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Introduction: What does it mean when the US and British financial systems launder hundreds of billions of dollars of illicit funds stolen by world leaders while their governments turn a ‘blind eye’, and yet the very same Anglo-American officials investigate, prosecute, fine and arrest officials from rival governments, rival banks and political leaders for corruption?
What does it mean when the US government expands a world-wide network of nuclear missiles on bases stretching from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Gulf States to Japan, surrounding Russia, Iran and China, while the very same US and NATO officials investigate and condemn rival defense officials from Russia, China and Iran, as military threats to peace and stability?
What does it mean when Anglo-American economic officials devote decades to raising the age of retirement, reducing working and middle class household income, cutting workers compensation, expanding part-time work, setting the stage for mass layoffs slashing unemployment and health benefits and reducing social spending by the hundreds of billions of dollars and then turn around and investigate and threaten rival countries, like China and Argentina with loss of markets, investment and employment for not doing the same thing ?
The meaning of Anglo-America’s long-term, large-scale structural regression is clearly evident across the world. From Europe to Latin America and from Asia to Africa, socio-economic and politico-military agendas have been reversed.
Since the end of the Second World War there had been incremental gains in labor rights, stable employment, poverty reduction and working conditions.
Recently, these have all been reversed: Longer working days and weeks with reduced salaries and benefits; unstable temporary work replaces stable employment; employer-funded pensions are eliminated and replaced by multi-billion dollar corporate tax cuts and off-shore tax evasion.
Systematic structural swindles by the leading financial institutions have forced employees to delay retirement for years in order to ’self-finance’ their own meager ‘pensions’, some expecting to ‘die at the job’.
Capitalist regression has been implemented by arbitrary state dictates and authoritarian decrees, erasing any pretense of democratic procedures and constitutional laws.
The regressive and retrograde leader-states from the imperial centers impose their conditions on follower regimes like Mexico and Russia forcing them to reverse their legacy of social progress while blackmailing these regimes’ oligarchs with the loss of lucrative markets, access to tax and money-laundering havens and impunity for their crimes and swindles.
Anglo-America: Historic Reversion
For the past three decades, the US and Great Britain have led the global drive to undermine labor’s advances. First, the economic structure sustaining labor organizations were dismantled and fragmented. Then organized labor was decimated, co-opted and corporatized.
Capital proceeded to reverse labor and social welfare legislation and lower wages, in order to impose longer workdays and destabilize employment.
The mass media re-packaged the regression cycle as ‘economic reform’, a euphemism, which disguised the re-concentration of power, wealth and income over the last three decades.
The growth of inequality and the concentration of wealth and assets to the 1% became ‘the standard’ for the Anglo-American era. However, class organization and the vicissitudes of class struggles continued to constrain efforts to impose unchallenged Anglo-American capitalist rulership throughout the world.
The first decisive blow against social reform resulted from the systematic Anglo-American breakdown of the former USSR and allied nations of the Warsaw Pact in East Europe. This was followed by the endogenous dissolution of Communist Party rule in China, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Baltic and Balkan states and their conversion into capitalist satellites. Social welfare, full employment, public pensions and health systems were shredded; labor lost all its rights except one – the right to emigrate to the West as cheap labor.
From Russia to Latvia and Poland to Bulgaria and Romania, there were massive layoffs, plant closures and the total dissolution of social security networks driven by the Anglo-America neo-liberal onslaught. The Atlantic Alliance brought their new Eastern satellites to social submission.
Until the second decade of the 21st century, Western Europe’s centers for the defense of the progressive social agenda were in France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. The social agenda in Latin America and China faced the Anglo-America offensive even earlier.
France: The Strategic Key to Anglo-American Social Regression
France has been the center where the Anglo-American regressive attack on socio-economic policy and Southern Europe’s resistance has been playing out.
By 2015 the regressive alliance had overturned all progressive social policy in the former communist bloc countries. Their alliance with Germany’s finance sector give them tight control of the EU and they successfully decimated the progressive social programs and labor legislation in Greece, Spain and Portugal.
France became the centerpiece for Western capitalism’s drive to incorporate Italy into the regressive orbit. The conquest of France and Italy would completely reverse 70 years of incremental labor gains after the defeat of fascist capitalism.
The assault on France’s progressive social agenda is spearheaded by the retro-Socialist President Francois Holland and his troika of authoritarian hyper-capitalist ministers: Financial Minister Michel Sapin, Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron.
The strategy of relying on a ‘nominal socialist’ to destroy the social welfare state is a classic ‘Trojan Horse’ operation. Hollande’s virulent anti-labor policy is implemented by decree under a joint plan developed in association with France’s leading industrialists.
The imposition of the regressive policy in France began in stages. It first established the retrograde political leadership with Valls, a notorious authoritarian police-state official willing to over-ride any democratic niceties. The Economy Minister, Emanuel Macron, a millionaire investment banker, is a direct associate of the financial elite, with no qualms in slashing labor programs. The Finance Minister Michel Sapin, a long-time accomplice of the French bureaucratic-capitalist elite, is prepared to slash pensions and public services while reducing job security in order to lower the cost of labor to capital.
Once the Hollande and his troika took control of the centers of political power, (and after militarizing French society in response to the terrorist attacks), the regime launched its anti-labor offensive to shred the progressive social agenda. Its first target was its most formidable – the mass of the French working class.
Declaring ‘anti-ISIS’ martial law powers, Hollande adopted an outright authoritarian strategy, bypassing the elected French Parliament in the legislature and imposed ‘rule by decree’ with the announcement of a highly regressive labor law against the French people.
The dictatorial labor decree was a first step to weaken organized labor’s capacity to protect wages and job security in order to give a powerful impetus to employer control over the French labor force.
Once Hollande’s labor decree established capitalist supremacy, his Troika would be in a decisive position to reverse seventy of incremental social advances.
