Home » Posts tagged 'serfdom'

Tag Archives: serfdom

Central banking is “a great business to be in, where you print money, and people believe it.”

That’s what the head of New Zealand’s central bank said recently in an unscripted moment of candor.

It led me to wonder about the nature of this strange “business.”

Let me put it into the simplest and most concise terms.

Central banks create fake money out of thin air and loan it to governments at interest.
Governments use violence and threats of violence to extract taxes from average citizens to pay the interest on the fake money the central banks created out of thin air.
Like the mafia, they can deploy violence to ensure there is no competition to their privileged racket.

That’s the unvarnished truth about central banking.

In short, it’s the business of usury and tax farming.

(To me, a more practical modern meaning of usury is “enslaving people with financial trickery.” Central banking clearly fits the bill.)

The central bank is a powerful wealth transfer mechanism that enables governments to harvest the productive efforts of their citizens efficiently and surreptitiously.

The central bank’s currency debasement transfers wealth from savers to those closest to the money printer, namely governments and their cronies.

The central bank’s real mandate is to transfer as much wealth as possible via currency debasement to the political class without causing alarm among the plebs. Ideally, it happens gradually so nobody notices, like a child taking only a little money out of his mother’s purse each day so she doesn’t notice.

However, sometimes their theft spirals out of control, and it’s impossible for the plebs not to notice.

Consider this.

The Federal Reserve—the central bank of the US—has printed more fake money in recent years than it has for its entire existence.

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

Canada’s Bill C-26: Yet Another Government Power Grab

January 28, 2023

Canada’s Bill C-26: Yet Another Government Power Grab

Technocracy – a 1933 cartoon by Winsor McCay.

Soviet Era Ethos Stomps Privacy and Due-Process

Another doozy from the Canadian government.

Following along several other bills winding their way along the Road to Serfdom…

Bill C-11 regulates the internet under the CRTC and paves the way toward institutionalized content moderation, the requirement for licenses to publish online, and regulation of user generated content (in Senate)
Bill C-36 the Online Harms Bill sought to designate political dissent as “hate speech” and invoked penalties for criticizing politicians (not sure where this one is at the moment).
Bill C-18 throws a funding lifeline to Canada’s flailing agitprop industry (a.k.a the mainsteam media), in that it will require tech platforms to pay licensing fees for content the media outlets post there (passed third reading in November). This bill will reward big media conglomerates like Bell, while freezing out small and independent organizations.

Here comes another one, Bill C-36: An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts, which passed first reading last June.

It’s been largely flying under everybody’s radar so far. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been actively raising awareness and Michael Geist had Brenda McPhail, their Director of the Privacy, Technology and Surveillance Program on his podcast last October.

We mentioned C-26 in AxisOfEasy #273 citing Gowling WLG’s coverage of it by Brent Arnold (Brent Arnold sits on the Internet Society Canada Chapter board, as do I, but I am writing this post from my role as easyDNS CEO, and not ISCC.)The Government Hereby Grants Itself The Following Powers:

The new bill is ostensibly a cyber-security and critical infrastructure bill, but it is riddled with nebulous, open-ended terms, Kafka-esque secrecy provisions, onerous penalties and conspicuously absent of any semblance due process:

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Serf-Expression

March 14, 2022

Serf-Expression

Eventually the “flock of timid and industrious animals” changes their minds about how much exploitation by the few is acceptable.

You may have noticed the news flow beyond the hot war in Ukraine is largely focused on capital: financial capital (markets, liquidity, interest rates, commodities, central bank tightening, etc.) and political capital (geopolitical maneuvering, sanctions, revising energy and defense policies, etc.)

Notice who’s left out, unnoticed and invisible? The serfs, the bottom 90% who have been decapitalized in the developed world and exploited in the developing world for the past 45 years.

With capital ascendant, the vast majority of financial and political gains flowed to the top tier of speculative capital (banks and billionaires) while the purchasing power of labor (i.e. wages) has been in a 45-year descent. (See chart below)

This disemboweling of labor transferred $50 trillion from labor to capital in the U.S. alone. Financialization and globalization devalued labor and working-class assets such as savings and boosted leveraged speculative bets only available to financiers and corporations, for example, stock buybacks funded by the tsunami of free money for financiers unleashed by the Federal Reserve and other central banks. (See chart below)

Even though the corporate media gives it no notice, serf-expression will become increasingly consequential. No, serf-expression is not a typo for self-expression, the core doctrine of modernism. By serf-expression I mean the serf’s expression of what is no longer acceptable. Another term for this is cultural revolution. I address social and cultural revolutions in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States.

