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Michael Hudson is good on the economy but sadly fell for convid.

I was expecting him to see the big pharma scam, but he didn't.

Here's another good economic blog, https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/

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Interesting about Michael. And Charles is interesting too. I like his recent post on facade vs. reality. I'm not sure if his solutions head the same direction as mine, but I'll read more. Thanks for recommending!

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"What we’re experiencing from those addicted to power is a desperate swarm of aggression, a last giddy head rush." Completely agree. Last gasps world.

Re: "As people are trying to figure out how to make it, many writers are turning to Substack. Some, like Naomi Wolf, are scraping by on 2400 paying subs."😹

As the pressure increases and the old system deconstructs, I'm trusting an ancient knowing that resides in all of us, comes into play, as we learn again how to live in, with and as nature, deepening our connections with each other. Transition will follow transition, will follow....etc. as we again pay attention to the 'core' stuff (often neglected) that doesn't change with change and speaks to something more 'real'.

I will listen to the vid while making breakfast in a bit. Thanks, Tereza. Happy Sunday!

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Haha, that's my strategy too--cook and listen! Good points as always, Kathleen, and special thanks for reading and listening since, as you'll notice, they're not redundant. Happy Sunday!

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Great points on the "gig economy". The servicification of employment essentially unravels what little remains of a social contract. It's one of the more aggressive forces com-modifying our lives. AI chatbot companions are already removing people from the equation, so that everyone can be perfectly alone. Quite tragically doubling down on people's isolation and exploitation.

I came across an interesting argument where someone pondered if "libre" technology was going to diverge from mainstream tech. Many of the responses were critical but I think that person was onto something. There are fundamentally different needs that those who want to decentralize power have than those who want to maintain top-down control. I don't know what can heal the bonds that have been shattered over a long time, but I pray for a miracle in that department.

Thanks a ton for the acknowledgement in your piece, it's greatly appreciated!

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Thank you, Gabriel, for your kind acknowledgement, your perceptive comments, and the engaged readers you brought to my site. When I look at new subs and what else they're reading, it's a whole different world from what I know, and you're the common link. That's so great and refreshing to have a new perspective!

I love your terms servicification and com-modifying. Yes, the commodification of everything is ruthless but I never thought of it as com-modifying, which of course it is. And the fundamentally different needs--I use the term purpose--is critical. I think you can use 'the master's tools to dismantle the master's house', and to build a new one. What else are you going to use?

And, to be hokey, you're the evidence of that miracle to me. The synchronicities are happening faster and faster, as Charles Eisenstein predicts.

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We exchanged on YT yesterday July 2nd about an observation I made in the 'economy' in a field. I would like to suggest reading this book by two young Frenchmen whom I'm found of in their thinking step by step in three books starting with one on collapsology as they call it and ending with 'Mutual Aid, the other law of the jungle' developing about the natural world well-documented cooperation rather than this law of the jungle we have been inoculated with. I didn't think the book had been translated in english but it did. I had google translate the french version I got and you can start getting familiar with it here:

https://tinyurl.com/yx3z9k4f

and obtain the book via amazon:

https://a.co/d/5w2cqfR

We will never be able to get over our materialistic perspective on things if we don't start knowing how things work on other planes and why we need to be in sync with them which we have not done as of yet! I love the way you bring about your writings and videos full of quotes and references.

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Thank you Marc! And sorry to have stopped responding, I cut myself off until I got my episode on Kennedy up on Substack and that took the rest of the day.

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I recently heard about the gig economy from my daughter, who's friend does it. I think it is a hijacking of the employee/employer-relationship. A permanent middleman between the employee and employer. Another way to take money away from the employee and employer. Both sides probably think this is great at first, then they realize all the limitations (scammed again). I have seen this slow methodical take over of one job category after another to syphon off money and consolidation. I would suggest the communities take over the property insurance, but only if that community controls their own weather. And storms are not made from afar and sent in as warfare. Under natural weather conditions an actuary can properly run the numbers for percentage of claims for proper premiums. What do you think?

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Hi, Helene and sorry I haven't gotten back to your email. And, btw, your logo is beautiful! Per your email, I love the idea of you posting the transcripts of important talks in other languages, to be read by the listening app. And 'In Their Own Words' is a great title. It would be a tremendous service for all of us! If I can't do something useful while I'm listening, it just won't happen.

I'm so glad you're intrigued by the idea of reinventing property insurance! I have some ideas that my system would make possible that I'm excited to share. I was looking to see if there was a nibble of interest, so I'll bump it up on the list! And your background would be great for understanding the practicalities of how it could work or not. And yes, controlling our own skies and sharing information with other communities would be key!

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Thanks for your thoughts on the Sub. and my Logo. I look forward to hearing your insurance ideas and playing the devils advocate, lol.

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Haha, that's cheating, you have to put your own insurance rooster in the ring! Don't tell me what's wrong with my model, tell me why the way you'd do it in your fiefdom is better, Czarina Helene ;-)

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Czarina Helene, I like the way that sounds. You start and we will build it together. I have to talk about it on email, because of my licensing. I'm like Ned Ryerson.

