"Financialization" Of The Economy Is Simply Usury By Another Name

The TSAP in a previous article wrote how the root cause of virtually all of the social and economic ills of the past half-century are a result of the "financialization" of the economy.  That is, when the financial sector (often known colloquially by the synecdoche of "Wall Street" or "The Banksters") takes on a massively outsized share of the economy and effectively becomes its master rather than its servant.  This occurred since 1971 when our "leaders" in Washington basically sold out to the 0.01% financial oligarchy, and made the conscious decision to have the lion's share of all newly created post-gold standard dollars flow directly from the printing press (or more accurately, keyboard) to Wall Street rather than to We the People.  The financial sector then used such massive excess money as leverage to further consolidate their power and control over the rest of us, and as they say, the rest is history.

But of course, it actually goes much deeper than that.  Professor Richard Westra had actually written a whole book back in 2016 about the deeper root causes of all of this financialization and the extreme inequality that has resulted.  And it turns out, there really is nothing new under the sun, but rather it is simply a newly-unleashed (and somewhat more sophisticated) reincarnation of the very ancient practice of usury.  He does not mince words here:

Usury laid medieval society to waste. Western civilization was saved by the rise of capitalism, which tamed the activities of money lending, and endowed them with socially redeeming value, tethering finance to expanding production of material goods and increased social wealth. Now, as the 21st century begins, bloating tides of money with no possibility of ever being converted into real capital wash over the world. Finance again has turned to its dark side, using money to make money with no socially redeeming purpose. Such is the endgame of economies managed by capitalists without capitalism. As Marx foresaw, capitalist society, like all others, is destined to be outpaced by history as the conditions of its existence decompose and become a drag on the human future. Either we will succeed in bringing about new politico-economic structures—or civilization will collapse into barbarism, just as usury broke it down in the past.

In other words, usury (broadly defined as the charging of any sort of fees for the mere use of money, thus using money to make money) has paradoxically both saved Western Civilization from itself once, but is now devouring that very same civilization.  In fact, Westra's book is titled, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door to Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole.  It is not even really capitalism anymore, as this financialization has fundamentally changed the rules of the game, turning it into "casino capitalism".  It explains not only the ever-increasing inequality that characterizes the postmodern era, but also debt slavery, wage slavery, inflation, and even the inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell which eventually kills its host.  After all, without economic growth, there can be no interest payments, thus the "grow or die" paradigm reigns supreme.  All for the benefit of the oligarchs at the top.  Ellen Brown had also made similar observations as well in her book, Web of Debt, as has the American Monetary Institute as well.

Even Aristotle himself talked about it back then, and not favorably at all.  Can you say, ipse dixit?

Contrary to its proponents, usury does NOT create wealth, because it does not actually create anything of value.  Rather, it literally does nothing more than milk existing wealth, much like a casino does.  Thus, it is inherently a zero-sum game at best.  Worse, in the long run, it acts as a slow poison and ultimately becomes a wealth-destroying negative-sum game, cannibalizing the real economy over time.

After all, while banks do create the principal of a loan out of thin air every day, they don't create the interest that must be paid back, which has to come from somewhere.  And that "somewhere" is, of course, the real physical economy.  Thus results a cascade of perpetual debt, artificial scarcity, and an ever-yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots, which then gets blamed on anything and everything but its actual root cause.  But "pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain", say the mainstream economists.  Move along, nothing to see here folks....

There is thus a very good reason why the practice was banned or restricted throughout a large chunk of history, and why practically all major religions have at some point or another considered it to be a sin to one degree or another (and some still do to this day).  And only in the past half-century or so has it been allowed to proceed with almost no restrictions at all.  In 1978, for example, the federal usury cap on interest rates was lifted, followed by further deregulation of Wall Street, and again, as they say, the rest is history.

