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Can Capital survive the abolition of the State?
I recently came across this excerpt from a short paper by the Marxist writer, Raya Dunayevskaya. The argument is a very dense consideration of a fundamental point of Marx’s theory. If it appears obscure and incomprehensible, that is okay; I offer it only as a reference for those familiar with the more arcane points of Marx’s theory. For everyone else, you can skip below, where I will address it directly in a way that makes its import both obvious and rather astounding:
Let me state right here that we have greatly underestimated Volume III of CAPITAL, which deals with these transformations. It is true that we caught its ESSENCE when from the start we put our finger on the spot and said the DECLINE in the rate of profit is crucial; the average rate of profit is completely secondary. Look at the mess we would have been in if we had not seen THAT and suddenly found ourselves, as did the Fourth [International], tailending the Stalinists’ sudden “discovery” (which had been precisely the PERVERSION with which the Second International PLANNERS had long ago tried to corrupt Marxism) that it was the AVERAGE rate of profit which was the “law of capitalism.”
Good, we saw the essence, but that is insufficient, and because that is completely insufficient, we were incapable of being sharp enough even here. For it is insufficient merely to state that the decline [in the] rate of profit, not the average, is crucial for understanding VOLUME III. The full truth is: JUST AS MARX’S THEORY OF VALUE IS HIS THEORY OF SURPLUS VALUE, SO HIS THEORY OF SURPLUS VALUE IS IN REALITY THE THEORY OF THE DECLINING RATE OF PROFIT.
Why couldn’t we state it this simply before? It is because we have been too busy showing that profit is only a disguise which surplus value wears and must be removed, again to see “the real essence”: exploitation of labor. Because the opponents we were facing were Workers Party underconsumptionists, we had to overemphasize this EVIDENT truth. But to overemphasize the obvious means to stand on the ground the opponents have chosen. Freed from these opponents and faced with PLANNERS WHO ARE NOT UNDERCONSUMPTIONISTS the greater truth of what Marx was saying suddenly hits us in the eyes with such force that now we can say: How could we have not seen what Marx was saying? It is all so clear: Since the realization of surplus value IS the decline in the rate of profit, the poor capitalist MUST search for profits.
The argument Dunayevskaya is making here is simple: Marx proposed that capitalism would be increasingly hamstrung by a decline in the rate of profit. This decline was not an accident or aberration, since it rested on a fundamental feature of the economy: On the one hand, the capitalist was always seeking to maximize his profits by reducing labor costs. This drive leads businesses to produce more output with fewer workers. On the other hand, the source of profits were the unpaid labor time of the employed workers. Thus, even as the capitalist tried to maximize profit by reducing its work force, its success at reducing its work force reduced the pool of unpaid labor time that was the source of its profits.
So far, not much of interest, right? Just another cat fight among the followers of Marx over interpretation of his theory; and Marxists are, if anything, more prone to cat fights than a bag of wet cats. But, then Raya does something jarring: she throws in that sentence at the end and changes the entire nature of the argument:
Since the realization of surplus value IS the decline in the rate of profit, the poor capitalist MUST search for profits.
Let me perform an intellectual shortcut here: Although it may not be obvious what she has just done, Raya has just stated that Marx is setting the reader up, not for an explanation why prices of goods reflect the values of those goods, but why they can never reflect the values of those goods. On a micro-level, Marx is explaining why that $600 iPad you got for Christmas probably cost no more than $3 to manufacture in China.
To put this another way: Marx was describing why the actual labor time expended in a capitalist economy must always and increasingly be greater than what is socially necessary. The tendency built into a capitalist economy toward a secular decline in the rate of profit produces its opposite: a mad scramble on the part of each capital, and all of them together, to find every avenue to maintain profitability in the face of this tendency; and this tendency can only be countered by effort to extend the social work day beyond what is actually required by society. As we have argued elsewhere, if Marx is correct in his analysis, there is a vast pool of superfluous labor within existing society that can be abolished without touching on the material living standard of society.
To put it bluntly, Marx’s law of the tendency toward a fall in the rate of profit predicts that if total debt, total consumption and total hours of labor don’t constantly increase capitalism will collapse. The social relation is not only incapable of achieving equilibrium, but it becomes increasingly self-disequilibrating as the productivity of labor increases. Assuming Raya was saying what I understand her to be saying, I think this self-induced, self-reinforcing, disequilibrium results in, at least, the following 5 symptoms:
- The Market for output must constantly expand.
- Total employment must always rise more quickly than productive employment. And, total hours of labor must always increase more quickly than productive hours of labor.
- Because of the above, total consumption must always increase more rapidly than necessary consumption (i.e., production). Which is to say, waste and unnecessary consumption becomes a matter of life or death for the economy.
- Since waste becomes a permanent feature of the economy and the rising cost of wasted effort must be borne by society, total prices must always increase more rapidly than total value.
- Since, wasted effort itself produces no new value, exchange itself is increasingly founded on debt; hence, the financial sector must always increase more rapidly than the industrial sector, and debt more rapidly than equity — leverage, which is, at root, only the relation between the sum total of social labor to the sum total of productively employed labor, must always increase.
Assuming I am correct about Raya’s comments about Marx’s third volume of Capital, and, that she is correct in her reading of the volume — two very big ifs, I admit — in his third volume of Capital, Marx is setting us up to understand how the State becomes an absolutely critical and absolutely necessary feature of capitalist society — a matter of life and death for capital. Each of the five symptoms of modern society I cited above are no more than functions taken on by the State to manage capitalist society through its increasingly devastating cycles of booms and busts.
