Excuses Excuses
Dear BBC - some handy suggestions, lame excuse-wise, for next quarter’s set of appalling economic figures:
The start of the football season.
Leaves on the line.
Germans.
Yobs.
Some localised drizzle in the vicinity of Croydon.
Snow on the line.
Unemployed, disabled, benefit-scrounging Polish single mums.
Swine flu.
Trains on the line.
Al-Qaeda.
Health and safety madness.
The pervasive influence of gangsta rap on the youth of today.
Brussels.
Labour.
Manufacturing Consent
“People will think what I tell them to think” - Charles Foster Kane.
Rupert Murdoch, it’s fairly safe to say, adheres to this principle of Orson Welles’ character in Citizen Kane. But suddenly, in the space of a week, a substantial pillar of the real-life media mogul’s grand exercise in thought-control has collapsed suddenly, without warning. Today marks the last edition of the News of the World, purportedly the biggest selling English-language newspaper on the planet.
We are only now beginning to grasp the degree to which our democracy in Britain was being damaged by a dominant newspaper group which, almost inexplicably, adopted the tactics of the Stasi and all of its equally disreputable forerunners. The king is dead – long live democracy.
When you can’t control people by force, and the voice of the people can be heard, you have a problem: it may make people so curious and so arrogant that they no longer possess the humility to submit to civil rule, and therefore there is the need to control what people think. The standard way to do this is to resort to, what was known in more honest times, propaganda - the manufacturing of consent.
Very few people have the time, energy or commitment to carry out the constant battle required to think outside of what the Murdoch press thinks. Instead, you come home from work, you’re tired, you’ve had a busy day - you’re not going to carry out a research project, so instead you turn on the television, you read the headlines in a newspaper, you watch sport, because that’s basically the way the system of indoctrination works. Sure, the other stuff is out there, but you had to work a lot harder to find it. But the more recent effect of social media has been to make alternative sources of information more widely available.
The ultimate question now is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication, and use their power as they tell us they must - namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the majority, and remove them from the public arena.
The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be cherished and preserved, or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of our existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to our survival.
Britain: Surging Ahead to the Nineteenth Century
The satirical online news website par excellence, The Onion, once published a spin-off book entitled ‘Our Dumb World.’ With stereotypical American brashness, it reduced the planet’s “lesser, conquerable” nations to easily digestible comic soundbites in Dorling Kindersley-style atlas format. “Located directly at the centre of the universe, around which everything else revolves, the nation of France is the sole beacon of life and civilisation in an otherwise empty void.” Fair enough. Canada: "For the United States, see pages 9 - 22." Ouch. And the headline for the UK entry -“Britain: Surging Ahead to the Nineteenth Century.”
As is the case with the best satire, it mirrors real life with unerring accuracy. Britain, indulging in some kind of resurrected sepia-tinged nostalgia for the days of Queen Vic, top hats and shoeless urchins, has now reclaimed its global pre-eminence in purveying eye-watering nineteenth-century levels of inequality and class division. We stick to what we do best. Now get back up that chimney, sweep.
While the richest one per cent of the population hoover up forty per cent of the total wealth, the rest of us downtrodden minions scrabble around for the increasingly scarce crumbs that drop from the top table. ‘So what,’ say so many of us. This is the system we have inherited; like it or lump it.
The NHS Primary Care Trust department I’ve been working in recently announced their intention, via a group e-mail to all staff, to relocate to remote Cornwall - a three-hour drive away from its present base, in which the new department will employ less than half of the number at present. The general reaction in the office, as the (theoretical) axe plunged, was little more than a collective shrug of the shoulders. One of my colleagues announced his feelings in all-too familiar fashion: “Well, if only Gordon Brown and that last lot hadn’t spent all the money then we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we?”
