Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/3L8OzfB6r1VbOfeAeinnSw
Podbean: https://revolutionnow.podbean.com/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revolution-now/id1530637420

Episode Summary:
In episode six of Revolution Now!, Peter Joseph critiques Wall Street and financialization, arguing that these systems detract from true economic value and foster instability. He discusses historical examples like slave bonds and modern practices such as “dead peasants insurance,” illustrating the moral decay driven by profit. Joseph delves into wage slavery, highlighting how debt and the labor-for-income system create modern servitude, and critiques libertarian ideals as incompatible with capitalism’s structural coercion.

He also addresses the influence of money in politics, arguing that corporate interests dominate legislation and discussing how neoliberalism exacerbates global inequalities. Warning about the rise of authoritarianism, particularly under Donald Trump, he emphasizes the broader systemic failures behind this political trend.

Finally, Joseph critiques Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), acknowledging its insight into the absurdities of fiat money creation but expressing doubt about its feasibility for systemic reform, advocating instead for its use to dismantle the current financial system.

Transcript:
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. Welcome to episode number six, October 13th, 2020. My name is Peter Joseph, and this is Revolution Now!

What I’d like to do today is pick up on the subject of the financial system from the prior podcast, where we delved into the nature of the stock market and Wall Street, hopefully making clear that the institution of Wall Street, the system of proxy financial trading, and all the peripheral institutions that support it, such as investment banks, not only do nothing to help society, they actually detract from true economic value, while ensuring inevitable economic instability. And this is all the result of what’s called financialization, as again was covered in the prior podcast, which is natural to this evolution of markets, as social conditions. And technology has changed, going from tangible economic creation for income, such as building tables and making shoes, to intangible products or instruments such as these proxy ideas of stocks, bonds, futures, and so on traded for profit and profit alone in what is a little more than a gambling game, huge gambling game that has outrageous influence on the world.

In fact, as an aside, I was just looking at some notes this morning regarding the depth and darkness of this reality. Believe it or not, America’s very first bond market centuries ago was backed by African slaves. Also note that after most of the world abolished slavery, except the United States, much of Europe still traded in slave bonds and other related instruments, financialization of slaves. So again, while Europe abolished slavery itself, which seems like a great moral decision, they still had no problem investing in profiting off of instruments, financial instruments related to abject slavery in America.

Another note, similarly, is something I’ve talked about before, is how corporations today can take out life insurance policies against their own employees and get a reward when their employees die, even if their employees are fired. This has been termed dead peasants insurance. And if you haven’t heard that term, check it out. It’s just another example of the sickness of financialization.

So the point here, ultimately, is that financialization and the interest to simply make money out of money through abstract instruments, really pushes moral and ethical sensibilities over the line, into an abstract game that has no loyalty to anything real. It’s just the widget come alive, and it is foundationally dangerous.

So all that understood, Wall Street is still an institution, not a structure. And when you step way back, and you take into account the whole of the financial system, specifically the money creation process, the monetary system itself, what you see plain as day is a deeply entrenched system of class oppression, as quoted in my new film, InterReflections, which came out last Tuesday… Which by the way, is why I didn’t have a podcast last week… One of my characters, speaking from the future, notes that it wasn’t the complete abolition of debt that human slavery finally ended on this planet.

Today, there are more slaves by UN definition than any time in human history, in absolute numbers. Bonded laborers. And that stat doesn’t include the fundamental argument of wage slavery through the ubiquitous imposition of external debt, in order to coerce people into a state of servitude, as I’m going to talk about in a moment. Believe it or not, wage slavery is not a pejorative. It’s not a Marxist term that someone came up with. It’s an historical debated notion that goes back over 100 years, seeing the obvious coercion, the structural imposition of forcing everyone to have a job in servitude to each other, in order to simply put food on the table. I do suggest a book by Larry Glickman called A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society.

And he talks about this history. He states, “The Civil War eliminated chattel slavery, but use of the wage slavery metaphor continued unabated. References abound in the labor press, and it’s hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase. For several decades, following the Civil War, as the trend toward wage labor progressed, working class organizations endeavored to strike down the whole system of wages for labor through strikes, worker owned cooperatives, and political parties. As long as men work under the wage system, there will be slavery, declared John Swinton’s paper in 1884.”

