Good on you Niall, having connections like these to on-board is awesome.
It was what you said (pasted below) that blew me away. I have followed blogs like ZeroHedge (Austrian biased) for years and these words had no right to surprise me. Once my eyes could see, I found myself walking round my city in amazement at all the symbology that is embedded in architecture, business logos and my State Parliament…covered in Sun hieroglyphics as was some churches… whoa there!
I need to change my view on the world constantly, when new information comes to light. I cant imagine what will come to light post SAFE…some of those Vatican documents and books would be good
Could you recommend any sources that would help reinforce the information you provided here? Maybe some Martin Armstrong/ Michael Ruppert in there?
Thanks
This is a common viewpoint. It’s more interesting than simple displacement of people by automation though. If you look at what economists call “the participation rate” which is the total percentage of the population involved in money earning activities, it’s been trending down in all western nations for some years now as more baby boomer retire and more young people wisely delay buying into the very bad economic deal on the table for them, which is why there is such high and rising youth unemployment.
Where things get much more interesting is that the exact same thing happened as the Roman Empire went into decline - fewer and fewer people earned their keep over time, and instead were sustained by those in power for various political and power reasons.
Similarly, why Egypt and many of the Middle Eastern countries recently collapsed is also due to the consequences of repeatedly buying sections of population off instead of creating use for them.
Basically, it’s always easier to kick the can down the road and buy off trouble. So that’s what those in charge do. Increment that over time and before you know it a third of the population aren’t doing anything useful, and the merry go round stops turning.
Those in charge of the US are well aware of this phenomenon of course, and that’s why there has been such a concerted push since the 1970s to keep the US looking more like a developing country with huge wealth inequalities with very weak social supports.
The idea is to maintain US preeminence by always remaining a developing country. And maybe that might work if there wasn’t such an enormous disguised and renamed welfare state in the US, though if that were also removed I would doubt anyone would want much to live or work there any more than Westerners would wish to emigrate to Nigeria for its economic opportunities (which are legion BTW, and many in Africa do emigrate there due to how much money one can make, but equally there is almost zero state support for you if you are unlucky in life and most Westerners would prefer few opportunities and security instead).
There is also the effect of private pension funding which has stopped working and has had huge consequences on how the workplace hires. Basically Bretton Woods set up a formula where a portion of wages was forcibly reinvested into the same companies via pension funds which was a way of renaming profits to avoid tax.
That works and inflates your stockmarket bubble so long as more is paid in than removed. Once more people retire than pay in, you get Japan where their stagflation began at around the same time people began to retire in number.
Much of the recent necessity to print money to inflate stockmarkets via quantitative easing is really about reducing the size of private pension funds i.e. transferring value away from old people to elsewhere in society. Sucks for those who “saved” all that money though because it’s being intentionally inflated away - that is what quantitative easing means.
Equally, the money never really existed anyway, it was a chimera. The only real old age provision comes either out of work or out of taxes as welfare as it always has done, and the long term picture on that - ignoring fossil fuels running out - truly is appalling.
The fixes to all this are all easy in the technical sense, but politically impossible without severe social dislocation. Fossil fuels running out would have been a good excuse for imposing autocracy, but those in power tend to greatly dislike having to get their hands dirty, despite what movies and books would have you believe. The vast majority like to tell themselves they do good for humanity, and that is hard to do when you’re squashing dissent. Makes it hard to sleep well at night you know