Like this is a genuine question for me. There seems to be some lack of awareness on the part of the people who make decisions that a consumers need to have money to consume with or the whole system siezes like an engine with no grease. The plebes need to be given back some share of profits so they can continue to purchase stuff and keep the whole system from breaking down.
Wanna know my conspiracy theory? They know the doom is coming soon. They just need the illusion of stability for a few more quarters before the veil fully falls and everyone finds out how fucked it is.
They are intentionally destroying everything because they think they can use their hoards to transition into the technocrat feudalism their policies brought about. They're cashing out so they can buy in after the system crash. Jokes on them there is no future if they get their way. Socialism or barbarism, no more margins like liberalism can exist. No more social democracy- the era of the great excess is over. We are not living in pre-apocalyptic times. The veil has already begun to fall.
Remember forever that apocalypse does not mean "the end of the world." It means "to reveal that which was previously concealed." The implication of course that it was already here. Long ago. But now we can see it for what it is.
Remember forever that apocalypse does not mean “the end of the world.” It means “to reveal that which was previously concealed.” The implication of course that it was already here. Long ago. But now we can see it for what it is.
:tumbling-down:
Now time to bring up apocalypse bingo that that includes the Rivera drying up and a third of the green things burning.
Remember forever that apocalypse does not mean “the end of the world.” It means “to reveal that which was previously concealed.”
That's a great point.
late 14c., "revelation, disclosure," from Church Latin apocalypsis "revelation," from Greek apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal," from apo "off, away from" (see apo-) + kalyptein "to cover, conceal," from PIE root *kel- (1) "to cover, conceal, save." The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos' book "Apokalypsis" (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, "Apocalypse" c. 1230, and "Revelation" by Wyclif c. 1380).
Its general sense in Middle English was "insight, vision; hallucination." The meaning "a cataclysmic event" is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism "belief in an imminent end of the present world" is from 1858. As agent nouns, "author or interpreter of the 'Apocalypse,'" apocalypst (1829), apocalypt (1834), and apocalyptist (1824) have been tried.
PIE is Proto-Indo-European.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. [...] PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years.
my conspiracy is that making life shitty and expensive is their way of reducing population growth so humans don't over populate the earth
Of course, but if the highest bourgeoisie are operating under the assumption that resource consumption per capita must continually increase, the obvious thing for them to turn to in order to prevent total climate collapse is population control.
Congrats you’ve discovered the underconsumption angle of Marxism. The proles necessarily cannot consume all that they produce, resulting in crisis.
For a good while that gap’s been bridged with credit.
in my experience, policy makers and captains of industry have no clue how any of this shit works. they are extremely blind to the contradictions of capitalism. the guy behind the wheel is racing all the other guys behind their respective wheels to get to the red light first. they are literally all the exact same asshole. they are smug and have swagger because they wear expensive fabrics, have comfortable transportation, know all the big people, and they believe this power and its prestige is synonymous with leadership ability.
one of the most disturbing things i have come to experience IRL is that the higher up you go in institutions, the more insular, inbred, and narrow minded the people are. all they know is chase subsidy, hype financing, massive tax breaks, union bust, money>commodity>money, subscription model, eat hot chip, and lie.
They're all incentivized to bullshit each other too because they'll keep their jobs unless something catastrophic happens or their boss doesn't like them. Any other mistake can be pushed onto middle management or bribed away.
Recessions allow capitalists to gobble up what little property the proles have accumulated while governments bail out corporations who suffer. Watch, there's gonna be quantative easing and bailouts and subsidies and shit while the people suffer.
- Always ask for fee refunds
- Always demand regular audits to make sure you aren’t getting hit by forgotten finance charges
- Sometimes cash limits are stupidly high but if they are the same as your credit line, accuse the bank of unethically raising it without your knowledge
Credit can only do so much when interest is strangling an increasingly large amount of the population, which either through disincentivization (gotta stick to buying the barest of essentials) or outright defaulting/seizing has the same effect regardless when it comes to stifling consumption. The credit economy doesn’t completely upend the “underconsumption” theory, it simply pads it out. The past 15 years has more-or-less been the padding wearing out and reality catching up.
Frank you have identified one of the contradictions of capitalism! Reliant on demand from proletariat spending to generate profits, yet constantly suppressing proletarian wages to increase profits.
I know a guy who works for McKinsey and he recently told me, very proudly, how "[they] basically just made all grocery stores in America 2% more expensive." He went on about how inflation is almost completely made up, and well yeah some inflation is natural cause of population growth and all that but most of it is people like him.
Is that guy Pete Buttigieg? Remember his bread price-fixing scandal?
He's a friend's best friend from high school. He seems nice but openly states that when it comes to money he has basically no moral qualms. Before price gouging grocery stores, he was working in Brazil to increase the sale of carcinogenic fertilizers in upper Amazon without considering how their runoff would flow downriver and polute local water sources.
He justifies all of this by saying that he deserves to make as much money as he can because he's comes from a poor immigrant family
Yeah, my dad and I were ad hoc going over the numbers and we're pretty sure like 75% of this series of inflation is just price gouging. Hard to tell without knowing the pricing contracts, but there is no way that steel and lumber aren't theoretically back to normal, but the pricing is still ridiculous.
Lumber at the box stores is back to "normal". If you are going to local lumber yard forget it. That guys probably bought at extremely high prices and will sit on that product and slowly sell it and than buy in bulk at what ever price is next.
Hd/ Lowes is 4.50 untreated 2x4. My "local" yard was 10 dollars still and at one point ,15 dollars
to attempt a more serious answer to your question, they each follow their individual perceived class interest. so although they might be able to agree that they should throw the proles a bone, shared class interest can't help them agree on how the pain should be distributed amongst them (the bourgeoisie) especially as the institutions become increasingly sclerotic
Like with the water in the west, where instead of trying to fix water rights in any way the Feds are just like "California was there first so they get their full amount the rest of you are getting cuts. No changes in what crops are being grown, no improvements in efficiency, no solutions, just kicking that can down the road.
Desperately trying to manufacture consent for people to spend money that they don't have
But that's the price of a banana! Should've been paying my rent in bananas :banana-duck-peeled:
