America's wealthy aren't going to be loaning 2.8 trillion dollars to the US treasury, so it doesn't really matter what they have. And 2.8 trillion dollars is an enormous amount of money by any standard.
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They are not just the "wealthy." They are far, far more than that. A few dozen people run the show, and not one of them is a politician. If the politicians were in charge, this would have been done a couple years ago when the democrats controlled the house and the senate.
GratefulFan · Member since
Sir GH wrote:
They are not just the "wealthy." They are far, far more than that. A few dozen people run the show, and not one of them is a politician. If the politicians were in charge, this would have been done a couple years ago when the democrats controlled the house and the senate. ==========================
Okay then, the shadowy puppeteers in the dark underbelly of American power aren't going to be lending the US Treasury 2.8 trillion dollars. My point about made up money and the threat of inflationary pressures remains the same.
And there are infinitely more pedestrian reasons that things didn't get done through the end of 2010, not least the consuming focus on health care.
The Real Wizard · Member since
GratefulFan wrote:
"Okay then, the shadowy puppeteers in the dark underbelly of American power aren't going to be lending the US Treasury 2.8 trillion dollars."
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These people *are* the treasury. They generate most of the wealth, so they call the shots on where the money is spent.
For thousands of years, money has been power. In this case, the US government is in trillions of dollars of debt, and the wall street criminals and big businessmen are all multi-billionaires. Who really has the power here?
thomasquinn 32989 · Member since
More accurately, property is power. The financial top brass know, as well as most intelligent people, that most money is entirely fictional and irrelevant - money only matters when used in certain ways, as far as power is concerned. Property in the right places is much more important than the amount of property.
catqueen · Member since
Sir GH wrote:
These people *are* the treasury. They generate most of the wealth, so they call the shots on where the money is spent.
For thousands of years, money has been power. In this case, the US government is in trillions of dollars of debt, and the wall street criminals and big businessmen are all multi-billionaires. Who really has the power here?
Isn't this the case in most of the world though?
magicalfreddiemercury · Member since
Wouldn't it be nice if we could balance all this talk about the billions or trillions countries owe with ideas on how to provide FOOD to people who are, at this moment, starving to death?
It just strikes me as surreal that everyone (I don't mean here in this thread) is weeping over stock market numbers while babies, swollen with malnutrition, have become little more than topics for 'in other news' spots on cable and standard TV.
GratefulFan · Member since
Because the land in the affected areas of Africa simply cannot support the people on it in it's current state, outside help is needed. That help does largely mean money in practical terms, and when countries and people are thrown into fear and situations where resources are disappearing in front of their eyes the purse strings are certainly at risk of being drawn tighter out of necessity, not just indifference or greed. As such, I don't know that you can separate the two issues completely really. The stock market is not just the temperature of the excess holdings of the rich, it is a major indicator of the fundamental health of the perceived future which directly or indirectly affects almost everybody. Poor performance affects the confidence of large and small business, which impacts hiring, which impacts everything. Regular working people looking towards retirement who have holdings in mututal funds either personally or through group pensions are thrown into uncertainty. Even people who are inspired to step off the Western treadmill and simplify their lives by situations like the heartbreaking one in Africa are cogs in the wheel that deepen recessions because they reduce consumption and focus on shedding debt. Nations in so much financial trouble themselves do have to be pragmatic with scarce money and watchful that poverty doesn't deepen dramatically in their own back yard. Economic downturns are a vicious cycle with implications that ripple far and wide, even as far as Africa.
The political situation and the obstruction of foreign aid there is another hurdle. At the bottom of it all is the fatefulness of the fundamental inequity between those of us that have enough and those that don't that is so difficult to process when there is so much suffering that surely must be unnecessary.
GratefulFan · Member since
Sir GH wrote:
These people *are* the treasury. They generate most of the wealth, so they call the shots on where the money is spent.
For thousands of years, money has been power. In this case, the US government is in trillions of dollars of debt, and the wall street criminals and big businessmen are all multi-billionaires. Who really has the power here? =========================
Last week, there was no money to be spent, so no shots to call. Did you miss that part? Are we even still talking about the same thing?
magicalfreddiemercury · Member since
[QUOTE] GratefulFan wrote: Because the land in the affected areas of Africa simply cannot support the people on it in it's current state, outside help is needed. That help does largely mean money in practical terms, and when countries and people are thrown into fear and situations where resources are disappearing in front of their eyes the purse strings are certainly at risk of being drawn tighter out of necessity, not just indifference or greed. As such, I don't know that you can separate the two issues completely really. The stock market is not just the temperature of the excess holdings of the rich, it is a major indicator of the fundamental health of the perceived future which directly or indirectly affects almost everybody. Poor performance affects the confidence of large and small business, which impacts hiring, which impacts everything. Regular working people looking towards retirement who have holdings in mututal funds either personally or through group pensions are thrown into uncertainty. Even people who are inspired to step off the Western treadmill and simplify their lives by situations like the heartbreaking one in Africa are cogs in the wheel that deepen recessions because they reduce consumption and focus on shedding debt. Nations in so much financial trouble themselves do have to be pragmatic with scarce money and watchful that poverty doesn't deepen dramatically in their own back yard. Economic downturns are a vicious cycle with implications that ripple far and wide, even as far as Africa.
The political situation and the obstruction of foreign aid there is another hurdle. At the bottom of it all is the fatefulness of the fundamental inequity between those of us that have enough and those that don't that is so difficult to process when there is so much suffering that surely must be unnecessary. [/QUOTE] ========================
You just gave me a beautiful lesson in common sense. :-) That was brilliantly written.
I do wonder, however, if the news concentrated as much on the famine as it did on the markets, whether the markets would have continued to tumble. Much of what happened the other day - with the 600+ point loss - I think was panic selling. If people had been preoccupied with other issues, they might not have had that knee-jerk 'sell' reaction and the market could have held steady. No? Maybe I'm just oversimplifying it because I'm still thinking with emotion rather than logic. I just feel the media helps control the path our minds take and they could be doing much more to raise awareness of what's happening to others rather than concentrate on what's happening to "me".
YourValentine · Member since
The losses at the stock markets had no basis in reality. In Frankfurt, for example, very healthy stocks with huge profits lost 5% for no other reason than paranoia: now that America is AA, they must pay higher interest rates for their debts, they will buy less imports, German companies will sell less, profits will go down - let us sell our shares in panic - just ridiculous.
It is true that many pensions worldwide depend on the stock markets which is a bad thing imo. Pensions should be paid by social insurance: those who work pay their share and those who are too old to work get their pension from the social insurance they paid their share into during their work life. This model has always worked and private profit hunters have no say in the system. Of course we need enough jobs to sustain the system.
People in Africa do not need to starve to death because of the recession in the Western world. Actually, it does not need that much money to feed the starving people in Africa: certainly less than the war in Afghanistan and probably even less than the bombing in Libya. It is all a matter of priorities. As to the donation by private citizens: in my experience it is always the poorer part of the private citizens who keep donating although they do not have that much themselves while the richer people often do not want to donate the equal of their kid's phone bill.