Is a Cultural Revolution Brewing in America? (April 9, 2021)

When the serfs no longer believe in the divine right of banks and billionaires, then the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the few will no longer be acceptabl…

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

Net-Zero Policies: Taking From the Poor and Giving to the Rich

November 21, 2021

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (R) and Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison gesture prior to a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rome, Italy, on Oct. 30, 2021. (Kirsty Wigglesworth- Pool/Getty Images)

VIEWPOINTS

Net-Zero Policies: Taking From the Poor and Giving to the Rich

It is too often overlooked in all the discussions about the “transition” to a net-zero emissions economy that the most consequential transition is that from democratic capitalism to feudal serfdom.

This is the conclusion of American demographer and “blue-collar Democrat” Joel Kotkin, who has highlighted that the supposedly well-intentioned green policies being adopted across the West come at enormous expense to the working- and middle-classes.

As Kotkin wrote in ‘Spiked’ earlier this year, “extreme climate measures have driven the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, construction and energy, while other environmental regulations have boosted housing prices.”

Kotkin’s thesis is that the West is on the road to serfdom. Rather than maintaining our capitalist societies where a large, asset-owning middle-class underpin a stable democratic system, we are becoming stratified feudal societies.

Home and small business ownership are declining, especially among the young and the less well-off, a group of technocratic elites are establishing themselves as permanent rulers in the apparatus of the administrative state, and corporate oligarchs are coming to dominate both the economy and broader society.

Epoch Times Photo — People view artist Luke Jerram’s new ‘Floating Earth’ Debuts In Wigan, England, on Nov. 18, 2021. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

This transition has been occurring for some time, but it has been accelerated by the COVID-19-inspired lockdowns and the zeal with which Western governments have thoughtlessly adopted net-zero emissions targets.

Both play out as an aggressive form of reverse Robin Hood asset stripping, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

Australia is now officially committed to a net-zero emissions by 2050 target.

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

Want to Understand Rising Wealth Inequality? Look at Debt and Interest

May 19, 2017

Want to Understand Rising Wealth Inequality? Look at Debt and Interest

“Governments cannot reduce their debt or deficits and central banks cannot taper. Equally, they cannot perpetually borrow exponentially more. This one last bubble cannot end (but it must).”

I often refer to debt serfdom, the servitude debt enforces on borrowers. The mechanism of this servitude is interest, and today I turn to two knowledgeable correspondents for explanations of the consequences of interest.

Correspondent D.L.J. explains how debt/interest is the underlying engine of rising income/wealth disparity:

Here is a table of the growth rate of the GDP.

If we use $16T as the approximate GDP and a growth rate of, say, 3.5%, the total of goods and services would increase one year to the next by about $500B.

Meanwhile, referencing the Grandfather national debt chart with the USDebtClock data, the annual interest bill is $3 trillion ($2.7 trillion year-to-date).

In other words, those receiving interest are getting 5-6 times more than the increase in gross economic activity.

Using your oft-referenced Pareto Principle, about 80% of the population are net payers of interest while the other 20% are net receivers of interest.

Also, keep in mind that one does not have to have an outstanding loan to be a net payer of interest. As I attempted to earlier convey, whenever one buys a product that any part of its production was involving the cost of interest, the final product price included that interest cost. The purchase of that product had the interest cost paid by the purchaser.

Again using the Pareto concept, of the 20% who receive net interest, it can be further divided 80/20 to imply that 4% receive most (64%?) of the interest. This very fact can explain why/how the system (as it stands) produces a widening between the haves and the so-called ‘have nots’.

In other words, the wealthy own interest-yielding assets and the rest of us owe interest on debt.

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

Charting America’s Descent Into Peasantry

March 31, 2016

Charting America’s Descent Into Peasantry

Earlier today, I published a post titled Americans Have Been Turned Into Peasants – It’s Time to Fight Back. In the hours since, I came across an article in the Washington Post which offers some additional details and graphics on the subject.

Here are a few excerpts from the piece titled, 2015 Was a Terrible Year for the Common Working Man:

By at least one measure, inequality among working men has grown for decades. But, in 2015, it accelerated: The wage gap among men saw its largest single-year increase on record.

