Video

The American Dream smh

people can change, it just happens slowly and feels painfully slow once one sees solutions that most don't

I think you'll find that it was heavily edited and very well done as well...

She is a translator. The parts where she is speaking to the audience have been edited out.

well said

The answer to that would be that the profit is of less interest to speculators than the value of the stocks and bonds (debt value). Speculators don't care about sustainability. They care about their cocaine habits. And they have a lot of influence over policy. They want to buy low in the morning and sell high a few hours later. That's also why student loan forgiveness in the US has not been forthcoming - the gamblers in the bond market don't want to be the last fool holding the hot potato just before we all admit that these things will NEVER get paid.

Colonel Panic It's not so much that a given company has to grow. The owners might like it to, but companies shrink and grow and merge and acquire and spin off and downsize and go bust constantly. What's necessary in the capitalist mode of production is that the system as a whole must grow, and it must do so at a rate attractive to capital. That is, it must provide a pretty sure prospect of profit. Otherwise, the capitalist has no motive to put his money into production, and value stops moving through the system, which is to say that the economy slows or stops. Unfortunately, this includes traffic in the necessary means of life, things like food and pharmaceuticals. So under the current arrangement, the supply of life's necessities depends on an economic system that always grows. Growth in real terms means growth in production and consumption of real stuff-- commodities. A good proxy for all of that is energy consumption. A growing economy happens to be one in which energy consumption is expanding year on year. That's an important side note. Professor Harvey also uses concrete production in China as an example of the scope and scale of economic growth today. What capital finds to be a healthy rate of growth is neighborhood of 3% annually. This means the economy doubles in size roughly every 25 years. So when anyone talks about sustainable growth at profitable rates, all we have to do is look at the size of the global economy in 2020 and ask ourselves if it is physically possible to double it in size, that is, double its production and consumption of material goods, because that is the proposition-- double it by 2045. Suppose we're cornucopian optimists, and we say sure, let's double it. Now it's 2045, and we need to double it again by 2070, and again by 2095, and again by 2120. So in order to sustain capitalism, we'll require the global capitalist economy a century from now to be 16 times the size it is today. At some point, you run into physical limits. There's only so much coal to burn and concrete and steel to make, and so on. There's only so much pounding the environment will take before industry destroys the conditions necessary for its own existence. To understand exponential growth, you just calculate how long it takes the thing to double and start doing your powers of two, and at some point, anyone sane has to admit that the world is only so big. This is the simple math nobody will face. And that's because putting the traffic in basic life necessities on some basis other than profit motive, decoupling human survival from growth, means taking control of the necessary means of life away from the most powerful group of human beings that has ever existed. That's what it means when we say let's base the economy on something besides growth.

Colonel Panic TLDR: it literally means taking private property away from the owners of it.