The joint Hollande-Troika-capitalist bloc emasculated the legislature, leaving a weak, bleating chorus of so-called ‘left Socialists’ to bemoan their political impotence. Then an entirely new business anti-labor code was rolled out, which included the right of bosses to hire and fire workers at will, extend the workday , lengthen the work week, undermine labor’s bargaining power and restrain strikes and job actions. This would open the way for a wave of irregular and contingent jobs for new workers . . . Using the pretext of terrorist attacks, the French capitalist class had begun to rule by decree to further expand and deepen their long planned assault on labor.
Hollande’s troika and France’s capitalists are lowering corporate taxes and employer contribution to social payments. Regulations that restrained the concentration of elite power were eliminated.
With curfews and ‘anti-terrorist’ militarized police in the streets, French business elite could now freely begin to to imitate the Anglo-American capitalist elite and impose an iron-fisted New Order.
Without labor constraints on French capital, the bosses are is free to relocate factories and investments any and everywhere, under the most favorable wage, tax, employment and environmental conditions.
No longer required to invest in French industry, the business elite can transfer capital from industry to financial sectors, allowing hundreds of billions of euros to be laundered in off shore tax havens.
The Hollande troika will now also establish its own version of ‘Security and Exchange investigators’ to prosecute and fine its rival Anglo-American financial swindlers, just as the Anglo-Americans pursue their French competitors today.
The Hollande regime’s regressive social agenda has opened the door for an even more extreme Presidential prototype to follow and Alain Juppe is waiting.
The rabid Republican Party presidential candidate, Alain Juppe, promises to go ‘whole hog’ in utterly destroying the French welfare state, as it has existed since the fall of fascism. If elected president, Juppe promised to slash 100 billion euros from the budget – double the amount that the Hollande regime currently seeks to cut. Juppe has pledged to eliminate 250,000 civil service jobs in all vital social sectors; to delay the retirement age from 62 to 65; eliminate the 35-hour workweek; facilitate worker layoffs and decimate unemployment benefits. Finally, Juppe has promised French capital that he would implement their entire business agenda, cut taxes for business and bankers and eliminate the tax on inheritance implemented nearly four decades ago.
In other words, the Hollande regime’s assault on labor and embrace of business has opened the door for the rise of the extreme right. Moreover, Hollande has manipulated the incidents of Islamist terrorism to assume arbitrary decree powers wiping out any pretense of a democratic government. The terrorist incidents are arguably related to Hollande’s colonialist embrace of the ‘regime change’ assaults against the secular nationalist governments of Libya and Syria and his policy of sending (or tolerating the recruitment of) marginalized French youth of North African ancestry to fight in the ensuing civil wars. This has further strengthened the rise of the extreme right in France.
As the Socialist and Republicans compete for dictatorial powers to serve business’ regressive agenda, the nationalist, protectionist and social reformist policies of the National Front are emerging as the populist alternative in the coming presidential race. Anti-fascist rhetoric has worn thin and important sectors of the working class will turn to the National Front in defense of their jobs and social legislation. The anti-immigration rhetoric of the National Front is now part of the political vocabulary of the Republicans as well as Prime Minister Valls.
The only alternative to a power grab by the French hard right is a mass general strike and sustained street battles in order to resist the reaction by decree.
As throughout history, popular struggles in France begin in the streets – among the trade unions and young workers angrily facing low wages, austerity and the grim prospect of ‘permanently’ temporary jobs.
The outcome of the intensifying French labor-capital conflict will have a decisive impact on the future of labor throughout Europe, especially among all Left unionists.
Latin America: The Labor-Capital Showdown
Beyond Europe, the Anglo-American onslaught against labor and the working class resonates most directly in Latin America and to a lesser extent in Asia and Africa.
The first country to fall victim to capital’s attack was Mexico with the implementation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). By the early 1990’s NAFTA had demolished the independent Mexican trade unions, crippled social legislation, eliminated subsidies to small corn farmers, forced peasants into debt, reduced minimum wage, doubled poverty levels and turned the majority of the labor force into landless, indebted, casual workers. On the other hand, NAFTA has been a bottomless source of wealth as capitalists accumulate double and triple digit profits and absolute power to hire and fire employees. Mexico’s government, under Anglo-American capital, has allowed the illicit transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars of Mexican assets to US, English and other overseas banks, which have become immense money-laundering operations. The proximity of Mexican drug cartels to the US banks has facilitated the extension of their networks into the US market. The horrific expansion of drug cartel death squads, linked to Mexico’s political leaders, dates from the 1990’s and the signing of NAFTA. This bloody nexus has consolidated neoliberal political power in Mexico and weakened the possibility of a viable mass electoral alternative.
Anglo-American dominance in Latin America in the 1990’s led to an entire panoply of regressive policies: privatizing and denationalizing the most lucrative natural and state resources, banks and industries; reducing wages and social spending for labor while increasing the concentration of capital. By 2001 however the Anglo-American edifice collapsed throughout South America with the demise of its neo-liberal political leadership.
From Venezuela in 1999, to Argentina in 2002, Brazil 2003, Bolivia 2006 and Ecuador 2007, left and center-left parties capitalized on their mass support and were elected into power. They took advantage of global economic conditions with the rising commodity prices, booming Chinese markets and new regional alliances to fund a variety of progressive social agendas, including increased social expenditures, guaranteed pensions, family allowances, minimum wages, wage increases for public sector and expanded labor rights.
The Anglo-American power elite was in retreat and isolated, but it was far from defeated. They retrenched and prepared to re-mobilize their strategic business, banking and political allies when the opportunity arose. They counter-attacked when global and regional conditions turned unfavorable to the social regimes.
The assault on Latin America was preceded by the Anglo-American neo-liberal take-over of Northern Europe from the 1990’s to the first decade of the 21st century. This was followed by the sweep and grab of the Balkans and Southern Europe. The combined Anglo-American-EU-NATO offensive now seeks to reverse the last social-welfare regimes in Europe: France and Italy with the help of President Hollande and Prime Minister Renzi.
Simultaneously the Anglo-American offensive has been launched throughout Latin America. Their goal is to recover the imperial prerogatives, political power and economic privileges lost during the previous decade. The primary Euro-American target is the ‘golden triangle’, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. These countries constitute a global center of immense oil and agro-mineral wealth.
