LET IT DIE: Rushkoff on the economy

LET IT DIE
by Douglas Rushkoff

March 15, 2009

With any luck, the economy will never recover.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation's banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they're enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I'm not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it's what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it's justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It's not just that I saw the downturn coming—it's that I feared it wouldn't come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It's like arguing to Brooklyn's latest crop of brownstone buyers that they've invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn't pretty.)

Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it's a whole lot easier to make these arguments. And, if anything, it's even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn't meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

Chartered Corporations

Back in the good ol' days—I mean as far back as the late middle ages—people just did business with each other. As traveling got easier and people got access to new resources and markets, a middle class of merchants and small businesspeople started to get wealthy. So wealthy that they threatened the power of the aristocracy. Monarchs needed to come up with a way to stabilize their own wealth before the free market unseated them.

They invented the corporate charter. By granting an exclusive charter, a king could give one of his friends in the merchant class monopoly control over a region or sector. In exchange, he'd get shares in the company. So the businessperson no longer had to worry about competition—his position at the top of the business hierarchy was locked in place, by law. And the monarch never had to worry about losing his authority; businesses with crown-guaranteed charters tend to support the crown.

But this changed the shape of business fundamentally. Instead of thriving on innovation and progress, corporate monopolies simply sought to extract wealth from the regions they controlled. They didn't need to compete, anymore, so they just sucked resources from places and people. Meanwhile, people living and working in the real world lost the ability to generate value by or for themselves.

For example: In the 1700s, American colonists were allowed to grow corn but they weren't allowed to do anything with it–except sell it at fixed prices to the British East India Trading Company, the corporation sanctioned by England to do business in the colonies. Colonists weren't allowed to sell their cotton to each other or, worse, make clothes out of it. They were mandated, by law, to ship it back to England where clothes were fabricated by another chartered monopoly, then shipped back to America where they could be purchased. The American war for independence was less a revolt against England than a revolt against her chartered corporations.

The other big innovation of the early corporate era was monopoly currency. There used to be lots of different kinds of money. Local currencies, which helped regions reinvest in their own activities, and centralized currencies, for long distance transactions. Local currencies were earned into existence. A farmer would grow a bunch of grain, bring it to the grain store, and get receipts for how much grain he had deposited. The receipts could be used as money—even by people who didn't need grain at that particular moment. Everyone knew what it was worth.

The interesting thing about local, grain-based currencies was that they lost value over time. The people at the grain store had to be paid, and a certain amount of grain was lost to rain or rodents. So every year, the money would be worth less. This encouraged people to spend it rather than save it. And they did. Late Middle Ages workers were paid more for less work time than at any point in history. Women were taller in England in that era than they are today—an indication of their relative health. People did preventative maintenance on their equipment, and invested in innovation. There was so much extra money looking for productive investment, that people built cathedrals. The great cathedrals of Europe were not paid for with money from the Vatican; they were local investments, made by small towns looking for ways to share their prosperity with future generations by creating tourist attractions.

Local currencies favored local transactions, and worked against the interests of large corporations working from far away. In order to secure their own position as well as that of their chartered monopolies, monarchs began to make local currencies illegal, and force locals to instead use "coin of the realm." These centralized currencies worked the opposite way. They were not earned into existence, they were lent into existence by a central bank. This meant any money issued to a person or business had to be paid back to the central bank, with interest.

What does that do to an economy? It bankrupts it. Think of it this way: A business borrows 1000 dollars from the bank to get started. In ten years, say, it is supposed to pay back 2000 to the bank. Where does the other 1000 come from? Some other business that has borrowed 1000 from the bank. For one business to pay back what it owes, another must go bankrupt. That, or borrow yet another 1000, and so on.

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

The biggest wealth generator of all was banking itself. By lending money at interest to people and businesses who had no other way to conduct transactions or make investments, banks put themselves at the center of the extraction equation. The longer the economy survived, the more money would have to be borrowed, and the more interest earned by the bank.

Financial Meltdown

Which is pretty much how things have worked over the past 500 years to today. So what went wrong? Nothing. The system worked exactly as it was supposed to. The problem was that after America's post WWII expansion, there was really no longer any real growth area in the economy from which to extract wealth. We were producing and consuming about as much as we could. Almost no commercial activity was occurring outside the corporate system. There was no room left to grow. Sure, outsourcing, lay-offs, and technology created some efficiencies, but wars, rising costs of health care, and exchange rates essentially offset any gains.

Making matters worse, all that capital that the wealthy had accumulated needed markets—even fake markets—in which to be invested. There was a ton of money out there—just nowhere to put it. Nothing on which to speculate.

The dot.com boom seemed to offer the promise of a new market, but it fizzled almost as quickly as it rose. So speculators turned instead to real assets, like corn, oil, even real estate. They started investing speculatively on the things that real people need to stay alive. What real people didn't understand was that there is no way to compete against speculators. Speculators aren't buying homes in which to live—they are buying houses to flip. Speculators aren't buying corn to eat or oil to burn, but bushels to hoard and tankers to park off shore until prices rise. The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Luckily for us, the banks, and the speculators depending on them, made a bad wager: they bet on our continuing capacity to provide a reality on which to base their highly leveraged schemes. We just couldn't do it. They put us between a rock and a hard place. With George W's help, they sold us on the notion of home ownership as a prerequisite to the American dream. And they created a number of loan products which made it look as if we could actually afford over-priced homes. The banking industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for laws making bankruptcy difficult or impossible for average people to accomplish—while simultaneously selling average people loans that they would never be able to pay back.

The banks didn't really care, anyway, since they never meant to keep these loans. They simply provided the cash to mortgage companies, who then packaged the loans. In return for putting up the original cash, the banks also won the right to underwrite the sale of those mortgage packages to investors—investors like pension funds, retirement funds, or you and me. Get it? The banks get all the interest, but we put up all the money. Our retirement accounts and pension funds invest in the very mortgages that we can't pay back. The bank collects any interest, playing both sides of the equation but responsible for neither.

And when the whole scheme begins to break down, what do we do? We try to bail out the very banks that created the mess, under the premise that we need these banks in order for business to come back, since only banks can lend the capital required for businesses to flourish.

Yes, It is Wrong

President Obama may be smarter than most of us, but he's still attempting to rescue the very institutions that robbed us in the first place. He's not a socialist, as conservatives may be arguing, but he is a corporatist. Using future tax dollars to fund government job programs is one thing. Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.

As painful as it might be to watch, and as irritating as it might be to those with shrinking retirement savings, the collapse of the centralized corporate economy is ultimately a good thing. It makes room for a real economy to rise up in its place. And while it may be temporarily uncomfortable for the rich, and even temporarily devastating for the poor, it may be the fastest and least violent way to dismantle a system set in place for the benefit of 14th Century monarchs who have long since left this earth.

