Forum Post: The Neoliberal Catastrophe
Posted 6 years ago on Feb. 7, 2018, 8:27 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
The neoliberal morons who own America and its politicians say high employment is the cause of stock market "slumps." They never heard that perpetual motion is impossible. It's the same with "Mr. Market," who makes money out of thin air. Every balloon must eventually lose such airy value.
OK. It's true that someone who buys a stock from an issue that raises capital to produce material products and services(1) is contributing to the real economy, though there's a strong parasitic element in such investments. But after issue trades are purely parasitic. They take from not add to the value of everything they taint. And yet fools still believe a strong stock market is a good sign and such asset shuffling at a profit contributes to the real growth of anything. Of course economists and philosophers knew all this centuries and even millennia ago. The Chicago school, Austerians, Harvard MBAs and the rest of the fools who own and operate the world have managed to unlearn the sad truth: you still can't make something out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit.
(1) Neither Financial services nor anything else in the FIRE sector are material products or services. Nor are purchases of patent monopolies to jack the price and gouge the public, like the recent pharma frauds and other parasitic ventures that threaten the life of the host economy.
"... the real danger is that the neoliberal model is increasingly under stress, as the consequences of rising inequality and unheard-of low levels of the benefits of growth going to laborers undermines the legitimacy of the system and is producing bad outcomes ranging from political fracture to falling life expectancy and an opioid crisis that is in large measure the result of the collapse of typically rural communities. The last thing the US needed was more transfers to the rich in the form of the Trump tax bill. So while Mr. Market may recover his sunny mood, the foundations of the economy continue to rot...."
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/02/mr-market-meltdown.html
A couple of bars of the symphony of self destruction of the human race are played in this post. Mentioned are the consuming FIRE and parasitic takeovers of pharma patents and other destructive "investments."
I hope the comments will add more concrete examples of the dissipative economic practices that have come to dominate our means of survival. Links are great. I hope to see them in support of instances of parasitism of which you are aware.
Related - My Nephew's Fiance was charged 100.00 for a flu-shot this year. I didn't get 1 this year but in the past have had opportunities that cost me nothing.
Communitization of the Medical/Pharmaceutical racket is the answer.
Anything that is run on a for profit basis will charge as much (and more) as the market can bear.
They'll manipulate supply because they can and demand because they can advertise and win the minds of fools.
Operating motto (ethos? Pathos?) of the American Petroleum Institute & others like A.L.E.X. & C.A.T.O. & GOP to name butt a few.
With the 1.5 trillion dollars tax cut, the market can bear more for sure, probably leading to inflation and higher interest rates later on. The tax cut was timed very poorly because the U.S. economy is running smoothly and All major developed economies are expanding simultaneously. We are encouraging more consumption while we are already consuming at a high rate. Much of the tax cut stimulus may well squirt overseas to help China boom. We went through something like this in the 1980s with Japan instead of China and a tax cut combined with the greatest ever peacetime military buildup in place of the recent trillion-dollar-plus tax cut.
It didn't end well for Japan with the boom (Tokyo real estate, Pebble Beach golf course, Rockefeller Center, and Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers All experienced great pricing surge upward; the U.S. was starting to sweat profusely in Congress about losing out to Japan in consumer HDTV technology and worry about the future impact of Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Project to leapfrog the U.S. dominance in computers) and the follow-on bust resulting in a decades-long recession.
What actually happened in the intervening decades was the end of the Soviet phase of the Cold War, the associated peace dividend of de-militarizing and freeing the ARPAnet to become the internet (at first variously dubbed as the National Information Infrastructure, Information Superhighway, Infobahn, etc.), and the internet-based technology, application, and social media boom evolving towards all-weather ubiquitous "compunication" (a now-dead lingo from the early 1980s for the "Convergence" of computing technologies with telephone technologies starting with AMPS {Advanced Mobile Phone Service} or cellular phone technology in the latter half of 1970s) that we use today as smart phones. Most of the companies dominating the boom were U.S.-based with Japanese companies seemingly withdrawing or absent from the competition. I remember that an M.I.T. dude (of Media Lab.?) was telling the U.S. to calm down about Japan's dominance of HDTV technology because the U.S. possessed capabilities to blow that dominance out of the water or make it the equivalence of insignificance with its presumed then-future dominance of the coming explosion of U-computing. It came to pass.
Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Project seemed to have produced human-lookalike robots capable of walking like human beings up and down stairs and talking and listening in friendly ways. Meanwhile the U.S. created and sometimes produced robotic contraptions that ran on wheels, tank tracks, hydraulic pistons, flew on helicopter-like propellers, with all kinds of different sensors. They were rather alien-looking, nowhere friendly and beautiful looking as the Japanese robots but after the multiple Fukushima nuclear meltdowns had occurred, it was not the Japanese robots that charged in to scout the accidents' corium scenes. It was the American robots.