And at the end of the day, it’s not a metaphor at all. And it doesn’t stop at the wage worker level specifically because obviously, today you have a whole different environment. Not everyone works for a “wage” in the literal sense. It’s the entire labor system for income structure that is coercive, whether you have one slave master, so to speak, or 10,000 masters to choose from, you’re still a slave. Just because you choose which corporation or institution to submit yourself does not make you any less of a coercive participant, in principle, than abject slaves years ago.

I know that sounds like a controversial statement, but it happens to be true in principle. It comes down to choice and coercion. Today, no one has a choice but to submit to the economic structure, unless they want to move to the forest and live illegally on state land, eating grubs, or of course, under a bridge somewhere in these lovely “curbside communities”, as pundits like to call them, to which there are 75,000 homeless alone here in Los Angeles.

There’s a libertarian idea that’s very popular, some may be familiar with, called the non-aggression principle. This is the idea that it’s morally inappropriate to have any kind of forceful interference. It is unethical, and hence people’s decisions should be by their own volition and free. Sounds simple and workable, right? Makes sense. And in the reductionist world of the libertarian mind, it does seem philosophically valid, when it comes to interpersonal situations, but that’s all. In fact, not only is this very notion incompatible with the way our bio-psycho-social nature is, when it comes to the freewill debate, but more importantly, it can not be held up as viable when you’re faced with a structural condition that creates scarcity artificially, forcing everyone to compete with each other for survival, through submission to each other, through labor.

The fact is we all need to breathe the air and drink water. Yes, that is a fundamental coercion of our need to exist, due to our biology. However, the capitalist structural condition is not inevitable. It does not need to exist. It is a man-made institution that we can actually change. So to say that the labor for income structure is free is like saying that people running around in the Hunger Games, fighting to the death as prescribed by the structure of the game they’re in; they’re free to make their own decisions in that structure. Yes. Free within the structure of coercion, they find themselves. And it’s on this structuralist level of observation that you completely debunk the entire moral philosophy of libertarianism, at least when it comes to economic theory.

So coming back to my main point, the greatest structural oppression, the systemic source of the mechanisms of class war, is grounded in the very nature of the monetary system, the financial system. The financial system itself, at its most root level, is a class war mechanism that continually oppresses those of the least means, keeping the masses in a state of deficiency through debt at all times. Debt is the key factor in the modern slave-based society.

However, before we jumped into all that, I want to speak my conscience a little bit about the upcoming Presidential election in the US, an election, from my analysis, has strong ramifications for not only the future of the US, but the world itself. Those who have followed my work over the years understand that I have little confidence in representative democracy or electoral democracy. I believe representative democracy isn’t really democracy at all. The idea of using the majority vote to install a person for a term in this so-called capacity that’s supposed to represent people, the constituency, has very deep limitations in and of itself.

First, once in power, people are allowed to complete their terms, regardless of what they’ve done or not done, unless some illegal activity occurs. There’s no active public communication or even channels, if you look closely. There’s no avenue for a public constituency to suggest true policy to their political candidates. Just look. Yeah, there are NGOs and things like this with traditional information lobbying, but these are more special interests than actual public will. People say you should write your congressperson to communicate, as if that’s efficient for millions of people.

Second, the entire system is based on partisan group loyalty. First and foremost, partisan group loyalty, which dominates all decisions like a filter. In the United States and most nations of the world, you see very strict party line votes consistently, proving that it’s less about public good and more about power dynamics. This group identity relationship is really far more dangerous than people realize. I call it “democracy by proxy” because all decisions are filtered through the group loyalty identity, not reason and logic or appropriateness. It has to be loyal to the platforms of these groups.

And third and most critically here is the political system is set in motion and ultimately funded by commercial lobbyists that represent corporate and special interests. This is needless to say, but people really forget the driving force here as to why nothing changes. Long story short, we see the limitations of government as really an extension of the business power mentality. This is the fundamental problem, but rather than recognize the interference of business with this so-called democracy, people have developed an ethic where they simply see state power as ultimately corrupt with no nuance, completely taken in by the Reagan/Thatcher era reality, dismissing the entire idea of government or management itself, in some cases, as a lot of libertarians will argue, as insane as that is, when you really think about what systems science means.

As I’ve always stated in regard to so-called political corruption, which I don’t see as a corruption at all, this is simply the free market at work. We live in a society where the fundamental action and hence ethic is competitive market trade and ownership. The method of business is the foundation of how our society moves, unfortunately, today. And to think that legislation or even Congress, people themselves, cannot be effectively purchased exactly like a loaf of bread is grave moral naivety.

