Showing posts with label Oligarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oligarchy. Show all posts

Monday, January 2, 2023

The Blue Church, the Blue Faith & Red Pills for 2023 | Jordan Hall

This is the formal core of the Blue Church: 
 
it solves the problem of 20th Century social complexity through the use of mass media to generate manageable social coherence.
 
The abstract is this: 
 
the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.

We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the 20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the 20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first decade of the 21st Century.

It is now beginning to unravel.


In part it is unravelling because of developing schisms within its master narrative, the Blue Faith. These are important, but they are not the subject of this essay. In this essay, I am focusing on what I think is both much more fundamental and much less obvious: deep shifts in technology and society that are undermining the very foundations of the Church. Shifts that render the Church itself obsolete. 
If you are ready for a deep dive, come on in. The water is warm.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Top 0.1% Of American Households Hold Same Wealth As Bottom 90%

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The US has a serious inequality problem according to a huge study by Credit Suisse: The top 0.1% of households now hold about the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%. The Gini coefficient is a measurement of the income distribution within a country that aims to show the gap between the rich and the poor. The number ranges from zero to one, with zero representing perfect equality (everyone has the same income) and one representing perfect inequality (one person earns the entire country’s income and everyone else has nothing). A higher Gini coefficient means greater inequality. Developed-market economies such as those in Germany, France, and Sweden tend to have a higher GDP per capita and lower Gini coefficients. On the flip side, emerging-market economies in countries like Russia, Brazil, and South Africa tend to have a lower GDP per capita but a higher Gini coefficient.

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The US, however, is a big outlier. Its GDP per capita is on par with developed European countries like Switzerland and Norway, but its Gini coefficient is in the same tier as Russia’s and China’s. On a global scale just 0.7% of the world's adult population owns almost half of the world's wealth, while the bottom 73% have less than $10,000 each. The 3.5 billion adults with wealth below $10,000 account for 2.4% of global wealth. In contrast, the 33 million millionaires comprise less than 1% of the adult population, but own 46% of household wealth. The past year saw a slight increase in the number of US dollar millionaires and high net worth individuals, with Japan the main beneficiary due to appreciation of the yen. 

The top tiers of the wealth pyramid – covering individuals with net worth above $100,000 – comprised 5% of all adults at the turn of the century. The proportion rose rapidly until the financial crisis, but has remained quite stable since that time. It currently comprises 8.2% of the global total, exactly the same as in mid-2015. The US, home to 41% of the world's millionaires, dominates the wealth league tables, while the UK had a terrible year in dollar terms. Britain lost by far the greatest number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals – those with more than $50 million – down 700 to 4,700. The UK also lost the most amount of millionaires, down by 422,000 to 2,225,000 people. Because the data is denominated in dollars, the pound's 18% collapse after the vote to leave the European Union will have driven a lot of the change. 

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Global Wealth Distribution

Credit Suisse (Oct 2015) - Just 0.7% of the world's adult population owns almost half of the world's wealth, while the bottom 71%
have less than USD 10,000 each. That poorest two-thirds of the population own a 3% sliver of the world's wealth, and inequality is rising.
 

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Confucius In The Age of Oligarchy

"Better light a candle
than curse the dark."
One great tradition of anti-oligarchical thinking in world culture stems from the influence of Confucius (551-479 BC). Confucianism can perhaps best be understood as a movement to save Chinese civilization from oligarchical depredations. Confucius starts from a standpoint very much like that of Plato (428-348 BC): the need to secure good government capable of promoting the general welfare. Confucius recognized that most governments in the divided and balkanized China of his time were unacceptable. 

The main political issue was the incessant private warfare of the Zhou dynasty military nobility, which served no useful purpose, but kept the country weak and divided, with no effective central government. According to Confucius, bad government derived from the fact that rulers and high officials lacked the character and qualifications to serve the common good. 


Sun Yat-Sen, Provisional President,
Republic of China (1912), the first
Republic in Asia: "Of the people, by
the people, for the people."
Confucius thought the main reason for this incompetence was the status of the rulers and hereditary aristocrats around them. He regarded most of them as parasites, and wrote in his Analects

“It is difficult to expect anything from men who stuff themselves with food the whole day, while never using their minds in any way at all. Even gamblers do something, and to that degree are better than these idlers.”
 

