An Economist for the Whole Earth

Without greater equality, Herman Daly, the pioneer of ecological economics, helped us understand that the environment has no real shot at renewal, writes Sam Pizzigati.

But that passing has, by and large, gone unnoticed, at least in the major media, with no obit appearing until well after his death.

Despite this media disinterest, Daly most certainly does figure to get much more attention in the years ahead. Why? The life’s work of this University of Maryland emeritus professor just happens to directly link the two supreme challenges of our time: environmental collapse and economic inequality.

Herman Daly pioneered the discipline of ecological economics. He gave us a vision — in works always “crystal clear, conceptually compelling” — of a “steady state economy” that featured “redistribution and qualitative improvement instead of perpetual growth” sure to overload and overwhelm our environment.

[consortiumnews.com]

An economic view that highly correlates with the work of Marx. I occasionally attempt to draw people into expanding their interest into the economic aspects of our societies. I use to use a show on RT {Keiser Report} which is no longer available as it was one discontinued after February. Following the right type of unbiased economic reporting will provide the basis of correlating economics with essentially all aspects of our governing. Combine this with someone who provides a sense of unbiased government, corporations, and judicial watch commentary, and you especially have the makings of discovering a reality that breaks apart the delusional reality managed by the system owned by the ruling class. The means to do this is all now available on RT again now. If their new shows keep expanding.

Our economic issues have been in warning mode since especially 2007. They've been controlled to purposely inflate wealth to the ruling class and their corporations with the collaboration of world representation. A virus and the Ukraine war have been purposely used to exacerbate their wealth since. Devastating results are reverberating around the globe. Almost to the point of WWlll having been started last week by a potential false flag operation by Ukraine. I've put a couple of economic articles together for us to get a sense of the seriousness of what role economics plays today.

{We need, Daly believed, to reject “having ever more” and revolve our lives instead around having enough, and that means sharing, a virtue today, he observed, often derided as “class warfare.” But real “class warfare,” Daly noted a decade ago, “will not result from sharing, but from the greed of elites who promote growth because they capture nearly all of the benefits from it, while ‘sharing’ only the costs.”}

Taken right out of the work of Marx. As much of the following.

{He contrasted his “min-max” to the conventional economics notion that the poor don’t get hurt when the rich get richer and may actually end up benefiting from the expenditures wealthy people make.

“I argue to the contrary,” Daly wrote in his 1996 book Beyond Growth, “that there is a limit to the total material production that the ecosystem can support, and that it would be clearly unjust for 99 percent of the limited total product to go to only one person. I conclude, therefore, that there must implicitly be some maximum personal income.”

A point of reference: Last year, the Economic Policy Institute reports, American corporate CEOs averaged 399 times the pay of our nation’s typical workers.

“Rich and poor separated by a factor of 500 have few experiences or interests in common,” he continued, presciently adding, “and are increasingly likely to engage in violent conflict.”}

Europe today is abuzz with protest against the devastating inflation rates and over their wages. Need a turkey for Thanksgiving? Good luck with that. As Mary found out yesterday!

You’re Living in a World Wrought by the Federal Reserve. Notice Anything Wrong?

Wall Street watcher and economist Nomi Prins warns that central bank strategies deployed since the financial crisis are destroying the real economy, worsening inequality, and creating societal chaos.

Ever wonder why it is that for most of the 21st century, no matter who is in the White House, no matter the state of the economy, and regardless of what ordinary people are suffering, money travels inexorably to the top?

If you find this baffling, you’re not alone. For many, it seems that the further we travel into this acutely challenging century, the political, economic, and social rules we thought we understood increasingly fail to apply.

[scheerpost.com]

{Prins points to the 2008 financial crisis and the Federal Reserve’s response as the pivotal moment in which we jumped on a tiger that we can no longer seem to dismount. What was supposed to be an emergency response to a crisis ended up turning into an unstoppable addiction to cheap money which, Prins argues, initiated a vicious cycle of pumped-up financial markets, destabilizing inequality, a public left worse off, and a political system increasingly unable to make real progress on long-term priorities like climate change. She spoke to the Institute for New Economic Thinking about who is responsible, what the public needs to understand, and why this tiger will not take us anywhere we want to go.}

We can go back to Bush's war on terrorism. Yes, the beginning of a deceitful expansion of perpetual warring. National debt began its unstoppable climb then. 2008 brought in the unstoppable expansion of printing money out of thin air. I've been using sources warning us of the results we're facing today. Markets and banking institutes having been rocking and reeling since. Only masked by more money being printed to falsely manipulate markets as being successful while the ruling class hoard and funnel that money into their coffers and buy back their own stocks. Purely another deception on deceptions. A delusional reality to mask over a failing capitalist system. We've gone from approximately 1 or 2 trillion in debt since the Bush era and now staring at over 31 trillion in that relatively short span. And that's most likely a deceptive quote also!

{So the idea, technically, from a capital market perspective, is that borrowing money in order to do something, or selling bonds in order to finance something, or selling shares in order to finance something, used to have a particular relationship to each other. If there was a transparent use for a company that had value to shareholders, they would be willing to effectively invest their money in order for that company to do what it does to grow whatever it’s growing. Part of that use could be profits, part could be wages, part could be cars. The point being that the relationship was more or less (though not always) transparent at a theoretical level.

But now there is more money being thrown into the markets from an outside source. It’s not money from the actual profits of a company or its long-term strategy, or the productivity of workers, or the creation of long-term things. You end up getting an unmooring between what markets are theoretically there to do in a capitalist society and from a capital-raising standpoint. There’s this other source that comes in and kind of turbo-boosts and distorts all of those relationships.}

Bernanke is a poster child of our representation and the ruling class that own them, as you read on. Stakes, mask, ignore=fuck over society.

You note in your book that our whole society has become alarmingly top-heavy due to these top-heavy approaches. I was struck by the statistic that in a single year of the pandemic, 2020, there were 500 new billionaires created, just as regular people were losing their jobs, losing their health, and many were losing their lives

What we’ve seen is actually more money created than what was sensibly needed to save the economy, and it’s obviously not going into the real economy. I’ve gone through the stats of the Fed’s books related to the $600 stimulus payments, the extra unemployment insurance, and even the PPP loans. The remaining money was leveraged into the financial system. What was on offer to the markets from the Fed dwarfs what actually went into the pockets of real people in the real economy.

As a result, the money just tsunamied upward in a very short period of time. That money unmoored from the real economy and did nothing for it. There were a lot of narratives flying around and guesswork on why the markets ballooned so quickly. What you didn’t have to guess was that trillions of dollars were created, not just by the US central bank, but by central banks around the world. And this was accumulated into the financial system and financial markets