Mike G. wrote: > ...so the bankers and "investors" and debt mongers and "investment > fund managers" and their lick spittles and camp followers and > enablers and massagers are "put in a bin". What happens then?
and later: > Here I guess, is one plausible answer (among a number) to the question > that I was posing... > > http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/painful-euro-crisis-and-lessons- > world-part-2 "Investors" are the citizens of the New World Order(tm). That's essentially what the article says. It's become a small group of large financial institutions, the power of which overwhelm what even big countries can muster: 147 institutions directly or indirectly control 40 percent of global revenue among private corporations. A sore point is that they pursue profits without concern over implications for countries and societies. Citizens of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your grimy, irritating, money-sucking biomass. The global financial market is changing course, away from looking after Western interests and acting in accordance with corporate governance as defined by the West toward a more global outlook guided by the interests of new group of creditors. Which is a journalist- or economist-jargon way of saying, "Investors -- corporations, funds, banks, drug- and weapons-cartels and a few families and individuals -- are people. Everybody else is biomass, krill in the sea of global finance; mites, biting flies and fungal mycelium in the rich farmstead of transnational investor prosperity. Okay, not absolutely everybody else. Those (putative) People need managers, cops and Munchkins of various kinds, roles requiring equally various degrees of smarts, education, cunning or, occasionally, clinically diagnosable psychopathy. Say, 1.0%, maybe? Who get their own schlurping spots, if not at the Money River, [1] at least at the Small Change Brook? Did I hear someone mention "99%"? Well, Pareto advanced this sort of thing a rule of thumb and others have surmised that it's some kind of natural law applicable to statistical ensembles. But I thought that was what society -- the "social contract" if you will -- was all about. Statistically, X% of houses burn down, X% of cars drive over a bluff, X% of urban pedestrians are mugged in a dark place by demented addicts and so on, so you organize fire departments, construct guard rails and hire beat cops [2] or install street lighting. Oh, wait, that's what *governments* do, governments ranging from the 4 Selectmen of Upper Sideamagasket, Maine to the US Congress. Only that takes money. Well, that's what finance is for, eh? <Voice of Death in Terry Pratchett novels/movies> UMMM.... NO, NOT FOR THAT. SORRY. </Voice...> I wrote earlier about the dairy science vision of eliminating the Cow, replacing her with a Rumen Vat and a Mammary Tissue Culture Vat. The finance guys don't even want the milk. They just want, each and every one of them, to have all the cream. What's wrong with this picture? -m [1] Elliot Rosewater, in conversation with his father. See: http://akkartik.name/blog/money-river [2] No, not that kind of beat. You know what I mean, even if they don't hardly make them like that no more. Man in gutter: Officer! Help! Call me an ambulance! Beat cop: Like, crazy, man! So, like: You're an ambulance! PS: Please lose the UTF-8 charset for email. Please? Pretty-please? _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
