Luna Moth (Actias luna)
2018-06-05 _F2A6622aaa Ice Age National Scientific Reserve Unit
With Washington’s help:
“Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.” Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
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“The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy”
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“Let’s join the empire and fix it from the inside
Said NO rebel ever”
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Michael Deterding
The “Empire” is a 21st century Chimera.
Hardly anyone has any idea what it looks like !
Take note !
The financial takeover of government , (and by extension, the rest of the planet)
“Central banks were supposed to free government from having to borrow from private bondholders. But budget deficits have increased the power of financial lobbyists who have pushed politicians to reverse progressive income taxation and cut taxes on capital gains. Instead of central banks monetizing deficit spending to help the economy recover, they create money mainly to lend to banks for the purpose of increasing the economy’s debt overhead. Since 2008 the U.S. Federal Reserve has monetized $4 trillion in Quantitative Easing credit to banks. The aim is to re-inflate asset prices for the real estate, bonds and stocks held as collateral by financial institutions (and the One Percent), not to help the “real” economy recover.
The situation is worst in the Eurozone. The European Central Bank has authorized €1 trillion (“Whatever it takes,” as its head Mario Draghi said) to buy bonds from banks but refuses to lend anything to governments on principle, even though budget deficits are limited to only 3 percent of GDP. This imposes fiscal deflation on top of debt deflation. Governments are forced to rely on bondholders and, increasingly, to sell off the public domain.
All this is contrary to what classical economists urged. Their objective was for governments elected by the population at large to receive and allocate the economic surplus. Presumably this would have been to lower the cost of living and doing business, provide a widening range of public services at subsidized prices or freely, and sponsor a fair society in which nobody would receive special privileges or hereditary rights.
Financial sector advocates have sought to control democracies by shifting tax policy and bank regulation out of the hands of elected representatives to nominees from world’s financial centers. The aim of this planning is not for the classical progressive objectives of mobilizing savings to increase productivity and raise populations out of poverty. The objective of finance capitalism is not capital formation, but acquisition of rent-yielding privileges for real estate, natural resources and monopolies.
These are precisely the forms of revenue that centuries of classical economists sought to tax away or minimize. By allying itself with the rentier sectors and lobbying on their behalf – so as to extract their rent as interest – banking and high finance have become part of the economic overhead from which classical economists sought to free society. The result of moving into a symbiosis with real estate, mining, oil, other natural resources and monopolies has been to financialize these sectors. As this has occurred, bank lobbyists have urged that land be un-taxed so as to leave more rent (and other natural resource rent) “free” to be paid as interest – while forcing governments to tax labor and industry instead.
To promote this tax shift and debt leveraging, financial lobbyists have created a smokescreen of deception that depicts financialization as helping economies grow. They accuse central bank monetizing of budget deficits as being inherently inflationary – despite no evidence of this, and despite the vast inflation of real estate prices and stock prices by predatory bank credit.
Money creation is now monopolized by banks, which use this power to finance the transfer of property – with the source of the quickest and largest fortunes being infrastructure and natural resources pried out of the public domain of debtor countries by a combination of political insider dealing and debt leverage – a merger of kleptocracy with the world’s financial centers.
The financial strategy is capped by creating international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank) to bring pressure on debtor economies to take fiscal policy out of the hands of elected parliaments and into those of institutions ruling on behalf of bankers and bondholders. This global power has enabled finance to override potentially debtor-friendly governments.”
Excerpt From
“Killing the Host”
Michael Hudson
Media has established a stage whereupon a Kabuki Theater of puppets prattles platitudes and parades Red Herring analysis of events happening on a geographical map that might as well be drawn by Flat Earth Cartographers.
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“What the Archives de la Planète makes clear is how much is at stake. It preserves in great antique beauty much of what was then crumbling & vanishing. … A century later, we're deeper into that process than could have been imagined.”
—Grace Linden
“The Archive Of A Vanishing World
Albert Kahn sought to preserve a world he perceived to be disappearing. A century later, his “Archives de la Planète” connects disparate lands, dying ecosystems and cultures, and a world being utterly transformed by modernity.”
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“Another cost of Biden's Ukraine Proxy War with Russia...Higher interest rates depressing home values...
Opening Passage:
U.S. mortgage rates jumped to their highest level in more than two decades.
The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit 6.92% this week, according to a survey of lenders released Thursday by mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Many lenders are offering rates well over 7%. A year ago, the average rate was 3.05%.
The most recent jump, from 6.66% a week ago, took the rate above the peak of the last financial crisis. The benchmark has climbed nearly 2 percentage points since August, adding to an already brisk rise since the Federal Reserve began lifting rates earlier this year.
The latest climb has been particularly painful for the housing market, putting homeownership out of reach for many would-be buyers because of the added monthly cost of paying a mortgage at a higher rate.”
“Mortgage Rates Hit 6.92%, a 20-Year High
The sharp rise in borrowing costs has cooled the housing market and put homeownership out of reach for many”
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What happens in the poles doesn’t stay in the poles. In a world dying in a vicious thermal maximum, the poles give us a hint of what’s to come for the rest of the world:
XR Cambridge
“Ridiculous heat anomalies are about to engulf the whole of Greenland with 20C+ above normal over a massive area. It will also be 26-28C in British Columbia, Canada for the next week. Heat everywhere at the top of the world. A climate system breaking down”
Reader Comment:
“Shura Hana
Vast ice sheet facing climate fight on two fronts...
The Greenland ice sheet may be more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought, new research suggests. While we debate endlessly about politics and energy solutions, while we fail to cut back as required and degrow, and while we fail to slow down as the virus is telling us to do, and as we descend deeper into the madness of #BAU and a #sixthmassextinction event we have yet to acknowledge, we are losing the great ice in the birthplace or our ancestral home.”
“Vast ice sheet facing climate fight on two fronts”
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Atmospheric Methane levels are out of control. This only ends one way:
Peter Carter:
METHANE STILL SURGING- ATMOSPHERIC UPDATE: 6th October
The combination of these NOAA methane screen captures, shows methane is at 1,925 ppb and has been accelerating higher from 2007, with a big increase from 2018. Experts say this recent large rate increase is driven by warming wetland feedback methane emissions (on top of other human sources increasing).
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