Seeking Reality,
Michael Hudson gave the keynote speech at the David Graeber Anthropology conference in Paris Tuesday. (I don't think President Macron was able to attend.)
In antiquity, the solution had to be found for the tendency for debts to end up making most of the population into forms of slaves, removing their personal power, and their ability to serve and pay taxes to the state. There were periodic debt repudiations, typically when a new king ascended to the throne. A mythology about "sacredness of contracts" being the basis of civilization has arisen in modernity. "SAcredness of contracts" means "debt slavery". It's not sacred. Debts-at-interest outgrow crops, livestock and families.
Western tradition (since Rome) indeed lacks a policy subordinating wealth to overall economic growth. The West has no strong government checks to prevent a wealth-addicted oligarchy from emerging to make itself into a hereditary aristocracy. Making debtors and clients into a hereditary class, dependent on wealthy creditors, is what todays economists call a “free market.” It is one without public checks and balances against inequality, fraud or privatization of the public domain...
..So we are led back to why I was invited to speak here today. David Graeber wrote in his Debt book that he was seeking to popularize my Harvard group’s documentation that debt cancellations did indeed exist and were not simply literary utopian exercises. His book helped make debt a public issue, as did his efforts in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Obama administration backed police breaking up the OWS encampments and did everything possible to destroy awareness of the debt problems plaguing the U.S. and foreign economies. And not only the mainstream media but also academic orthodoxy circled their wagons against even the thought that debts could be written down and indeed needed to be written down to prevent economies from falling into depression.
That neoliberal pro-creditor ethic is the root of today’s New Cold War. When President Biden describes this great world conflict aimed at isolating China, Russia, India, Iran and their Eurasian trading partners, he characterizes this as an existential struggle between “democracy” and “autocracy.”
By “democracy” he means oligarchy. And by “autocracy” he means any government strong enough to prevent a financial oligarchy from taking over government and society and imposing neoliberal rules – by force...
Michael Hudson’s Major Lecture at the Global University in China on July 11th, 2022 – and posted with Dr Hudson’s permission
The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place
The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria – love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak.
The Greek concept of hubris involved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor.
That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving the gods. That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage. Chieftains, kings and temples were in charge of allocating credit and crop-land to enable smallholders to serve in the army and provide corvée labor. Rulers who behaved selfishly were liable to be unseated, or their subjects might run away, or support rebel leaders or foreign attackers promising to cancel debts and redistribute land more equitably...
..The West, in its U.S. neoliberal iteration, seems to be repeating the pattern of Rome’s decline and fall. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the One Percent has always been the trajectory of Western civilization. It is a result of classical antiquity having taken a wrong track when Greece and Rome allowed the inexorable growth of debt, leading to the expropriation of much of the citizenry and reducing it to bondage to a land-owning creditor oligarchy. That is the dynamic built into the DNA of what is called the West and its “security of contracts” without any government oversight in the public interest. By stripping away prosperity at home, this dynamic requires a constant reaching out to extract an economic affluence (literally a “flowing in”) at the expense of colonies or debtor countries...
..As I have sought to emphasize, oligarchic control of government has been the distinguishing feature of Western civilization ever since classical antiquity. And the key to this control has been opposition to strong government – that is, civil government strong enough to prevent a creditor oligarchy from emerging and monopolizing control of land and wealth, making itself into a hereditary aristocracy, a rentier class living off land rents, interest and monopoly privileges that reduce the population at large to austerity...
..To save themselves from being swept into the whirlpool of economic destruction now engulfing the West, countries in the world’s rapidly growing Eurasian core are developing new economic institutions based on an alternative social and economic philosophy...
(Hudson, speaking to Chinese University students, proceeds to laud China for avoiding these pitfalls, but the Chinese Communist Party looks like an oligarchy to me, and their public banking seems to have as much of the corrupt-public siphoning from it as possible. I am personally dubious that China can actually set the best sort of example.) https://thesaker.is/michael-hudson-the-end-of-western-civilization-why-it-lacks-resilience-and-what-will-take-its-place/
One of the points Michael Hudson repeatedly makes is that, historically grain was money, and a king or temple also created seasonal credit-money for farmers who promised to pay grain at harvest. Taxes were paid in grain or labor. It is clearly possible to create an agriculturally based financial economy. It is not compatible with contracts where all risk is born by the farmer. In that system the money lenders soon own everything and all people are slaves. Slave based economiesare much less productive and resilient.
