign investments exceeded foreign earnings on US investments. Therefore, America’s earnings abroad covered its energy deficit in its balance of trade.
The economic stability achieved during the Reagan administration was shattered by Wall Street greed. Wall Street threatened corporations with takeovers if the corporations did not produce higher profits by relocating their production of goods and services for American markets abroad. The lower labor costs boosted earnings and stock prices and satisfied Wall Street’s cravings for ever more earnings, but brought an end to the rise in US living standards except for the mega-rich. Financial deregulation loaded the economy with the risks of asset bubbles.
Americans are an amazingly insouciant people. By now any other people would have burnt Wall Street to the ground.
Washington has unique subjects. Americans will take endless abuse and blame some outside government for their predicament–Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, China, Russia. Such an insouciant and passive people are ideal targets for looting, and their economy, hollowed-out by looting, is a house of cards.
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My gut feeling is capitalism works best with growth, but doesn't require it. Capitalism is ideally a mechanism for efficiency. However, the "frontier" (which we arguably no longer have in the classic sense) acts as a way to allow escape from failed/failing systems. Without the frontier's growth potential, we have to be better and smarter (oops), because resource constraints often lead to ....
No, deception is not what makes life possible for human beings. What makes life possible for human beings is production.
True, perhaps 0.1% of the current human population of earth could survive as predators, by simply grabbing goods that the natural processes of the earth environment create.
So, make your choice. Kill off 999 out of 1000 humans and those few who remain can live the life of cavemen... and good luck to them. Life will be tough and uncomfortable, and most people alive today would probably kill themselves out of sheer unwillingness to tolerate such a difficult life.
What humans need to understand is... only human production can feed the other 99.9% of the current human population. No form of deception produces goods, much less all the goods required to keep 99.9% of human population alive. The role of deception is to shift a large percentage of goods produced by productive humans into the pockets of human predators... NOT to produce anything. So yes, deception is rampant in the modern world, but AT BEST only shifts the productive consequences of the actions of productive humans to the pockets of deceptive predatory humans, and shift the destructive consequences of human predators onto human producers.
The system cannot be saved. What's worse, humans cannot be saved. At this point in history, the vast majority of humans are terminally STUPID and shall remain utterly controlled by the brainwashing controlled by the predators-that-be. And so the current system will continue until the corruption of the predators kill off the species (with larger or more equivalents of the gross, blatant irresponsibility of Fukashima perhaps).
You could run for President in a bid to save us.
I'll leave that to Adam Kokesh.
:-)
"The America in which I grew up was self-sufficient. Foreign trade was a small part of the economy. When I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the US still had a trade surplus except for oil. Offshoring of America’s jobs had not begun, and US earnings on its foreign investments exceeded foreign earnings on US investments. Therefore, America’s earnings abroad covered its energy deficit in its balance of trade."
I love PCR, but he's got a sentimental weakness that seems to forbid him from digging down just one more notch to discover the fundamental realities of the world. PCR never looks at the fact that growth is exponential and as such the energy deficit was only ever going to get worse. No civilization/society has ever proven "self-sufficient" (which is why none exist today). US population has increased 40% since 1980; oil imports, though having tapered off signficantly in the past few years, is up 13% since then. The "serivce" economy started to take root back in the 80s; it saw a big jump in the financial sector as the manufacturing sector started to decline; the ramp-down of manufacturing in the US pretty much translate to China's ramping up (in addition to South Korea and Taiwan). Energy/oil demands starting back in 1980 can be see in this graph:
http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/oil_consu...
Note how the US's oil consumption dropped off in the 80s (slow ramp up until the housing bubble bust) and how China's has rocketed.
In order for there to be REAL jobs there needs to be production, and production requires energy. I htink that PCR would be well served by spending some time with Gail Tverberg.
I wish that ZH would change this stupid voting shit such that you couldn't vote w/o making some sort of comment. This is all pretty serious stuff, and to just do drive-by down-voting when someone presents some actual data (rather than some stupid fucking rant) is a big diservice to us all.
Fucking children...
I so agree with you. What's the point of assigning plus or minus 1 "brownie point" or throwing verbal stones around if nobody ever thinks or learns anything, and nobody is willing to ever question their own ideas?