If the corporate supermarket chain's debt structure renders it incapable of stocking its shelves this spring, this may be the wake-up call that consumers need to finally subscribe to a Community Supported Agriculture farmer. If the former associate fund analyst at Lehman realizes that he is unable to get a job not just because his industry is contracting but because his work day creates no real value for anyone at all, he will be forced to learn how to do something that does. If an urban elite parent realizes he can no longer pay private school tuition for his kids, maybe he'll consider donating to public school the time he would have spent earning that tuition.

In short, the less we are able to depend on business-as-usual to provide for our basic needs, the more we will be forced to provide them for ourselves and one another. Sometimes we'll do this for free, because we like each other, or live in the same community. Sometimes we'll exchange services or favors. Sometimes we'll use one of the alternative, local currencies coming into use across the country as Central bank-issued currencies become too hard to get without a corporate job.

Deprived of centralized banks and corporations, we'll be forced to do things again. And in the process, we'll find out that these institutions were not our benefactors at all. They were never meant to be. They were invented to mediate transactions between people, and extract the value that would have passed between us. Far from making commerce or industry more efficient, they served to turn the real world into a set of speculative assets, and real people into debtors.

The current financial crisis is the best opportunity we have had in a very long time for a bloodless revolution against the faceless fascism under which we have been living, unaware, for much too long. Let us seize the day.

(UPDATE: "Hack Money, Hack Banking" by Douglas Rushkoff, the March 20 follow-up to "Let It Die," is available here.)

Longtime Arthur columnist Douglas Rushkoff has just finished his life's work, "Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back," to be published June 2, 2009 by Random House. (Pre-order info: Amazon). His live talk radio show, Media Squat Radio, airs Mondays 7-8pm EDT on WFMU. Streams at www.wfmu.org and iTunes.

Previous Rushkoff columns on the economy:
"No Money Down" (Arthur No. 31/Oct 2008)
"Riding Out the Credit Crisis" (Arthur No. 29/May 2008)

http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/03/16/let-it-die-rushkoff-on-the-economy/

http://snipurl.com/egcnt

Speaking of "Century of the Self"....

excerpts from:

Only in America Could Misery Be Turned Into a Commodity

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com
http://www.alternet.org/story/126345/

• You need not be Marcus or R.D. Lang to feel the stress, depression, boredom and loneliness permeating everyday life up there in Gringolia. But to get an overview, it does help to be a couple thousand miles outside the place. Kind of like being high in the stands at the racetrack with binoculars rather than down at the rail next to the paddock.

• I used to think it was just some melancholic germ of my own that made me see a slowly increasing American alienation, anxiety and inner sadness over the span of my 62 years. Now however, I'm pretty convinced there is a national pathology at work, one that author Arthur Barsky called the "pathology of American normalcy." Sounds accurate to me.

• The pathology of Americanness is entirely about human consciousness, a taboo subject in our declining industrial super state.

• But who'd have guessed (psychology) would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.

• After all, they are in the alienation business. It is entirely in the profession's best interests that it treats us as if our lives are lived in a vacuum, our loneliness and despair are entirely our own, as if there were no such thing as context, much less American society's corrosive and toxic environment in which so many of us live out our lives.

• Put another way, it acknowledges our misery, then privatizes it, then administers lonely, alienated "treatment" for our emptiness in a private void, one among tens of millions of like emptinesses in similar voids that are in no way supposed to be societal. No matter that there are enough sufferers to constitute an entire society in themselves.

• The result, whether or not by design, is to perpetuate the most venerable of American myths, that of the completely autonomous self. Which denies us the power and beauty, not to mention the healing and efficacy, of human unity.

• In the big picture, much of the U.S. mental health industry, and its associated systems, perpetuate and even propagate mental sickness perhaps as much as it alleviates, through its paradigms.

• The American Psychological Association's initial refusal to condemn member participation in the Bush regime's torture told me all I needed to know about U.S. psych-officialdom.

• The entire machinery of education, social work, psychology and medicine are meshed (though the practitioners would stoutly deny it) and help hold firm the class line in this country.

• Given the economic and societal breakdown now under way and accelerating toward completion, Obama or no Obama (what is this thing of ours, this national obsession with saviors, elected or otherwise?), it's bound to be interesting to see if they can indoctrinate, dope, counsel and lock up or medicate the dissidence, and perhaps outright resistance that will occur.

• And what I see, based upon my own experience and watching that of others, is that alienation and the pain of utter aloneness is in the rootstock of nearly all psychic malady, excepting the clearly organic. If when we look around us in the world, we do not see ourselves in society, nor does society see itself in us, we eventually come to feel the sustained, unutterable pain of aloneness.
  

• We got there partly through our weakness, shallow greed and mindless consent, but more so by the orchestrated world machinery benefiting powerful elites, both corporate, governmental and financial (is there a difference?), which have always been among us, although never in such strength.
  

• The night winds are rising and with them comforting assurance that The Machine is not everything ... indeed, not anything by the light of these indifferent stars.

  The Full Monty : http://www.alternet.org/story/126345/

and in fact Century Of The Self would be a good watch at this point...

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his Web site.

© 2009 JoeBageant.com All rights reserved.

And Not A Shot Is Fired

"How does the technique work? It may, for instance, be applied to some easily discoverable public concern. To answer the need, a piece of "enabling legislation" is suggested, carrying no authority, expressed or implied. It sets up an "agency." The agency, once established, follows normal agency behavior. The need becomes more precisely defined. A modicum of authority is requested. Pressures are organized, artificial and real, from "above" and from "below." The requested authority is voted, and pressures wane. In due course, further authority is suggested, and new coalitions of pressure appear. All in good time an Authority is there, self-contained; a new instrument of power has arisen, sufficient unto itself. This instrument may be local, regional or nationwide. Its key word is Authority. In the beginning, this word is seldom employed.

"By such parliamentary means a democratic and representative government can be made authoritative, legally, and piece by piece. The form remains, an empty shell. Its philosophy and its content are gone. The person, the individual, who one year is free and independent, is next year just a little more restricted. Then a little more, and a little more. Suddenly, overnight, he no longer is a person. He is a cog, being moved inexorably by the monolithic machinery of the State.

"And not a shot is fired!"