As much as this kind of reaction made me want to head-butt my desk in abject despair, I can only feel that it is inevitable in many ways. Not only because it is a perfectly correct statement, in the same way that, in the context of the global financial crisis, one man pissing in a river adds to a biblical flood is also a perfectly correct statement. But such utterances by bleary-eyed, cash-strapped ordinary folk are also inevitable in terms of the quite awe-inspiring powers of manipulation that the moneyed elite are still capable of wielding, rallying the masses in defence of their own corporate interests.
It is awe-inspiring in the sense that I’m never ceased to be amazed by the level of subservience that is still implicit amongst a shat-upon working and lower-middle class, who continue to wholly subscribe to a system that, in the long run, can only prove to be their undoing. It is awe-inspiring that so many of the downtrodden continue to extol the virtues of the free market neo-liberalism that in the short term brought nice big TVs and cheap holidays, but in the long term only serves to reward an increasingly small number of ludicrously wealthy people at the very top, at the cost of everyone else.
The market is a tool, of sorts, and often a useful one at that. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make of it. Many of Britain’s greatest accomplishments stand in complete defiance of the free market: the prohibition of slavery and child labour, the creation of national parks and public forests, the construction of roads, bridges, churches, schools and universities, and, of course, the creation of a national health service. If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to primary schools, and every wealthy family could import an indentured servant or two, paying them with meals instead of money.
The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will, it seems, be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power, at least by those prepared to undertake such a daunting venture. The great challenge now facing Britain, and other countries throughout the world, is how to find a proper balance between the efficiency and amorality of the free market. The United States has demonstrated over the past three decades the problems created by swinging too far in one direction, weakening the regulations that safeguard workers, consumers and the environment. An economic system promising freedom has too often become a means of denying it, as the narrow dictates of the market gain precedence over more important and fundamental democratic values.
In the meantime, what we are witnessing in the United Kingdom is the return to a Victorian-era ethos of narrow, over-privileged, eye-wateringly wealthy elites resurrecting their cruelly antiquated, anti-democratic authority over the rest of us proles. The new rich, brim full of the values of old and reasserting a form of born-to-rule style authority, increasingly resemble the plutocrats of the nineteenth century, minus the more admirable aspects of that era such as the belief in philanthropy, benevolence and some degree of kind-heartedness towards those less fortunate. The spark of genuine social democracy in Britain now seems rather brief in a sense of wider history. It gestated during the first world war, broke out after the second, and fizzled out during the 1970s. Social democracy now seems just that – a spark, a spasm, an historical aberration. Don’t get ideas above your station. Look after number one. And didn’t I tell you to get back up that chimney? It’s not going to sweep itself.
Tories, Yellow Tories and Blue Labour. Our Democracy Stinks.
Leftie cockney firebrand, former Mayor of London and professional newt-botherer Ken Livingstone decided to entitle his part-autobiography, part-political tract ‘If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish It’. Whilst the former Red Ken (these days probably more of a rosé) still no doubt has his fair share of detractors, he pretty much hit the nail right on the head with this one. Never before in British history has such thin slivers divided the political parties in terms of their ideological stance. We have Tories, Yellow Tories, and now Blue Labour to choose from at our next trip to the ballot box. Our democracy stinks.
A member of the House of Lords called Baron Maurice Glasman – thus not exactly a man with his finger on the pulse of working class Britain – recently coined the term ‘Blue Labour’. He suggested that the party embrace a more socially conservative and economically liberal agenda, and specifically establish a dialogue with sympathisers of the far-right English Defence League in order "to build a party that brokers a common good, that involves those people who support the EDL within our party." Whether this involves Labour’s current geek-in-chief Ed Miliband shaving his head, adopting racist hollering during PMQs and downing pints of Stella in Luton council estate pubs remains to be seen.
For many, of course, the problem with Labour, ever since it was New rather than Blue, was that it was already too ‘blue’ - too pro-market - to be believable when it went looking for support among its traditional voters. The re-branding and re-marketing of Labour under Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair had already shifted the party away from its roots as it went chasing after a middle class, centrist vote that shifts ever more to the right. Does anyone really believe that, had Labour got re-elected, they would be behaving that differently than the Blue and Yellow Tories? It seems doubtful.