Marx’s law of the tendency toward a decline in the rate of profit is, in reality, a theory of the State. To extend Raya’s statement: Marx’s theory of value is the foundation for his theory of surplus value; his theory of surplus value is the foundation for his theory of the decline in the rate of profit; and, finally, his theory of a decline in the rate of profit is the foundation for his theory of the modern State.
Powerful support for my interpretation of Raya’s argument can be found simply by looking at the title of the paper from which the above quote was drawn: “The despotic plan of capital vs. freely associated labor”. In this paper, Raya counterposes the modern State to the free association of individuals, explicitly arguing that planning arrived at by free association is completely incompatible with the various forms of State management of the economy with which we are familiar: everything from the centralized planning of the Soviet type to the fiscal and monetary levers of neoliberal political-economy. In 1950, with the ink still drying on National Security Council Report 68, Raya was making the argument that, in her words, “If the order of the factory were also in the market, you’d have complete totalitarianism.”
Effort by the State to manage the economy, as envisioned by the Truman administration, had to lead to an increasingly totalitarian reorganization of society. This, apart even from consideration of the aim of that management — which, for Truman, was a means of accruing the resources for a long-term conflict with the Soviet Union — implies the subjugation of the whole of social relationships to the despotism of capital.
Marxists and progressives who see in the increasing entanglement of the State in the economy — as borrower, lender, consumer and employer of last resort — some realization of the possibility for a humane society are not only wrong, but dangerously misguided in their approach to every social issue from the present intractable unemployment, to poverty, to every form of inequality, the environment and global relations. They are trying to use as a solution the very instrument of society which maintains those evils and makes their continuation possible.
Richard Trumka: How a tired old union hack misses the point completely
Once upon a time, the union boss was hated and feared on Wall Street, now he or she is just ridiculed or ignored – or propped up in front of the TV cameras to serve as a convenient scapegoat for why you’re paying for Wall Street failures.
Little does the Party of Wall Street suspect that, indeed, they are right – union hacks like Trumka are precisely the reason why you are footing the bill for GM mismanagement, and Goldman Sachs’ venality. The unions sold you out to cash in on the virtuous cycle of ever bigger defense budgets, rising employment fueled by wars and economic predation, and an ever growing slush fund of union dues.
Now the bills have come due, and Goldman Sachs wants to blame the UAW because Ford, GM and Chrysler can’t build a decent automobile at a competitive price – a price that requires that an American standard of living be readjusted to conform to Chinese wage levels.
Watch below as Richard Trumka whines like a bitch for a return to the good old days when American union bosses marched hand in hand with corporate predators in support of the Johnson-Nixon carpet bombing of Vietnamese villages.
Richard L. Trumka’s remarks at the Spotlight on Jobs Crisis forum.
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Six degrees of Larry Summers…
Click picture to go to Muckety
We thought you might want to know a little more about the economic adviser to the Messiah, Larry Summers, since he does play such a unique role in contemporary American economic history.
If you trace his connection to Robert Rubin – his mentor – you will find how he comes to be associated with the Wall Street octopus known as Goldman Sachs, and the manipulation of global markets which serve to keep the dollar as world reserve currency.
Trace his connection to Paul Samuelson, and Kenneth Arrow, and you will find he is the nephew of two Nobel Prize winners – one who is probably most responsible for formulating the political-economy of the American Empire, as it has been used to destroy the minds of several generations of young economists; the other, Kenneth Arrow, who first formulated a theory for why the current collapse of capital is not really happening.
He comes from good stock…
For a fun time, click on the name H. Rodgin Cohen, an adviser to Larry, and find out who advises him…
The Wiki has this to say of Mr. Cohen:
Regarding the worst economic crisis in 80 years, Cohen defended the financial system and Wall Street: “I am far from convinced there was something inherently wrong with the system.”
Cool tool! Enter your favorite A-list pond scum and find out how they’re being bred…
The consequences of our own decisions…
One of the nagging difficulties we have with trying to communicate our view of things is in conveying to others that actions and decisions have consequences.
Our society has avoided reducing hours of work, and is now suffering the latest in string of such consequences, which we will try to detail below. This is only a first attempt, so criticisms are welcome.
1. The first consequence of a too many hours of work was the Great Depression;
2. The second, which was made unavoidable by the first, was the debasing of money from gold;
3. The third was the growth of government, in the form of the New Deal, to cope with the massive unemployment produced by the Great Depression, and which was made possible by the debasement of money;
4. There followed the massive preparations for World War II, and the outbreak of the conflict, which was made possible by massive pool of labor made available by the unemployment created by the Great Depression;
5. The above was followed by the implementation of National Security Memorandum 68, and the creation of the Cordon Militaire to contain the Soviet Union and establish the American Empire, made possible by the great pool of untapped superfluous labor which caused the Great Depression;
6. Which was followed by monetary instability, as the United States began pulling in global resources in the context of fixed exchanged rates;
7. Which finally forced the United States to abandon the dollar’s peg to gold, and a decade of monetary instabilty;
8. Which triggered the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt, and produced an unbroken string of trade deficits to this day;
9. Which forced permanent fiscal deficits, and the beginning of the consumer debt crisis;
10. Which, to control high interests rates, led to the manipulation of markets for various commodities – most importantly gold – by the American government;
11. Which led Washington to deregulate the derivatives market, even as those markets had nearly killed the global economy, and produced the Asian Meltdown, the Russian Financial Crisis, and the Argentina Crisis;
12. Which led to the monstrous overhang of CDS and other financial instruments of mass destruction;
13. Which led to last year’s Wall Street Meltdown, and the emergence of the greatest economic crisis since;
14. The Great Depression, which is not really a depression, but merely Mister Market’s way of saying you are working too hard…
The Wall Street Crisis: How Washington was slowly starving you
Wall Street is broken – this much we know because assholes in very expensive business suits keep coming before one congressional committee after another to repeat it.
