Dr. Diablo
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NATO Prepares for Trump Presidency (Spiegel)
NATO has a $1B building? They should join up with the EU, I hear they have one of those.
“…member states agreed to a goal of spending 2% of their national GDP on defense. …Germany, the second-strongest economy in the alliance, next to the United States, spends only 1.19% of its GDP…”Greece is the only member paying the full 2%. Maybe they should be in charge of NATO and the EU? I’m sure they’d have quite a new perspective on the EU project.
Try not to take too much offense at being called an economist. I’m sure he meant it in the best possible way.
A twiddler, a dreamer, a jabberbox. A bad egg.
@Rapier, the key thing to understand about the American system is that the power lies in the PEOPLE. They are the government. They are the law. Therefore, so long as the people hold any desire to have a rule of law, it lives inside them. Because we sure know that desire isn’t inside government, or most of the men that occupy it, and mostly never has been. This tension goes far, far back, before the founding of the Republic, even before the American Revolution, and we’ll never be rid of it because all men struggle with healthy limits on their behavior vs the desire to be free.
It’s no laughing matter to hold government to the rules. If the people don’t get up and do it, every day for 240 years, certainly nobody else will. But eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and if the people won’t do the vigilance, no one can help them. So I, we, aren’t asking pretty please. We’re going out and doing our duty.
The fantasy rolls ever on. Least astonishing non-upset ever: if you couldn’t tell 2 months ago, when Trump rallies were 40,000 and Hillary 4,000, and online views of their speeches were running 25:1, then I don’t know what to tell you. It reminds me of “The Big Short”, where the premise of the very movie is that “nobody could have seen it coming”, just this tiny handful of lucky, careful agitators. Meanwhile, TAE, HousingCollaspeBlog, FinancialSense, and a field of alt-media viewed by ten million eyes were on it from the day Greenspan lowered rates. Unintended consequences. Nobody saw it coming. Except the 10 million of us all screaming at the top of our lungs in the corner that this would be a national and banking catastrophe.
They saw it coming. Everybody saw it coming. They were LYING. As they are lying now about it being an upset: it’s only an upset because they wouldn’t report the news.
But the world rolls on and we have new challenges: hold the new government to the law; local, civil, criminal, security, and international law, same as the last 5 Presidents and the last 26 years, none of whom would. No rest for the weary.
And to think all they had to do was run someone boring and less corrupt, but they couldn’t. The theft is now so big and the fraud and control so expensive that the smallest restraint in the stealing from the people would collapse the system. …Which will collapse anyway. Closing the Collapse Gap at last.
Clueless as ever, they can’t figure out why US import/export numbers won’t respond.
For your benefit, I offer this highly scientific explanation one more time:
Thanks to a 15-year rolling catastrophe of corruption, theft, failing civil and property rights, and massive outsourcing, citizens of the United States DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY.
They are poor, broke, bankrupt, out on the street, living in a van…by the river. They’re homeless, jobless, washed up, kaput, ruined, without that discretionary spending capital, they have no prospects, they are insolvent, no longer a going concern, living in a box.
This unusual, unprecedented, multi-decadal dearth in income, now coupled with a tripling in health care and a freeze in lending even on the shortest terms for rates averaging 20%, might — just MIGHT — have something to do with the lack of U.S. retail buying from China and worldwide. In turn, that smoldering crater of lacking demand might, possibly, have follow-on consequences in Chinese economy, solvency, then onward down to commodity countries and worldwide. Petrol and energy demand charts, anyone?
I know this is only a tender and tentative proposition that people who have no jobs have no money, no borrowing, and no purchasing, but I feel it might be worthy of further investigation. I am open to myself being employed on this, if anyone is offering a research grant, so I too can buy ramen noodles from China again and move into a box further from the river.
Fitts had an interesting perspective on this. If the system is killing you, and Trump is the maltov cocktail you have at hand, do you throw it?
This is one of the key differences right now: it happens that the Democratic voters will be eaten second; they are either on some subsidy, in a limping coastal city, or at a government/insider job that sustains them, while the Republican base in flyoverland, the workers and Main Street businesses are have already been completely cannibalized as, the Nation Review said, a “vicious, selfish culture” of “dysfunctional, downscale communities [who] deserve to die.”–Language we would never tolerate for an instant concerning any other group. We already know that the entire GOP defense and insider structure has endorsed Hillary, that means the GOP party from the dog catcher on up did NOT endorse Trump, (and they are not allowed to “choose” our candidates) but maybe 1/3 or more have openly agitated for or endorsed Hillary. (Note to self: beyond the leaks proving she did not fairly win the Party endorsement, does this mean that Hillary is not the Democratic candidate, but the Republican one? Or does it mean there are only two parties now: the Insiders and the Outsiders?)
