Monday, April 20, 2015

The Mainstays of our NA Economies are the growing and harvesting of sickness and death...

Understanding our current monetary situation,
-as neighbors and vassals of the USA, growing and harvesting sickness and death as the mainstays of our economies...

A primary job of government in the fiat (paper) money era is to manage the money supply.  (ref. http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf )  This requires a bit of work to digest. I suggest reading on and coming back later if you wish to verify what I’ve said here.

Too much money in circulation runs the risk of creating an inflation panic which will destroy the value of savings. Too little money means not enough for economic activities to grow with the population and stay at healthy employment levels.
The government should manage the too much money scenario by increased taxation, and the too little money, by deficit spending.

The only way the new money needed to keep pace with needed new employment, is for the government to deficit spend, i.e.. to spend more than they collect in taxes. (they have to spend first, in order to be able to collect it).  Balancing the budget by definition will cause unemployment to rise, businesses to fail, and deflation to set in, and if kept up, result in a  major depression.

Because voters have been taught by the corporatists over the years that deficit spending is the rocky road to the evils of foreign socialism, our governments in North America are forced to strive to achieve balanced budgets. The resulting periods of recession and near depression cause massive unemployment, each time shifting wealth from the mass of population to the 1%, eroding the middle class on the way.

(This is why our economists, and governments, and universities, do not teach what I’m writing here, because they depend on subsidies by the 1%, for their classrooms and their election campaign expenses)

Nevertheless, led by the USA, our governments have found a way around this. Spending massively on armaments and health, they avoid the label of “deficit spending”, but can still increase the money supply when needed.

In addition, giant agribusiness and pharmaceutical corporations contribute massive inputs to economic activity, aided by governments which overlook the fact that agricultural subsidies and agricultural marketing all go to increase the meat, dairy, egg, and corn and soy industry inputs. These agribusiness industries are major contributors to the unhealthy lifestyle and sicknesses which are the chief raw material for the medical and pharmaceutical industries. 

When did you ever hear an agribusiness advertising campaign for broccoli, or cabbage, or apples, for anything but dairy, or meat?

The pharmaceutical industry spends much twice as much advertising as it does on research, ( and much of that is bogus) . It spends 6 times as much advertising to doctors as to the public. And increasingly we learn its products either don't work, or cause side effects which require yet more drugs to palliate.

So we have the armaments, agribusiness and health industries, all complicit with government subsidies and expenditures in growing and harvesting sickness and death as the primary support of North American and indeed, global economies... 

What we lose is the opportunity to fund education, healthy food, increased effort to stave off global warming. Instead we build a world full of enemies, and transfer increasing ownership of land and its resources to the 1%, who are like the landlords and warlords of the Middle Ages, using our bodies and abilities to fight their interminable wars of conquest, grasping absolute ownership and control of more of everything than they can possibly use, on the path to eliminating life on planet earth in the process...

The USA budgets about 18% for defense (really “war”), and 25% for health, plus another 4% to farmers to grow unhealthy food.

Canada budgets 8% on defense, and about 11 % of federal revenue and up to 50% of provincial revenues on health, and another 15% of provincial revenues on education which perpetuates the economists myths.





Tuesday, April 14, 2015

News of Our Time

News of Our Time

In the West
The women come
And go  *
In the East
The warlords too
Do come and go
Fall and rise
Disappear then
Materialize
Beamed from space
Into this place
Riding thunderbolts
Exploding into parts
All that deemed
Wise
Or arts
Of careless living
The dances and
The grace
Of women
In the West
Who come and
Go
Speaking only
Of Michelangelo  *

Donato  Apr. 10  2015

*phrase from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot  ca. 1910

Unlimited Prosperity Machine, Warfare the Product?

Looks as if US Leaders, government and industry, have found a formula for unlimited prosperity, at least for the 1%. They have decided to “farm” terrorism globally. They spend unlimited amounts of US$ on armaments, surveillance, and security operations at home and abroad. This creates growing resistance dubbed “terrorism”, The US$ rises against all other currencies. Citizens and governments of foreign counties buy US $, ship the US what it needs for civilian comfort, food, clothing, manufactures of all sorts, in return for the “safe haven” saving of US$. Since it costs the US nothing to print this money, maybe they have created an economy, where constant warfare is the product, and provides all the well-paying jobs. Come to think of it, that is the exact situation that prevailed in Europe throughout much of the past 2000 years….

It is a recursive equation, warfare = resistance = terrorism = more warfare.  According to the mathematics of complex phenomenon theory, the system will finally be unable to hold the energy put into it, and due to some unpredictable unlikely unremarkable cause, will collapse in the dynamics of chaos. Return all our governance and survival systems to compost. In history, the human leaders of large systems never forecast correctly the results of their actions… Maybe if we survive, we'll be rid of the large systems, live in smaller ones...

Friday, April 10, 2015

Medieval or Modern, Warlords or Landlords?

Medieval or Modern, Warlords or Landlords?