The narrative of course, is that politicians being bribed, taking money from special interest, is unethical. And hence, there’s no need to question the incentives of the structure of our economy and the social system because it’s always just a bunch of bad apples. Get money out of politics, everyone says now- get big money out of politics, as if that somehow makes it different. Which, of course, is just a vain slogan in the end. Today, lobbyists literally write laws that Congress puts forward. Corporate lobbyists are not on the periphery, in the traditional sense of that term, the “lobby”, they are fully entrenched inside the political machine; fully entrenched in decision-making processes for the general public.

And while I certainly agree that we have to have campaign finance reforms and lobbying reforms to try and limit this monetary influence, really such moves go against the grain of the entire condition, the entire sociological condition, what our social system actually is. Money is what moves everything in our society, so why is it that we can’t let politicians and legislation be bought as well? If we can’t buy legislation and politicians, it’s utterly antithetical to core market principles. If anyone’s ever listened to or read the testimony of famous American lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, his candidness on the subject shows the depth of the sickness.

What I like most about what he has to say is how, since he had virtually owned Congress at one point, he had a third of the total congressional body in his back pocket, in his own words, he goes on to talk about how it’s rationalized, which is very important. Everyone’s rationalizing this, as if it’s in the best interest of the country. How the corporations rationalize hiring lobbyists for their own bottom line, of course being self-preserving, which of course is natural because corporations are responsible to shareholders, and everyone has to make money to keep their jobs. He then talks about the rationalization of himself and how he went about seeing this as a good thing and not criminal. And then of course, the rationalization of those very politicians, who almost universally feel they’ve done nothing wrong, as they take literal bribes, even though they don’t think them that way, and then insert policies into bills on behalf of special interest and companies.

Today, more than half the members of the United States Congress are millionaires. It has been estimated that the number of working lobbyists in the US is around 100,000 and that lobbying brings in $9 billion annually. This infamous revolving door between big business and politics is really an everyday characteristic future. It’s now standard operating procedure for political figures to come from business origins, only to eventually leave office and either return to those prior vested interests, or then become lobbyists themselves. As Thomas B. Edsall, researching for the New York Times once wrote, “When Washington politicians leave office, many if not most, no longer return home. Instead, they head straight to the lucrative world of K Street, the nation’s lobbying corridor, which runs through the heart of Washington. A former member of the House or Senate with even modest seniority can now expect to walk into a job paying up to a million dollars or more a year, and much more when bonuses are paid for bringing in new clients.”

Hence it’s no surprise that in a detailed study in 2014 conducted by Professors Martin Gilens at Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, they concluded, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” The researchers concluded that lawmakers’ policy actions tend to support the interests of the wealthy, Wall Street, and big corporations. No surprise.

And then we have the broader concept of neo-liberalism something people speak about a lot today. Yet they tend to speak of it as if it’s somehow an addition or a policy, and it’s not native to the social system- the global socio-economic system. All neo-liberalism is are free market principles applied to globalization. The pursuit of global capital is never ending in this ethic of economic growth and corporate expansion. And the last thing capitalism wants is a nation that has closed off its resources or labor pools from others to exploit.

So forget state programs, privatize everything. Don’t let any industry be nationalized. Let markets decide the future of civilization through trade agreements, not government. And as a nuanced aside, please understand that the free market theory, as expanded to the neoliberal ideology, has its inherent contradictions, that people, again, become confused about. It is a natural function of this kind of economy, the capitalist economy, to create power consolidation. And when you create power consolidation, you are able to move against the very free market premises that enabled that power consolidation. I hope that makes sense, whether it’s monopoly and cartel in the commercial arena specifically, or it is the collusion of banks and corporations directly with government to organize trade deals for their own sector or industry’s benefit.

In other words, what I’m trying to say is that all market-based societies gravitate towards competitive power consolidation, which ultimately leads to that illusion that the state presents the problem, not the market, as per libertarian assumption. It’s actually the other way around. You can’t separate the system as a whole, whether it’s domestic free market concepts versus international neoliberal applications, it’s all the same systemic output.

Similarly, it’s incredibly important to look at neo-liberalism as a national geopolitical strategy of manipulation. Countries that move against the free market ethic are routinely deemed to totalitarian or dictatorial or committing human rights violations, and so on. Sanctions are imposed. The long history of coups and overthrows in Latin America, for example, as numerous democratically elected leaders tried to nationalize their industries in the internal belief and benefit of their country were killed or removed.

