The media offer a contrasting view of life this morning. The New York Times has a story about homelessness in the USA reaching record highs. It has increased by 18 per cent in a year, reaching 770,000. The problem is growing in every major economy, including our own.
The FT, meanwhile, notes:
Global corporate debt sales soared to a record $8tn this year, as companies took advantage of red-hot demand from investors to accelerate their borrowing plans.
Issuance of corporate bonds and leveraged loans climbed by more than a third from 2023 to $7.93tn, according to LSEG data, as big companies from AbbVie to Home Depot took advantage of borrowing costs falling to their lowest level in decades relative to government debt.
My point is a simple one. There is a mass of money seeking purposeful use in developed country economies. That does, of course, imply that there must be under-taxation in these same economies: the money that the government has created is not being returned to it by way of taxation.
Alternatively, it suggests that there are available funds for social investment that the government refuses to make use of, which it could do by offering the opportunity for those funds to become the capital for social housing, amongst other things.
Instead, that money is being used to fund pointless mergers and acquisitions or to continue destroying our planet by generating wants that can only result in excess carbon production.
There are real needs that need to be met in the major economies of the world. They arise because markets do not care about outcomes. That, they claim, is not their purpose. The consequence is that governments must care, as should the people who run those governments. If not, people suffer, as is too obviously the case.
Meanwhile, the FT celebrates excessive corporate borrowing, not questioning its real value. Simultaneously, the world's media line up to criticise government borrowing, suggesting that this is the source of our undoing when the government should be borrowing the excess funds it has injected into the economy to provide the capital for the funding of the infrastructure that we need to meet need.
Why can't this very obvious required change in behaviour be seen by those with the power to change the allocation of resources within our society for the better?
Because of this failure by our politicians, media and economists, people suffer. There can be no justification for that. This is why we need to change ideas.
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When we see how certain and clear the media are in their primary purpose of guarding the interests and needs of the economic system, how ruthless and focussed the lobbying function is at the same, why are we inclined to the view that says our politicians, media and economists ‘fail’ us? Why not simply recognise that they are not working for anyone or anything other than the economic system and the financial elites that benefit from it, that they do not ‘fail’ us, they manage us. They marvel at their own success and despise the gullibility of “the people” they are elected by.
We need to change our mind-set, assert any values we profess to hold and recognise, as Multi-Billionaire Warren Buffett said, “There’s class warfare, all right, and it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making it, and winning.”
Might roots of poverty lie in the mass promoted belief that the main purpose in life is the conspicuous acquisition of wealth and its demonstration, plus the related, self-harming mass acceptance/worship of such?
Might such obscure the under-publicised and under-taught, deep human need/emotional wealth found in developing our natural and learned powers to enhance our World and to benefit from equitable and positive relations with others?
(From Grace Lee Boggs)
I always remember the quote from Michael Corleone in ” The Godfather III ” .
He’d spent his whole life trying to make ” the family business ” legitimate only to find when he actually managed it he found there were more crooks than in organised crime .
🙂
My father always said there’s crooks in suits than those in prison.
I came across 2 books of interest at the bookstore today. 1 about the alienation people feel from national income maximisation of quasi- neoliberal technocratic government. The other about our preoccupation of trying to create a narrative about our lack of social narrative.
Then I read Kier Starmer is looking for ideas of growth from the regulators. We killed growth, we killed our economic story of the 20th century and our politicians (including the centre left) don’t know how to put it back together.
Much to agree with
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little” (Inaugural Address, Franklin D. Roosevelt, January 20, 1937).
Why is the Labour Government ignoring the proposals from the campaign group ‘Patriotic Millionaires UK’? (sister to Patriotic Millionaires in the US). The group exists to change the current economic system which is obviously failing. They believe extreme wealth must contribute more so working people and those on low incomes aren’t picking up the pieces of a broken economy. They think the country deserves proper investment by taxing the richest people!
Also, Brexit denial (a lack of integrity) breeches the MPs Codes of Ethics and Standards considering the negative economic impacts (- 4.5% of GDP). If Labour don’t have an alternative strategy to overcome the economic calamity then they must: 1) Have another referendum; or 2) Urgently renegotiate and rejoin the Single Market & Customs Union.
This humanity deficit has been growing in my lifetime. The growing dominance of oligarchy has shattered the post-war settlement, means that many human systems are no longer working in the best interest of humanity, that we are servants of the economy and not the other way around, that governments are persuaded that spending on health, welfare, and education is somehow wrong, that private wealth is more important than the public good, and that there is no cost to environmental rape and pillage. My sense of this has only grown since I moved from UK to Netherlands a few years. My new country is by no means immune from the Right (“The Wrong”) e.g. Wilders, but the society as a whole is much better balanced on access to health and education, on delegation to much more effective local authorities, and by having a Written Constitution that enshrines rights and equality (based in part on their bitter experiences of WW2). So it is starting from a better place, but it is also slipping quickly rightward under a torrent of right wing media, internet information warfare, and special interest with, for example, fear of immigration leading to the effective collapse of Schengen in the last few months. I sit here in my older years wondering about the world we are leaving our children and how we deal with this societal decay in which even Labour Governments are now afraid of their prior policies. My fear based on history – and I do not want this – is that such prolonged social injustice foments unrest, violence and even (sotto voce) revolution, such that it is completely obvious in retrospect. How do we avoid repeating this nasty arc in human history and get back to a more balanced and sustainable society?