The Argentine neo-liberal restoration took off in December 2015 with the election of far-right President Mauricio Macri. His junta wasted no time in stripping the state of its social legislation, dismantling job security through large-scale layoffs and assuming authoritarian rule by decree to devalue Argentina’s currency by 40% and to eliminate state subsidies and raising the price for gas, electricity, transport, and water between 300 and 800 %.
The regressive offensive was in full force. Next, Brazil’s twice elected President Dilma Rousseff was ‘impeached’ and essentially overthrown by a bizarre legislative right-wing coup-d’état, designed to reverse a generation of progressive regulatory, labor and employment legislation. It was also secretly designed to halt corruption investigations against many right-wing politicians.
Venezuela is next. It will be the scene of a full-scale-elite coup-d’état with imperial backing, to overthrow the government of President Maduro and end decades of progressive social advances under the Chavista governments.
While in France and Italy, the great social reversal is being implemented by internal enemies from the ‘progressive’ political parties (”Trojan Horses”), in Latin America the reversal is led by openly hostile class enemies who depend on the arbitrary exercise of executive power. The drive to put a definitive end to the ‘welfare state’ in Europe and Latin America is marked by the use of dictatorial decrees, (in the style of Mussolini in the 1920’s) as exercised by Argentina’s elected President Marci in January 2016 and Brazil’s ‘Interim (Coup) President’ Temer in April 2016. Meanwhile capitalist lockouts, hoarding and sabotage are being used to crush Venezuela’s elected government.
This epochal confrontation has spread across Africa and Asia. China’s capitalist offensive has seen a four-fold increase in the number of new billionaires in less than a decade, at the expense of hundreds of millions of workers stripped of their rights and social programs.
South Africa, under the ANC government, turned its back on social gains promised by the liberation struggle and has imposed regressive social legislation and repressive anti-labor decrees. A corrupt class of black and white billionaires now rule by guns and clubs over the black working class.
In Africa and the Middle East, the social welfare states of the nationalist regimes in Iraq and Libya have been completely shredded through imperialist military intervention and civil war. Their once advanced societies have been thrown back into ethno-tribal warfare with no remaining modern social institutions in those two blighted, resource-rich nations.
Wither the Class Struggle: Historical Reversal and Class Revolt?
The Anglo-American offensive to reverse decades of social advance has captured most of Europe. They have incorporated or coopted the Social Democratic parties and are moving swiftly toward dismantling the decade-long center-left welfare states in Latin America.
In Africa, the centerpiece of Anglo-Americanization is South Africa, the continent’s most advanced bastion of international capitalism.
In Asia, China, the second most important capitalist economy in the world, has been leading the struggle to overturn the social agenda of the revolutionary past.
Large-scale, prolonged class resistance in several decisive centers is emerging to confront this Anglo-American process of reversion. The class confrontation however takes specific characteristics in each country.
In France, the major protagonists of street fighting and marches are young unemployed or casual workers, members of the strategic transport and oil unions and student-workers facing a bleak future of marginal employment and a shredded social safety net.
Trade unions and farmers’ association have joined the street struggles on numerous occasions, possibly in preparation for a general strike.
In Latin America, the center of the class struggle is Argentina. Power-mad President Macri immediately imposed regressive policies against all sectors of the working class. His actions managed to unite the four major trade union confederations, multiple retirees associations and small businesspeople bankrupted by exorbitant charges on gas and electrical use and regional neighborhood federations. The widespread growth of job actions among public sector employees points to a general strike.
The regressive assault on long-term social legislation in Brazil immediately followed the thinly disguised capitalist coup. The ousting of President Rousseff has provoked street demonstrations, led by the huge rural landless workers movement (MST), the confederation of industrial and service workers (CUT), social movements of the homeless workers and the recipients of Lula’s poverty programs. New revelations, based on taped conversations among the coup plotters reveal their plans to oust the incumbent President Rousseff in order to derail official investigations into their own corruption scandals. This has enraged the general public.
With the initial take-over, the Brazilian political-financial elite has prepared to launch its full-scale reversal of pensions and employment laws and wage guarantees. The pro-business leadership plans to slash corporate and wealth taxes and to appoint business executives to all leading ministries. The deep corruption scandal and the mass demonstrations suggest the rightwing power grab may not survive.
The regressive offensive in Venezuela has severely crippled the national economy and deeply eroded living standards of the vast majority of the working class. The rightist Congress, backed by the US and allied with international mass media, industry and multinational banks, are trying to force the resignation of Socialist President Maduro.
Maduro has declared a state of emergency and mobilized the armed forces. He called on the military and popular militia to defend the constitutional order and has threatened to mobilize the workers to “take control of the means of production”. Still, the leftist government vacillates over arming the militias and workers. A wide gap remains before the word and the deed.
In the meantime Venezuela’s right wing and left-wing mass mobilizations face each other in the streets seething with class hatred and waiting to engage in a decisive confrontation. The military thus far remains constitutionalist and on the side of the elected president.
In South Africa, the corrupt pro-business ANC led by President Zuma murdered dozens of striking mine workers. It has impoverished millions of shantytown residents, while increasing the wealth and power of the black-white elite. On April 30, 2016, 1.1.million South African activists, including civil society and community organizations and trade unions covering the mining, manufacturing and service sectors have organized to form a new confederation linked with informal, unemployed and poor workers. The South African Workers Summit replaces the moribund and corrupt labor confederation, COSATU, the ‘labor desk’ for the neo-liberal ANC regime. The new confederation will co-ordinate mass struggles and reclaim social programs as a central part of the anti-capitalist revolution.
In China, the growth and consolidation of the world’s second largest concentration of billionaires has led to the proliferation of large-scale industrial workers’ strikes, walkouts and confrontations with factory bosses, company unions and government officials. China is becoming the epicenter of Asia’s working class struggles. Chinese workers have forced the government to investigate and jail over 200,000 corrupt officials, high and low, and to concede substantial wage increases and social compensation to factory workers. Fearing more social upheaval, China’s billionaires and multi-millionaires have transferred hundreds of billions of dollars of stolen assets abroad in a buying spree of high-end property in the ’safe’ Anglo-American “heartland” of world reaction.
