Cutting through the B.S. on Cyprus

25 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Neo-Colonialism, Wall Street Fraud

Tags

American Oligarchy, Bill O'Reilly, Capitalism, Corporate Mouthpiece, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Cyprus Debt Crisis, Economic Collapse, Empire, Financial Elite, Fox News, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mano Singham, Neoliberal Capitalism, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Resource Wars, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

I was researching a bit on the Cyprus meltdown and found the usual exaggerated talk of Russian “black money” and the spendthrift Cypriots, but cutting through the noise are two articles on this subject of the Cyprus debt crisis. The first is by theoretical physicist Mano Singham:

What the Cyprus crisis reveals about oligarchic control

“…Ordinary Cypriots, like ordinary citizens in the Netherlands and Germany and anywhere else, had little or no say in how their governments and banks operate. They just go about their lives, working and putting some money away in savings. But governments and big banks set policies that favor the global financial oligarchy and enable them to send vast amounts of money rapidly around the globe in order to get high returns, by lending to governments through the banks.

But when things go sour and governments cannot repay, what they do is pit ordinary people of the donor countries against the ordinary people of the recipient countries in their efforts to make sure that the oligarchy in untouched. By causing people to think that ‘hardworking’ Dutch and Germans are subsidizing ‘lazy’ Greeks and Spaniards and Cypriots, and throwing in ‘greedy’ Russians into the mix, they manage to obscure the fact that they are all getting exploited because the allegiance of all their governments is to the big banks, and that the global oligarchy is really calling the shots through its puppets in the IMF and the ECB.

One sees this over and over again in other contexts. In the US we see how the oligarchy pits Chinese or Mexican workers against American workers, making them see each other as the enemy and fight with each other, when the real winners, all the time, are the global oligarchy, while the real losers, all the time, are the workers in each country…

As we well know, when you[the Oligarch class] own the media, then you can spin reality anyway you want it and have the plebs fighting amongst themselves. This is why the informed person will never win with brain-washed people quoting Bill O’Reilly and other such talking heads of the corporate-owned media. Just smile and roll your eyes.

The other article is by Yves Smith at naked capitalism which goes more into detail on the American Oligarchy and dispels much of the myths surrounding Cyprus.

Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs?

…Now notice how much space I’ve devoted to showing that major parts of the conventional narrative about Cyprus are not all that they are cracked up to be. But see another implicit part of the story: that Russia’s oligarchs and “dirty money” are a distinctive national creation. Do you ever hear Carlos Slim or Rupert Murdoch or the Koch Brothers described as oligarchs? To dial the clock back a bit, how about Harold Geneen of ITT, which was widely known to conduct assassinations in Latin America if it couldn’t get its way by less thuggish means? (This is not mere rumor, I’ve had it confirmed by a former ITT executive)…

…there’s been a peculiar sanctimonious reluctance to apply the word oligarch to the members of America’s ruling class. Some of that is that we Americans idolize our rich, and the richer the better. No one looks too hard at the fact many of our billionaires started out with a leg up, parlaying a moderate family fortune (for instance, in the case of Donald Trump) into a bigger one, or having one’s success depend on other forms of family help (Bill Gates’ mother having the connection to an IBM executive that enabled Gates to license MS-DOS to them).

But the fact that some people have advantages and are able to make the most of them, isn’t the reason to pin the “o” word on America’s top wealthy. It’s that, like Simon’s prototypical emerging market magnates, they increasingly dominate our society and are running it strictly for own self interest and devil take the rest of us. And the results on important metrics are worse than in Russia. The Gini coefficient is a widely-used measure of income inequality. The Gini coefficient is worse (higher) for the US than for Russia…

…Top executives have operated in a manner that is less obviously thuggish than the violent ways of some of Russia’s richest, but the hollowing out of labor and shortened job tenures have come with high costs across broad swathes of society. And the oligarchs that Johnson singled out, the elite that control the biggest financial firms, have become singularly, systematically predatory. We discussed long from in ECONNED the scale and nature of the looting that produced the global financial crisis.

And let us not forget that people are dying thanks to bank-related abuses, even though it’s not as direct or obvious as by assassinations. On the mortgage front alone, we’ve discussed for three years how many foreclosures are simply unwarranted, some created by servicers for their own profit, many of the others unjustified because it would have been better for everyone, the borrower, the mortgage investors, the broader community, for the borrower to get a modification, but the servicer put its own bottom line first and foreclosed. There have been cases of suicides on the eve of foreclosures, and even a courtroom death that was attributed to the stress of fighting a dubious foreclosure. But in addition to these clear cases of death by bank, there are many more cases where the financial distress of a foreclosure leads to a later suicide, or the curtailment of spending on health measures that shorten lifespans. The major servicers have blood on their hands as much, likely much more, than the demonized Russian oligarchs, but everyone here is too polite to say so out loud.

Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom was learning to call things by their proper names. The time is long past to kid ourselves about the nature of the ruling class in America and start describing it accurately, as an oligarchy…

The colonization of the language by the corporate media is a large part of the way the masses can be controlled without firing a bullet, as illustrated by a commenter to the above article:

It’s absurd to call the crooks who have robbed or attempted to rob the Russian people of their wealth “oligarchs”, but then to turn around and call the cut-throat corporate vultures of Wall Street elite stewards of capitalism or “philanthropists” or merely “wealthy”.

The Western press has masterfully perpetuated this hypocritical view of the wealth accumulated in the West vs. Russia and vs. China as well. Notice that the press doesn’t dare call the Chinese billionaires in the communist party “oligarchs”.

It’s interesting how these terms get latched on to certain nations and cultures in pop-foreign-affairs discussions. It’s entirely originated by Western journalists pushing a corporate narrative of Americana that excludes the harsh reality of both the inequality and injustice of our modern system.

I’ll add that oligarchy as a term and a topic of political discussion goes back to Aristotle and the Greek philosophers.

You can’t sustain a democracy in an oligarchic state. The writers on Athenian democracy understood that 2000 years ago,”

– Chris Hedges, “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

The rich in the US are controlling policy. Since the 80′s they’ve been rigging the tax and regulatory framework to redistribute wealth upward.

The reality is that conservatives have been quite actively using the power of the government to shape market outcomes in ways that redistribute income upward. However, conservatives have been clever enough to not own up to their role in this process, pretending all along that everything is just the natural working of the market. And, progressives have been foolish enough to go along with this view.”

– Dean Baker, “The Conservative Nanny State

It started with Reagan, got worse in Clinton, and was maintained and finalized with the W. Bush tax cuts and benign neglect which Obama has continued (the exception are cases like Enron and Madoff, where rich people got hurt).

Oligarchy in its most basic definition is one where the ruling class protect and grow their wealth in their rule of a nation or society. Is there any doubt that, given the trends since the 80′s in both market deregulation, tax expenditures for the wealthy, and the growth in inequality and destruction of the middle class, that we have been in an oligarchal rule under the bankster corporate overlords and the military industrial complex, which includes all the moguls of Wall Street in energies, insurance, and banking.

It’s worth noting that Simon Johnson, someone who has demonstrated his competence in academia and policy at the IMF, and who has also tirelessly attempted to inform the public of the misdeeds of the powerful money changers, has focused specifically on the American oligarchs in the finance industry, as early as 2009:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103122382

In times of crisis, if the government doesn’t stand up for the people and use taxation and spending to fix the gross inequality that comes about from forms of unfettered capitalism, then the result is a massive wealth grab…

I think that sums up the situation quite nicely, and in a world of depleting resources we’ll see more of this greedy scramble for the last few slices of the economic pie as it shrinks. Get ready to pitch a tent in an American shanty town coming near you.

Chomsky Poses a Question

07 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, ALEC – American Legislative Exchange Council, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumer Culture, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Henry Bemis, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Noam Chomsky, The Elite 1%, The Twilight Zone, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

In his latest essay, Chomsky asks the simple question, “Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?” And when he says “capitalism”, he means the true capitalism we have today here in America in which capital has corrupted and usurped government regulation and legislation to the (N)th degree. Crony capitalism is the same as unfettered capitalism which is the end result of all types of capitalism if they are left to play out to their inevitable conclusion, something Chomsky calls “really existing capitalist democracy” or RECD for short.

First, Chomsky proclaims the obvious fact that RECD is incompatible with true democracy and that civilization cannot survive under RECD with its corporate-run government passing as faux democracy. He then asks whether a functioning democracy under a capitalist system would make a difference.

For the litmus test, Chomsky confronts the most apparent and grave danger facing mankind – environmental catastrophe, an unfolding crisis we here at this site are very familiar with. As is often the case in an RECD, what the public wants and what the corporate forces ruling the country demand are two very different things. To illustrate this divergent reality, Chomsky quotes from recent studies by Kelly Sims Gallagher in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In contrast to well over a hundred countries which have enacted renewable energy policies and targets, the U.S. “has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.”

And it’s not by lack of public desire that such renewable energies have not been enacted. On the contrary, the vast majority of Americans have favored such action in order to avert the very environmental catastrophe currently threatening life as we know it. But as Chomsky wryly comments:

The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy.

Now to combat this influence of science on the minds of the common people, our corporate overlords have used one of their lapdog lobbyist groups, ALEC, to enact legislation with the Orwellian title “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” which would actually cast a cloud of doubt over the science of climate change by forcing schools to allow alternative interpretations, i.e. climate change denial:

The ALEC Act mandates “balanced teaching” of climate science in K-12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.