Ellen Brown (Web of Debt) Achieving Self-Funding Local Sovereignty as Global Food Systems CollapseThe solution to the current food crisis is small and local, including growing food locally. But how to fund local food co-ops without pricey loans from big banks? This article is a sequel to one discussing home gardens and community food co-ops as local counter-measures to an impending food crisis. The question to be addressed here is how to fund them. What sort of local currency could fund food co-ops independently of the credit dollars we get from banks?
But first, some framing of the problem. It’s not just about temporary food shortages. It’s about sovereignty from the sort of global control foreshadowed in Henry Kissinger’s notorious statement, “Control food and you control the people.” https://www.globalresearch.ca/achieving-self-funding-local-sovereignty-global-food-systems-collapse/5786180
The Consciousness of Sheep, A Flaw Seldom Mentioned , explores the spotiness of where money is and is not, as global economy is controlled by vested extractive interests, who desperately fear losing assets, control and income. In protecting their parasitic positions they hasten the death of actual human economy, the life support of the people who produce things (as well as everybody else). Not only is the standard narrative wrong, but because of the true – global – nature of the crisis, the received policy responses will exacerbate the problem. Viewed internationally, we discover that we have almost exactly the opposite problem to the one which exercises national economists and policy makers. Far from having too much currency in the economy, as the people of Sri Lanka have been the first to discover, we actually have too little. Because, while the rules of the global economy are changing fast, for the moment we are operating under a version of the dollar system first introduced at the end of the Second World War. And the currency we are short of at a global level is not pounds, euros or even Sri Lankan rupees… it is US dollars.
Surely not, didn’t the US congress just vote to create another multi-trillion-dollar stimulus package? Well, yes it did. But as happened every other time the state turned on the printing presses, almost all of those dollars rapidly found their way to the corporations and the banks, where they disappeared as pre-existing debt was repaid, or they have been left as assets on the balance sheets of the banks… none of which is in any hurry to be the next Lehman Brothers or royal Bank of Scotland. https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/11/a-flaw-seldom-mentioned/
Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook's Content Policy They present themselves well. Nice and pleasant.https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/I don't recall how many billions of dollars of US stuff was left in Afghanistan for reuse by the new rulers, but it seemed that leaving it mostly intact was like a ransom-payment to do the evacuations at the last minute.There has long been black-market diversion of NATO military supplies to Ukraine, since 2014, when the buildup to fight Russia began. Now it is an established criminal enterprise. This article says that the black--market weapons are largely going to Odesa, then south along the black sea coast until the go west to Albania, where the criminal enterprise includes the intelligence services. Direct sales to Russia on the battlefield are happening, with cash payments and Russian citizenship for participants. The cash payments are made considerably smaller, but will buy an apartment in Moscow, for instance. On the radio wave of the Ukrainian units, Russian negotiators persuade the artillerymen and tankers to advance to the indicated points and surrender with their equipment. In exchange – Russian documents, freedom and some money. The brought “Caesar”, “HIMARS” or PzH 2000 is considered sufficient proof of loyalty that the military who surrendered with it would avoid filtration and prisoner camps. With new documents, they start a new life somewhere in a cozy Ural city far from the front line, and even send money in bitcoins to their families so that they can go to them.
