Transform the economy: grow your own money.
When Rich Fitzgerald - President of the Allegheny County Council
(county.allegheny.pa.us/council/dist11.asp) -
mentions the possibility that we might see hyper-inflation, it's time to REALLY start thinking outside of the box.
======
From:
Institute of Science in Society
Financing Poverty:
Rescuing the rich instead of the poor
...in complete contrast to the slow, miserly way in which the wealthy nations have treated the poor, they sprang to action with the utmost generosity to rescue the rich.
By the end of October, £1.8 trillion have been wiped off the global economy, according to Bank of England’s latest estimate. The US bailout alone has already cost the taxpayer more than US$1 trillion. That’s a huge amount, but still small compared with the total value of the world’s economy at $65 trillion, and a mere drop in the ocean against the $596 trillion in outstanding global derivatives (financial contracts). The taxpayer’s money is being thrown into a “bottomless pit”, says David Korten, a long-time critic of the financial system and author of international bestseller, When Corporations Rule the World (1995, 2001). The danger is that if governments continue to misdirect massive public funds towards rescuing the financial system, its collapse will bring down the real economy.
It is important to distinguish between the real economy of people trading in goods and services based on real value, and the financial system, which trades in money as such, in sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, hedge-funds, and private equities that have become “reckless speculation that produces nothing of real value”. It is the difference between “Main Street” and “Wall Street”...
...it is the financial system that has impoverished people and planet...
...money is not wealth...
So long as appropriate public regulation was in place after the financial crash of 1929 to hold it accountable to Main Street, Wall Street performed its appropriate tasks reasonably well. As it became less and less accountable, however, it turned from serving Main Street to preying on it, creating “a mind boggling variety of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ financial games.” People were encouraged to run up credit card and mortgage debts beyond their means, then hit with fees and usurious interest rates as they fell behind in their payments. The banks sold the high-risk mortgages on to brokers who packaged them into tradable securities and sold them on again to other banks, and used the proceeds to finance more lending to unqualified borrowers. Many of these overrated securities ultimately ended up in the portfolios of retirement funds, and so the risk is passed to unsuspecting Main Street workers and pensioners.
Wall Street also found it profitable to merge regulated banks with unregulated investment houses to facilitate insider dealing and finance a proliferation of highly leveraged hedge funds and private equity funds that specialize in gambling with other people’s money using exotic financial instruments no one fully understands.”
In short, Wall Street players created and profited from financial and real estate bubbles and debt pyramids “that used borrowed money to create paper assets that became collateral for more borrowing to create more paper assets to justify compensating packages for themselves in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” In 2007, the 50 highest paid private investment fund managers got an average $588 million in compensation, which is 19 000 times the average worker’s pay. As Korten says, and many would agree, “It may be legal, but it is not wealth creation. It is an act of theft.”
Toxic money
Wall Street and its globally extended financial system create not wealth but paper money based on usury at the expense of unbearable debt, misery and poverty to the most vulnerable people and the most vulnerable nations.
Worse still, the enormous paper assets created out of nothing go to fuel conspicuous consumption and exploitation of the earth well beyond what it can thermodynamically sustain. Indeed, money in an economic system is often compared with energy in the living system. When money ceases to flow, the economic system collapses, just as the living system cannot function without energy flow. This analogy holds so long as Wall Street is held accountable to the real economy, but breaks down completely with the proliferation of the unregulated financial sector. Be warned: all money is not equal; that created in the financial sector is not energy as much as pure entropy, the toxic dissipation that ultimately kills the system. In healthy systems, money, like energy, flows symmetrically in just exchange based on real values of goods and services, so little entropy or waste is generated
(see
The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms
by Mae-Wan Ho
i-sis.org.uk/rnbwwrm.php
for a detailed exposition on a new theory of the organism relevant to this discussion).
Rein in the financial predators and shift to a circular economy of nature...the dominant model replaced by a circular economy that mimics nature, in maximising the efficient use of renewable energies, the sequestering of carbon from the atmosphere, and the recycling of “wastes” into resources. This circular economy will prove itself most effectively in organic, localised food and energy systems that can free us from fossil fuels while feeding and energizing the world...After all, if you grow your own food without having to buy fertilizers, pesticides, or seeds, you are not only safe from financial predators, but also from corporations like Monsanto that aim to monopolize your food supply In that way, we can save ourselves, the economy and the climate all at once.