Of course this “balanced teaching” won’t include the views of those much more astute scientists who have accurately said that the IPCC’s climate models and forecasts have been and continue to be much too conservative and optimistic. The corporate intrusion into America’s classrooms will undoubtedly include viewpoints from people who say that CO2 is good for the planet and that God would not allow man to destroy himself.

Again, Chomsky explains that such dumbing down of the populace is done intentionally to serve the short-term profit motives of our corporatocracy. Keeping the masses ill-informed and living within a cloud of propaganda and infotainment is the primary objective of the ALEC legislation. Creating a country full of Al Bundys and Homer Simpsons has been an ongoing process since the inception of a post-World War II Consumer Culture. When the primary tool for constructing a nation’s identity – “The Media” – is motivated by money, society is destined for a meltdown. We are following the doctrine of ‘preordained destiny’ right into the annals of extinction alongside the dinosaurs and the Dodo bird.

…Within the RECD system it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences.

These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within RECD, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power.

Chomsky compares the corporatocracy’s willful ignorance on human-induced climate change to that of the ongoing banking crisis and the financial sector’s criminal behavior in disregarding “systemic risk”, i.e. the risk of collapsing an entire financial system or entire market. The systemic risk of continuing to exploit fossil fuels is more blatantly obvious every week, month, and year that passes. Enjoying 20/20 hindsight and taxpayer-funded bailouts won’t be an option for a crash of the global biosphere.

Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout.

In future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions – actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.

Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal.

The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet. The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction.

Over four centuries of commodifying the planet and two centuries of wallowing in a fossil fuel high have turned the industrialized world into crazed drug addicts marching towards their own destruction. It is only the planet’s unindustrialized “primitive people’ who remain clear-minded enough to act rationally and wisely. By all estimations, having even a semi-functioning democracy under a capitalist system would exponentially improve our odds of survival; but under the current regime, no living thing will get out alive when glorified apes dressed in suits are flinging shit and wielding weapons of mass destruction.

This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.

This is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict – unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of RECD.

Our present predicament is best described by a commenter in regards to the short film ‘Time Enough at Last‘:

Eat the Rich

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Barack Obama, Capitalism, Class War, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eat the Rich, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jacob "Jack" Lew, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Resource Wars, sequestration, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

The Sequester has been the big topic in the news as of late. What it amounts to is austerity for the masses in America. Obama created this stealth austerity maneuver with his newly appointed Secretary of Treasury, Wall Street shark Jacob Lew:

…President Obama and a host of administration spokespersons have condemned the Sequestration, explaining how it will cause catastrophic damage to hundreds of vital government services. Those of us who teach economics, however, always stress “revealed preferences” – it’s not what you say that matters, it’s what you do that matters. Obama has revealed his preference by refusing to sponsor, or even support, a clean bill that would kill the sequestration threat to our Nation. Instead, he has nominated Jacob Lew, the author of the Sequestration provision, as his principal economic advisor. Lew is one of the strongest proponents of austerity and what he and Obama call the “Grand Bargain” – which would inflict large cuts in social programs and the safety net and some increases in revenues. Obama has made clear that he hopes this Grand Betrayal (my phrase) will be his legacy. Obama and Lew do not want to remove the Sequester because they view it as creating the leverage – over progressives – essential to induce them to vote for the Grand Betrayal…

In a rare case of truth-telling, a San Francisco news station spells out exactly what this stealth austerity is intended to do – strip away what is left of the social safety net and the remnants of the New Deal:

So while the financial elite are protected by wealth security insurance programs, aka quantitative easing and endless bailouts, the carcass of Main Street is picked clean by various asset grabs. Conservatives are correct in that you cannot have endless growth of debt and spending, but their demand of government cuts as the way to bring back growth and renew the economy will not work. It will serve only to further push down an already devastated middle class, hastening America’s fall into a barbaric neo-feudal society in a world of resource-scarcity and environmental devastation.

…It follows that neoliberal leaders of governments and their corporate masters view the ongoing economic contraction as a temporary deviation from the “natural” pattern of wealth accumulation-to-elites-trickle down-to-the-masses economics made possible by constant growth. Therefore, economic elites see an “opportunity” to use austerity as a cover to increase upward wealth transfer.[xi] A bonus is to accomplish the long-standing atavistic goal of rolling back[xii] the gains of the New Deal and Great Society.[xiii] Hence the massive governmental and corporate propaganda assaults on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid –and other social benefits programs- as “Entitlements” that allegedly weaken the collective moral character, fiscal integrity and work ethic of the nation. The central premise of this attack -which is arrantly false yet widely disseminated without skepticism by mainstream media- is that these entitlements[xiv] for the “Lesser People”[xv]place the United States government at high risk of debt[xvi] default[xvii] or bankruptcy.[xviii]