Like Plato he argued that government needs to be in the hands of the most capable and competent. Ability has nothing to do with birth, nobility, or wealth, but depends on character and knowledge alone, which in turn are the results of education. Confucius called for careers open to talent, in which appointment and advancement would be based on ability, not on property, hereditary rank and title. Contrary to this, oligarchy represents an irrational principle based on domination and repression, justified neither by merit and ability, nor by the results achieved.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

The Demographic Crash of Civilizations

The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to the latest UN-World Population Report. However, the most important development of the twenty-first century is likely to be the great extinction of peoples, nations, cultures and civilizations. The so called ‘developed world’ is failing to attend to the most elementary task of any successful civilization: raising children. Civilization, culture, social harmony and economic prosperity rest upon the indispensable pre-condition of simple physical existence. The failure to reproduce renders all other achievements irrelevant. 

Prosperity, war, birth control, decadence, exploitation, austerity, abortion
and degradation reflected in the age structure of the German population 1910,
1970, 2009 and 2060
(HERE)
Take Germany for an example: The total population counts some 82 million, the current fertility rate is 1.43 and keeps declining. Out of the 82 million, some 17 million have a recent ‘immigrant background’, some 22 million are pensioners. Germany's impressive work force still counts some 40 million, while the neoliberal gulag of the Schroeder-Merkel regime produced an impoverished human junk heap of 11 to 18 million people. Eight million adults between 18 and 65 of age are unable to sustain themselves, are either jobless or working-poor, trapped in exploitive lease labor contracts, One-Euro-Jobs, part-times jobs, mini-jobs, and other odd Hartz-schemes. Half a million Germans are homeless, many of them children. Organized slavery entertained by the remaining tax payers. The average income laborer tributes two thirds of his gross income to a ruthless government that dished out 400 billion Euro to zombie-banks, and rips-off 100 million Euro every day to pay interest for the public debt. In this environment around 650,000 children are born each year (one third with 'immigrant background'), as compared to 840,000 yearly deaths, giving an annual shortfall of about 200,000. In other words, while over-aging and impoverishing dramatically, Germany loses the equivalent of a mid-sized city each and every year. In fact official German projections indicate that the total population will shrink to between 65 and 74 million by 2060, depending on annual net migration of 100,000 to 400,000. Obviously, the derailed reproduction of the natives (one out of three women never bears children; some 200,000 abortions every year; several hundred thousand homosexuals; etc.), along with genocidal immigration policies, population reduction and population replacement will essentially extinguish the historic German nation within this century. This general trend and time frame equally apply to almost all other European nations.

The all season disaster recipe from the Pentagon's cookbook:
NATO-engineered regime changes and civil wars, stimulated mass migration and
ensuing colonization of global venture lumpen-proletariat and refugees amongst
30 million jobless and 120 million poor native Europeans
(HERE + HERE + HERE)
Today the global average fertility rate is 2.3, and 80% of the world population lives in countries where women have on average fewer than 3 children. This means the global fertility rate is barely higher than the replacement fertility, and the increase of the world population is primarily due to the increasing length of life. In 1960 China’s fertility rate was 6.1. Now it has dropped to 1.6. In Iran, the fertility rate in 1985 was 6.3; now it is down to 1.9. In Thailand, the fertility rate was 6.14 in 1955, 3.92 in 1985, and is 1.49 today. The problem with the ‘developed world’ is not only that it is broke but that it is old and barren. Fertility rates are mostly way below replacement levels, many nations are over-aged and have reached the demographic point of no return. Globally the lowest fertility rates occur in the most modernized areas of Asia: China (1.55), Japan (1.40), South Korea (1.25), Taiwan (1.11), Hong Kong (1.04), Macau (0.91), and Singapore (0.80). Extinction level rates are also prevalent among Southern European countries and former Soviet states: Portugal (1.52), Spain (1.48), Italy (1.42), Greece (1.41), Poland (1.33), Ukraine (1.30), etc.

In Africa, children under age 15 account for 41% of the population in 2015 and young persons aged 15 to 24 for a further 19%. Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia, which have seen greater declines in fertility, have smaller percentages of children (26 and 24 %) and similar percentages of youth (17 and 16%). In total, these three regions are home to 1.7 billion children and 1.1 billion young persons in 2015.
 

Source: UN DESA




Source: CIA World Factbook



Source: CIA World Factbook

Sunday, June 7, 2015

“Wealth will not help a pilot to navigate his ship.”

“Out of Oligarchy arises Democracy”
Plato's Republic (Book VIII - 380 B.C.E.):

[...] What manner of government do you term oligarchy? 

A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it. [...] Oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.

