The Money Tree by Opednews
A colleague in the public banking movement recently forwarded two videos for me to watch: here and here.
I only watched the beginning of each before closing them down. Why? I've seen too many of these doomsday videos to watch more. They get thousands of hits, but they are disaster-porn.
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 supposedly inevitable economic/political/environmental debt & mismanagement. Such disaster porn provides palliatives to those who would do nothing anyway, but they are wrong and dangerous. For those who don't to bathe in the comforting notion that there's nothing they can do, while sitting in their easy chair watching their screens, powered by cheap energy, here's how to combat them.
1. First of all, America is
Not Broke! See this article to see where to come by $100 Trillion
(yes, with a 'T'). The first three solutions have been tried and
proven. The last two are forensic accounting solutions, but together may
add up to $100T, or even more.
2.
I know all about the $1 Quadrillion in derivatives mentioned in the first one - I even used the OCC chart
in my presentation on Public Banking as WESPAC 2 months ago that showed the existence of the American 1/4 piece of that (the $1Q is worldwide, an
important distinction). However, let's just stipulate that not even a
fraction of this money will ever be paid out, not because some bank might not
owe it someday, but because it CAN'T be paid. This the real danger, that
debts that can't be paid, won't be, and that the institutions that either owe it or expect to be paid it, will
collapse.
This is major reason we need alternative banking institutions like State Banks which don't speculate in highly dangerous derivatives and which are not subject to new FDIC deposit confiscation rules.
This is major reason we need alternative banking institutions like State Banks which don't speculate in highly dangerous derivatives and which are not subject to new FDIC deposit confiscation rules.
Both Paul Craig
Roberts, former Asst. Treasury Secretary under Reagan, and I, have separately
recommended making all unpayable derivatives bets "null and void" - the phrase
used independently in both our articles, though me earlier by 3 years (does
PCR read my stuff? I doubt it, but it is a coincidence we came up with
the same solution!): http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-necessary-addendum-to-Pa-by-Scott-Baker-120606-371.html
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 in effective 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?
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