Monday, March 29, 2021

Lost Opportunities

 Renting Life,

  Everything that made industrial capitalism rich, everything that made America so strong in the 19th century, through its protective tariffs, through its public infrastructure investment all the way down through world war two and the aftermath, was that we had a mixed economy in America. Europe also had a mixed economy, and in fact, every economy since Babylon has had a mixed economy.
  But in America you’ve had something entirely different since 1980. Something that was not foreseen by anybody, because it seemed to be so disruptive: namely, the financial sector saying, “We need liberty – for ourselves, from government.” By “liberty” they meant taking planning and subsidy, economic and tax policy, out of the hands of government and put into the hands of Wall Street. The result was libertarianism as a “free market.” In the form of a centralized economy that is concentrated in the hands of the financial centers – Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse. What you’re having today is an attempt by the financial sector to take on the role that the landlord class had in Europe, from feudal times through the 19th century. It’s a kind of resurgence of feudalism.
  If you look at the last 200 years of economic theory from Adam Smith and Marx, onward, everybody expected a mixed economy to become more and more productive, and to free itself from the landlords – and also to free itself from banking...
  But in the United States and England, you have finance becoming something completely different. Banks don’t lend money to build factories. They don’t create money to make means of production. They make money to take over existing assets. Some 80% of bank loans are mortgage loans to transfer the ownership of real estate.
  But of course, that’s what created a middle class in the United States. The middle class was able to buy its own housing. It didn’t have to pay rent to landlords or absentee owners, or to warlords and their descendants as in England and Europe. They could buy their own homes. What nobody realized is that if you borrowed the money to take a mortgage, there’s still an economic rental value. Most of it is no longer paid to the landlords. It’s paid to the banks. And so in America and Europe, the banks now play the role that landlords played a hundred years ago...
​  ​The fight really is against government that would do anything that is not controlled by the 1%, and by the banks. Essentially, the merger between Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – the FIRE sector. So, you have a relapse of capitalism in the West back into feudalism, but feudalism with a financialized twist much more than in medieval times.
​ The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that we’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let them run everything. Then Americans will lend them the money or buy them out and thus control them financially. China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. The fury in the West is that the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources and foreign agriculture.​..
  What’s is ironic now is what has happened in the last few years in the fight against Russia and China. America has killed the free lunch. It said, okay, now we’re going to have sanctions against Russia and China. We’re going to grab whatever money you have in foreign banks, like we grabbed Venezuela’s money. We’re going to excommunicate you from the SWIFT bank clearing system. So, you can’t use banking. We’re going to put sanctions against banks that deal with you.
​  ​So Russia and China have seen that they can’t deal with dollars anymore, because the United States just unilaterally rejected their use by any country that does not follow its military and financial diplomacy. If countries do have dollars as reserves and lend them back to the United States, it’s going to spend them on building more military bases around Russia and China, to make them waste their money on military defense spending. So, America itself has ended the free lunch, by the way in which it’s fighting against China and Russia.
​  ​And now Russia and China, as you pointed out, are de-dollarizing. They’re trading in each other’s currency. They’re doing the opposite of what Bretton Woods tried to create. They’re inspiring monetary independence from the United States.​..
​  At issue is what kind of an economy we need in order to raise living standards and, wages and self-sufficiency and preserve the environment. 
What is needed for the ideal world that we want?​    [Description follows...]
​  The banks fear this because they see that Modern Monetary Theory no longer gives them control. They want the rich One Percent to be able to have a choke point on the economy, so that that people cannot survive without borrowing and paying interest. They want to control the choke points to extract economic rent. So you have the West turning into a rent-extractive economy, a rent-seeking economy. The ideal of Russia, China, and other countries is that not only of Mar​x,​ but also of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and even Ricardo in the sense that the aim of classical economics was to free economies from economic rent. The American economy is all about extracting rent through the real estate sector, the financial sector, the health insurance sector, monopolies and the infrastructure sector.
  The US economy has been Thatcherized and Reaganized. The result is a fight of rentier economic systems against China and Russia.​..
 Industrial capitalism was evolving toward socialism. It was socialized medicine, socialized infrastructure, socialized schooling. 
So, the fight against socialism is also a fight against what made industrial capitalism so successful in the United States and Germany.
​  ​What you’re seeing now is a fight for what direction civilization will follow.​..
...And it was expected that once you had capitalism free of the landlord class, free of something that wasn’t really industrial capitalism at all (it was a carry-over from feudalism), you wouldn’t have this overhead of the idle 1%, only consuming resources and going to war.
​  ​World War I changed all that. Already in the late 19th century the landlords and the banks fought back. They fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalists, and they euphemized it as free markets. That slogan meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Americans call that a free market. The Free World was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance. So, it’s Orwellian double-think.​..
  Well, as opposed to that, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, and that do not have a banking class and landlord class controlling the economy. The kind of arrangement that you had in Germany in the late 19th century: government, industry and labor coordinated. The question was how to provide the financing for industry so that banks can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding to build infrastructure and uplift the population.
​  ​China is doing just what made America rich in the 19th century, and what made Germany rich. It’s the same logic of industrial engineering. This plan is based on economic expansion, environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, so this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.
​  ​Europe had a choice: Either it could shrink and be an American satellite economy, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously to forego growth and become a set of client oligarchies and kleptocracies. It is willing to let its financial sector take over just as in America. That’s a “free market,” because I’m told by American officials that they can just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable.


