Debt Rattle January 29 2015

[Raúl Ilargi Meijer]

Unknown Crack salesmen ‘Going East’ on streamliner City of San Francisco 1936 • What The Oldest Stock Market Index Is Telling Us (MarketWatch) • I Am
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 29 2015]

[Dr. Diablo]

–“…yet the alternative to austerity is money, and the money has to come from somewhere.”–
No, no no no no! These deadly mouth-breathing idiots: wealth is not money you goofballs! The “money” doesn’t have to come from anywhere. You don’t even need “money”. What you need are commerce and trade. That is, to get off your duff and “work.”

Suppose the Greeks took a holiday in 1999, locked up the house and flew off on a spaceship. They return in 2015 only to find their kids have trashed the place. What do they need to put their house back in order? Money? For what? To hire Macedonians or Bulgarians to bag the trash? No. They would pick it up and repair it themselves. So for what would they need money? What they need is to apply the astonishing pool of idle workers to the astonishing pile of work. So…what exactly has been keeping 50% of all Greeks apart from the overwhelming body of work that needs doing? I want you to really, deeply think about this. They’re lazy? Bored? Misinformed? Lack bus tickets? What is it?

You see if you take money out of the equation, the solution gets simple and becomes obvious. So how is it when you add money back into the equation it freezes up again? It is because the “money” — or type of money and/or system they’re using now may be the problem and not the solution? Work it out for yourself. Is it?

If the Greeks landed on a fully electrified, populated, constructed land, stocked with ports, railroads, shipbuilders, natural gas fields and so on, they’d say “Holy wow! We’re rich! Rich I tells ye!” And yet somehow they’re poor. Their cooperation system is broken, and somehow seems to be delivering all their wealth to people outside the country. How odd.

If there were no money–at all–in Greece or anywhere, it would be invented instantly. Most times and places in history prove this. They don’t need to “get” it from anywhere. THEY are the money. The money is an IDEA, that lives in their HEADS. Money is a PROMISE. You can use whatever you like a placeholder, cows, salt, iron rods, promissory notes on a warehouse, but it’s irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that they have wealth, of some sort, anywhere, by the act of being alive, and can “monetize” that into promises that members of that society can cooperate, organize, and exchange amongst themselves.
Having to “get” the money from someone illustrates clearly that whoever you need to petition to “get” the money is who is really in charge. And also entirely unnecessary for commerce, for their daily life, for their ability to pick up a hammer and shovel and do work. If they are unnecessary, yet extract energy, then are they best defined as a parasite? Think for yourself. Are they?

To make this more concrete, my preference for commercial “money” is the self-liquidating gold promissory note, although in concept you could use anything as the placeholder/backing commodity. You extend credit 90 days backed by real goods–at the first level, the gold or commodity, and if the 90-day contract is fulfilled, by the copper you mined, the shirts you stitched, or whatever real commercial goods you needed the money for in the first place. Once the real goods exist, you sell them to the next level and close the note, and so on from the cotton fields up through the spinners, weavers, sewers, saleclerks and so on. Eventually, the end user buys them from wages that were themselves paid from self-liquidating promissory notes, closes the books, and it starts all over again. It’s not a “money” system, like a pile of gold is, it’s a transmission system. An energy-information transmission system, directing commercial actors to what is selling, what is not, what needs to go faster or slower, and closing contracts on failures before they get too far past 90 days. But note: you don’t need “money” to make it work. Start with one gold coin, split into milligrams, and you have the backing items, the spark you need. The rest is simply a system of commercial promises that REFER to the backing collateral. Capisce?

Hard for us to believe, but there is this thing called “cash” and “work” which can be used to build an economy in lieu of “debt.” What this writer is saying is that Greece can only borrow their “money” from someone, and are helpless little children, unable to fix or do anything without permission of “debt” and “money” from the debt/money issuer. False! If they wish to, the Greeks can kick out that bad idea and fix their country themselves, for their own pleasure and enjoyment. Oh wait–they can’t? So…what’s stopping them?

US and UK are stronger and escaping the trap, says the aptly named Carney? You’re hilarious. Quit your day job.

[justjohn]

Nice picture up top. Looks like car salesmen headed to Detroit to see the new 1937 Pontiac intro. Curious what those were like, I found this:
https://www.hemmings.com/hcc/stories/2005/02/01/hmn_feature4.html

” … evokes the trim that adorned the early diesel locomotives built by GM’s Electro-Motive Division that powered the Union Pacific’s passenger streamliners, the City of Los Angeles and City of San Francisco.” Weird that the locomotive pictured is also a GM product, I never knew they were into those too.

[Author]

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