You are not wrong, you just left something big out, ecological degradation. Globally our economies have extracted renewable natural resources at a faster rate than they can replace themselves. The economy is dependent on the ecosystems within which in operates. Now this system is global. Degradation arises because we have allowed corporations (producers of goods) to externalize the costs and internalize the profits. Unregulated capitalism ignores or deliberately destroys the underlying source of materials and labor that are the main inputs of the good produced. Inflation is a function of demand and scarcity, which corporations can manipulate to their advantage. Remember that the economy has four inputs: capital (the only thing corporations care about); labor, which is a cost capitalists always try to minimize; resources, including renewable and non-renewable items like timber and steel; and energy, which has its own externalized cost known as climate change. Inflation is caused, at least in part, by the reduction in supply of these resources because corporations don't replace what they extract, and they refuse to acknowledge the damage their extraction and energy use cause.
It has always bothered me that the cost to the environment is never factored in the true cost of things. I respect how Bhutan measures DGP in happiness. We should be doing somethin akin to that when factoring the cost of things. Oil is WAY more expensive than 5 bucks a gallon.
You got it right. Real time, one-to-one mitigation of EVERY TAKE never occurred. WE not only drained the swamps, we were blind to the exponential ripple effect of putting round pegs in square holes. This is greed and avarcie posing as a meme in phoney economics. The only economy is ecology. Capitalism is a Giant Parasite, and its huge belly is the Oligarchy. Capitalism cannot survive its appetite. When slime mold has eaten all else, it eats itself. Loren Eisely stated this unequivably more than 50 years ago. Commoner stated, flat out, that consumptions produces garbage, and when it comes to getting rid of it, there is no there - there, or anywhere else. Humans have abandoned any pretense of ethics. There is no ethical or moral compass. Ecology - parasitism, commensalism, mutualism. Only one guarantees survival. We are on the wrong end of this menu, and the cooks have left the kitchen. This is real economy, and we are not There. We are nowhere, in the Land of Oz. Now, we are so fucked.
Wayne, one correction to that. Timber IS a renewable resource. I come from timber country in the Pacific Northwest and when managed properly timber is harvested every 40-60 years. Unfortunately it's way more profitable for timber companies to export raw logs to Asia rather than supporting local mills and communities.
I remember whey they clearcutted all the old growth forests that werent protected and sold the logs to Japan for a pittance so that Japan could sink them in water and save them for later. Real f@&$king smart🙄
I think this is an important expansion of Jeremy’s argument because it points to something deeper than inflation alone.
The economy is not separate from ecology. It depends entirely on healthy soils, water systems, forests, energy, biodiversity, and stable climate conditions. Yet much of modern economic growth has come from extracting these systems faster than they can recover, while corporations keep the profits and society absorbs the long term costs.
So in many ways, what gets called “growth” is often the depletion of the very systems future prosperity depends on.
I also think this helps explain why so many people feel something is fundamentally wrong even when stock markets are doing well. Financial wealth can rise while communities become less stable, resources become more scarce, and everyday life becomes more expensive and fragile.
At some point the economy has to be measured not only by profit and consumption, but by whether it is actually supporting long term collective well being and maintaining the living systems upon which all economies ultimately depend.
Completely agree. Waking folks up to this fatal flaw has been my life's work. It is truly insane to believe we can extract ceaselessly on a planet of finite resources. We will, by choice or by force, move toward a restoration economy. I'm working on (another) piece about that right now.
Youre right - extraction and the using up of Natural resources - our water, forests, public lands, the extinction of our wildlife and the destruction of their habitat. And all of those are far more important than fossil fuels.
I am 86 years old. When I was a toddler my mother paid 5 cents for a loaf of bread. When I was 6 my father bought a 4 bedroom home for $15,000. It isn't just inflation, it is enslavement of the population by corporations and the wealthy. Soon all children will have to work too so the family can eat.