[...] How does the change from oligarchy into democracy arise?
Democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power. [...] That is the nature of democracy, whether the revolution has been effected by arms, or whether fear has caused the opposite party to withdraw. [...] The people, consisting of those who work with their own hands, when assembled, is the largest and most powerful class in a democracy.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Modern Money Mechanics | The Alchemy of Global Neo-Feudalism

"Modern Money Mechanics" was a booklet published
and distributed by the Federal Reserve Bank of
Chicago, originally written by Dorothy M. Nichols
in May 1961. Described as a "workbook on bank re-
serves and deposit expansion", the text offers a
detailed description of the basic process of money
creation out of absolutely nothing in today’s glo-
bally established fractional reserve banking schemes
such as the Federal Reserve System and the European
Central Bank (see also HERE).
Most academic texts teach that money is created first by someone making a deposit and then the bank waits for someone to come along and borrow it. 

However, that is not true: Modern Money Mechanics explains how money is created the instant it is borrowed. In other words, debt creates money. All the so called ‘Western’ governments create bonds (= public debt), give them to private bankster-cartels called ‘independent central banks’ or 'commercial banks' which use that debt to create money. There is no other value attached to it. It is the act of borrowing which causes it to spring into existence. Also all other banks are creating money based on a borrower’s promise to pay (the IOU = I Owe You). They create money by ‘monetizing’ the public and private debts of businesses and individuals.

In his book ‘The Creature from Jekyll IslandG. Edward Griffin elaborates on this in the example of the US:

» The entire function of this machine is to convert debt into money.  It’s just that simple.  First, the Fed takes all the government bonds which the public does not buy and writes a check to Congress in exchange for them.  (It acquires other debt obligations as well, but government bonds comprise most of its inventory.) There is no money to back up this check. These fiat dollars are created on the spot for that purpose. By calling those bonds “reserves,” the Fed then uses them as the base for creating 9 additional dollars for every dollar created for the bonds themselves. The money created for the bonds is spent by the government, whereas the money created on top of those bonds is the source of all the bank loans made to the nation’s businesses and individuals. The result of this process is the same as creating money on a printing press, but the illusion is based on an accounting trick rather than a printing trick. 

The bottom line is that Congress and the banking cartel have entered into a partnership in which the cartel has the privilege of collecting interest on money which it creates out of nothing, a perpetual override on money which it creates out of nothing, a perpetual override on every American dollar that exists in the world. Congress, on the other hand, has access to unlimited funding without having to tell the voters their taxes are being raised through the process of inflation. If you understand this paragraph, you understand the Federal Reserve System.

[…] The federal government adds ink to a piece of paper, creates impressive designs around the edges, and calls it a bond or Treasury note. It is merely a promise to pay a specified sum at a specified interest on a specific date […] this debt eventually becomes the foundation for almost the entire nation’s money supply.  In reality, the government has created cash, but it doesn’t yet look like cash. To convert these IOUs into paper bills and checkbook money is the function of the Federal Reserve System.

An instrument of government debt is considered an asset because it is assumed the government will keep its promise to pay […] so the Federal Reserve now has an ‘asset’ which can be used to offset a liability. It then creates liability by adding ink to yet another piece of paper […] the “Federal Reserve Check” […]

There is no money in any account to cover this check. Anyone else doing that would be sent to prison. It is legal for the Fed, however, because Congress wants the money, and this is the easiest way to get it […] The process is mysteriously wrapped up in the banking system […] The Federal Reserve check is then deposited in one of the Federal Reserve Banks […] These checks become the means by which the first wave of fiat money floods into the economy.
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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Trading with Nothing for Something | Islamic Perspectives on Fiat Money

Money must have intrinsic value ... Fiat currency and
banking are acts of crime ...
(HERE)
 

"[...] Money must have intrinsic value due to it being the measure and store of the value of things. A form of 'money' that is open to total artificial manipulation and subjective valuation will not be able to perform these two functions of money.

[...] Fiat currency and banking are acts of crime, in fact, among the worst crimes in human history. Banking institutions must be held accountable for the continuous campaigns of wars and colonialism – today, corporate colonialism – which are undeniably their biggest and lucrative money-making opportunities. They have left behind clear fingerprints and traces for the world to see. They are also directly responsible for the impoverishment of countries shackled by unpayable debts owed to internationally recognized bloodsucking money lenders and financiers.  