So the conflict here is, who gets eaten first? If you’re being eaten, you will throw the maltov at the shark. If it’s the other guy being eaten, you wait, saying, “what if the boat catches on fire and sinks us all?” Destroying the system, the government, energy-distribution, social-power-flow system is no small issue. Any nation that attacks or disables it is in a world of misery for quite some time. And if it can be reformed, maybe we should just choose the lesser evil and start the 12,037th useless protest?
It depends on whether you’re being eaten by the shark — Right Now — or not. Demographically, 50% of the nation is being eaten. Geographically, 90% of the nation is being eaten. They throw it.
When that’s true, there is no battle between Democrats and Republicans, Black and White, City or Country, North or South, just Insiders vs Outsiders. Only this: “It’s a Big Club, and you ain’t in it.”
For legality, there’s no contest. The present actors, including Hillary, DO and HAVE DONE all the things that Trump only SAYS. It’s as if words have somehow become more real than reality, that maybe nothing is real unless we report and admit it. The sex scandals come to mind–accusations of bad behavior vs almost certain confirmation after decades of bad behavior, but there’s a better example. Trump SAYS he will stop Muslim immigration until he can get US immigration process under control and get some paperwork on applying immigrants. This is a thing–like most things–he HASN’T done, because he’s never been in an official position, ever. Meanwhile, statistically zero Christian refugees have been imported from Syria, despite the fact that they comprise a noticeable portion of the population and despite that as non-Muslims, they are under a lot more pressure. That is to say, Obama has an actual, measurable ban on Christian immigration in place for a year. …Yet no one reports it or cares, because hey, Trump SAID something again. Its’ Trump that’s the racist bigoted one, despite the EXACT SAME THING going on right now by Obama. I’m not certain of the origin of this psychosis that SAYING something is far worse than DOING it, but it drives simpletons like me, flyoverland, and apparently the FBI, bananas. We are not smart-thinking sophisticates like you find in S.F. and D.C. For us, the law is prosecuted on what people actually, and provably DO, and I very much hope that your law does too. …Some thoughts.
Golly, Shak, generally Raul and Nicole offer nothing but constructive ideas you can use at home. One of those above is, “Don’t take it all too seriously.” But if you look to the very latest article, you’ll see a laundry list of how when the very character of the money system changes, the electoral and political system must as well. And what this will mean at your house: https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2016/10/the-imf-and-all-the-other-losers/
Everyone has opinions. Certainly the Americans do about leaders in France, Britain, Germany…and Syria, Libya, and Egypt, in which they enforce the selection of their favorite leader at the point of a gun, and nevermind economic collapse and WWIII falling on the Deplorables.
Not trying to step on any toes, it’s just what I do naturally…
Highly entertaining. I put forward a series of questions any scientist would ask, viz. “Is this true? If so, what then? How can I prove or disprove it?” and **the very act of asking questions** is “denial.” Denial because I didn’t begin the scientific inquiry from the conclusion? I’m sorry, but what kind of scientific inquiry is that? You promote science by examining what doesn’t fit, what’s odd, where knowledge can be expanded, not by repeating theorems of 2+2=4 which have long since been established.
Besides, as the last few times did I say CO2 had no effect on the climate? Or the straw man, “has no effect at any level”? Did I suggest that humans were or were not responsible? Nope. As a scientist, you’d have to ask the question, “which came first, the heating and flexing from ice load, THEN the volcanism, or the volcanism first?” “If the former, there is every reason to believe that AGW exists and could therefore be the CAUSE of the secondary effects.”
This is where — whether AGW is true or false — it has become a cult. The very suggestion that someone might ask questions — and secondary questions, mind you — is verboten and will have you expelled and persecuted. Does this not show that, whatever the truth, the act of refusing to ask questions, refusing to prove or disprove them, is therefore, by every known definition, not science? Or will we only have science where there are no more questions, but predetermined responses, and no need for further experiments as we already know everything?
I’m just agape as to what is considered “science” and “anti-science” anymore. Asking falsifiable questions and testing them is science. Shouting down people who have questions and testable theories is using social censure and political engineering to answer a scientific question. Doesn’t that seem like using a hammer to bake a cake, i.e., a technological non-sequitor? We answer scientific questions with experiments, data, and debate, not social censure and ostracism.
Speaking of, TAE is not “overrun with climate change deniers” (sic), we’re pretty measurably about 50-50, with our host Raul setting the tone and firmly in the AGW camp. Yet the very existence of opposing views may be threat enough for some to avoid reading the blog. And what part of science is that, where we refuse to read, hear about, or refute those with opinions differing from our own? Where people different from ourselves must be silenced, imprisoned, fined, destroyed — a sentiment often seen in the broader Global Warming discussion? Do you see skeptics calling for the imprisonment of scientists who support AGW? No, you see calls for raw data sets, less politiciced funding, and more objective measurement stations. What an odd discussion where one side calls for data and the other calls for prison? Which side would you suppose is scientific?
In my world, science asks the tough questions and plays the Devil’s Advocate. As do I. Please join me. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” Let’s not steal the wonder and newness out of life; let’s dream them.