You are absolutely spot on correct to point out that some of the very best commentators are unwilling (?or unable?) to drill down the one or two additional levels to arrive at REALITY, which is where all the practical answers are.
Even though I disagree with you around the edges now and then, I appreciate that you take the topics seriously and attempt to identify and address what matters.
Sigh, I appreciate you taking the time to post. I was wishing, however, that there woiuld be responses to what set off my rant, not to the rant itself (which had little value for discussion as relates to the article).
seer - i personally try not to comment, although a few drinks in and getting annoyed, i usually do, and usually regret it (i guess why bother, but NSA has my number already. no drones yet). and i would rather just give a + or - to someone that has expressed already something that i had thought of, or had not thought of and realized was of some value. the majority of people here are adults and not just 'being a friend'. it is fight club. you are allowed to wrong, but you have to be strong.
"the majority of people here are adults and not just 'being a friend'. it is fight club."
I'd always thought that "fight club" meant to not hold back. I DON'T view "voting" as really fighting...
Oh, and I'm NOT looking for "friends." I am, however, wanting to engage in conservations about things that influence our world.
Well, I didn't want to restart our fundamental argument about energy again. We can agree that we disagree about that... though probably because we adopt different contexts. I point out that PLENTY of energy is available for every human being to live a quality life. Every morning an unshielded nuclear fusion reactor appears in the east and then sets in the west 12 hours later. If half of the military budget was spent on solar energy collection, that would pay for enough solar panels to supply 100% of the energy required for a quality life. And guess what? Why does the USSA even need a military except to steal energy from others? So... obviously they don't need to steal energy, just divert their military budget to energy. Plus, that's only the sun! Virtually the entire volume of earth is very hot, and plenty of freaking magma is known to be close to the surface in many places.
The bottom line is... there is plenty of energy, and plenty of room for 10 billion human beings to live a quality life. That's a fact. However, that is NOT what I personally want. If I even have to live on a planet, I'd prefer to live on a planet with somewhere between 7,000 and [at most] 7,000,000 individuals. So personally I HATE population, and consider earth grossly overpopulated for purposes of my personal preference.
Which means, though I agree in spades with your sentiment (less population and less waste), I'm afraid the facts don't agree.
... HOWEVER ...
If you add a premise to this question that predators rule the earth as they do today, the gross inefficiencies and endless corruption will indeed assure the world has severe "energy problems" in the fairly near future.
IF you add that premise, then we'd have to agree. I'm not willing to add that premise in my conversations because... I am not willing to accept overt, blatant, endless, unlimited domination by predators and corruption in my life, or my conversations. Think about it, that premise assumes a certain kind of human behavior (predatory behavior and corruption) is an absolutely fixed and necessary feature of reality --- but reality and physics is not!
Sadly, I can't argue that honest, ethical, productive, benevolent humans will never stand up to (defend themselves against) dishonest, unethical, destructive, malevolent human predators... because I've seen enough to be confident THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. And therefore, humans are finished.
If that sounds like "the end of the story" for mankind as a whole, IT IS. However, a very small number of serious, diligent, dedicated honest, ethical, productive, benevolent human beings can find ways to evade [and collaborate with each other]. In the short term they can live a better life, and they can invest much more of their productive output to implement the next steps required, rather than fund predators. And in the longer run, they can in fact escape the domain the predators control and establish a "spin off species" for lack of a better term.
ONLY by abandoning the vast, vast, vast majority of sheeple-chimps on planet earth can the most capable escape the predators grasp. Every attempt to "convert the entire system" (even of just one fictitious nation) is sure to be co-opted or destroyed by predators. It has happened every time, and will continue to happen every time. Perhaps all the optimists who imagine "the system can be fixed" should think a while about what Einstein said about "repeating the same actions and expecting different results".
One might ask, why is it impossible for mankind to overcome the predators? In essence, everyone hoping for a rise of liberty believes the human predators can be beaten. But the predators cannot be beaten... especially not at this point in history and technological development.
Why?
