THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT.
The brilliant biologist and TV star is a direct inspiration to me. Saving the wild lands we have left is the only cause I have left, and that has taken a beating this year. But Sir David has been criticized before for failing to use his plummy pulpit to make a stand, or educate the public about the imminence and permanence of total ecological destruction, and our failures to stop it. He has recently responded, and to his credit has stirred himself admirably, issuing public warnings.
Consider then, how painful, but necessary, it is to criticize him again. This brilliant man deserves better than to end his career as a shill for disaster capitalism, a useful idiot, a coddled/addled TV star pitchman, or maybe hedge fund grifter — how about sincerely befuddled do-gooder, who has been trained to talk by the PBS (BBC) fundraisers.
The point is to resume our laypersons’ discussion of Hamiltonian finance (the American system) versus Modern Monetary Theory. Which you and I, Patient Reader, get to work out as much as anyone on Earth, so here goes the critique:
Only a fool would turn to Wall Street to save nature.
Whatever one’s individual understanding of money has been, from “why ain’t I got none?” to “a penny saved is a penny earned” to “time to make the donuts” to “my portfolio is perfectly balanced,” it’s important, as a citizen if not for yourself, to realize that it doesn’t work like that anymore. Everything any one of us has tried to believe about money and finances and taxes and work and success, is now garbage. The President of the United States, the famous billionaire who runs the show, has no money and doesn’t pay his taxes and has wrecked our economy in a way that more money can’t help. That isn’t stopping Trump from deluging the banks of the world with $Bucks$. The Trump-appointed chimp at the Federal Reserve, Mr. Powell, is printing money to speculate on Wall Street stocks, pumping it out by the hour to cover losses on the downside so it can keep inflating the upside. (The terrifying idea of inflation — to tame which Central Banks were formed — and which we have been trained all of our lives to see as Satan — is now finally revealed to be totally meaningless, a trick to gull the rubes, a bug-bear or hobgoblin left over from J.P. Morgan’s gold-hoarding view of the world. Also inflation’s deadly eternal “other shoe,” austerity, that lie that civic budgets must be pinch-penny managed and starved of funds, cutting even the few workers on public payrolls, to keep money “freed up” for “the economy” at a time of crisis. Both should have been chucked out with the gold standard.)
So, for money at all, all bets are off, and anyone including me who says he’s an expert is a liar, and next stop Cloudcuckooland. Still, Patient Reader, these imaginary digital trillions don’t just fly up into the ether and won’t be accounted away, not without Bernie Sanders. Phantom wealth must run to ground; it must yield returns downtown to be exchanged for hookers and blow in mid-town, and pay for the townhouse up-town. Thus there must be ever-soaring rents, more privatization of public services, more catastrophically rising health care costs, more militarized world police, ever-higher college tuition even though nobody is there, more barren acres of sprawl, and more carbon consumed, consumed, consumed. Why would Sir David want all that?
Fallacy of The Organic Theory of Money: Sir David, a naturalist, naturally believes there is a crisis, and with money always so terribly scarce, and now especially, he is calling out the people, through their parliaments assembled, to rummage in their cupboards for old silver clippings, and put up special taxes and levies throughout the lands, and dig out those shavings of precious coin. In other words voted over by their Parliaments, by putting it in as a line-item in their always-stressed budgets, thus guaranteeing, or “backing” the creation of that money. By each putting up just a few silver coins each, each year, only a widow’s mite to some but all for the cause, eh? it could be Invested, he says into a special fund, all handled by the flash boys on Wall Street, which means it will breed returns; and the Fund will be sold to the public to attract new funds; and maybe need to be balanced with hedged securities. But anyway a giant treasure chest, like a bank, where the money created will keep earning compound interest forever and be able to spin off new funds to be circulated into the economy in ways that…save wild lands, whatever those are.
The fallacy is, the power of that money will be multiplied for the Wall Street boys, many times over; 10 times, at least, if they’re not cheating. All the imminent and permanent destruction of the world is being caused by the floods of money misapplied by feckless corporations and authoritarian despots. Wall Street will take Sir David’s Fund and use it to finance oil wells and prison labor camps and skyscrapers in Dubai. Sir David’s tiny pittance of 500 billion florins per year, government backed and soundly invested, will let the goons call their buddies at the Fed for 5 trillion more free ducats to buy up land and water systems and raise everybody’s rent by tearing down downtown to build more empty condos.
Frankly, tragically, Sir David has no business lending his golden credit to a call for more phantom wealth to be created by central banks, backed by bank-captive governments. The debt money trap is what finances the killing the world. Sir David should be telling us, solemnly, to look at our individual lives, our daily conscious decisions, the importance of reconnecting on a personal level to wild places, by loving and caring about them. Just like he’s always done.
He’s old and establishment; maybe he does believe money can solve our problem. But surely it’s also an old belief — an old establishment belief — that you can’t serve God and Mammon?
The Valley Village View 