Meanwhile, over the past year Nick Clegg has of course sold the Liberal Democrats down the river by siding up to Dangerous Dave Cameron and his Tory cohorts in the present coalition, hence the ‘Yellow Tory’ moniker that, in the eyes of most, is still firmly affixed to the now-beleaguered party as they consistently flatline in the opinion polls. Any distinction that the Lib Dems held in terms of their manifesto policies has swiftly disappeared now that they too have been seduced by power, abandoning all ideological distinctiveness in the hope of impressing some imaginary median voter sipping a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in their back garden in Hemel Hempstead.
Yesterday the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England, questioned not only the legitimacy of the present coalition’s draconian policies but also the health of democracy itself on these shores. Dr Williams's article in the New Statesman said the government was facing "bafflement and indignation" over its health and education plans: "With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no-one voted. At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context."
Britain today is only notionally a democracy. We have elections every five years or so and that's about it, give or take the very occasional referendum in which the result is usually pre-ordained, as witnessed by the recent AV debacle. Recent history has seen an unprecedented decline in voter turnouts - in 2001, only 59% of the British public turned out to vote, the lowest turnout since 1918. As a result, the legitimacy of our governments' mandates is looking increasingly questionable. We are facing a situation whereby the processes of democracy, including general elections, become empty rituals. In most of the important policy areas, public opinion is either not represented in the political mainstream or else treated as an utter irrelevance. Regarding all of the vital issues of today, there exists virtually no difference between the three major political parties.
A true democracy requires an informed public, because people can only make meaningful decisions if they know about the issues. An informed public requires a free press, since most people do not have the time to conduct personal research investigations into all the issues themselves. A democracy requires a free press to objectively and honestly disseminate information to the public. In this area, too, Britain's democracy is sorely lacking. The track record of the British corporate media is exactly what you'd expect from organisations owned by corporations and dependent on corporate money for revenue - i.e. one of remarkably consistent subservience to the establishment.
It is clear that democracy in Britain is in severe crisis. But this can, in theory, be ameliorated. A free press is entirely achievable, and it is possible to have a true democracy, or at least something very much approximating it. It would, however, take a monumental effort to push through the democratic reforms necessary to truly allow the British people to govern themselves. Powerful establishment forces - to whom, of course, the very idea of true democracy is an anathema - would have to be fought every step of the way. It would require mass, sustained public action. But that, of course, is what true democracy is all about.
Beyond the Peak
Oil is the foundation of, and is present throughout, the edifice of human civilization. There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy – oil and natural gas – in every calorie of food you and I eat in the industrialized world. Fertilizers are made from natural gas. Pesticides are made from oil. Oil-powered machines are driven to plant, plough, irrigate, harvest, transport, package. You wrap the food in plastic – that's oil. All plastic is oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every car tyre. Oil is everywhere; it's ubiquitous. And it's because of oil that there are almost seven billion people on this planet right now.
The arrival of this cheap and easy energy which is equivalent, by the way, to billions of slaves working around the clock, changed the world in such a radical way over the last two centuries that the population has gone up 10 times. But, by 2050, oil supply will be able to support less than half the present world's population in their present way of life. So, the scale of adjustment to live differently is enormous.
The world is now using six barrels of oil for every barrel it finds. Five years ago it was using four barrels of oil for every barrel it finds. A year from now it is going to be using eight barrels of oil for every newly-discovered barrel.
What is disturbing is the lack of any real effort from governments and industry leaders worldwide to do something different. We have these attempts to build more wind power and to maybe do something with tidal power, we've got attempts to make cars a little bit more efficient, but there's nothing which really looks like a revolution coming along; it’s all pretty minor tinkering, which is pretty frightening given the circumstances.
