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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-believe-in-magic/

Do You Believe in Magic?

The people pretending to run the world’s financial affairs do. The more layers of abstract game-playing they add to the existing armatures of unreality they’ve already constructed, the more certain it becomes that they will blow up all the support systems of a sunsetting hyper-tech economy that now has no safe lane to continue running in.

Virtually all the big nations are doing this now in desperation because they don’t understand that the hyper-tech economy is hostage to the deteriorating economics of energy, basically fossil fuels, and oil especially. The macro mega-system can’t grow anymore. We’re now in the de-growth phase of a dynamic that pulsates through history, as everything in the universe pulsates. We attempted to compensate for de-growth with debt, borrowing from the future.

But debt only works in the youthful growth phases of economic pulsation, when the prospect of being paid back is statistically favorable. Now in the elder de-growth phase, the prospect of paying back debts, or even servicing the interest, is statistically dismal. The amount of racked-up debt worldwide has entered the realm of the laughable. So, the roughly twenty-year experiment in Central Bank credit magic, as a replacement for true capital formation, has come to its grievous end.

Hence, America under the pretend leadership of Joe Biden ventures into the final act of this melodrama, which will end badly and probably pretty quickly. They are about to call in the financial four horsemen of apocalypse: 1) Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), 2) a command economy, 3) Universal Basic Income (UBI, “helicopter” money for the people), and 4) the “Build Back Better” infrastructure scheme.

MMT is the idea that a nation which claims a monopoly on issuing money can “create” new money ad infinitum with no negative consequences. That is, we can “lend” ourselves money (borrow it into existence) without having to worry about paying it back. The theory caught on only because that’s what we’ve done for two decades and, so far, it hasn’t destroyed the banking system — though debt turned exponential, which is to say ruinous, only recently — so we won’t have to stand by long to see how this experiment works out. Note this too: MMT completes the divorce between productive activity and capital formation, that is, prosperity without wealth.

A command economy means that government increasingly attempts to takes over economic enterprise, to replace x-million individual economic choices of freely-acting people in a society with bureaucratic central planning. (Have you already said ha-ha-ha, knowing how that has worked out through history?)

UBI is the primary feature of that because, in a command economy, production is mostly pretend, so you just have to give people money (for nothing). Remember the old basic operating system of the Soviet Union, stated succinctly as: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Got that?

The idea behind “Build Back Better” is to renovate the infrastructure of a hyper-tech economy that actually no longer exists because we are in the contraction phase of an historic pulsation or cycle, leaving us with lots of tech and less production, tending toward zero. Nobody flogging this slogan actually knows what it ought to mean under the circumstances, which is to go with the flow of the reality of this contraction: to downsize, downscale, and re-localize all our activities to bring them back into sync with actual productivity — that is, raising food, making real stuff, and trading it. Again, it’s the energy dynamic, stupid.

To get to that point, we’re going to shed the massive over-burden of financial game-playing that has pretended to represent our economy. That means stock valuations and bond prices will vaporize along with the derivative activities concocted for trading gainfully in these now-phantom representations of capital. If that happens sooner rather than later, we won’t even be able to pretend to Build Back Better the interstate highways, the electric grid, airports, and all the other stuff in the “infrastructure” folder.

Indeed, a lot of that would be malinvestment folly now because we’re nearing the end of mass motoring and commercial aviation as we’ve known them. If we even have electricity twenty-five years from now, it will come from much-reduced grids on a much more regional basis. The bottom line for all this is that pretty soon every corner of the country will be on its own amid quite a bit of social disorder and financial wreckage. So, whatever energy you actually can marshal to Build Back Better, save it for your town or your local community. And remember, all of the attempts by a national government to control these events, and coerce its citizens in the service of that, will only lead to a more ineffectual and impotent national government that nobody has faith in, confirming the fact that you are on your own.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/03/21/want-to-serve-the-empire-help-circulate-its-propaganda-narratives/

Want To Serve The Empire? Help Circulate Its Propaganda Narratives!

Hey kids! Wanna do your ol’ Uncle Sam a big honkin’ favor? Wanna serve the US empire like a good little lickspittle? Wanna help kill other people’s kids in far off lands for fun and profit?

You do?? Well bust my britches, that’s just swell!

It’s actually really easy. You don’t even need to be smart to do it — heck, it’s actually a whole lot easier if you’re not. Just shut off that pesky little lightbulb inside your noggin and listen up.

All you have to do to help ol’ Uncle Sam spark off them shiny lil’ Tomahawk missiles and incinerate those goofy foreigners for geostrategic control and Raytheon shareholder profits is this: just go around repeating the same stuff your buddies at the US State Department say about governments we don’t like.

That’s it! That’s all there is to it. It really is that simple.

Now I know you young ‘uns don’t do all your talkin’ to each other like us old timers do. You like to get on them newfangled apps and internets with your iPods and your talking dongle widgets and your fancy America Online CD-ROMs. And that’s just great! We need lots and lots of that stuff.

Just get on that there Tweeter machine and tell all your friends that Russia is real, real bad. Or maybe make one of them TikTak dances about how China wants to harvest everyone’s organs. Or heck, you can just share plain ‘ol online news articles about how bad the governments we don’t like are, since them outlets all say the same stuff we say anyhow.

Y’see kids, it’s like this: Before we launch missiles, we launch narratives. Before we drop bombs, we drop stories. Before we invade, we propagandize. We need to make sure everyone’s on our side before we can roll in their and kill those evil terrorists and babies and grandmas, otherwise we risk turnin’ everyone in America and our client states into a buncha stinkin’ anti-war hippies.

And we definitely can’t have none of that. If Americans decide they don’t like war they start making a big scene in front of everybody, holding protests and telling everyone really nasty stuff about your ol’ Uncle Sammy. Then before you know it we got us a real leftist revolutionary movement on our hands, and I ain’t talkin’ about any of that cutesy Bernie Sanders stuff. I’m talking about an actual uprising against the rich folks who run this here blessed country and tearing down the whole empire bolt by bolt.

I know we talk a big game about the scary bad guys being the jihadis and the North Koreans and whatnot, but really the folks who are most dangerous to our enterprises here are the folks who are going around telling everyone that we’re up to no good up in Langley and Arlington. The last thing we need is a buncha hoodlums running around sharing a lot of unauthorized stories about how we’re doing bad things and not really telling the truth about our military agendas. That’s why we’re trying to censor them offa the internet for good.

So get out there and grease the wheels of imperialism, sonny boy! Tell ’em Maduro is starving his people! Tell ’em Assad must go. Tell ’em them Iranians are the world’s worst sponsors of terrorism instead of us and the Saudis! Whatever you see them saying on Fox or CNN about governments we don’t like, you just pick up that torch and run with it, because anything negative you share about them helps us. That’s the best way you can help keep them big ol’ expensive gears of war turning, ya little stormtrooper.

Heck, if you help share our propaganda narratives about the nations that disobey us, you’re could pretty much even say you’re like one of our soldiers. If you think about it, there’s hardly any difference between you and the guy who actually hits the switch to deploy the bombs. You’re just showing up a little earlier in the process, laying down a little storytellin’ so we can rev up our war engines and get the real party started.

So hold your head up high, soldier! By helping us market our wars at home and abroad, you’re helping to make sure we can keep on killin’ until there’s no one left to kill. You just keep talking online about how bad them Russians and Chinese and all them are and keep your tongue lickin’ the imperial boot nice and clean, and you’ll have done your ol’ Uncle Sammy proud.