Richard,
You are one of the lucky people who, regardless of your political views,
benefited from FDR's social welfare state and now in your twilight years,
thank goodness that you don't need to worry about your security and your
care. But now that social welfare state that you derogate, is being
dismantled and the people who are left alive in this country, are facing the
reality that Chris Hedges describes. I read about and listen to what is
happening to people every day and I weep for them. And because I am an old
blind woman who, although I worked in a professional capacity, did not work
in a job with benefits and a pension, I worry that I will live longer than
my income will provide quality care for me. This is really not a matter of
political philosophy. It's a reality that most of us need to deal with.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of R. E. Driscoll Sr
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2018 8:02 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Conjuring Up the Next Depression
The prediction of doom and gloom is in the same class utopian socialism.
Richard
Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 12, 2018, at 9:43 AM, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:it.
While I have not gone to BARD to download Collusion, this article is
another Chris Hedges Alarm. Probably falling on more deaf ears than
on those listening and acting upon the very obvious outcomes Hedges
warns about.
Personally, I and my family are caught, unable to find a safe harbor
for the future. We will go under just as surely as there will be
uncontrolled inflation.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/11/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Collusion is on BARD and I tried to read it, but I couldn't understand
collapse.Well, here's the explanation and I understand this, sort of, and it
doesn't make me happy.
Miriam
Conjuring Up the Next Depression
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
During the financial crisis of 2008, the world's central banks,
including the Federal Reserve, injected trillions of dollars of
fabricated money into the global financial system. This fabricated
money has created a worldwide debt of $325 trillion, more than three
times global GDP. The fabricated money was hoarded by banks and
corporations, loaned by banks at predatory interest rates, used to
service interest on unpayable debt or spent buying back stock,
providing millions in compensation for elites. The fabricated money
was not invested in the real economy. Products were not manufactured
and sold. Workers were not reinstated into the middle class with
sustainable incomes, benefits and pensions. Infrastructure projects
were not undertaken.
The fabricated money reinflated massive financial bubbles built on
debt and papered over a fatally diseased financial system destined for
U.S.
What will trigger the next crash? The $13.2 trillion in unsustainable
their place, and a Christianized fascism.household debt? The $1.5 trillion in unsustainable student debt? The
billions Wall Street has invested in a fracking industry that has
spent
$280
billion more than it generated from its operations? Who knows. What
is certain is that a global financial crash, one that will dwarf the
meltdown of 2008, is inevitable. And this time, with interest rates
near zero, the elites have no escape plan. The financial structure
will disintegrate. The global economy will go into a death spiral.
The rage of a betrayed and impoverished population will, I fear,
further empower right-wing demagogues who promise vengeance on the
global elites, moral renewal, a nativist revival heralding a return
to a mythical golden age when immigrants, women and people of color knew
our prisons.
The 2008 financial crisis, as the economist Nomi Prins points out,
"converted central banks into a new class of power brokers." They
looted national treasuries and amassed trillions in wealth to become
politically and economically omnipotent. In her book "Collusion: How
Central Bankers Rigged the World," she writes that central bankers
and the world's largest financial institutions fraudulently
manipulate global markets and use fabricated, or as she writes, "fake
money," to inflate asset bubbles for short-term profit as they drive
us toward "a dangerous financial precipice."
"Before the crisis, they were just asleep at the wheel, in
particular, the Federal Reserve of the United States, which is
supposed to be the main regulator of the major banks in the United
States," Prins said when we met in New York. "It did a horrible job
of doing that, which is why we had the financial crisis. It became a
deregulator instead of a regulator. In the wake of the financial
crisis, the solution to fixing the crisis and saving the economy from
a great depression or recession, whatever the terminology that was
used at any given time, was to fabricate trillions and trillions of
dollars out of an electronic ether."
The Federal Reserve handed over an estimated $29 trillion of this
fabricated money to American banks, according to researchers at the
University of Missouri. Twenty-nine trillion dollars! We could have
provided free college tuition to every student or universal health
care, repaired our crumbling infrastructure, transitioned to clean
energy, forgiven student debt, raised wages, bailed out underwater
homeowners, formed public banks to invest at low interest rates in
our communities, provided a guaranteed minimum income for everyone
and organized a massive jobs program for the unemployed and
underemployed. Sixteen million children would not go to bed hungry.