Governments, driven by economists who don't really appreciate the issues at hand, are trying to stimulate consumerism to restore past prosperity in the hope that they can restore the past. They're printing yet more money whilst lacking any collateral at all. So, if the economy improves and recovers and the growth returns, it will only be short-lived because within a short period of time it will hit the supply barrier again, there will be another price shock and a deeper recession. A series of increasingly vicious circles ensues.
You have economic growth, followed by a price spike, causing great hardship. That's where we are now. But what we also have now is this situation where there's no more ability to produce cheap energy. We're at the peak – soon to hit the down slope of oil production. Oil cannot be extracted any faster which means that things shut down, the price of oil drops (which it did in early 2009) but then as you have a “recovery” the price of oil starts to come back. It's recently been hovering at about $100 a barrel and what we see is that, at this cost, with the financial and economic collapse, people are having a hard time affording that.
World oil production right now is about 86 million barrels a day. Over 10 years, you're looking at roughly 14 million barrels a day having to be replaced. There's nothing around which can come within even 1% of meeting that sort of demand. If we don't do something pretty quickly there's going to be a huge energy deficiency. The big mistake was in not recognising a decade or so ago that a concerted effort needed to be made to develop these sustainable forms of energy. That’s something our grandchildren will look back on with total disbelief. They will know we were dealing with a finite commodity, and wonder how we could possibly have built our economy around something which was going to eventually disappear.
For the first time in human history the species is now faced with the depletion of a core resource central to our current system of survival. And the punch-line of the whole saga is that, even with oil becoming more scarce, our economic system will still blindly push its cancerous growth model, so people can go out and buy more oil-powered cars, exasperating the decline. Are there solutions to replace the hydrocarbon economy? Of course. But the path needed to accomplish these changes will not manifest itself, since new solutions can only be implemented through the profit mechanism. People are not investing in renewable energies because there is no money in it in both long and short-term. And the commitment needed to make it happen can only occur at a severe financial loss. Hence, there is no monetary incentive and in this system, if there is no monetary incentive, things do not happen. On top of it all, Peak Oil is just one of many surfacing consequences of the environmental-social train wreck gaining speed today.
Other declines include fresh water - the very fabric of our existence - which is currently showing shortages for 2.8 billion people, and on pace to reach 4 billion by 2030. They also include food production: the destruction of arable crop land, from which 99.7% of all human food comes from today, is occurring up to 40 times faster than it is being replenished. Over the last 40 years, 30% of the world’s arable land has become unproductive. Not to mention that hydrocarbons are the backbone of agriculture today and, as they decline, so will the food supply.
As far as resources in general, at our current patterns of consumption, by 2030 we will need two planets to continue at this level. Not to mention the continual destruction of life supporting biodiversity causing extinction spasms and environmental destabilisation across the globe. Alongside all these declines we have near-exponential population growth, where by 2030 there may be over 8 billion people on this planet. Energy production alone would need to increase 44% by 2030 to meet such demand.
And again, since money is the only initiator of action - are we to expect that any country on the planet is going to be able to afford the massive changes needed to revolutionise agriculture, water processing, energy production and the like, when the global debt pyramid scheme is slowly shutting the entire world down? Not to mention the fact that the unemployment you currently see is going to become the norm due to the nature of technological unemployment. The jobs are not coming back. And finally, on a broad social perspective, from 1970 to 2010, poverty on this planet doubled due to this system and, given our current state, do you honestly think we will see anything less than more doubling, more suffering and more mass starvation?
We must do all we can to avoid that condition. It's clear we're on the verge of a great transition in human life. What we face now is the most fundamental change we've known over the last century. The "in" group will do all it can to stay in power; they'll use the army and navy and lies or whatever they have to use to keep in power. They're not about to give it up because they don't know of any other system that will perpetuate their kind. But when things get so bad that people lose confidence in their elected leaders, they will demand change. Something’s got to give.
