I agree.

Bankers have rewritten the moral code to define the man who cannot repay a debt as the degenerate. Now we define a man’s morality by his willingness to repay debts at the expense of his security and that of his family’s.

It should be that he who levies an unjust debt over another man is he who should be punished. Defaulting on unjust debts is natural and necessary to keep the banks in check.

Yes who paid for this?

Sanders is correct about Dodd-Frank, but Trump-blaming is click-bait for the Right. The same comments could and should be made about Obama’s contribution to the banking monopoly.

The lack of regulation over banks is not a right-left issue. Both parties are aggressively pro-bank and anti-regulation. At odds are the masses of people and the oligarchy who benefits from loose monetary policies.

Also, to blame economic failures on any president is short-sighted. Every president is a pro-banking president.

Dodd-Frank rollbacks are the design of the very banks that the policy is intended to reign in. Its amendment enables the investment arm of banks to commingle with their responsibility to protect depositors, and the very issues that led us to 2008 are again systemic.

It’s important to remember that raising interest rates did not cause the problem. A reversion to a more natural rate of interest elucidated the failure that already existed. Twenty years of falling interest rates, and the promise of further drops, enabled a 40 trillion dollar bond market to flourish, and for bond traders and banks to speculate with depositors’ funds because they didn’t anticipate any stress on the economy that would stop the music that enabled the ever-decreasing interest rates.

Then Covid came along…a stress on the economy. Then inflation came along…a stress on the economy. The Fed should increase rates, albeit much more slowly and naturally. Rates should never reach 0%, but should be around 6% to discourage speculation and excessive leverage.

Taxation of the poor is not about raising money. It’s about control.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/sohrab-ahmari/terrible-american-turn-toward-illiberalism/

Great article

Advocacy for decentralized systems and uniform opportunity for mankind is inconsistent with the myth of American exceptionalism. One must cast off identification with a nation state, and commit to being a citizen of the world.

Book recommendation:

The Limits of Power, Andrew Bacevich

This is usury. Until the finance industry eviscerated anti-usury laws, this was illegal for a thousand years.

Usurious loans are more often placed upon a population than taken by a population. When a man is in need of a car or a house, the terms of those loan are not consensual, and he becomes a slave to the finance industry.

The fact that there are 40 trillion in the bond market that nobody wants to buy…makes the bond holders/banks insolvent, and speaks to the hilarity of US Debt as a preservation of value.

And so did the bank create for itself another debt slave.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ’They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England...Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root….

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. “

George Orwell

👍. A two party state is not a democracy. We are a plutocracy. To vote on either side is to vote in complicity with policies that favor the corporations and the 1% over your own well being.

Neither the militarized state capitalism of the United States nor a centralized welfare state is an adequate goal for us.  The systems perpetuate material, cultural, and environmental deficits.  Technological innovation...Bitcoin, Tor, Nostr... provide platforms for rational social order and the free association of people.  They empower the laboring masses, push the commercial and financial institutions toward democratic control, and disable the ideology of possessive individualism, predatory capital accumulation, and exploitation by external authorities. These institutions are inhuman.

“The economy is doing fine, but the people aren’t…the people do not do well because they are not intended to do well.”

Emilio Medici

Brazil, Head of State, 1971

Let us question all the establishments that are so ingrained in our lives that their existence is assumed to be normal, rather than parasitic.

“The National Security State is an instrument of class warfare, organized and designed to permit an elite, local and multinational, to operate without any constraint from democratic processes. This allows the bulk of the population to be treated as a mere cost of production.”

The Real Terror Network

Edward Herman

“Its task once terminated, the proletariat has been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. The bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the death of all art, and, in fact, the debased artists had fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet of the eminent jobbers and low satraps whose alms permitted them to live.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans. “A Rebours”

On the social implications of loose monetary policy, on the consolidation of wealth, and on the financialization of everything that makes us human.

Did you push that button to see how it works?

Let them call me a Bitcoin Maximalist.

I am also a human rights maximalist, an access-to-healthcare maximalist, a free speech maximalist, an environment and future generations maximalist, and a right to be un-governed maximalist.

Bitcoin maximalism is belief in the sanctity of life on Earth