To me, the most unfortunate of this was Salvador Allende in Chile, and he was on the edge of building an actual cybernetic system to manage their economy, completely unprecedented, organized by a genius systems theorist named Stafford Beer. And the coup happened, the whole thing was shut down. I always wonder what would have happened if this small country was allowed to conduct this economic experiment, but it was shut down. And you can look it up, as well. It was called Project Cybersyn.

Anyway, all of this is to set the stage for how we’ve arrived at this incredibly disenfranchised and alienated citizenry, not only in the United States, but across the world, particularly the Western world, where the level of apathy and anger has really turned things on its head. So you have this global economic machine for half a century enriching the few at the expense of many, something that should be readily apparent to everyone right now, as the billionaires keep making trillions in total, as the lower-class remains stifled during COVID-19. And naturally, people are upset and have been upset for a long time.

So by the time we get to the 2016 US election, the disgust was very ripe, as a substantial number of people simply rejected establishment candidates. Bernie Sanders arises in the US as an independent, and he gets screwed over by the DNC. No question that the Democratic primaries were rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favor. And so the progressive community threw their hands up in the air once again and withdrew. Large swaths of people that were for Bernie Sanders, in desperation now turned to anything against the neo-liberal establishment ticket. And so a multi bankrupted so-called billionaire named Donald Trump rides down an escalator and announces his run for the Presidency. He had admitted in prior interviews that he would only run for President if he was broke. Yes,, he actually said that. And in this marketing campaign to compensate for the half a billion dollars of personal debt he is in, he used his reality TV show experience to mold what has become the Trump show. And what does the Democratic establishment do? They prop Trump up. The Clinton campaign spent millions pushing Trump to the forefront, thinking it was a good strategy. And of course, it all backfires, and Trump actually wins the electoral college.

Now, what has he done since his election? Why should we judge this man? Well, aside from clear and obvious interests to perfect his brand and to continue to make deals behind the scenes, as the President of the United States, to enrich himself, he has also pathologically worked against anything the Obama era administration put forward and got passed. However, way beyond that, he has forged such a dark narrative about himself and the battles against his enemies, that we have evolved a far more dangerous Trump than he was when he first took power. He is actively and brazenly embraced one tyrannical plight after another, molding a strong man cult of personality image for himself, where today a vast number of people in the United States blindly follow his words without any question. He has done virtually everything prior historical authoritarian minds have done, in terms of their showmanship, in an effort to alienate population in their favor, from calling everything fake news, to promoting social class and racial division.

He is by far the most culturally destabilizing President in history. He pedals special interests for the working class, yet all of his tax cuts favor the wealthy by a long shot. And he is clearly in the same conservative camp that wants to eviscerate social programs in the name of anti socialism, removing things like social security and beyond, coupled with a complete and utter disregard of any science related to our ecology. At least the Democrats give lip service and have proposals on the books to help the growing ecological crisis unfolding every day, right now. Republicans, and by extension Donald Trump, have zero.

And the point I’m trying to make here, as upsetting as it is, is that we are faced with an unprecedented vote for the lesser evil circumstance. It’s not worth the risk to keep such an unstable man in power, and making things worse in society, sadistically, is not going to help future activism, I’m sorry to say.

So to summarize this, you have a guy in a position of great desperation. People are coming against him rapidly from the southern district of New York because of tax and other forms of fraud. He is half a billion dollars in debt, which is going to come due, unless he can hide behind the Presidency. He knows what he needs to do, which is why he stifles the post office, creating outrageous narratives about voter fraud, and so on and so on and so on. He’s a desperate and malignant narcissist, backed into a corner, and there’s nothing more dangerous.

And finally, and I’m going to leave it at this because I really hate talking about this subject, is you’re dealing with a global rise of authoritarianism due to the tenuousness of our social condition at this time. You are seeing people gravitate in the same way they have in prior dictatorship circumstances, whether it’s Mussolini or Hitler or beyond. People become fearful, their economy is in shambles, they’re afraid. For some reason, there’s a gravitation towards the strong armed cult of personality leader, the paternal figure. And it’s not just an American phenomenon right now, it’s happening across the world. The cancer exists in our global social system, and the cancer continues. And every now and again, you get a tumor of such vast strength that it has to be taken down immediately, surgically, in order to allow for more progress to be made against the cancer itself.