Beyond the Pale
It's simply a matter of historical fact that the dominant intellectual culture of any particular society reflects the interests of the dominant group in that society. In a slave-owning society the beliefs about human beings and human rights and so on will reflect the needs of the slave owners. In the society, which again is based on the power of certain people to control and profit from the lives and work of millions of others, the dominant intellectual culture will reflect the needs of the dominant group. So, if you look across the board, the ideas that pervade psychology, sociology, history, political economy and political science fundamentally reflect certain elite interests. The academics who raise concerns over this tend to get shunted off to the side or labelled as ‘radicals’, or worse.
The dominant values of a culture tend to support and perpetuate what is rewarded by that culture. And in a society where success and status is measured by material wealth - not social contribution - it is easy to see why the state of the world is what it is today. We are dealing with a value system disorder, completely denatured, where the priority of personal and social health have become secondary to the detrimental notions of artificial wealth and limitless growth. And, like a virus, this disorder now permeates every facet of government, news media, entertainment - even academia.
Built into its structure are mechanisms of protection from anything that might interfere. Disciples of the monetary-market religion and the self-appointed guardians of the status quo constantly seek out ways to avoid any form of thought which might interfere with their beliefs. The most common tactic employed is the use of ‘projected dualities’. If you're not a conservative, you must be a socialist; If you are not Christian, you might be a Satanist; and if you feel society can be greatly improved to consider, perhaps, taking care of everyone? You're just a ‘Utopianist’. And the most insidious of them all: if you are not for the ‘free market’ you must be against freedom itself.
Regarding media coverage, every time you hear the words 'freedom', ‘progress’, ‘development’ or 'government interference' said anywhere, it means, in decoded form: blocking maximization of turning money into more money for private money possessors. That’s it. Of course, when you hear the word 'freedom' it also tends to be in same sentence with something called 'democracy'. It's fascinating how people today seem to believe that they actually have a relevant influence on what their government does, forgetting that the very nature of our system offers everything for sale. The only vote that counts is the monetary vote and it doesn't matter how much any activist yells about ethics and accountability.
In a market system, every politician, every legislation and hence every government is for sale. Even with the 20 trillion dollar bank bailouts starting in 2007 - an amount of money which could have changed say, the global energy infrastructure to fully renewable methods, instead going to a series of institutions that do nothing to help society, institutions that could be removed tomorrow with no recourse - the blind conditioning that politics and politicians exist for the public well-being still continues. The fact is, politics is a business - no different than any other in a market system, and they care about their self-interest before anything else.
George Carlin, comedian, social critic, 1937-2008:
I don't really, honestly, deep down believe in political action. I think the system contracts and expands as it wants to. It accommodates these changes. I think the civil rights movement was an accommodation on the part of those who own the country. I think they see where their self-interest lies; they see a certain amount of freedom seems good - an illusion of liberty - give these people a voting day every year so that they will have the illusion of meaningless choice. Meaningless choice - so that we go, like slaves, and say “Oh, I Voted.” The limits of debate in this country are established before the debate even begins, and everyone else is marginalized and made to seem either to be communist or some sort of disloyal person - a “kook”, and now it's “conspiracy”. Something that should not be even entertained for a minute: that powerful people might get together and have a plan! Doesn't happen! You're a “kook”! You're a “conspiracy buff”!
Of all the mechanisms of defence of this system, there are two that repeatedly crop up. The first is this idea that the system has been the “cause” of the material progress we have seen on this planet. Well, no. There are basically two root causes which have created the increased so-called “wealth” and population growth we see today.
One: the exponential advancement of production technology; hence scientific ingenuity, and
Two: the initial discovery of abundant hydrocarbon energy - which is currently the foundation of the entire socio-economic system.
