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The Crash That's Coming: More Bubbles Are Turning 'There Will Be Blood' From Fiction to Prophecy
Now that that this year's Oscars are history, imagine if you will, an awards ceremony honoring not the best of the best but the worst of the worst, not just spinoffs like the "Razzies" (the Golden Razberries) for movies. Who should we single out as the biggest slime balls and sleazoids who caused the most damage to our society in the year gone by?
Can you envision an Academy Award-like statuette to "honor" the people we should be despising the most?
The political among us will immediately visualize potential awardees among our own devil incarnates. On the liberal left, perhaps it would be that dick Cheney or even Bill O' Reilly; on the right that ever evil Bubbaman, Bill Clinton, or the liberal media's NY Times might be pounced on by the "wingers," like red meat, at least before the recalls.
Others would conjure up offending glitterati, easy targets like Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan, and others among the most photographed famous for being famous non-functionals among us.
We all have our personal top ten lists of the big enchiladas we love to hate. Bashing Bush as a recreational sport is fading across the spectrum, as his approval ratings continue to fall and his "power" is seen more and more as a joke.
My guess is that few among us would know who to name among the real decision makers, the truly powerful-financiers, traders, corporate honchos-who have taken our once prospering economy and flushed it down the toilet. Why not honor the investment banker who lost the most, the predatory lender who stole the most, and the regulators who were asleep at the switch? If we can't put Wall Street on trial, we can at least shame the masters of the universe with scorn and satire.
For reasons that have everything to do with proclivities of our press, our distracted culture, and the persistence of traditions among the politically active, most of us think that the White House is the only epicenter for change. We focus on political change and ignore the economic interests and wheeler/dealers who set the parameters -and limits---for what politicians can accomplish.
Look around. Check out your rising credit card bills with their ever rising fees and interest. Inflation is driving prices up, not only at the pump but at grocery stores and shopping centers. Jobs are harder than ever to find in part because of outsourcing and layoffs, in part because a decline in investments in industries that hire and pay well. Travel abroad and you'll weep at how little your dollars can buy.
While economists worry about "staving off" a recession, some parts of the country are already -wash my mouth out with soap for saying this---in a depression. (Analysts at investment banks say the recession is here!) Please forgive my use of "the 'D word" even if economists are looking back to 1933 to come up with ideas for how to stem the free fall in housing values. Already, former Treasury Secretary says this may be the "worst crisis in housing finance since the Depression."
Fear of economic collapse is replacing fear of terrorism. The real homeland insecurity these days is to be found among the two-to five million (yup, the number has been expanded) American families who are in danger of having their homes foreclosed. Add in all their tenants and their neighborhoods---because when one house goes, property values decline next door and the tax base quickly erodes.
California is among the hardest hit states, a reality not mentioned at the Academy awards, of course, probably because Beverly Hills and Manhattan real estate are not feeling the pain yet. Home ownership is part an industry that sells the American dream, and Hollywood is known as the Dream Factory. Marion Cotillard, the French actress who won for Best Actress said her award showed that "it is true there are angels in this city. " LA is known as the "City of Angels."
Oui, ma chérie, mon amour, there are good guys, but also bad institutions. Very bad!
While she was having a beautiful emotional moment in front of a global audience, 650,000 foreclosed properties were for sale in California according to RealyTrac, the company that is tracking this slow-motion disaster. That was an increase of 177% over the year before. 9821 California homes went into foreclosure just this past January, says another research firm, representing about $8 billion in value. Over 25,000 homes are in pre-foreclosure in Los Angeles alone as of Oscar Sunday. Nationwide, 1.7 million homes defaulted last year.
Most of these homes were owner -occupied, so we are not just talking about an abstraction but millions of real people, disrupted lives and dreams for families affecting schooling and even voting because most registrations are residential. This problem has been called a "50-State Katrina."
And most of these homeowners are likely in deep debt now that they can't use their homes as ATM machines to pay off their credit card bils. Even as credit cards are being talked about as the next bubble to burst, the Oscar telecast on ABC hyped credit cards as marketed by Master Card. They were a major advertiser among all the talk of the greater glory of American entertainment.
Priceless!
Many of our media outlets themselves have taken in millions in ad revenues from ads for deceptive lenders and get rich quick schemes. The media has been encouraging Americans to shop till we drop and go more deeply into debt. Even a recent Superbowl broadcast ran cool but misleading ads by Ameriquest, a loan company that has since imploded along with credit card companies and mortgage hustlers. And now the Oscars lend their "credibility" to the plastic prison.
Many of those who borrowed themselves into a modern form of serfdom didn't realize how much they would have to pay. They are the new victims of downward mobility. No wonder most marriages break up under this kind of stress. Late night TV is filled with commercials for debt consolidation because these companies know how much anxiety and sleeplessness afflict those in debt. This is the pervasive personal nightmare that the media profits from. Maybe they should win one of our anti-Oscars.
