Interesting that the media balleyhooed the Pope's climate remarks but missed the Pope's call for letting TBTF banks fail

Posted by freedomforall 9 years, 4 months ago to Economics
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Excerpt:
Today, in view of the common good, there is urgent need for politics and economics to enter into a frank dialogue in the service of life, especially human life. Saving banks at any cost, making the public pay the price, forgoing a firm commitment to reviewing and reforming the entire system, only reaffirms the absolute power of a financial system, a power which has no future and will only give rise to new crises after a slow, costly and only apparent recovery. The financial crisis of 2007-08 provided an opportunity to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and new ways of regulating speculative financial practices and virtual wealth. But the response to the crisis did not include rethinking the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world.

. . . A strategy for real change calls for rethinking processes in their entirety, for it is not enough to include a few superficial ecological considerations while failing to question the logic which underlies present-day culture.
SOURCE URL: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31737-a-revolutionary-pope-calls-for-rethinking-the-outdated-criteria-that-rule-the-world#14362057194271&action=collapse_widget&id=0&data=


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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 4 months ago
    The Pope's trashing of modern civilization is much broader in scope and deeper philosophically than banking policy, but he does emphatically denounce the idea that borrowers should be required to pay their debts as a matter of moral principle.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 4 months ago
    I'm going to insert a quote from a book we have been using and one that has been available in various editions since 1947. From Chapter 6 page 42 of"Henry Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson

    " When people invest their own funds they are usually careful in their investigations to determine the adequacy of the assets pledge (collateral), the business acument and the honesty of the borrower"

    If the government operated to the same strict standards their would be no good argument for it's entering the field {of borrowing and lending} at all. Why do precisely what private agencies already do?

    But the government almost invariably operates by different standards. paraphrased The argument for entering the lending business is to provide loans for those who cannot get them from private lenders. {having obtained the money by borrowing from the taxpayers and other investors.} Another way of saying the government will take risks with the peoples(taxpayers) money that private lenders will not take with their own or their investors money {savings accounts and programs including retirement accounts such as PERS, unions, social security etc.}

    The government acknowledge the percentage of loss will be higher for government loans than private loans.But claims it is offset by increased production. by borrowers who pay back and even those who don't pay back

    It seems plausible if you focus on the people who the government supplies with funds and forget those whom their plan deprives of funds {The often unwilling loaner or tax payer.} What is being lent is not money a medium of exchange but capital.

    If the government takes it in the form of taxes or by other means such as regulations it is not available for use elsewhere.

    The government not only has no local knowledge of the lender as to ability to pay back the loan it doesn't care as the recent housing bubble crashed showed.

    Credit is not something the lending institution nor the government gives it is something the individual has or hasn't earned. (end of paraphrasing but.)

    You can apply this lesson to the real life collusion of government and the largest banking concerns to this discussion, the Greek situation or the financial disaster in the USA and it's root causes.When the government borrows money from the future wit no intent of repaying the first sentence is not allowed nor encouraged to exist but it never the less honestly describes the government as not worthy of credit.

    When you go to vote in a very few months ask yourself if this vote was a loan of cash money from my retirement fund would I vote for the two major parties, separately or in their current form as the Government Party, and loan them the bucks I need to survive in my eighties and nineties?

    Whereupon having answered that honestly you may choose to support evil greater or lesser or by voting for None of the above by any means and using any other valid choice possible. It's your money that you earned they are stealing. Be it precious metal futures, housing loans to those with no credit, or funding EU bailouts.It's your retirement being flushed down the toilet.
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    • Posted by 9 years, 4 months ago
      Superb analogy! Thanks, MichaelA.
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      • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 4 months ago
        The rest of the story. The government decides if it is in the loan business it should share in the profits.none of which go to pay off the loan from the taxpayer but are diverted to other areas. Thus diverting even more funds from those who earned it - especially if there is no profit. Available capital shrinks from those have business acumen to those who haven't a clue as more taxes are levied to service the governments permanent loan from the producers.

        In the end and the housing market is a good example with forced sales to those with no credit at all government tells private industry to not only keep making those toxic loans but a. forces them to foreclose on the one hand and backs up the loans b. through bundling and then the devices of FannyMac and FreddieMae (I used the new same sex names this time. FM and FM pay off at some point by using even more tax dollars minus mondo bonuses to the CEOs of those two concerns. The foreclosed housing values are revalued and the smaller banks end up closing enter FDIC - more tax money needed. In one case to get rid of these toxic properties one bank gave them away to veterans about 50,000 nation wide or at least offered. No doubt someone snapped them up bulldozed the derelict dwellings and made a killing on urban renewal projects.