======
(county.allegheny.pa.us/council/dist11.asp) -
mentions the possibility that we might see hyper-inflation, it's time to REALLY start thinking outside of the box.
======
From:
Institute of Science in Society
Financing Poverty:
Rescuing the rich instead of the poor
...in complete contrast to the slow, miserly way in which the wealthy nations have treated the poor, they sprang to action with the utmost generosity to rescue the rich.
By the end of October, £1.8 trillion have been wiped off the global economy, according to Bank of England’s latest estimate. The US bailout alone has already cost the taxpayer more than US$1 trillion. That’s a huge amount, but still small compared with the total value of the world’s economy at $65 trillion, and a mere drop in the ocean against the $596 trillion in outstanding global derivatives (financial contracts). The taxpayer’s money is being thrown into a “bottomless pit”, says David Korten, a long-time critic of the financial system and author of international bestseller, When Corporations Rule the World (1995, 2001). The danger is that if governments continue to misdirect massive public funds towards rescuing the financial system, its collapse will bring down the real economy.
It is important to distinguish between the real economy of people trading in goods and services based on real value, and the financial system, which trades in money as such, in sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, hedge-funds, and private equities that have become “reckless speculation that produces nothing of real value”. It is the difference between “Main Street” and “Wall Street”...
...it is the financial system that has impoverished people and planet...
...money is not wealth...
So long as appropriate public regulation was in place after the financial crash of 1929 to hold it accountable to Main Street, Wall Street performed its appropriate tasks reasonably well. As it became less and less accountable, however, it turned from serving Main Street to preying on it, creating “a mind boggling variety of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ financial games.” People were encouraged to run up credit card and mortgage debts beyond their means, then hit with fees and usurious interest rates as they fell behind in their payments. The banks sold the high-risk mortgages on to brokers who packaged them into tradable securities and sold them on again to other banks, and used the proceeds to finance more lending to unqualified borrowers. Many of these overrated securities ultimately ended up in the portfolios of retirement funds, and so the risk is passed to unsuspecting Main Street workers and pensioners.
Wall Street also found it profitable to merge regulated banks with unregulated investment houses to facilitate insider dealing and finance a proliferation of highly leveraged hedge funds and private equity funds that specialize in gambling with other people’s money using exotic financial instruments no one fully understands.”
In short, Wall Street players created and profited from financial and real estate bubbles and debt pyramids “that used borrowed money to create paper assets that became collateral for more borrowing to create more paper assets to justify compensating packages for themselves in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” In 2007, the 50 highest paid private investment fund managers got an average $588 million in compensation, which is 19 000 times the average worker’s pay. As Korten says, and many would agree, “It may be legal, but it is not wealth creation. It is an act of theft.”
Toxic money
Wall Street and its globally extended financial system create not wealth but paper money based on usury at the expense of unbearable debt, misery and poverty to the most vulnerable people and the most vulnerable nations.
Worse still, the enormous paper assets created out of nothing go to fuel conspicuous consumption and exploitation of the earth well beyond what it can thermodynamically sustain. Indeed, money in an economic system is often compared with energy in the living system. When money ceases to flow, the economic system collapses, just as the living system cannot function without energy flow. This analogy holds so long as Wall Street is held accountable to the real economy, but breaks down completely with the proliferation of the unregulated financial sector. Be warned: all money is not equal; that created in the financial sector is not energy as much as pure entropy, the toxic dissipation that ultimately kills the system. In healthy systems, money, like energy, flows symmetrically in just exchange based on real values of goods and services, so little entropy or waste is generated
(see
The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms
by Mae-Wan Ho
i-sis.org.uk/rnbwwrm.php
for a detailed exposition on a new theory of the organism relevant to this discussion).
Rein in the financial predators and shift to a circular economy of nature...the dominant model replaced by a circular economy that mimics nature, in maximising the efficient use of renewable energies, the sequestering of carbon from the atmosphere, and the recycling of “wastes” into resources. This circular economy will prove itself most effectively in organic, localised food and energy systems that can free us from fossil fuels while feeding and energizing the world...After all, if you grow your own food without having to buy fertilizers, pesticides, or seeds, you are not only safe from financial predators, but also from corporations like Monsanto that aim to monopolize your food supply In that way, we can save ourselves, the economy and the climate all at once.
======
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 5:25 AM
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