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Archive for the ‘Communism’ Category

It is true that as the financial and economic crises roll on, as more and more disasters accumulate, as more people are thrown into unemployment and suffering that more and more of us will question the fundamentals of our economic system. It is inevitable that many will be drawn to some of the criticisms of capitalism, including Marxism.

The Guardian today published a salutary overview of this revival:

In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the “contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism”.

 

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? “It is extremely unlikely that such a ‘post-capitalist society’ would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the Soviet era,” argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. “What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about.”

Marxism is a strange thing; it provides a clean and straightforward narrative of history, one that irons out detail and complication. It provides a simplistic “us versus them” narrative of the present. And it provides a relatively utopian narrative of the future; that the working classes united will overthrow capitalism and establish a state run by and for the working classes.

Trouble is, history is vastly more complicated than the teleological narrative provided by dialectical materialism. The economic and social reality of the present is vastly more complicated than Marx’s linear and binary classifications. And the future that Marx predicted never came to fruit; his 19th Century ideas turned into a 20th Century reality of mass starvation, failed central planning experiments, and millions of deaths.

Certainly, the system we have today is unsustainable. The state-supported financial institutions, and the corporations that have grown up around them do not live because of their own genius, their own productivity or innovation. They exist on state largesse — money printing, subsidies, limited liability, favourable regulation, barriers to entry. Every blowup and scandal — from the LIBOR-rigging, to the London Whale, to the bungled trades that destroyed MF Global — illustrates the incompetence and failure that that dependency has allowed to flourish.

The chief problem that Marxists face is their misidentification of the present economic system as free market capitalism. How can we meaningfully call a system where the price of money is controlled by the state a free market? How can we meaningfully call a system where financial institutions are routinely bailed out a free market? How can we meaningfully call a system where upwards of 40% of GDP is spent by the state a free market? How can we call a system where the market trades the possibility of state intervention rather than underlying fundamentals a free market?

Today we do not have a market economy; we have a corporate economy.

As Saifedean Ammous and Edmund Phelps note:

The term “capitalism” used to mean an economic system in which capital was privately owned and traded; owners of capital got to judge how best to use it, and could draw on the foresight and creative ideas of entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers. This system of individual freedom and individual responsibility gave little scope for government to influence economic decision-making: success meant profits; failure meant losses. Corporations could exist only as long as free individuals willingly purchased their goods – and would go out of business quickly otherwise.

 

Capitalism became a world-beater in the 1800’s, when it developed capabilities for endemic innovation. Societies that adopted the capitalist system gained unrivaled prosperity, enjoyed widespread job satisfaction, obtained productivity growth that was the marvel of the world and ended mass privation.

 

Now the capitalist system has been corrupted. The managerial state has assumed responsibility for looking after everything from the incomes of the middle class to the profitability of large corporations to industrial advancement. This system, however, is not capitalism, but rather an economic order that harks back to Bismarck in the late nineteenth century and Mussolini in the twentieth: corporatism.

The system of corporatism we have today has far more akin with Marxism and “social management” than Marxists might like to admit. Both corporatism and Marxism are forms of central economic control; the only difference is that under Marxism, the allocation of capital is controlled by the state bureaucracy-technocracy, while under corporatism the allocation of capital is undertaken by the state apparatus in concert with large financial and corporate interests. The corporations accumulate power from the legal protections afforded to them by the state (limited liability, corporate subsidies, bailouts), and politicians can win re-election showered by corporate money.

The fundamental choice that we face today is between economic freedom and central economic planning. The first offers individuals, nations and the world a complex, multi-dimensional allocation of resources, labour and capital undertaken as the sum of human preferences expressed voluntarily through the market mechanism. The second offers allocation of resources, labour and capital by the elite — bureaucrats, technocrats and special interests. The first is not without corruption and fallout, but its various imperfect incarnations have created boundless prosperity, productivity and growth. Incarnations of the second have led to the deaths by starvation of millions first in Soviet Russia, then in Maoist China.

Marxists like to pretend that the bureaucratic-technocratic allocation of capital, labour and resources is somehow more democratic, and somehow more attuned to the interests of society than the market. But what can be more democratic and expressive than a market system that allows each and every individual to allocate his or her capital, labour, resources and productivity based on his or her own internal preferences? And what can be less democratic than the organisation of society and the allocation of capital undertaken through the mechanisms of distant bureaucracy and forced planning? What is less democratic than telling the broad population that rather than living their lives according to their own will, their own traditions and their own economic interests that they should instead follow the inclinations and orders of a distant bureaucratic-technocratic elite?