Because of a simple and unavoidable fact of reality: destruction is vastly more potent and powerful than production. At root, THIS is the reason predators always win, and WILL always win (from this point forward).
Think about this fundamental fact for a second.
production: How much time, effort, expertise and resources (money) is required to build and furnish a home?
destruction: How much time, effort, expertise and resources (money) is required to destroy a home?
The answer is obvious. Some complete moron can set a house on fire with a free match given a few seconds of effort, and completely destroy the home. At the very most he might spend a dollar or three for gasoline to assure he achieves complete destruction.
In contrast, to build and furnish a home requires a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of expertise, and a lot of resources (money).
Which is why... predators only need to THREATEN to destroy to convince the vast majority of human beings to SUBMIT and allow themselves to be enslaved.
This dynamic is AN INHERENT FACT OF REALITY... in the environment we call earth.
And therefore, every conventional effort, and every widespread effort non-predators make to escape their servitude is inherent hopeless... by the nature of reality.
However, individuals who are observant might notice a couple "escape clauses" in this formulation. If "conventional efforts" and "widespread efforts" are inherently futile, what about "non-conventional efforts" and "non-widespread efforts"?
Sure enough, therein lies a couple possible ways out. However, to have any chance of success, an individual must abandon all hope to achieve any widespread success. That will not happen, because the predators can apply the vastly more potent and powerful nature of destruction against you.
So... give up politics, give up argumentation, give up changing the world... and... what? Answer: look for extremely small scale ways to achieve independence from the predators. One of the most important realizations can be characterized with an important cliche, namely "out of sight, out of mind".
Which means, identify places (perhaps the boonies) and activities that keep you out of sight of the predators (and everyone else caught up in their system).
The first part generally involves some degree of physical isolation and/or camouflage. The second part can be achieved in ways as simple as "cash businesses" and "offshore expenses" and "never live or function where you are considered a citizen == slave".
In the longer run, the necessary solution is to leave planet earth. The finite size of earth is precisely what makes the "threaten and steal" modus-operandi practiced by the predators so very easy to implement and expand. The denser the population, the more difficult it is to avoid the notice of predators, and to avoid their destructive actions.
Before modern times, individuals who were brave enough, smart enough, creative enough, resourceful enough and independent enough... could get fed up with the predators-that-be (wherever they lived), and simply move to some frontier to escape those predators.
Sadly, since every piece of land on the planet is now claimed by some pack of predators or other, this approach is now more difficult. However, "claimed" is not what matters, but "enforced" is. Which is why one can still apply this "move to a frontier" approach... though they must implement this in somewhat less straightforward way than when literal frontiers existed on earth.
Today, one can still move to certain places in the boonies, or "extreme boonies", and set up a moderately self-sufficient life that is for practical purposes "out of sight and out of mind" of the predators-that-be. Especially with 2 to 8 collaborators, quite an excellent life can be established (or even by 1 individual with sufficient expertise and savings). This is what I did 3 years ago, and I remain very glad I did. I would think more individuals would get tired of complaining and voting and otherwise wasting their time... and take actions that actually work, including this idea.
Incidentally, the single most effective way to become largely "out of sight, out of mind" is to live somewhere on the planet where you are NOT considered a "citizen" or "official permanent resident". By this one simple action you "magically" appear to predators as "a welcome guest spending outside money into their economy" rather than "a slave to be endlessly impoverished, enslaved and abused". This one action is sooooo simple and sooooo effective, I almost say "if you don't take this action, you definitely don't care enough about liberty to experience any".
However, in the long run, the predators-that-be will make remaining "out of sight, out of mind" more and more difficult. Which is why humans must find a way to move into outer space. This restores the dynamics of what used to be called "frontier" on planet earth... but does so thoroughly and permanently.
The volume of space, even just within this one solar system, is so enormous... that predators cannot dominate... not even nominally rich and powerful predators. First of all, an individual or collaboration of a few [dozen or hundred or thousand] individuals can easily make themselves utterly impossible to find. Furthermore, even if some idiotic predator managed to find them, the energy required to attempt to travel to their location, steal their goodies, and drag them back home... would vastly exceed the value of the goods stolen. Furthermore, the predators would be such incredibly easy targets as they approach in the utter openness of outer space, while those they were chasing could hide out deep inside asteroids and be impervious even to nuclear explosions.
