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Forum Post: Pig Productive

Posted 7 years ago on March 24, 2016, 11:09 a.m. EST by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

It's All Productive to a Pig

From an interview of Michael Hudson by Chris Hedges at teleSUR's "Days of Revolt."

"... if you have a pharmaceutical company such that raises the rate of drug from $12 a shot to $200, that's all of a sudden, their profits go up. Their increased price for the drug is created, is counted in the national income accounts, as if the economy is producing more....

"... The head of Goldman Sachs came out and said, Goldman Sachs workers are the most productive in the world. That's why they're paid what they are. And the concept of productivity in America is the income divided by the labor. So if you're Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million a year in salary and bonuses, you're considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and that's enormously productive. So we're talking with tautology. We're talking with circular reasoning here.

"So the issue is whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, predatory pharmaceutical firms, actually add a product or whether they're just exploiting other people. And that's why I called my book [http://www.amazon.com/dp/3981484282] Parasitism, because the parasite, people think of the parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of the host, or taking money out of the economy. But in nature, it's much more complicated. The parasite can't simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb. It has an enzyme that numbs the host so the host doesn't even realize the parasite's there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that makes the host–it takes over the host's brain. And it makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of the body, that actually part of itself, to be protected....

"... And the reason the price of the house has gone up is that a house is worth whatever a bank is going to lend against it. And if banks made easier and easier credit, lower down payments, then you're going to have a financial bubble. And so now, you have, indeed, real estate having gone up as high as it can, I don't think it'll take more than 40% of somebody's income to buy it. But now, if you, imagine if you're joining the labor force. You're not going to be able to buy a house at today's prices, putting down a little bit of your money, and then somehow end up getting rich just on the house investment. All of this money you pay the bank is now going to be subtracted from the amount of money that you have to spend on goods and services.

"So we've turned the post-war economy that made America prosperous and rich, we've turned it inside out, and somehow the most people believe that you could get rich by going into debt to borrow something that's going to rise in price. And you can't get rich, ultimately, in going into debt. In the end, the creditors always win, and that's why every society since Sumer and Babylonia have had to either cancel the debts, or you come to a society like Rome that didn't cancel the debts, and then you have a dark age. Everything collapses."

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-hudson-and-chris-hedges-the-real-world-cost-of-turning-classical-economics-upside-down.html

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[-] 2 points by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX 7 years ago

The ghost of Milton Friedman is the spirit of Wall St that haunts but fails to terrorize (as it should) the brain dead debt peons of the 99%. It can be seen, by those with strength and courage enough to look, that our economy is dying by the infestation of Wall St parasites. Michael Hudson is among a handful of Cassandras whose legitimate warnings are thoughtlessly dismissed. The conditioned responses are issued from the programmed thralls who, sadly, are still the majority in America and the developed world, including all the Wall St elite and the politicians they own.

[-] 1 points by grapes (5232) 7 years ago

The pharmaceutical/medical industry is a parasite. The U.S. pays so much more for pharmaceuticals and medical procedures than all other countries on a per capita basis with nothing good to show. Medicare was barred by our Con-gress from negotiating with drug providers for volume discount. How ridiculous is that? It's corruption.

The various free trade treaties extend the tentacles of this monster of Big Pharma/Finance/Con-gress to the rest of the world by selling out our workers. It's corruption, again. Big Pharma and Big Finance are the twin evils in collusion (with our backyard cesspool fountain - "soft o'er the fountain, ling'ring falls the brownie moon") sucking the lifeblood out of not just the U.S. economy but those of our trading partners due to our diminished purchasing power as well as inflating drug prices over there. That's why we in the U.S. must chop them off, to save ourselves as well as the world.

Elizabeth Warren has already developed a cozy relationship with some Biggies, hasn't she? She's no doubt charming and a fast study, isn't she?

I remember Craig Venter used to say six months of delay in coming out with a disease's cure was unacceptable to him because he had served in Vietnam and saw things first-hand. Now what diseases have we cured since then, reading the "Book of Life"? How much delay has occurred since the "Book of Life" was opened? Has it now become more acceptable to let people die while profits pile up?

[-] 0 points by turbocharger (1756) 7 years ago

The goal is that others compete with these assholes and they grab market share.

Of course when the people continue to elect corporatist pigs, how can anyone compete to make things better?