I am 76 and agree with you. Encouraging people to get into debt over their heads locks them into the treadmill. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Gamblers and their cronies continue to loot the US Treasury - and have begun playing the game at the Federal level you see writ large in the current stock market: Look, we can sell US debt paper worldwide! Wow, look how much money we can move into our pockets. AND we will make the serfs pay for it!
Just a sidebar that I keep returning to: We have not faced how structurally deficient our Constitution is. It is easily taken over by special interests who have discovered how immune they are from the democratic process. President Eisenhower and Admiral Rickover spoke about these issues after WWII and it has come to pass. The Arms Dealers and the Wall Street Gamblers have become far more brazen about looting the US Treasury than either gentleman envisioned. I submit we will not really get past this without developing some reliable method of amending our Constitution to correct its weaknesses and make it small 'd' more democratic. Underneath the noise, the labels, the fingerpointing, yadda, yadda, is the tax revenue and finding ways to put those monies into their pockets that holds the looters attention.
If one wanted to paddle back to the headwaters — the source of 90% of human caused problems — it is the profit motive. Gain for the few at the expense of the many (or the environment). Incarnated in its two basic manifestations: Democratic Neoliberalism or Republican Neoconservatism. So long as we are stuck there, we will continue toward demise.
Unfortunately, changing the above is likely a multi-generational process. Not sure we’ll survive long enough to make the transition.
——————————
A clarification regarding the national debt matter: we don’t *owe* anybody 39 trillion dollars. We have a debt-based currency system. “National Debt” is simply our money supply. It is not supposed to be “paid back” otherwise there’d be no circulating money. Thirty nine trillion is simply the measure of current economic activity. The critical question (as Corbin points out elsewhere) is what are the funds being spent *on*? Are they fueling necessary commerce and meeting the true needs of the country, or are they going largely to further enrich individuals and corporations who already control too much wealth. The latter results in deficits and is that which is currently destroying our country and world.
Unfortunately it is going to take a bloody, vicious revolution to change things. Get ready for the torches and pitchforks. I am not saying we should do that, as everyone will suffer, only that it seems to be the only way to get the overlords to pay attention.
You continue to get it right. There are so many threads to this. An example of how we tend to look at problems through a narrow lens is this article from Oregon. It points out the companies where employees are on SNAP benefits, mentions the hourly wages and lack of taxes that the companies pay but it ignores everything that you are talking about that exacerbate people's financial situations. There are the other costs of living; housing, medical care & insurance, high college debts, car ownership dependence, etc. We need more people and media to be connecting these dots. Here is the article: https://lincolnchronicle.org/oregonians-using-snap-benefits-most-frequently-listed-big-grocery-retail-companies-as-employer/
Suppose the Dems take both houses in 2026. Do you actually believe the party has the vision to do what you propose? I mean, this is the party of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
Beautifully reasoned and written. Problems. We are overbuilt right now. We are over-consuming at a rate at least 20 times what is needed to keep the average human being healthy and viable. Comeptition is not the weather either. It is just bolemia. Eat and puke. That is the top 20 percent. Starve to death? That is the bottom 80, as you say. So the oligarchy gives us edible cardboard, laced with toxins. The REAL WEATHER is the threat Corbin. Capitlaism will ENSURE, not insure, Earth's biologic extinction. One tapeworm in the gut, unckecked by a healthy diet and self-awareness, will kill an organism. Slime mold, as Eisely pointed out 50 some years ago, will eat its host, and then itself. Suicide for lunch. Corbin, you have your finger on the pulse of Earth death, not Earth Life. All of us are immersed in Addiction, not one or two, but thousands of off ramps away from continuity and mutual healthy survival. Humans master one activity, One Agency, as you say -- Killing. Self and Others. Killing. We run away in fear from self death, only to run into the Black Hole of Extinction. Suicide For Lunch. Leadership now, and for centuries, has Always been Out To Lunch, tapeworms and cancers and rabid Honey Badgers, paranoid to the Nth degree. Addicted, hoarding junkies with hyper-violent tendencies they carry out with Proxies. Deranged is too kind a word. Answers? I have none that tapeworms would endorse. My answer - look into a mirror until you either collapse in shame, or swallow the Blue Pill.
