Disaster Porn is all the rage now. Slick videos - and some not so slick - purport to show the inevitable collapse of the economy, even the world from economic/political/environmental debt & mismanagement. Such porn provides palliatives to those who would do nothing anyway, but they are wrong and dangerous. Here's how to combat them.

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3.  The government can, should, and has, produced sovereign money, debt-free.  It's been doing this since the beginning of the Republic with coins, and most famously with paper money during the Civil War (when it became 40% of the currency).  It can do this again, under the constitution's Art. 1, Sec. 8, and SCOTUS' Julliard v. Greenman 8-1 decision that upheld this right.  Remember, money is not wealth.  Real goods and services that have exchange value are wealth.

4.   To talk of $100T unfunded liabilities, as one of the videos does, far off in the future is almost meaningless without projecting revenue too (which, without at least some of the 5 reforms above, really will be inadequate).  Also, to talk of spending money as if we are getting nothing back for it, is even more absurd.  Social Security helps keep seniors from poverty - what is the deflationary effect of millions of starving homeless seniors?  (Deflation is worse than inflation, as any honest economist will tell you).  These films don't answer that.  Medicare also keeps people healthy (it would be cheaper and more efficient to have Medicare for all, than this hodge-podge corrupt private system that leaves 50 million uninsured, and subject to ruinous medical bills far, far higher than the "discounted" rate of insured patients.  Even without that, the cost curve is already flattening, and will continue to do so).

5.   There are new discoveries all the time. A cure for Alzheimers would take nearly a trillion off the future obligations roster and let people work well into their seventies if they wanted to (and increasingly, healthy seniors do).  A new energy source like Thorium reactors or fusion or even just more efficient batteries or solar power would be game-changing too.  3D printing promises to bring manufacturing into the home, and may even create replaceable human organs in a few years.  None of these innovations are ever figured into disaster-porn movies.

I've only touched on some of the economic counter-arguments to disaster porn, but similar solutions, or even the same solutions, could be offered to solve environmental, political or social problems. 
If the government produced its own sovereign money, could it use that to clean up politics by publicly funding campaigns?  Could that money be used to fund Medicare for all?  Corruption, waste, and inflation are always a problem, of course, but there's no evidence that we have less of that under the present private system.
If all people had access to the world's resources, and people who used them had to pay a tax back to the community, estimated to be 1/3 of GDP by Georgist economists, wouldn't that be enough to run a decent sized government?  Wouldn't people and businesses than also be encouraged to use resources sparingly (to avoid paying the tax) and wouldn't this lead to environmental sustainability?
That there is no value in providing wealth to the top 1% from idle speculation hardly needs elaborating, but the truly destructive effects of such wealth inequity are just now becoming empirically obvious to all but the 1% and their sycophants.

Now, here is the real danger.
That a fascist, defensive, inward-looking, corrupt, frozen-in-time, aggressive and paranoid corporatacracy government will do none of these things, or might even disable others from doing them.  Our government, aided by the private central bank, has plunged us into recessions and even depressions, repeatedly, while blaming a fictional "business cycle" for their own failures and for the greed of the member banks that run them.  There is no "business cycle," because people's true demand never slackens, it just becomes ineffective demand (i.e. they have no money).  The solution ought to be obvious by now - put more money into people's hands, preferably by paying them for working, but if necessary (i.e. during a deflationary depression), by simply mailing them a check for debt-free dollars.  Of course, to get people to understand this means their relearning what money is, what land monopoly means, what investments the government actually has, and what money is stored offshore, and finally, how to preserve money in the states for state needs, not wall street greed (and gambles).  All of this is covered in my article linked above: America is not Broke!

Will we get there?  I don't know.  The so-called leaders are led by the nose by the corporations and their true owners, don't understand any of this, and are resistant to learning.  They are corrupted by the Money Power and the brainwashed media.  Therefore, it is up to us to teach them, or to replace them with leaders who DO understand.

What choice do we have?

Authors Website: http://newthinking.blogspot.com/

Authors Bio:

Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:

http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of articles for Common Ground's national publication, GroundSwell, and has advocated for the Georgist Land Value Tax to public and political audiences.

A complete list of his publications can be found here:

Click Here

He is also New York State Coordinator and Senior Advisor for the Public Banking Institute

Click Here, which seeks to promote Public Banking. The PBI is chaired by another OEN blogger, Ellen Brown.
Scott has appeared on TV/Radio and in in-person Presentations to explain the principles of Georgism, Greenbacking, and State Banking. These may also be found on his personal blog: http://newthinking.blogspot.com/

Scott has a dozen progressive petitions on Change.org which may be found here:

http://chn.ge/10nUAmJ

Scott was an I.T. Manager for a major New York university for over two decades where he earned a Certificate for Frontline Leadership.

He had a video game published in Compute! Magazine: Click Here

Scott is a graduate and adjunct faculty of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York City.

Scott is a modern-day Renaissance Man with interests in economics, science and all future-forward topics.

He has been called an "adept syncretist" by Kirkus Discoveries for his novel, NeitherWorld - a two-volume opus blending Native American myth, archaeological detail, government conspiracy, with a sci-fi flair http://amzn.to/10nUoDV

Scott grew up in New York City and Pennsylvania. He graduated with honors and a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University and was a member of the Psychology honor society PSI CHI.

Today he is an avid bicyclist and ride co-leader in a prominent bike advocacy organization.

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