Monthly Archives: Νοέμβριος 2012

The “free market”

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The euphemism “free market” means central planning by the banks and high finance — by Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, the Paris Bourse and centers further eastward. Their plan involves untaxing rentier income and wealth, headed by land-price gains (the “unearned increment”) and financial deregulation. This shifts the allocation of capital and policy planning out of the hands of government into those of the banking sector. This financialization of the economy (and indeed, of the political system) is more centralized than public planning by elected officials. And whereas government planning tends to be long-term, financial planning under neoliberalized conditions is hit-and-run. Whereas government planning is supposed to promote capital formation and full employment, today’s financial planning makes returns by stripping assets, inflating asset-prices (the Bubble Economy) and minimizing the return to labor relative to rentier returns.

Hudson, Michael (2012-10-04). THE BUBBLE AND BEYOND (Kindle Locations 201-208).

Rentiers

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"By rejecting the classical distinction between productive and unproductive labor and credit, today’s national income accounts classify rentier gains as “earnings” on a par with wages and profits, adding to national product rather than simply being transfer payments. This approach treats all wealth as being earned as part of the production process, not extracted from the economy in the form of a free lunch (“economic rent”) by rentiers".

Michael Hudson: "Bubble and Beyond"

Loans

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"About 80% of bank loans in the United States, Britain and other English-speaking countries are real estate mortgages, making land the major bank collateral. The result is that mortgage bankers receive the rents formerly taken by a hereditary aristocracy in postfeudal Europe and the colonies it conquered".

Michael Hudson:"The Bubble and Beyond"

Hope will come…

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«Hope will come with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class. This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of working class enslavement, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself»

Απόσπασμα από: Chris, Hedges. «Death of the Liberal Class.»

New Cycle, New Storm

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«Over the last millennium Europe has witnessed long cycles of widening and narrowing economic disparity. In each cycle, once the gap between the rich and the rest widened beyond a certain point, it presaged decline and disaster for all of society, the rich as well as the poor. Could we be seeing the first tremors of a new cycle, the outliers of the next menacing storm»

Kenneth S. Friedman: Myths of the Free Market»

Privatization and Size of the State Sector

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«Ironically, privatization and increased competition also had little immediate impact upon the size of the state sector itself. We have already seen that in Thatcher’s Britain the scope of the state actually expanded. So it was elsewhere. Between 1974 and 1990 (thanks in some measure to endemic private-sector unemployment) the share of the employed workforce in public service actually grew: from 13 percent to 15.1 percent in Germany; from 13.4 percent to 15.5 percent in Italy; from 22.2 percent to 30.5 percent in Denmark. Most of these government employees, however, were now in the tertiary sector rather than in manufacturing: providing and administering services (financial, educational, medical and transportation) rather than making things.»

Tony Judt: «Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.»

The Art of Power

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«Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma. Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic. To realize his vision, he compromised and improvised. The willingness to do what he needed to do in a given moment makes him an elusive historical figure. Yet in the real world, in real time, when he was charged with the safety of the country, his creative flexibility made him a transformative leader».

«…Jefferson believed in the possibilities of humanity. He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes. Broadly put, philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power».

Jon Meacham: «Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power»

Secrets

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«The urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature; even the least curious mind is roused by the promise of sharing knowledge withheld from others. Some are fortunate enough to find a job which consists in the solution of mysteries, but most of us are driven to sublimate this urge by the solving of artificial puzzles devised for our entertainment. Detective stories or crossword puzzles cater for the majority; the solution of secret codes may be the pursuit of a few»

John Chadwick: The Decipherment of Linear B

Από το βιβλίο «The Code Book»