Voters are rightly furious at the proposal to spend $700,000,000,000 that
the government doesn't have to bail out Wall Street bankers who created the
current economic crisis in the first place. But why then aren't we concerned
about the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve is pumping into the
system? Or the trillions missing from the Pentagon? Or the quadrillion
dollar derivatives bubble.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Why won't the bail out work? Must see video
What went wrong in the capitalist casino?
Perhaps more important - and never mentioned in the media - is that all the news we get every day and every hour is all about the bankers while presidents, prime ministers and other elected leaders of the world have been reduced to the role of mere commentators who are expected to supply taxpayers' money whenever it is needed to bail out the wealthy.
Indeed, what we are watching is nothing less than the steady transfer of real political power from the polling station to the market and from the ballot to the wallet - reversing the democratic gains we have made over the last century when we were able, increasingly, to use our votes to shape our economic future.
Our 1945 manifesto made that clear in the very next passage following the quote above. This is what it said: "The nation wants food, work and homes. It wants more than that. It wants good food in plenty, useful work for all and comfortable labour-saving homes that take full advantage of the resources of modern science and productive industry."
That was the policy that swept Labour MPs into power in 1945 and gave this country the National Health Service, the welfare state and a massive house building programme, made possible by elected local authorities who had the resources made available to them by the Treasury.
Now, 63 years later, we are back facing a similar situation and we need to understand why it has happened if we are to see our way forward.
We have been told every day by the media that we should put our faith in the market and that elected governments are the problem and not the answer and, for that reason, should not interfere.
These ideas began to emerge in the political mainstream when Margaret Thatcher came to power and in 1994 "new" Labour adopted them as the basis of its own approach which explains why she once described "new" Labour as her "greatest achievement".
Trade union rights are now more restricted than they were in 1906, wages have been held down and people have been advised to borrow and spend as an alternative - which explains why the stock market has fallen and locked more and more people into debt, which is a subtle form of slavery itself.
This is why so many people are frightened and frightened people can sometimes be persuaded to seek an answer by identifying an enemy who can be made a scapegoat for failure - as Hitler did when he blamed the Jews, the Communists and the trade unions for the mass unemployment in Germany and set up a fascist dictatorship which led to the Holocaust and war.
Hitler dealt with the unemployed by giving them jobs in the arms factories and the armed forces which led to the Second World War and the massive human cost it caused.
~ more... ~
Transmitting the Shrouds of the Dead - Alejandro Jodorowsky
In 1970, John Lennon introduced to the world Alejandro Jodorowsky and his movie El Topo, which the filmmaker wrote, starred in, and directed. The movie and its author instantly became a counterculture icon. His spiritual quest began with the Japanese master Ejo Takata, the man who introduced him to the practice of meditation, Zen Buddhism, and the wisdom of the koans. At the direction of Takata, Jodorowsky became a student of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, thus beginning a journey in which vital spiritual lessons were transmitted to him by various women who were masters of their particular crafts.
This article is excerpted from The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, recenty published by Inner Traditions.
"Ejo, I want to propose something. Let us bury this stick among the trees here, as if it were a plant. Let us imagine that someday it will sprout and produce branches, even fruit . . ."
After we finished burying it, my friend gave a huge sigh. It was as if he had shed an immense burden. He burst out laughing, then he took his monk's robe out of the net sack. "It was my master, Momon Yamanda, who gave me this kesa.* He wove into it parts of the funeral shrouds of his father and his mother. Do you understand? We often speak of the transmission of the light, but the real master transmits the shrouds of the dead. We must see life -- both our own and that of the cosmos -- as an agony. This is the teaching of the Buddha Shakyamuni. After his satori, he went to the place where they incinerate corpses, and he gathered pieces of cloth left there, washed them, dyed them, and sewed them together painstakingly and slowly, giving his total attention to every stitch. That kesa was transmitted from patriarch to patriarch through the ages. Everyone who wore it while meditating was burning in body and in soul. To reach the marrow of the soul, everything superfluous must be burned to ashes. By wearing the garments of so many dead people, Buddha taught that liberation is to be obtained for them as well. When a flower opens, it is springtime for the whole land. The Buddha is like the brilliant prow of a vessel that leads it and its blind passengers to the port of salvation. I know that my way is not the same as yours, for you are more attracted to artistic creation than to meditation. But you know -- there is really no difference between us. Compassion inhabits us both. Just this once, please give me the pleasure of seeing you dressed in my kesa."