Thus, it would behoove America (and the world) to ultimately phase out the practice of usury.  Set a binding cap on all interest rates and similar financial fees that are charged to individual borrowers (but crucially, no limit on the reverse, such as savings accounts and government bonds, as that would not really be usury), say 10%, and make it a "sinking lid" that gradually drops each year until it ultimately reaches zero.  Also, phase out the practice of fractional-reserve banking in favor of full-reserve banking, by gradually raising the reserve ratio each year until it reaches 100%. Make the FERAL Reserve truly FEDERAL instead.  Bring back the ancient practice of debt jubilees as well.  And of course, reverse the deregulation of Wall Street that has occurred since the 1970s.  And finally, make it so any newly-created money goes first to We the People before it even reaches the big banks at all.

Additionally, the global scam of poorer countries being forced to borrow at interest (usually in a foreign currency, which makes it that much worse for them) from the oligarchs in rich countries, trapped in perpetual debt and thus manipulated for their resources, also needs to end as well.  Yesterday, full stop. World Bank and IMF, we're looking at YOU.

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  The ever-insightful Jared A. Brock has an excellent article about the inherent unsustainability of usury (and rent-seeking in general) here as well.

Yet Another Study Confirms Lockdowns Did More Harm Than Good

We already know that lockdowns were the worst public health policy failure since, well, ever.  Or at least in the past couple of centuries or so.  The pro-lockdown narrative has been completely laid waste long ago, and can never be even remotely rehabilitated by even the most intellectually dishonest cranks and intellectual poseurs in the future.  History will NOT be kind to the lockdown zealots at all!

And just when you thought we have already seen the most unflattering studies of all, a new one comes along that makes lockdowns look even worse still.  This new study looked at differences in all-cause death rates among various pairs of neighboring US states in which one state imposed a mandatory stay-at-home order in the spring of 2020 and the other did not.  (For completeness, the authors also looked at lockdown states that did not share a border with non-lockdown states as well.)  In using all-cause mortality data, they sidestep the biggest possible source of bias, namely differences in how Covid deaths are counted, and also capture at least some of the collateral damage of lockdowns as well.  There were in fact a total of ten non-lockdown states, so that gives us plenty of comparisons for how lockdowns or lack thereof worked in practice in an American context.

After adjusting for a host of potential health and demographic confounders, the results were more likely to favor the non-lockdown states.  That is, on average, the lockdown states actually had higher death rates than the ten non-lockdown states.  Thus, one can firmly conclude that the lockdowns did more harm than good, effectively killing more people than they saved.  Read that again, let it sink in, and remember that deaths are just the tip of a very large iceberg of collateral damage.

Oh, and by the way, the authors found that this was true regardless of whether they restricted their analysis to 1) the first Covid wave only, 2) the lockdown period only, or 3) the entire period from March 2020 up to and including January 2022.

As William Farr (of Farr's Law fame) famously said, "the death rate is a fact, anything beyond this is an inference".  And the inferences we can draw from this study about these worse-than-useless policies are quite damning indeed.  The lockdown zealots really have blood on their hands, it seems, likely to the tune of 110,000 excess deaths according to this study.

And that's just for the lockdowns proper.  How about masks?  Well, there's that pesky Foegen Effect, impaired gas exchange, microplastic fibers, bacteria and mold growth, and of course the killing of our oceans when billions of them are disposed of.  Plus, they don't really work.  School closures?  Also more harm than good, at least in the long run.  Forced business closures?  Self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good (and also subsumed under lockdowns as well).  Forced restrictions of healthcare?  Again, also self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good.  "Flattening the curve" is literally nothing more than prolonging the worst of the pandemic, any way you slice it.  

And the jabs?  Well, those on balance also seem to be worse than useless as well for most people, and especially for kids.  Locking down and otherwise imposing restrictions while we waited for them to arrive was clearly NOT worth it at all.  And while we may never know exactly how many excess deaths were due to exactly which cause, be it the virus, the lockdowns and NPIs, or adverse reactions to the jabs, the latter are highly unlikely to be trivial either.

