Forum Post: rent or debt
Posted 3 years ago on Feb. 10, 2021, 5:50 p.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
What kind of enterprises do we need to best support human (and individual, obviously) survival?
How do we convince lenders to support the production of material goods and services instead of the rent seeking parasitizations and the asset stripping and dismantling of industry that has turned Wall St. into a virtual game board for rich investors? Then there are activities like high speed trading that make money but contribute less than nothing to the real economy.
Michael Hudson has a lot to say about public versus private banking and the kind of economic activity that is permitted and/or encouraged by each. "... A public bank is not going to make corporate takeover loans or loans to corporate raiders. It's going to make loans to actually increase the tangible economy, not to take it over and turn public infrastructure - the education system, healthcare, transportation and communications – into rent extraction...." https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/02/michael-hudson-changes-in-super-imperialism.html post-vid 06-Rents-or-Growth-2-10-2021
Not only banking and finance have devolved to dysfunctional rentier parasitisms. Energy, mass transportation and communications, medicine and especially pharmaceuticals seek profit streams by methods not conducive to the missions which they claim to accomplish.
Take Covid vaccines for example. Why are there proprietary vaccines? Why are patent monopolies allowed and production and distribution limited by intellectual property rights? The health and well being of people and our communities should not be placed at risk to secure the profits of Pharma parasites. Their properties will be confiscated and their persons arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned, if America and the world ever awaken!
see: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/02/intellectual-property-cause-of-covid-death-genocide.html
Video link https://youtu.be/t9nyWXlvjRw
good one!
Look who it is! So nice to see you flip! Yes, I'm still around, and Shadz and a few others as well. The forum has remained a constant in my life which has seen a lot of change over the past few years. I'm very grateful it is still going. I think it still gets a good amount of traffic as well, especially during the election.
So glad you and Mayda are well. Thankfully America avoided full on fascism for now, but what a crazy 4 years it was. Turned out Trump was much worse than I thought he could ever be. And, sadly, I don't think the right wing nut jobs are finished. If it's not handled well, they'll be back.
Biden is a relief even if he is a centrist liberal lol! Even George W. Bush was looking good next to Trump. How quickly things can turn! Maybe they can turn quickly for the better as well!
We miss your excellent posts here so please give us something to read and think about!
All the best, bw.
hey Beauty, and nice to see (hear, read?) you also. glad to hear that you are helping to keep this forum going. you know i agree that GW was made to look civilized by trump. what a country - what a world. well i hope this wakes people up to the true security threats we face - like the lunatic neo nazis and now energy security (Texas).
that has been my main focus lately - the coming problems with energy. lots of interesting info but the main point is that the green new deal will not sustain our current lifestyle. nobody seems to be planning for a future that will have to run on less energy dense sources. most people seem to think that electric cars and solar panels will save us - sadly they will not. much more info if interested but below is a bit from a study by the Finnish govt - the whole article (and the study itself) is well done and worth reading. i will try to remember to check back in periodically - see you soon?
“To phase out petroleum products (and fossil fuels in general), the entire global industrial ecosystem will need to be reengineered, retooled and fundamentally rebuilt," the report notes. "This will be perhaps the greatest industrial challenge the world has ever faced historically.” As we have not properly planned for the possible phasing out of fossil fuel energy, it is entirely possible that as energy systems, oil in particular, come to contract, we could witness “the peak of industrial output per capita sometime in the next few years.” In short, we have entered a new era of expensive energy that is likely to trigger a long-term economic contraction. Right now, though, “no one is preparing for this,” said Hagens. “Not only are we speeding, but we are wearing energy blind-folds at the same time. But the momentum of our current system forces us to have conversations about a bigger system not a smaller one—so the correct and valid plans and blueprints are not discussed…
Although the world therefore needs to urgently transition away from fossil fuels, it may well be too late to do so in a way that avoids an economic crisis. And doing so will require industrial civilization as we know it to be fundamentally transformed:
Government Agency Warns Global Oil Industry Is on the Brink of a Meltdown
https://www.vice.com/en/article/8848g5/government-agency-warns-global-oil-industry-is-on-the-brink-of-a-meltdown
Without electricity, Texans are probably glad that they weren't driving electric vehicles during the recent natural [i.e. non-manmade per the directive of the ACP or American Conjob Party] disaster.
New York went through a similar problem during Superstorm Sandy when we had gasoline down in the storage tanks of the gasoline/petrol stations but no electricity to operate the pumps to move the gasoline to the vehicles. It sounded rather silly but it unfortunately happened. Energy resiliency does matter.
It seemed that the propane users in Texass had fared better than the electric vehicle users there recently although they had to line/queue up to get their portable propane tanks refilled. Electric vehicle battery recharging is fairly slow relative to liquid fuel transfer.
Green New Deal is a worthwhile aim to strive for. Renewable energy must become a far more important component of the total energy mix but I suspect that it will still fall short of reaching the target of the World achieving zero net emission of greenhouse gases by 2050. Red China's coal-fired power plants will surely be operating at that time. Absolutely no other country can counteract that using anything.
Red China is using electric vehicles to deceive the World yet again that it is doing much to reduce greenhouse gas emission while spewing tons and tons of greenhouse gas every second into the air from these coal-fired power plants. There were many cancers ( I suspect perhaps 20% of them were pollution-induced ) in the Chinese people, likely caused by the rampant water, air, and soil pollution so concentrating pollution to coal-fired power plants may make sense but only if the pollution is captured there. I doubt very much that the numerous coal-fired power plants in Red China are capturing the pollution, knowing the "CCP is god" (for the state) and "money is god (for the subjects) atheist philosophy.
While Red China is cleaning the face, it cleans only its nose bridge to be "highly efficient." The D.P.R.K. is the best country to be in for this CoViD-19 pandemic because I think that there is no clear evidence proving that it has even a single case of this deplorable CoViD-19. Kim Jong-un is the greatest leader our World has ever seen, protecting all these children. The Red Scarf is "stained with the blood of the patriots." Of course, only human rights patriots should hold power, which comes out of the barrel of a [Miaoist] gun of Maui. Children, for efficiency, emulate the Redfuckgina but get a plunger fast for killing the mouse @28:44 called Redwall at Kaohsiung (高雄).
"You are welcome," also sprach Zarathustra.
Gerrymandering's meaning in the U.S. ( as "the hookup is the meaning," 'tis greasy GOOPy slope ) : "Voters don't choose their representatives. Representatives choose their voters" of Rustia with Big Techs' Sucked Data and Infoshroud ( Redfuckgina instead has a different bamboozleshroud, of course.) Observe how well the Clintons had done by feeding beans to "China [which] ate our lunch" in order to gift U.S. fine art.