Imperialist Economics 101

Under a fractional reserve monetery system: inflation causes prices to swallow savings, and deflation causes defaults. Both are bad. The reason for this is that in a fractional reserve system debt is always larger than the money available to pay that debt. This means that if the banks don’t continue to expand the money supply people will default and if they do continue to expand the money supply then prices will rise, and swallow up the savings. (It is important to note that this wouldn't happen in a full reserve system, because a full reserve system means that debt is never larger then amount of money available to pay that debt.When fractional reserve is done to other countries most smart people called it neo-imperialism, when the Fed does it here they call it Keynesianism or progressivism.



Robert Hass's poem, Ezra Pound's Proposition, is rather stunning in the way it presents the invisible connections between International finance and prostitution.


Robert Hass:

Ezra Pound's Proposition

from Vol. 36 No. 5

Beauty is sexuality, and sexuality
is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
"How about a party, big guy?"

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam’s great turbine, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detriot, financed
by Lazard Freres in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Fransisco
or Halliburton in Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.



 

Occupy Wall Street revisited: ideas in conflict.

Don't forget the dream of occupy walls street: to make a true alliance against the two main modes of empire; the Corporation, and the State. Most people are starting to understand that these two things are linked, but It seems that very few people understand the impossibility of corporate power apart from the state. The State is the monopoly of force. The corporation is a legal entity contracted, sustained, and defended by the State. Who does Black Water call when it's systems get hacked? One of the major pit falls of the ill faited occupy Wall Street, in my opinion, was its unwillingness to address the role of progressivism in the very formation of the Corporation. The Corporation as we know it today arose from the kinds of public works programs and progressivist policies one sees in F.D.R.'s New Deal. The corporate charter was penned in order to lower the burden (responsibility) of corporations so that they could produce more jobs for the working class. But it wasn't just the progressivis that refused to see the pit falls of there ideology, the Libertarian wing of the movement had even harder internal conflicts to deal with.

                                         How progressive are the interment camps?

No Doubt the Progessivist wing had a few blind spots, but they weren't the only ones protesting wall Street. It was Libertarians like Peter Schiff and Ron Paul, who most accurately predicted both the coase and the nature of the 2007 finical crises, but alas, they where unable to reach out to the people hardest hit by the crises, because of their opposition to the kind of government ad that this population has come to depend on, larglely do to sustemic problems with both wings of politics. Thus came the re-emergence of Marxism in the occupy movment. No Doubt Marxism is sexy, although I fail to see how 1x1=1 could salve the real world problems we find our selves in today. I do owe a debt of gratitude to Marx for inspiring a number of my own direct influences; Guy Debord, and Herbert Marcuse to name a few--"Zizek will put you in gulag!"...[[one of the most glaring, yet unanounced, conflicts between Zizek and the occupy wall street movement is Zizek's concept of the "Big other." For Zizek the "Big other" is an imagened conspiracy that limits our ability to enjoy pleaser, the 1% is an example of the "Big other" only for occupers the 1% is real. This aperint contradiction with the movment didn't stop Zizek from capitalizing on the movement though.]] It was occupy Wall Street that got me seeking out these Marxist types. There is a lot of veriety in Maxist thinking. But really, what does a credit bubble have to do with labor value? It does, albeit in an indirect way, the Fed prints money to keep pace with the debt they make possible, which leads to inflation, which widens the gap between wages and the cost of living, which increases the working classes dependence on credit, starting the whole process over again. Each time this process is repeated the working class gets more in debt to the "capitalists.” See Richard Wolf,When Capitalism hit the Fan, for a more detailed alyises. Richard Wolf thought he came up with a radical new theory, What he doesn't seem to realize is his thoery depends on the kind of credit critique that was pioneered by the Austrian school economists like, Friedrich August Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. Marx doesn’t address the calculation issue, which is the core problem of bubbles, overproduction is one of the major contributors to bubbals. One way that Marxism could solve this problem is by putting the power of "market" planning in the hands of the consumers themselves, and sense workers are also consumers this could be done at the factory level. Worker counsels that make only what they need, pace Guy Debored, and/or anarcho-syndicalism. But that’s not really what the current wave of Marxists like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou are calling for, those guys are Trotskyite globalists that just want to incress global codependency. In the end the issues that divided all these groups to begin with proved to be insurmountable to make a true opposition to the status-quo, and the open form made space for all manner of washed up old ideology. In the process of examining all these political philosophies I've come to realize something though. The State is primarily concerned with controlling the means of production, in our case the State has handed over that control to the Corporations, through land grants, production contracts, legal immunity, money laundering privilege, I couldn't list all the ways the government makes corporate corruption possible. We can't forget that this handing over is no lose to the State its self, the State and the Corporation are made up of the same people, the Corporation is powerless without the State and the State is even more powerful with the Corporation as a mechanism of manipulation and rescores extraction. Government services, the benevolent arm of the State, is just a way to keep its host alive while it sucks its vital life blood. The means of production, and the land it is made from, does not belong to the Government. It belongs to the people, and the plants and animals that inhabit it. It is only though a monopoly of force, and contral of vital resources that the Government is able to continue its false pretense of benevolence. This is the same strategy the Empire uses to conquer other countries through the faults pretense of nation building, foreign ad, and (predatory) lending.

                                          This guy gets it.

                Lost of good stuff here, we should re-open the comens, and be more cooporetive. That stuff the interviewer was saying about greed being good is a lowed of crap. As fare as the interviewy... did I miss somthing? How can you defend the bail out and protest it at the same time?

Audiobook: Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevski (Hosted Media)