The continued advance of working class struggles against the public and private oligarchs has forced the Chinese Prime Minister to reform elite privileges and prosecute large-scale banking swindles and illegal seizure of farmland. Especially important, millions of workers have successfully secured double-digit wage increases and the right to legally live in urban/industrial and construction centers.
As it gains momentum, class struggle in China can become the centerpiece for a wider Asian social transformation and a great leap forward to socialist values.
Conclusion
The Anglo-American drive to establish a global regressive social order has pushed billions of workers on five continents into destitution, insecurity and lifelong exploitation. The capitalist world rules by fiat and violence, declaring that social regression and worker repression are the ‘wave of the future’. For the elite, the proper order of the universe is being ‘restored’!
In response, new working class organizations have emerged and engage directly to defend their historic social advances and economic rights.
In the course of defending their past progressive social legacy, the new working class militants can clearly see the imperative to challenge and overthrow the entire political and economic order. From France to Latin America, from China to South Africa, class struggle is defining the present and future of class relations.
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What do you mean by this? The US has nuclear missiles in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania? Do you have some evidence for this?
Even Karl Marx would have been interested enough in facts which existed independently of the fantasies in his head to notice that people who are not very bright and not blessed with energy will find it hard to maintain unearned prosperity after the world’s billions of poor and uneducated get a leg up in a (re)globalised economy. He would notice too that modern capitalism has provided the means for unprecedented increases in longevity which make the old defined benefit pension schemes unviable and potentially expose the old to poverty if retirement continues to occur at ages which few used to achieve but now most do.
“What does it mean when… ”
It means they are hypocrites. The corruption of the English elites and they subservience to money goes back at least to the “glorious” revolution. In the US since around the creation of the Federal Reserve.
The state used to regulate corporations.
Now corporations are the state.
Government of the corporations
by the corporations
for the corporations.
Let’s hope it perishes from the Earth
before humanity does.
While bleeding hearts like the author of this article believe that unearned wealth transfer to the lower classes in countries like Venezuela and Brazil does good, in fact it does irreparable harm. It simply encourages even greater disproportionate reproduction by the less capable segments of society, thereby decreasing the aggregate IQ of the country.
Here is a summary of a study of IQ across the Brazilian racial categories; “browns” are racially mixed (descendants of black and white, of Amerindian and white, or of all three races):
“An investigation was carried out on the intelligence of 10 year-olds in Brazil, using the Standard Progressive Matrices. It is estimated that the mean IQ in Brazil is 87.8. The mean IQs of the four principal racial and ethnic groups are estimated as whites, 95; “browns”, 81; blacks, 71; and Asians, 99. These IQs are calculated in relation to a British mean of 100.”
A rational person would consider 1) Lynn’s demonstration of a tight correlation between IQ and national wealth, 2) the data in the paragraph above, and 3) the fact that in the past 30 years the proportion of the Brazilian population that is white dropped from 55% to 47% because of the higher birth rates of browns and blacks, and would conclude that subsidies to the latter groups are harmful to the long term prospects of Brazilian society. Any subsidies should be contingent upon reduced family size, otherwise you are simply buying more chaos for the future.
The so called elites who control most of the wealth of the planet suffer from an obsessive-compulsive disorder of the same general type as obese people who eat far more than they should and thus are often seen as unhealthy and disgusting by those of sound mind and body. Most of them use the contributions of the legitimate rich as a Trojan horse. This is not to excuse the working class of the western democracies(?) for using credit to sell their inheritance for a mess of Chinese plastic, plastic entertainment and designer drug sports. The term fat cats is far more accurate than it seems. These folks are not only mentally ill, but have infected the world with their sickness.
Soviet propaganda nonsense, the fascists’ leading lights were almost all former orthodox socialists, they formulated instead a nationalistic socialism that you would probably find laudable if you actually researched it.
There is more to life, love and politics than IQ. Alt Right would be better off without HBDtards and the racially obsessed. My thanks to Mr. Unz for the Unz review. I have learned a lot here. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Don’t forget to take the mice with you, you loathsome dolphin.
Why certainly. The oil profits from Venezuela should go straight to Wall Street and trickle down appropriately.
“In response, new working class organizations have emerged and engage directly to defend their historic social advances and economic rights.”
Why do unions and minorities support the party that wants open borders, which reduces their pay and progress ?
It means the banking mafia completed their hijack of Britain and America in the 1980s mainly as a result of their control of the mass media.
It won’t last because when the banking mafia take over a country completely they destroy the economy incredibly fast.
(It only took ten years from the final deregulation of the banks in both US/UK to produce the 2008 crash).
The big risk is the banking mafia starting another world war to get out of the mess they created.
In case anybody has missed, the reversal of worker’s rights and benefits in the west started in 1991. Coincidence? Hardly. You see most concessions to the working class the capitalists made because of a threat of communist revolution. Once that threat was gone in 1991, the cruel capitalists realized it’s now safe to take away anything that they can from the working class.
Even the concessions that the US made during the great recession – the social security act – was not made because the capitalists have suddenly grown a heart. It was made because the October revolution at that time was very fresh in their minds and they were scarred it can happen somewhere else too.
Capitalism is an awful system. Even the Nazis knew this. That’s why they called themselves National Socialists, they didn’t call themselves National Capitalists or National Democrats. They knew that the word capitalism has very limited propaganda appeal for the masses. There is nothing appealing about Capitalism, unless you plan to exploit someone to death.
That’s the reason why the workers standards of living are plummeting, because the good old USSR is not around to keep the greedy capitalists scared and honest.
There is a strange puritanism at the core of Libertarianism. Some of its biggest adherents are actually uptight and sober men & women who aren’t given to self-indulgence and wild hedonism. Indeed, they seem more enthralled with the Stick aspect than the Carrot aspect of Libertarianism. They figure that vice and self-indulgence will be balanced out by the hard lessons of experience.