I’m not sure that Marxists have ever understood capitalism; Das Kapital is a mammoth work concentrating on many facets of 19th Century industrial and economic development, but it tends to focus in on obscure minutiae without ever really considering the coherent whole. If Marxists had ever come close to grasping the broader mechanisms of capitalism — and if they truly cared about democracy — they would have been far less likely to promulgate a system based on dictatorial central planning.

Nonetheless, as the financial system and the financial oligarchy continue to blunder from crisis to crisis, more and more people will surely become entangled in the seductive narratives of Marxism. More and more people may come to blame markets and freedom for the problems of corporatism and statism. This is deeply ironic — the Marxist tendency toward central planning and control exerts a far greater influence on the policymakers of today than the Hayekian or Smithian tendency toward decentralisation and economic freedom.

Zero Hedge

Now I’ve seen it all.

The USSC upheld Obamacare by, basically, twisting the Constitution into a pretzel, crapping on it, whizzing on that and then eating it.

Finding first that the Commerce Clause bars the government from compelling one to enter into commerce, the analysis then turned to whether there was any way to save the constitutionality of the act.

The justices found one.

They re-interpreted the penalty clause as a tax.

And of course, Congress can levy taxes.

That’s the path taken by this tortured process — a path that could only be dreamed up if someone had already determined the outcome they sought instead of being an independent jurist.

The real surprise, however, is that Chief Justice Roberts, believed to be a strict constructionist on the court, managed to not only agree with this piece of tortured logic he found and constructed it as the opinion is his!

So much for judicial restraint and strict construction!

You really ought to read the dissent that starts on page 127 of the opinion.  Justice Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito eviscertate the majority, saying in part:

Here, however, Congress has impressed into servicethird parties, healthy individuals who could be but are not customers of the relevant industry, to offset the undesirable consequences of the regulation. Congress’ desire to force these individuals to purchase insurance is motivatedby the fact that they are further removed from the marketthan unhealthy individuals with pre-existing conditions, because they are less likely to need extensive care in the near future. If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, “the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . . spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.” The Federalist No. 33, p. 202 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

What little was left of The Constitution died today, June 28th, 2012.

And incidentally, the math on federal health spending coupled with this decision means that by the time a 55 year old man reaches 85 (his life expectancy, roughly) the Federal government will be attempting to spend roughly $15 trillion a year on health care.

(No it won’t, no we won’t get that far, and the detonation of our government on the fiscal side is now assured — or your health care will be sacrificed.  This is mathematics, not politics.)

After an $80 billion bailout that went to both GM and Chrysler, GM is heavily investing in China…and downsizing here in the USA.

GM claims this is to “ensure the long-term success” of their company, but they wouldn’t even still BE a company, without American taxpayer dollars, would they?

Well, it seems they were so greatful over the bailout, that they’ve decided to repay our INSANE generosity by pulling as much out of the US as possible, and shipping it over to China…including investing heavily in the Communist Party of China (CCP) and wooing the higher-ups with Cadillacs.

What do you think of THAT, America?

The Pampas of Argentina or the backwaters of Paraguay were the preferred location for those who openly professed their reprehensible loyalty to the Führer principle. However, do not blame all those ex-Nazis for selecting the shores of the Americas for their new domicile, their seeds were planted long ago in the offices of Wall and Broad Streets. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will saga shares more, than what one wants to admit, about the dark side of American History.

From the beginning of the Republic, the Federalists conspired for the illegal passage of their central government constitution in order to form a competing world empire with their British cousins. Their leader was Alexander Hamilton, who championed making individual states subservient to the original crony capitalists. When the Father of our Country, George Washington admonished about the dangers on entangling alliances, the world was warned that the drive towards independent liberty was compromised under this new Federal system.

When Andrew Jackson rallied frontier populism against the establishment elites of his era, you had an opportunity to restore some of the former glory of the Revolution of 1776. The conflict over the abolishment of the National Bank symbolizes the eternal struggle that continues to this very day.

The Manifest Destiny of the U.S.-Mexican War demonstrated just how far the country strayed from the fundamental concept of independence from England. The expansionistic campaign had more in common with the Crown than the Boston Tea Party.

The early 19th century fascists looked to their next defender Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer for the railroad corporatist cabal and the worst of all despotic presidents, to complete the task.

Myth #1: Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves.

Myth #2: Lincoln’s war “saved the Union.”

Myth #3: Lincoln championed equality and natural rights.

Myth #4: Lincoln was a defender of the Constitution.

Myth #5: Lincoln was a “great humanitarian” who had “malice toward none.”