Two years ago, I began researching a documentary IN DEBT WE TRUST (Indebtwetrust.com) to explain the growing debt burden that Americans are buried under. The film warned of the crisis to come and spotlighted subprime lending as one of its causes.
Few distributors were interested. The subject was considered "boring." When it came out last year, it was marginalized; now it is being hailed by some as prophetic. Initially, a San Francisco newspaper dismissed it as "alarmist," but later, one cable channel compared it to the movie Carrie, suggesting this subject is even scarier. Many schools, organizations and community groups are now screening the DVD to spread awareness of the problem.
While we imagine the kind of awards show that might call more attention to the rogues and scammers in our midst, one of the world leading business newspapers, The Financial Times suggests that movies on this subject are welcome. In an editorial titled "CREDIT SQUEEZE - THE DISASTER MOVIE," the FT compared the credit "squeeze" to "the plot of a hundred disaster movies," writing, "the longer this goes on, the greater the risk to the real economy."
Sadly, it is still going on and deepening with no signs of abating.
"News Dissector" Danny Schechter blogs for Mediachannel.org. His film In Debt We Trust spawned the action website StopTheSqueeze.org. He's written a new book on the crisis called "We Are Screwed" and is looking for a publisher. Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org
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63 Comments so far
Show Allmiftin,
go to
www.solardirect.com/energy/sun-oven/sun-oven.htm
and check out the solar powered stove for cooking the rice and beans Firewood is not needed. As for the mice and rats...
Hey, it is well documented that people even eat other people when they are really hungry.
Did yu know that sailors Shanghied out of Portland Oregon were the scum of a ship. If food got low, they drew straws and the short straw sailor was the evening meal. The cooks called it "Long hog" for supper. That's true. So mice and rats aren't horribly bad. Gotta eat the guts though if you want any fat.
I've had lots of street vendors "Mongolian Bar-B-Q" in Japan, Taiwan and the Phillipines. You never knew what it was, but it was always yummy. ___ After a few beers or a jug of Saki anyway.
GREED IS THE CREED
DEBT IS THE NET
Rules of the price system:
Someone develops a way to produce something using less labor - either a more efficient method or a new machine. The result is that fewer people are employed, leading to a decrease in purchasing power at precisely the same time as production is going up. Under the rules of the price system a person has to trade their labor for money to buy goods. This type of system makes sense when a decrease in labor results in a decrease in production. However, in today's technological society a decrease in human labor is usually accompanied by an increase in production. The only way around this problem has been an ever expanding debt which is now reaching the breaking point. There is an alternative to the price system that has been well-researched by a group of concerned scientists and engineers known as Technocracy, Inc. Those concerned about peak oil might be interested to know that M. King Hubbert, founder of peak oil theory, was a prominent member of Technocracy and the author of its primary literature, The Technocracy Study Course. This group has for over 50 years educated the public on the inherent unsustainability of the price system and what can be done about it. It is in everyone's best interest to investigate Technocracy, Inc. There is a solution to our current problems, but it cannot be found within a price system.
Thanks for the sun oven link. I built my first sun oven 22 years ago. How old are you? Even the best sun ovens are useless on overcast days which is 75% of the time where I now live. This would be fine if people could survive by eating cooked food only seven days out of every month. Otherwise you're going to need fire wood.
Kem, I've never partaked of mice or rat, but I have eaten some squirrel meat a friend shot hunting. Even barbequed it was stringy and tough, and there wasn't much of it. I don't know what he did with the guts.
Patrick M, the rules of capitalism will be changing -- Toyota now has a factory in Japan that can produce a car without a human hand touching it, and requiring only a dozen techicians overseeing the robots. That's the future of manufacturing, and even retailing, but Toyota won't be selling many cars if the people have no money to buy them. There will have to be a complete rejection of the 19th century 'pay for work' scheme we currently suffer under, because technology is not going to go back in the box.
Kem, I've never partaked of mice or rat, but I have eaten some squirrel meat a friend shot hunting. Even barbequed it was stringy and tough, and there wasn't much of it. I don't know what he did with the guts.
Patrick M, the rules of capitalism will be changing -- Toyota now has a factory in Japan that can produce a car without a human hand touching it, and requiring only a dozen techicians overseeing the robots. That's the future of manufacturing, and even retailing, but Toyota won't be selling many cars if the people have no money to buy them. There will have to be a complete rejection of the 19th century 'pay for work' scheme we currently suffer under, because technology is not going to go back in the box.
"There will have to be a complete rejection of the 19th century 'pay for work' scheme we currently suffer under, because technology is not going to go back in the box."
Technocracy, inc. has been arguing this very point for its entire existence as an organization.
The price system is thousands of years old and is based upon the premise of scarcity of goods. For most of human history, it was not possible to produce enough goods. In conditions of scarcity a price system makes sense. Today, it is possible to produce far more goods than people could even consume, but the price system makes the distribution of this abundance impossible.
Technocracy once did some calculations showing that the work day need be no longer than 4 hours a day for half the year, with retirement at age 45. This was the amount of required labor to operate society. Obviously under our price system if people were only working 4 hours per day than no one would have enough money to make ends meet. That's why we have so many pointless jobs - the price system has to employ more people for an ever increasing amount of time per person at an increasing number of pointless tasks, as machines replace the need for humans doing "useful" work. We also have to waste resources under a price system - conservation would mean the elimination of jobs. It is insanity, because none of it is necessary. These problems come from applying an economic system based on scarcity to a society capable of abundance.
You might be interested in Technocracy's proposed method of distribution to replace the price system, energy accounting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Accounting
Patrick M:
The society of abundance is interesting. I read the PDF booklet on continental enery cards; it sounds like a credit card to me.
Think of it: it gets us what we want/need, extends credit when necessary, and sits like a blood sucker on those who don't pay it off on time, and is freely available to practically everyone.
The energy process sounds a lot like communisim using technology, however, creating more equal equals, like the credit cards.
I have retired at 40; by watching my overhead and employing myself when not employed by others, I have a sufficiency. I am now 69, almost.
So this method works for an individual.
The collective continental energy sceme would require a population control, and an physical sink to put all that entropy in...we have tended to abuse the commons so far as a collective population, if not as individuals.
But it is interesting, as I said. This abundance thing.
"Think of it: it gets us what we want/need, extends credit when necessary, and sits like a blood sucker on those who don't pay it off on time, and is freely available to practically everyone.
The energy process sounds a lot like communisim using technology, however, creating more equal equals, like the credit cards."
No, you misunderstand what energy accounting is. Money is a form of debt while energy accounting is a measurement of the energy consumed and is thus completely different from any price system whether it is communist or capitalist. Thus there would not be any way to "repay" your energy credits as they are immediately void when spent - there is nothing to repay. It is more like a debit card in this aspect, I suppose. But that is ignoring the very significant difference between energy accounting and all forms of the price system - which all employ debt as their method of exchange. The only real resemblence to a credit card would be in the sense that all the information of one's energy account would be contained within it, and it would bear one's identification so that another person would be unable to use it, and that it would be scanned when making purchases. Credit and debt are both price system functions which would not even exist with energy accounting.
The reason for equal distribution of energy credits is that with such a system, each person's share of energy credits would be far in excess of what they would be able to spend, even if they were trying to be wasteful. Since energy credits cannot be saved or transferred to another person, it becomes pointless to have differentiations in incomes. At the end of the balanced-load period any unspent credits are added to the total for the next balanced load period. It is important to remember when discussing this that in a Technate, everthing would be run much more efficiently. It is not possible to have an abundance with all the waste that exists under the price system.
As far as I know technocracy's energy accounting is the only system of distribution which recognizes that it is the non-human energy (from coal, oil, etc) which is the primary factor in production in today's technological society. All price systems take as their basic premise that human labor is the primary factor in production. Both communism and capitalism evolved before the wide-scale automation of human labor, and both capitalism and communism assume that labor is the primary factor, and that a decrease in human labor would result in a decrease in production (when in today's society the reverse is the case as has already been pointed out)
As far as population control, I'm not sure what you mean. Technocracy does recognize that there are physical limitations to resources, and that there is an optimum population that can be sustained while not sacrificing the quality of life. It remains to be seen whether or not population control would be necessary - experience has shown that with rising standards of living, birth rates naturally level off. With Technocracy the standard of living would be greatly increased for all citizens of North America (this is the stated purpose of Technocracy, they would be wasting their time were it otherwise)
I can only give a very rough summary of Technocracy's ideas - they have published a complete explanation of their design in the Technocracy Study Course, written by none other than the founder of peak oil theory, M King Hubbert. The Study Course is a much more in-depth explanation of Technocracy's social design and their reasoning than is possible for me to provide. Anyone concerned for the future of this planet should investigate the ideas of Technocracy, Inc.
Excellent points you have brought out Patrick M.
Consume With Meaning
The only real choice is consuming power. With an abundance of consuming power, we can consume as often as we like, every day of the year, and always win our choice.
Energy Accounting eliminates both the basis and the need of all social work and charity. It would reduce crime to but a small fraction of what exists today.
If we don't like the war, the poverty, the misery, the waste, the crime, the disease, and the corruption which the Price System spawns, why do we stick with it ?
Technate - An Idea For Now Stephen L. Doll.
The North American Technate TNAT
How is the present system functioning and how has it functioned within its limited context?
This system defeats itself for the reasons mentioned by Patrick. A political Price System is destroyed as purchasing power is no longer gotten by human labor as machines supplant humans as to 'productivity'. Purchasing power is hence destroyed.
Technology destroys the Price System ... or the Price System will destroy Technology in order to maintain its 'brand' of social control which no longer makes much sense.
As resources are destroyed the window for change closes more. If we destroy our resource base then we destroy our true wealth... for a desultory purpose. Making debt tokens.
The American Political Price System TNAT info.