The tenets of capitalism have been cleverly woven into another myth, 'Rugged Individualism'. One wants to be a self-reliant individual because that is supposed to be the best kind of individual. I listen to people argue for the current system as the only real, true, American way. Many of them are living on the raw edge. People would rather keep these self-destructive myths alive than admit the problem is the myths and why they are told. Especially why they are told. You simply cannot be self-reliant if you hold no power. And we are not powerful without each other.
This post sounds a great deal like some of Corbin's own ideas - great minds, right?
""It doesn't have to be this way. When private utilities refused to electrify rural America because the margins weren't good enough, Franklin Roosevelt didn't hand them public land and tax breaks and hope for the best. He offered two models, and both worked. The Tennessee Valley Authority was built, owned, and operated by the government — public power for the public good, still running today. The Rural Electrification Administration loaned federal dollars to locally owned cooperatives, built and governed by the communities they served. Those co-ops still provide electricity to 42 million Americans. In both cases, the infrastructure got built. In neither case did the profits go to wealthy shareholders. The public needed something. The private sector wouldn't provide it on fair terms. So FDR said the hell with them — and the public did it itself, and kept what it built.""
Thank you Corbin, these are some of the most important essays of our time in the U.S. I hope the midterms change the political landscape. And I hope that the MAGA opposition gets the memo: no elite business as usual. If it doesn't, there are other countries folks. Germany. Ireland. Uruguay. Panama. Sweden. A mixed group, but you can find something you like and that is more truly progressive than anything the U.S. has demonstrated so far. Pick a spot where the oceans moderate climate change. Learn to use crypto so you can protect yourself from bank failures and gouging.
And I sure hope to see some of the centrists debate with Corbin.
You are not wrong, you just left something big out, ecological degradation. Globally our economies have extracted renewable natural resources at a faster rate than they can replace themselves. The economy is dependent on the ecosystems within which in operates. Now this system is global. Degradation arises because we have allowed corporations (producers of goods) to externalize the costs and internalize the profits. Unregulated capitalism ignores or deliberately destroys the underlying source of materials and labor that are the main inputs of the good produced. Inflation is a function of demand and scarcity, which corporations can manipulate to their advantage. Remember that the economy has four inputs: capital (the only thing corporations care about); labor, which is a cost capitalists always try to minimize; resources, including renewable and non-renewable items like timber and steel; and energy, which has its own externalized cost known as climate change. Inflation is caused, at least in part, by the reduction in supply of these resources because corporations don't replace what they extract, and they refuse to acknowledge the damage their extraction and energy use cause.
It has always bothered me that the cost to the environment is never factored in the true cost of things. I respect how Bhutan measures DGP in happiness. We should be doing somethin akin to that when factoring the cost of things. Oil is WAY more expensive than 5 bucks a gallon.
You got it right. Real time, one-to-one mitigation of EVERY TAKE never occurred. WE not only drained the swamps, we were blind to the exponential ripple effect of putting round pegs in square holes. This is greed and avarcie posing as a meme in phoney economics. The only economy is ecology. Capitalism is a Giant Parasite, and its huge belly is the Oligarchy. Capitalism cannot survive its appetite. When slime mold has eaten all else, it eats itself. Loren Eisely stated this unequivably more than 50 years ago. Commoner stated, flat out, that consumptions produces garbage, and when it comes to getting rid of it, there is no there - there, or anywhere else. Humans have abandoned any pretense of ethics. There is no ethical or moral compass. Ecology - parasitism, commensalism, mutualism. Only one guarantees survival. We are on the wrong end of this menu, and the cooks have left the kitchen. This is real economy, and we are not There. We are nowhere, in the Land of Oz. Now, we are so fucked.
Wayne, one correction to that. Timber IS a renewable resource. I come from timber country in the Pacific Northwest and when managed properly timber is harvested every 40-60 years. Unfortunately it's way more profitable for timber companies to export raw logs to Asia rather than supporting local mills and communities.