This reminds me of what my father had told me of Nazi Germany's soldiers in World War II. They dressed extremely well and marched most impressively while goose stepping. The U.S. troops were nowhere as neat- or powerful-looking as "the Krauts." They marched in a demure manner as if they hadn't filled their stomachs at breakfast (perhaps they were saving their energy for the fight; our Orangutan playing as a strongmonkey will likely disappoint - er kann Deutsch nicht! - the strength of a nation lies not in its army's march but in its mighty right) but Boy! See the Numbers and the Total capabilities! They came. "I saw." We conquered. In "God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
Yeah, as I cleaned out their abode and freshened up their water, I played with my guppies. Like the Wehrmacht, the rainbow-color-shimmering beautiful guppies were really neat whipping their tails hard around the round basin to hold their own very orderly places against the maelstrom I created to collect their excrement to the center of the basin (why did this collection method work?). Then I, as "the Godzilla," came by with the coins from all around the world to float them beside my foot-long blue and white electric wooden toy motorboat. The guppies scattered. Most coins sank BUT a Japanese coin could float. Why? Archimedes was here.
China may fare differently as Japan did because China used its state industrial policies to require technology transfers by U.S.-China (controlling shares of 51% owned by China's companies) joint ventures. It also has state-sponsored cyber industrial and military espionage, not to mention their buyouts of U.S. politicians up to and including the then President and his consort to open up the vas deferens to transfer rocket/satellite-launching, radiation-hardened electronic technologies. China essentially acted like a whore to lure Wall Street in to make it squirt and inseminate.
The U.S. feels the de-industrial AIDS and may very well be nucleofried in the coming miniaturized thermonuclear battles worldwide. China and Russia may become the Afghanistan and Iraq of recent years because the U.S. military would have to charge in or start the global thermonuclear war to clear out the havens of (and kill) the cybernucleoterrorists. Ubiquitous Hydrogen Bombs for Everyone!
There will be laptop H-bombs, Untersee express deliveries, exo-atmospheric EMP detonations, laser/particle-beam blinding or kinetic killing of the spy satellites that had allowed mutual trust in the Soviet-U.S. nuclear arms reductions to become possible, etc. "Domino D-T (Deuterium-Tritium mass-extinction boundary) Pisczar" can deliver in a pizza box a thermonuclear device of specified yield and particle/radiation spectral distribution worldwide to anyone with the money and a smart phone to order. Ü beckons.
Inflation's pressure has already built up for food price increases. Once the boiler has worked up a head of steam, the train will get going. Choo! Choo! All aboard. Where's Flip these days? His happy days are here.
No our rate of consumption is actually going down as is the poor and the lower middle class's wages and so their ability to consume more than just what they need for survival. https://t.co/VRCHjyhq0c The wealth care tax break for the wealthy few is in the process of further destabilization of the USA's economy - the economy that serves REAL Flesh & Blood People not the economy of the stock market that serves artificial life forms known as corpoRations.
Personal debts have recently hit all time high. As are the rates of new auto sales. They say to me that people (probably the middle middle-class and up people you've missed) have been contracting debts to consume more. The U.S. has an inequality problem so it is entirely possible that the consumption of the rich and the well-off more than compensate for the poor and near-poor's lack of consumption. The aggregate consumption is certainly higher than those of recent years.
A lot of that is people who have more month than they do money and they have not yet learned that you can't add to your charge account debt forever before you can't afford the minimum payment and your credit is cut off and you file bankruptcy.
It sounds like our Orangutan has already shown them the way of surviving multiple bankruptcies and emerging prosperous.
The U.S. is following down the same path ( the more one buys and borrows the better off one lives until one can't "swing it" anymore but there is bankruptcy avaliable - or the U.S. money-printing press that ensures that the U.S. can Always pay off all its U.S. dollar-denominated debts but of course how much the dollars are worth in real goods then is an open question without Saudi Arabia's petrodollar support which must end if and when Saudi Arabia has exhausted all of its crude oil; the petrodollar has real value as opposed to most other fiat currencies; Russia also has huge amounts of crude oil and natural gas but unfortunately, Russia's behaviors have eroded most people's confidence that Russia would back up its rubles with crude oil and natural gas; Russia fussed with Ukraine all because it wouldn't subsidize Ukraine's natural gas purchases to the tune of just a few billions of dollars a year which is really NOT that much at all by U.S. standard for aids to Israel and Egypt, for example, to buy peace; if Ukraine is so important to Russia, why didn't Russia just give Ukraine an annual allowance of natural gas free of charge? Russia should be very rich with oil and gas wealth by now but alas, its system is neither Norwegian {the state holds and invests the oil and gas trust fund for its people} nor Saudi Arabian/American {however tribal and autocratic the Saudis are, they still dispense some of their oil wealth to their people} ).
Here is an open secret in business: bankruptcies make you rich if you know how to fly-by-night and "re-organize" after making it big. It's certainly an ever-present source of rancor by enlightened people (yes, including Adolf Hitler, are you surprised?) against the self-proclaimed "God's Chosen People."
At least you got your pick for POTUS, I know you love your Trump saving you from those "neoliberials" and liberals alike
When the EMP cripples the U.S., we'll finally figure out how we had been sold out by the traitors in the early 1990s.
Oh I don't know about that i think we will be dealing with the traitors of 2016 for the next few decades.