So, Libertarianism is paradoxical in championing total freedom and total pleasure in the conviction that those who indulge in such excesses will get a good spanking from reality and be sobered into responsibility. Young people have shown support for Ron Paul as a champion of fun and pleasure, but Paul’s defense of Libertarianism has always been more about the stick that controls the penchant for fun and pleasure. Personally, he hasn’t been a self-indulgent reveler in drugs and sex.
So, why does he champion the freedom to indulge in such things? Because he feels that total freedom will correct and balance itself out AS LONG AS the government doesn’t step in to bail out the crazy loons.
In this sense, the Rightist Libertarians or Stick-Libertarians are more responsible and consistent than Leftist Libertarians or Carrot-Libertarians. The former values the Stick aspect of Libertarianism. It champions individual freedom to indulge in all sorts of behavior on the premise that individuals will be sobered into sanity when excess leads to loss and pain.
In contrast, Leftist Libertarians want to have the cake and eat it too. They demand the freedom of excessive indulgence — the carrots of life — , but they don’t think individuals should ever be held accountable or shoulder the burden for the problems they cause. This Woodstock Libertarianism or Carrot-Libertarianism[of Bernie Sanders supporters who demand that Society pay for everything they indulge in and fix the problems that they cause] says individuals have the right to wallow in pleasure and excess, but if things go wrong as the result of such trashy behavior, it is up to Society and Government to repair things, clean up the mess, and fix problems. So, let people use all kinds of drugs and then have the government offer treatment. Let hippies mess up Woodstock and then have OTHER people clean up the mess. Let young women have wild sex, get pregnant, and then demand government to pay for their welfare and well-being. Let black kids sing rap, run around crazy, and act like louts… but have government fix the mess of urban degeneracy.
Needless to say, Stick-Libertarianism, with roots in hard Cowboy ethos, makes more sense than Carrot-Libertarianism. It’s like the ants vs grasshoppers. But even Stick-Libertarianism fails to understand that certain addictions rob people of their freedom and power of reason. Once people become addicted to something like meth or gambling, they cannot control themselves even when they know it is destroying them. Humans are rational beings but also sensual beings, and certain vices are so pleasurable and addictive than once people revel in them, many individuals cannot wrest themselves from the addiction.
Libertarians make such a big fuss about individuality and reason, but what good is reason when so many people are turned into sensual addicts to wanton pleasure that make them surrender the power of reason? Reason is about restraint and critique. How can reason prevail among some people who are prone to addiction to wanton pleasure that tells them to ABANDON EVERYTHING FOR MAMMON?
I am afraid that there is no way out from the current system of corporate psychopath looting of wealth on a worldwide scale colliding with the demographic time bomb. PavewayIV #57 has described these psychopaths (http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/05/a-new-turkish-us-quarrel-about-syria.html#comments)
“The organization (the U.S. government) is diseased – it’s psychopathic – it will NEVER cede power back to the people. This is the very nature of organizational psychopathy. It is infested with psychopathic individuals from top to bottom who will never let the organization become healthy because a psychopathic system enables them – as individuals – to acquire more power for themselves. Mutually beneficial psychopathy that has no other goal than acquiring more power and control. The end state is tyranny – we’re closer and closer to it every day….
Useless, broken tools like voting, ‘the law’ or hoping for a non-psychopathic leader are an utter waste of time. Attempting to fix those tools is a waste of time because they were broken on purpose and will be broken again by the same people. Persistence and tenacity are useful traits when the tools work. They obviously don’t – our effort has nothing to do with it.”
Population explosions in the face of diminishing energy and other basis resources will ultimately lead to population and long term ecosystem carrying capacity collapse.
(https://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/04/23/overview-of-our-energy-modeling-problem/).
Greed and personal irresponsibility on a system wide basis have led us to this tragic point. As Pogo once said ” we have met the enemy and he is us”.
It means they’re being consistent. But given that the first two paragraphs of the introduction charged the very same people of being hypocritical, i.e., inconsistent, this was a worrying sign for the rest of this unfortunate article, which was big on rhetoric, but lamentably parsimonious on statistical evidence.
I think this is true however my overall take is
– communism sucks cos low productivity
– capitalism sucks cos it’s high productivity is hoarded by the capitalists
and so the best system is
– scared capitalism
and people need to scare them pretty damn quick before they blow things up permanently.
@What does it mean when…
It means the rule of the Robber Barons, of the highway robbers cum high seas pirates. The law of the gun. Your money or your life.
Pure fiction.
The author never said that wealth should be redistributed to poorer nations, just that we should quit fleecing them with our military and our banks.
Also, the British do not have a mean IQ of 100. The British are ethnically mixed (which is part of the Anglo formula by the way), so you have a population at the top that is really smart and the rest of the population that is as smart as rocks. Have you ever seen the lower class whites in the UK?
You might as well say that Indians and the Chinese have an IQ of 120.
“The so called elites who control most of the wealth of the planet suffer from an obsessive-compulsive disorder of the same general type as obese people who eat far more than they should and thus are often seen as unhealthy and disgusting by those of sound mind and body. ”
– An interesting analogy. I knew an old fellow (died some years ago) who was very well off financially and who admitted to me that his greed was something over which he had little control. Your comment put me in mind of this fellow, who certainly fit the description you give.
That level of greed is something incomprehensible to me personally- for instance, I cannot understand people like Hillary Clinton who literally wallow in money and yet continues to want ever more.
This is the scariest thought for white people. That whites could make a stable first world nation is not in question.
But can white people maintain their status at the top of the food chain if they stop destroying their competition with their military and they stop stealing from the world’s peasents?
I don’t think so, and I believe reversion to the mean is exactly what we will see. The best case scenario is that whites will rediscover their protestant roots of hard work and savings. The worst is that whites will not be able to reconsile a future where a high standard of living requires hard work and thrift and instead cling to leisure and mediocrity.
