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Forum Post: Growth of Debt

Posted 3 years ago on Feb. 5, 2021, 5:12 p.m. EST by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

Like a feudal lord who extracts so much rent from his tenants that they can no longer work to produce wealth for him to appropriate, the FIRE Sector has profited during the pandemic, while the real economy we depend on to produce necessary goods has been decimated.

One might say that the hospitality industry and such services are not really necessary. But they're much more useful than billionaires. Our masters point to things we didn't have 100 years ago. They do so to take credit and encourage complacency about their extractions. And that sort of progress includes many of the entertainment and recreational products that have suffered, while Wall St. prospered in the past year.

When we examine the past 70 years more carefully, we realize that the conservatives in America have been working to first slow and then reverse the progress that had been steady since the mid 1930s. The force toward regression increased about 1970. Nixon began to impede useful progress and Reagan stopped it and turned it around. While there continues to be some areas of progress, it's been economically regressive for most of us since at latest 1982. The only growth for most people has been growth of debt, which is one and the same as the profit of investors. The rate of compound interest and profits is the exponential concentration of wealth with the top ten percent.

Like a profligate lord 1000 years ago, the Wall St. billionaires have destroyed the economy that produces their wealth. They make money out of thin air. That is: their profits are created on the ledgers of the banks that leverage their stock purchases, while the production of real goods and material services no longer play a significant role in their imaginary enterprises.

The real economy is being fatally burned in the FIRE on Wall St. The arsonist billionaires and their conservative accomplices are totally oblivious to their destruction of the real economy that must exist for the money they create to be useful.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/01/michael-hudson-finance-capitalism-vs-industrial-capitalism-the-rentier-resurgence-and-takeover.html

Video link https://youtu.be/RJsQt_87RgU

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[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 3 years ago

It's not necessarily true that the entire FIRE sector profited from the pandemic. Landlords and landladies must still pay their states' real estate taxes while their tenants aren't paying their rents because the tenants are shielded by the governments. I just don't see how that can be profitable. Evictions haven't really been allowed to start yet while maintenance and upkeep such as providing heating and shoveling the recent feet of snow still need to be done in order to avoid having to pay the hefty penalties to the governments of the city and state.

There's a reason for Trumpism. Trump has been dealing with the very highly regulated city and state of New York ( which favor the quick imposition of poorly thought-out and largely out-of-touch regulations; the practice of law is often very profitable--the more laws, the more gotchas, and the more work for the highly paid lawyers who are predominantly Democrats and 卍 rather than 卐 ) for many decades. He evolved a style of dealings which worked magic on the U.S. ( my initial calculation in March 2020 of the CoViD-19 death count for the U.S. of around 700,000 hit me with disbelief but I don't argue without a solid basis; many have died of Trumpism-induced fake news, disinformation, misinformation, manipulation for making profits, arbitrary rule making, political cover-up, etc. Of course, the U.S. still hasn't quite caught up with Russia which had brought out its tanks to bombard their White House ) and the World as well. Pootin/Trump/Xi was the 3-4-5 ( base-altitude-climb ) triangular basis for the weapon of mass destruction. Guess which country is the most-nuked one? Not Japan.