The Warlord life style:
Looking at European life in the 14th Century, we see it was organized between three estates, The first, the church, the second, the nobles and knights, and the third, all the rest. The nobles and the church exacted taxes on the rest, and basically held them hostage to make or do whatever the first and second estates needed or wanted to maintain their lifestyles. Individual bishops and nobles raked in thousands of times the annual earnings of even highly skilled artisans in the third estate. The rest, other than the merchants, (whose talent for acquiring and trading wealth the nobles needed to sequester from time to  time) of the ordinary people lived by labouring 14 hour or more days, able to save nothing for old age, getting sick and dying for lack of medical care, without education. Basically,they were slaves, their labour and their bodies were used to grow food, make the finery and grand buildings the nobles and clergy wanted, and fight and die in the interminable wars the nobles fought amongst themselves, and against other agglomerations loosely called countries. Countries only because they were ruled by a king, not because they had any form of governance that ensured the safety and well being of the citizens of the territory designated as a country. These warlord rulers lived to indulge in extravagant displays of their wealth such as their ability to cause the erection of enormous cathedrals and castles, laden with high art,  and to engage in ferocious battles amongst themselves. They none of them could agree together long enough to form large territories of relatively peaceful governance, until at least another two centuries had passed.

Then we got the Landlord life style:

The nobles of fairly large territories got together to force the kings into signing contracts, contracts to which they were all bound, that introduced some order, some rules of governance and justice, thai would provide a glue to prevent them all from continuing to tear each other to pieces, and destroy their citizens in the process. But the powerful had to give up a lot of their own prerogatives, the idea that might was right, and that the people are basically just another resource they could use at pleasure to meet their own extravagant need for display, and heroism in battle, and acquisition of each other’s territory. They had to give up acting on large and serious matters of state out of sheer personal whim, and learn to become rational, thoughtful, and at least somewhat principled and aware of the needs of the citizens.

But they did not give up entirely their urge for domination, they just put it underground for awhile.

The ascendance of the Landlords and resurrection of the Warlords:

Today, on a global scale, we have seen for a brief period that the Landlord lifestyle was superseded in many places by the Democratic governance style. But that period has been short, and is rapidly giving way to a return to the Warlord style over the Middle East, and much of Africa. And the Landlord lifestyle is returning in full armour, driven by politicians and global corporations who are the new landlords, and ruled by the 1% who together now have control of 50% of the world’s wealth. Wealth in the form of deeds of land, control over vast corporations producing armaments to sell to the Warlords, agribusiness to mine people’s hunger, and food addictions, for profits, pharmaceutical corporations to mine their health for profits, funding colleges and universities so they will produce workers educated enough to work the levers of all these corporate interests, but fearful of losing their funding if they speak out against the new (old) despotism.


On the farm years ago, I heard local people speak of a man with a large “corporation”, meaning he had an over-large belly from eating too much rich food…In Italian, I believe, a man with a seriously large amount of power is called “un pancione”. a “big belly”.

Warlord business is profitable business. That’s why capitalism and its robot corporations (landlords of money) have brought it back, rather, taken advantage of it’s continued existence and fostered it’s renewed growth.

I use the word “robot” on purpose. Capitalism and its offspring are robots of the mind and mined resources. The people associated with it, in every way, just mindlessly do what its mindless structures demand of them.

Donato Cianci April 10  2015

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Not a choice to be good

Islamophobia in the USA

http://www.globalresearch.ca/islamophobia-in-the-usa-the-case-of-the-arabic-language/5439800

“On March 18, a student in Pine Bush High School near New York City recited the American Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic. This was done as part of the school’s Foreign Language Week, which was conducted to celebrate the “many races, cultures and religions that make up [the US and the Pine Bush] School District.”

One would expect the multicultural and cosmopolitan American society to appreciate such gestures. However, the reactions to the recitation of the Pledge in Arabic spoke otherwise: the language in itself was described to be meant for terrorists, and associated with Islam. Such bigotry once again highlighted everything that is wrong with USA: xenophobia, racism, ignorance, violence and above all, Islamophobia.”  quote from Sufyan bin Uzayr

My reflection:
It is not the USA that is bad and mean and wrong, not that beautiful landscape and all its creatures. The human condition itself contains all the adjectives he uses against the USA, including all their opposites, of generosity, open-heartedness, tolerance, compassion, acceptance of others. Nothing and no person is bad or good, just that they are thus. Thus things are thus and just so (flowing within the Tao, the Te of natural justice), that flower that monkey that crying baby that revenge seeking person… All strange and familiar wonderful and fearful.  Of course when we have choice we will try to steer in the direction of what we call good. But our perspective is small and immediate and biased by all our programming, our humanity. Imagine going to my garden and seeing that the plants need water. I take some to them. I call that good. But, if I could control the rain, would I call it good to do so? How can I know whom or what I harm by my choice of weather? Better to just take what I get. And when I choose, I choose from my knowledge and my heart, and then wait to see what comes, without being addicted to the outcome I envisaged. No one can foresee the result of any action. Just to choose and go with the flow, witness the path to the next choice…what will be will be…

I have no choice to be labelled bad or good in any circumstance, only to to do the best I can. Trust my own personal morality, my own awareness and intuitions, accepting what comes, and extending the same welcome to others who follow their own morality, not necessarily that of the majority, of the unaware herd.
 Donato Cianci