I can hear poor Jay sighing from here. You do understand what a Normal distribution looks like don’t you?
The reason one doesn’t say the Chinese or Indians have an IQ of 120 is that they don’t.
Admit it, you don’t really understand the subject of intelligence testing.
Zuma can hardly be called pro business. With all the race laws applied , poor attitude and general corruption the best he can be called is pro crony capitalist. The ANC has followed the policies of the national democratic revolution to try and capture the heights of the economy and has captured the state which is then used to fill the pockets of ANC/zuma pals. Zuma in turn has been captured by a number of Indian business men (The Guptas being the foremost).
It didn’t need fear of communism to generate a lot of antitrust (antimonopoly) fervour before WW1 and the key to capitalism being made to work for maximum benefit is enough competition to ensure that any one capitalist enterprise has to be very productive, clever and lucky to continue making good profits for many ddecades.
As Adam Smith made clear uou can’t trust the capitalists not to try and avoid the rigours and dangers of serious competition and that’s one place where the state has an important roll without killing the animal spirits, risking of their savings and enterprise which cause capitalism to add value. Assuming you don’t fantasise about commissars and bureaucrats creating cutting edge businesses – as opposed to organising Japan in the 19th century and China over 100 years later to catch up with what others had already shown would work – you need people to aggregate capital from savings and for some of them at least to have a high tolerance for risk and corresponding entrpreneurial or merely overoptimistic imagination. To condemn “capitalism” as you do is to condemn the only means of social activity mankind has ever found to escape the Malthusian fate.
I think you underestimate the effects of the accelerating technological advances now extending for well over 200 years. Keynes was over optimistic in his vision of the future circa 1929-30 – looking 50 years ahead – but that was mostly because he didn’t see the expansion of wants. But, despite many unfortunate demographic tendencies we are yet to experience the full impact of the STEM education of tens of millions of bright Indians and Chinese. Increased longevity will probably be a big economic negative in conventional terms though a real gain but, if African population growth at least moderates progressively so it doesn’t continue at 4+ total fertility the basic material needs of people should be met easily enough while affording them leisure for whatever suits their mentality. Solar energy in Australia is already making power stations unprofitable which have hundreds of years supply of the cheapest coal in the world.
This article is a very good summary of the current world order.
Camouflaged by the (so-called) economic theory of neoliberalism, elites for the past 30-40 years have successfully pursued policies which increasingly concentrate economic/political power in their own hands.
Although, as yet incomplete, the elites’ goal is to render democracy a politically empty system: this can be most easily witnessed in the US. In substance, “democracy” is revealed in a 2 party system in which both parties are controlled & beholden to exactly the same elite class. That many important republicans can support Clinton demonstrates just how real party differences are. Corruption of the democratic process is further confirmed by the fact that procedurally US democracy is entirely untrustworthy. Bush winning the 2000 election by SC fiat, the 2004 shenanigans and the general issue of allowing voting by machines which are proven to be SO questionable are all indicative of a power structure that is not even worried by the appearance of corruption, let alone it’s reality.
Trump and Sanders are symptomatic of a public that is (as yet) struggling to wake up to the vile reality of the 21st century.
Governments around the world are
(metaphorically )reducing citizens to subjects. The concept of government by the people, for the people is dying, if not dead.
Of course, many will wish to deny that that Marx was essentially correct: the current rotten state of the world is the natural consequence of unrestrained capitalism. The more capitalists concentrate economic power, the more they will concentrate political power in their own hands…the more they can concentrate economic power….. This infinite drive to profit, exclusive of other considerations creates it’s own contradictions: Imperialism. Capitalists, their exploitation of workers hitting local or absolute limits (SOMEONE– salary earners — must have SOME means to buy capitalist production) turn, inevitably to exploiting each other. The current Anglo-Zionist attacks on Russia and China should be seen as no more than imperialism….
Once we accept that western democracy is/has collapsed into some kind of neo-feudalism–neo-fascism, a vital question remains: can a nation, can the world, be “fixed” via democratic process (the ballot box) or must the current system be, essentially, liquidated ? Consider this:
“Brazil’s twice elected President Dilma Rousseff was ‘impeached’ and essentially overthrown by a bizarre legislative right-wing coup-d’état…”
Consider, also, the Ukraine…Hondourus, Iraq, Libya, Brazil…etc
Essentially, you reduce all economic systems, other central command economies, such as Stalinist Russia, pre-70’s China to “Capitalism”.
Actually, non-capitalist systems can integrate entrepreneurial/innovative economic practices. “Socialism” does NOT imply nothing more than Stalinism.
Socialism, in essence, is a system to deny private control of the (public) State.
Socialism will encourage individuals to innovate for their own benefit, but NOT at the expense of the State and people. THAT is the essential difference between socialist & capitalist democracy.
Sorry my lengthy explanation of your confusion over the difference between the politics or political ideal of socialism and the economics of organising capital gotvlost by the site’s software and i can’t be bothered to waste more time except to note that war is the great socialist activity and it is in that wasteful realm that you find the good examples of state sponsored science and innovation. State sponsored entrepreneurialism is a bit like Dr Johnson’s woman preaching or “dog walking on its hinder legs”.
Anglo-America? I thought Americans, by enlarge, were Anglos, do you mean Anglo-Zionist?
Average better iQ of British and average lower IQ of Brazilian haven’t sealed the fates of the majority of the citizen Something else has. If British were so smart, why did they succumb to political rhetoric of the liars from both side of the divide- conservatives and Labor. Why they could not compete with Germany or France or S Korea or even Malaysia and beg to China .
Quite true. On economics, Hitler and Mussolini were a lot more progressive than the neo-liberals.
When did that happen? As far as I’m aware, the PRC is still a one-party state.
Should read: fake socialist.
After (or during?) the war, the communists started to use fascism as a term of abuse for a multitude of enemies, when it was in reality an offshoot of earlier socialist ideology. Fascist Italy was the second country to recognize the USSR https://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/when-fascism-was-on-the-left/
Except that standard of living in Britain is much higher than in Brazil. I do not argue that average IQ is the sole determinant of a country’s worth or destiny; I merely argue against those who deny a link.