But, what does it mean to say Wall Street is broken? What does a broken Wall Street mean to us, the collective body of penniless uneducated fucking hillbillies.
We didn’t work on Wall Street anyways. We didn’t collect the big bucks for seducing wealthy widowed Miami Beach retirees and pension funds to invest in ponzi schemes.
At best, we used our credit cards more than we should have and ended up in a hole as our creditors jacked rates to levels unheard since Mohammed preached against usury.
This blog holds to the idea that the statement, “Wall Street is broken,” essentially means, at least, “The domestic funding mechanism of the American Empire is broken.” Wall Street has, for the last sixty years or so, functioned mainly as the pump through which Washington siphoned off a massive amount of the social product of economic activity to maintain its unique position as global hegemon.
All the concern in Washington regarding a broken Wall Street is less about the suffering of Main Street than it is about the greatly reduced prospect for this economic strategy.
Using data provided by Washington, John Kemp shows us that in the period since the implementation of National Security Council Memorandum 68 Wall Street has benefited fantastically by serving as the essential mechanism for gaining access to trillions of dollars of global resources.
As shown in the following graph, Washington’s dependence on Wall Street has led to the massive expansion of the financial sector of the economy, which grew much faster than the overall economy for the last sixty years.
Reading Kemp’s article it is fairly obvious the rapid growth of the financial sector has been powered mainly by the fantastic expansion of a disguised form of debt peonage: a permanent state of indebtedness, which ties no single working stiff to the company store of any particular employer, but enslaves all of them together to the continuous extension of their working time despite improvements in productivity.
Output rose eight times between 1975 and 2007. But the total volume of debt rose a staggering 20 times, more than twice as fast. The total debt-to-GDP ratio surged from 155 percent to 355 percent. Second, almost all this extra debt has come from the private sector. Take a look at Chart 2.
Kemp notes:
Despite acres of newsprint devoted to the federal budget deficit over the last thirty years, public debt at all levels has risen only 11.5 times since 1975. This is slightly faster than the eight-fold increase in nominal GDP over the same period, but government debt has still only risen from 37 percent of GDP to 52 percent.
Instead, the real debt explosion has come from the private sector. Private debt outstanding has risen an enormous 22 times, three times faster than the economy as a whole, and fast enough to take the ratio of private debt to GDP from 117 percent to 303 percent in a little over thirty years.
To repay the total accumulated debt of individual working families and corporations would now require more than the gross output of the United States for three years – including the federal, state and local revenue share of this GDP.
For the working family this debt burden has meant the forced entry into the labor force of millions of mothers with young children, the contracting out of household tasks, such as childcare, cooking, etc., and the lifelong struggle to maintain employment amidst the rising tide of mortgage, credit card, auto, and other forms of personal debt.
Kemp continues:
This created a dangerous interdependence between GDP growth (which could only be sustained by massive borrowing and rapid increases in the volume of debt) and the debt stock (which could only be serviced if the economy continued its swift and uninterrupted expansion).
The resulting debt was only sustainable so long as economic conditions remained extremely favourable. The sheer volume of private-sector obligations the economy was carrying implied an increasing vulnerability to any shock that changed the terms on which financing was available, or altered the underlying GDP cash flows.
None of this was an accident: By pursuing the kind of permanent economic expansion, out of which it could siphon off ever greater amount of economic output to fund its empire, Washington was, at the same time, slowly impoverishing you.
You responded to this slow economic asphyxiation by joining your husband in the workforce to increase your family earnings, and by financing more and more of your consumption with debt – hoping to keep your head above the debt tide with longer hours of work involving more family members.
We note: None of this was ever forced on you. Nobody came to your house and threatened to arrest you if you did not charge that 42 inch, wide-screen, high-definition plasma television on your Visa card.
You are ultimately responsible for the mountain of debt you have accumulated and which compels you to sell yourself out each day like a two dollar hooker to men in very expensive suits who now come before congressional committees begging for handouts like platinum plated hobos.
By the same reasoning, however, Washington and its coterie of filthy, boot-licking, whore-economists never once explained to you that the mountain of debt under which you labored was the direct result of Washington’s subtly tightening choke hold on the material living standards of your family.
Washington was slowly starving you and your family to encourage you to accumulate that debt.
Every time economic output faltered, Washington quietly increased the pressure on your family, and, at the same time, eased a little on interest rates, while making ever greater sums of money available to be lent to you through its debt manufacturers on Wall Street – Home mortgages, auto loans, student loans, small business loans for nail and tanning salons, restaurants and the like: whatever it took to drive you deeper in debt, compel you to work longer hours, and siphon off the revenues to fund its empire.
What a fantastic scam! The harder they squeezed, the more debt you took on.
Soon they were handing you cash based on the quality of your smile, not caring whether you had the means to repay or not; not caring whether what you wanted to buy (house, car, plasma television) was even worth the money to be paid for it; not caring whether that restaurant you always dreamed of opening would close in bankruptcy – as 6 out 10 did – in the first 3 years.