The free-market / capitalist / monetary market system - whatever you want to call it - has done nothing but ride the wave of these advents with a distorted incentive system and a haphazard, grossly unequal method of utilizing and distributing those fruits. The second defence is a belligerent social bias generated from years of propaganda, which sees any other social system as a route to so called ‘tyranny’ with various name-droppings of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and the death tolls they generated. Well, as despotic as these men might have been along with the societal approaches they perpetuated, when it comes to the game of death - when comes to the systematic daily mass murder of human beings - nothing in history compares to what we have today.
The famines that have occurred throughout at least the last century of our history have not been caused by a lack of food. They have been caused by relative poverty. The economic resources were so inequitably distributed that the poor simply didn't have enough money with which to buy the food that would've been available if they could have afforded to pay for it. This is an example of structural violence. Another example: in Africa and other areas, tens of millions of people are dying of AIDS. Why are they dying? It's not because we don't know how to treat AIDS. We have millions of people in the wealthy countries getting along remarkably well because they have the medicines that will treat it. The people in Africa who are dying of AIDS are not dying because of the HIV virus, they are dying because they don't have the money with which to pay for the drugs that would keep them alive. Gandhi had similar examples to this in mind when he said that “the deadliest form of violence is poverty.”
The Crisis in Public Health
From the waste machine known as the market system, to the debt machine known as the monetary system - hence creating the monetary-market paradigm which defines the global economy today - there is one consequence that runs through the entire machine: inequality. Whether it is the market system creating a natural gravitation towards monopoly and power consolidation, generating pockets of wealthy industries that tower over others regardless of utility - top hedge fund managers in the City of London taking home tens of millions a year for contributing literally nothing, whilst a scientist looking for a cure to a disease might make £40k a year. Or whether it is the monetary system which has class division built right into its structure.
For example, if I had a million pounds to spare and I put it into an account at 4% interest, I will make £40,000 a year. No social contribution, no nothing. However, if I'm a working class person and have to take loans to buy my car or home I am paying in interest which, in abstraction, is going to pay that millionaire with the 4% account. This stealing from the poor to pay the rich is a foundational, built-in aspect of the monetary system, and it could be labelled “Structural Classism”. Of course, historically, social stratification has always been deemed unfair but obviously accepted overall, seen as the top 1% of the population now owns 40% of the planet's wealth. But, material fairness aside, there is something else going on underneath the surface of inequality, causing an incredible deterioration in public health as a whole.
People often are puzzled by the contrast between the material success of our societies - i.e. unprecedented levels of wealth - and the many social failings. If you look at the rates of drug abuse, violence, self-harm amongst children or mental illness, there is clearly something going deeply wrong with our societies. This data simply shows the intuition that people have had for hundreds of years, that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive, is truer than we ever imagined.
There exist very powerful psychological and social effects of inequality, more to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority. This kind of division perhaps goes hand in hand with feelings of disrespect - people feeling looked down on at the bottom which, by the way, is why violence is more common in more unequal societies - the trigger to violence is so often people feeling looked down upon and disrespected.
If there is one principle to emphasise, it is that the most important principle underlying the prevention of violence is equality. The single most significant factor that affects the rate of violence is the degree of equality versus the degree of inequality in that society.
So, what we're looking at is a form of general social dysfunction. It's not just one or two things that go wrong as inequality increases, it seems to be everything, whether we are talking about crime or health or mental illness or whatever.
One of the really disturbing findings out there in public health is that you should never ever make the mistake of being poor, or being born poor. Your health pays for it in endless sorts of ways: something known as the 'health socioeconomic gradient'. As you move down from the highest strata in society, in terms of socioeconomic status every step down, health gets worse for umpteen different diseases. Life expectancy gets worse, infant mortality rate - everything you could look at. So, a huge issue has been why is it that this gradient exists?