Since Antarctic ice is net expanding (which could mean higher precipitation and not necessarily cold) but only this one shelf is melting, does that substantiate that it was warming from underground volcanic activity, as was recently reported? And is that because of the changing weights of ice north and south are flexing the tectonic plates? Or is it related to the massive planet-wide increase in earthquakes? And if we have a massive increase in earthquakes, doesn’t that suggest we may have a greater increase in volcanoes than we are aware of, as most volcanism is undersea and therefore largely unmeasured? This in turn would lead to massive relates in CO2 and other gasses, keeping in mind that a single eruption can release more questionable gasses in one even than entire nations do in a year? And if so, is that the cause (because the earth has had warming/cooling ages as far back as we can see and CO2 in Ice Cores rise AFTER the warming) or the effect (because AGW would melt icepacks and therefore flex the planet)? Gentlemen, start your predetermined answers.
That’s enough stirring the pot for one day.
Isn’t that amazing? And that would make the South Pole measurably heavier, but the north pole lighter? What effects would this have on the compression/distortion of the earth? Since polar sea ice is waterborne, can they accurately measure back 50,000 years like they can in the Antarctic? And the two numbers roughly match, but why? There is a theory proposing that the earth is (more) electrical than we generally assume, and could transmit cold and heat through the planet in the same way a thermocouple uses the Seebeck effect. (We may see something of this in Saturn’s hexagonal polar formation) So with enough electrical input, you could literally pump heat to one side of the planet and cold to the other, particle by particle. Whether this is actually true remains to be seen, but it would explain the bizarre symptoms, and would in that case support that the warming problem may be due to additional sun output (as suggested by all the planets warming), which would also further support why warming and cooling run like clockwork over the many Ice Ages — it’s the natural heartbeat of the sun. Now if only we could build an experiment on the premise and (dis)prove it. Science!
“Exporters have warned the plummeting pound will erode earnings and economic growth…”
But, but, I thought devaluing your currency was the one true way to prosperity! …Except when it isn’t? Lower currency causes expansion of exports that puts people to work! …Except when it doesn’t? I’m so confused.
Neoliberal economists, you’re the experts, help!
Nah, I live here, I’ve been all over the northeast: it’s arable. Is it top-quality soil, like when they first came off low-intensity, manure-based rotation agriculture? Of course not. But most any place in the northeast weeds will colonize and overgrow fields in a single season. The majority of those places it will colonize so densely as to create a mat composed of grasses, goldenrod, amaranth, chenopodia, milkweed, burdock, wild carrot, and a great deal more depending on the area and needs of the soil. With experience, you can read the weeds like a book and get a better understanding of the soil than a lab test, since it will also tell you how wet and dry, what months, what history, how compacted, etc.
Will a badly compacted, oversprayed field grow corn this year without massive tractors and petrol-based inputs? No, it may take years to recover even with focused attention. But that doesn’t mean it’s not arable: if it grows weeds, then it can grow hay, rye, daikon, helianthus, field peas, etc. Can you sell a 1,000 acres of hard-pan daikon to one neighborhood? No, the market won’t bear it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t food, it just means people prefer beer and Cheetos. Nevertheless, north of the Mason Dixon line, the soil can be largely remediated in 5 years of these lesser crops, and you got a lot of food off it too…just that the food wasn’t cash profitable. That means your problem isn’t the soil, which can be restored without a lot of effort, but excessive property taxes, which is political. Who’s going to carry the farm while we drain out the glyphosate and rebuild the soil? And although we don’t have the inputs to recover every area this fast, topsoil can be rebuilt at a rate up to 1″/year, with truckloads of food coming off every acre you’re rebuilding. But with the taxes and market set the way it is, it’s illegal to try — you’d have the farm taken long before.
And we’re not even talking about laying down pots and high tunnels on parking lots to intensively grow greenhouse-style, aquaculture in old warehouses, or putting in orchards and grass, much less square-foot gardens or multi-storied food forests. The northeast has forest lots in every back corner, and every edge leading up to those forests can be put in berries and fruit trees, and every forest can be interplanted with nuts, so we can add, not subtract those as well.
There are 124.6 million houses in the U.S. and every one has running water. If you add an apple tree to every other front yard, at half the average yield of 3-4bu/tree, you add 125M bushels of production. 1 Bushel=40lb, Americans eat about 20lbs of apples/year, so apples enough for 250M Americans in one action. Apples do not require good soil, or at minimum the soil on their footprint can be strongly amended. Grapes are as productive but require less soil and less water.
Winter squash can be grown with lower yield on straight weeds (who will soil repair), so at less than half the +10 tons/acre you’d have 10,000lb per 4,000m sq or 40,000ft sq or 400ft x 100ft area. They provide 100-200 cal/lb. or 1,000,000cal/ac. They will also grow up fences or walls and there are many desert varieties so the edge of any parking lot or chain link fence becomes a food tsunami.
See what I mean by opportunities, increasing yields, soil repair?
