The Multi-Trillion Dollar Bailout

The multi-trillion bailout has repercussions that will reverberate throughout society. Considering recent history and the exploding divide between the rich and the poor, a massive welfare handout to the rich in the face of the poor who now must deal with "bum proofing" and the elimination of the social safety net, is a huge slap in the collective face of most people. The working poor also face the truth of this as many are forced to rely on food banks and hand outs in the context of working for a living where remuneration for hard work is insufficient to support life. On top of this, the multi-trillion dollar bailout package is funded by the expansion of the money supply that is nothing more than the increase of fictitious value that has devalued the dollar. No real value is involved beyond the printing up of massive amounts of cash to bail out companies that got into trouble by speculating through the creation of fictitious value from endless flipping for increased profits. This speculation has played out and the loss of faith has catastrophically flipped the investors from greed to fear. This multi-trillion dollar bailout threatens to balloon to $7.7 trillion dollars altogether. War debts alone are between 1 to 2 trillions, which is calculated separately. Let’s get some perspective on this. If you were to personally pay of this debt, you would need to pay about $12.00 per day, every day since the foundation of the solar system some 4.56 billion years ago. Even with the multi-trillion bailout, you’d have to pay 120 cents a day since the beginning of time.

There has been a history in the development of this catastrophe. From ancient times where money changing and lending provided a livelihood from usury; i.e., making money by charging a fee or interest, to credit flipping for profit of today, we arrive at the conclusion of extreme economic duress and catastrophe. All value that is held in the minds of people is based on what is useful for life in the context of what exists in the world around us. Thus anything that is desirable entails use value and when it is altered through our labor efforts to something even more useful, there accrues value, labor value, relative value, absolute value, surplus value and so forth. In order to promote trade beyond mere barter, the concept of the universal commodity that evolved from commodities of created surplus value was created to expedite trade between people, regions and nations. This is where trouble emerged. The universal commodity became a very desirable thing to have, as usually universal value was transferred to a small item of high value that became a fetish. Such fetishes are things like precious stones like diamonds, rubies and emeralds; and today the dollar. To have a lot of this universal value made a person rich and powerful. The attraction of this fetish brought whole societies in thrall of this "super value".

Once fetish value in the form of gold was the standard of absolute value as there was a limited supply and thus absolute value was relatively fixed. Upon this all other values were based and society was relatively stable. When the supply of universal value was "too tight" for profit making, even for the purpose of usury, then a method to expand universal value was needed in order to fulfill the necessity of expanding profit; that thing that is the engine of capitalist profit making. This is a two fold problem, as a fixed level of a universal commodity within the context of an expanding population translates into less for everyone. The other problem is that an expanding population also produces more use value which is combined with technological advances that multiplies this tendency. This cheapens all commodities that are produced in the face of increasing surplus value. The solution has become the detachment of the money supply from a fixed universal value; gold, so that the money then becomes a floating currency, subject to all kinds of manipulation.

This kind of chaos in the economy, sometimes referred to as the anarchy of fictitious currencies and capital. This is due to the chaos of currency speculation of all world currencies where fictitious value goes every which way. This creates a lot of uncertainty right across the economic board from the unemployed to the affairs of whole nations. No body is sure of anything anymore. Speculators jump from one to another hoping to gain and making the other guy absorb the loss. They are uncertain about work and thus tighten their spending. Banks are more reluctant to give out loans on anything due to the risk that evolved from credit schemes such as the sub-prime mortgage collapse of the fall of 2008 that spread out to engulf the whole world economy. Hundreds of millions around the world face job losses and are just one paycheck from the street. Adding this to the current homeless problem will only exacerbate the current problem. It is estimated that the sub-prime mortgage collapse created about ten million more homeless in the US alone that now have to face the terror of living without anything and totally dependent on the charitable whims of others that may or may not come. In that frame of reference, charities have suffered a huge drop in donations which in its way, threatens the well being of many people in the world that were already in a state of homelessness and starvation before the crisis hit. Take the drop in charitable donations and the sharp rise in poverty together and you get a volatile brew for trouble to come. In many parts of the world before the collapse, there were huge numbers of people too poor to survive. This "chicken" now appears to be coming home to roost in the developed world.

The nightmare comes from the fact that the lack of a universal commodity needed to acquire real values like food, drink and shelter, people are thrown into fear because they have long forgotten how to manage totally on their own. Many people would have a hard time identifying use values lying all around in nature waiting to be turned into value items they can directly use. Much of this has gone into industry where raw materials are turned into clothes, prepared food, clean bottled water, pre-fab homes, cars and the like. Labor has been collectivized and organized in order to tap surplus value for profit. Many people in the manufacturing industry now only do a small fraction of the total work involved in making a complete product. This atomization of labor input has disastrous consequences when the combined efforts of an industrial complex are suddenly shut down and/or separated from one another. No one person is familiar with all the processes that go into making something complex like a motor car that is build from a host of labor disciplines from mining, refining, cloth making, glass making, metal tooling and far more. Without the organization of a factory, the manufacture of such an item is almost impossible today.

People fear a planned economy due to the influence of propaganda that they would some how lose their freedom and rights. Yet a planned economy not rooted in fictitious value is something that is now necessary. Without an economy at all, there is no freedom; plenty of necessity to fret over and no concern about rights except day to day survival in a hostile natural setting. The current arrangement has most of the people fretting over their own necessity and also the necessity of the rich gambling speculators, while all the freedom goes to those who are speculating with the lives of not only themselves, but everyone else as reflected in the unfolding disaster that is the current ruin of the economy. So for many, the current situation and the threats imposed on the future, is a nightmare, seldom equaled in history.

Curiously, solutions such as city garden growing spaces emerged almost simultaneously to the economic collapse. This is supposed to be a food security solution to a dwindling economy, but too many people don't have access to space. Those who live in apartment blocks on any floor but the ground floor and homeless people have no access whatsoever to growing space. Even if they did, most don’t know the first thing about growing food or looking after farm animals. It looks like a solution on the surface, but at least one acre is required for intensive farming to maintain a family of four. An acre is 160 feet by 160 feet square. Many city plots offer only 100 square feet; well below what is required for even one person. How is the shortfall to be made up in the absence of an economy?

We who live in the context of civilization and are alienated from nature, suffer greatly when the economy is greatly reduced or absent. This is one of the driving causes of the fear that spurs an economic collapse. This is what is behind the nightmare for most people and it appears that the trillions in bailout will disappear into an economic equivalent of a black hole. The world economy verges on a great depression, the likes of which will be unprecedented and historic in proportion.