The Full Text of And Not A Shot Is Fired

Ship Of Fools

Ship Of Fools
By Paul Craig Roberts
2-9-9

Is there intelligent life in Washington, DC? Not a speck of it. The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his government of neconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, American's largest creditor. The January payroll job figures reveal that last month 20,000 Americans lost their jobs every day. In addition, December's job losses were revised up by 53,000 jobs from 524,000 to 577,000. The revision brings the two-month job loss to 1,175,000. If this keeps up, Obama's promised three million new jobs will be wiped out by job losses. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that this huge number is an understatement. Williams notes that built-in biases in seasonal adjustment factors caused a 118,000 understatement of January job losses, bringing the actual January job loss to 716,000 jobs. The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed as some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs. The Household Survey shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two month reduction of Americans with jobs of 1,638,000. The unemployment rate reported in the US media is a fabrication. Williams reports that "during the Clinton Administration, 'discouraged workers' those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had--were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been 'discouraged' for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18% in January, from 17.5% in December." In other words, without all the manipulations of the data from a government that lies to us every time it opens its mouth, the US unemployment rate is already at depression levels. How could it be otherwise given the enormous job loss from offshored jobs. It is impossible for a country to create jobs when its corporations are moving production for the American consumer market offshore. When they move the production offshore, they shift US GDP to other countries. The US trade deficit over the past decade has reduced US GDP by $1.5 trillion dollars. That is a lot of jobs. I have been reporting for years that American university graduates have had to take jobs as waitresses and bartenders. As over-indebted American consumers lose their jobs, they will visit restaurants and bars less frequently. Consequently, Americans with university degrees will not even have jobs waiting on tables and mixing drinks. US policymakers have ignored the fact that consumer demand in the 21st century has been driven, not by increases in real income, but by increased consumer indebtedness. This fact makes it pointless to try to stimulate the economy by bailing out banks so that they can lend more to consumers. The American consumers have no more capacity to borrow. With the decline in the values of their principal assets--their homes--with the destruction of half of their pension assets, and with joblessness facing them, Americans cannot and will not spend. Why bail out GM and Citibank when the firms are moving as many operations offshore as they possibly can? Much of US infrastructure is in poor shape and needs renewing. However, infrastructure jobs do not produce goods and services that can be sold abroad. The massive commitment to infrastructure does nothing to help the US reduce its massive trade deficit, the financing of which is becoming a major problem. Moreover, when the infrastructure projects are completed, so are the jobs. At best, assuming Mexicans do not get most of the construction jobs, all Obama's stimulus program can do is to reduce the number of unemployed temporarily. Unless US corporations can be required to use American labor to produce the goods and services that they sell in American markets, there is no hope for the US economy. No one in the Obama administration has the wits to address this problem. Thus, the economy will continue to implode. Adding to the brewing disaster, Obama has been deceived by his military and neoconservative advisers into expanding the war in Afghanistan, a large mountainous country. Obama intends to use the draw-down of US soldiers in Iraq to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. This would bring the US forces to 60,000--600,000 fewer than US Marine Corps and US Army counterinsurgency guidelines define as the minimum number of soldiers necessary to bring success in Afghanistan--and less than half as many as the army that was unable to occupy Iraq. The Iranians had to bail out the Bush regime by restraining its Shi'ite allies and encouraging them to use the ballot box to attain power and push out the Americans. In Iraq the US troops only had to fight a small Sunni insurgency drawn from a minority of the population. Even so, the US "prevailed" by putting the insurgents on the US payroll and paying them not to fight. The withdrawal agreement was dictated by the Shi'ites. It was not what the Bush regime wanted. One would think that the experience with the "cakewalk" in Iraq would make the US hesitant to attempt to occupy Afghanistan, an undertaking that would require the US to occupy parts of Pakistan. The US was hard pressed to maintain 150,000 troops in Iraq. Where is Obama going to get another half million soldiers to add to the 150,000 to pacify Afghanistan? One answer is the rapidly growing massive US unemployment. Americans will sign up to go kill abroad rather than be homeless and hungry at home. But this solves only half of the problem. Where does the money come from to support an army in the field of 650,000, an army 4.3 times larger than US forces in Iraq, a war that has cost us $3 trillion in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs. This money would have to be raised in addition to the $3 trillion US budget deficit that is the result of Bush's financial sector bailout, Obama's stimulus package, and the rapidly failing economy. When economies tank, as the American one is doing, tax revenues collapse. The millions of unemployed Americans are not paying Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes. The stores and businesses that are closing are not paying federal and state income taxes. Consumers with no money or credit to spend are not paying sales taxes. The Washington Morons, and morons they are, have given no thought as to how they are going to finance a fiscal year 2009 budget deficit of some two to three trillion dollars. The practically nonexistent US saving rate cannot finance it. The trade surpluses of our trading partners, such as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, cannot finance it. The US government really has only two possibilities for financing its budget deficit. One is a second collapse in the stock market, which would drive the surviving investors with what they have left into "safe" US Treasury bonds. The other is for the Federal Reserve to monetize the Treasury debt. Monetizing the debt means that when no one is willing or able to purchase the Treasury's bonds, the Federal Reserve buys them by creating bank deposits for the Treasury's account. In other words, the Fed "prints money" with which to buy the Treasury's bonds. Once this happens, the US dollar will cease to be the reserve currency. In addition, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia, countries that hold enormous quantities of US Treasury debt in addition to other US dollar assets, will sell, hoping to get out before others. The US dollar will become worthless, the currency of a banana republic. The US will not be able to pay for its imports, a serious problem for a country dependent on imports for its energy, manufactured goods, and advanced technology products. Obama's Keynesian advisers have learned with a vengeance Milton Friedman's lesson that the Great Depression resulted from the Federal Reserve permitting a contraction of the supply of money and credit. In the Great Depression good debts were destroyed by monetary contraction. Today bad debts are being preserved by the expansion of money and credit, and the US Treasury is jeopardizing its credit standing and the dollar's reserve currency status with enormous quarterly bond auctions as far as the eye can see. Meanwhile, the Russians, overflowing with energy and mineral resources, and not in debt, have learned that the US government is not to be trusted. Russia has watched Reagan's successors attempt to turn former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into US puppet states with US military bases. The US is trying to ring Russia with missiles that neutralize Russia's strategic deterrent. Putin has caught on to "comrade wolf." He has succeeded in having the president of Kyrgyzstan, a former part of the Soviet Union, evict the US from its military base. This base is essential to America's ability to supply its soldiers in Afghanistan. To stop America's meddling in Russia's sphere of influence, the Russian government has created a collective security treaty organization comprised of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan is a partial participant. In other words, Russia has organized central Asia against US penetration. To whose agenda is President Obama being hitched? Writing in the English language version of the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, Stephen J. Sniegoski reports that leading figures of the neocon conspiracy--Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Brooks, and Mona Charen--are ecstatic over Obama's appointments. They don't see any difference between Obama and Bush/Cheney. Not only are Obama's appointments moving him into an expanded war in Afghanistan, but the powerful Israel Lobby is pushing Obama toward a war with Iran. The unreality in which he US government operates is beyond belief. A bankrupt government that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year! The world has never seen such total mindlessness. Napoleon's and Hitler's march into Russia were rational acts compared to the mindless idiocy of the United States government. Obama's war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan. When asked about the mission, a US military official told NBC News, "Frankly, we don't have one." NBC reports: "they're working on it." Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid "mission creep without clear parameters," the US "needs a clear mission." How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed? How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?