Because I do this, I can see these things as obvious as the rest of us would go the mall and participate in a 99c sale, so I forget it looks like a brick wall to outsiders where every brick is the same hard, unbending rule, written by agribusiness or other outsiders in articles for the unknowing public. Yes there are problems, but it’s almost impossible to calculate how fast nature can bounce back, or how much food we’d have if we applied ourselves even a little.
The 50% loss of U.S. food is easily true: they didn’t also mention the tossing of half-eaten food once on the plate. But by U.S. law it’s basically illegal to economize food in a number of ways, and portions are too large because the massive legal overhead for restaurants (property taxes, OSHA, Obamacare, minimum wage, reporting, health compliance) means portion sizes is one of the few places they can provide more, which means we’re also eating more than we want or is healthy for us. –1st world problems.
Add to this the nation-sized agricultural spaces that are unused. Lawns, of course, but in the northeast virtually all land is arable, and everywhere is unused, or used wildly below its potential. Don’t believe me? Pick a random streetview on GoogleEarth. The southeast is also largely arable although the crops grown on them would have to be different and potentially lower-yielding. The deserts are probably arable but would require extensive time and remediation via permaculture terracing.
Since the U.S. alone has maybe 2 nations the size of France not being utilized, how close are we to overburden? Or is it more “We have enough for everyone’s need, not everyone’s greed”? Would we rather people starve than eat a blemished apple? The answer in the U.S. is “absolutely!”
We’re possibly even dumber than the 1930’s, where the answer to American hunger was to plow under crops. After years of tilling fields, mule teams tried to walk between the rows rather than plow them, resisting turning a productive green field into a desert. Economists thereby proved they didn’t have the brains God gave a jackass, and even today espouse creating prosperity by destroying things.
Like then, we have a distribution problem, not a production problem. And that’s a political problem, not a physical or even an economic one. Since the U.S. could feed much of the world if asked–we have the land, the ability, and 100m unemployed people–then we have a world-wide hunger and poverty problem solely because of political choice. In other words, we’re killing people on purpose. But we here already knew that.
Headlines working hard to make recent events as racial as possible. As an American, I see careful tending going going back 40 years to keep this trouble prepared for ready for use. And it ain’t too hard to substantiate that feeling with hard documentation.
But they’re assuming we will be against each other and not them and it hasn’t been working very well. Justice and theft are color-blind, unrelated to your status or country of origin. Justice is something we can all agree on. It’s easy: Keep your word. Don’t take stuff. Don’t hurt others. Indict, try, and remove those who do. Replace those who won’t do their job. Problem solved.
My edit will reliably work the 1st time but not thereafter on Firefox.
Edit is working (1st time) right now.
I suspect from anthropological, cultural, and verbal evidence that North America used to have a lot more seasonal variability than the incredibly placid rise out of the Little Ice Age that we’re used to. There are stories of microbursts and possibly massive ocean storms while, although it was introduced long before, agriculture was steadily rising as the weather warmed out of 1400-1500 bottom.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png/450px-2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.pngPoint? If we return out of unnaturally placid period into a far more variable weather common before 1100, we would need to revive the old pre-1100 technologies. Those periods were marked by an enormous breadth of food supply compared to today, both in Euro-style small farms, but more especially in the non-coastal U.S. where Continental weather even now can move between 80 degrees and snow in hours (e.g. Minnesota). Native food production they call “wild” “primitive” “hunting and gathering” by all the usual idiots too dumb to pick up a shovel and understand what they were doing. Native agriculture was essentially permaculture, which depended on carefully tended food forests, bushes, wild herbs and plants, coupled with excruciating care in food sources like perfectly clear waterways, fish runs, mussel beds, migratory birds, deer and buffalo, etc.
So if the weather’s bad? No matter how bad SOMETHING comes in each year. No corn, as happened in 1815 explosion of Tambora? There is fish, game and potherbs. Too wet for for wheat? There are cattails, arrowroot, berries, rye, fruit trees, etc. But what you’re trading is efficiency (maximum yield) for security (maximum security), and generally they’re opposites. That’s physics. We’re already past the horizon on efficiency vs. resiliency and we’re complaining we can’t go even further? That maybe we’d have to change and admit our ways are not so perfect? Awww.
So if you suspect weather will be less perfect, better get cracking on selling off the mega factory farms and monoculture and get back to very small scale, highly diverse family farms, perhaps focusing on far more resilient tree/forest culture. Then they might find out the reason we never did monoculture before wasn’t because we were primitive and stupid, but because until 1800-1900, the weather wouldn’t support such dangerous nonsense.
And it may not again. Let’s not cry over returning to normal weather on earth.
Sounds like a good time to stake your allotment and grow some potatoes and peas. …If you’re really serious about that “post-oil economy.”
Imported Tequila and smartphones will not be on the menu.
Thanks for running down the long list of gaping insanity. Listening to the positions is a lot like walking down the hall in the psych ward and listening to the schizophrenic ramblings that initially seem lucid, then after a few sentences devolve into the earnest rambling of lunatics.
