More Europeans Will Die from Energy Crisis Than Ukraine War?

[alexa]

However I saw some graphs yesterday which showed that for the people of the UK voting for labour was very much the best approach. When Labour was in power our standing of living, health service and so on went up to the European average but when the Tories were in power it went way below. Having had them in power for the past 12 years the standard of living in the UK now is well below that of Europeans. Yes, Brexit could have a part but from the 90's it was the same. Tories in power. Standard of living of the people of the UK lower than the average in Europe and now well below.

 

[georgephillip]

However I saw some graphs yesterday which showed that for the people of the UK voting for labour was very much the best approach. When Labour was in power our standing of living, health service and so on went up to the European average but when the Tories were in power it went way below. Having had them in power for the past 12 years the standard of living in the UK now is well below that of Europeans. Yes, Brexit could have a part but from the 90's it was the same. Tories in power. Standard of living of the people of the UK lower than the average in Europe and now well below.

I think the US and UK are suffering from the same disease: finance capitalism.
In the US, the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) has replaced manufacturing as the dominant strain of capitalism.

Privatization has greatly increased to cost of living in this country compared to 50 years ago when the government was seen as a fourth factor of production concerned with providing low-cost or free public schools, roads, and other nodes of critical infrastructure.


"MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, most people think of all kinds of capitalism as being the same and the assumption is that industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century somehow was always financialized because there were always banks but financial capitalism... is a political system and as a political system it’s very different from the industrial capitalism dynamic.

"In industrial capitalism, the whole aim or the hope of the industrial capitalists in the late nineteenth century, especially in Germany and central Europe was that banking would no longer be just usury, it wouldn’t be just consumer lending to exploit labor, and it wouldn’t be lending to the government somehow.

"The financial system would recycle the economy savings and money creation and credit into industrial production and would finance the means of production to make that productive instead of predatory and parasitic as it became and that seemed to be the way that industrial capitalism was evolving up until World War I."

Finance Capitalism’s Self-Destructive Nature | Michael Hudson

 

[alexa]

I think the US and UK are suffering from the same disease: finance capitalism.
In the US, the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) has replaced manufacturing as the dominant strain of capitalism.

Privatization has greatly increased to cost of living in this country compared to 50 years ago when the government was seen as a fourth factor of production concerned with providing low-cost or free public schools, roads, and other nodes of critical infrastructure.


"MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, most people think of all kinds of capitalism as being the same and the assumption is that industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century somehow was always financialized because there were always banks but financial capitalism... is a political system and as a political system it’s very different from the industrial capitalism dynamic.

"In industrial capitalism, the whole aim or the hope of the industrial capitalists in the late nineteenth century, especially in Germany and central Europe was that banking would no longer be just usury, it wouldn’t be just consumer lending to exploit labor, and it wouldn’t be lending to the government somehow.

"The financial system would recycle the economy savings and money creation and credit into industrial production and would finance the means of production to make that productive instead of predatory and parasitic as it became and that seemed to be the way that industrial capitalism was evolving up until World War I."

Finance Capitalism’s Self-Destructive Nature | Michael Hudson

We have been through this all before - before WW1 and 2. In the interval Keynes who considered himself a socialist said we had to give up this Globalism which apparently was as much as we have today. He said that the only way we were going to survive without the workers going on revolution was to change this. Roosevelt thought the same or bought into this argument when he created the New Deal and pretty much everyone had by the end of WW2. So, people were not allowed to take more than a minimum amount of money out of the country. Monopolies became a thing of the past. Countries learned that it was the responsibility of Governments to regulate the economy. Banks especially had to be kept in check. Banks were apparently hated and generally owned by the 'Renter' class. Then there was the other things like the Government making sure there could be full employment and benefits if people were out of work. They had to create social mobility. Basically again he was sure that if the Government did not do something then eventually working people would revolt. The British elite had been scared of this since the French Revolution.

As you will probably know that is what we had until the beginning of the 80's. At least it was in the UK I am not certain about the US but I think much the same. It was during this time that the standard of living of working people improved and there was genuine social mobility.

However as we all know Thatcher and Regan wanted to bring us back to how we had been before WW2. I cannot believe it because they were old enough to have known. Oh of course the answer to the situation by the bankers and Corporations was war and as you know we had two which involved pretty much the whole world during this time. Hayek believed we were all totally selfish. I would suggest Hayek himself was extremely selfish and he projected this onto everyone else. He believed that if we went down the road and found a twenty dollar bill we would not share it with the people with us. We would just put it in our pockets and a twenty dollar bill was worth a lot more in those days.

