What perpetuates the fossil fuel fraud?

Discussion in 'Energy' started by 101101, May 2, 2020.

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  1. 101101

    101101 Well-Known Member

    My guess is it is much more than greed that has made possible the perpetuation of a power source that was so long ago obsolete.

    In particular modern monetary theory seems to provide the answer. It allows government to base the entire political and economic system on how government itself chooses to leverage future opportunity costs with inflation.

    Imagine that in the 1920s all money was replaced with monopoly money from the classic game Monopoly (little pink bills) that only the government could print and further that this was made the only practical legal means of tender and that only the government could tax it.

    And imagine further that printing this stuff at a certain rate (not too quick and not to slow) cumulatively increasing the pool of money was a necessary but not wholly sufficient condition for expanding the economy. Don't think "oh its merely a necessary component, one of many necessary parts" No, its the economic equivalent of being able to turn up or turn down the strength of gravity on the Earth's surface with the power to make it so you can't even stand up or you feel like your are pushed up hills or cast adrift. Almost more incredible is a hand full of super fallible governments have this power but their population doesn't know this because of propaganda about the primacy of markets.

    Now understand that the government prints and spends that mere monopoly money fiction first on whatever it wants and only later taxes or issues bonds to get back any amount that risked creating slippage in the form of inflation. It taxes and issues bonds to stop inflation slippage and therefore increase animal spirit belief in the glue like power of its fictional monopoly money. Again, yes it produces concrete results but runs on the habitual unconscious equivalent of brain washed conditioning and superstition. Lets emphasize, the bonds entice some to buy (give the government back its make-believe monopoly money to reduce slippage) because it provides a small shelter against inflation. But...be it a Treasury note or Treasury bond or Treasury bill it is nothing at all but more monopoly money paid back with yet more inflated monopoly money and it pays a pittance and it is no guarantee against inflation eating away the principal just a guess and the government just does it to trim back any apparent trend of inflationary slippage after the fact. There is no debt it cannot actually owe or be owed its own fake monopoly money in any contingent real sense because there is no real limit on its printing more and no prudent risk on printing aside from debasing the currency with unwanted amounts of inflation so it all reduces to opportunity cost and future opportunity cost in particular. And the question then reduces further to: for the benefit of whom. It cannot continue to be first and foremost for the benefit of fossil fuel associated inherited wealth.


    And despite the myths there is no great gain or profit in a bank brokering these bonds or being owed them its just more chasing of monopoly money and spreading of it- banking is not even remotely the constraint even if majority public banking and better citizen bankruptcy protections are needed. Rather sovereign monopoly money governments hide their culpability behind a multitude of fictitious banks that are always coming into and going out of existence- remember in the 07 crisis when the government effortlessly jammed all that toxic derivative sludge down Wells Fargo's throat and look a decade later it is still bloated with it. The government also controls the interest rates on its currency (the main inflationary lever in the end- because it is a reductive function of money printing or so called money multiplying) and again private money multiplier loans and rates can be a problem if too much usury is allowed but again it turns out all the banks are just a part of the government monopolized fictitious money printing machine. And crucially there is no deficit (its all surplus) and nothing the government owes anyone except more future monopoly money printing and it is all ultimately owed back to the government under sovereign fiat currency.

    It also can't run out of money because it can always print more. The firewall between the Fed and the government is just more diversion another fraud designed to distract from the US being a fully planned centralized top down society just like the old Soviet Union it used to project onto. They manufacture crises to cover that it is regularly necessary to print more money to expand society but they ink cloud it so we do see them handing stacks of cash to their friends first.