I think you missed the point completely. I wasn’t advocating socialism – that has been tried. I was merely stating that capitalism is regressing to its more primitive past. I think that anon understood 100% what I was trying to say, that capitalism needs some socialist elements – Scandinavian style, not wahhabi style capitalism (i.e. ultraconservative) like in US.
I wouldn’t disagree with the proposition – brry much an Adam Smith point – thst capitalists will from time to time tend to make the system work in a more primitive and brutal way. And i can see that your emphasis is on the US where, as in the UK, the 1980s saw much reaction ti what was seen as conditions seen as inhibiting capitalism’s effective working. But your reference to Scandinavia shows that you were overstating, as if it was a worldwide phenomenon, the regression of capitalism to a more primitive staee.
Yes, capitalism clearly produces the most stuff but imo only scared capitalism shares it out in a way that prevents its own eventual destruction.
You are right. There is a contradiction there. If Scandinavia is going to be a shining example of what capitalism should look like – then regression of capitalism is not a worldwide phenomena. Although US is trying to bring the rest of the world in line with their austere vision of capitalist orthodoxy – and they are using various trade pacts to try to accomplish this.
Since the demise of USSR, capitalists are starting to think that there is no alternative to their system. This might or might not be true, but it’s not good that they are testing the limits of tolerance of the working men and women by stagnating their wages and benefits and their standard of living because they think that the Capitalist system has proven once and for all that it’s irreplaceable.
I would agree that solar power has a lot of upside potential. I was on the research team that developed the process for creating inexpensive photovoltaric quality silicon metal using a reducing arc furnace metallurgical process. Dow Chemical is now using this method in their silicon metal to wafer plant in Brazil.
One major stumbling block to wide scale application of solar cells is storage of the energy for peak use and after dark uses. There are various mechanical systems for converting excess daytime solar energy into potential energy (e.g. pumping water to a higher water reservoir. There are also new liquid batteries (e.g. Vanadium) and molten salt batteries (e.g. magnesium-lithium?). What is the solution that you recommend?
Another limitation to solar is the use of highly conductive metals, such as silver, in their manufacture. Some carbon nano-fibers show promise but are still in the development stage (e.g. Japan).
As for demographics, I am not optimistic especially with the African and South American population predictions and the coming water shortages. Then there is the coming La Nina drought cycle that will cause mass migrations into Europe from Africa and the Middle East as well as from South America to El Norte. Note that the Syrian conflict started from a drought in 2006-2009 causing farmers to lose their wealth producing potential. Also check out the salinization of Syrian soils over the last 2000 years.
Old style capitalism works on an individual basis where two parties agree to a price or worth of the products of their mutual labors. Modern so-called capitalism like communism is a rigged system that favors the elite. These elites are just like mafias in a casino where they always win and continue to concentrate the wealth of the producers. These workers are mostly serfs in a rent seeking system. See the works by Michael Hudson for more on how capitalism has degenerated:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/03/why-michael-hudson-is-the-worlds-best-economist/
I hope this response is of some benefit to the discussion.
Mr. Petras, I have a hard time understanding your point of view.
If you look at the Left in Europe and America, they have abandoned the interests of the working class and are interested in cooperating with global business interests while winning elections with offers of ethnic spoils, celebrations of social deviance, and minor acts of redistribution (usually paid for by taxes on income, not capital gains) to social parasites. They have a winning formula that gets them corporate donor money and cobbles together enough votes to win an election–and their policies are as reactionary as the corporate right with respect to the working classes.
If you look at the Far Right parties in Europe, they are actually trying to organize the working classes, as well as take policy positions that support the interests of the working class. Yet people like you attack the Far Right and Far Right parties and hold out the promise of a “real Left” that does not exist as far as I can tell beyond the minds of a few intellectuals. Chomsky talks “anarcho-syndicalism” but promises to vote for Hillary. In the real world, I can’t see a place for your “real Left” except as a faction within the Far Right, which as far as I can tell is the only political group that is serious about ending globalization and Empire.
“Modern so-called capitalism like communism is a rigged system that favors the elite.”
Excellent!
The Left has effectively been suborned by PC.
The globalists want unlimited cheap labor and the Left can’t oppose cos “racism” hence the only opposition is coming from the populist Right.
It’s globalist vs nationalist now.
To support your statement:
“At the beginning of the Kosovo war, President Bill Clinton candidly admitted that: “If we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key…. That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.” John Keegan, the eminent British historian, later concluded that he “sees the war as a victory not just for air power but for the ‘New World Order.’”
“Sean Gervasi, first warned of the potential for NATO to serve as the military security force for this globalist New World Order while at the 1996 Prague Conference on the Enlargement of NATO. His paper, “Why is NATO in Yugoslavia,” demonstrated that Yugoslavia stands at the crossroads of a oil trade and transportation route combining Emperor Charlemagne’s dream of a great European waterway with the fabled Silk Road.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/06/comm-j23.html
Your inclusion of China into the Anglo-American capitalists club makes your article a trojan horse. I have to admit that the technique is very smart tough, hide one lie among ten truths and the lie becomes a truth. Fortunately it becomes harder and harder to make it stick.
Mr James Petras,
Italy has been conquered too, by more or less 10 years.
Remember the time when the Germany-Italy Treasury asset spread skyrocketed?
It was because the government was disobeying… accustomed as governments where till then to govern. To save his chair, Berlusconi had already removed the very disobeying ministry Tremonti, but it wasn’t enough.
Berlusconi himself held the unforgivable conviction that it was, well, the office of Italy’s president to govern Italy.
Noteworthy: he had been setting political and economic ties with Lybia and Russia, developing good relationships with Gaddafi and Putin.
Rating agencies, and “investors” launched their co-ordinated military-financial attack. It worked.
An ex Goldman Sachs you certainly know very well, Mario Monti, was “suggested” by unidentified forces that were called “the markets” by the media as the new President, and swiftly appointed such by the Head of State.