Now, as of now, the polls seem to indicate that Trump has already sealed his own demise in the election. However, if he doesn’t win by a landslide, definitively, he will fight it. He will use his constant rhetoric about illegal voting through the postal system, a system he has clearly tried to engineer to help suppress the vote against him, and he will take it to the Supreme Court with his newly stacked judges, and he possibly will win. And mark my words, if he succeeds at that, we are in a lot of trouble.

Now, moving on. In my outline here regarding the financial system, I realized as I was doing this podcast, that I have an entire section talking about the same thing in the most simplified terms, at least I think they’re most simplified, in my new film InterReflections. So I’m going to play a multi minute section of this piece, and hopefully it’ll break things up with the monotony of my droning voice as well. This piece will describe the inherent flaw of the financial system, based on debt with interest charged, coupled with the fundamental fact that markets lead towards disequilibrium in favor of consolidation of power and more wealth in a positive feedback loop.

They described this, using examples of an island civilization. And also note, they are talking from the future about 120 years from now, looking at present day in hindsight.

Speaker 2:
So I’d like to go back to the subject of inequality, but this time to understand the mechanics of the oppression, how the hierarchy was kept in place.

Speaker 3:
Okay, let’s start with money. Money was the infrastructure of the market economy, and how it was created and moved around was instrumental to lower class oppression.

Speaker 4:
So you had these things called banks and they had the ungodly power to make abstract value out of nothing. If a person needed money for a home or car or business, they went to their local bank and applied for a loan. And if approved, the person signed a contract, binding them to return that loan money at a future date. Though, it’s not really a loan in the sense of somebody lending out what they already owned. Contrary to what most assumed, banks didn’t loan out money they actually had. They instead created new money in the form of credit backed by debt.

Speaker 4:
So on one side, money represented a store of value people could spend, while on the other, it was a liability made out of debt. In other words, for every dollar that existed, there was also a debt of a dollar owed to some bank, somewhere. That was how money was brought into existence. And when someone repaid the loan debt, the money then disappeared.

Speaker 3:
That understood, any kind of service in that economy sought a profit. And in the case of a loan, that came in the form of a fee called interest. So the borrower not only had to eventually repay the loan, but also the interest charged as well.

Speaker 5:
Imagine an island of 100 people. They decided to organize themselves through market economy. They plop a bank down, and each of them take a loan for 100 credits of money at 10% interest. So they all now have 10,000 credits total in their money supply. And they begin to work and exchange, creating economic activity. When the time comes to pay back the loan, they realize they owe not only the 100 credits, but the 10% interest, so 110 credits. Same for the whole society. In total, everyone on the island now owes the bank 11,000 credits, but yet only 10,000 actually exists in the money supply. There is now more debt owed than money in existence, due to the interest charged.

Speaker 3:
So three things can happen. One, those short can take on more loans to temporarily cover the old ones, postponing the problem. Two, people could ramp up competitive trade, increasing economic activity, to try to get enough from others to cover the debt, displacing the debt responsibility, like a game of musical chairs. Or three, the bank comes in and takes real property to compensate for the outstanding debt, which is inevitably what happens somewhere down the line, anyway.

Speaker 2:
Wait, that can’t be right. That would just be system of organized theft.

Speaker 3:
Yes. Banks were vehicles of creation on one side and a system of organized theft and class oppression on the other. But in a large complex global society, one based on economic growth, money moves so rapidly, it was very hard for the mechanics of this to be recognized, obscured by things like the boom and bust cycle, monetary expansion and contraction.

Speaker 2:
Please continue.

Speaker 3:
Back to our island again. But this time for the sake of simplicity, let’s remove the interest fee from the equation and focus only on the outcomes of competitive trade itself.

Speaker 5:
So the 10,000 credits of money has been moving around through trade, labor, investment, starting businesses, hiring employees. And as is inevitable to the game, some businesses will outperform, winning disproportion income, while others will fall behind, losing income. And naturally, those with more money can then increase their gaming advantage, becoming ever more competitive, and of course, more prone to keep winning.

Speaker 4:
As the old adage went, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. A small business with limited means simply can’t compete with a larger one that can outperform them in the same service, due to having more resources to work with.

Speaker 3:
So on our island, we see an inevitable point in time where say 10% of that population managed to acquire 90% of the island’s wealth, while the other 90% of the population now has only 10%. by the way, this isn’t some arbitrary assumption. This can be modeled mathematically. The dynamics of mass competitive trade in any society always moves toward disequilibrium.

