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When was the last time a monopoly or quasi-monopoly was broken up? A generation ago, or was it two generations ago?

The Ruling Class that wants us to love our servitude incites us to seek divisions: between red and blue, left and right, progressive and conservative, and so on. The Ruling Class in the mainstream media, in Washington D.C. and in Silicon Valley are experts at manipulating language and terminology to divide and conquer.

But beneath the superficial red-blue divide they are hawking, a broad-based political rebellion against the Oligarchy and their Ruling Class nomenklatura is gathering momentum. People left, right and center are awakening to two painfully obvious realities:

1. the political-social-economic system no longer works for the bottom 95%

2. the system is intrinsically unfair–rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

The bottom 95% lack the political influence of the Oligarchy, and so their only means of expressing their disapproval is at the ballot box, by rejecting the approved mainstream candidates in favor of candidates who might move the needle in a rigged system.

What are the core economic issues that people are trying to solve at the ballot box?

1. The systemic lack of fairness: the growing sense that opportunities are not being distributed as widely or fairly as they once were; ruling elites now have advantages the “rest of us” don’t.

This advantage is very basic: capital has accrued most of the gains of the past decade’s growth and asset appreciation, labor’s share of the GDP continues to slide.

Much of the wealth is controlled by corporate-state cartels operating rentier skims: prices rise while quality and quantity of goods and services remains the same or decline. This is more akin to extortion than a free-market competitive market.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Future of Privacy

October 25, 2018

The Future of Privacy

Roughly one hundred years ago, the people who “ran things,” – the drivers behind governments, big business and banking – formulated a concept which became known by a number of names, but, predominantly, as the “New World Order.”

The concept was to put an end to unnecessary competition and warfare and have a central, unelected group of people run the entire world. It was not considered necessary to completely eliminate individual countries; the idea was to control them all centrally. It also didn’t necessarily mean that wars would end. Warfare can be quite useful for rulers, as they provide an excellent distraction from resentment toward the leaders who impose control over a people.

Ever since that time, this same rough group of people has continued generationally. Sometimes, but not always, the family names change. Useful people are added on and less useful ones removed. But the concept itself has continued, evolved and, in fact, gained strength.

But, as yet, the process remains incomplete. Several facets to a New World Order are not yet in place. It’s proven difficult to “fool all of the people all of the time,” so the effort to subjugate an entire world has taken more time than originally anticipated.

An essential component of this control is the elimination of the personal holding of wealth. Whilst the leaders intend to expand their own wealth in an unlimited fashion, they seek to suppress the ability of the average person to increase his own wealth. Wealth leads to independence and independence from a New World Order is unacceptable. Wealth gives people options. They must be taught to accept being herded like cattle and being compliant, or they will become troublesome.

Not surprising then, that, recently, organisations like the OECD have been created to eliminate the individual’s ability to create and maintain wealth for his own benefit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gold in the “Everything Bubble”: Effective Diversification?

September 25, 2018

Gold in the “Everything Bubble”: Effective Diversification?

What do you do when nearly all asset classes are overvalued?

Diversification is one of the oldest principles by which people try to hang on to their wealth, however little they might have. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, it goes. Diversification is not designed to maximize profits or minimize costs. It’s designed to get you through a smaller or larger fiasco, not necessarily unscathed but with at least some of your eggs intact so that you can go to market another day. This search for stability is a critical concept when looking at gold as diversification of risk in other asset classes.

There are many reasons to own or trade gold that are beyond the scope of my thoughts here on diversification. So I’ll leave them for another day.

The classic and most basic diversification for American households has been the triad of stocks, bonds, and real estate. In the past, it was often held that when stocks go up, bonds decline. This has to do in part with the Fed, which tends to raise rates when things get hot, thus driving up bond yields (which means by definition that bond prices decline). So stocks and bonds balanced each other out to some extent.

Throw in some leveraged real estate – the house you live in – and in the past, your assets were considered sufficiently diversified.

But this no longer applies today: Stocks, bonds, and real estate – both residential and commercial – all boomed together since the onset of QE in 2009. Other asset classes boomed to, including art and classic cars. Almost everything went up together in near lockstep. For a while, gold and silver, which had been on a surge since 2001 continued to surge. In other words, it was very difficult to achieve actual diversification.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Watch: The Spider’s Web – Britain’s Second Empire Revealed

September 23, 2018

Watch: The Spider’s Web – Britain’s Second Empire Revealed

At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands.

Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance.