For point? Farage said “Hey can we get a grip on the hyperbole here? Not helping.” And already the markets have the FTSE at par with the EU markets down, showing the opposite of all paranoid fears. The Dow is still over nosebleed 17,000. Nothing’s happened. Not really. Even Osborne has not yet resigned. A lot of lawyers have to sit in a lot of rooms before we’ll know anything for sure. The only thing we seem to know is the dictatorial hyper-globalization seems to have reached its high water mark, whatever path that water may take as it recedes. And good riddance. If only it could have broken earlier, tens of thousands of Greeks, Spaniards, and other austerity fodder might still be alive now.
A thought, if this is the 224 year cycle, that’s been centralizing since the U.S. was founded, then it’s going to be a long, long unrecognizable reversal down the other side.
“The FTSE 100 ended 2.6% lower [..] ..wiping off nearly $132 billion since the referendum…”
Careful, that money probably wasn’t “lost”, exactly, it rotated out of FTSE and other exchanges and INTO something else. Bonds, mostly, dropping many interest rates from “stupid” to “beyond stupid.” Since the Bond market is well over 10x larger, this doesn’t have an equal effect. But unless players went bankrupt, reversed margin and paid off debt, etc then the money is all out there in something. Just not the FTSE.
PS, everything insiders steal or everything that goes wrong for the next 10 years will be the nationalist’s fault. Every attack the EU lays on the British people will be the fault of UKIP. By the time they’re done, every Briton will be begging to join the unelected, unaccountable, genocidal EU superstate, just like the Ukraine dreams of being only as dysfunctional as Greece. …Or so the plan goes.
Steal away, fast as you can! Every insider has a free pass.
Whether it was plan B or plan Q, news on the ground looks like the insiders started motions for a destabilization and color revolution in the UK an hour after the vote to bring them to heel or punish them for daring to resist. They’ve already got neonazis, labor groups and NGOs agitating violence, although the working class they’re supposedly part of largely voted to leave. I guess we’re going to see how the Ukrainian Plan works on a supposed 1st world country.
I guess we can tell how the Scottish Independence movement suddenly got insider funding and legitimacy after 200 years of uselessly moping around — classic checklist for control and destabilization is to implant a troublesome nation or group in their midst. Pakistan for India, Ukraine for Russia, “Safe Zone”/”Special Interest Area”/”Kurdish Federal State” in Northern Syria, and now Scotland for England. We already saw the “Leave” vote is in lose-lose. There are hurdles in UK Parliament, hurdles in registering the divorce under Article 50, hurdles in confirming or undoing the 99 EU laws governing pillowcases and 12,000 laws governing milk, and dramatically, hurdles getting or overriding Brexit through Scottish Parliament where disobeying the EU, which neither is part of, is actually illegal. So Brexit? Go ahead: the UK will cease to exist as Scotland and Northern Ireland secede then bedevil them for 500 years.
You feel lucky punk? Shouldn’t you just have accepted slavery rather than freedom? Life would be so much easier. Bona na croin.
And what actor is known as the Father of Lies, who progresses his plans only by means of separation and deception? What beneficial and enduring institution was ever created by means of dishonesty and manipulation?
This article just picked up by ZeroHedge.
@ Americans have zero savings
Thanks Obamacare, the health care the world cheered for: rather than restrain costs, premiums have doubled and the deductible is $4,000. The premium for acceptable healthcare at my company is now equal to 100% of a worker’s income…and they’re talking about how “it’s hard during those family years”? Never used to be.
Can we go back to capitalism now? Bad as that was, it was still 20x better than this.
“The yuan accounted for 2.79% of global payments…” That’s a bit disingenuine. The top currencies in 2015 were USD 43%, EUR 29%, GBP 9%, JPY 3%. That puts China in at number 4 or 5th most used currency in the world, not say, 30th as a 3.3% share might imply. Besides, the other thing no one gets is that China doesn’t want the reserve currency, or at least not right now. It leads to a whole slew of problems like Triffin’s paradox and the Dutch disease they won’t take on willingly. What they’re after is to create a parallel monetary path so they and the world are not held hostage to abhorrent U.S. and Western monetary policy. That means being more deeply traded, yes, but not because they want the reserve currency. It’s enough to be a safety valve or escape route. They can prosper if they use any fair trade exchange, the SDR, Bitcoin, gold, while the U.S. and indebted west cannot. With fair trade currency–by definition stopping trade deficit–the U.S. would have to tighten their belts by $500 Billion/year; and with the disruptive consequences of that, probably a lot more.
So can this 3% matter? You bet it can. But you have to know what they’re up to, and what they really want.
I don’t know where you are, but over here it’s happening right in front of our eyes. You can pick chart after chart all day long: 20% on food stamps, corporate and personal bankruptcy, workforce participation rate, retail sales, inventories, energy use, indebtedness, and lately, just to let you know it’s really kicking in, suicide, overdose, infant mortality and premature death rates. I don’t know what more you’d be looking for, unless you believe the hilarious Dow, which has the wealth of the elite’s management class locked up in it, and would lose their loyalty if it or their home prices fell.