Sixty years ago Karl Polanyi anticipated the present crisis when he wrote that belief in “free market forces” –a dogma at the core of neoliberalism[xix]– is a direct threat to the “natural environment…[which also] would result in the demolition of society.”[xx]…

…It is vital to remember that on the whole, they do not yet understand why modern societies -right now- are entering a post-growth world, which augers a context where government public policy –if it overcomes neoliberalism,[xxxv] which is not guaranteed- faces the central challenge of justly divvying up a shrinking economic pie. (Remember that almost every public health lecture, article and discussion in the United States ends with some variation of this exhortation: “We’re the wealthiest and greatest nation on earth. We’ve got the technology, know-how and resources to do the job; we just need the determination to commit them…”)

Neoliberal governments are blind to the emerging world of degrowth and continue apace facilitating the 1% to impoverish and cannibalize widening segments of the 99%, in essence producing more and more socioeconomically and politically superfluous people in the process. Neoliberalism can only operate in a social world where as the economy contracts -for thermodynamic reasons- wealth and other economic benefits continue to flow upwards, while the costs and burdens fall upon those outside the tiny elite economic… – source

In other words, capitalism is cannibalizing itself – eating the underclass and environment to keep this unchecked growth of wealth accumulation intact for the upper class, as scientist Brad Jarvis also explains:

The big news of the week was, of course, the “sequester,” one of several attempts by radical government-haters to open the door to unrestrained pillage of nature and society; it will cut back on many of the means we currently have for limiting and adapting to environmental damage. The scale of that environmental damage includes, of course, more than climate change: recent research shows that wild bees are more critical to our food supply than honeybees, and being wiped out by the top mechanism of extinction, habitat loss…

…I recalled something I learned a few years ago about what is perhaps the key driver of business operation, pursuit of profit. Profit must continuously increase, preferably at an exponential rate, for a business to be considered successful. There are several ways to do so: add value to what you produce, increase demand for what you’re already making, and reduce costs. The first two approaches increase consumption if the business can provide supply to meet demand, which is bad enough in a resource-constrained world. The last approach, however, is the most damaging when applied exponentially, because there is always a minimum cost required – you can’t get something for nothing – and if you’re “successful,” you are likely just good at forcing someone else to eat that cost. Many of the mechanisms directly causing unhealthy income and social inequality in this country and elsewhere may be directly tied to the application of this approach, but it has even more far-ranging effects. Because business is the most powerful human enterprise, society and the planet’s other species are effectively being forced to give more than they can afford and still survive. We are all dying as a result. – source

What else can I say, but that we will eventually have to eat the rich.

Mankind’s Infantilism and the Death of the Planet

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Peak Oil, Poverty, Self-Delusion of Man, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

Hello my fellow Earthlings. We think we’re so fucking clever, don’t we. We’ll probably revert to our rodent instincts and burrow underground when the shit really hits the fan. With the eco-apocalypse fast approaching, the best way for the human species to redeem itself would be to voluntarily undergo a cultural and spiritual transformation on a global scale. When I say spiritual, I mean honoring the ground we walk on and not some false deity. Science, not mythology, is the basis for my beliefs. This Earth is all we really have. Start caring for it and respecting it with the same reverence and homage we pay to our electronic toys of mass distraction, i.e. TV, iphones, video games, computers, etc…

Know that this culture of self-worship and materialism is sending our species to the dustbin of failed evolutionary experiments, most certainly by the end of this century if not mid-century. The evidence is all around us if only we care to open our eyes.

Below is a video I put together to illustrate the suffocation of the real world beneath the concrete, steel, and asphalt world humans have superimposed on it. We have worked to replace what is genuine and long-lasting with something that is artificial and unsustainable. And all the science says this world we have created from fossil fuels cannot be maintained in the long run, not even with so-called renewable energy. On top of that mess, we are wrecking the planet’s biosphere and ensuring that our descendants will have no chance to experience nature or a habitable planet. We have quite literally destroyed our only true home, leaving us vulnerable to the vicious elements of the outside world which are growing ever worse in the form of climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.

I’m afraid that confronting this civilization-ending calamity is not a solo endeavor, but must be a global undertaking. As someone said on this site before, the success of a society, be it an ancient tribe or a technologically advanced people, depends on whether there is cooperation and shared sacrifice. I don’t have to tell you that in today’s world, such traits are in short shrift. Individualism and self-interest dominate over any sort of collectivism and altruism. Self-glorification and the almighty profit motive are not going to solve these problems. The solution for global ecological destruction will not be found in an accounting scheme or any other such capitalist interest.