Deflation As Precursor to Hyperinflation

Lucid article addressing the illusion that deflation is the principal prospect...

clipped from www.marketskeptics.com It is no accident that many of the worst periods of hyperinflation are preceded by deflation. In fiat currencies with high levels of government debt, severe cases of deflation cause a loss of confidence in the nation's currency by shrinking the economy and making the government's debt appear increasingly unsustainable. The loss of confidence then causes the flow of money to speed up as individuals become desperate to exchange cash for real goods as fast as possible, producing hyperinflation.

A lucid outline of the sequence of events....

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Great Depression of the 21st Century: Collapse of the Real Economy by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, November 15, 2008

The financial crisis is deepening, with the risk of seriously disrupting the system of international payments. This crisis is far more serious than the Great Depression. All major sectors of the global economy are affected. Recent reports suggest that the system of Letters of Credit as well as international shipping, which constitute the lifeline of the international trading system, are potentially in jeopardy. The proposed bank "bailout" under the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is not a "solution" to the crisis but the "cause" of further collapse. The "bailout" contributes to a further process of destabilization of the financial architecture. It transfers large amounts of public money, at taxpayers expense, into the hands of private financiers. It leads to a spiraling public debt and an unprecedented centralization of banking power. Moreover, the bailout money is used by the financial giants to secure corporate acquisitions both in the financial sector and the real economy. In turn, this unprecedented concentration of financial power spearheads entire sectors of industry and the services economy into bankruptcy, leading to the layoff of tens of thousands of workers. The upper spheres of Wall Street overshadow the real economy. The accumulation of large amounts of money wealth by a handful of Wall Street conglomerates and their associated hedge funds is reinvested in the acquisition of real assets. Paper wealth is transformed into the ownership and control of real productive assets, including industry, services, natural resources, infrastructure, etc. Collapse of Consumer Demand The real economy is in crisis. The resulting increase in unemployment is conducive to a dramatic decline in consumer spending which in turn backlashes on the levels of production of goods and services. Exacerbated by neoliberal macro-economic policy, this downward spiral is cumulative, ultimately leading to an oversupply of commodities. Business enterprises cannot sell their products, because workers have been laid off. Consumers, namely working people, have been deprived of the purchasing power required to fuel economic growth. With their meager earnings, they cannot afford to acquire the goods produced. Overproduction Triggers a String of Bankruptcies Inventories of unsold goods pile up. Eventually, production collapses; the supply of commodities declines through the closing down of production facilities, including manufacturing assembly plants. In the process of plant closure, more workers become unemployed. Thousands of bankrupt firms are driven off the economic landscape, leading to a slump in production. Mass poverty and a Worldwide decline in living standards is the result of low wages and mass unemployment. It is the outcome of a preexisting global cheap labor economy, largely characterized by low wage assembly plants in Third World countries. The current crisis extends the geographic contours of the cheap labor economy, leading to the impoverishment of large sectors of the population in the so-called developed countries (including the middle classes). In the US, Canada and Western Europe, the entire industrial sector is potentially in jeopardy. We are dealing with a long-term process of economic and financial restructuring. In its earlier phase, starting in the 1980s during the Reagan Thatcher era, local and regional level enterprises, family farms and small businesses were displaced and destroyed. In turn, the merger and acquisition boom of the 1990s led to the concurrent consolidation of large corporate entities both in the real economy as well as in banking and financial services. In recent developments, however, the concentration of bank power has been at the expense of big business. What is distinct in this particular phase of the crisis, is the ability of the financial giants (through their overriding control over credit) not only to create havoc in the production of goods and services, but also to undermine and destroy large corporate entities of the real economy. Bankruptcies are occurring in all major sectors of activity: Manufacturing, telecoms, consumer retail outlets, shopping malls, airlines, hotels and tourism, not to mention real estate and the construction industry, victims of the subprime mortgage meltdown. General Motors has confirmed that "it could run out of cash within a few months, which could prompt one of the biggest bankruptcy filings in U.S. history". (USNews.com, November 11, 2008)) In turn this would backlash on a string of related industries. Estimates of job losses in the US auto industry range from 30,000 to as much as 100,000.(Ibid) [...snip....] In the last two months, there have been numerous plant closures across America leading to the permanent layoff of tens of thousands of workers. These closures have affected several key areas of economic activity including the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, the automobile industry and related sectors, the services economy, etc. US factory orders have declined dramatically. Research firm Autodata reported in October that "sales of cars and light trucks in September had declined 27 percent compared with a year earlier."(Washington Post, October 3, 2008) Unemployment According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, an additional 240,000 jobs were lost during the month of October alone: "Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 240,000 in October, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.1 to 6.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. October's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 127,000 in August and 284,000 in September, as revised. Employment has fallen by 1.2 million in the first 10 months of 2008; over half of the decrease has occurred in the past 3 months. In October, job losses continued in manufacturing, construction, and several service-providing industries... Among the unemployed, the number of persons who lost their job and did not expect to be recalled to work rose by 615,000 to 4.4 million in October. Over the past 12 months, the size of this group has increased by 1.7 million." (Bureau of Labor Statistics, November, 2008) The official figures do not describe the seriousness of the crisis and its devastating impact on the labor market, since many of the job losses are not reported. The situation in the European Union is equally disturbing. A recent British report points to the potential plight of mass unemployment in North Eastern England. In Germany, a report published in October, suggests that 10-15% of all automotive jobs in Germany could be lost. Job cuts have also been announced at General Motors and Nissan-Renault plants in Spain. Sales of new cars in Spain plummeted by 40 percent in October in relation to sales in the same month last year. Bankruptcies and Foreclosures: A Money-spinning Operation for the Financial Giants Among the companies on the verge of bankruptcy are some highly lucrative and profitable operations. The important question: who takes over the ownership of bankrupt giant industrial corporations? Bankruptcies and foreclosures are a money-spinning operation. With the collapse in stock market values, listed companies experience a major collapse of the price of their stock, which immediately affects their creditworthiness and their ability to borrow and/ or to renegotiate debts ( which are based on the quoted value of their assets). The institutional speculators, the hedge funds, et al have cashed in on their windfall loot. They trigger the collapse of listed companies through short selling and other speculative operations. They then cash in on their large scale speculative gains. According to a report in the Financial Times, there is evidence that the plunge of the US automobile industry was in part the result of manipulation: "General Motors and Ford lost 31 per cent to $3.01 and 10.9 per cent to $1.80 despite hopes that Washington may save the industry from the brink of collapse. The fall came after Deutsche Bank set a price target of zero on GM." (FT, November 14, 2008, emphasis added) The financiers are on a shopping-spree. America's Forbes 400 billionaires are waiting in limbo. Once they have consolidated their position in the banking industry, the financial giants including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, et al will use their windfall money gains and bailout money provided under TARP, to further extend their control over the real economy. The next step consists in transforming liquid assets, namely money paper wealth, into the acquisition of real economy assets. In this regard, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is a major shareholder of General Motors. More recently, following the collapse in stock values in October and November, Buffett boosted his stake in oil producer ConocoPhillips, not to mention Eaton Corp, whose price on the NYSE tumbled by 62% in relation to its December 2007 high (Bloomberg). The target of these acquisitions are the numerous highly productive industrial and services sector companies, which are on the verge of bankruptcy and/or whose stock values have collapsed. The money managers are picking up the pieces. Ownership of the Real Economy As a result of these developments, which are directly related to the financial meltdown, the entire ownership structure of real economy assets is in turmoil. Paper wealth accumulated through insider trading and stock market manipulation is used to acquire control over real economic assets, displacing the preexisting ownership structures. What we are dealing with is an unsavory relationship between the real economy and the financial sector. The financial conglomerates do not produce commodities. They essentially make money through the conduct of financial transactions. They use the proceeds of these transactions to take over bona fide real economy corporations which produce goods and services for household consumption. In a bitter twist, the new owners of industry are the institutional speculators and financial manipulators. They are becoming the new captains of industry, displacing not only the preexisting structures of ownership but also instating their cronies in the seats of corporate management. No Reform Possible under the Washington-Wall Street Consensus The November 15 G-20 Financial Summit in Washington upholds the Washington-Wall Street consensus. While formally presenting a project to restore financial stability, in practice, the hegemony of Wall Street remains unscathed. The tendency is towards a unipolar monetary system dominated by the United States and upheld by US military superiority. The architects of financial disaster under the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) have been entrusted with the task of mitigating the crisis, which they themselves created. They are the cause of financial collapse. The G20 Financial Summit doesn't question the legitimacy of the hedge funds and the various instruments of derivative trade. The final Communiqué includes an imprecise and blurred commitment "to better regulate hedge funds and create more transparency in mortgage-related securities in a bid to halt a global economic slide." A solution to this crisis can only be brought about through a process of "financial disarmament", which forcefully challenges the hegemony of the Wall Street financial institutions including their control over monetary policy. "Financial disarmament" would also require freezing the instruments of speculative trade, dismantling the hedge funds and democratizing monetary policy. The term "financial disarmament" was initially coined by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s. Obama Endorses Financial Deregulation Barack Obama has embraced the Washington-Wall Street consensus. In a bitter twist, former Congressman Jim Leach, a Republican who sponsored the 1999 FSMA in the House of Representatives is now advising Obama on formulating a timely solution to the crisis. Jim Leach, Madeleine Albright and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who also played a key role in pushing through the FSMA legislation, were in attendance at the November 15 G-20 Financial Summit, as part of President-elect Barack Obama's advisory team: "President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden announced that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Republican Congressman Jim Leach would be available to meet with delegations at the G-20 summit on their behalf. Leach and Albright are holding these unofficial meetings to seek input from visiting delegations on behalf of the president-elect and vice president-elect. (mlive.com, November 15, 2008) Related Article Who are the Architects of Economic Collapse? Will an Obama Administration Reverse the Tide? - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2008-11-09 The engineers of financial disaster are being considered by President-Elect Barack Obama for the position of Treasury Secretary.