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, is a documentary film that shows how Britain transformed from a colonial power into a global financial power.

Source: Tax Justice Network

The Spider’s Web was substantially inspired by Nicholas Shaxson’s book Treasure Islands.

Sponsor the next film on Patreon

Plutocracy Now!

September 6, 2018

Plutocracy Now!

The United States today qualifies as a plutocracy – on a number of grounds, and it is having a profound impact on the media, education and think tanks–indeed on the whole of society, says Michael Brenner.

Plutocracy literally means rule by the rich. “Rule” can have various shades of meaning: those who exercise the authority of public office are wealthy; their wealth explains why they hold that office; they exercise that authority in the interests of the rich; they have the primary influence over who holds those offices and the actions they take.

These aspects of “plutocracy” are not exclusive. Moreover, government of the rich and for the rich need not be run directly by the rich. Also, in some exceptional circumstances rich individuals who hold powerful positions may govern in the interests of the many, for example Franklin Roosevelt.

The United States today qualifies as a plutocracy – on a number of grounds. Let’s look at some striking bits of evidence. Gross income redistribution upwards in the hierarchy has been a feature of American society for the past decades. The familiar statistics tell us that nearly 80 percent of the national wealth generated since 1973 has gone to the upper 2 percent and 65 percent to the upper 1 per cent. Estimates for the rise in real income for salaried workers over the past 40 years range from 20 percent to 28 percent. In that period, real GDP has risen by 110 percent – it has more than doubled.

To put it somewhat differently, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top earning 1 percent of households gained about 8 times more than those in the 60 percentile after federal taxes and income transfers between 1979 and 2007 and 10 times those in lower percentiles.

In short, the overwhelming fraction of all the wealth created over two generations has gone to those at the very top of the income pyramid.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Workers’ Power vs. Climate Destroyers: What It Will Take to Save the Planet

August 30, 2018

Workers’ Power vs. Climate Destroyers: What It Will Take to Save the Planet

Humanity faces a multi-faceted crisis. Endless wars of imperial aggression, both overt and covert– from Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan to Yemen, Palestine and Central and South America. These conflagrations compel those at the bottom of the economic pyramid to fight and die to protect the wealth and privileges of those at the top. These wars destroy human beings and our natural environment, but also opportunities and resources that could be allocated to human betterment. Nuclear arsenals remain on hair trigger alert, with fearsome destructive potential, one accident or a single myopic policy decision away from wiping out the entire human race. Economic inequality, having already reached obscene proportions, is showing no sign of slowing down or reversing course. Racism, xenophobia, sexism and other forms of hate-filled discrimination are used to distract and divide those victimized by the current state of affairs and to hinder a united fight by all of the oppressed against our common oppressors.

And then there’s the matter of climate Armageddon. The world is heating up as a result of economic and energy policy choices. These choices have maximized profits for the 1% while threatening the very biosphere we all depend on for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We know that the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting additional carbon in our atmosphere are driving rapid planetary warming. We know this, not because a majority of climate scientists believe it to be true – that’s not how science works; after all, majorities of scientists have been wrong on occasion. We know this crisis is real because a substantial amount of data has been collectedthat corroborates the climate change hypothesis, and because key scientific predictions based on the theory of human-accelerated climate change have been born out by evidence and experience. Climate change has been directly implicated in:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How “Wealthy” Would We Be If We Stopped Borrowing Trillions Every Year?

August 24, 2018

How “Wealthy” Would We Be If We Stopped Borrowing Trillions Every Year?

These charts reflect a linear system that is wobbling into the first stages of non-linear destabilization.

The widespread presumption is the U.S. is wealthy beyond words, and will remain so as far as the eye can see: wealthy enough to fund trillion-dollar weapons systems, trillion-dollar endless wars, multi-trillion dollar Medicare for all, multi-trillion dollar Universal Basic Income, and so on, in an endless profusion of endless trillions.

Just as a thought experiment, let’s ask: how “wealthy” would we be if we stopped borrowing trillions of dollars every year? Or put another way, how “wealthy” would we be if the rest of the world stops buying our trillions in newly issued bonds, mortgages, auto loans, etc.?

The verboten reality is our “wealth” is nothing but a sand castle of debt. Take away more borrowing and the castle melts away. I’ve gathered a selection of charts that show just how dependent we are on massive debt expansion that continues essentially forever, as any pause in debt expansion will collapse the entire system.

Corporate buybacks have powered rising corporate earnings–and the buybacks are funded by debt. Corporate debt has exploded higher in the past decade, enabling stock buybacks on an unprecedented scale.