The mentally ill and the homeless-an estimated 553,742 Americans are
homeless every night-would not be left on the streets or locked away in
$10,000 bonus for all U.S.The economy would revive. Instead, $29 trillion in fabricated money
was handed to financial gangsters who are about to make most of it
evaporate and plunge us into a depression that will rival that of the
global crash of 1929.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers write on the website Popular
Resistance, "One-sixth of this could provide a $12,000 annual basic
income, which would cost $3.8 trillion annually, doubling Social
Security payments to $22,000 annually, which would cost $662 billion, a
decade."public
school teachers, which would cost $11 billion, free college for all
high school graduates, which would cost $318 billion, and universal
preschool, which would cost $38 billion. National improved Medicare
for all would actually save the nation trillions of dollars over a
rate jumps to 28 percent.
An emergency clause in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 allows the Fed
to provide liquidity to a distressed banking system. But the Federal
Reserve did not stop with the creation of a few hundred billion
dollars. It flooded the financial markets with absurd levels of
fabricated money. This had the effect of making the economy appear as
if it had revived. And for the oligarchs, who had access to this
fabricated money while we did not, it did.
The Fed cut interest rates to near zero. Some central banks in Europe
instituted negative interest rates, meaning they would pay borrowers
to take loans. The Fed, in a clever bit of accounting, even permitted
distressed banks to use these no-interest loans to buy U.S. Treasury
bonds. The banks gave the bonds back to the Fed and received a
quarter of a percent of interest from the Fed. In short, the banks
were loaned money at virtually no interest by the Fed and then were
paid interest by the Fed on the money they borrowed. The Fed also
bought up worthless mortgage assets and other toxic assets from the
banks. Since Fed authorities could fabricate as much money as they
wanted, it did not matter how they spent it.
"It's like going to someone's old garage sale and saying, 'I want
that bicycle with no wheels. I'll pay you 100 grand for it. Why?
Because it's not my money,' " Prins said.
"These people have rigged the system," she said of the bankers.
"There is money fabricated at the top. It is used to pump up
financial assets, including stock. It has to come from somewhere.
Because money is cheap there's more borrowing at the corporate level.
There's more money borrowed at the government level."
"Where do you go to repay it?" she asked. "You go into the nation.
You go into the economy. You extract money from the foundational
economy, from social programs. You impose austerity."
Given the staggering amount of fabricated money that has to be
repaid, the banks need to build greater and greater pools of debt.
This is why when you are late in paying your credit card the interest
repay.This is why if you declare bankruptcy you are still responsible for
paying off your student loan, even as 1 million people a year default
on student loans, with 40 percent of all borrowers expected to
default on student loans by 2023. This is why wages are stagnant or
have declined while costs, from health care and pharmaceutical
products to bank fees and basic utilities, are skyrocketing. The
enforced debt peonage grows to feed the beast until, as with the
subprime mortgage crisis, the predatory system fails because of
massive defaults. There will come a day, for example, as with all
financial bubbles, when the wildly optimistic projected profits of
industries such as fracking will no longer be an effective excuse to
keep pumping money into failing businesses burdened by debt they cannot
expenses,"
"The 60 biggest exploration and production firms are not generating
enough cash from their operations to cover their operating and capital
Bethany McLean writes of the fracking industry in an article titled
"The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground" that appeared in The
New York Times. "In aggregate, from mid-2012 to mid-2017, they had
negative free cash flow of $9 billion per quarter."
The global financial system is a ticking time bomb. The question is
not if it will explode but when it will explode. And once it does,
the inability of the global speculators to use fabricated money with
zero interest to paper over the debacle will trigger massive
unemployment, high prices for imports and basic services, and a
devaluation in which the dollar will become nearly worthless as it is
abandoned as the world's reserve currency. This manufactured
financial tsunami will transform the United States, already a failed
democracy, into an authoritarian police state. Life will become very
cheap, especially for the vulnerable-undocumented workers, Muslims,
poor people of color, girls and women, anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist critics branded as agents of foreign powers-who
will be demonized and persecuted for the collapse. The elites, in a
desperate bid to cling to their unchecked power and obscene wealth,
will disembowel what is left of the United States.
Chris Hedges