The proximate trigger of the debt crisis was the deterioration in lending standards and rise in default rates on subprime mortgage loans. But the widening divergence revealed in the charts suggests a crisis had become inevitable sooner or later. If not subprime lending, there would have been some other trigger.
So it has come crashing down – and the extent of this crash has still not even begun to make itself felt.
Wall Street is now broken, but more than this is the collapse of the very mechanism Washington employed to compel you to work longer hours by slowly starving you and your family and pushing you into debt to survive.
This is what Washington thinks it can fix with a $700 billion gift to Wall Street, and another $825 billion in Barack’s stimulus package.
It is not going to work – period, full stop.
The debt, as Kemp tells us,
…is so large it will stretch even the tax and debt-raising resources of the state, and risks crowding out other spending.
Trying to cut debt by reducing consumption and investment, lowering wages, boosting saving and paying down debt out of current income is unlikely to be effective either. The resulting retrenchment would lead to sharp falls in both real output and the price level, depressing nominal GDP. Government retrenchment simply intensified the depression during the early 1930s. Private sector retrenchment and wage cuts will do the same in the 2000s.
The solution must be some combination of policies to reduce the level of debt or raise nominal GDP. The simplest way to reduce debt is through bankruptcy, in which some or all of debts are deemed unrecoverable and are simply extinguished, ceasing to exist.
This debt has to be abolished, and working hours severely reduced. This is the only solution for you, your family, and your future.
Will Barack follow this solution?
We prefer to think of him as a modern Lincoln – although he may turn out to be a 21st Century Ford. We prefer in other words to believe that he will be driven, as Lincoln was driven, to do the unthinkable.
In Lincoln’s case, it was the abolition of slavery, which he refused to address until it was forced on him by secession and war.
For Barack, the abolition of debt and the reduction of working hours will likely not come as the result of secession and war, but the failure of economic policy to reinstate the essential material condition of empire – the ever increasing domination by Washington over the billions of unpaid hours of work.
The new and old “normal”
History, Marx believed is a continuous process – that is, a cumulative unfolding of events which do not merely change the faces of the actors, but alters the relations they enter into even as they may imagine they are performing the same old play.
Speculators in the stock market, however, very often imagine it ruled by regularities – cycles, patterns, waves – in which the same events play themselves out again and again across an equities landscape which never fundamentally changes.
They have a rule for this: “Only fools believe it is different this time.”
Of course, it may be a matter of your time horizon: we leave home each day and return to find everything pretty much as we remembered it; but we return to our childhood home and find everything just seems so much smaller than we recalled – if it is there at all.
The median price of a single family home in 1950 was around $3000.
By 2005, a single family home fetched about $264,000.
Blogger Cassandra asks us to consider which of these two prices is the normal one; and, what, if anything, we take for granted in the economy today can be considered normal, as well:
In Japan, “normal” meant that in 2004 residential real estate prices were roughly 30% of late 1980s or early 1990s prices. In Germany , though nominal prices might be similar in many places to those prevailing two decades ago, the real price destruction would be probably be similar to Japan’s. But what is “normal” for economic growth? Or what is “normal” for aggregate US consumption? Or the amount of debt a typical household can sustain? What is the “normal” leverage for a bank, or the normal return on equity o a listed company? What is a normal share of GDP for corporate profits in an economy experiencing deep recession? What is “normal” for sustainable government budget deficits? What is the normal income multiple of a banker or CEO to a policeman, a professional baseball player to a school-teacher or a doctor to a nurse? What is the normal amount of due diligence a bank should do before extending a loan and what is normal for the amount Honeywell Industries will earn per-share in the coming years?
During the time from 1950 to 2008 Washington’s role in the economy has increased several magnitudes, and with this intervention, debt has increased phenomenally, as has the financial sector and prices generally.
Seen one way, price levels for all goods has increased to the astounding heights we currently take for normal.
But, since Marx reminds us history is a continuous process, we cannot afford to ignore the growth of the other factors in the equation – government intervention, public and private debt, and the bloated financial sector.
The latter – financials – is mostly dead; public and private debt continue to hover over us like some massive Sword of Damocles; and, government, whose growth accounts for much of the debt, and much of the growth of the financial sector, is teetering on the icy edge of disaster.
Now, what is normal? With all the changes to the economy between 1950 and 2005 is is clearly unknowable what the “real” price of a single family home is now, much less to assume that it fall somewhere on a curve between the beginning of the housing bubble and when it burst in 2005 or so.
But, let’s add another complication:
Oops! Another complication: Change in labor productivity 1950 -2004
According to Erik Rauch, “the number of weekly hours needed to produce the 1950 worker’s output declined by almost one hour per year until the mid-1970’s, and has been declining by about half an hour per year since then.”
Rauch estimates, “An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950.”
Which implies, all things being equal, the actual “real” median price of a home built in 1950 (the price measured in the actual expenditure of human working time) may have declined to as little as $825.00.
That’s EIGHT HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS, not $264,000.
For pretty much the price of your congressman’s shabby, not ready for Wall Street, ill-fitting, rumpled, J C Penny’s quality business suit, you could have a three bedroom, two bath, McMansion on a cul-de-sac in Culver City.
So, even if we assume government statistic on productivity are correct – and there is evidence they are not – clearly home prices have significantly further to fall.
Deflation: a good idea whose time has come.
Is serious left criticism of government’s share of GDP possible? (17)
Continued from here.
Dirt cookie, anyone?
Anyone?
No takers, huh?
Well, it is an acquired taste.