I could write a whole book about this topic, but the bottom line remains the same --- the predators will [have to ] remain content with enslaving the 99.9999999% of human beings who remain on planet earth. Given that "faster than light" travel is inherently impossible, the predators cannot ever create anything even remotely like the "galactic empire" portrayed in StarWars and other movies. In fact, they could not create anything even remotely like the universe portrayed in Firefly and Serenity either.
Disclaimer: I don't want the predators on earth to dominate. But I do not practice self-deception, and hate to waste my time and effort on hopeless causes. And 100% of the evidence is... the overwhelmingly vast majority of human beings on earth will remain sheeple-chimps... as long as human life on earth exists.
Yeah, and I'm just some dumb hick living out in the backwoods, so I really cannot fathom the concept of unlimited "free" and all-providing energy...
These were claims made for oil and for nuclear (here on earth), and while solar energy is a different case, the equation is the same. That is, one cannot state that there is enough of something without providing for current and future needs/uses. Further, "collection" is a lot more than what most people think (if they even think about it at all*).
I'm sure that you and others have it all worked out, but I'm just not feeling all that secure that you know what the affects will be. Earth's system has a balance and I'm not so certain that one can go about intercepting solar radiation in some large way without altering weather patterns. Farming is real sensitive to soil temps.
* Had a local person claim that there was all sorts of energy available from a local grass (not switch grass) for use for making ethanol. I'll give the person the benefit of the doubt. BUT, there's the energy issue of collecting that grass! I have a lot of folks haying around me so I have a bit of a clue as to what it takes to actually cut, windrow, collect and "package," store, and if it's to consumed/processed off-site, hauling/shipping of this "grass." Have to say, people in the hay-making business aren't actually making a killing (and now that a lot of folks are losing their ponies there's a big hit on the "economies of scale" front).
And with the "energy" situation all "solved," what about the other resources? What about the physical space in which to wedge ourselves into? Or, are you expecting to have your energy solution all to yourself (along with the "predators" and TPTB)?
"Disclaimer: I don't want the predators on earth to dominate."
What you or I want matters little. Predators cannot exist without prey. Too little prey and the predator populations decline as well. But this discussion (at this point) isn't to the level as experienced raw and in nature: having had to bury one of my critters today after having a real "predator" experience. Humans, as Peter Kropotkin wrote in his book Mutal Aid, tend to be more cooperative than combative and that this is borne out by our very numbers (7+ BILLION- if we were really horrible then we wouldn't likely have been able to achieve such numbers; however, since the dawn of the oil age, on the whole, our desire to be a lot more friendly toward each other has increased).
""But I do not practice self-deception"
Are you sure? </sarc>
"But I do not practice self-deception, and hate to waste my time and effort on hopeless causes. And 100% of the evidence is... the overwhelmingly vast majority of human beings on earth will remain sheeple-chimps... as long as human life on earth exists."
Not going to garner a lot of friends with views like that! </sarc> But, more seriously, if there's nothing that can be done about the entirety of the human condition then what can people really do? Ever think that a lot of those whom you believe/think are sheep are aware of how fucked up things are and that, rather than pound their heads on hard objects, they decide to just go about experiencing life? Here's some of the people that you are referring to (this is where my wife is from- I'm slightly familiar with the area):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/thehousekeeper/sets/72157624907237786
Just one real, physical data-point to hopefully help you get at least a vague grasp on the solar energy issue. ALL my electric power comes from solar panels that I purchased and installed outside. Though I didn't adopt this approach, the area required to power a home is approximately the surface area of the roof of a moderate size home, unless you are some kind of power-glutton.
The only other energy I consume is gasoline to fuel my airplane, which I actually don't need to fly more than 3 or 4 times per year to stock up on supplies, though I like to fly around quite a bit more often than that. However, my airplane gets 75 miles per gallon, so the additional energy consumption of my airplane is minor. I also grow my own food, so I don't consume additional energy for that.
