UG#508 - Truth & Lies of The Financial "Crisis" (Peak Oil and Peak Ponzi)
Robin Upton | 18.07.2010 12:10 | Energy Crisis | Social Struggles | Sheffield | World
The show this week looks at the financial crisis from two angles. Most of it is given over to a talk by Nicole Foss about the implications for expansionary debt-based money of hitting the planet's ecological limits. We conclude with a reading of Michael Hudson's 2009 article, The Language of Looting, which explains how the term "free market" is now used to mean the opposite of its historical meaning.
The corporate media usually presents the financial crisis as if it were due to bad apples, sloppy accounting practices or other localised phenomena, whereas in fact it is systemic. Ponzi schemes such as the modern fiat currency systems must expand or die. Our main talk this week is by Nicole Foss from The Automatic Earth. Speaking to a Transition Towns conference in June 2010 at the Seale Hayne Agricultural College, Devon, UK, she takes peak oil/resource depletion as a given and explores the implications for a world money system based on unpayable debt, concluding that the years ahead hold increasing repression from centralised power increasingly desperate in enforcing untenable debt. People currently uninterested in what is really going on will be forced to pay attention as resource shortages bite and the 'business as usual' mirage never arrives. Our second hour concludes with a reading of Michael Hudson's 2009 article "The Language Of Looting" which explains how economic history has been censored to allow the term "free markets" to be used to mean the opposite of its historical use.
Robin Upton
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