Some suggest that it is because poor people in countries lacking universal healthcare can't afford to go to the doctor; it's about healthcare access. Yet you see these same gradients in health outcomes in countries with universal health care and socialized medicine. Okay – next 'simple explanation': On average, the poorer you are the more likely you are to smoke, to drink and indulge in all sorts of other lifestyle risk factors. Yes, these contribute, but careful studies have shown that it explains maybe about a third of the variability. So what's left? What's left has a lot to do with the stress of poverty. The poorer you are, the worse your health is. This tells us something really important: the health connection with poverty - it's not about being poor, it's about feeling poor.
Increasingly we recognize that chronic stress is an important influence on health, but the most important sources of stress are the quality of social relations. And if there is anything that lowers the quality of social relations it is the socioeconomic stratification of society. What science has now shown is that regardless of material wealth the stress of simply living in a stratified society leads to a vast spectrum of public health problems and the greater the inequality, the worse they become:
Life expectancy: longer in more equal countries.
Drug Abuse: less in more equal countries.
Mental Illness: less in more equal countries.
Social Capital - meaning the ability of people to trust each other: naturally greater in more equal countries.
Educational Scores: higher in more equal countries.
Homicide rates: less in more equal countries.
Crime and Rates of Imprisonment: less in more equal countries
It goes on and on: infant mortality – obesity – teen birth rate: less in more equal countries. And, perhaps most interestingly: innovation: greater in more equal countries, which challenges the age-old notion that a competitive stratified society is somehow more creative and inventive.
Moreover, a UK-based report called The Whitehall Study confirmed that there is a social distribution of disease as you go from the top of the socioeconomic ladder to the bottom. For example, it was found that the lowest rungs of the hierarchy had a fourfold increase of heart disease-based mortality compared to the highest rungs. This pattern exists irrespective of access to health care. Hence the worse a person's relative financial status, the worse their health is going to be on average.
This phenomenon is rooted in what could be termed 'Psychosocial Stress', and it is at the foundation of the greatest social distortions plaguing our society today. Its cause? The monetary-market system. Make no mistake: the greatest destroyer of ecology; the greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution; the greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, abuse and inhumanity; the greatest generator of social and personal neurosis, mental disorders - depression, anxiety, not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis - is not some corrupt government or legislation, not some rogue corporation or banking cartel, not some flaw of human nature and not some secret hidden cabal that controls the world. It is, in fact, the Socio-Economic System itself at its very foundation.
The Monetary System
Now, so far we have focused on the market system. But this system is actually only half of the global economic paradigm. The other half is the “Monetary System”. While the Market System deals with the interaction of people gaming for profit across the spectrum of labour, production and distribution, the Monetary System is an underlying set of policies set by financial institutions which create conditions for the market system, among other things. It includes terms we often hear such as interest rates, loans, debt, the money supply, inflation, etc. And while you might want to pull your hair out listening to the gibberish coming from the monetary economists, the nature and effect of this system is actually quite simple:
Our economy, or the global economy, has three basic things that govern it.
1. Fractional reserve banking: the banks printing money out of nothing.
2. Compound interest: when you borrow money, you have to pay back more than you borrowed which means that you, in effect, create money out of thin air, which has to be serviced by creating still more money.
3. The belief that we live in an infinite growth paradigm. Of course the economic paradigm we live in now is a Ponzi scheme - a fraud. Nothing grows forever. It's not possible.
As the psychologist James Hillman wrote: “The only thing that grows in the human body after a certain age is cancer.” It's not just the amount of money that has to keep growing - it's the amount of consumers. Consumers to borrow money at interest to generate more money and, obviously, that's not possible on a finite planet. People are basically vehicles to just create money, which must create more money to keep the whole thing from falling apart, which is what's happening right now.
There are really only two things anyone needs to know about the monetary system:
1. All money is created out of debt. Money is monetized debt whether it materialized from treasury bonds, home loan contracts or credit cards. In other words, if all outstanding debt was to be repaid right now there would not be a penny in circulation.
2. Interest is charged on virtually all loans made, and the money needed to pay back this interest does not exist in the money supply outright.
Only the principal is created by the loans and the principal is the money supply. So, if all this debt was to be repaid right now, not only would there not be no money left to circulate, there would be a gigantic amount of money owed that is literally impossible to pay back, for it does not exist. The consequence of all of this is that two things are inevitable: inflation and bankruptcy.
As far as inflation goes, this can be seen as a historical trend in virtually every country today, and easily tied to its cause which is the perpetual increase of the money supply which is required to cover the interest charges and keep the system going. As far as bankruptcy goes, it comes in the form of debt collapse. This collapse will inevitably occur with a person, a business or a country, and typically happens when the interest payments are no longer possible to make.
But there is a bright side to all of this, well, at least in terms of the market system. Because debt creates pressure. Debt creates wage slaves. A person in debt is much more likely to take a low wage than a person who isn't, hence becoming a cheap commodity. So it's great for corporations to have a pool of people that have no financial mobility. But hey - that same idea also goes for entire countries. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which mostly serve as proxies for transnational corporate interests, give gigantic loans to troubled countries at very high interest rates. And then, once the countries are deeply in the hole and can't pay, austerity measures are applied, the corporations swoop in, set up sweatshops and take their natural resources. Now that's market efficiency.
But wait – there's more: there's this unique hybrid of the monetary and market system called the stock market. Which rather than, you know, actually produce anything real, they just buy and sell money itself. And when it comes to debt, you know what they do? That's right - they trade it! They actually buy and sell debt for profit. From credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations for consumer debt, to complex derivative schemes used to mask the debt of entire countries, such as the collusion of investment bank Goldman Sachs and Greece, which nearly collapsed the entire European economy. So when it comes to the stock market and Wall Street, we have an entirely new level of insanity born out of the Money Sequence of Value.
All you need to know about markets was written in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago. It was called 'Lessons of the Brain-Damaged Investor’. This article explained why people with slight brain damage do better as investors than people with normal brain functionality. Why? Because the slightly brain-damaged person has no empathy. That's the key. If you don't have any empathy you do well as an investor. And so Wall Street breeds people who have no empathy; to go in there and to make decisions and to make trades they have no compunction about and no thought whatsoever as to how what they are doing might affect their fellow human being. So they breed these robots. These people who have no souls.
Furthermore, they are processing, generating and re-securitizing nothing. If you write £10 billion on a cocktail napkin and you sell it to J.P. Morgan, and J.P. Morgan writes £10 billion on a cocktail napkin and you swap those two cocktail napkins at a bar, you each pay yourselves a quarter of 1% in a fee, and make a lot of money for your Christmas bonus. You each have on your books a £10 billion cocktail napkin which has no real value, until such time as the system is no longer able to absorb bogus cocktail napkins, in which case we go to the government to get bailed out.
And because of Wall Street, the City of London and the global stock market there are now, at a conservative estimate, about 700 trillion dollars of outstanding fraudulent claims known as ‘derivatives’ still waiting to collapse. This value amounts to over 10 times the gross domestic product of the entire planet. And while we have seen the bailouts of corporations and banks by governments, which, of course, comically borrow their money from banks to begin with, we are now seeing attempts to bail out whole countries by conglomerates of other countries through the international banks.
But how do you bail out a planet? There is no country out there that isn't now saturated in debt. The cascade of sovereign debt defaults we have witnessed can only be the beginning when the maths is taken into account. It has been estimated in the United States alone that income tax would need to be raised to 65% per person just to cover the interest in the near future. Economists are now foreshadowing that within a few decades 60% of the countries on the planet will be bankrupt.
In other words, the world is going bankrupt, whatever the hell that means, because of this idea called "debt" which doesn't even exist in the physical reality. It's only part of a game we've invented... and yet the well-being of billions of people is now being compromised. Huge layoffs, tent cities, accelerating poverty, austerity measures imposed, schools shutting down, child hunger and other levels of familial deprivation. All because of this elaborate fiction.