Economies the size of the EU or US are like enormous flywheels, so powerful it takes enormous abuse and enormous time to slow them down. But they are dedicated to their cause, and just as W. and O. took a decade to grind the entire military into the sand, so too they have finally kicked out enough pillars to have the economy sag and fail. But we put up a Potemkin Facade and a “Open for Business” sign, so nothing to see here.
But this is the most common end to empires. Why attack and face retaliation when you can strangle them until they collapse? Like an old tree they are burrowed out from within by political termites and eventually any strong wind blows them over. So long as they’re being hollowed out, why bother kicking them over? Then you’d get blamed. Let it happen organically, on its own.
Not exactly true: Gen X and Y, who are broke and homeless, now outnumber the Boomers. They would like lower prices. However, you’ve got a worse problem: now that one is middle aged and past buying peak and the other has lived their entire life without the possibility of ownership, so now neither group even WANTS to own a house. –Or maybe more specifically, not in anything like these conditions. Like, if you give it to me for free I might be able to afford it, but otherwise, who needs the risk/hassle?
So? So, not only is the system hog-tied in needing to levitate national collateral to create the illusion of solvency, the houses that have no real market support or value have no velocity either. That is, it is the core asset and almost exclusive retirement money the Boomers have, but they can’t sell them. And at 0%, what will they do otherwise? Lack of velocity is simply another way to say a “Depression”.
Yesterday they ran an article on how 50% of retirees have $5,000 saved. I thought, “So much?” Who are these Americans who have even $5,000? That is to say, are one medical bill from bankruptcy. Point being, they cannot hunker down in their asset either, as they need daily expenses. Although taxes vary to the extreme nationwide, they will be eaten alive in the most populous states as well: NY, IL, CA etc have taxes exceeding $3,000/yr, or $250/mo in carrying costs, plus maintenance. High costs are not just devastating the young, it’s possible soon everyone will prefer lower prices.
Leading to the next problem: setting aside that the banks and therefore financial market would collapse 30 seconds after the $28 Trillion in housing stock was revalued, if house values declined, so would assessments and taxes, which would collapse state and local governments as well, quickly followed by the Federal Government, because if every city and state is individually bankrupt, it can only follow that the nation as a whole is too.
So, still looking for affordability? The opposite path is to never allow housing prices to fall, while there are no incomes to create buyers, which will freeze the market into the Dark Ages, which it has. There is no turnover, no purchases, no maintenance or improvements, and the economy as a whole is shackled for decades with a $28 Trillion albatross. Can’t happen? The original Great Depression of 1873 lasted 23 years and to some extent longer. From ’08 that would be until 2031.
Just adding, it doesn’t take ANY debt to increase GDP. You can exclusively use savings and production to make and do things, although that isn’t the way it’s usually done. In any case, any % debt increase over GDP leads to what? That’s right, debt infinitely running away from production, which must and will create an inevitable crash as the worthless debt becomes recognized as worthless, is written off, until claims on goods and actual goods again match up. …Then humans make the same mistake all over again.
Since during the collapse-reset of fantasy claims to reality, assets are repossessed and ownership is changed, who benefits from the over-issuance of debt and its inevitable default? Does that group run the system, or is it controlled fairly and with equal voice by the creditors and debtors? If it is not fair, not overseen, and benefits only one party, then perhaps we should correct this beforehand?
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
But why fret on that if you benefit more during collapse than when it runs smooth? Collapse as often as you can, or better, an endless rolling collapse, every day.
Again, I only wish I were being sarcastic, or this were The Onion, but in addition to giving everyone a new EU Tax # on the eve of Brexit (I’m sure they never intend to use it), and Britain losing $8.6B to the immediately-failing Juncker Plan while English homelessness is up 25% in 4 years, the EU is spending $1.4M of Britain’s money to rename the English Channel to le “pond” to “encourage greater integration” between “regions” — not nations, heavens no: nation-states must be annihilated and replaced. With corporations, I expect. Certainly Draghi’s new bond-buying program turns the printing press to unlimited cash support to private corporations. –But only the annointed ones, of course, the friends of friends. You won’t see him buying Greek supermarkets or Ma-n-Pop Diner’s debt and helping them out. Heavens no. Help is exclusively the purview of the large, connected, insiders; a group sometimes referred to as the “corrupt crony class” even as thousands die of suicide, neglect, and open abuse in an open war on the people.
If only the amusement of renaming the Channel were all, although I suppose making everything non-English is the fashion these days. No. In addition, the EU intends to break England into 11 Administrative Districts, which considering +90% of the law is written by the EU (mainly because they write new laws by the hundredweight) is not an idle bureaucratic structuring. Oh no. Besides spinning off districts like Wales and Northern Ireland who are very likely to go their own way and destroy Britain’s hard-kept sovereignty, they are taking the coasts, tying them into Portugal and foreign coasts where the districts will be out-voted and overlooked, losing all local sovereignty as well.