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I know I said it before, but great video!

You know me, I LOVE to focus on how our savings and labor are being devalued via the constant running of the printing press. Instead of it getting easier to get by as automation and technology improves, somehow it's getting HARDER as it takes MORE dollars to get (housing/food/entertainment) than it did last year. Sadly, I see no easing of this issue....how many trillions of dollars will they print this year, or next? What about 2030?

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Thank you so much, SimComm! You're absolutely right to focus on the rising cost of basics, especially housing. Rather than giving everyone more money, it would be a greater benefit to bring that cost down. But it's not the gov't printing the money, they don't have the right to issue anything but coins. It's the bankers. And I definitely see a way to break what should never have been usurped by them in the first place. It's the only way to reclaim our lives and labor.

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Yes, normally I say it's collusion between the bankers and the politicians, who will ALWAYS find an excuse to print money and hand it out to their buddies. The rest of us pay for this largesse via higher prices (thus the devaluation of our savings and labor).

You can't have a real economy with fake money.

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I added a few paragraphs to the text that weren't in the video. Actually, they were the original draft but then seemed too dense for the video. They explain how money's created and the impact that has. The politicians can borrow money, hence the debt ceiling, but according to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, they can't create it.

I generally say that this is the single most important fact to understand in economics (one that economics professors and professional economists don't). Without changing this, nothing can be changed. But changing to gold and silver created the problem the Revolutionary War was fought to reverse. The colonists wanted land-backed money for local exchange, as Ben Franklin had designed. Instead, those who fought weren't paid for their services because they were using the metal-backed money to pay off the financiers, and were foreclosing on their farms for back taxes. Hence Shay's Rebellion, put down by a mercenary army hired by the bankers, and that ushered in the Constitution to make sure the States would never control their own economies again.

IMO, land-backed money is real money, it's just serving the wrong interests--the bankers rather than the communities.

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I uave heard of some people building family compounds to they can live/work together. Even if you can buy the land mortgage free, you still have the property taxes which are ever climbing so you never truly own the land. Nothing short of Jesus returning will change what we have sown.

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The point you're making is one I make in my episode on The Greater Reset. But theologically, I think that any God who loves us would never have abandoned us in the first place. So the power to change it is as present now, in us, as it's ever been or ever will be. Nothing else makes logical sense to me.

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Jun 25, 2023·edited Jun 25, 2023

At the global level, it does seem that the nature of power and control conferred by money is changing from hegemonic (US dollar) to multi-polar. Will this change be enough to de-fang the influence of the kind of person who seems to be attracted to the top of the power pyramid like a moth to a flame, the same kind of person who relishes “the intoxicating of power” and “the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless”? Probably not.

Isn’t the fundamental problem that money is a system whose very purpose is to control and exert power? How to create an alternative store of energy/labor that does not also create control? How to divorce value from control? Is that something which digital smart contracts could accomplish?

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I'll reply to you and SimComm both here, Tirion. What I thought later that I didn't make clear is that you'll only change their intoxication by taking the drug of power over others away from them. My book goes back 3500 yrs to the creation of money, yes, as a means of co-opting all of us into being complicit in their desire to conquer and control others. But then in the section on system change, I reinvent money based on what we want it to do. Don't throw out a system of reciprocity with the bathwater! Units of trade are a good thing, and a means of distributing the legacy of the built infrastructure with flexibility, not just one family inheriting.

But I also make the point in my book that the monetization of metals (another form of fiat currency) debased the precious mettle of humanity. Colonization of the world would never have been possible without a concentrated form of power over others in gold and silver. And the Constitution handed us right back to the bankers: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-constitutional-convention-coup.

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Tereza, your ideas about money are fascinating; but how to separate value from control, which is integral to the concept of money? I don't think that the inventors of money had a "desire to conquer and control." I think they already had not only control, but ownership. I think they saw money as a tool of livestock management. Money is a foundation stone of the control-manipulate-harvest business model, which they have always used to operate this planet. Call me crazy, but that's the only way I can make sense of past and present.

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Ah Tirion, spoken like someone who hasn't read my book! If what I said above was intuitive and common knowledge, why would I have bothered to write it? But don't take my word for it, read David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years. It's twice as long as my book, which tries to summarize his anthropological findings in a chapter or two, but it covers the invention of coinage for what he terms the coinage-taxation-conquest triangle (or maybe slavery is the third but enslavement of others).

Coinage, combined with taxation, turned conquest into a self-perpetuating machine. In order to get the coins to pay their taxes, people had to supply the military with food, shelter, armor, weapons, sex, whatever. So instead of the warring lord needing to pay and equip, feed, etc his army, the people who were already under his control did it for him. Otherwise, they could become slaves themselves. It was brilliant, in the most diabolical way.

It hasn't been always! Nor has it been everywhere, as Graeber's posthumously published The Dawn of Everything shows: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/muskrat-love-and-anarchy and https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/when-mothers-ran-the-world.

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This is exactly why "only gold and silver" are supposed to be money in America. The founders knew that if given the chance, the bankers and the politicians would collude and print the wealth right out from under us.........

which is exactly what's happening.

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