Which is to say: while you acquire the means to build holocaust machines, the poor of Haiti sprout a taste for dirt, water, salt and vegetable shortening patiently baked to a crumbly goodness, almost, but not quite, reminiscent of something edible.
A blog we came across had this to say about the flavor:
A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.
However, there is an upside to this earthy diet:
Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.
Which latter health effect, no doubt, will provide a modicum of relief to us all, when the American system of medical care collapses under the weight of our Full Spectrum Dominance.
Gated communities are very expensive, and, if you did not notice, you are getting closer to the day where you can’t afford to live here any longer.
Somewhat like that mortgage meltdown stuff which seems to be affecting everyone but you – for the moment.
Remember that other victim of the mortgage meltdown, Bear Stearns?
The Wiki does:
On March 14, 2008, JPMorgan Chase, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, provided a 28-day emergency loan to Bear Stearns in order to prevent the potential market crash that would result from Bear Stearns becoming insolvent. Two days later, Bear Stearns signed a merger agreement with JP Morgan Chase in a stock swap worth $2 a share. In addition, the Federal Reserve agreed to issue a non-recourse loan to JP Morgan Chase, thereby assuming the risk of Bear Stearns’s less liquid assets. This sale price represented a staggering loss as its stock had once traded at $172 a share as late as January 2007, and $93 a share as late as February 2008.
One day a major investment bank is worth $172 a share, two months later, it is worth $2 a share.
The average price of an American home in October 2005 was $264,000. Were the housing market to collapse like Bear Stearns, within months that average home price would drop to $3000.
Which, oddly enough, is about equal to the unadjusted median price of a home in 1950 – the year the Truman administration embarked on its spanking new economic policy of Full Employment.
(We are joking here, of course, about the, “oddly enough,” part. Actually, there is nothing odd about it: it was exactly the value we expected, when we went looking for it while writing this chapter.)
Federal Reserve bailouts might work for insignificant minor league players like global investment banks, but, if you imagine they can step in and bail out us home owners…well, we do sincerely hope you have a Plan B.
Even if the Federal Reserve had the capacity to bail us out, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as we write this, is just now announcing Washington’s intention to permanently “resource” sufficient means to fight Iraq- and Afghanistan-level conflicts, while maintaining its on-going capacity to pursue a Full Spectrum Dominance strategy.
The paper said the Defense Department would respond to China’s expanding military power through “shaping and hedging.”
“This approach tailors investment of substantial, but not infinite, resources, in ways that favor key enduring US strategic advantages,” it said.
“At the same time we will continue to improve and refine our capabilities to respond to China if necessary,” it said.
The paper said Russia was leveraging its oil wealth, asserting claims in the Arctic, and continues “to bully its neighbors, all of which are cause for concern.”
It also pointed to Russia’s resumption of long-range bomber flights, withdrawal from arms control and force reduction treaties, threatened to target countries that host US missile defense bases, and signaled increased reliance on nuclear weapons as a foundation of its security.
“All of these actions suggest a Russia exploring renewed influence, and seeking a greater international role,” it said.
But the paper said the strategic environment the United States faces for the forseeable future “will be defined by a global struggle against a violent extremist ideology that seeks to overturn the international state system.”
Which implies Washington has figured out how to repeal the laws of
- physics, or,
- economics.
Or, most likely, Washington has firmly decided to sacrifice us all.
As Jeffrey Sachs so emphatically pointed out, to maintain the present level of insanity going under the name, Full Employment, requires a trade surplus, or, failing that, a cataclysmic reduction of the American standard of living.
Just after World War II, when Uncle Sam’s Club opened for business, the policy of Full Employment was possible because the United States enjoyed just such a trade surplus.
In the words of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):
long before the war, the United States had run an almost unbroken string of trade surpluses—that is, an excess of exports over imports—and the war damaged or destroyed much of the most significant international competition for U.S. industry.
People in Europe needed everything, and, for a relatively steep price, we could provide it.
The least important component of that price was interest on the loans we provided to them to buy goods from us.
The most important component – the gift that keeps on giving, so far – was the adoption by Europe of the dollar as the international currency for trade.
And, that was a good deal for us, since, according to the CBO:
After 1970, however, the almost unbroken string of trade surpluses turned into one of trade deficits, and in the 1980s and 1990s, those deficits grew quite large.
Which, for you, means, the value of everything for which you have worked your entire life – everything for which you have struggled, everything for which you rose from your bed each and every morning of your adult life, everything you had ever hoped to pass on to your children, or enjoy in your retirement – today hinges on the willingness and ability of foreigners to hold US dollars to settle their international trade obligations.
Precisely the same foreign individuals who are the target of our military policy of Full Spectrum Dominance.
(How do you say, “Fucked!“, in Arabic?)
To be continued
Is serious left criticism of government’s share of GDP possible? (16)
Continued from here.
At this point we have to apologize for leaving the impression that the irresponsibility of Washington is somehow the cause of the current fiscal bomb set to go off beneath your feet in the not too distant future.
True, Washington sold you a bill of goods, but that transaction was carried on under the time honored market signboard, Caveat Emptor!
According to the Wiki,
Under the doctrine of caveat emptor, the buyer could not recover from the seller for defects on the property that rendered the property unfit for ordinary purposes. The only exception was if the seller actively concealed latent defects.
The authors of NSC-68 never concealed the fact you would be required to work longer than is necessary to feed, clothe, and, house your family in order to enforce the new order which emerged in the aftermath of World War II.
Washington has always emphasized a call for further sacrifice at every critical juncture in the rocky economic path you willingly adopted for the past sixty years.