It’s time to face what we have done to the planet and ourselves. I don’t expect any such great awakening to occur. I’m fairly confident that we will stumble along into total collapse with all the usual mayhem that ensues in such an event – drought, famine, pestilence, and war. We humans had such promise, but we’re throwing it all away. If only we would grow up.

Protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline While Obama Golfs with Oil Executives

21 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Barack Obama, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Drill Baby Drill, EROEI, Geoscientist J. David Hughes, Inverted Totalitarianism, Keystone XL Pipeline, McDonaldization of Society, Peak Oil, Tar Sands

Are we going to wage an all-out war on reality while the natural world crumbles beneath our feet? By all available evidence – yes. The corrosive and corrupting effect of capital is working its Voodoo magic behind the scenes to ensure that industrial civilization will not go away quietly in the night, but will hang on to the bitter end. In response to anyone challenging the primacy of fossil fuels, Big Oil says “From my cold, dead hands!’.

According to a new report by geoscientist J. David Hughes, the cost of tar sands appears to outweigh any imagined benefits:

An EROEI of less than 3:1 for 80% of tar sands and the U.S. is counting on that for a large percentage of its oil ‘needs’, currently 24%? And the fossil fuel industry/government sock-puppet PR machine is touting this as a viable source of energy to prop up our vacuous, corporate manufactured, McDonaldized culture.

The Violence and Coercion of the So-Called free Market (Guns, Slaves, & Steal)

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate Neo-Colonialism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Hydro-Colonialism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Neoliberal Capitalism, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Poverty, Resource Wars, Roberto De Vogli, The Elite 1%

My internet is still down, but will hopefully be back up by tomorrow night so I can put out a few posts I was contemplating. In the mean time, an interesting excerpt from a new book by Roberto De Vogli, associate professor in global health at the University of California Davis and University College London.

Excerpt…

And of course it continues today as has been discussed in previous posts on this site. So much for the “free market”.

Capitalism, Population Growth, & Climate Change

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

'A Great Aridness', Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Chaos, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, Overpopulation, Phoenix Boomburbs, PIMCO's Bill Gross, Regulatory Capture, The Elite 1%, Urban Sprawl, William deBuys

I mentioned earlier that I’d talk about my reading list. I’ve got a few books I’ll review for this site. The one I’m reading currently is about how the U.S. Southwest, where I live, will be affected by anthropogenic climate change. The book is ‘A Great Aridness‘ by William deBuys.

A few excerpts from the intro:

As deBuys mentions in his intro, the housing market in the Southwest, in particular Phoenix, took a hit in 2008 but is expected to get back on the [population] growth track in the near future.

I will go so far as to say that not only growth but capitalism itself may be in part dependent on a growing population,” Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Bill Gross wrote. – link

Capitalism is fueled by population growth. More people = more consumption = increased GDP and tax revenues.

Elliott D. Pollack, CEO of the economic and real estate consulting firm Elliott D. Pollack & Co., said Arizona’s economic growth depended on adding 100,000 people every year. The population boom fueled growth in “people–serving” jobs, such as doctors, real estate agents and salespeople, he said.

Pollack said he doesn’t expect Arizona to return to the job growth of 2007, just before the crash, until 2015.

“It will be almost a lost decade,” he said. – link

The following satellite pictures tell the tale of the exploding population in Phoenix, even coining a new phrase to describe such explosive growth suburbs as “Boomburbs“…

In the early twentieth century, when big American cities spawned satellite cities, those satellites were often downscaled mimics of the cities they surrounded. Like New York City, for example, its suburb Newark, New Jersey, had its own downtown. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, a different kind of satellite city emerged: a populous suburb with no central business core. “Boomburbs”—suburbs with populations of 100,000 or more that have maintained double-digit growth over decades—are primarily a phenomenon of the southern and western United States….

…Like much of the American Southwest, southern Arizona is arid, and agriculture depends on irrigation. As a result, cultivated fields—rectangles of green and brown—contrast with the pale tan of the naturally bare desert soil. In the 1989 image, most of the land east of Chandler is agricultural. Between 1989 and 2009, however, most of the fields give way to the blue-gray colors of buildings and pavement. In 2009, only a small number of agricultural fields remain, mostly east and south of Route 202. Because many of the United States’ boomburbs occur in the arid Southwest, planning for their water needs is particularly challenging for metropolitan and municipal governments. – link

Getting back to the book’s theme of climate change and the U.S. Southwest, a ballooning population is running headlong into a future characterized by a “new form of desertification… [brought on by] industrial society’s abuse of the atmosphere.” Radical transformation of our corporate-monopolized economy is the only way that climate change can effectively be dealt with. This would, however, appear all but impossible when any form of true government oversight and responsiveness to the citizens has been thoroughly corrupted and sidelined by corporate interests. According to a review in Truth-Out, deBuys illustrates in detail how corporate power is preventing any such changes:

…Of all his stories documenting the choppy and chaotic effects of global warming in the Southwest, especially the rising temperatures and the plagues of droughts, fires, and bark beetles killing thousands of acres of forest trees, I found the natural history and political drama of Mount Graham the most compelling. This is an example where political corruption and higher temperatures collude in unleashing the decline and fall of the Southwest…

…DeBuys sums up both the science and the biopolitics (ruthless politics) sealing our fate. He sees the triumph of corporate power as a resurrection of the 1520 Requerimiento, Spain’s legal justification for the enslavement and murder of the resisting indigenous people to clear the way for Spanish plunder and political control in the Southwest and Latin America. Indeed, the Requerimiento marked “the momentum of Spain’s imperial impulse,” no different than “the momentum of contemporary climate change today.”

The connection of past colonialism with its present variety, triggering and making global warming possible, is an insight into and a lesson on how the future is likely to be…

There are two major differences between the avarice of the Gilded Age Robber Barons and that of today’s all-powerful multinational corporations. Firstly, the corporations of today are much more omnipotent and control society through a form of despotic rule called ‘inverted totalitarianism‘. As Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer exclaimed last summer, “They were pikers compared to what we’re doing now.” Secondly, an egregious wealth gap and the political disenfranchisement of the worker do characterize both periods, but now the world must contend with climate chaos along with a host of other environmental problems, any one of which can bring down modern civilization.

Earth to Humans: “Get Off Your Merry-Go-Round Ride to Extinction”

11 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Devon G. Peña, Drought in America's Bread basket, Droughts and Fire in Australia, Droughts in Brazil, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kulturecritic, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Poverty, Privatization, Sandy Krolick, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

Hello dominant life form of planet Earth. Yes, that means you Homo Sapiens. I’ve watched as over the millennia you evolved from a primitive ape-like hominid species, surviving purely by instinct, to the technology-wielding, sophisticated-thinking creature of today. Truly, the planet became your smorgasbord and you have partaken freely. As a matter of fact, you have very nearly emptied the planet’s entire refrigerator and cupboards and are now preparing to lick your plate clean. I’ve been throwing up some warning signs, especially this past year, to try to get your attention and perhaps make you reconsider your current omnivorous appetite. After all, you do share the planet with other life forms who have been hoping someone or something will put an end to your callous industrial rampage. I’ve even set in motion a sort of evolutionary check-and-balance, a doomsday device if you will, in the form of atmospheric heat-trapping gases, ensuring your demise just in case you don’t get the message of behavior modification. In other words, your dominant socio-economic paradigm of capitalism is fatally flawed.

In terms of economic expansion and human overpopulation:

Your voracious appetite for the world’s natural resources — fish, timber, potable water, arable land, minerals, et al. — continues unabated. And after consuming them, you leave behind mountains of waste and destruction. Does it always take a crisis before you creatures take action? Instead of waiting until you suffocate to death in a world of hypoxic oceans and dead forests, try listening to those lone voices of dissent screaming for your attention:

Look, I have news for you. The human economy does not take precedence over the Earth’s natural ecological processes which have evolved over millions of years to provide you with clean water, clean air, fertile land, and productive plant and animal life. All of these priceless necessities have been given to you at no charge to your accounting ledger. I guess free lunches are something no human can refuse, but the bill will come due no matter how you try to hide it by pushing it off onto the environment and future generations. In a planet without a stable biosphere, your glimmering metropolises with their megalithic concrete and steel structures reaching heavenward are nothing more than fleeting sand castles to be washed away by the next rogue wave of a surging sea… Sandy was just a warm-up event. Perhaps a new ‘Dust Bowl’ event and heat waves down under demanding a new color code on the weather map and droughts rendering useless a nation’s hydroelectric power will do the trick. I suppose as long as the $tock exchanges of the world are operable, your “business as usual” scheme of perpetual growth and converting all the natural world into capitalist symbols of wealth will carry on its merry way right over the edge of global extinction. And you thought the “fiscal cliff” was something to worry about?

As a mentor and intellectual peer of this site said recently, “tribes and societies that did master effective class consciousness thrived, for a very long time. Those that didn’t, don’t.” At today’s massive scale of production and consumption, the human and environmental exploitation characterized by modern industrial capitalism undermines the long-term existence of mankind along with every other living organism on the planet. Capitalism shoehorns everything into its profit-seeking regime, no matter if that means global genocide on a scale never heretofore seen:

…Actually, the more I reflect on it, the clearer I see the logic, the rationale, behind the bankers’ and the capitalists’ push for privatization. It is not just more profits they are after, not just share price or corporate valuation; no! They are after mass extermination, genocide on a grand scale – of the world’s needy, the under-funded, the unwanted, the uncivilized, the savages and the barbarians, the commies and the Islamists, in short, elimination of all of the Others.