Neo Liberalism believed we were all hyper rational. They are basically describing people who had no access to their inner feeling self - hence no ability to have empathy and because they were like that and the only things which were worth anything to them were those that made them feel superior to others, that is the sort of world they apparently believed everyone was and that was the economy they set in motion.

Of course the freedom they spoke of was only freedom for those wanting to play with money. It had nothing to do with genuine freedom yet the US seems full of people who believe it is.

and it has not increased growth. In some places it has halved it and in others even more. The average growth rate was 3%. Latin America at this time had growth of 3%. For some reason the have suffered the most and their growth during Neo Liberalism has only been 0.2% Parts of Africa have also suffered a big drop in their standard of living so the mantra that it helps those with the least does not really stick. It is a system which creates massive inequality giving all the gains to one group of people so that the majority of people have seen no real increase in standard of living since it came into being and many people have seen a definite decrease not least the people living in Latin America.

So the banks. The banks after WW2 became a place where people could expect fair and honest dealings. They would not allow you to borrow more than it looked like you could afford. All that was about to change. I am sure you will remember receiving letters offering you a couple of thousand dollars if you agreed to them changing to working on the stock exchange.

I think it was Clinton who started having bankers on his team. Maybe just one which was carried on by the next guy and so on until Obama who started having them all over your Government. At this time Goldman Sachs was training some of the apparently brightest and then putting them into Government. I am told that wherever you have someone who has been working in Goldman Sachs you will have them working in your Government. Well we know that is the history of Sunak in the UK so it will be interesting to see how that goes.

OK the rest to put as briefly as possible though it is as horrible as possible. Banks kept changing themselves. At one time they apparently had to be in partnerships and if they lost money they were responsible for it. Sachs and I am sure many others found a way to circumvent this so that they no longer were. Going on from this they started gambling and deliberately bringing down companies or countries just so they could make a bob or two. I will say again. They and other Corporate Powers are all over your Government and no doubt the UK's too. This is corruption at its highest level.

They have been taken to court and fined a few million dollars but I am told this is nothing to them and the only way to end what they are doing would be to start putting them in jail. However I think other people are possibly nearer reality when they say there is no way of getting them out.
Obviously they were responsible for creating the recession of 2007/8 and it was deliberate as far as Goldman Sachs were concerned. They made an enormous amount of money from this. Remember I said the original neo libs seemed like people with no empathy. The number of lives the ones there in 2007/8 ruined, it seems this has not changed. Now we are apparently in much the same situation as we were prior to the two world wars and that was almost certainly what caused them. Following Keynes got us out for a while to see a productive way of living with high social mobility. Since the 90's however the US Government which is run by Bankers and Corporate Powers has been indulging in war after war after war the latest being in Ukraine. What they would want would be a world war. That would destroy the world. Another reason for the fake information the Globalists paid to be created to make people believe that global warming was a lie. These people seem so insane that they would rather they and their families were dead than they lose their position. They all have underground towns and what not but though that might work for nukes, there is no chance of it working with Global warming.

Oh with the UK and US and our particular ways of suffering. In the US it very definitely was the idea that the US could lose its manufacturing but the people who were involved in that would get into higher and more sophisticated jobs. No courses were offered for the people to achieve this and if there was the odd one, most people stayed unemployed or managed to get a similar type job still available.

In the UK we were told by Thatcher's Government that the jobs she was dismantling in manufacturing would either be replaced by those in Finance Capitalism and I think they did call it that or the service sector. I am guessing that the Finance Capitalism one was similar to what they were telling you guys you would get.

Beyond sickening.

 

[alexa]

Been feeling uncomfortable about saying Clinton started having a Golden Sachs advisor and Obama put them everywhere in Government. That came with a whole lot more information but and this is particularly given the way things are politically in the US, it looks a bit suspicious as if it is the Dems, Obama in particular being set up as the 'baddie' which is making me question whether and to how much they are involved in Politics.

 

[Ringo]

Western imperial elites are so delusional it's jaw dropping.
The leader of the European Union claimed, without irony, "We do not wage war, we do not impose our model"... Europe colonized the planet and has waged war everywhere, most recently Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc. Westerners should stop projecting their colonialist values systems on everyone else. Our ancestors sailed out to conquer and colonize. Their ancestors built a wall.