Tuesday, October 17, 2017
How The Elite Dominate The World: Debt As A Tool Of Enslavement
Throughout human history, those in the ruling class have found various ways to force those under them to work for their economic benefit. But in our day and age, we are willingly enslaving ourselves. The borrower is the servant of the lender, and there has never been more debt in our world than there is right now. According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt has hit the 217 trillion dollar mark, although other estimates would put this number far higher. Of course everyone knows that our planet is drowning in debt, but most people never stop to consider who owns all of this debt. This unprecedented debt bubble represents that greatest transfer of wealth in human history, and those that are being enriched are the extremely wealthy elitists at the very, very top of the food chain.
Did you know that 8 men now have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people living on the planet combined?
Every year, the gap between the planet’s ultra-wealthy and the poor just becomes greater and greater. This is something that I have written about frequently, and the “financialization” of the global economy is playing a major role in this trend.
The entire global financial system is based on debt, and this debt-based system endlessly funnels the wealth of the world to the very, very top of the pyramid.
It has been said that Albert Einstein once made the following statement…
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”
Whether he actually made that statement or not, the reality of the matter is that it is quite true. By getting all of the rest of us deep into debt, the elite can just sit back and slowly but surely become even wealthier over time. Meanwhile, as the rest of us work endless hours to “pay our bills”, the truth is that we are spending our best years working to enrich someone else.
Much has been written about the men and women that control the world. Whether you wish to call them “the elite”, “the establishment” or “the globalists”, the truth is that most of us understand who they are. And how they control all of us is not some sort of giant conspiracy. Ultimately, it is actually very simple. Money is a form of social control, and by getting the rest of us into as much debt as possible they are able to get all of us to work for their economic benefit.
It starts at a very early age. We greatly encourage our young people to go to college, and we tell them to not even worry about what it will cost. We assure them that there will be great jobs available for them once they finish school and that they will have no problem paying off the student loans that they will accumulate.
Well, over the past 10 years student loan debt in the United States “has grown 250 percent” and is now sitting at an absolutely staggering grand total of 1.4 trillion dollars. Millions of our young people are already entering the “real world” financially crippled, and many of them will literally spend decades paying off those debts.
But that is just the beginning.
In order to get around in our society, virtually all of us need at least one vehicle, and auto loans are very easy to get these days. I remember when auto loans were only made for four or five years at the most, but in 2017 it is quite common to find loans on new vehicles that stretch out for six or seven years.
The total amount of auto loan debt in the United States has now surpassed a trillion dollars, and this very dangerous bubble just continues to grow.
If you want to own a home, that is going to mean even more debt. In the old days, mortgages were commonly 10 years in length, but now 30 years is the standard.
By the way, do you know where the term “mortgage” originally comes from?
If you go all the way back to the Latin, it actually means “death pledge”.
And now that most mortgages are for 30 years, many will continue making payments until they literally drop dead.
Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize how much they are enriching those that are holding their mortgages. For example, if you have a 30 year mortgage on a $300,000 home at 3.92 percent, you will end up making total payments of $510,640.
Credit card debt is even more insidious. Interest rates on credit card debt are often in the high double digits, and some consumers actually end up paying back several times as much as they originally borrowed.
According to the Federal Reserve, total credit card debt in the United States has also now surpassed the trillion dollar mark, and we are about to enter the time of year when Americans use their credit cards the most frequently.
Overall, U.S. consumers are now nearly 13 trillion dollars in debt.
As borrowers, we are servants of the lenders, and most of us don’t even consciously understand what has been done to us.
In Part I, I have focused on individual debt obligations, but tomorrow in Part II I am going to talk about how the elite use government debt to corporately enslave us. All over the planet, national governments are drowning in debt, and this didn’t happen by accident. The elite love to get governments into debt because it is a way to systematically transfer tremendous amounts of wealth from our pockets to their pockets. This year alone, the U.S. government will pay somewhere around half a trillion dollars just in interest on the national debt. That represents a whole lot of tax dollars that we aren’t getting any benefit from, and those on the receiving end are just becoming wealthier and wealthier.