The big boyz have seen all the data and crunched all the numbers, and it is clear to them – the earth is running out of resources, Mars is -50 C all of the time, and we can no longer afford to carry all of this excess baggage here on the planet — all of these miserable, thankless, do-nothing mouths to feed. So the plan is brilliant. You reduce the number from 7+ billion by at least 33% without firing one shot. You simply privatize all natural resources and then price access so that the bottom third of the globe’s population cannot afford it. And so, they die; it will be the biggest die-off of the Anthropocene epoch…

You ignore my overt signals at your own peril.

[youtube:www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-IHOEPrKNQ]

The Fiscal Spiked Dildo

05 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

"Pass-Through" Tax Exemption, Active Financing Exception, Austerity, Barack Obama, Capitalism, Corporate $tate, Corporate Masters, Corporate Welfare, Economist James Henry, Empire, Financial Elite, Fiscal Cliff, Government-Corporate-Lobbyist Complex, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Multinational Corporations, Naked Capitalism, Payroll Tax, Poverty, Social Unrest, Special-Interest Tax Credits, The Elite 1%, The Fiscal Spiked Dildo, The Joint Committee on Taxation, The Wealth Gap, Too-Big-To-Fail Banks, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, Yves Smith

While many liberal blogs were celebrating what looked on the surface to be an Obama victory of raising taxes on the über wealthy, they apparently did not notice what was being slipped up their behind.

For starters, the payroll tax, which was lowered in 2011 from 6.2% down to 4.2% in an effort to breathe some life into a moribund middle class, has jumped back up by 2% to its original rate. 160 million American workers will now shell out another $35 to $180 per week depending on their income level. The payroll tax is capped for incomes greater than $113,000 at $2,274. This means that it’s a regressive tax –anyone making over $113,00 will pay less as a percentage of their income, while for everyone else the tax is a net increase of 2%.

So while the plebs are scrounging around to pay that extra tribute to the Empire, our corporate overlords have extracted more blood from the serfs:

The “fiscal cliff” legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren’t the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff’s edge — they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week…

In late July, Finance Chairman Max Baucus announced the committee would soon convene to craft a bill extending many expiring tax credits. This attracted lobbyists like a raw steak attracts wolves. …

General Electric and Citigroup, for instance, hired Breaux and Lott to extend a tax provision that allows multinational corporations to defer U.S. taxes by moving profits into offshore financial subsidiaries. This provision — known as the “active financing exception” — is the main tool GE uses to avoid nearly all U.S. corporate income tax.

Corporations also got another legalized tax avoidance here:

As part of the fiscal cliff deal, Congress also extended another little-known tax break that benefits large multinationals selling products through overseas affiliates. This “pass-through” exemption permits a U.S.-based company to set up a new corporation in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands and sell it a patent owned by the U.S. parent company. Royalties on overseas licensing of that patent would then route to the tax-sheltered firm, instead of the U.S. parent company. The Joint Committee on Taxation says the two-year cost of extending this shelter is $1.5 billion.

And you wouldn’t expect the financial oligarchs to forgo any of their piece of the pie:

The financial services industry, whose leaders had earlier joined a group of other corporate executives pushing for a “fair” solution to the fiscal crisis, is one of the primary beneficiaries of special-interest tax breaks. The active-financing exception, for example, permits banks like Morgan Stanley to avoid the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate on interest income from money lent overseas. A handful of other U.S.-based multinational companies with financing arms, such as Ford Motor Co. and General Electric, also use that exemption to lower their tax bills…

…[T]he “active financing” exception … permits businesses earning interest on overseas lending to defer U.S. taxes on that income indefinitely…

Vampire-squid Goldman Sachs and too-crooked-to-fail Bank of America also get tax breaks for moving into the new World Trade Center that replaced the pre-9/11 one:

…This tax provision was created to help revitalize Lower Manhattan’s small businesses but instead helped out these two mega-bailed-out banks and helped to subsidize the construction of luxury apartments. Goldman Sachs alone was reported to have received $1.6 billion in tax-free financing of its new building…

There are many more corporate giveaways in the fiscal spiked dildo that was rammed into Main Street, but you get the idea. America is just one big plantation for our corporate masters to harvest from on a perpetual basis. Yves Smith has a post discussing the permanent cementing-in of a class structure composed of the ‘have all’ and ‘have nothing’:

…The newest chat, with economist James Henry, focuses on how the deal on estate taxes allows the rich to pass on wealth to their children, allowing inequality to persist across generations. And he reminds us that a lot of Congressmen are rich enough that this provision will benefit their families…

I could not have summed up the situation better than the first commenter:

In their mad dash to cling to a sinking ship’s last remaining point above water, the callus elite won’t hesitate to trample all over women and children. In a world of ‘peak everything’ and a dying biosphere, the venal nature of man will surely surface in spades.