The fact is, the amount of surface area necessary to power the USSA with solar panels is easily available, and has no significant or negative impacts on anything. The reason these kind of solutions are not possible is manyfold, but the fact that predators-that-be consume and misdirect and waste such huge quantities of resources produced by producers is the problem. I can assure you one thing. If government just shut down, energy would be cheap, plentiful and affordable. The only reasons serious problems exist is the predators-DBA-government who cause and intensify problems in order to justify their existence (as they PRETEND to solve the problems but obviously never do).
honestann,
Effective FTL travel has been theorized to be possible by warping space locally around the ship (yup, we're talking warp drive). Originally, the energy equivalent of the mass of Jupiter was required:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
But later I read there was a new wrinkle (pun intended) on the concept where only the rest mass of a volkswagen was needed. Sorry, no link, but that's a VERY nice reduction in energy!
Sure, people propose all sorts of crazy theories. I doubt anyone will ever find a way to achieve FTL. Hopefully I'm wrong, but that's my educated guess.
No offense, but if it builds upon Einstein's theories, I think it has the potential to be very clever, and I doubt the physicists involved are actually crazy. Who so pessimistic?
Partly because I have seen these kinds of theories come and go. They have never panned out in the past, and almost all of them are actually pure speculation, not really legitimate theories. It is easy to create speculations and call them theories, but that is almost always a waste of time and enthusiasm.
Hey, I've been a scientist, engineer, inventor and product developer my whole career, which means I'm always on the lookout for new possibilities, and I'm pretty damn good at figuring out which ideas are possible, feasible or likely to pan out, and which are not.
Sadly, most scientists today have been programmed to generate interest and enthusiasm in order to help justify their salaries, so no longer can we take any of these kinds of claims seriously without investigating them carefully and in detail ourselves. Sad but true.
The fact that you seem so concerned about what others think of your comments indicates that you have self esteem issues. Why do you feel the need to come to this website to express your thoughts and have the readers here provide you with the confirmation you, apparently, desire? I sincerely feel sympathy for you. I genuinely can't imagine how awful it must feel to be concerned about how complete strangers react to my comments or how they feel about me after reading my comments. I have two recommendations: 1) get professional help, soon; 2) stop taking yourself, and ZH, so seriously. But, don't get me wrong, when it comes down to it...........I don't care what you do, think, say, or how you feel about this comment.
I tried again and again to point people like you at their glaring misconception of "exponential energy [use needed for exponential growth]"
Nowhere is it written that (overall) energy use has to increase in lockstep with (overall) growth.
You can have growth (measured in needfulness for the populace, which determines it's price and therefore GDP or economic growth), even lots of growth or basically unlimited, by producing things that use less energy than the ones they replace.
"I tried again and again to point people like you at their glaring misconception of "exponential energy [use needed for exponential growth]"
And I'm still waiting on people like you to actually demonstrate how it's possible. No numbers. No nothing other than "'true' free trade/capitalism" will solve it all.
"Nowhere is it written that (overall) energy use has to increase in lockstep with (overall) growth."
w=fd
It's NOT w=d. Force means applied energy. KInd of hard to get any work done without energy.
"You can have growth (measured in needfulness for the populace, which determines it's price and therefore GDP or economic growth), even lots of growth or basically unlimited, by producing things that use less energy than the ones they replace."
But isn't this describing a ratcheting down? And when one has ratcheted down, then what? Ultimately it's: w=fd that we have to contend with: "producing things" requires work, which requires energy.
GDP is gobblygook. We show cleanup of environmental waste sites as being "productive." It does nothing to provide for Food, Shelter or Water: though it might make these more possible, it doesn't use energy directly on them.
I know GDP is a crook, but you have not given me any clear definition how you understand "growth" so I must use something, and I also added "needfulness for the populace" as a more general term.
Why do you fear a ratcheting down?
The typical example for such is function 1/x, it gets closer and closer to 0 but in reality it never reaches zero as time never reaches infinity.
And in this here discussed case the ratcheting down is not towards zero, but at a minimum towards the currently available sustainable amount of energy harvested from the sun. (So PV, solar thermal, wind, hydroelectric, biomass up to wood.)