I remember whey they clearcutted all the old growth forests that werent protected and sold the logs to Japan for a pittance so that Japan could sink them in water and save them for later. Real f@&$king smart🙄
I think this is an important expansion of Jeremy’s argument because it points to something deeper than inflation alone.
The economy is not separate from ecology. It depends entirely on healthy soils, water systems, forests, energy, biodiversity, and stable climate conditions. Yet much of modern economic growth has come from extracting these systems faster than they can recover, while corporations keep the profits and society absorbs the long term costs.
So in many ways, what gets called “growth” is often the depletion of the very systems future prosperity depends on.
I also think this helps explain why so many people feel something is fundamentally wrong even when stock markets are doing well. Financial wealth can rise while communities become less stable, resources become more scarce, and everyday life becomes more expensive and fragile.
At some point the economy has to be measured not only by profit and consumption, but by whether it is actually supporting long term collective well being and maintaining the living systems upon which all economies ultimately depend.
Completely agree. Waking folks up to this fatal flaw has been my life's work. It is truly insane to believe we can extract ceaselessly on a planet of finite resources. We will, by choice or by force, move toward a restoration economy. I'm working on (another) piece about that right now.
Youre right - extraction and the using up of Natural resources - our water, forests, public lands, the extinction of our wildlife and the destruction of their habitat. And all of those are far more important than fossil fuels.
I am 86 years old. When I was a toddler my mother paid 5 cents for a loaf of bread. When I was 6 my father bought a 4 bedroom home for $15,000. It isn't just inflation, it is enslavement of the population by corporations and the wealthy. Soon all children will have to work too so the family can eat.
I am 76 and agree with you. Encouraging people to get into debt over their heads locks them into the treadmill. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Gamblers and their cronies continue to loot the US Treasury - and have begun playing the game at the Federal level you see writ large in the current stock market: Look, we can sell US debt paper worldwide! Wow, look how much money we can move into our pockets. AND we will make the serfs pay for it!
Wow! What a great game!
Thank you. It is a game that will end someday and it won't be pretty!
You're not wrong about any of this. I graduated in 1979 and I've watched this happen and lived with the consequences.
Just a sidebar that I keep returning to: We have not faced how structurally deficient our Constitution is. It is easily taken over by special interests who have discovered how immune they are from the democratic process. President Eisenhower and Admiral Rickover spoke about these issues after WWII and it has come to pass. The Arms Dealers and the Wall Street Gamblers have become far more brazen about looting the US Treasury than either gentleman envisioned. I submit we will not really get past this without developing some reliable method of amending our Constitution to correct its weaknesses and make it small 'd' more democratic. Underneath the noise, the labels, the fingerpointing, yadda, yadda, is the tax revenue and finding ways to put those monies into their pockets that holds the looters attention.
💯 I find myself using that word "enslavement" EVERY day when talking about our system. You are so right!
If one wanted to paddle back to the headwaters — the source of 90% of human caused problems — it is the profit motive. Gain for the few at the expense of the many (or the environment). Incarnated in its two basic manifestations: Democratic Neoliberalism or Republican Neoconservatism. So long as we are stuck there, we will continue toward demise.
Unfortunately, changing the above is likely a multi-generational process. Not sure we’ll survive long enough to make the transition.
——————————
A clarification regarding the national debt matter: we don’t *owe* anybody 39 trillion dollars. We have a debt-based currency system. “National Debt” is simply our money supply. It is not supposed to be “paid back” otherwise there’d be no circulating money. Thirty nine trillion is simply the measure of current economic activity. The critical question (as Corbin points out elsewhere) is what are the funds being spent *on*? Are they fueling necessary commerce and meeting the true needs of the country, or are they going largely to further enrich individuals and corporations who already control too much wealth. The latter results in deficits and is that which is currently destroying our country and world.
Unfortunately it is going to take a bloody, vicious revolution to change things. Get ready for the torches and pitchforks. I am not saying we should do that, as everyone will suffer, only that it seems to be the only way to get the overlords to pay attention.