So, do we have a sense of where the EU is headed yet? Is saying the total destruction of Britain and perhaps all nation states actually hyperbole, or a cold, critical assessment? Because I’m struggling to come up with another plausible reason here.
While Oliver’s move should start a movement among pop figures to make a real difference, the debt-retirement situation is a sad reflection of the world.
Many (in the U.S. at least) have already cottoned on to this debt-retirement plan. That is, debt vultures are buying debt and foreclosures at 10c on the dollar or less, so it stands to reason that since it’s for sale, I could buy my own or my neighbor’s debt, retire it, and save 90%. Stands to reason but not to our system of fraud and extraction.
In fact, the banks do not allow anyone but themselves and their friends to buy debt–arguably illegally, as it’s for public sale, but not public to YOU? Why? Because normal people would do exactly what Oliver did. So we could start a collective crowd-funded corporation to help ourselves, but because you’re not in the club, as soon as they found out, they’d illegally deny the sale and claim you were illegally a bank or financial institution and have you arrested. –Or so I’ve heard.
So it points out that the real point is NOT making money, because clearly they could sell your debt at 15c and make 50%, 100%, 200% more than to a vulture fund. It’s about CONTROL. The bank-club has the control, and they cannot let the people-club regain anything. “Illegal” for them to regain any control at all. Illuminating, isn’t it?
Couldn’t you re-state Gross’ “Capitalism doesn’t work at 0%” as “We don’t have Capitalism now” or “What we have isn’t Capitalism”?
Bonus round: If what we have isn’t Capitalism, then what is it? Some names for alternative economic systems are Communism, Socialism, Feudalism, and Fascism. Is it one of these?
“Though the bond liabilities remain on the government’s balance sheet, because they aren’t held by the private sector any more they’re effectively irrelevant.” So again, we can have infinite debt, and it never matters because it’s in one pocket and not another? History disagrees. It says if the government owns infinite debt eventually the market doesn’t trust them and the currency collapses, and with it the economy and government. History varies on when that happens, but it’s not a free lunch.
P.S. in this story, where the Bank is buying up all government bonds, Abe is going to fund this by issuing government bonds. Why bother? What’s with the illusion that they’re not just going to be bought with bank-printed money? And why are they printing money to buy and control the economy? To “help[ ] improve household sentiment.” Gosh, nothing tells me the economy is all fixed quite the way that unprecedented levels of intervention to prevent real price discovery and economic collapse does. All confident now, thanks. Not to mention lying to and manipulating people does nothing to fix reality, but that’s where we are now: “fixed with the power of lies!”
The Dalai Lama better look out or he’ll be arrested in Europe for hate speech. His suggestion that crashing wildly different cultures together will cause social problems sounds suspiciously like what they call “right wing.”
Since it’s my job to point out that when the entire society is corrupt, science is too, here you go:
https://www.naturalnews.com/054141_Big_Pharma_research_fraud_ghost_writing_science_papers.htmlPharma paid PR firms to write their research studies for them. No one really checks. Checking would cost money, and you get the money for that research from corporations. So really, they’re just cutting out all the waste of running fraudulent studies and hiding the destructive ones, and just making up the research they were going to pay to have published anyway.
So is this better, or worse, than the 300 computer-generated nonsense articles that were also published without anyone noticing? Science is not religion, and should not be treated as such.
Well I’m certainly upholding my namesake’s advocate.
“Murder”? Strong words. But I constantly hear how “we can’t sustain”, when we are already carrying the present population while barely using the arable land, wasting half the food, most of the oil, and spending trillions on defense. This negativity leads to the conclusion that we must, inevitably, reduce to *some number*. That is to say, millions will die. Since millions will die because we don’t do a darn thing, and that death is pretty much optional, it’s more or less deciding to kill them all. And we as citizens collectively acquiesce to that view, that is to say, agree. Manslaughter might be more legally accurate, as you’re arranging mortal peril or not preventing a death, but it’s often called 3rd degree murder.
If you want to have populations decline “naturally”, which is probably a good idea, you immediately get to the question of “who?” Who decides? Who gets to decline? Me? You? How fast do we “decline” them? Say, stop providing care at 72? By wealth and status? Intelligence? Then it seems we’re right back to eugenics and mass murder. The ways I would alter society to be more accepting of life and death are subtle, complicated, and voluntary, but nobody’s going to listen to me. Eugenics and central, government control of Plato’s Philosopher-Kings is eminently logical–it’s sensible to treat men as cattle and cull them before the pasture’s dry—but that’s one of its chief dangers because it always ends badly, in holocausts and horrible, early death for all, most specifically the vulnerable. Let’s find another way. Since we don’t have to in North America at least, we have time. Personally, I wonder why culturally we’re all so terrified of death and spend the fortunes of our children to prevent it; we never used to. And they’re violently attacking anyone who doesn’t want to live at all costs–that’s what the work on helmets, seat belt, vaccines, swimming life guards and living in a tiny, carpeted box, clicking on a tiny screen is all about. Leave them alone. Let people live, and with the necessary addition of letting them die if they want. I’m not deciding what’s safe, how could I? That’s the approach of a psychopath. I’m not deciding who should live or die, who reproduces or doesn’t, I’m not God. But I can leave them alone to be free men, to experience life as we all do with neither hinderence nor egomaniacal “help”. So far as I can tell, that’s the cost or consequence of freedom anyway. Presently they take billions from me to save millions of men so they can later spending more of my billions to kill or “population limit” them like chess pieces in a global cock fight. Cut out the middle man: leave them alone at both ends.
