(Nearly) Impossible Challenge of Creating a Sustainable Economy

Dave Pollard is a brilliant KnowledgeManagement expert as well as philosopher and environmentalist. I have linked to some of his posts before, and will probably continue to do so for some time to come. He wrote another incredibly insightful and important to read article about how the American (and International) economy is a scam that is on the brink of collapse.

From his website How to Save the World: The (Nearly) Impossible Challenge of Creating a Sustainable Economy (Part One)

There is something happening here, and it's been going on for a long time, driven by greed, political expediency, and a sustained and sophisticated campaign of misinformation about how a healthy economy is created and measured. It is quickly coming unglued, and the consequences of this deception are going to wreak havoc on us all for decades. It is possibly the greatest fraud and theft in the history of civilization. Here's how it works:

1. The government has to lie about the real increase in the cost of living, and the real levels of unemployment and misery among its citizens. This is in its interest, since admitting bad economic news is hazardous to politicians' health.
2. The government then has to artificially suppress interest rates, so that they, and corporations, can borrow money virtually free. As a consequence, since borrowing has no cost, there is no need to repay it; it can be refinanced indefinitely, and left for future generations to worry about. 
3. To keep money supply high enough that it is freely available to all borrowers, the government needs to print masses of new money. To conceal this, it needs to stop reporting the true money supply, as the US government has done.
4. To lock in foreign suppliers of cheap goods and services in struggling nations, the affluent nations need to develop co-dependent relationships with these countries, such that they are forced to accept payment in an essentially worthless currency.
5. To lock in citizens, the government and large corporations need to work together to enable the large corporations to generate staggering profits, increasing by double-digits every year. So-called 'free' trade agreements, massive subsidies and tax breaks, the continued availability of essentially free money, deregulation, liability indemnification, allowing price-fixing oligopolies, union-busting and massive offshoring etc. all allow this. As a result, stock markets soar, and citizens (unable to obtain any return on risk-free investments while the real cost of living is rising by 7% or more per year) are forced to pump all their investments into these stocks, including their pensions.

Click here to read the rest of Part 1.

And click here to read Part 2, equally intriguing.

This kind of stuff makes me think very hard about what the next steps for a recent graduate should be...