Forum Post: The Great Mistake
Posted 5 years ago on Dec. 21, 2018, 2:03 p.m. EST by agkaiser
(2516)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
The dumbest human species mistake was Adam and Eve abandoning the garden for the pastoral animal slavery lifestyle ... until Cain killed Able symbolizing agrarian human slavery displacing the pastoral culture.
Those Great Errors have, in my mind, never been surpassed - only repeated by varying the methods employed by individuals and groups to appropriate the wealth produced by community members working for the elite classes. With each iteration the threat to the human race's survival has expanded and intensified.
Today the threat looms largest in for profit Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Medicine and Pharma are vying for first place. Other for profit threats include the energy industry, commercial communications and mass transportation.
The Rentier dominated economy is a threat to survival.
"A euphemism is a rhetorical trick to make a bad phenomenon look good. If a landlord gets rich by gentrifying a neighborhood by exploiting tenants and forcing them out, that’s called wealth creation if property values and rents rise. If you can distract people to celebrate wealth and splendor at the top of the economic pyramid, people will be less focused on how the economy is functioning for the bottom 99%." - Michael Hudson
How the Orwellian world was won:
BONNIE FAULKNER: ... A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception is all about the depredation of vocabulary to hide reality, particularly the state of the economy. Just as history is written by the victors, you point out that economic vocabulary is defined by today ís victors, the rentier financial class. How is this deception accomplished?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s been accomplished in a number of ways. The first and most brutal way was simply to stop teaching the history of economic thought. When I went to school 60 years ago, every graduate economics student had to study the history of economic thought. You’d get Adam Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, Marx and Veblen. Their analysis had a common denominator: a focus on unearned income, which they called rent. Classical economics distinguished between productive and unproductive activity, and hence between wealth and overhead. The traditional landlord class inherited its wealth from ancestors who conquered the land by military force. These hereditary landlords extract rent, but don’t do anything to create a product. They don’t produce output. The same is true of other recipients of rent. Accordingly, the word used through the 19th century was rentier. It’s a French word. In French, a rente was income from a government bond. A rentier was a coupon clipper, and the rent was interest. Today in German, a Rentner is a retiree receiving pension income. The common denominator is a regular payment stipulated in advance, as distinct from industrial profit.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/12/michael-hudson-the-vocabulary-of-economic-deception.html
The sooner we put out the FIRE by communitization of IT and all the rest of the top 5 tyrannical oppressors the better the outlook for humanity will be.