America: a Banana Republic with Nukes.

04 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Banana Republic with Nukes, Big Oil, Capitalism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Darbikrash, Empire, Financial Elite, Globalization, Government-Corporate-Lobbyist Complex, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jeffrey Sachs, Military Industrial Complex, Regulatory Capture, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, The Price of Civilisation, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, Too-Big-To-Fail Banks, Unfettered Capitalism, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

An interesting article came to my attention via a referral from The Big Picture. The economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins, has written an article, The four business gangs that run the US, which is a review of Jeffrey Sachs book, The Price of Civilisation. Sachs should have entitled his book ‘The Price of Capitalism’. In order to protect corporate interests, the exploiters will always use their wealth to bribe the political system (such as campaign contributions and promises of lucrative positions in the private sector after leaving government posts). We are all familiar with feedback loops in terms of climate change, but there also exists one within our socio-economic system which is extremely destructive. I refered to this feedback loop as the government-corporate-lobbyist complex in my post Guns, God, and Greenback$. Sachs describes this pernicious feedback loop, which has accelerated wealth to the top 0.001%, as follows:

Sachs says…

Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth.

Sachs even uses the term corporatocracy to describe the four primary U.S. business sectors which have usurped our government:

1.) Military-Industrial-Complex

Sachs says…

As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then.

2.) Wall Street-Washington complex

This group, comprised primarily of the big financial corporations (i.e. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley), systematically worked to “capture” regulation and take control of the money system which, Sachs says, “paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government”.

3.) Big Oil-transport-military complex

Sachs says…

Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.

Now you know why America has a rail system that even the Bulgarians would be ashamed of, as Kunstler is fond of saying. Next time you fill up your tank, think of the perpetual oil wars in the Middle East as an externalized cost of subsidizing America’s car culture. Anita Dancs calculated the cost of securing our liquid fuel addiction back in 2010:

…Put all these numbers in perspective: The price of a barrel of oil consumed in the United States would have to increase by $23.40 to offset military resources expended to secure oil. That translates to an additional 56 cents for a gallon of gas, or three times the federal gas tax that funds road construction.

If $166 billion were spent on other priorities, the Boston public transportation system, the “T,” could have its operating expenses covered, with commuters riding for free. And there would still be money left over for another 100 public transport systems across the United States. Or, we could build and install nearly 50,000 wind turbines. Take your pick.

Sachs also reminds us that “Big Oil has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda. Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries and others in the sector have underwritten a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.”

4.) Healthcare Complex

Sachs says…

The key to understanding this sector is to note that the government partners with industry to reimburse costs with little systematic oversight and control. Pharmaceutical firms set sky-high prices protected by patent rights; Medicare [for the aged] and Medicaid [for the poor] and private insurers reimburse doctors and hospitals on a cost-plus basis; and the American Medical Association restricts the supply of new doctors through the control of placements at medical schools.

‘The result of this pseudo-market system is sky-high costs, large profits for the private healthcare sector, and no political will to reform.

We are the only industrialized country on Earth without universal healthcare. We pay more than anyone else and get less for the money spent. One of every five or six GDP dollars goes to feed this beast, but our life expectancy doesn’t reflect it:

Sachs says the elite take care of their own and have no concern for the plebs down below:

There is absolutely no economic crisis in corporate America. Consider the pulse of the corporate sector as opposed to the pulse of the employees working in it: corporate profits in 2010 were at an all-time high, chief executive salaries in 2010 rebounded strongly from the financial crisis, Wall Street compensation in 2010 was at an all-time high, several Wall Street firms paid civil penalties for financial abuses, but no senior banker faced any criminal charges, and there were no adverse regulatory measures that would lead to a loss of profits in finance, health care, military supplies and energy.

Ross Gittins concludes his review of Sachs’ book by briefly summarizing the path the elite took to amass their incredible wealth:

The 30-year achievement of the corporatocracy has been the creation of America’s rich and super-rich classes, he says. And we can now see their tools of trade.

It began with globalisation, which pushed up capital income while pushing down wages. These changes were magnified by the tax cuts at the top, which left more take-home pay and the ability to accumulate greater wealth through higher net-of-tax returns to saving.’

Chief executives then helped themselves to their own slice of the corporate sector ownership through outlandish awards of stock options by friendly and often handpicked compensation committees, while the Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way. It’s not all that hard to do when both political parties are standing in line to do your bidding, Sachs concludes.

There was a comment that Darbikrash made on another website a year ago which pertains to this subject and clearly explains the corrupting influence that money has on government. Here is an excerpt:

Now you know how the elite have made this country a Banana Republic with nukes. Unfettered capitalism = monkeys with guns.