Government debt–federal, state and local– is rising an exponential rates.We’re not paying for more government programs with earnings–we’re simply borrowing trillions and hoping we can borrow the interest payments that will also rise along with the debt.

Household debt, student loans, auto loans–all are soaring. The corporate sector, government and the household sector–all are living on borrowed money, and relying on magical thinking to mask the inevitable consequences.

Here’s debt to GDP. Yes, the economy expanded, but debt expanded much faster. Every additional dollar of GDP now requires multiple dollars of new debt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Are All Lab Rats In The Largest-Ever Monetary Experiment In Human History

August 18, 2018

We Are All Lab Rats In The Largest-Ever Monetary Experiment In Human History

And how do things usually work out for the rat?

There are ample warning signs that another serious financial crisis is on the way.

These warning signs are being soundly ignored by the majority, though. Perhaps understandably so.

After 10 years of near-constant central bank interventions to prop up markets and make stocks, bonds and real estate rise in price — while also simultaneously hammering commodities to mask the inflationary impact of their money printing from the masses — it’s difficult to imagine that “they” will allow markets to ever fall again.

This is known as the “central bank put”: whenever the markets begin to teeter, the central banks will step in to prop/nudge/cajole the markets back towards the “correct” direction, which is always: Up!

It’s easy in retrospect to see how the central banks have become caught in this trap of their own making, where they’re now responsible for supporting all the markets all the time.

The 2008 crisis really spooked them. Hence their massive money printing spree to “rescue” the system.

But instead of admitting that Great Financial Crisis was the logical result of flawed policies implemented after the 2000 Dot-Com crash (which, in turn, was the result of flawed policies pursued in the 1990’s), the central banks decided after 2008 to double down on their bets — implementing even worse policies.

The Largest-Ever Monetary Experiment In Human History

It’s not hyperbole to say that the monetary experiment conducted over the past ten years by the world’s leading central banks (and its resulting social and political ramifications) is the largest-ever in human history:

(Source)

This global flood of freshly-printed ‘thin air’ money has no parallel in the historical records. All around the world, each of us is part of a grand experiment being conducted without the benefits of either prior experience or controls. Its outcome will be binary: either super-great or spectacularly awful.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Energy slaves, “hard work,” and the real sources of wealth

August 9, 2018

Energy slaves, “hard work,” and the real sources of wealth

Many Canadians and Americans struggle financially. Millions are unemployed. Many others live paycheque-to-paycheque. A 2017 report by the US Federal Reserve Board found that 40 percent of US citizens couldn’t cover an unexpected expense of $400 without selling something or borrowing money. There’s a lot of denial and misunderstanding regarding the financial challenges faced by a large portion of our fellow citizens.

Equally, though, there is misunderstanding, denial, and myth-making regarding those among us who are more financially secure, those who are well off—“the rich.” Most glaring is the way we mischaracterize the sources of our wealth, luxury, and ease. We lie to ourselves and each other regarding why we have it so good. The rich often claim that their wealth is a result of “hard work.” We hear people objecting to even the smallest tax increase, saying: “I worked hard for my money and no one is going to take it from me.”

The reality, however, is quite the opposite. The rich don’t work very hard. Every poor women or girl in Asia or Africa who gets up at dawn to walk many kilometres to carry home water or firewood for her family works harder than the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires. Every farmer with a hoe or toiling behind an oxen works harder than any CEO. My farmer grandparents worked far harder than I do, yet I live much better. I would be self-delusional in the extreme to attribute my middle-class luxury to “hard work.”

No, those of us in North America, the European Union, and elsewhere in the world who enjoy privileged lives live well, not because we work hard, but because of the vast energy windfall of which we are the beneficiaries. We live lives of comfort and ease because our work is done for us by “energy slaves.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich

August 5, 2018

Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich

Professor and author Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote about a group of wealthy individuals who paid him to answer questions about how to manage their lives after what they believe will be the collapse of society. He only knew at the time he was engaged that the group wanted to talk about the future of technology.

Rushkoff afterwards explained that the group assumed they would need armed guards after this collapse to defend themselves. But they rightly wondered in a collapsed society how they could even control such guards. What would they pay those guards with when the normal forms of payment ceased to mean anything? Would the guards organize against them?

Rushkoff provides a compelling analysis of a group of frightened wealthy men trying to escape the troubles of this world while alive and wishing to leave a decaying body behind when the time comes and transfer their consciousness digitally into a computer. (I’ve written about consciousness and computers previously.)

