We are drilled daily to think that economic growth is what we need. It is said to mean more jobs, more wealth and a better world. Lately however we have been able to see that after a century of chasing the economic paradigm our society is not stabile or consilidated at a certain level of wealth. We instead see increased joblessness due to automation, which is of course due to economic pressure on manufacturers. We are told the future will see even more jobs replaced by machines, meaning few people with normal incomes. Ok, now does the economy stimulate jobs or does it cost jobs?
What is economic pressure anyway? It is the need to increase revenue, profit in order to sustain loans made by central banks, in a competitive environment created by the same banks. Not only do companies need to make more money than is necessary to run them, they need more money than all other companies that try to do the same thing. All these other companies are as much in debt as them, with the same banking system. This banking system is itself looking to make a profit, and that is exactly where it all goes wrong.
If you are a bank you make money off of loans. This means you are looking for people that need money. There are two reasons why people need money: 1. They want to do a thing that cost more than they saved. 2. They need money because they don’t have any. In both cases banks ask more money in return than they loan out, so through loans they actually create demand for more loans. With non commercial banks this would be fine, because the interest on the loans would be reasonable, but today banks are commercial, big and costly, so they ask for more money out of society than it would cost to make the loan. In fact they compete to extract as much money as they can. Thus they create their own market, and then some.
Commercial banks extract money from circulation by putting money into circulation. As such they are responsible for a constant need for money in society. They do this for their own profit, and this happens to be ideal for a society run on fossil fuels. As long as new activity requires constant renewal of loans, banks can adapt spending to the availability of fossil fuels so that prices don’t fluctuate too much and people keep believing in this system. It is a carefull game of carrot and stick. You borrow money and enjoy spending it on fossil fuels, then you become dependent on them, then you will need money again as the banks are always extracting as much as possible to maintain their power.
This is economic capture. Spain is suffering from it big time. They consumed gas and are 26 Billion Euro in the hole. This consumption was of course driven by loans. Now they are forced to undermine the growth of solar to ensure that money will still be spend on gas, and banks that set up the investments in them keep the return on investment. A whole nation has to suffer because (obviously foreign) banks demand it. This is economic capture. Spain will do things against its own interest and that of its people. It will keep consuming gas even though it and its people don’t want to.
Economics is the marketing message of the banking system. So many people are now caught in costly lifestyles that force them to 1. Consume fossil fuels and 2. Remain captive of economic factors, more than ever before. This is what was meant at the Davos meeting several years ago, that there was still 100 Trillion in debt load that could be heaved on the shoulders of world citizen, thus turning them into oxen for the banks (who of course pretend they are just doing their jobs).
We wrote earlier about how our money should be split into three kinds, 1. Auro for labour, 2. Euro for fossil fuel and 3. Joule for renewble energy. How the role of banks should be divided between nobody (Auro be a gold coin), the state (who determines who gets to consume fossil fuels) and the people (who produce renewables individually or as a group). This alternative to the current system would deal with this job and environment destoying nature of the commercial banking system, and free us from economic capture.