by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
I May 2014 it was revealed by many of the world's media – even mainstream ones – that automobile manufacturers have acquired large tracts of land in many country where the can send newly manufactured cars to die.
In the economic statistics, however, those cars show up as sales of new vehicles and thus create a fake economic growth and also a fake GDP for the countries where those cars have been made and registered. This all despite the fact that none of those cars will ever actually drive on our roads bar to said graveyards, maybe.
By means of this fiddling of the figures the people are sold the lie that the economy is on the up again but you can only fool people for a certain length of time. There comes a moment when folks – unless they are extremely stupid – will wake up and recognize the game that is being played.
Most people will not understand the logic of why something is being made that will not be sold and sent to the knacker's yard to be scrapped, in the end, and it only makes sense if we understand that the GDP figures are the collateral for the loans that countries take out from the private banks around the world. It is a ponzi scheme that is going to collapse – again – and then the troubles will be greater still then they were in the “Great Recession”.
Seeing those automobile graveyards one can but wonder as to whether or not there may not also be warehouses full of (other) consumer goods made but not sold and also, in due course, destined for destruction.
To have things produced, whether cars or other, to simply scrap then as they cannot be sold as people do not have the money to buy them and as too many are made just does not make economic sense, on its own. Only when it is used to massage the GDP figures it does. This is the capitalist system gone mad and the sooner we bury it the better.
Resources are being used up and energy, workers exploited and the Planet ravaged and plundered all just in order to pretend that the economy is doing fine? As it also does not make economic sense this is just weirder than weird.
But this fake economy and growth is also the key reason why obsolescence is built into (almost) every product today as only NEW sales count in the statistics and repair does not show up in this league table and it is but that league table that counts.
And it also goes for the housing crisis, as it is called. We do not have a housing crisis but an empty homes crisis but, yet again, refurbishing existing housing stock is not newly built and again does not figure in the growth statistics; only newly built homes do.
When we have masses of homeless but empty homes (and buildings that could be made into homes) that could house the homeless of several countries with still room to spare we must come to realize that something is, in the worlds of Hamlet, rotten in the state of Denmark, or, in this case, in the system as a whole and not just in one nation.
Not only are figures massaged and GDP created that does not actually exist upon which loans are then taken out but in those operations the entire Planet is not only mortgaged but also ravaged. It is indeed so stupid – for lack of another word – that it simply does not make sense on any level really bar – to some extent – in the league table game.
This is proof – yet again – if any more really would be needed that capitalism as a system is not working for people and Planet and never really has worked and that everything is based on a gigantic ponzi scheme which is about to collapse around our ears. And collapsing it will, make no mistake about it.
Overproduction is the problem and not under-comsumption by people who cannot afford to buy the products and in order to make us all buy the same things over and over again, as already mentioned, the capitalists decided some time ago to make products in such a way that they would have to be replaced every couple of years and cannot be repaired. And to top it all they also destroyed the repair economy making it thus impossible to get even things that can be repaired fixed.
Not only is the economic growth we are being told about a fake; any growth is unsustainable in our finite world and we have to be rethinking things.
Growth that comes from new innovative products that people buy because they are new and innovative is one thing – though also not directly sustainable – but fake growth created by overproduction and by built-in obsolescence is a crime and not just a lie. A crime against the Planet and the people.
© 2014