Top earners — men who made more than 95 percent of their peers — saw wages last year rise by 9.9 percent, according to an analysis of federal data. Men in the middle — with earnings higher than half their peers — saw a much-smaller 2.6 percent increase.

Now here’s a graphic of the trend:

Screen Shot 2016-03-30 at 3.48.46 PM

Meanwhile…

Since 1973, wages among men in the 50th percentile have fallen a total 4.6 percent. Wages for men in the 95th percentile, meanwhile, are up 51.4 percent.

Here’s what that looks like:

Screen Shot 2016-03-30 at 3.49.52 PM

This isn’t the outcome of a fairly regulated free market economy. It’s what you get in a rigged economy.

The American public is being used like a cheap suit by the status quo. When will enough be enough?

Must Watch Video – “The Veneer of Justice in a Kingdom of Crime”

March 21, 2016

Must Watch Video – “The Veneer of Justice in a Kingdom of Crime”

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him…The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

– H.L. Mencken

It does not take a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

– Samuel Adams

Fiat justitia ruat caelum
“Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

I believe it is the duty of every single American citizen to sit down and watch the following mini-documentary. In just 45 minutes, you will learn more about the state of the union and the the world around you than decades of schooling and mainstream media could ever provide. Ignorance is not bliss, and if it weren’t for the blinding levels of ignorance pervasive in modern society, we wouldn’t find ourselves in this current deplorable state — on a knife’s edge between manageable serfdom and intolerable tyranny.

No one in American society is supposed to be immune from criminal prosecution, yet the Justice Department within the Obama administration took it upon themselves to grant such immunity to the mega banks and their employees. This is a tale of the traitors operating within the highest levels of U.S. government, and it is a saga of how the rule of law was openly torched in front of our very eyes.

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

The Status Quo Plan – Convince the American Public to Accept Serfdom

March 13, 2016

The Status Quo Plan – Convince the American Public to Accept Serfdom

Earlier today I came across a fantastic article published at Naked Capitalism by a writer known as Gaius Publius.

Yves Smith introduces the piece with the following poignant passage:

Let us not forget that the “things are going to get worse for you” story also conveniently diverts attention from the degree of rent extraction and looting that is taking place. US corporate profit share of GDP has been at record levels, depending on how you compute if, of 10% of 12% of GDP, when no less than Warren Buffett deemed a profit share of over 6% of GDP as unsustainably high as of the early 2000s. That higher profit share is the direct result of workers getting a far lower share of GDP growth than in any post-war expansion. So the increased hardships that ordinary people face is not inevitable, but is to a significant degree due to the ruling classes taking vastly more than their historical share out of greed and short-sightedness.

Now here are some excerpts from the Gaius Publicis piece:

If you think of the country as in decline, as most people do, and you think the cause is the predatory behavior of the big-money elites, as most people do, then you must know you have only two choices — acceptance and resistance.

Why do neo-liberal Democrats, like the Clinton campaign, not want you to have big ideas, like single-payer health care? Because having big ideas is resistance to the bipartisan consensus that runs the country, and they want to stave off that resistance.

But that’s a negative goal, and there’s more. They not only have to stave off your resistance. They have to manage your acceptance of their managed decline in the nation’s wealth and good fortune.

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

Western Peoples Are Being Re-Enserfed

February 26, 2016

Western Peoples Are Being Re-Enserfed

Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, free farmers were defenceless in the face of Viking, Magyar, and Saracen raiders. The need for protection led to the enserfment of free people who accepted the suzerainty of those able to provide walled defenses and armed fighters to ward off attacks. As time passed, the attacks ceased but the feudal arrangements persisted, and the system became exploitative.

Today jobs offshoring and the financialization of the economy are again enserfing the people, but the cause is debt, not armed invaders. Today’s rentier class, unlike the one that emerged from feudalism, has never provided any service in exchange for the debt peonage that it has imposed.

Below is an excerpt from the Introduction to the German edition of Michael Hudson’s book, Killing the Host to be published in November by Klett-Cotta:

Today’s reversal of progressive values is a historical transition point much like what occurred from the Roman Republic to Empire during the century of Social War, 133-29 BC. Rome’s debtors and plebs lost in a wave of political violence. It was by murder that the oligarchic party prevented the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus in Rome after 133 BC. Julius Caesar suffered a similar fate in 44 BC after moving to take the demos into his camp. Other politicians urging debt cancellation also were killed.