Hitler Gets A Margin Call

Naomi Wolff and the 10 Steps to Fascism

Naomi Wolff interview about her new book on the 10 Steps to Fascism

Game Over: Thirty-Six Sure-Fire Signs That Your Empire Is Crumbling

by David Michael Green

So. You've built yourself an empire, eh?

Well, bully for you!

What's next, you ask? Well, now you've got to do what everybody does when they have an empire, of course. You've got to worry about it falling apart, mate!

But how to tell for sure? Let me see if I can be helpful. Here are some rules of thumb to keep in mind, thirty-six sure-fire indicators that your empire is falling apart:

You know your empire's crumbling when the folks who are gearing up their empire to replace yours start blowing up satellites in space. And then they don't bother to return your phone calls when you ring up to ask why.

You know your empire's crumbling when those same folks are cutting deals left, right and center across Asia, Latin America and Africa, while you, your lousy terms, and your arrogant attitude are no longer welcome.

You know your empire's crumbling when you're spending your grandchildren's money like a drunken sailor, and letting your soon-to-be rivals finance your little splurge (i.e., letting them own your country).

You know your empire's crumbling when it's considered an achievement to pretend that you've halved the rate at which you're adding to the massive mountain of debt you've already accumulated.

You know your empire's crumbling when you weaken your currency until it looks as anemic as a Paris runway model, and you're still setting record trade deficits. (Hint: Because you're not making anything anymore.)

You know your empire's crumbling when "the little brown ones" (thank you George H.W. Bush - certainly not me - for that lovely expression) in country after country of "your backyard" blow you off and proudly elect anti-imperialist leftist governments.

You know your empire's crumbling when you can't topple those governments and replace them with nice puppet regimes - like in the good old days - even if you wanted to. And you badly want to.

You know your empire's crumbling when one of their leaders comes to the United Nations and makes fun of your emperor, calling him the devil, and joking about smelling sulphur where he just stood. And though a few folks cringe, everybody laughs.

You know your empire's crumbling when just about your entire military land force is tied up in a worse-than-useless war launched on the basis of complete fabrications, that every day is actually making you less - not more - secure from external threat.

You know your empire's crumbling when almost half the soldiers in that war are high-paid mercenaries, and you don't dare institute a draft.

You know your empire's crumbling when you send soldiers into war with two weeks training and a lack of armor, and then you keep them there for three, four and five rotations.

You know your empire's crumbling when a member of the Axis of Evil can test missiles and explode nuclear warheads, and all you can do about it is mumble some pathetic warnings about how they better not do that again or there will be consequences.

You know your empire's crumbling when you even think that there is an Axis of Evil.

You know your empire's crumbling when a rag-tag military hodge-podge of irregulars has you pinned down in an endless fight you can't win, but also can't lose.

You know your empire's crumbling when you're too dumb to even ban Humvees as a first step toward ending your dependency on a foreign-owned crucial resource.

You know your empire's crumbling when you trade your prior moral leadership on human rights issues for global disgust at your torture, 'extraordinary rendition' (a.k.a. kidnaping for torture) and the dismantling of nine centuries worth of civil liberties progress.

You know your empire's crumbling when you blow off international law that you once helped create, and undermine the institutions of international governance that you once helped build.

You know your empire's crumbling when opinion polls confirm that every month you're more and more despised throughout the world.

You know your empire's crumbling when you can't even pull off the hanging of a tin-pot murderous former dictator without turning him into a hero.

You know your empire's crumbling when you're the richest country in the world, but nearly 50 million of your people don't have basic health care coverage.