~ more... ~
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monopoly-finance capital and the crisis
From: Interview of John Bellamy Foster for Norwegian Daily, Klassekampen
I don't think capital has anywhere to turn in the immediate situation, that is, there is no hope for restarting accumulation right now. One hears all the time about the creation of new bubbles, and certainly since financialization is how capital in the monopoly-finance phase has sought to combat stagnation, this is a natural enough question to ask. But it is often treated as though bubbles, i.e. major speculative episodes within the more ongoing financialization process, can be based on anything whatsoever. Historically, however, such speculative bubbles in the advanced capitalist economies are based in the stock market and real estate. Neither is likely to be expansive at present. We are in a period in which a massive wiping out of value is taking place, which will eventually, as in all such occasions in the history of capitalism, create the basis for renewed accumulation. But the process has to work its way out first. Right now we can say that there is a crisis of financialization on top of stagnation, pulling the economy doubly down. A speculative bubble in natural resources or food is hard to imagine since these are known to be the most volatile areas in which to invest; right now commodity prices are dropping rapidly in response to world recession, increasing fears of deflation, and placing third world economies especially in danger.
The system has geographically expanded throughout its history and in recent decades, but is coming up against limits in this regard today. Just think of the massive depeasantization of the world that we have seen in the past few decades, perhaps the greatest movement of peoples in all of human history, in effect a whole new set of enclosures on a global scale. China's enhanced role in the world economy, indeed the only significant sustained source of growth in the global economy for more than a decade, on balance seems not to have increased the stability of the system -- if anything the reverse. Geographically, and in terms of imperialism, we are up against the kind of absolute limits of capitalist expansion pointed to by Rosa Luxemburg.
[ ... ]
The crisis is a clear illustration of the point that productive forces are shackled by the existing relations of production (i.e., class, property relations). In the present case, the combination of stagnation in the real economy and the imperative of ever increased accumulation of capital, demanded by the capitalist relations of production, led to accelerating concentration of profit in the financial sector. In recent years in the United States, over 40% of all profit in the entire economy was concentrated in monopolized finance. But these booked profits were ultimately based on the assurance of future payments by workers ever more squeezed in the stagnating real economy. Then the payments on subprime debt faltered, and as a result of the completely opaque securitization process, no one knew which debts were bad and which were good. At the same time, the illusion that derivatives constituted "insurance" against default completely evaporated -- indeed it turned out to be the equivalent of adjoining house owners insuring each other against fire when the whole neighborhood burns down. Credit markets froze because the banks and other financial institutions were ceasing to lend since the borrowers could not be counted on to pay them back. The banks themselves were insolvent, their capital had disappeared, and they could not pay their current debts, were they forced to do so.
Under these circumstances, no matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars in liquidity were poured into the financial sector, nothing happened. All those with money, including the banks, were hoarding. The U.S. was printing dollars like mad and flooding the financial sector with liquidity, but rather than loaning out money capital the banks were stuffing it in their vaults, or more precisely using it to purchase Treasury bills, creating a kind of revolving door that negated the attempts of the government. Faced with an insolvency crisis, and the prospect not of making money but of being presented with claims they owed but could not pay, the banks did exactly what Keynes had said they would do under such circumstances: they simply hoarded cash. At present, the authorities have prevented a complete meltdown (in the U.S. version of a plan adopted with some variation by all the advanced capitalist countries) by injecting capital directly into banks in return for preferred stock (a partial nationalization of banks), guaranteeing new debt of banks, and increasing deposit insurance. In the United States alone this is estimated potentially to cost $2.25 trillion -- far beyond the $700 billion bailout of a couple of weeks ago (New York Times, October 15, 2008). This is a desperate attempt to stop the financial avalanche.
~ more... ~
Top 25 censored stories for 2009
~ Project Censored ~
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