You continue to get it right. There are so many threads to this. An example of how we tend to look at problems through a narrow lens is this article from Oregon. It points out the companies where employees are on SNAP benefits, mentions the hourly wages and lack of taxes that the companies pay but it ignores everything that you are talking about that exacerbate people's financial situations. There are the other costs of living; housing, medical care & insurance, high college debts, car ownership dependence, etc. We need more people and media to be connecting these dots. Here is the article: https://lincolnchronicle.org/oregonians-using-snap-benefits-most-frequently-listed-big-grocery-retail-companies-as-employer/
Suppose the Dems take both houses in 2026. Do you actually believe the party has the vision to do what you propose? I mean, this is the party of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
Beautifully reasoned and written. Problems. We are overbuilt right now. We are over-consuming at a rate at least 20 times what is needed to keep the average human being healthy and viable. Comeptition is not the weather either. It is just bolemia. Eat and puke. That is the top 20 percent. Starve to death? That is the bottom 80, as you say. So the oligarchy gives us edible cardboard, laced with toxins. The REAL WEATHER is the threat Corbin. Capitlaism will ENSURE, not insure, Earth's biologic extinction. One tapeworm in the gut, unckecked by a healthy diet and self-awareness, will kill an organism. Slime mold, as Eisely pointed out 50 some years ago, will eat its host, and then itself. Suicide for lunch. Corbin, you have your finger on the pulse of Earth death, not Earth Life. All of us are immersed in Addiction, not one or two, but thousands of off ramps away from continuity and mutual healthy survival. Humans master one activity, One Agency, as you say -- Killing. Self and Others. Killing. We run away in fear from self death, only to run into the Black Hole of Extinction. Suicide For Lunch. Leadership now, and for centuries, has Always been Out To Lunch, tapeworms and cancers and rabid Honey Badgers, paranoid to the Nth degree. Addicted, hoarding junkies with hyper-violent tendencies they carry out with Proxies. Deranged is too kind a word. Answers? I have none that tapeworms would endorse. My answer - look into a mirror until you either collapse in shame, or swallow the Blue Pill.
Capitalism is the problem, and money in politics.
FYI: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/opinion/artificial-intelligence-bernie-sanders.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nFA.zERQ.oL75SfMI2gUT&smid=url-share
This is critically important to talk about. Thank you.
The tenets of capitalism have been cleverly woven into another myth, 'Rugged Individualism'. One wants to be a self-reliant individual because that is supposed to be the best kind of individual. I listen to people argue for the current system as the only real, true, American way. Many of them are living on the raw edge. People would rather keep these self-destructive myths alive than admit the problem is the myths and why they are told. Especially why they are told. You simply cannot be self-reliant if you hold no power. And we are not powerful without each other.
This post sounds a great deal like some of Corbin's own ideas - great minds, right?
""It doesn't have to be this way. When private utilities refused to electrify rural America because the margins weren't good enough, Franklin Roosevelt didn't hand them public land and tax breaks and hope for the best. He offered two models, and both worked. The Tennessee Valley Authority was built, owned, and operated by the government — public power for the public good, still running today. The Rural Electrification Administration loaned federal dollars to locally owned cooperatives, built and governed by the communities they served. Those co-ops still provide electricity to 42 million Americans. In both cases, the infrastructure got built. In neither case did the profits go to wealthy shareholders. The public needed something. The private sector wouldn't provide it on fair terms. So FDR said the hell with them — and the public did it itself, and kept what it built.""
https://morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/the-great-data-center-swindle
Thank you Corbin, these are some of the most important essays of our time in the U.S. I hope the midterms change the political landscape. And I hope that the MAGA opposition gets the memo: no elite business as usual. If it doesn't, there are other countries folks. Germany. Ireland. Uruguay. Panama. Sweden. A mixed group, but you can find something you like and that is more truly progressive than anything the U.S. has demonstrated so far. Pick a spot where the oceans moderate climate change. Learn to use crypto so you can protect yourself from bank failures and gouging.
And I sure hope to see some of the centrists debate with Corbin.