It was november 2011. As of then, nothing has been decided in Italy that is not decided by the powers your article speaks about.
As for the minister of Economy and Finances, since that time it has always been one of them, a solution they favour compared to having to exercise their power through indirect pressure.
I don’t need tell you how smoothly the whole media have been co-operating with all of that. That is unchanged across the whole West, so it’s as if you had listened and read the Italian media already, even if you haven’t.
Back to 15 years ago, centre-right and left-right parties alike were afraid of the labor unions reaction to every law concerning labor and the economy they made.
Prolonged nation-wide strikes were enough to imperil a government’s life.
All of this has been wiped away in this short span of time. You read the “left” party’s big shots’ itnerviews on their left party friend magazines now, and they stand out for the passion they show in urging the TTIP to be approved.
“It’s a chance we can’t miss. The benefits, oh, they are so un-missable for all of us!”, they chant and chant…
Wages and the “power of purchase” they correspond to have been decreasing steeply.
I don’t think you need me to detail further.
I’ll only add that remembrances of the years were communism was rampant, and an overtake by the USSR-allied Communist Party looked not so unlikely (yes, I know the USA would have intervened militarily/by a coup d’etat, to avoid that), are still alive in me.
If you have never lived in a country where the communist party gets over 30% of votes, the extraparliamentary far-left monopolyzes labor associations, “worker controllers” at factories live in constant fear, and leftist “activist groups” rival each other at “who of us were able to hate the owners stronger”, as the leader of one of those groups recounted decades later, you may not know that, at least for Italy, this is nothing but the transition from a nightmare to the next one.
Decency and dignity are possible only when there is balance between two opposite evil forces. This is what the 5 last decades in Italy have been taught. (Goethe wrote that nothing good can be made from the crooked timber of humanity.)
Nice to see it’s not only I who has such feelings and hopes.
“Anglo-American” today stands for another, single name that can’t be named.
Yes many average people haven’t realized that, but on a site like this, it’s an assumed fact.
No straight, peaceful change is possible, I am afraid.
Marxism was every bit as dreary as techno-capitalism.
Humans are driven by their will-to-power: every ideology will turn into nothing but an instrument to achieve power, indefinitely, until and unless resistance is met.
Balance is the best condition, but it occurs only in temporal brackets between a kind of dominion and the next.
Average IQ, and average IQ of the elites, “seal” much more than so many people feel comfortable believing.
And yet they don’t, obvsiouly, determine everything.
Over time I have reluctantly come to accept this as truth. But it is an element and not the entirety of humanity that is crooked. Living among us are humans who have no conscience and have an insatiable desire for wealth and power. The absence of conscience gives them an advantage which results in all of us being ruled over by psychopaths. Perhaps the HBD people will isolate the genetic indicators for conscience and thus we will be able to identify the psychopaths in the womb and snuff them out. Does this seem cruel? Only if you have a conscience. I have come to believe it is them or us.
What HBD has been able to illuminate (or rather Steve and hbdchick) is that, a population ‘that no longer marries cousins’, experiences a levelling of relatedness. It is just possible that this levelling of relatedness is a causal factor in the emergence of societal wide institutions and consc(ient)iousness.
So subservience to money is a recent phenomenon?
Excellent. Capitalism lifted millions out of poverty, more than any other system in history per Milton Friedman. Today we have a bastardized, over-taxed, over-regulated, cronyist, centrally-directed monstrosity that the left loves to characterized as “capitalism.” The solution” of the left is not any kind of economic rationality but more beggar they neighbor taxation and lunatic, unsustainable labor laws that make hiring labor an expensive and perilous proposition best done only as a last resort. Kill the golden goose, in short. Guaranteed, without fail, social decay as holy writ, and national policy.
Many legal doctrines or devices were developed to moderate abuses in capitalism, such as anti-trust laws, wage and hour laws, workplace safety laws, workmen’s compensation schemes, unfair competition laws, fraud laws, impartial courts to mediate contract disputes, right to work laws, unions, trade libel laws, interstate commerce regulation (genuine), child labor laws, etc.
Few of these were enacted by people looking back over their shoulders for red revolutionists.
That said, the phenomenon of financialization about which Charles Hugh Smith writes in depth is something new. It’s an abuse begging to be addressed in the way that the listed solutions to other problems of free markets were. But, per usual, the socialist and FSA morons want to completely throw out “capitalism” and bring in the all-time Destructo-Doctrine beloved of parasites and intellectually-challenged utopians everywhere.
ten four good budy!!
Exactamundo Anna!
That is my pointthat I mean…. So clled Capitolism… ya got to know… it is worse than what the mufres said about Commies… My Gramps was almost a Commie… Well, he shipped out aththe age 14years… never to se Norge ever again nor his sister/mother … and his identical twin Bro… who drowned up in Victoria Canada … sad story! I think Gr. Uncle’s name was probably Aurther Eriksen…and he died in the 1930’s… So that’s part of my sad family histotu// and ev4erbody gotsone… sheesh, I can’t seethedamed screen, and the f’n keyboard is shot, so see ha
you must be a real type of Workin’ Guy”… I wonder if you aren’t one of my pardners, here on the San FrancisoWaterfront… I mean… We sure had some characters…
Do you remember the name Eric Hoffer? He had already retired, when I hit the bricks.. he was gone when I started working on the docks in SF, But ran into him down in town… Jeesis, the guy was huge.. about 6ft 4..and wide… huge!!
And to add to the story… all that thick german aaccent… the guy grew up in the mid west… never even sawr germany… he got that thick accennt fromhis mmomms
I remember Eric Hoffer but I never worked the docks. IBEW and Teamsters. I’m from the Midwest currently in the deep south. Organized labor is of course a subset of working class. Politically my heart is with the Wobblies but as a practical matter I will support any populist whether from the left or right. Its a pity that so many of my countrymen know nothing of solidarity and brotherhood. American workers are a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.
This is quite an astute analysis, anon, the best comment I’ve seen on this thread.