You know your empire's crumbling when the World Health Organization ranks your healthcare system 37th 'best' in the world, just above Slovenia, and just below Costa Rica. (And far below Colombia, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.)

You know your empire's crumbling when instead of making it easier for citizens to obtain a higher education, you're making it harder and more expensive.

You know your empire's crumbling when your government gives tax breaks to industries as a reward for exporting your jobs elsewhere.

You know your empire's crumbling when the so-called 'opposition' party can't even turn that obscenity into a viable campaign theme and use it to clobber the worst emperor in your history.

You know your empire's crumbling when your middle class has been stagnant for three decades, while the wealth of the hyper-rich continues to climb through the roof.

You know your empire's crumbling when your reaction to that is to exacerbate the problem by enacting tax policies that massively increase further still the gap between the rich and the rest.

You know your empire's crumbling when the predatory class has taken over your government and is stripping the country of everything not bolted down to the floor. And then it sells the floor itself, as well, to your rivals.

You know your empire's crumbling when you're spending tens of billions of dollars you don't own on new nuclear warheads and space weapons that don't work, to be used against an enemy you don't have.

You know your empire's crumbling when one of your cities drowns and your government does next to nothing before, during and after.

You know your empire's crumbling when a massive environmental nightmare is looming around the corner, and your emperor not only ignores it, but claims it isn't real while taking steps to exacerbate it.

You know your empire's crumbling when your emperor is warned by a CIA briefer of an imminent terrorist attack of vast proportions, and responds by remaining on vacation and dismissing the briefer with the words: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

You know your empire's crumbling when the same emperor drops everything to fly across the country from his vacation home in order to sign a bill intervening on the wrong side of a personal medical drama involving a single family.

You know your empire's crumbling when gays and immigrants are used as diversionary issues to keep people from thinking about the pillaging of their country and their wallets actually taking place. And it works.

You know your empire's crumbling when people are getting more religious and less scientific, not the other way around.

You know your empire's crumbling when your political leaders start to be chosen by dynastic rules of succession.

And you especially know your empire's crumbling when the most idiotic child of one of the least accomplished leaders in its history is not only crowned as the next emperor, but is even revered for a time by most of the public as a great one.

Rome? Britain? Spain?

At this rate we'll be lucky to end up like Belgium.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/gameover.php

http://snipurl.com/2x5t2

American Capitalism: The Murder Culture vs The Gift Culture

By Justin Frambes

7/11/08


"Centuries ago they came to the "New World", the masses of European settlers escaping political and religious oppression, war, corrupt landlordism, etc. for freer, much greener pastures, but unknowing pawns as they were and slaves to a system so omnipresent they never saw it, let alone questioned it, they brought with them the monetary control system and systematically conquered the entire North American continent, ultimately resulting in the deaths of anywhere from 8 to 145 million American Indians through disease, dispossession of their land (most often illegal), and outright genocide, all in the name of [American] "progress" and profit. Along with the American Indians, the Gift Culture" passed into the pages of history.

As the United States established itself, so did capitalism and the modern corporate world under the monetary control system. Viewing the continent as a vast source of future wealth and American Indians and their way of life (Gift Culture, sustainability) as "savage," "antiquated," and standing directly in its way atop "waste and unappropriated lands" 1, it set upon its mission of removing them and plundering the land for every resource it had. Blinded by greed for the money and power to be obtained through acquisition of all the natural resources and growth of a taxpaying population, it never questioned its predatory way of service to self (where one serves self) at the expense of others — e.g. their disrespect, disregard, and brutality toward other peoples, other customs, animals, and nature itself (indeed, it lived completely out of touch with nature, where its only relationship to it was to prey upon it). Today, 232 years after its inception, the American empire having influenced almost every corner of the world (and led almost all other nations by example), its pursuit of material and financial wealth through capitalism has left the Earth's air, land, rivers and sea polluted beyond human repair and humanity in a state of misery and disarray.

American Indians were (and had always been) free from the monetary control system, living under their humble Gift Culture, but efforts during the 18th and 19th centuries to force them into accepting "civilization", being American citizens, and ultimately taxpayers subject to the jurisdiction (control) of the United States were relentless and unyielding, and eventually succeeded. What the world largely has today, as a result of the historically costly success of America and capitalism and abandonment of the Gift Culture (excluding the digital world where it still lives), is that of a convenient but ultimately regressive, debt-based, fast-paced, stressful, egocentric, self-important, individualistic, isolationist, unsustainable, anti-communal / anti-tribal, fear-based (fear of losing money, power, importance, normalcy, services, materialism, of death, and so on) way of life disconnected from nature and almost completely devoid of meaning and realism.

It is very revealing that most people cannot imagine what life would be like without money. The problem however is not necessarily money itself, it is humanity's belief in and use of it (via the ego). Unfortunately it demands that life is a perpetual state of debt to someone or something other than oneself, something to be continuously earned until the end ("the cost of living"), and places an arbitrary numerical value on life itself, when in actuality all life is equal and sacred. Furthermore it gives only the illusion of balance; its very existence creates imbalance and poverty, the opposite of its purpose, which is to obtain security. And when accompanied by greed, hatred, or self-centeredness it becomes the tool of corruption, control (through ownership), and leads to destruction and disregard for others and loss of quality and integrity in its pursuit, namely that of profits.

Such things are incapable of existing under a Gift Culture, a free system that is not derived from the ego and based on pure self-interest, but one of codependence, coexistence, and care for others — where wealth is not in how much one acquires, as it is under capitalism, but how much one can give away freely. With no universal currency to acquire, there is no controllable economy or outlet for greed and hatred through ownership to be had. The American Indians, for instance, had not even a definition of private property:

"The Indians had no concept of "private property," as applied to the land. Only among the Delawares was it customary for families, during certain times of the year, to be assigned specific hunting territories. Apparently this was an unusual practice, not found among other Indians. Certainly, the idea of an individual having exclusive use of a particular piece of land was completely strange to Native Americans.

The Indians practiced communal land ownership. That is, the entire community owned the land upon which it lived." 2

Ownership of land is now at an all-time high and how much global corporations own is staggering. The capitalist system, having operated at full speed for over 200 years, has exhausted the world extensively, and is at this point showing blatant signs of impending failure, all due to its unsustainability and careless disregard for everything except itself. People are now, more than ever, finding themselves with less and less money and are becoming disillusioned with the monetary control system as a whole as the trillions of dollars of unpaid debt come full circle, causing prices to skyrocket due to the plummeting purchasing power of the dollar and the stock market to threaten a disastrous collapse.

With nothing being manufactured in the country anymore thanks to rampant outsourcing by corporations for higher profits and the Federal Reserve Corporation as usual looking out for its own interests and those of the banks, there is no solution in sight to the problem except to brace oneself for the impending great wave of changes.

