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.

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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.

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Top 25 censored stories for 2009

• #1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
• # 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
• # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
• # 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
• # 5 Seizing War Protesters' Assets
• # 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
• # 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
• # 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
• #9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
• # 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
• # 11 El Salvador's Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
• # 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
• # 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
• # 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
• # 15 Worldwide Slavery
• # 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
• # 17 UN's Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
• # 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
• # 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
• # 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
• # 21 NATO Considers "First Strike" Nuclear Option
• # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
• # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
• # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
• # 25 Bush's Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

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Prophet Yahweh predicts spaceships will appear Oct. 31st in support of Senator Obama

According to Prophet Yahweh: Some time before Nov. 11, 2008, more than likely before the presidential elections, and possibly on October 31, 2008, at approximately 12 noon, spaceships will start appearing, on my summons request, and hover over my school for all Las Vegans and media to see and film.

He goes on to say that: My UFO Summoning School is located by one of Las Vegas' housing projects in the middle of the ghetto. There I teach people the ancient art of summoning or calling down UFO's and spaceships on-command.

In anticipation of the spaceships' descent, Prophet is planning to install live, Internet broadcast streaming capability at his school. He is doing this so people, worldwide, can see him call down the spaceships on Oct. 31, 2008, exactly at 12 noon, and the spaceships that appear for the entire time they sit up in the sky.

Prophet says that he may be off a little with the dates and some details he gives, but let there be no doubt that something within the general overview of what he says is going to happen.

He claims that these space beings are the Angels of Yahweh, the Creator of all things. And, they are talking to him, on a daily basis, via a sophisticated form of telepathic, non-verbal, none-talk, brain-to-brain communication. Most of the time, when they contact him, he is sleep. At that time, he hears a voice speaking to him inside his head.

He also says that: Unless I am misinterpreting my visions, it's very likely that Yahweh's angels are going to descend down from space, in one of their spaceships, on two different occasions, in a different, single ship, each time, and hover over my school, in Las Vegas, NV for three days so the media can film them.

When asked why the spaceships will appear, Prophet boldly says that:

One of the many reasons why they will do this is to show support for Presidential candidate Barack Obama. This will be done so people will know that Obama is the best choice to lead America through the troublesome times to come.

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Sun's protective 'bubble' is shrinking

New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago.

Scientists are baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way and are to launch mission to study the heliosphere.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, will be launched from an aircraft on Sunday on a Pegasus rocket into an orbit 150,000 miles above the Earth where it will "listen" for the shock wave that forms as our solar system meets the interstellar radiation.

Dr Nathan Schwadron, co-investigator on the IBEX mission at Boston University, said: "The interstellar medium, which is part of the galaxy as a whole, is actually quite a harsh environment. There is a very high energy galactic radiation that is dangerous to living things.

"Around 90 per cent of the galactic cosmic radiation is deflected by our heliosphere, so the boundary protects us from this harsh galactic environment."

The heliosphere is created by the solar wind, a combination of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields that emanate a more than a million miles an hour from the sun, meet the intergalactic gas that fills the gaps in space between solar systems.

At the boundary where they meet a shock wave is formed that deflects interstellar radiation around the solar system as it travels through the galaxy.

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'Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose quirky philosophy points, oddly, right into cyberspace'

Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nervelike constellation of wires. We live in an intertwined world of telephone lines, wireless satellite-based transmissions, and dedicated computer circuits that allow us to travel electronically from Des Moines to Delhi in the blink of an eye.

Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into "the living unity of a single tissue" containing our collective thoughts and experiences. In his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard wrote, "Is this not like some great body which is being born - with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory - the body in fact of that great living Thing which had to come to fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness?"

"What Teilhard was saying here can easily be summed up in a few words," says John Perry Barlow. "The point of all evolution up to this stage is the creation of a collective organism of Mind."

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From Cyberspace and the Dream of Teilhard de Chardin:

The evolutionary ascent of human beings occurs, according to Chardin's theory, in two stages of what he calls "planetization." The first stage is the "Go forth and multiply" stage, in which humanity expanded, in both quantity (in the very number of persons), and in quality (psychological and spiritual development). As Blanche Marie Gallagher, B.V.M., explains in her introduction to her Meditations With Teilhard de Chardin, "During the long period of expansion, physical and cultural differences isolated the peoples of the Earth from each other as they spread to fill the Earth. At the beginning of our present century, with most of the habitable surface of the Earth occupied, the races began to converge. Through technology, tangential energy becomes evident in the response of the people across the Earth to each other; people are sharing their wars, their coronations, their concerns. Thus the law of complexity-consciousness develops."

We have reached the end of the expanding, or "diversity" stage, and are now entering the contracting, or "unifying" stage. At this point, Chardin's theory runs completely counter to Darwin's, in that the success of humanity's evolution in the second stage will not be determined by "survival of the fittest," but by our own capacity to converge and unify. The most important initial evolutionary leap of the convergence stage is the formation of what Chardin termed "the Noosphere." It's formation, as Michael Murray explains, begins with "a global network of trade, communications, accumulation, and exchange of knowledge, cooperative research ...all go into the weaving of the material support for a sphere of collective thought. In the field of science alone, no individual knows more than a tiny fraction of the sum of scientific knowledge, and each scientist is dependent not only for his education but for all his subsequent work on the traditions and resources which are the collective possession of an entire international society composed of the living and the dead. Just as Earth once covered itself with a film of interdependent living organisms which we call the biosphere, so mankind's combined achievements are forming a global network of collective mind."

"The idea," writes Chardin, "is that of the Earth not only covered by myriads of grains of thought, but enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection." One hesitates to invoke the terms "group-mind" or "hive mentality," but they are, perhaps, leaps made by far less developed creatures than we that presage our own ascent. We know that such a thing can and does exist in a variety of species, especially ants, migratory birds, and others. We also know the evidence regarding the "hundredth monkey" (once a learned behavior is taught to a significant portion of a population ;in this famous example, of monkeys;the behavior becomes instinctual even for those completely isolated from the community which acquired the behavior). If C.G. Jung has given us the notion of the "collective unconscious," Chardin, then, speaks of the "collective conscious."

Chardin waxes poetic (as he often does) when he describes it: "Noosphere ...the living membrane which is stretched like a film over the lustrous surface of the star which holds us. An ultimate envelope taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like a luminous aura. This envelope was not only conscious, but thinking...the Very Soul of the Earth." Not only are our bodies the stuff of the Earth's body, but our minds are the consciousness of this being, the Earth. We have supposed that we are individuals, yet we "are dust, and to dust ye shall return." We have supposed our minds are our own, that even if the Earth is conscious of herself in us, she is conscious of being many little selves; but perhaps, as theorists in the field of transpersonal psychology suggest, we are mistaken. Chardin, in fact, argues that it must be so, that "what we are aware of is only the nucleus which is ourselves. The interaction of souls would be incomprehensible if some Aura' did not extend from one to the other, something proper to each one and common to all." Chardin believes, too, that this consciousness is not only psychological, but of the greatest spiritual importance, as well. "Nothing is precious," he says, "except that part of you which is in other people, and that part of others which is in you. Up there, on high, everything is one."