How did these guys trust each other back then? What was the secret? They were clearly murderous scoundrels. 
Secret societies? Help me out.​  Samo Burja:
​  With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. This trust at a distance provided the conditions for ocean-based commodity markets to beat regional commodity markets. After this material transformation, the plantations in the New World and workshops in India became logistically closer to a city than shepherds living in geographically nearby hills. 
​  ​Before this point, city-based labor markets had the highest impact on society, while the role of markets in exchanging the raw resources of the countryside for the finished products of the city was minor and easily replaced by customary trade. With the social technologies of long-distance commerce, the labor market of a city became connected to a commodity market that could match its pace, opening massive potential to make the city a center of material production.
​  ​Creating those markets involved mass dislocation. Armies rip people from their homes and turn them into soldiers; this was well understood in antiquity. During industrialization, the shock of dislocation from previous social ties combined with a newly institutionalized environment to produce distress not too dissimilar from the shock of incarceration or hazing.​..
​  ​The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons.
​  ​When times change—and you don’t need or can’t sustain the full pace of industrialization anymore—the vast masses of the industrial population prove themselves difficult to demobilize from their war of production. They can’t be returned to the social fabric of agricultural society, since the urban environment that enabled the agricultural hinterland to function no longer exists. The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life.
​  ​The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional. Bureaucracies decay in a way that is much less visible than the decay of factories. 
​ ​The real upward mobility of dysfunctional agriculturalists to functional industrial workers is replaced by the on-paper upward mobility of functional industrial workers to dysfunctional knowledge economy workers. Despite these measures, the real downward mobility is eventually made apparent.​ 
(I see it, peekaboo!​ Hey, where do competent workers go, now?​)​ ...​
​  ​If this is correct, then post-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization. Such a society doesn’t even have the social infrastructure of agricultural civilizations. This means it cannot even mint the preliminary social capital needed to reindustrialize. Likewise, we have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.
​  ​What then follows is slow decay, first of production and then of advanced technology itself. At a macro scale, this is the deep root of civilizational collapse.​..
Mostly, the adjustment to decline would just be an invisible lowering of expectations. When political incentives at all layers of the government pyramid go against ascertaining the truth of a situation, the truth isn’t ascertained.
​  ​Social scientists wouldn’t see it coming, since official numbers would be about as reliable as public health messaging during a pandemic. Wealth can shrink by 1% per year for a century, while measures such as GDP can show continued growth by 2% per year. The Soviet Union’s era of stagnation had 30 years of solid growth according to their metric of NMP (Net Material Product). American economists only noticed and revised our GDP estimates for the Soviet Union after its collapse.​..
  ​Whatever solution our civilization might find to escape the post-industrial trap, it will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.​ 
{Spiritual ​honesty​?}

Why Putin's Pipeline is Welcome in Germany:​  (l​ower​ rent)
  In his meeting with Stoltenberg in Brussels, Blinken warned that Western companies participating in building Nord Stream 2, which is 90% complete, would face sanctions mandated by Congress:
​  ​“President Biden has been very clear in saying that he believes the pipeline is a bad idea; it’s bad for Europe, bad for the United States,” said Blinken, adding, U.S. law “requires us to sanction companies participating in the efforts to complete the pipeline.”
​ ​What is behind American opposition to Russian natural gas going to Germany, and from there to NATO Europe?
​​First, the pipelines bypass Ukraine and Poland, cutting those countries out of the transit revenue. 
Second, we want NATO Germany to buy our own shale-produced natural gas.

​Better refloat that boat! Russia does already have a fleet of icebreakers...
Russia Pitches Frosty Arctic Sea Route As Superior Alternative To Blocked Suez Canal

"Biden" floats a rival plan for global trade to counter China's Belt-and-Road initiative, "New Silk Road" to Boris Johnson. 
Both of these men are titular heads of government within the rentier globalist/Atlantacist financial capitalist order. 
What can this rentier new-world-order have to offer that is not rentier extraction? 
This is a head-fake, a narrative-adjustment.

But, but, but what else can there possibly be? This is the riddle of the Sphinx.
Monetary adaptation to planetary emergency: addressing the monetary growth imperative
Conclusion: In any economy where money hoarding and accumulation is not curtailed, and where most of the money in circulation is issued by private banks as debt, with or without interest, there will be a system-wide scarcity of money available to people and organisations to service their debts – unless, that is, there is continual economic growth. To avoid the deleterious implications of a shortfall of money in an economy, policies are used to maintain economic growth, which is therefore a form of imperative on society. This MGI may be accentuated, at a system-wide level, by the practice of full-reserve re-lending of money. Interest is not the main driver of the imperative, but because it increases the transfer of money to those who are wealthy and more likely to hold that money in a stagnant form that is not available for debt servicing by others, interest charges may indeed exacerbate the MGI. We conclude that the debt-money system creates a competition for money between debtors and savers which is resolved through creation of more debt-money, which in turn drives growth and the resulting ecological and climate emergency.