Myth #6: War was necessary to end slavery.

The significance of the War of Northern Aggression is that the principle of independent sovereign states under the precepts of constitutional law died. With the prevention of secession, the liberty of a voluntary union was betrayed for the rule, under a loyalty oath, to an Amerikan Reich.

The next False Flag excuse was the Spanish-American War and the “Remember the Maine!” slogan that pushed the country into a “Pacific Imperium“. Those NeoCons, like Senator John McCain, who revere Theodore Roosevelt as a model for imperialist jingoism, draw their psychopathic lusts from the same bloodline as Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler.

World War I produced the infamous Woodrow Wilson internationalist treason. No longer will America be a society governed by elected representatives. The only coup to come out of his administration was won by the banksters. The fate of a proud people, sealed with the creation of the Federal Reserve, the establishment of the income tax and the permanent foreign military intervention abroad is the basis for the final destruction of the country and the horrors that befell our nation in the last century.

World War II inflicted the Franklin D. Roosevelt curse that guaranteed the imposition of socialism on the American people. How ironic that the Hitler bogyman’s regime, the scourge of Western Civilization and the reason for defending democracy, ultimately lead to similar collectivist policies, now adopted in the United States.

Just look to the ignominious involvement of Prescott Bush’s involvement with the funding of Adolph Hitler. Even FAUX news cannot hide the relationship in Bush’s Grandfather Directed Bank Tied to Man Who Funded Hitler.

“Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp., a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated Press.”

So what can and should a “reasonable man” conclude from these examples from history? The essential lesson is that the pristine fairy tale of the federal government’s noble role as defender of righteousness, that politicians want to accept and often die for, is a fictional myth.

Power politics always serves the interests of the banking elites, who control the political process, own the financial capital and manipulate the media viewpoint of events. This reality is pure fascism. You live under this system, so grow up, and admit it . . . it is the lamentable truth.

The Fourth Reich did not originate with Operation Overcast, the initiate name for Operation Paperclip. The classic book Fourth Reich of the Rich, by Des Griffin deserves another read.

“Some 150 years ago, in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln acknowledged the fact that “no foreign power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.”At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.”

Are we committing national suicide? Webster’s Dictionary (1828) defines suicide as: “Self murder; the act of designedly destroying one’s own life.” For that to be true on a national scale, the decisions leading up to our national self-destruction would, of necessity, have to be made by those who govern the country Congress, or “the government.”

Much of the German population was captivated by Hitler. The “presstitute” Goebbels’ media holds out Obama as a shining example. His manners are a composition of every tyranny to grace the scorched earth of despotic government. Will the America public come to their senses and make war against this Amerikana version of the Fourth Reich? You need not look for the Boys from Brazil to find today’s Nazi’s. They do their business in New York City, run their international institutes from London and order their bombing from Washington, DC.

Sieg heil! to the New World Order is the modern definition of national suicide.

SARTRE

Most Americans believe that we still live in a capitalist system and that free markets primarily determine the growth and development of our economy.  But is that really the case?  No, sadly it is not.  The truth is that the U.S. Federal Reserve does a tremendous amount of central economic planning.  So what makes the central economic planning that the Federal Reserve does different from the central economic planning that communist China does?  Yes, in China it is the government that does the central planning and in the United States it is a private central bank that does the central planning, but other than that are there any huge differences?  And if our economy is centrally planned, then how can we continue to claim that we still have a free market capitalist system?

Certainly China goes into greater detail in their economic planning, but that does not mean that the economic planning that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government do is not similar.

After all, free markets do not set interest rates in this country – the Federal Reserve does.

The Federal Reserve also determines what the money supply will be.

The Federal Reserve is the one that decides if inflation is too high or too low.

The Federal Reserve is the one that decides if unemployment is too high or too low.

In addition, the Federal Reserve has a tremendous amount of regulatory power over U.S. banks and the entire financial system.  Most Americans simply do not realize how much power the Federal Reserve has over our banks.  Just last year Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.

Like the communist Chinese, the Federal Reserve is not elected and it is essentially accountable to nobody.

Like the communist Chinese, the Federal Reserve also picks winners and losers.  You see, not all financial institutions are treated equally by the Fed.  For example, some have access to the Fed’s discount window and others do not.

How is that fair?

Certainly the Federal Reserve does not do all of the central economic planning in this country.  The U.S. government loves to get involved in economic planning as well.  For example, the U.S. government has decided that there are certain types of light bulbs that we are allowed to buy and certain types of light bulbs that we are no longer going to be allowed to buy.  It doesn’t matter that the new light bulbs are far more dangerous to children or that most of us would still like to have the choice to buy the old light bulbs.