Calm down V., I read and respect you. If you agree on the pre-contact populations then you’d have to agree with me that the addition of a million things—10,000 new plants, a thousand breeds of new animals, roads, cooking pots–would have to wildly increase the possible population. Now we’re only talking about how many more. Differences on the cause of climate change aren’t applicable to this specific question, although thankfully men are still able to have non-identical points of view.
You’re assuming me and my lifestyle. You’re assuming what I see and don’t see. I see it. I know it. I’ve spent my life buried in it and surrounded by it. But I also know this: there are an awful lot of things we’re not doing that we could do, and it sounds like you agree with me on this. How do I know? What do I do for a living beside point out where science is failing? I’ve spent a lifetime growing things, acres and acres. In pots, in driveways, in rail yards, in fields and forests. I’ve spent a lifetime learning how it used to be done, in a burnover with a deer-bone hoe, and in the most modern ways we know. I drive by the million American houses with a million acres of unused land, and the thousands of abandoned malls and factories, down the highways with a hundred-thousand acres wasted on each side. Not an able-bodied man is out. Like “Tomorrowland” no one is doing anything. With not a foot of that land in use, you don’t think we can increase the capacity of the nation? If we stop wasting all our oil driving, all our steel and timber building things we intend to knock down? Of course we can. By orders of magnitude.
How do I know? Because I don’t read it online. I get up, go out, and grow stuff every day, summer and winter. I keep up with the latest greenhouse, aquaponics, and desert permaculture. I convert houses from fossil fuels to sustainable ones. But the one thing I can’t stand is the fatalistic attitude that it’s all over, we’re all going to die, why bother? We *are* all going to die. Your time is indeed short. All the more reason to go out and move the world in a positive way. That many will not heed the call and will most probably do selfish, deadly things does absolve me of my responsibility to do what is right. What is right is to work, and work, and work some more, and tell them, and to have the tools at hand should anyone want to save their fellow man. And I do. But they will and do literally die cursing rather than pick up the shovel I saved for them.
It is right not to assume the worst of others and their lives as I would not assume that of you. Clearly you care. But caring has to be turned to action. I can guess carrying capacity because I’ve spent my whole lifetime working on the problem agriculturally, ethnologically, technologically, from stone age to space age. The knowledge is far too vast to put in an encyclopedia, much less a post, but if you want, I can forward the sites, titles, and knowledge of growing to you, and you can start planting, growing, and teaching too. The world of pre-contact is gone. But we can build a better replacement if we try, and if not we will indeed die. Your choice. It starts today.
This scientist/anthropologist is either hilariously inept or he’s measuring an isolated N. Am. in pre-1500 terms.
The population estimate before contact was some 30M, so you can start there. However, Turtle Island was largely alien to the land we know today. All things we take for granted, the weeds, dandelions, hay crops, honeybees, apples, pears, cows, chickens, entirely missing. In their place, Ice-Age like orchard grass, conifers, and endless nut forests.
So not only is it possible to have everything they did–rivers teeming with fish, buffalo plains, etc, but we have cleared, drained forests and fields, with the seed and animal base of the entire planet. You could double 50 million even with native-level technology. So you could probably double it again with rudimentary, mostly non-electric technology, either 1850-style, or modern, post EMP-style. After that it gets more challenging to figure, but I expect you could double it again with arid permaculture, not wasting 100% of American lawns, and applying abundance to where we presently monoculture.
Sustainable is perhaps definitionally opposite to growth, but we’re not anywhere near the carrying capacity of N. America, not even on a low technology base. So whether to kill 250M Americans is a voluntary choice, not a technical one. Would things have to radically change? Of course. But they already did: from contact to now the land is unrecognizable. From 1940 to now is unrecognizable. So from now to 2070 should be no different. It’s just a matter of choosing mass life, or mass murder.
But that’s specific to N. America. For other places besides Africa, I cannot say.
It’s based on confidence, which is ephemeral and psychological. It can change in an instant. And it would go to real, useful things. Why? Because the only other asset class requires trust, which without confidence is broken by definition.
But all that “wealth” was illusion anyway: more calls on wealth than actually exist.
But without trust we have no division of labor and no exchange of goods, which would be very, very bad. I sympathize with your question of when.
