I was reading an article about how the derivatives market bubble is 1.144 quadrillion dollars, or $190,000 per person on the planet. One of the things this seems to say to me is that no bailout can ever work because the number is simply too high — the artificial systems that created these numbers have to be allowed to collapse. I understand that there will be some trickle down damage from cutting the parasitic upper class, the corporatocracy, the bankers, and the financial aristocracy down to size, but it’s far better than allowing them to continue their blood-sucking status quo.
We have an extreme abundance of resources and productivity on the planet — enough for everyone on Earth to live in reasonable luxury. The problem is that the system we have — the system that allows things like a derivatives bubble — exists to pool extreme wealth in small populations. Another way of putting that is that it’s a system designed to create poverty in large populations (since wealth can’t really be created, but only moved around, when you make one group rich, another becomes poor, duh). Which is pretty messed up since, like I just said, we have more than enough to go around.
I don’t really have a lot of sympathy for the people who’ve lost their “life savings” in these false wealth-creation schemes, be they based on the idea that housing values will go up indefinitely, or be they based on the idea that a stock market investment will pay out twenty or thirty percent or more yearly. The idea that wealth is created out of simply having money — the idea that money creates money, rather than work or product creating money — is an idea that serves only the artificial aristocracy that profits from it, and does nothing for society or the average person.
I repeat myself, but it’s just so messed up that in a historical period where we have so much productivity — energy, food, resources, toys, everything — per person, that we can even consider the idea that we have to worry about “recession” or “global depression”. Argh!
Other than that, Nefarious and I went on a giant bike ride (the first of the year), circling High Park — about three and a half kilometers of hilly paths — and then after we got home, went for a long walk into High Park Village to go to the bookstore. I picked up The Book of Three for us to read, but instead of starting that we ended up reading classic ghost and scary stories.
Nonetheless, she does not seem particularly worried about saying “Bloody Mary” into the mirror three times — “It’s just a story, daddy!” I think I’m probably more irrationally scared to do it than she is. In any case, she got so much exercise today that I’m sure she’ll sleep through any nightmares.
