Vnlr: good day everyone!
...
and appart from that there's not much going on in Belgium...Parliament wants to pass a law that will take away the money grants from people who are workless because they spend their time at home caring for a very ill relative, and they are also working on an act that will force people who retired early (often miners, workers in the steel industry etc... who were battered and incapable of further labor by the time they retired) to go back to work again.
capitalist swine, they should be strung up with rusty barbed wire >:(
I did go through two Insomnia sales, the first and the second, taking only short naps, trying taking part
in the festivities as an observer for historical purposes, but did wind up getting some games. heh And the
best part of the sale is the conversations and getting to know the people in the community in the threads...
Sad to hear of such things, a lot of the same going on all over Europe. It isn't Capitalism, its Fascism, or
Kleptocracy, Plutocracy or Oligarchy, Corporatists, take your pick of label(s), but what it is definitely not, is
Capitalism.
Capitalism is just applied theory, which revolves around the flow of capital and sustainability in manufacturing, and not a disposable kind of manufacturing like we have today. The flow of capital runs through society through employment and small business that provides goods and services that cycle through society where very little is wasted. As an example, you build a table, it is built to last. That table is bought, and used, and then will either need to be fixed at some point, or resold in a second hand market, giving jobs for craftspeople and resellers.
When it comes to finance, it is the same principle, where investments are made in long lasting ventures with the focus of sustainability through slow and steady growth, and speculation plays a small role in helping to raise capital to help business opportunities grow, to help advance the interests of society with innovations in technologies and in general advance the interests of mankind.
Instead, what we have in this age, is speculation being the primary vehicle for creating wealth from thin air, by creating toxic assets and originating debt, without capital to lend and value to back that debt up. They can borrow again and again, sometimes infinitely against something that has no collateral value, through reihypothification. Banks have been turned into "investment banks" tied into the Central Banks, which are printing money by the trillions and giving it to the bad banks at zero interest loans, and they don't lend it out to flow capital through society, instead they use it to turn over transactions with all the toxic assets.
In Capitalism, when speculators make bad bets (commit fraud and other crimes) they go bankrupt. Today, when they crash, they steal the wealth of society through bailouts, and soon will be confiscating the funds in savings accounts and seizing property, and then imposing those debts on the whole populations of countries through austerity measures and dismantling social programs.
All of this is unsustainable of course, but you can expect nothing less than blind greed from the Interests of Business. In the end it will be up to the people to rise up and clean up this mess, hopefully through peaceful means...