Forum Post: your debt is their wealth
Posted 6 years ago on Nov. 14, 2018, 6:52 p.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Compound capital gains, profit and interest increase the price of everything, the wealth of the few and the debt of the many at an exponential rate. Banksters and billionaires are a threat to the survival of the human race. They are more dangerous than all the tyrants and terrorists since the beginning of civilization.
The measure of debt is also the measure of the wealth accumulated by investors, that is not used to increase production. It is abstract and dissipative economic activity, as is trade and outsourced production. All such activities are parasitic on and destructive of real economy.
Wolf Richter: The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q3 2018 https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/wolf-richter-state-american-debt-slaves-q3-2018.html
Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong!
"... For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists. And so Hudson emphasizes that our Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries now, Orwellian in the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength. He writes: 'A constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times' (p. 266). ..." - from Michael Hudson’s New Book: "And Forgive Them Their Debts"
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/145003.html
I took a labor economics course (a long time ago) where the prof tried to convince us that 5% unemployment IS full employment! It was Keynesian economics and I never accepted it because to accept that meant it was okay for 5% of people to be left out in the cold. It was also obvious that it was a b.s. number as we know unemployment numbers are b.s. today. They think we're all just a bunch of dummies and granted many are and they count on us believing their crap about there not being enough money when in fact there is more than enough money to end all poverty on this earth. It's all in how it's distributed!
Absolutely it's about distribution! So is debt bondage and the exponential growth of the power of the financial overlords due to compound interest. It's easy to say but it's been going on for at least 3000 years. Saying it's so doesn't do shit, until we convince the born, bred and programmed idiots that believe paying debts is the morally and politically correct thing to do.
Until a critical mass are convinced we must tax the rich out of existence we will continue to talk silly shit like I've just spent 5 minutes doing.
Right. Debt is not money. People living on low wages are living on debt which is not money in their bank (although it may "feel" like that), it is actually money they OWE. In reality, debt is negative money.
Debt enriches the banks and the wealthy who make the loans and reap the interest and is chains for everyone else. And today, they have figured out how to loan money that doesn't even exist, loaning the same money out several times. Fiat money.
Ali lives in Gaza 3000 years ago. He owns a ship and wishes to trade with Greeks. He contracts with a local producer, Jamal, for trade goods, which are sold to him on credit. He departs for Greece with the goods.
Jamal trades Ali's credit contract for other goods he wants, needs or can sell or trade.
Ali trades his goods in Greece for a local credit contract, which he trades locally for goods he can take back to Gaza.
When he arrives back in Gaza he can trade his goods for credit that, hopefully, has value twice his original credit device plus all expenses. He trades that to buy back his prime contract and another load of goods. Life goes on.
If all the transactions had taken place in local currencies, each of which had agreed upon standard values, the money used would have been indistinguishable from the credit devices. Money is simply a credit conveyance. There may be a distinction between money and debt but there's no real difference.
Money is debt, according to David Graeber and others who study the history of money.
Well, the individual who owes the money owns "debt" not "money." It's someone else's money.
It's not semantics, debt and money are different things. Debt is money that is owed. The danger is when people think their bank account is bigger because it has more debt in it, say, after taking a loan, imo.
beautifulworld: "Debt is not money." You: "Money is debt." When combined, we get confusion. I: "Real money is finite. Fake money is potentially infinite. Debt encompasses both but it creates major economic catastrophes eventually when it comprises too much of fake money."
My housing rent was tripled in a few months. I doubt very much that the new owner of my housing had paid for their ownership with money based upon their labor. Therein lies the seedling of future destruction. The Chinese are the wise people who say that in muddy waters lurk the big fishes and just pass the fish eyeballs off to the next bozon as pearls. The Germans were the Higgs bozon in 2007-2011 because the U.S. had a sterling reputation passed down from the older generation of Americans. I sensed a problem when I kept on receiving phone calls offering me below-inflation-rate loans. I was wondering from where all of this money came. I suspect that a significant part of it came from the Germans because they had high savings rate and economically well linked to the U.S. I dislike unfair dealings so here I still am, protesting against Wall Street's greed.
I am sure that the Chinese, similarly with high savings rate, were hurt, too, but the common people there had been so accustomed to being ripped off by the state that they couldn't tell or care anyway. Both China and Russia had backed off from using Bitcoins for undermining the U.S. dollar's reserve currency status/U.S. advantage to create money "from thin air" because the state couldn't control the capital flow in Bitcoins. It's far easier to rip off what they control. "Don't rob a bank. Own it by using debt. Then suck it dry from the inside (through de facto eternal/rotating-door 'loans.')"
Many hedge funds do this debt-based mergers/acquisitions to businesses, too. However, they were generally not bailed out by the Fed with the notable exception of Long-Term Capital Management whose imminent but not-come-to-pass collapse was the result of Russia's sovereign debt default due to the option-trading computers neither read nor understood the implications of that news.
I have decided that now is the time to impose sanctions on those computers, seize their passports, and put them on our no-fly list.
There will be no true freedom or democracy until a wealth tax precludes the possibility of billionaires!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/145003.html
Yes agree. We should absolutely confiscate the wealth of Jeff Bezos and his ilk and divide it amongst the country. Eat the motherfucking rich. Not being sarcistic either.
"And our Orwellian, our neoliberal notion of unrestricted freedom for the creditor dooms us at the very outset of any quest we undertake for a just economic order. Any and every revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail."
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/145003.html