[...] The monetary system based on fiat currency ensures that the amount of debts created will always be far more than the actual money supply, which means that many will never be able to repay the original sum, what more the interest. Many will be forced to default, declare bankruptcy and watch as their possessions are confiscated before their eyes. This does not happen to individuals only, but also to countries and nations which are forced to sell their resources for a measly price due to their inability to repay their international debts.

Muhammad Mahathir - Malaysian Prime Minister (2008):
» Quantitative Easing is a privilege for the rich nations only. When Greece lost money, it could not print currency notes or issue cheques to pay debts.Greece needs to borrow money from European countries to repay loans. Again no currency notes would be involved. The amount lent would be credited to the Central Bank of Greece which then would issue cheques to the commercial banks... Rightly both the United States and United Kingdom should be bankrupt. To recover they should be selling all their banks, industries and other assets at fire-sale prices. That was what the Asian countries were forced to do after the currency traders forced many of them almost into bankruptcy. But the bankrupt powerful countries of the West don’t have to do that. They carry out Quantitative Easing, print money and refinance their banks and bankrupt industries. And they talk about transparency in business practice. «
 
[...] One-third of the world's population now lives in a state of poverty. This is not due to the lack of natural resources or intellectuals, but due to the mischief of the robbers, i.e., the international bankers who went around the world selling their loans while hiding behind the pretext of offering technological progress and modernity to the 'backward' countries.

[...] The criminal act of banking (lending other people’s money on interest without their consent and earning through that without any risk of loss or without any labor involved) cannot be separated from fiat currency. Without fiat currency, banks today will not be able to function as how they are functioning. From the very beginning, it was the introduction of promissory notes (which have now devolved to fiat currency) that allowed the banks to engage in this misuse of the money that was entrusted to their safe-keeping by the unsuspecting masses. Both the practice of banking and the use of fiat currency are based strongly on Riba [usury].

[...] Fiat currency today cannot be a measure of value or a store of value as it constantly loses its illusory 'value' due to it not having natural or intrinsic value. In reality, it is nothing presented as something. This is why fiat money and chronic inflation are not separable; both are the results of each other. Nothingness will only return to nothingness and history is a witness to this.

Imran N. Hosein  (2013) - The International Monetary System:
» When the poor are permanently poor, and the rich permanently rich, that is oppression! All around the world today that oppression exists, and is constantly increasing - the poor grow poorer and the rich richer. Riba [usury] is the cause! A predatory global elite, centered in the West, but also around the world, is constantly sucking the wealth of mankind and impoverishing the masses through riba. Their ultimate objective is to utterly enslave all of mankind in a new sophisticated slavery.Political, legislative, judicial and legal systems, the media etc.,  are all created by the oppressor, and all function to preserve the system of economic oppression. Television is used to transport the masses to fantasy-land so that they remain unaware while riba is used to enslave them. «
 
[...] When inflation occurs, the purchasing power of the money we hold (fiat currency) falls, that is to say, the money that we use today buys lesser and lesser constantly. As time passes, the purchasing power of money only falls, hence people can only buy lesser with the money they have.

 [...] This fall in its purchasing power does not happen based on real situations where the money supply circulating in the nation naturally exceeds the goods and services available in the same nation. The resultant increase in the price of goods and services is due to the artificial creation of money out of nothing. This artificial creation of money out of thin air - one of it - is due to what bankers call Fractional Reserve Banking. This has never ceased to happen since banking took control of the money supply of a country and as a result, the price of goods and services are deliberately forced to be raised and as an inevitable result, the value of the money in our possession (purchasing power) keeps falling. This is intended rip off [Al-Bakh].

Riba-nomics
 
[...] Therefore, trading with fiat as a means of exchange, in reality, is trading with nothing for something. There is no equality; it is zulm [oppression], a clear act of injustice especially from the part of the issuer of the money.

[...] We do not need to bring down, attack or destroy the banking industry. The usurers will themselves bring the banks down since usury is baatil [falsehood], and baatil is bound to perish. What we have to do is to bring the haq [truth] and haq does not need the majority to give it any extra strength.

[...] Many shops and traders around the world have started to accept the Dinar [gold] and Dirham [silver] as payment. Some have also started using it as their mahar and some have went a step further by signing business contracts with the Dinar and Dirham being the capital as well as the profit.

Tarek El Diwany, 2014: » An economically educated person should ask why a man would go to prison for creating money at home, while the bankers do it for a living. Still the question goes unanswered. Why does the crime of counterfeiting become a respectable profession through the act of incorporation as a limited company? Can you give me one example in Shari’ah where something that is haram [forbidden] becomes halal [legal] by the granting of a commercial license?
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