You could have demanded a dismantling of the Cordon Militaire in the wake of the the Soviet Union’s collapse, some 20 years ago – a move which might have saved you some of the $9 trillion of public debt run up since then.
But you did not.
This eruption will be your fault, not Washington’s.
It is true, as has been noted both by the authors of NSC-68 and the authors of the NeoCon war planning document, REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, that you are incapable of being roused from your slumbers for anything short of a Pearl Harbor-September 11th scale event.
And, it is true that the fiscal bomb currently ticking down to zero will dwarf both those events, and make you long for the happy days of the Great Depression – when only 25 percent of working men and women were unemployed.
However, the present crisis – uncomfortable as it will be for us – is merely a modest expression of a much deeper set of economic forces – forces, which, even assuming the most fiscally responsible of regimes these past twenty years, firmly and irreversibly placed us on collision course with the historically unprecedented catastrophe toward which we now hurtle.
*****
You will recall that the military Keynesianism adopted by the Truman administration in 1950 relied on permanent economic expansion to fulfill two objectives: an open-ended Cordon Militaire around the Soviet Union, and, an improving standard of living for you, the American voters.
The thought process of authors of NSC-68 probably went something like this:
“If we keep producing more silly gadgets and worthless trinkets to inspire their consumer confidence, the idiots will never realize we are busy converting their lives into an unbroken string of empty meaningless moments of unnecessary, intellect-stultifying, toil.”
Can you say: “Iphone2!”
We don’t know how you feel about them, but every time we see one of those suckers, we get the overwhelming urge to rush out and take a second mortgage.
To pay off our home equity loan…
Which paid off our credit cards…
After we bought the previous version of the “Iphone!”
Ah, yes. The virtuous circle of consumer confidence: we work, so that we may borrow; we borrow, so that we may buy; we buy, so that we may work.
Speaking of silly gadgets and worthless trinkets, about now you are wondering how the government managed to fund the production of all those aircraft carriers and Minuteman II missiles systems – which latter runs about $7 million a pop.
As we noted earlier, despite the mystical pronouncements of the high priesthood of the Church of Full Employment, Washington cannot just print an endless stream of dollars to pay for really expensive items like Minuteman II holocaust machines.
To build the machines requires the real effort of real scientists, engineers, tool and die operators, and office managers.
First, these people have to be trained.
Second, the instruments of production, and raw materials have to be secured.
Finally, while they are building engines of death, they are not engaged in economically necessary activity like building homes, growing food, assembling cars, etc.
So, all this must be done on their behalf by people who have real jobs jobs aimed at producing life, maintaining life, supporting life, feeding, housing and clothing the living.
At least up until the moment the engines of death are actually unleashed in a searing cloud of flesh puddling apocalypse heralding the onset of nuclear winter.
(For what it is worth: however, idotic and superstitious it may be for explaining the beginning of life on Earth, Intelligent Design remains very much the leading scenario for how it ends.)
The means for growing the food, building the homes, and clothing the backs of our tirelessly working Dr. Strangeloves-in-waiting, if it is not to be taken from the current consumption of the rest of their fellow American voters, and, the current investment in means of production by American businesses, must be secured from the global labor pool beyond the borders of the United States.
This, of course, is so amazingly obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with the basic principles of economics, it hardly bears mentioning.
Which is why it is routinely overlooked by the brightest minds in the field of economic policy – which minds prefer to keep the evil spirits of economic catastrophe at bay with primitive chants, cabalistic incantations understood only by initiates, catatonic mouthing of talking points, and, a very liberal swinging of sulfurous incenses.
To wit, this threeway exchange between Fareed Zakaria, Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence Summers:
ZAKARIA: Oil and food prices are sky-high, world markets are down, and the American economy seems to be slinking into a long slump. Just how scared should we be?
Well, I’ve gathered three of the top economists in the world to talk about all of this.
[…]
The first question to you, how scared should we be? In other words, are we in the phase of a crisis where the pain has been felt, and there’s going to be a long, slow working out of this pain? Or are there more unpleasant surprises to come?You know, what innings are we in?
JEFFREY SACHS, DIRECTOR, THE EARTH INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, ECONOMIC ADVISER TO GOVERNMENTS: I don’t know if Paul and Larry agree exactly, but one thing that could be added to this is the question of whether there’s a way to counteract the downturn itself, not whether one should pump up the economy, and so forth. But is a recession at this point unavoidable? This is going from, you know, gloom to gloomier.
But I would say yes, and that the attempt early on in the next presidency to have a big stimulus and keep pushing, and do everything we can to avoid the downturn, would actually prove to be fruitless at this point, because there are so many imbalances that have been built into the U.S. economy in the last decade, and especially in the last few years, and now added to the — now added on by the global markets — that consumers really are going to have to adjust.
They’ve not been saving for years. The housing market is not going to be the way the economy is going to recover. There’s going to have to be a lot of structural change in the U.S. economy. There’s going to have to be export-led growth to an important extent, because we’ve been borrowing on an amount that we will not continue in the future…
ZAKARIA: So, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), a recession will actually have an effect of cleansing the system. It will take out some of these unsustainable imbalances.
SACHS: No, what I’m saying is that, the idea that there really are enough gears right now to just keep that headline measure of the total size of the economy growing at some positive, close-to-normal rate, is just not the case. We don’t have tools like that, that can do that.
And there are so many problems that need adjustment right now, and such a legacy of imbalance, that I think that heroics to stop a downturn wouldn’t work.
