Economic Whores

Welcome to MindContagion.org

This site is an indictment of the worlds current financial system. Only the facts of how the system operates are required to condemn it. In many instances the facts have to be extracted from multiple layers of obfuscation before the real operation of the financial system and the financial community becomes clear. Then again nobody said that it would be easy.

This site is not yet another conspiracy theory site about secret societies running the Federal Reserve. There are more than enough of those to satisfy everyone. That is not to say that the "Magic Hand" of Adam Smith is in control of the financial market. That market mechanism disappeared a very long time ago. The few global financial movers and shakers don't have to have secret meetings, they don't have a common agenda to enslave the rest of the population. At least not a conscious agenda. They are themselves controlled by a different magic hand, the hand of greed. Most of the time they operate separately and greed makes their actions seem coordinated. Sometimes they do form cartels, trusts, and alliances, all to increase profits and if they can't increase their companies profits then they can at least increase their own wealth.

The leaders of the financial industry have created a dysfunctional system which is now wrecking the global economy. This did not happen overnight, it was a long a slow process. The process involved lobbying government leaders to enact laws favorable to the financial industry, to remove regulations, to tighten regulations on the financial industries customers (at this point they might be called victims), and to reward their failures with even larger sums of money (bailouts). Throughout history the failure of the financial industry had been spectacular and painful for the world. The industry tires to pass off their handiwork by claiming it is a natural business cycle and totally out of their control. Then from time to time this "business cycle" swings so far out of control that the financial industry, the banks, the hedge funds, the brokerage houses, and the insurance industry lose more money on their activities in the course of a few years than they have made in their entire history. When that happens we all lose because the rising tide doesn't raise all boats but a financial hurricane does sink them all together.

The financial community can't perform this magic alone, even with the willing aid of the government. They need accomplices. They need the help of the people, people like you and me. We willing help them because we believe that there is no other system. In fact there is because the financial industry using it control of the government has taken away most other options. The financial industry has created the myth that the current economic system based on usury is the only workable system with no alternatives. The industry prefers a nicer term like credit to that of usuary but they are identical. Usuary is simply a means to create financial poverty for the many and wealth for the few.

In order to continue to shift the wealth from the many to the few the monetary system today is propagated by a value system that is taught through propaganda. We are taught to value money not intelligence. We are taught to value money not innovation. We are taught to value money not compassion. We are taught to value money not morality. We are taught to gather wealth at any and at all costs, to the cost of our own well being, to the well being of the planet to the well being of everyone around us.

Most everyone is aware that we live in an unequal world. Few realize, however, just how extreme the inequality has become or how fast the gap between the poor and the super rich is growing. The world now has more than 350 billionaires. Their combined net worth exceeds the combined net worth of the world's poorest two and a half billion people. This is but one manifestation of the extreme economic and social distortions created by the globalized free market economy.

History proves a better world is possible when committed people work hard enough for it. It's how slavery was ended; workers won the right to organize and bargain collectively; women gained equal suffrage to men, control of their own bodies (which they are quickly losing), and more rights (but not equal rights) and status in the work force; blacks and other minorities won important civil rights; and politicians once enacted important social legislation if only out of fear of what might happen if they didn't.

Today's world is the corrupted world of both the neoconservative and neoliberal "free market" capitalism. Capitalism under the total control of giant corporations; that benefits the privileged few alone causing great human misery and despair. Creating a despotic world that can't endure nor must we allow it to much longer; one with endless wars for power and profit; where people are commodities (labor whores to be bought sold and traded)to be used as needed and discarded like trash when they're not; with no concern for preserving an ecology able to sustain us and which won't much longer because we're destroying it and ourselves for profit; where essential human needs don't matter under an economic model only valuing private gain; where democracy is incompatible with predatory capitalism. A world no one should want to live in or ever have to; one we must change or perish. In the language of capital, that's the bottom line. Only a mass movement of committed people can change that world.

Most of us have forgotten the real wealth all around - the fertile soils, the great forests, the minerals and cattle. The fundamentals of the productive economy.

“When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money.” [ 1 ]

We are regularly assured by the world's power brokers that they are fully committed to equality and sustainability so long as economic growth and the expansion of free trade are not compromised by governmental restraints on the market. So sacred have growth and free trade become in our modern culture that only rarely do we find the courage to ask why they should be given precedence over the needs of people and nature. Why should we consider elevating the importance of growth and trade at all except to the extent that they serve people and nature?

By now it is more than obvious to the majority of the people on this planet that economic growth and free trade are not leading us toward economic justice and environmental sustainable. To the contrary, they are taking us in the direction of increasing economic injustice and environmental unsustainability. The debates over jobs versus the environment miss a basic point. Assuring everyone the means to meet their basic needs and achieving a sustainable balance with the environment are mutually supportive goals. There are powerful theoretical arguments why, in a resource scarce world, neither is possible without the other. There is, however, an irreconcilable conflict between the goal of creating economically just and environmentally sustainable societies and embracing sustained economic growth, unregulated markets, and free trade as the organizing principles of public policy. The resulting policies are well suited to producing more millionaires and billionaires. They are ill suited to achieving justice and sustainability.

John Doe © 2008

[ 1 ] Cree prophecy. http://www.unahi.org/quotes/native-american-quotes.htm