And as we are starting with a non-miniscule overall amount of energy available E, cutting some use of it down by innovation can free up quite a bit for other uses. (Not to forget the other side that we are very, very far from using all or just a significant part of available E coming constantly from the sun.)
But these guys' answers are always "more regulation, "more government" and "more taxes" ~ but only on "the rich"...
Government CREATED the problems. We need better answers...
"But these guys' answers are always "more regulation, "more government" and "more taxes" ~ but only on "the rich"..."
"always" and "never" are words that should be used cautiously.
I agree that there is more "management" going on. I would like for there to be a more detailed discussion as to WHY: it's too easy to just toss out the typical political lines and feel that those have the "answers."
"Government CREATED the problems. We need better answers..."
We need better QUESTIONS!
Governments and industry have been linked from the hip since day one.
Read a bit about Cecil Rhodes: http://www.pbs.org/empires/victoria/empire/rhodes.html
If you believe this don't blame industry. They're only taking advantage of government...yet people think government action is the solution.
"If you believe this don't blame industry. They're only taking advantage of government...yet people think government action is the solution."
I blame BOTH.
Also, there is no "solution" because the problem still isn't identified: and I don't believe in the word anyway.
Who owns the game-- Who runs the show-- Cui Bono? Are the only questions to be asked--
Most, but by no means all, here, know the answers very well, and it pisses them off plenty-- but the great proportion of American voters-- let's say the 45 million who actually voted to put sara palin a heartbeat away-- those folks certainly have no idea-- along with a high percentage of the other sheep.
Only when a sufficient % of the public grasps the truth and consequence of what PCRoberrts (and otherts) are telling us-- can there be change. Our contribution is to spread the word.
"Change" for change's sake is meaningless.
I don't like a lot of things that are going on, but I KNOW that hanging bankers and politicians isn't going to resolve our fundamental problems.
PCR believes that brining jobs back to "America" is what is required. I think that this notion sells well, and perhaps PCR really means well and is just suffering a bit of naivete. The problem is that this does nothing to support consumption as most things anymore require taking on debt to finance, or would still be out of reach when one figures that everyone's broke now and that producing and consuming internally doesn't build up wealth. This plea only sets the stage for the already broke citizens to pay for retreating companies (from abroad) to facilitate them relocating, downsizing and increasing automation, offering only handfuls of human jobs.
I like PCR, but I like logic above all else.
Agreed -- also, how does one "bring back jobs" without protectionism? Again, there is the overall efficiency issue ....
It's too funny when people say that the FED doesn't know what it is doing and the government is full of idiots, as if the Keystone Cops were running the show. Nothing could be further from the truth. For all intents and purposes, everything is going according to plan. To borrow a phrase from Kubrick, it's "Eyes Wide Shut" around most of the world. The "Big Lie" continues to convince, fool and rule the day. Psychopaths have always been running the show. It is no small feat to control the minds of billions of people. If you can beat "Big Blue" in chess, then maybe you can avoid the fate planned for this little planet.
Pop, I think that the confusion lie in people's inability to separate the message from the messenger. People seemingly tend to poke at the messengers as being stupid when it's the message that's stupid. The conveyed "messages" are meant for distraction, so, yeah, shouldn't be any confusion about those being idiotic*.
* Hell, when we're operating under the premise of perpetual growth on a finite planet then everything is just an extention of STUPID (even if the part itself might not be stupid).
"If you can beat "Big Blue" in chess, then maybe you can avoid the fate planned for this little planet."
There was a Star Trek episode in which Capt Kirk explains how he kept from failing "the" big test at the Star Trek Academy. Basically he cheated. He explained that since the objective was to not lose he looked outside of the test parameters which were designed only to allow failure; having noticed this Kirk opted to "think outside the box." So, on that note, I'd look to unplug Big Blue and call it "game over" :-)
The Big Liars have a tough job. They have to convince the masses that all is OK. I'm not ready to come to the conclusion that the motives go any farther than just maintaining power, I'm tending to believe that the System has some sense of benevolence in it yet. It can only but end in collapse, so whether we go out with the music playing or by someone unplugging it the end result is the same.