Adam Gaertner on the use of ivermectin against COVID. Thanks Jeremy.
Look at the graph of what Niceragua did with ivermectin. 
Ivermectin use continues to be suppressed by hook, crook and threats.​ 
Do take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D, won't you?

Surgeon Warns Vaccinating People Infected With COVID Could Cause ‘Avoidable Harm’
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm says we’re taking the COVID pandemic problem, where a half-percent of the population is susceptible to dying, and compounding it by vaccinating people who are already infected.

​Gilad Atzmon has more on that story, with a focus on the relationships between Pfizer, the Israeli government, and Israeli vaccine trial subjects without informed consent.
​  In Israel yesterday, an independent legal body that calls itself the Civilian Probe (CP)* published its finding regarding the catastrophic impact of the Pfizer vaccine on the nation.
​  ​In their report, which they submitted to the Attorney General and the Health Minister, the committee listed a chain of critical legal and ethical failures that point at a possible attempt to mislead not just Israelis but also the entire world. Since the beginning of January I have been reporting on an undeniable correlation between vaccinations, cases and deaths (here , here, here and here ). The CP confirms my suspicions but their study also presents alarming medical findings regarding the scale of lethal side effects. 
​  ​In the document the CP points at a government attempt to conceal its dealing with Pfizer.​..​
​  ​“What do we learn from the facts on the ground?” the CP report asks. “An examination of mortality data published by the government shows that there is a correlation between number of vaccinations and the number of deaths. The excess mortality is noticeable among people up to 70 and also among adults over the age of 70, and remains even after offsetting the deaths attributed to Corona. In the population over the age of 70 - in January 2021 an excess mortality of 19.5% was observed compared to October 2020 - the month when the corona data were highest, and 22.4% compared to January 2020. In the younger population - an excess mortality of 7% was observed in January 2021 compared to the month October 2020 - the month in which the corona death numbers were the highest, and 7% compared to January 2020. It should be noted that this trend continues in the following month as well.”
​  ​As mentioned above I have been writing about the devastating correlation between vaccines and deaths since early January. In Britain and the USA, we detect identical correlation between mass vaccination and death. However, far more problematic is the realm of side effects, something which governments, the WHO, the corrupted pharmaceutical industry, and of course social media giants attempt to suppress in the most Orwellian manner. The Israeli CP seems to have produced the first robust report on Pfizer’s vaccine side effects. They published a table of their findings, which they summarize here:
​  ​“As one can detect looking at the table - there are close to 200 deaths, and this - only by examining about 800 reports of cases of serious side effects. As mentioned, the CP is still working on analyzing side effects and we have hundreds of additional reports that are subject to analysis. Our study so far indicates that about 25% of deaths are from people under the age of 60. About 15% of them are under 50 years old. 7 of the deceased are at young ages - below age 30. Also, the study identified 27 cases of heart problems in people under the age of 60, of which 24 cases are among young people aged 17-30.  Regarding the issues to do with female medical complications (including labor-complication, delayed menstruation or irregular menstruation, etc.) - it should be noted that the committee has about 200 additional reports that have not yet been included in the final list of our findings.”
[We tried to report vaccination side effects in a patient ​at our clinic ​last week. It was extremely cumbersome, an intimidating process, and we are not sure that we were successful.​ The RN left a recorded message.​ No organization can afford what it takes to report mild-to-moderate side effects within this ​US ​format.]

​Major vaccine-industry advocate... ​
White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci declared Sunday that children either need to be vaccinated or must wear face masks if they want to play together.

​Look at these graphics. Texas is sliding into natural herd immunity. 
This was happening already before vaccinations started. 
Peak cases were in mid January. 
Spring break didn't even cause an uptick.
12% of Texans are fully vaccinated.​ 
Kids are mostly back in school.
https://www.texasobserver.org/tracking-covid-19-in-texas/

A​t least the threat of global shipping through the arctic with Russian icebreakers is now forestalled!​ 
The Ever Given is out of the Suez Canal, thanks to full (super) moon, high tide, big tugs and dredging.

​Unmoored​

4 comments:

  1. Portuguese news channel promotes the use of ivermectin

    https://twitter.com/Covid19Crusher/status/1376471402543464452

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Think it'll catch on in France?
      Is Portugal in line for another spanking?
      Where will they obtain the ivermectin?
      It seems blocked.

      Delete
  2. "Reduced vitamin D values resulted in a higher infection risk, mortality and severity COVID-19 infection."

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076021000765

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Indonesian study from last March was confirmatory enough for me, but,yeah, this is more, and it all keeps saying the same thing the Germans dug 200 years ago.
      Naked white Germans outdoors...

      Delete