In Part II we will also talk about how our debt-based system is literally designed to create a government debt spiral. Once you understand this, the way that you view potential solutions completely changes. If we ever want to get government debt “under control”, we have got to do away with this current system that was intended to enslave us by those that created it.
We spend so much time on the symptoms, but if we ever want permanent solutions we need to start addressing the root causes of our problems. Debt is a tool of enslavement, and the fact that humanity is now more than 200 trillion dollars in debt should deeply alarm all of us.
Credit to Economic Collapse
Globalization Is Poverty: "The Endgame Is Painfully Obvious"
Central bankers have never done more damage to the world economy than in the past 10 years. One may argue this is because they never had the power to do that. If their predecessors had had that power, who knows? Still, the global economy has never been more interconnected than it is today, due mostly to the advance of globalism, neoliberalism and perhaps even more, technology.
Ironically, all three of these factors are unremittingly praised as forces for good.
But living standards for many millions of people in the west have come down and/or are laden with uncertainty, while millions of Chinese now have higher living standards. People in the west have been told to see this as a positive development; after all, it allows them to buy products cheaper than if they had been made in domestic industries.
But along with their manufacturing jobs, their entire way of life has mostly disappeared as well. Or, rather, it is being hidden behind a veil of debt. Still, we can no longer credibly deny that some three-quarters of Americans have a hard time paying their bills, and that is very different from the 1950s and 60s. In western Europe, this is somewhat less pronounced, or perhaps it’s just lagging, but with globalism and neoliberalism still the ruling economic religions, there’s no going back.
What happened? Well, we don’t make stuff anymore. That’s what. We have to buy our stuff from others. Increasingly, we lack the skills to make stuff too. We have become dependent on nations half a planet away just to survive. Nations that are only interested in selling their stuff to us if we can pay for it. And who see their domestic wage demands go up, and will -have to- charge ever higher prices for their products.
And we have no choice but to pay. But we can only pay with what we can borrow. As nations, as companies, and as individuals. We need to borrow because as nations, as companies, and as individuals we don’t make stuff anymore. It’s a vicious circle that globalization has blessed us with. And from which, we are told, we can escape only if we achieve growth. Which we can’t, because we don’t make anything.
So we rely on central bankers to manage the crisis. Because we’re told they know how to manage it. They don’t. But they do pretend to know. Still, if you read between the lines, they do admit to their ignorance. Janet Yellen a few weeks ago fessed up to the fact that she has no idea why inflation is weak. Mario Draghi has said more or less the same. Why don’t they know? Because the models don’t fit. And the models are all they have.
Economic models are more important in central banking than common sense. The Fed has some 1000 PhDs under contract. But Yellen, their boss, still claims that ‘perhaps’ the models are wrong, with it comes to inflation, and to wage growth. They have no idea why wages don’t grow. Because the models say they should. Because everybody has a job. 1000 very well paid PhDs. And that’s all they have. They say the lack of wage growth is a mystery.
I say that those for whom this is a mystery are not fit for their jobs. If you export millions of jobs to Asia, take workers’ negotiating powers away and push them into crappy jobs with no benefits, only one outcome is possible. And that doesn’t include inflation or wage growth. Instead, the only possible outcome is continuing erosion of economies.
The globalist mantra says we will fill up the lost space in our economies with ‘better’ jobs, service sector, knowledge sector. But reality does not follow the mantra. Most new jobs are definitely not ‘better’. And as we wait tables or greet customers at Wal-Mart, we see robots take over what production capacity is left, and delivery services erase what’s left of our brick and mortar stores. Yes, that means even less ‘quality’ jobs.
Meanwhile, the Chinese who now have taken over our jobs, have only been able to do that amidst insane amounts of pollution. And as if that’s not bad enough, they have recently, just to keep their magical new production paradise running, been forced to borrow as much as we have been -and are-, at state level, at local government level, and now as individuals as well.
In China, credit functions like opioids do in America. Millions of people who had never been in touch with the stuff would have been fine if they never had, but now they are hooked. The local governments were already, which has created a shadow banking system that will threaten Beijing soon, but for the citizens it’s a relatively new phenomenon.