Rome survived not by prosperity at home but by looting foreign regions. Arminius made a brave stand to resist Rome in 9 AD in the Teutoburg forest. But by that time the die was cast. Over the next few centuries the oligarchs imposed debt bondage on a quarter of the population, plunging the imperial economy into serfdom.

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

How The Masses Deal With Risk (And Why They Remain Poor)

January 31, 2016

How The Masses Deal With Risk (And Why They Remain Poor)

Last week I discussed how humans are wired to pay attention to scary things.In financial speak: risk. Darwinism has chastised those who ignore risk by rewarding them with an early grave, and by process of elimination rewarded those who stay out of the cross hairs.

Thing is, we no longer live in a world where saber-toothed tigers threaten our existence. In today’s world far greater risk lies in the truly enormous and disproportionate emotional attitude to (and assessment of) risk.

This has nothing to do with Darwin but rather more to do with an educational system designed and built for the industrial age. Education today is an advertising agency which leads us to believe we need the society on which it relies upon for its existence.

Beginning with the schooling system and followed by “higher education”, the middle and upper middle class in developed societies are by and large serfs. And they’re serfs because they don’t understand risk.

The overwhelming majority look at risk incorrectly. They look at it two dimensionally: “The more risk I take the more ‘volatility’ I have.” The fact is, risk is actually subjective to your own personal situation. Mismanaging your own personal situation increases risk disproportionately.

Let me give you an example of how easily an otherwise intelligent person gets royally screwed by the system by routinely miscalculating risk.

Let’s take Harry, a fictional guy from a middle class family who’s just left high school. Harry really wants to get ahead and has set himself a goal of becoming a millionaire by the time he’s 25. He figures that by 35 he’ll be worth north of $10 million.

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

The Re-enserfment of Western Peoples

November 9, 2015

The Re-enserfment of Western Peoples

The re-enserfment of Western peoples is taking place on several levels. One about which I have been writing for more than a decade comes from the offshoring of jobs. Americans, for example, have a shrinking participation in the production of the goods and services that are marketed to them.

On another level we are experiencing the financialization of the Western economy about which Michael Hudson is the leading expert (Killing The Host). Financialization is the process of removing any public presence in the economy and converting the economic surplus into interest payments to the financial sector.

These two developments deprive people of economic prospects. A third development deprives them of political rights. The Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnerships eliminate political sovereignty and turn governance over to global corporations.

These so called “trade partnerships” have nothing to do with trade. These agreements negotiated in secrecy grant immunity to corporations from the laws of the countries in which they do business. This is achieved by declaring any interference by existing and prospective laws and regulations on corporate profits as restraints on trade for which corporations can sue and fine “sovereign” governments. For example, the ban in France and other counries on GMO products would be negated by the Trans-Atlantic Partnership. Democracy is simply replaced by corporate rule.

I have been meaning to write about this at length. However, others, such as Chris Hedges, are doing a good job of explaining the power grab that eliminates representative government.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/The-Most-Brazen-Corporate-by-Chris-Hedges-American-Hypocrisy_Americans-For-Prosperity_Corporate-Citizenship_Corporate-Crime-151107-882.html

The corporations are buying power cheaply. They bought the entire US House of Representatives for just under $200 million. This is what the corporations paid Congress to go along with “Fast Track,” which permits the corporations’ agent, the US Trade Representative, to negotiate in secret without congressional input or oversight. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Almost-200-Million-Donate-by-Paola-Casale-Banking_Congress_Control_Corporations-150620-523.html

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

Neo-Feudalism Has Officially Arrived – Congressman Suggests Building a Moat Around White House | Liberty Blitzkrieg

November 19, 2014

Neo-Feudalism Has Officially Arrived – Congressman Suggests Building a Moat Around White House | Liberty Blitzkrieg.

What has been occurring over the past several years is not a recovery, rather, it’s a painful transition of the U.S. into a neo-feudal society. Earlier this week in the post, Welcome to the Recovery – U.S. Child Homelessness Hits Record as Poverty in Mass. is Highest Since 1960, I wrote:

While the general population is aware something is seriously wrong, people remain extremely confused about the root of the problem. This is because what’s happening all around us isn’t socialism and it isn’t free market capitalism. It is actually a return to something much more ancient and much more oppressive. It is a return to serfdom, neo-fedualism and oligarchy.

Well now we have definitive proof. It can’t get any more in your face than this.

From MarketWatch:

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

Tag Archives: serfdom

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Latest Posts