Saturday Youtube – Peep Jousting Edition
It’s the Easter holiday, so I might not have any new posts for a few days. But I think we can all agree that Peeps rule!
And for your reading pleasure, a couple of posts I wish I had written:
Orwell Watch: Democracy Being Linked to Socialism
And from the New York Times:
Saturday Youtube – Mountain Top Removal Edition
I’ve always been a fan of the South. A culture based on beer, deer hunting, moralizing, sleeping around, coke for breakfast, and picnics of chilled fried chicken is right up my alley. I’ve known that MTR or mountain top removal was going on for a while, but I didn’t really pay attention until I saw that JP Morgan Chase was a key financial backer of Massey Energy, one of the major MTR miners in West Virginia. Coal’s place in the economy and culture of the mid-Atlantic South is rooted in the Earth’s period of high-oxygen levels about 300 million years ago:
We know why oxygen went up for the first time on land—plants grew into great trees that filled out into planet-spanning forests. As the trees toppled, and topple they did with great regularity, since roots had not yet modernized and all plants of the Carboniferous were less securely rooted, large quantities of organic material were quickly buried before decomposing. In our world, microbes quickly attack felled trees, and the process of decomposition uses oxygen. But 300 million years ago, lignin, the hard parts of trees, was only newly evolved, and microbes of the time had not yet evolved the trick of breaking down this new material. The consequence was the Coal Age.
But enough background.
Toxic West Virginia: Mountaintop Removal- Episode 1
Mountaintop Removal Movie from iLoveMountains.org
Mountaintop Removal Mining
Mountaintop Removal in Kentucky
Tennessee Ernie Ford – 16 Tons
Tim McGraw – Southern Voice
Saturday Youtube – Jubilee Edition
I have right around 450K in debt with minimum payments of about $5,000/month. I also have an income of approximately 0$/month. You don’t need to be Aristotle to figure out that the payments are not being made and the debt will never be paid back. My example is perhaps extreme, but the level of household debt relative to income in the United States is completely out of whack. I posted this chart a few days ago, but it shows a steady increase in the amount of household debt relative to income since the end of WWII, with an almost apocalyptic acceleration starting around 2000.
With that as background, and with this post from libertarian and tea party member WC Varones discussing a debt jubilee favorably, here are a few youtube videos making the case for a biblical style debt jubilee by probably the only economist I know that argues for it:
Six Minutes with the Renegade Economist – Michael Hudson Special…
Banks Want Control of Society Via Debt Slavery
Michael Hudson 1-2 Iceland Under Attack
Nine Inch Nails – Head Like a Hole
angryfutureexpat
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