Speaker 3:
So back to my point, when he put this together, a displaced debt burden and the application of interest, you can begin to see the insidiousness. An economic process based upon competitive advantage and trade that inevitably consolidates wealth, increasing that advantage, coupled with a financial system that is charging interest on loans that can never be fully repaid.

Speaker 4:
So it’s no surprise that in the early 21st century, the global economy had about 200 trillion in debt and only 80 trillion in outstanding currency. While in the United States, then considered the richest nation on the planet, half of the population had less than $1000 in savings, while also spending more each year than they actually earned, just trying to keep up.

Speaker 3:
While on the global level, nearly 50% of the population lived in poverty, on less than $5.50 a day, as roughly 30 individuals, yes, 30, owned more wealth than the bottom half, 3.6 billion.

Speaker 5:
Now there are plenty of other intermittent things that contribute to this disparity. Offshore tax savings for the rich, the mythology of trickle down economics, where government favors business over the public’s wellbeing, gaming strategies to restrict the power of unions and keep wages low, various shenanigans related to this thing called the stock market. But the financial system and its use of debt is really the foundation of it all.

Speaker 2:
Wow. You would expect riots in the street if people really understood that.

Speaker 3:
Well, there eventually were, but again, at the time, people just couldn’t see it. But no, it wasn’t until the complete abolition of debt on all levels that human slavery finally ended on this planet.

Peter Joseph:
Now, I think that’s a pretty decent description of those two phenomena that keep the lower class low, while also not having to go into too much detail about things like the fractional reserve lending system and the roles of the central banks and commercial banks in specific detail, in terms of how they’re networked and how it works.

I think I would bore everyone to tears if I went down the math of all of this, so I’m not going to do that. I’m going to recommend people just look at the section of my book on the issue or research it on your own. The bottom line is that all money is made out of debt, and money is fundamentally fake, and there’s no association to anything that relates to the natural resources of this planet and so on.

And this leads me to the final subject I want to touch upon in this podcast, which is the subject of MMT or modern monetary theory. MMT today is largely associated with a man named Warren Mosler, who wrote a paper called Soft Currency Economics. He’s written many other things since, but this is his most notable publication, as far as I’m concerned, highly referenced by proponents of MMT. I think the confusion found with my prior criticisms of MMT is that people think I’m attacking the perception or the interpretation. Truth is, I see logical validity to just about everything the observation makes in the theory. The idea that the federal debt is actually an interest rate maintenance account makes perfect sense. The idea that taxation exists less to fund the government and more to reduce inflation also makes sense.

Long ago, I put forward an argument regarding the federal reserve and how the federal income tax, which was passed right after the installation of the federal reserve bank in 1913, was put in motion to ensure that the interest payments were made to the central bank. This is not definitively explained anywhere in the literature, but it makes perfect sense. The central bank came into power, they wanted to make sure their interest was being paid, and hence comes the federal income tax.

Beyond that, it is clear that the money monopoly promotes an illusion that we’re supposed to be bound by a domestic sense of debt, as opposed to the reality that large governments like the US can pretty much make as much money as they care to, completely voiding the argument of scarcity and how we can’t afford this and that. That is one of the great revelations, even though it’s been completely obvious, MMT aside.

So I get all of that. It’s a reversal of dynamics, and it turns the intuition of the fiat system on its head for most people. My argument has not to do with the validity of the theory, but rather what we’re supposed to do with it. How does this information help create solutions? All it really does is expose the inherent absurdity and contradictions of the fiat money creation system. And proponents of this, in the activist context, show a wide range of abstract policy shift suggestions, almost universally saying that we should reorganize in a way where we can have constant deficit spending and not worry about it in the first world nations, not all nations can do this, and solve problems directly by running the digital printing presses and other adjustments to compensate for this new change.

And all I can say to that is good luck. If you can create something that makes it into positions of power in Congress or whatever nation you’re in, and you can get them to revise their entire legacy of spending and the relationships their in, I will be very impressed if any policy could be instituted based around this.

In summation, MMT is a great exposure of how idiotic our financial system is, and it should be used as a tool to tear the system down, not reorganize the seats on the Titanic.

And I think that’s all for now. I really appreciate everybody listening. Please check out InterReflections. There’s a subreddit for the show. Revolutionnow.live is the website, and I will talk to you all next week. Thank you.