by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Governments all over the world, bar in the tiny Himalayan state of Bhutan, are obsessed, literally, with economic growth but not in order that people can have a better life and way of life but because it determines the general domestic product (GDP) of a country and with it and through it a nation's credit status and credit worthiness.
And according to this credit status and credit worthiness rating, given by some organizations to countries, thus obtained a nation can borrow from the world's private banks – there are virtually no others even though they may be called the Federal Reserve Bank (USA), Deutsche Bank (Germany) or whatever – creating another ponzi scheme and another bubble.
This obsession with growth goes even so far as to creating a fake growth in that industry keeps producing.
Douglas Rushkoff has said that we are living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
That is what is called overproduction and has nothing to do with making things that are needed but with keeping “slaves” employed – and only that to some degree – and thus built-in obsolescence in products, graveyards for newly produced cars, etc.
Industry keeps producing things that no one buys, because they do not have the money to do so, to make it appear as if the economy is booming. In the case of cars they go even so far as to register those – even though those new cars are destined to be scrapped as no one buys them – to themselves and their agents to make it appear that x-amount of new cars have been bought.
This is what in other places would, like when you and I would do something similar, called fraud, and here it is done at a grand scale. Governments are pretending that they have so much in assets – the true assets are we, the “slaves” and our kids, if we have any – on which they can take out loans from the world banks, all of which, as said already, are private. And that means that they are not answerable to the governments the nations of whose name they often bear but only to their owners and shareholders.
When Bernie Madoff made off with a fortune from a collapsed ponzi scheme and later was caught he was done for fraud but when industry and governments do it seems to be fine.
While many may think that the system is broken this is not the case; it was, in fact, designed that way, and is doing nothing for any one of us.
Already in the book “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” by Robert Tressell, first published in 1914, after the author's death in 1911, the main character explains that we actually, under the proper system, could have enough for everyone but capitalism does not work that way now, does it.
It wants more, more and still more, and everyone else has to pay for it by buying the products that they design in such a way that they are obsolete within a short space of time in various ways and cannot be repaired if something goes wrong with them. The Earth and its children, all, are exploited so that some people can have great riches. And when they have all they could ever possibly need they want still more, and then more still. It is an obsession, a sickness, and the governments have fallen ill as well. Time for a change.
© 2014