LAWRENCE SUMMERS, FORMER U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY, FORMER PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Jeff, we’ve been friends for 35 years, and I’ve never heard you say such a fatalistic thing.
I don’t disagree with you about the difficulty, the challenge. And I think, no matter how brilliantly policy is carried on, the next three or four years are not likely to be three or four particularly favorable years in American economic history.
But I think it’s a serious mistake to suggest that we should somehow accept our recession like a man, and that if we just do that, we’ll cleanse the imbalances…
Notice how Summers challenges Sachs’s manhood in this exchange – daring the sissy-boy, this wannabe economic chicken-hawk warrior, to display his soft pudgy manicured hands to the viewers.
“You betta man up, bitch!” Summers appears to be saying. “Shit is gonna hit the fan, and we will need every able bodied dick to to be out there swinging.”
Of course, you will also notice Summers never challenges the premise of Sachs’s statement: without a massive reduction in the living standards of American voters, the current eruption of interlocking crises can not be fixed.
To be continued.
Is serious left criticism of government’s share of GDP possible? (A full accounting)
Continued from here.
By now it should be clear to you that the real question is not can the left criticize government’s share of GDP?
Rather, the question can be posed more briefly:
What LEFT?
Indeed, what we have so far witnessed here – beginning with the Democratic Party’s Truman administration, and continuing without interruption through Democratic and Republican administrations down to our own beloved Moron, and likely to be continued unchanged by either that neanderthal of the right, John McCain, or, that darling of Europe and the cell phone set, Barack Obama – is nothing less than the coagulation of all the most essential features of a fascistic regime unmatched even by the standard of Hitlerian depravity.
Hyperbole, you protest. The manic mutterings of a deranged and unbalanced mind.
Guilty as charged.
For, although we have laid out for you the carrying costs of empire, in 2008 dollars, and hinted at the mortal outrage of its human costs – in lost opportunity for human self-development, and the astonishing loss of life in the present catastrophic occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – we have, so far, concealed from you the running total of brutality of the present course you have supported these sixty years.
To put this in an increment you might understand, the Wiki has this to say about scale of human loss on September 11, 2001:
There were 2,974 fatalities, excluding the 19 hijackers: 246 on the four planes (from which there were no survivors), 2,603 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon. An additional 24 people remain listed as missing. All of the fatalities in the attacks were civilians except for 55 military personnel killed at the Pentagon. More than 90 countries lost citizens in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
NIST estimated that approximately 17,400 civilians were in the World Trade Center complex at the time of the attacks, while turnstile counts from the Port Authority suggest that 14,154 people were typically in the Twin Towers by 8:45 a.m. The vast majority of people below the impact zone safely evacuated the buildings, along with 18 individuals who were in the impact zone in the south tower. 1,366 people died who were at or above the floors of impact in the North Tower. According to the Commission Report, hundreds were killed instantly by the impact, while the rest were trapped and died after the tower collapsed. As many as 600 people were killed instantly or were trapped at or above the floors of impact in the South Tower.
Fatalities (excluding hijackers) New York City World Trade Center 2,603 died and another 24 remain listed as missing American 11 88 United 175 59 Arlington Pentagon 125 American 77 59 Shanksville United 93 40 Total 2,974 died and another 24 remain listed as missing. At least 200 people jumped to their deaths from the burning towers (as depicted in the photograph “The Falling Man“), landing on the streets and rooftops of adjacent buildings hundreds of feet below. Some of the occupants of each tower above its point of impact made their way upward toward the roof in hope of helicopter rescue, but the roof access doors were locked. No plan existed for helicopter rescues, and on September 11, the thick smoke and intense heat would have prevented helicopters from conducting rescues.
A total of 411 emergency workers who responded to the scene died as they attempted to implement rescue and fire suppression efforts. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) lost 341 firefighters and 2 FDNY paramedics. The New York City Police Department lost 23 officers. The Port Authority Police Department lost 37 officers. Private EMS units lost 8 additional EMTs and paramedics.
Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., an investment bank on the 101st–105th floors of One World Trade Center, lost 658 employees, considerably more than any other employer. Marsh Inc., located immediately below Cantor Fitzgerald on floors 93–101 (the location of Flight 11’s impact), lost 295 employees, and 175 employees of Aon Corporation were killed. After New York, New Jersey was the hardest hit state, with the city of Hoboken sustaining the most fatalities.
Weeks after the attack, the estimated death toll was over 6,000. The city was only able to identify remains for approximately 1,600 of the victims at the World Trade Center. The medical examiner’s office also collected “about 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to the list of the dead.” Bone fragments were still being found in 2006 as workers were preparing to demolish the damaged Deutsche Bank Building.
Let us call the above figures, taken from the pages of the Wiki, a single unit of loss.
We can give this unit of death and destruction the name, “September 11th” – being a unit of death and destruction equal to the total loss of human beings in Washington, Pennsylvania and New York on the bright blue morning of September 11, 2001.
2974 persons dead, 24 additional persons missing, untold thousands injured directly and indirectly as a result of this insanity.
According to a recent study, the human cost of your Full Spectrum Dominance has so far amounted to 10,000 September 11th events in incidents ranging from the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, under a program called Operation Ajax, to the 7.8 million slaughtered during the Vietnam War, to more than 1 million deaths in Iraq since the United States invasion in the first Gulf War in 1991.
The authors go on to say:
And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.
This uniquely American Holocaust has been estimated to total 20-30 million mostly civilian deaths, and as many as 200-300 million wounded, on every continent, and in every region of the planet!