On that fateful day in March 2020, the hard-won wisdom of the ages, based on over a century of research, was summarily thrown out the window like so much garbage by people who really should have known better.  The official pandemic playbooks of several countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, among other countries, and even the WHO as recently as 2019, not only did NOT promote the use of mass quarantines, let alone full lockdowns, but actually advised against doing so.  And while such time-tested advice was mainly geared toward influenza pandemics, at least some of the national playbooks (especially for the UK) explicitly applied this same reasoning to a potential "SARS-like coronavirus" pandemic as well.  Thus, this can be considered a classic example of a Chesterton's Fence:  before you remove a fence, be sure you know why it was put up in the first place.  Second-order thinking was clearly NOT being done here at all, it seems.

And even that is being charitable, assuming that the lockdown zealots were simply good people who made bad decisions because they panicked, when clearly some if not most of them had less-than-lofty ulterior motives that later became readily apparent once the initial "fog of war" had largely lifted.

The biggest question now is, will future generations ever forgive us?  Because that will be a pretty tall order for them indeed, as the regrettable consequences of the past two and a half years will continue to reverberate for decades to come.  And those who pushed for these worse-than-useless policies, doubling down and refusing to listen to reason, have an indelible stain on their honor.

UPDATE:  See the latest analysis from the ever-insightful Joel Smalley here as well.  It seems that the jabs are also responsible for a good chunk of both Covid and non-Covid excess deaths as well, particularly among younger folks.  After all, jab deaths and virus deaths are not mutually exclusive, as negative efficacy and host compromising can represent a collision of both factors together.

Degrowth Is A Nonstarter And Won't Work. Here's What Will Instead

From ecological overshoot to all of its attendant crises, including climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and mass extinction, along with the current global energy crisis, the idea of "degrowth" (i.e. a deliberate and planned shrinking of the economy) may seem like an appealing alternative in some circles.  However, not only is it a political nonstarter, but the level of central planning and austerity required would ultimately do more harm than good, get us permanently stuck in a bad place, and we would still end up destroying the Earth in the end (albeit a bit more slowly, compared to business as usual).  It would "flatten the curve", of course, but really just drag it out and prolong the pain without solving the problem.  In other words, it would basically be like Covid lockdown, only permanently, though hopefully minus all of the antisocial distancing and ocean-killing masks.  And we saw what a disaster that was, with the Global South faring the very worst in terms of collateral damage.

And that's before we get into the sort of extremely high and confiscatory tax rates (on both income and wealth) that would be required on not only the rich, but also on the middle class and working class, and even the working poor of the Global North.  Which the oligarchs would so artfully dodge with ease of course, leaving the rest of us holding the bag.  Though to be fair, not all degrowthers necessarily agree with that idea, and many prefer Pigouvian taxes on pollution and resource depletion (most notably carbon taxes), and perhaps also taxing advertising revenue as well, instead of income and wealth.

Some excellent articles casting doubt on degrowth can be found here and here, truly food for thought indeed.

Of course, we clearly need to end our inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell (as Edward Abbey famously said) which ultimately kills its host.  We need an economy that is no longer dependent on growth and can still provide prosperity for all with or without growth.  We need to stop obsessing over the fundamentally flawed metric of GDP, which really ultimately stands for God Damn Profits nowadays.  Rent-seeking, usury, artificial scarcity, cronyism, speculation, and other forms of parasitism and economic manipulation from the top down are the ultimate reasons why our current economic system is so hooked on growth for the sake of growth.

As the futurist Walter Ignatius Baltzley noted back in 2015, the only way to end this system of cannibalism (sorry, "capitalism") is to give it the ONE thing that it absolutely cannot survive:  ABUNDANCE.  That's right, capitalism needs scarcity to function, which is why it has to create so much artificial scarcity nowadays to prop itself up.  Capitalism will thus fatally overdose on capital, in other words.  Abundance is of course the polar opposite of the sort of eco-austerity of degrowth.  With enough abundance, we can humanely euthanize this dreadfully toxic system for good, and easily transition to post-capitalism, and ultimately a post-growth and post-carbon economy. 