Prices vary and are discussed, for 2 “Caesars” the Russians gave 120,000, although their Ukrainian “partners” desperately bargained and asked for 2 million. However, freedom and Russian passports are also a significant part of the fee … But one PzH 2000 self-propelled gun, according to various sources, cost the Russians more than $ 100,000. http://thesaker.is/arms-for-victory-over-russia-no-for-their-resale/
Military Summary has consistently provided high accuracy updates of theUkraine war. The report of an intact HIMARS launcher and intact missiles being sold to Russian forces by Ukrainians for somewhat over $1 million starts at 17:39. https://rumble.com/v1c1d1r-ukraine.-military-summary-and-analysis-12.07.2022.html
Oxymoron in Oz sends this article posted by Forensic Biologist, Paul Spradbury, which pertains to the long term effects of reverse-transcription of mRNA into DNA in gene-therapy vaccines, causing the human cells affected to keep making spike protein as long as they persist. This is also passed on to egg cells in human ovaries, which have a very high uptake of the mRNA lipid micelle "Trojan horses". These eggs cannot repair DNA damage internally, and also pass the modified DNA to offspring. Importantly, the mRNA has also been modified to never-break-down. We might presume that it eventually does, but that may be wrong. There was spike protein circulating in 6 out of 6 mRNA vaccine recipients tested at 6 months, about a year ago, by Robert Malone MD's lab. That is eternity for mRNA. The ongoing production of January 2020 spike protein by cells, due to vaccine immortal-mRNA and reverse-transcribed DNA causes the cells to keep making spike protein, leading to clots and to a breakdown of the T-cell immunity, which is important in destroying mutated cells that can become cancer, as well as viral and bacterial pathogens. There is also impairment of the ability of cells to self repair DNA errors internally. All of these malfunctions of the normal immune system and DNA/RNA cellular information system gradually degrade the affected cells, and also the whole immune system, similar to AIDS. Spradbury was sent this whistle-blower information anonymously, but it is high quality information and clearly comes from somebody with detailed and accurate understanding of the biochemistry and immunology involved, some insider. I have seen a lot of this particular warning. HIV discoverer and Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier gave this same warning, that "vaccinated" people would progressively start dying off 2-3 years after "vaccination".Of course the deaths from clotting in the heart and brain can come right away, and the immune-system attacking heart cells which are pumping out spike protein can also come soon, causing other forms of sudden cardiac death. There are sequential overlays of causes of death, and there is a big variation in how much any person is affected, and which of their cells get affected when the "vaccine" gets into the bloodstream and travels around. The big question in my mind is that of how many people will have the establishment of "permanent" mRNA and reverse-transcribed DNA spike-protein production factories in cells. Many of these cells will be initially destroyed by the immune system. Some will be more sheltered from that. The eggs in the ovaries are a highly targeted and highly vulnerable population, and may cause more and more birth defects over time, as egg-cell DNA , which cannot self-repair properly, leads to defective human fetuses. Among girls who grow to womanhood from such pregnancies, fertility can also be impaired. The fade from unaffected white to sudden-death-after-vaccination black may have a lot of people remain in the white zone, not progressively degraded by these gene-modifying treatments, or there may be only a few who are not doomed to premature death. How many will be in the slightly-gray zone? How many children will survive gestation and live as "gray"? This is a very real concern to all of us who have loved ones who have been injected. https://paulspradbery.blogspot.com/2022/06/parrhesia.html
Regulatory Capture Perfected: According to an ex-pharmaceutical industry and biotech executive, documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine suggest the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Moderna colluded to bypass regulatory and scientific standards used to ensure products are safe.
Alexandra Latypova has spent 25 years in pharmaceutical research and development working with more than 60 companies worldwide to submit data to the FDA on hundreds of clinical trials.
After analyzing 699 pages of studies and test results “supposedly used by the FDA to clear Moderna’s mRNA platform-based mRNA-1273, or Spikevax,” Latypova told The Defender she believes U.S. health agencies are lying to the public on behalf of vaccine manufacturers. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/fda-moderna-bypass-covid-vaccine-safety-standards-documents/
In December 2020, the US FDA authorised the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA covid-19 vaccines, claiming “the benefits outweighed the harms.”
Now, a group of international researchers has gone back to re-analyse the original trial data upon which that claim was made.
A pre-print study (not yet peer-reviewed) by Fraiman and colleagues contradicts the FDA’s claim that the benefits outweigh the harms of the mRNA vaccines.
In fact, the authors conclude that the vaccines are associated with an “increased risk of serious adverse events” that surpass the “risk reduction for covid-19 hospitalisation” relative to the placebo group. https://maryannedemasi.com/publications/f/the-serious-adverse-events-of-mrna-covid-19-vaccine-trials
Harmless Gardener (pictured with exceptionally cold-tolerant 2 1/2 year old Mexican avocado seedling
)
Thanks Dr John. Great post. Appreciate all the info resources too. The avocado tree looks great!
"By “democracy” he means oligarchy. And by “autocracy” he means any government strong enough to prevent a financial oligarchy from taking over government and society and imposing neoliberal rules – by force..."
Spot on.