10,000 September 11th events.
And this was in peacetime.
To be continued
Re: The People 
For Sale: one slightly used pump (as is)
The financial system set up after World War II to assist Washington in its strategy of siphoning economic resources to maintain and expand its vast military empire has collapsed.
Nowhere is this more clear than the complete breakdown of monetary policy, already touch and go in the last downturn, in the present financial crisis: the Federal Reserve Bank, the institution responsible for managing the mechanism of credit markets to assure continuing financing for Washington’s growing debt, has exhausted its traditional tools.
According to Brad Setser, the Fed has been forced to step into the role formerly played by private market players:
Over the last few months, the Fed has more or less taken over a slew of functions previously performed by the private financial system.
Banks with spare cash (more deposits than loans) used to lend to banks that were short of cash (more loans than deposits). Now they lend to the Fed, and the Fed lends to the banks that are short on cash. That way no bank risks taking losses lending to a bad bank ….
Money market funds used to lend both to the financial sector and to firms with short-term financing needs. Now they (to simplify a bit) just buy Treasuries. The Treasury met this demand by increasing its issuance, and (to simplify a bit) putting the cash it raised on deposit with the Fed. That in turn allowed the Fed to lend to institutions in the US and abroad that previously relied on money market funds for financing.
Foreign central banks used to buy rather significant sums of Agency bonds, and in the process finance (indirectly) the extension of credit to American households. Now foreign central banks just want Treasuries. The Fed now plans to purchase rather significant quantities of Agencies, in effect making up for the fall off in demand from other central banks.
To paraphrase a thug from an earlier time: L’Économie c’est Moi.
But, closer to home that might be rewritten thusly, Markets “R” Us!
According to the Economist, the Federal Reserve’s effort is aimed to provide, “investors with the confidence that a committed buyer is in the market.”
Which is to say, the Fed is intent on using your tax dollars to support asset prices long enough until, they desperately hope, capital markets begin to function again on their own.
Deflation, the WMD of the poor and dispossessed, is here, and Washington has stepped down into the filthy gutter of Wall Street ponzi schemes to prevent the global and domestic Joe Plumbers from ever seeing the fruits of their victory – a victory they have achieved simply by being what they are: poor, dispossessed, and utterly dependent on social production and consumption.
It is, above all, absolutely critical to Washington to prevent the general fall in prices of goods and assets, a ensure their continuing upward spiral.
This much is understood by many, since deflation is a dagger aimed at the heart of accumulated wealth.
Forty-eight percent of investment assets are held by the top one percent of Americans; with the top ten percent holding 85 percent of such assets – as the charts show below.
Table 2: Wealth distribution by type of asset, 2001
At first blush, this looks like a classic case of “comforting the comfortable.”The Federal Reserve is clearly stepping in to prevent the wealth of a handful of individuals from being dissipated through deflation, and it is doing it using the money of those who have least.
The astounding concentration of wealth demonstrated here should cause one to question democracy itself: how is it possible a government, “of the people, by the people,” could stand by and allow the most amazing impoverishment of that people, and the lopsided distribution of the product of that people into so few hands – and to follow this tragedy by working furiously to maintain this lopsided distribution?
The cynical answer is, of course, it wasn’t that hard at all. They just waited until you were off to the mall shopping off the effects of September 11, 2001 – as instructed by the Moron.
The serious answer, however, is the concentration of wealth was the outcome of the deliberate Washington policy of inflating the economy and siphoning off an increment of this inflated economic activity to fund its empire.
Specifically, Washington secretly planned an open-ended inflation of economic activity, because economic growth,
…would permit, and might itself be aided by, a build-up of the economic and military strength of the United States and the free world; furthermore, if a dynamic expansion of the economy were achieved, the necessary build-up [of US military forces] could be accomplished without a decrease in the national standard of living because the required resources could be obtained by siphoning off a part of the annual increment in the gross national product.
It was a secret deal between Washington and Wall Street – not a secret deal in the conspiratorial sense, since all the players overlapped, and had to overlap, given Washington’s nationalization of industry to fight World War II – but a secret deal in the sense the American people were locked out of the discussion, never provided any meaningful alternate economic policy choices, and because the real reason for the economic policy decisions made in the decades after were never provided in a way alternatives could be examined.
So, when inflation began to bite in the 1950s, when 100 years of trade surpluses turned into trade deficits in the 1970s, when industry began abandoning the Midwest for the South, and for China and the low wage periphery, when trade deficits turned in budget deficits, and those budget deficits turned in personal savings deficits, and as the national, corporate and personal debt ballooned to the kinds of cataclysmic number we witness today, no one in mainstream politics stepped forward to say:
“Well, it would not be this way, if Washington would simply stop surreptitiously stealing national income to fund its empire. That really is the entire cause of our economic problems.”
Because, you see, if you want to sipon off the wealth of a nation to fund your empire, you need a pump, and Wall Street was that pump – in the entirety of human history, no social organization has ever been as efficient as finance capitalism in siphoning off wealth.
But now deflation has broken the pump – the ongoing collapse of real estate, the collapse of credit and equity markets – all the result of a mass of impoverished and dispossessed billion slaves who cannot feed themselves with what they earn producing the whole world of wealth that is now crashing aound us.
And, the last target of deflation – Washington – finds itself desperate to get the pump running again.
In Paul Krugman’s opnion, “Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.”
To which, the residents of Kibera reply, “What do you mean ‘We’ white man.”
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