For example, Baltzley in another article applies this idea directly to Big Oil.  How do you win a tug-of-war against a much stronger opponent?  By simply letting go of the rope, and letting them fall on their butt.  Thus, as crazy as it sounds, get out of the way and simply give the fossil fuel fat cats what they say they want so much.  Yes, you read that right.  Let 'em "drill, baby, drill", and "frack, baby, frack"!  The government can even buy their oil (and natural gas) at a premium and then turn around and re-sell it at a loss.  The resulting massive surplus of cheap energy would flood the market, bringing down the cost of living in general, and by doing so....will also bring down the cost of renewable energy alternatives like wind and solar that will ultimately replace fossil fuels, while oil and natural gas become less profitable over time.  In the very short run, it would be quite a boon for Big Oil, but in the long run it would be giving them the very rope with which to hang themselves.  (Fortunately for us, Big Oil is extremely shortsighted.)

Yes, it's quite the Hail Mary pass indeed.  But when both Plan A and Plan B have been ruled out as impractical and/or politically impossible, and time is running out, that ultimately leaves us with Plan C.

So what are we waiting for?  Prime that pump, and prime it good!  Let Big Oil and the oligarchs enjoy their utterly foolish pride before the fall.  Remember, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Oh, by the way, wanna hear a joke?  Peak Oil.  That's the joke.  Yes, oil production will inevitably peak at some point.  Duh!  And hopefully demand will peak before supply does.  But we still have more than enough to deep-fry the planet many times over.

Quite frankly, the biggest supply constraint of all right now is NOT geology, but rather geopolitics, as Europe is currently learning the hard way with Russia weaponizing its natural gas against them. And the aforementioned plan would solve that as well.  Canada alone could supply more than enough (liquefied) natural gas to Europe to be free from Russian energy dominance, but they won't, because they never developed the export facilities to do so in time.  That leaves the USA to fill in the gap, of course.

UPDATE:  So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a steady-state economy of course.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, ten percent APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the financialization of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  Let's make it history.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.

FINAL THOUGHT:  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, our ultimate goals at least seems to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth as well.

See here as well.

The Ultimate Death Blow To The Already Collapsed Narrative

The "vaccine" narrative, along with the rest of the official Covid narrative, has collapsed faster than formerly healthy young athletes on the field after being jabbed with novel experimental gene therapies misnamed "vaccines".  But like a zombie, it just won't seem to fully die already...until this new study of the unjabbed, that is.  The effective control group for this massive experiment are the unjabbed, and this new international cohort study's results are finally in:

• Over 70% of the unjabbed cohort relied on natural remedies (largely vitamins and minerals, like C, D, zinc, and a bit of quercetin here and there) and/or off-label generic drugs (largely HCQ and IVM) against the virus.
• Only about 0.4% of them were ever hospitalized for Covid at all, either as inpatients OR outpatients.  So much for a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" gumming up hospitals, right?
• Most had faced some level of discrimination in society, and many were fired from their jobs, due to their unjabbed status, which was of course harmful to their mental health.
• Otherwise, they seemed to be healthy overall.
• There was practically no confounding from flu vaccines or any other vaccines, as only a tiny sliver of the cohort expressed any intent to receive any at the time of the study, especially for flu vaccines specifically.
• And the real kicker:  people who said that they never wore masks had the lowest incidence of suspected or confirmed Covid of all of the subgroups in the study.  Reread that again and let that sink in for a moment.

Thus, not only does the "vaccine" narrative get thoroughly laid waste by this study, the mask narrative does as well, a fortiori.  Two zombie lies were thus killed with one stone.

The Alliance for Natural Health put out an excellent commentary about this study as well.

No wonder the powers that be wanted to get rid of the control group before the truth finally came out.  The perceived benefits of the jabs are shrinking, while evidence of the risks keeps on mounting every day.

Oh, and as for the other major component of the official narrative, namely lockdowns, well, that has also been thoroughly laid waste as well.  The delusional beliefs of the lockdown zealots have been revealed time and again to be, well, delusional.