        Those who ran this charade got re-elected

        The taxpayer was not the true loser in all this. It was the countless businesses where they couldn't spend or invest their money TANSTAAFL and Senator Thomas Dodd one of the chief architects along with Barney Frank is now a CEO at a million a year of a private corporation with a house in Ireland. Who said crime doesn't pay?
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 9 years, 4 months ago
    As an ex-Catholic (but still a Christian), I've come to regard what this particular Pope has to say as on the same level as a lib Hollywood actor who thinks he is now entitled to spout PC remarks about this, that or the other that's way outside of his realm of expertise.
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  • Posted by wiggys 9 years, 4 months ago
    the problem with the pope is the same problem that 0 has as well as most of the people who are termed world leaders but i say they are world destroyers, is that they do not think nor do they know how to think.waste of time even listening to them. they will not be happy until all of the business community has been terminated.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 9 years, 4 months ago
    The old saw "follow the money" has never been more cogent. He who got the money makes the rules. And is not afraid to let it be known. When Diamond Jim Brady Was asked why he wore so many diamonds, he said, "Thems whats got 'em, shows 'em. When you fight the money giants, the money walls go up and most efforts just make short inroads. When the dust settles from all the wars, takeovers, conflicts the wealth stands virtually unscathed. The faces may change and the languages change, but the language of wealth remains.
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    • Posted by 9 years, 4 months ago
      He who creates the money (after bribes/campaign contributions to the con-gress) from nothing makes the rules. Wealth? Only if producers are stupid or naive enough to consent to trading in a rigged market. That is the problem. Producers let others (looters/banksters) rig the marlets as a cost of doing business, but don't realize how that is giving away the ultimate means of production to the enemy.
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  • Posted by SaltyDog 9 years, 4 months ago
    I find it interesting that His Holiness (who is considered by Catholics to be the Vice Regent of the Almighty) has chosen an atheist to be one of his top science advisors. Please consider that for a moment: when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, he is deemed to be infallible. Therefor, he is preaching an opinion of an atheist. In some circles that might be thought of as heresy.
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    • Posted by ewv 9 years, 4 months ago
      If you read his encyclical On Care for our Common Home you readily see that he is invoking thousand year old mystic asceticism and the injunction to live for "God's Creation" and serve the poor. He trashes the Industrial Revolution for its economic achievements. He is still fighting the Enlightenment that overthrew the death grip of the Church establishment over the west. The viros are all too willing to help him. They want us to believe they are infallible, too. "The religion is settled". Their anti-Industrial Revolution "ecology" ideology fits like a glove.

      Conservatives have been criticizing the Pope for being "co-opted" by the viros. It's the other way around': those in the modern viro "ecology movement" have been co-opted by thousand year old nihilistic mysticism. The religious conservatives dare not discuss that.
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      • Posted by 9 years, 4 months ago
        "those in the modern viro "ecology movement" have been co-opted "
        Yes, the church attained and held power for hundreds of years. The looters are rationally copying an evil approach that worked (to enslave millions for millennia.)
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        • Posted by $ jdg 9 years, 4 months ago
          The modern "ecology movement" is mainly just a front for a few thousand super-rich people who want to continue keeping lots of unbuilt land which they don't own off the real estate market (thus letting them continue to use it for free, both as scenery and as a buffer against the rest of us "riff raff" moving into their neighborhoods). Those who really believe that an environmental emergency exists are merely useful idiots. They were "co opted" from the day they existed.

          Similarly, the '60s "peace movement" was both heavily funded and marketed to Western media by the Soviet Union. That was the only battle they won in Viet Nam.
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      • Posted by SaltyDog 9 years, 4 months ago
        It's been a long time since I would take the time to read much of anything from the Holy See. The Vatican has long ago forfeited any moral ascendancy that it may have enjoyed. I give the same weight to the Pope's proclamations that I give to BHO's Final Four picks or his thoughts on Travon Martin.
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    • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 4 months ago
      World War II a blanket excommunication could have and should have stripped Adolf and Benito of their claimed legitimacy.

      Of course when you are postage stamp surrounded by people with the means to turn Vatican City into a concentration camp - and when you think of the loss of income in the future...what is important was and is again all too apparent.

      For all the good Christians in that church you might consider a second reformation.
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      • Posted by 9 years, 4 months ago
        As should those who are of the Republican religion.
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        • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 4 months ago
          The Republicans have no religion. They follow the dictates of the Democrats who have no religion. Every well cared for dog has it's master even lapdogs of the left. The Republicans get a Boehner out of the deal. Arf Arf.
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          • Posted by 9 years, 4 months ago
            RE: republican 'religion.' I was talking about the thought process of people who vote Republican. It is based on faith like almost all religion, and is as easily proven just as objective.
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            • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 4 months ago
              Of course and there is the tie in with the Democrats whose faith based secularism is even closer to their common core roots - Marxist Leninist Keynesian Economics. To quote Lenin. You don't teach it you preach it.

              Now go out and vote for them again.
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