    But what about gold or silver or crypto or some alternative? Fiat generally isn't even printed its just moving electrons around and its backed by the force of tax, guns butter and law. Crypto on some level is trying to preserve the red light zone of cash or the notion that interests rates could be made predictable or that people might evade tax (controls on inflation) by never coming up for air to buy actual tangible goods. Its delusion but may extend the life of cash and the tech will reinforce the robustness of fiat monopoly money printing. Would crypto make animal spirits more predictable by replacing targeted cash injections with injections by formula? Not when it lacks the power of fiat along so many dimensions and would have to compete with fiat. If not fiat formula what about a naturally constrained like historical gold or silver? Same issue and it just goes in the direction of barter and can't compete with the power of unconscious control over animal spirits. Don't believe it? People will a trade in a heart beat a brick of gold or a paid off home and paid for raw land for the right amount of electron movement in a computer they can't find or a stack of fictitious monopoly money that they believe meets some threshold on being less make-believe. Still not convinced(?)- run it in reverse- could the government replace its made up green dollars by claiming it was switching to the classic Monopoly game's paper currency? Not impossible but... Or imagine that the government said suddenly that due to an error (not credible I know) its sovereign currency the US dollar had gone negative in value overnight like a barrel of oil and that its negative value was now frozen and being recalled as debt due to its original issuer the USG on a 1:1 basis to be repaid over 10 years time in its new just issued currency the dollar II? Upheaval of course but people would likely still trade with old dollars if allowed as in "I'll take $150 of your old dollar debt if you sell me that planter." Interesting how even a negative value is better than freezing a zero value or zeroing out because it preserves the vestment or sunk cost future expectation interest.

    Continued in next post
     
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  3. 101101

    101101 Well-Known Member

    continued


    The government can overheat the economy and cause slippage by printing too much money ahead of actual production or ahead of actual material wealth from expanding useful production. Inflation itself is a kind of tax. In the end what it does is leverage future opportunity costs with an inflation biased system. It biases for inflation because the opposite, deflation leads to actual psychological de-vestment of the currency itself, it is immersion or spell breaking going in the direction animal spirit disgorgement of the currency. But the solution for deflation is more money printing within limits.

    It is a top down fully planned centralized system and economy where the government is the prime mover of all economic action. And it prioritizes vestment at all costs. It doesn't care whether it is taxing away monopoly money and burning it, or using transfer payments of its monopoly game money (public and corporate welfare spending) as 1/3 of all spending (the historical norm) or both as it ultimately is only every buying raw demand or vestment of our animal spirits in team dollar and team USA. Note, if it takes money out of circulation it generally burns it. It might prefer to give more to the rich at times because they are sometimes the most vested but other times its shoring up the vestment elsewhere, but its usually doing both.


    It has been throwing first shot or essentially first issuance new money at fossil fuels because they create kill switch style addiction and strongly reinforce the addicted bondage of vestment. And because vestment be it time killing debt or addicting luxury income, is still vestment, the government doesn't give a damn. But the public has what turn out to be backwards superstitious dis-empowering ideas about how this works. People vaguely think its possible to over spend but they wrongly think the government can go broke or run out of money and people are encourage to think this. The government doesn't want to break the habit of belief in the monopoly money so it comes up with frauds like 911 and the 07 Bush collapse and the CV and a bunch of crap wars as cover to regularly dump a bunch of newly printed monopoly money into the economy to expand it. Of course these frauds have cost countless lives which tragically makes them more believable and reinforces vestment up to a point.


    So fossil fuels are incredibly stupid, but under the moronic treadmill logic of consumables these hold on in the way a government might do a co-intelpro or cultivate nicotine and alcohol abuse because it was a way of driving vestment control as in yoking addicted people who otherwise wouldn't chase monopoly money so people go to a crap babysitting, busy work, resource wasting unnecessary job enslavement to fund an addiction. It was apparent 100 years ago that the atom or sun would provide the energy and machines would do the work but also that fiat could be the ring through the nose.

    The notion of full employment (or defacto money enslavement) is a notion of full vestment but its nonsense. So for instance a high indexed non discretionary cradle to grave basic income is not inflationary or doomed to be tentative or discretionary, no its basic social contract where any silver spooner in society can opt out of involuntary work. Again, the work (automation) and energy inputs are taken care of so so a leisure class can't ***** that inflation might lead to increased taxes and reduce its undue extracted miss appropriated surplus because it surplus didn't belong to their non contributing (or net negative) no real skin in the game selves to begin with.