Here I want to focus on what I see as the failure of these people to understand the single most salient fact about their situations: Their wealth and their identities are social constructs that depend on thousands if not millions of people who are employees; customers; employees of vendors; government workers who maintain and run the law courts, the police force, the public physical infrastructure, legislative bodies, the administrative agencies and the educational institutions—and who thereby maintain public order, public health and public support for our current systems.

Those wealthy men aren’t taking all this with them when they die. And, while they are alive, their identities will shift radically if the intellectual, social, economic and governmental infrastructure degrades to the point where their safety is no longer guaranteed by at least minimal well-being among others in society.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What’s Wrong with the Economy: 9 Toxic Dynamics

June 13, 2018

What’s Wrong with the Economy: 9 Toxic Dynamics

These nine dynamics are mutually reinforcing.

Beneath the surface signals of an eternally rising stock market and expanding GDP, we all sense something is deeply, systemically wrong with the U.S. economy. These nine structural dynamics generate secondary dynamics, all of which are toxic to social mobility, sustainable prosperity, accountability and democracy:

1. The financialization of the economy, which transformed services, credit, risk and labor into commodities that could be traded globally. Financialization generates enormously asymmetric returns: those with access to low-cost credit, global markets and expertise in finance collect the lion’s share of gains in income and wealth.

2. The technological transformation of the economy, which has placed a substantial scarcity premium on specific tech/managerial/communication skills and devalued ordinary labor and capital. As a result, the majority of gains in wealth and income flow to those with the scarce skills and forms of capital, leaving little for ordinary labor and capital.

3. The end of cheap fossil fuels. The fracking boom/bubble has obscured the long-term secular trend: the depletion of cheap-to-access and process oil. As many analysts have observed (Nate Hagens, Gail Tverberg, Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson et al.), the global economy only grows if energy and credit are both cheap.

4. Globalization, which transformed the developing world into the environmental dumping ground of the wealthy nations and enabled the owners of capital to offshore waste and labor.

5. The destructive consequences of “growth at any cost” are piling up. “Growth” is the one constant of all existing political-economic systems, and none of the current Modes of Production (i.e. the structures that organize production, consumption, the economy and society) recognize that “growth” is not sustainable.

The first two dynamics drive three other dynamics that have hollowed out the productive economy:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Economy Is Failing Our Society

May 21, 2018

Our Economy Is Failing Our Society

If we want to extend the opportunities for positive social roles to everyone, we have to change the way money is created and distributed in our economy.

One of the most unrecognized dynamics of our era is the structural dependence of our society on our economy. One set of pundits, politicos and academics wring their hands over the fragmenting of civil society (the rise of disintegrative, divisive forces and the decay of integrative forces) and decry the rising inequality that is our economy’s dominant feature, while another set of pundits and academics celebrate the economy’s remarkable adaptability or focus solely on reading financial tea leaves (interest rates, Fed policy tweaks, unemployment rates, etc.)

Those few analysts who escape their respective silos/academic ghettos rarely get past generalities such as the erosion of social mobility, a dynamic that is clearly economic and social. But the precise mechanisms behind the secular erosion of social mobility are lost in platitudes about how A.I. and robots will free us all to be poets or consumers of a vast and endlessly enjoyable leisure.

The key understanding that’s lacking is that economic structures organize and limit the social structures underpinning civil society. To understand why civil society is disintegrating on so many fronts (public health, civil discourse, etc.), we must understand how our economy has failed to support the social structures required for an integrative, inclusive civil society.

Our economy is transforming/adapting as a result of powerful secular trends:the 4th Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. the digital-networked-AI-Big-Data revolution), globalization, the commoditization of ordinary capital and labor, the financial and political dominance of quasi-monopolies and cartels, and perhaps the most unrecognized dynamic, the devaluation of ordinary capital and labor in favor of scarce and often rarified forms of capital and labor in the fields of technology, entrepreneurship and finance.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wealth Preservation: Understanding Silver and Gold Content for Collapse Investing

May 11, 2018

Wealth Preservation: Understanding Silver and Gold Content for Collapse Investing

Investing in precious metals is a great way to diversify and preserve your wealth. You can even find it on eBay! While this article is by no means an exhaustive treatise on gold and silver buying, it is more of a “primer” to give you some basic information you need to get started (if you plan on going into this area) or to provide knowledge to arm you in your dealings with people. Some of this may be useful for you in purchases of precious metals, but the scope of this is mainly to cover things that you may find when out hunting in the flea markets, thrift stores, yard sales, or other areas of the “secondary shops.”

First, we’ll cover gold measured in terms of purity that is expressed in karats, symbolized by the letter “K” and “kt” with jewelers.

24 Karat 100%, or pure gold

22 Karat 91.7% gold

18 Karat 75.0% gold

14 Karat 58.3% gold

10 Karat 41.7% gold

Now let’s cover silver, a metal marked with a purity mark. Here are the marks and their percentage of silver contents that correspond:

999 99.9% silver

958 95.8% silver

925 92.5% silver (known as Sterling silver)

800 80.0% silver

We are referring mostly to jewelry or decorative pieces and keepsakes here (such as silverware, candlestick holders, or other things that may bear a stamp to show their precious metal content). Coins are a little bit more involved and beyond the scope of this article, as there are too many to list here.

One of the problems that people run into with jewelry and their great-grandmother’s candlestick holders is that most businesses that buy them will usually pay according to their melt value. This is especially true with silver. Most of these dealers will estimate the silver content of your item by weight, and then will pay you roughly 15-25% under value to cover their handling and melting charges.

Learn how to test your junk gold and silver

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Creating Wealth” Through Debt: the West’s Finance-Capitalist Road

May 8, 2018

“Creating Wealth” Through Debt: the West’s Finance-Capitalist Road

Photo source David Shankbone | CC BY 2.0

Volumes II and III of Marx’s Capital describe how debt grows exponentially, burdening the economy with carrying charges. This overhead is subjecting today’s Western finance-capitalist economies to austerity, shrinking living standards and capital investment while increasing their cost of living and doing business. That is the main reason why they are losing their export markets and becoming de-industrialized.

What policies are best suited for China to avoid this neo-rentier disease while raising living standards in a fair and efficient low-cost economy? The most pressing policy challenge is to keep down the cost of housing. Rising housing prices mean larger and larger debts extracting interest out of the economy. The strongest way to prevent this is to tax away the rise in land prices, collecting the rental value for the government instead of letting it be pledged to the banks as mortgage interest.

The same logic applies to public collection of natural resource and monopoly rents. Failure to tax them away will enable banks to create debt against these rents, building financial and other rentier charges into the pricing of basic needs.

U.S. and European business schools are part of the problem, not part of the solution. They teach the tactics of asset stripping and how to replace industrial engineering with financial engineering, as if financialization creates wealth faster than the debt burden. Having rapidly pulled ahead over the past three decades, China must remain free of rentier ideology that imagines wealth to be created by debt-leveraged inflation of real-estate and financial asset prices.

Western capitalism has not turned out the way that Marx expected. He was optimistic in forecasting that industrial capitalists would gain control of government to free economies from unnecessary costs of production in the form of rent and interest that increase the cost of living (and hence, the break-even wage level).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How We’re Fighting to Save Democracy From Bribery and Gerrymandering, One State at a Time

February 26, 2018

How We’re Fighting to Save Democracy From Bribery and Gerrymandering, One State at a Time

In Pennsylvania, the democratic system isn’t broken. It’s dead.

Adam Eichen, Rabbi Michael Pollack, Emmie DiCicco speaking at a March on Harrisburg barnstorming event at the UU Fellowship of Erie, PA. February 19, 2018
Photo Credit: Rhys Baker

Political alienation plagues our nation, and most of us are correct in feeling that we have little to no impact on the decisions that govern our lives. Research shows that the average American has “near-zero” influence on public policy, while those with wealth have “significant influence.” Unfortunately, this conclusion is based on data from the 1980s and 1990s, and things have only gotten worse since then.

This problem is of increasing concern in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in which campaign finance limits are non-existent and political district lines would be more fairly drawn by an energetic puppy with a sharpie taped to its tail. The state also has no limits on the value of gifts to state legislators. If you are feeling particularly generous—or self-interested—you can take a legislator to the Super Bowl or pay off the student debt of his or her child.

In Pennsylvania, the democratic system isn’t broken. It’s dead. And regardless of political affiliation, Pennsylvanians are correct in having lost faith in our government.

But here’s the deal: Recognizing this sober truth, as depressing and upsetting as it may be, does not preclude reason to hope that things can get better.

Anger and aimlessness lead to helplessness and apathy. But when solutions are coupled with a plan to achieve them, our emotions are transformed into positive, constructive political action. This plan of action is what Pennsylvanians need now.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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