But getting back to the Federal Reserve, how “democratic” or how “capitalist” is it to have 12 unelected people sitting around a table deciding the economic direction of this country?

The truth is that we live in a system that simply does not trust free markets and that believes that our economy needs to be “managed”.

I have to admit that my thinking on these issues was stimulated when I recently read an excellent article by Vitaliy Katsenelson in which he asked the following question….

It is a fundamental tenant of American capitalism that central planning of economies doesn’t work in the long term, whether in Soviet Union historically or in China today. But I often wonder: How is the Fed’s Board of Governors – the proverbial 12 guys in a room – any different than the 24 guys in a room who make up the Chinese politburo?

Is Katsenelson not right about this?

How in the world is the Fed’s Board of Governors all that much different from the Chinese Politburo?

In both cases, a group of unelected elitists makes the major economic decisions for all the rest of us.

That certainly does not sound like “capitalism” to me.

Would the free markets really produce worse results for our economy than the Federal Reserve does?

Would America ever have gone through the Great Depression if the Federal Reserve had not been created in 1913?

Would we have experienced the financial crash of 2008 if the policies of Greenspan and Bernanke had not created tremendous bubbles in the financial system?

Would the U.S. dollar have lost over 95 percent of its value since 1913 if the Federal Reserve was not around to constantly inflate our currency?

Would the U.S. government have the largest debt in the history of the world if we were not using the debt-based monetary system imposed upon us by the elite international bankers?

Now that the total debt of the U.S. government is $14,228,193,126,138.72, it is getting really hard to deny that the federal government is drowning in debt.

Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher unknowingly indicted the very system he serves when he recently made the following statement….

“If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when.”

If the Federal Reserve had never been created, and the U.S. government had been issuing debt-free currency all this time, it is entirely conceivable that we would have absolutely no federal government debt at this point.

But defenders of the Federal Reserve tell us that if not for the brilliant people over at the Fed, America would be an economic basket case by now.

Oh really?

In case anyone has not noticed, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a very long track record of incompetence.  Nearly every major judgment that he has made since taking over that position has been wrong.  If one of us could go down the street and appoint the manager of our local Dairy Queen as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, it is very doubtful that person could do a worse job than Bernanke has done.

Unfortunately, most Americans do not understand this.  Most Americans are still convinced that “the greatest economy on earth” will just keep roaring along forever.  Most Americans are spending and partying as if everything is going to be just fine.

Sadly, as Richard Daughty recently pointed out, most Americans will not wake up and realize just how bad our economic problems really are until it is too late….

In fact, to use an analogy, the economy is like a group of overpaid people, milking the government for every dollar and benefit they can get, on a chartered airplane that has been certified as “unsafe,” where one minute everybody is having fun, drunk as skunks, laughing and telling dirty jokes, and the next minute the plane is plunging out of the sky, out of fuel, one wing is in flames, the engines are dead, the entire electrical system is kaput, and, worst of all, the beverage cart is completely empty of cold beer and those little bottles of different kinds of tasty liquors. Uh-oh!

Most Americans have become so “dumbed down” that they still won’t even understand what is happening even after the economy has collapsed.  Newsweek recently found that 63 percent of Americans do not know how many justices are on the Supreme Court and 29 percent of Americans cannot even name the current Vice-President.

America today is rapidly degenerating in many of the same ways that the Roman Empire once did.  Tens of millions of Americans are lazy, slothful and absolutely addicted to entertainment.  It is frightening to see just how many Americans did not show any empathy during the recent crisis in Japan or when we started launching missiles on Libya.  The following mini-documentary that was recently posted on YouTube does a beautiful job of making this point….

So is there any hope for America?

Let us hope that people wake up, because there are going to be even more economic disasters coming our way.  Right now a large percentage of the American people don’t even know enough to realize what the real problems are, much less what the solutions may be.

When most Americans talk about economics, they instantly start blaming “Obama” or “Bush” and a lot of them never even bring up the Federal Reserve.

But it is the Federal Reserve that has the most power over our economy.

If Americans want to blame someone in Washington D.C. for the economic mess that we are in, the number one culprit is the Federal Reserve.

Yes, Obama, Bush and virtually every member of Congress has played a role in our economic nightmare as well.  But it is the Federal Reserve that is actually “managing” our economy.

We would have been much better off if we had allowed free markets to “manage” our economy all this time, but very few Americans actually seem to still believe in free markets anymore.

The Economic Collapse