In order to survive what seems to be coming, compassion (with discernment) for others, the slow formation of localized, self-sustaining communities, and free exchange of goods will become inevitable necessities, and perhaps with those, as the money itself and the belief in it collapses, will arrive a gradual return to the Gift Culture, where such selflessness, while at first provided out of necessity, will eventually be done so voluntarily as humanity realizes a better way of living.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=785

http://snipurl.com/2x5ck

Aaron Russo, 1943-2007

Award-winning filmmaker and libertarian political activist Aaron Russo succumbed to cancer Friday at age 64.

Russo was best known for his films, most famous among them Trading Places and The Rose, which won three Golden Globe awards in 1980.

What’s less well known is that he was also instrumental in bringing musical acts to the United States in the 1970s, including one of my all-time favorites, Led Zeppelin.

In his later years, though, Russo turned to politics. In 1996 he produced and starred in a film, Mad as Hell, where he criticized many government policies such as the national ID card, the war on drugs, and government regulation of alternative medicine. In 1998 he ran in the Republican primary for governor of Nevada but was defeated. In 2002, before he could decide whether to run again, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer.

In 2004 he ran for President under the Libertarian Party banner, but failed to get the nomination.

Most recently he produced a documentary film, America: Freedom to Fascism, showing a quest to discover which law requires Americans to pay federal income taxes and finding something quite different.

And in 2007 he was one of the first to endorse Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) for President, doing so even before Paul announced his candidacy. Just before he died he spoke to long time friend and libertarian activist Stephen Gordon about Ron Paul:

In our last telephone conversation, Aaron told me he’d kick my butt if I didn’t do what I could to ensure Ron Paul is the next president of the United States. This was his style. While some have viewed his rough-appearing exterior in a negative manner, those of us who knew him realized what a Teddy Bear he truly was. For those who aren’t aware, Aaron has a long history with Congressman Paul. — Gordon Unleashed

Gordon also says: “If I had to guess the epitaph Aaron would prefer, it would be this: All your freedoms, all the time!” We can honor the legacy of Aaron Russo by rededicating ourselves to the fight to reclaim our lost liberties.

Watch Aaron Russo’s Mad as Hell

Watch America: Freedom to Fascism

Vampire Nation

What Lies Beneath: Privileged Grotesques, Ordinary Monsters and the Iraqi Deathscape.

by Phil Rockstroh

7/12/07

At present, George W. Bush is unpopular with the majority of the American public not because of the murderous mayhem he has unloosed in Iraq; rather, his standing has plummeted, due to the fact that he didn’t deliver the goods. Americans are fine with fueling our republic of road rage using the blood of Iraqis (or any other distant and darker people) as long as “the mission” doesn’t drag on too long or reveal too much about ourselves.

How did we come to be a nation of vampires who live by sustaining ourselves on the blood of others? Is our mode of collective being so toxic in the United States that a writer must bandy about metaphors culled from Gothic horror fiction to describe it?

I’m afraid it’s come to that: We are a people whose psyches have grown monstrously distorted from an addiction to imperial power and personal entitlement. (Imagery of Smurfs and Teletubbies won’t rise to the analogy, albeit as terrifying as those demons of hell-bound cuteness are.)

The corporate culture of exploitation has begot a hellscape of narcissists. It is an authoritarian culture riddled in kitsch and cruelty, in nationalistic hagiography and displaced rage – all the distortions of national character inherent in privileged grotesques and ordinary monsters.

A narcissist’s actions are monstrous because his only love is the image of himself wielding control and power. (Does this remind you of anyone, perhaps someone who struts about in a flight suit — someone prone to proclaiming himself “the decider” – someone who grows intoxicated to the point of becoming insensate from a whiff of his own pheromones as he swoons in macho-narcissistic self-worship?)

And what about the everyday monsters, those who feel nothing — not outrage, not remorse, nor sorrow – by the conscience-devoid attempt made by our vampiric leaders to sustain “our way of life” on Iraqi blood? Are you not a monster as well when you feel nothing before immense human suffering? If you are impervious to, grown inured of, or have chosen to remain ignorant of the agony of the Iraqi people, then you might as well join the ranks of the undead — because the distant landscape of corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan matches your internal deathscape.

In short, our empire’s dependence on the resources (the life’s blood) of others renders us a nation of vampires. Moreover, the corporatist character (our national character) is defined by the vampire’s trait of taking, never giving. Accordingly, what do the big monsters at the top take from us, the little monsters?

To name one: our time, the precious hours of our finite lives. The corporatists are Time Vampires: For a moment, reflect on all the hours of life you’ve wasted away — in office cubicles, in commuter traffic jams, in the addictive pursuit of consumer dreck, or simply numbed-out and exhausted, rendered inert from the incessant, soul-sucking stress of the corporate state.

The corporatocracy devours our time and, like the charges of a vampire, has made us dependent and slavish in return. In our bloodless enslavement, we lose the vitality borne of existing within life’s inherent mysteries and grow estranged from the deep resonances of participation mystique.

How does one begin to take back one’s soul from these elitist usurpers? Start with this: The ebullient skepticism engendered from calling out soul-numbing, self-serving authoritarian lies.

In an era as perilous as ours, it’s imperative we act with utmost urgency. Yet, tragically, the exigencies of our age are being played out against a panorama of longer, more stressful work hours, superficially ameliorated by a mass media culture comprised of ceaseless trivia and mindless distraction.

This pathology began years ago when our ancestors offered up their life’s blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age. Henry Ford was a gray ghoul who measured out our flesh with his productivity-measuring stopwatch; he was a cunning practitioner of the black art of convincing human beings they’re mere cogs in an inhuman machine. It was only a short trudge from there through history’s slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann, insulated within his vampire’s coffin of cold calculations that shielded him from the horrific implications of the system of mechanized extermination he devised.

The corporate vampire’s creed is defined by ruthless efficiency; the fear of a “loss of productivity” is the driving force of the death machine. The system is so ruthless and inhuman that it must conceal its true face, hence the rise of the telegenic undead known as the corporate media. Do not look to them to report the facts of our condition: After all, a mirror can’t reflect the image of a vampire. A vampire is empty to the core; therefore, there is nothing to reflect.

Furthermore, his emptiness is the progenitor of his destructive nature. Rather than face himself, his appetite for death will devour all in its path: rain forests, Arctic glaziers, the people of Iraq, the hours of your life, as well as your inner being.

It is the force that holds Democratic politicians in the thrall of their own fecklessness, because they answer to the same blood-sucking, corporate masters as the rest of us. Quite simply, they’re afraid of their bosses too. The Washington Beltway is a version, in miniature, of the entire soul-dead, American corporatocracy. The careerist politicians within the Beltway are afflicted with the same diminution of choice — the same hyper-attenuation of the will to freedom — as the rest of us.

And what remains for us: an existence (or lack thereof) within this hierarchical hellscape of narcissists. What sort of a pathetic mode of being is this, a life shackled to the service of a monstrous system wherein one must evince the obsequies of a vampire’s bloodless lackeys?