    You can see the logic of how the MMT link between money and vestment or money and blind black hole control is a link that makes money and power fungible or makes control itself liquid and fungible with itself.

    So imagine the stupidity of people trying to scrounge fictional printed monopoly money to increase the volume of voice to increase their influence on the monopoly money printer. And by the logic of vestment it gives the most voice to those most vested in the make-believe monopoly money.

    Government could just as easily give money to green energy to create vestment but green energy doesn't create as much direct vestment as the stupid inbred backwards rent seeking of fossil fuels. But through the lens of backwardness, rent seeking is more vestment. Fossil fuels are like a drug that needs 15 other bad rent seeking drugs to cover its side effects. In the system of parasite investment-vestment we've created, we think contribution is when a parasite walks into a casino and pays off a casino employee to tell them which slot machines they can put a quarter in and skim endless quarters off the people putting quarters in other machines. The parasite's vestment is in their continued ability bilk like a credit card that can't be paid off and in having everyone else's vestment through all the sunk costs those people have in the rigged casino machines, sunk costs they can't get back which keeps the losing more and more. When the parasites keep raising idiot questions about the job enslavers or "who is going to pay for it" the translation is: no one can be allowed to interrupt their no skin in the game, no contribution trickle down thieving. Remember every time you follow an order from a boss you are accepting and reinforcing your role as property so better know the beast to reverse this process.

    With the power inherent in fiat we could totally divest fossil fuels in a heart beat and comfortably retire out all its hourly and salaried employees (execs and major shareholders must accept 0 in return for not doing time) and make the pensioners held hostage to stupid fossil fuel hostage taking whole and zero all the banking contracts while protecting deposits. We could do this in a heartbeat while firing up a GND. Same power government used to injunct most business under CV could easily be used to do this. We could end all fossil fuel usage and business in the US within 5 years. We can and should do that.
     
  4. SouthernDude

    SouthernDude Active Member

    Dude. What the heck. It’s really simple, an adequate, cost effective alternative to fossil fuels just hasn’t really existed until now - hence why wind and solar are going gang busters now.

    Electric cars are still in the early adoption phase. Most people are still skeptical about electric cars because of the lack of infrastructure, the price of the EV relative to an equivalent ICE, and the range of the car (if they don’t know what it is). Things will change in a few years once more infrastructure is built out and battery prices go down.




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  5. Paul K

    Paul K Active Member

    Politics and subsidies. No government wants to be associated with job losses. Grants, tax breaks and subsidies to fossil fuel corporations are simply massive. Estimated to be at least 6 BILLION a year for Canada alone (the IMF thinks it's much higher). When governments try to implement green policies the fossils
    scream "job losses" and the money starts flowing.

    In Canada it's hard to form a majority government without support from Alberta (Canada's Texas). The major source of provincial revenue has been petroleum royalties which have now vanished. Alberta is the only Canadian province with no sales tax has nothing to fall back on for revenues. Years ago when being a Conservative meant you might actually try to conserve things, Premier Peter Lougheed established a heritage fund which was supposed to grow into a financial cushion to absorb the impacts of economic downturns. It was squandered by the "anti-tax" Ralph Klein regime. I might add that the royalties charged were a pittance compared to some other countries.

    "Lefty socialist" Norway by contrast charged much higher royalties from the oil cos. and built up a sovereign wealth fund which is now over a trillion dollars. When the dust settles after the oil crash they will still be in great shape also having an abundance of hydro electric power.

    When someone complains to me about their tax dollars subsidizing my electric car I politely point out that they've got it wrong. Far more of my tax dollars are going to prop up the fossil fuel industries that power their car. After their stares of disbelief I just tell them to search "petroleum subsidies" on the internet. Most people have no idea the extent of this.
     

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