And if you see them saying things like: “if you don’t buy a flat today, you will never be able to afford it” and “..a person without a flat has no future in Shenzhen.”, you know they have it bad. These are people who’ve only ever seen property prices go up, and who’ve never thought of any place as a ghost city, and who have few other ways to park what money they make working the jobs imported from the US and Europe.
They undoubtedly think their wages will keep growing too, just like the ‘value’ of their flats. They’ve never seen either go down. But if we need to borrow in order to afford the products they make in order to pay off what they borrowed in order to buy their flats, everyone’s in trouble.
And then globalization itself is in trouble. The very beneficiaries, the owners of globalization will be. Though not before they have taken away most of the fruits of our labor. What are you going to do with your billions when the societies you knew when you grew up are eradicated by the very process that allowed you to make those billions? It stops somewhere. If those 1000 PhDs want to study a model, they should try that one.
Globalization causes many problems. Jobs disappearing from societies just so their citizens can buy the same products a few pennies cheaper when they come from China is a big one. But the main problem with globalization is financial: money continually vanishes from societies, who have to get ever deeper in debt just to stand still. Globalization, like any type of centralization, does that: it takes money away from the ‘periphery’.
The Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Starbucks model has already taken away untold jobs, stores and money from our societies, but we ain’t seen nothing yet. The advent of the internet will put that model on steroids. But why would you let a bunch of Silicon Valley venture capitalists run things like Uber or Airbnb in your location, when you can do it yourself just as well, and use the profits to enhance your community instead of letting them make you poorer?
I see UK’s Jeremy Corbyn had that same thought, and good on him. Britain may become the first major victim of the dark side of centralization, by leaving the organization that enables it -the EU-, and Corbyn’s idea of a local cooperative to replace Uber is the kind of thinking it will need. Because how can you make up for all that money, and all that production capacity, leaving where you live? You can’t run fast enough, and you don’t have to.
This is the Roman Empire’s centralization conundrum all over. Though the Romans never pushed their peripheries to stop producing essentials; they instead demanded a share of them. Their problem was, towards the end of the empire, the share they demanded -forcefully- became ever larger. Until the periphery turned on them -also forcefully-.
The world’s central bankers’ club is set to get new leadership soon. Yellen may well be gone, so will Japan’s Kuroda and China’s Zhou; the ECB’s -and Goldman’s- Mario Draghi will go a bit later. But there is no sign that the economic religions they adhere to will be replaced, it’ll be centralization all the way, and if that fails, more centralization.
The endgame of that process is painfully obvious way in advance. Centralization feeds central forces, be they governmental, military or commercial, with the fruits of labor of local populations. That is a process that will always, inevitably, run into a wall, because too much of those fruits are taken out. Too much of it will flow to the center, be it Silicon Valley or Wall Street or Rome. Same difference.
There are things that you can safely centralize (peace negotiations), but they don’t include essentials like food, housing, transport, water, clothing. They are too costly at the local level to allow them to be centralized. Or everybody everywhere will end up paying through the nose just to survive.
It’s very easy. Maybe that’s why nobody notices.
Credit to Zero Hedge
Dragon skeleton in China
Locals who flocked round the bizarre discovery appeared to believe it could be the real thing.
More than 10 million people have viewed the short video of the gigantic bones which resemble the fire-breathing legendary dinosaur-like creature.
The remains appear to be a long spine, with a pair of arms and legs, and a dragon-like skull at one end.
Dozens of locals gather round the skeleton in the video which was filmed in Zhangjiakou City, in China's northern Hebei Province.
Villagers appear to be convinced as they stand in awe of the giant pile of bones.
The skeleton matches with the dragons that appear in Chinese mythology.
AsiawireThe skull of the 'dragon' which many felt was made using that of a cow.Unlike the creatures from the West, Chinese dragons have no wings and fly by “swimming” through the air like a snake.
Authorities examining the corpse have yet to release a statement about the so-called dragon’s remains.
Credit to express.co.uk
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