To reverse this situation: Now is the time to drag the lies of the corporate state into the sunshine where they will wither to dust. We are not powerless: We live in a world where our collective, hidden intentions are made manifest by our outward actions. This is why Gothic — even B-movie — metaphors are not an overwrought description of our present condition. Ergo, by the vehicle of cultural collaboration, we are a nation of world-destroying, B-movie monsters — we are a hack-scripted, second-billed feature at the drive-in movie of existence — a laughed-off-the-big-screen of the cosmos, box-office poison of a people.

We are soul-sucking creatures of kitsch. Flesh-eating zombies of conformity. Road-rage werewolves. Right-wing, talk show demons whose wrathful voices rage into empty air. Hungry ghosts wandering the aisles of supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurant chains and the food courts of shopping malls. We are: The Fat, Mindless Blobs That Ate the Planet.

To survive, first, we must find the monster within, then drive a stake through its heart.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com

Ron Paul Blasts the War On Terror

Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11 |

Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11

"'My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise,' said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. 'As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all.'"

'V' Visits The White House

'V' Visits The White House:

"About 60 protesters dressed up as the Guy Fawkes look-a-like 'V,' from the movie by the same name, staged a protest at the White House yesterday. In an encouraging sign, a group of elementary school children visiting the White House on a school trip were much more interested in 'V' than in the White House or its occupant. The children busied themselves taking photos of the 'Vs' and shaking their hands: a clear sign that the Rove/Fox propaganda machine has little effect on those who will be left holding the tab for the recklessness of the 'Baby Boomer' generation. ..."

Will Iran's Detention Of UK Sailors Lead To War?

Will Iran's Detention Of UK Sailors Lead To War?:
"There are many unanswered questions surrounding the capture of the fifteen British seaman/inspectors by the Iranians this week. Were they in Iraqi or Iranian waters? How can we be sure? Why did the British Foreign Office prohibit the frigate from going to the aid of the sailors when it could have? Why would Iran be so foolish as to hand the British and Americans an excuse to turn this provocation into an attack on Iran? Will it be enough to provoke war?"

Moyers: The Secret Government

The Constitution in Crisis

For too long the full length 90 min. version of this documentary has been unavailable. Only a 20 minute version has been circulating. Now as of January 10, 2007 this failure of access ends. Bill Moyers, the respected TV journalist, analyzes the threats to constitutional government posed by an illegitimate network operating from within the government but using secrecy to set itself up outside of the government / peoples oversight. All this back in 1987. This documentary gives a fascinating overview of what has actually happened in the last 50 years regarding the CIA and the Cold War (including Iran, Guatamala, Cuba, Vietnam and Chile). The foundation for the massive push towards greater secrecy in government going on today. Posted by Robert Carrillo Cohen producer "HACKING DEMOCRACY." www.hackingdemocracy.com

Draft The Ivy League!

from Lostwriters.net: "A Military Draft"

"...There are a lot of nations in this world where people are kooky, but only America has the military outreach to project our kookiness onto the world. That is why more than any nation state, America desperately needs a military draft. Numb-skullism, when pertaining to family matters or animal rights or liver abuse, is small potatoes when compared to kickin’ the world’s butt.

......

....We need some high-grade cannon fodder. We need surly, condescending middle-class punks trained to the max in video combat who will instantly clog the wheels of military arrogance. We need those cocky, irreverent kids who as miserable soldiers know their career sergeant is dumber than mom’s brainless poodle. We need those thinkers who just can’t comprehend why our military bureaucracy is determined to sink their overweight body in some quagmire surrounded by killing fields. What we need in our military is a strrong contingent that can’t keep their foul mouths shut and have never seen a program they could just go along with.

And of course we need their parents, parents who contribute to the financial campaign of the local sleaze-ball politicians, who without hesitation will scream and threaten Mr. Corrupt if their little Johnny or Judy comes within 100 Starbucks of any war. And that blur that will blow you off the road and into the ditch, that would be mom headed to her Congressman’s office: “What the f_ _ _ (she hasn’t used that word since Richard Nixon was president) are we doing in that stupid Iraq, you moron Congressman? End this war yesterday if you want to be a Congressman tomorrow!”

We need middle-aged Americans who are closer to the power structure of this nation, who understand how to impact public policy and how to keep our military from sliding into more bloody foreign adventures where our nation's butt gets kicked. As we know, shopping at Macy’s isn’t stopping this war in Iraq.

The greatest resource and safeguard we have for stopping these foolish and wasteful wars that this country keeps returning to like a dog’s bone is to give middle-class Johnny and Judy a real stake in getting their posterior diplomas shot off. The fear that Johnny and Judy could be drafted to fight in some bizarre war will be enough to send their middle-class parents tripping into hysterical spasms with nasty public scenes that will accomplish more than getting them booted out the local country club.

People, it’s time to get serious. It's time to bring on the great middle class..."

FULL MONTY

Habeas corpus

In English Common Law habeas corpus is the name of several writs which may be issued by a judge ordering a prisoner to be brought before the court. More commonly, the name refers to a specific writ known in full as habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, a prerogative writ ordering that a prisoner be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not he is being imprisoned lawfully.

The words habeas corpus ad subjiciendum are Latin for "You (shall) have/hold the body to be subjected to (examination)", and are taken from the opening words of the writ in medieval times. Other habeas corpus writs also existed, e.g. habeas corpus ad testificandum ("You (shall) have/hold the body to bear witness", for the production of a prisoner to give evidence in court.

Habeas corpus ad subjiciendum

Known as the "Great Writ", the writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum could formerly be used not only in criminal cases, but in cases of imprisonment for private debt. In many jurisdictions today the writ can also be issued against private individuals.

The right of habeas corpus has long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject. Dicey wrote that the Habeas Corpus Acts "declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty".

.........................

From Wikipedia

The American Experiment, Really

by Gilles d'Aymery

What have we come to?

A hyper-militarized and arch-violent nation where 100 million people -- one third of the US population -- are directly or indirectly related to the military and countless law enforcement agencies, spending on death and destruction more than the remaining of the entire world; a self-indulgent nation of buccaneers drowning in consumerism and waste without any regard for the consequences wreaked on the environment and the rest of humanity; a pitiful land gripped by fear and insecurity; a human construct based on a mixture of savage social Darwinism, an irrational, deeply conservative (in the reactionary sense), religiosity, and an absurd (and groundless) belief in an innate, god-given Goodness; and the slow but unrelenting "Third-Worldization" of the social and economic fabric of the country where even hope has been hijacked and raped. In brief, a deluded people in unreserved denial of the damages and destructions they inflict upon themselves and the world.

Rejoinder: We are the chosen people. Doing god's work is hard work. (...)

MORE...
.....................................................................