Obama’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently said, “We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation… or one year of 10% unemployment.”

In response, here’s Brad Pitt in The Big Short: “You know what I hate about fucking banking it reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number. Every 1% unemployment goes up 40,000 people die. Did you know that?”

Summers is saying America needs to kill 1 million people over five years or 400,000 people immediately, not sure how his math works out. Honestly, I wouldn’t even call it math. It’s just a high priest of the state religion the empire calls economics, calling for more human sacrifice.

God knows the pyre is heaped high enough. Over 1 million Americans dead from COVID, plus the tens of millions globally so pharma companies could have monopoly profits. All sacrificed for ‘the economy’, a conception as inchoate as Ba’al. Millions of Muslims droned, tortured, and starved to death, as sacrifice to the war gods Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

100 million debt slaves offered up to the perverse gods of health, the average household over $100,000 in debt to the financial temples. An entire country dead, dying, or enslaved, an entire planet burning in sacrifice to the god of growth, and still the White Gods want more. As Frank Ocean sang,

If it brings me to my knees
It’s a bad religion

Tolstoy called it in when he compared Economics (then called Political Economy) to a modern religion. He said:

“Soon, on this theme as many books and pamphlets were written and lectures delivered as there had been treatises written and religious sermons preached on the former theme, and still unceasingly mountains of pamphlets and books are being written and lectures are being delivered; and all these books and lectures are as cloudy and unintelligible as the theological treatises and the sermons, and they, too, like the theological treatises, fully achieve their appointed purpose, i.e. they give such an explanation of the existing order of things as justifies some people in tranquilly refraining from labour and in utilizing the labour of others.”

Like temple priests living off the grain of others, fat cats like Larry Summers and economists in general (the richest, whitest, and malest of all PhD programs) conveniently discover a philosophy of life that justifies them having the working class having not. Nevermind that the basic assumptions of western economics are widely unproven, they carry on like alchemists whose periodic table doesn’t even work. Also never mind the completely different experiences of economists in places like China, that’s communism, which doesn’t count as economics at all. Because it actually considers working people, and that’s heretical.

Even today, when there is obvious profiteering from energy companies, pharma companies, the entire healthcare ‘industry’, the financial sector, and all the people that crashed the economy before, even today the call is for human sacrifice, never corporate. As Tolstoy said:

“The cause of this evidently unjust assertion is that those who have formulated, and who are formulating, the laws of science belong to the well-to-do classes, and are so accustomed to the conditions, advantageous for themselves, among which they live, that they do not admit the thought that society could exist under other conditions.”

And yet the fact is that society can exist under other conditions. Goods like healthcare, transportation, food, and shelter can be supplied publicly. We can all get together and take care of each other. Companies can be prevented from price gouging and endless share buybacks, or simply privatized. Prices can be controlled, as they indeed were in America during and even after World War II, and which iconoclastic economists like Isabella Weber have proposed now.

The fact is also that human sacrifice doesn’t work. There is no simple correlation between high unemployment and low inflation. These aren’t just levers you pull. You can’t even test the correlation because it’s too wildly unethical, people would fucking die. Yet this is taken seriously as a policy recommendation, to be deployed on entire populations.

The fact is that inflation is just a measure of an economy seizing up, and given that ‘an economy’ is just a vague label for ‘everything people do involving money’, inflation has a lot of causes. Rather than taking a holistic look at an economy as having people in it, and those people living in a planet, these fuckers sacrifice both humans and the entire Earth to make a line go up in their economic charts. It’s no better than astrology, and far more bloodthirsty than anything the ancients came up with.

Motherfuckers out here calling for the poor to just die and calling it economics. It’s indistinguishable from human sacrifice. Which still doesn’t work and is still evil, however bloodlessly you do it now. Ghouls like Larry Summers and international hitmen like the IMF circulate this pablum like it’s holy law when it’s not. It’s just the naked law of power, God’s most detested sin of harming the poor. It’s time to whip some cords together and scourge these peddlers of human sacrifice out.