It's funny how growth doesn't even mean much anyway. Growth? Of what? GDP? LOL. GDP numbers are fuzzy fantasy fictional creations of the human mind. It's incredibly pathetic the blind importance we give to this human artifact. We are living in a fantasy lalaland of fictions, lies, and virtual constructs ever further disconnected from reality. It is clear that the modern exponential-everything global ponzi financial-political-economic system is actually imaginary. The entire financial system along with several large redundant sections of our modern economies could dissapear overnight without anything actually changing on the ground in terms of resource scarcity. A good 60% of phony economic activity could dissapear with absolutely NO CHANGE whatsover in the real physical natural world, execpt perhaps for the brain cells of a large proportion of humans moving in sync towards producing chaotic behaviour.
Perhaps mother nature could teach us a lesson to bring as back down to earth. A major coronal mass ejection, geomagnetic storm, or solar proton event would do the trick very effectively.
nice.
so be it. . .
Yeah, the measure has become but a means to distract from the real things that have to be measured. A big problem is that we just can't seem to accept the facts of living on a finite planet: for the longest time people couldn't accept that oil was finite. It's all mass hypnosis: "DOW," "GDP" always popping up flashing on screens or are spoken by the "spokespeople."
"The entire financial system along with several large redundant sections of our modern economies could dissapear overnight without anything actually changing on the ground in terms of resource scarcity."
Well, the global trade system would suffer seizures and there would be disruptions for a fair amount of time. It's going to happen eventually; I suspect that TPTB really do know this and they're just kind of looking at how to unwind all this: one could view all the stuff that the Fed and US govt is doing as impacts the rest of the world as helping foster a notion of reshuffling global trade in a way that allows the US to back out; maybe a bit far fetched...
Might free up some energy- a PLUS! But then again, without actually crunching numbers for what people would end up having to do in their absence (more travel to do business?) I couldn't say for sure.
"Profits are no longer a measure that social welfare is being served by capitalism’s efficient use of resources."
What the hell do profits have to do with social welfare? So by this measure, businesses auch as gambling, firearms, porn, and alcohol are not profitable. This is such crap.
"Capitalism has been transformed by powerful private interests whose control over governments, courts, and regulatory agencies has turned capitalism into a looting mechanism."
Capitalism has not been transformed. God, even more crap! What you've just described IS NOT capitalism. It is runaway corruption, and nothing else.
The American sheeple make me puke. The whole lot of them deserve to be fucked in the ass brutally and repeatedly and then marched off to concentration camps to die in the gas chambers run by their Chinese masters. Let every Wal-Mart be a camp worthy of Auschwitz for these fuckers to die in.
Der Juden is asking for it.
Why not tell us how you REALLY feel?
/sarc
Louis McFadden (1932 speech on the House floor):
Some people think the Federal reserve banks are United States Government Institutions. They are not Government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders. …
Those 12 private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this country by bankers who came here from Europe and who repaid us for our hospitality by undermining our American institutions. Those bankers took money out of this country to finance Japan in a war against Russia. They created a reign of terror in Russia with our money in order to help that war along. They instigated the separate peace between Germany and Russia and thus drove a wedge between the allies in the World War. They financed Trotsky’s mass meetings of discontent and rebellion in New York. They paid Trotsky’s passages from New York to Russia so that he might assist in the destruction of the Russian Empire. They fomented and instigated the Russian revolution and they placed a large fund of American dollars at Trotsky’s disposal in one of their branch banks in Sweden so that through him Russian homes might be thoroughly broken up and Russian children flung far and wide from their natural protectors. They have since begun the breaking up of American homes and the dispersal of American children.
The crux of our economic woes lay in the fact that over the last several decades we have created entitlement societies on the back of the industrial revolution, technological advantages, capital accumulated from the colonial era, and the domination of global finances. Now reality has begun to come into focus and it is becoming apparent that this is unsustainable.
Promises were made on the assumption that those advantages would continue in both Europe and US, and that ever greater prosperity and entitlements would be sustained through debt financed consumption growth.In that eerie fantasy world, debt fueled consumption was to be the catalyst to bring about ever more growth. The entitlements and promises that have piled up have become overwhelming. More on this subject in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-crux-of-our-economic-woes.htm...