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Twenty-First-Century Fascism

October 21, 2015

Twenty-First-Century Fascism

Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.

The few thousand people controlling global capital amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), who, as the capitalist elite of the world, dominate nation-states through international trade agreements and transnational state organizations such as the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the International Monetary Fund.

The TCC communicates their policy requirements through global networks such as the G-7 and G-20, and various nongovernmental policy organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberger Group. The TCC represents the interests of hundreds of thousands of millionaires and billionaires who comprise the richest people in the top 1 percent of the world’s wealth hierarchy.

The TCC are keenly aware of both their elite status and their increasing vulnerabilities to democracy movements and to unrest from below. The military empire dominated by the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) serves to protect TCC investments around the world. Wars, regime changes, and occupations performed in service of empire support investors’ access to natural resources and their speculative advantages in the market place.

When the empire is slow to perform or faced with political resistance, private security firms and private military companies (PMC) increasingly fulfill the TCC’s demands for the protections of their assets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Globalized Crisis

September 7, 2015

Globalized Crisis

If there is a bright side to the turmoil that has roiled the global economy since 2008, it is that not every part of the world has erupted simultaneously. The first blow was the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, to which Europeans responded with self-satisfied reflections on the superior resilience of their social model. Then, in 2010, with the outbreak of the European debt crises, it was America’s turn for schadenfreude, while Asian countries pointed to the over-extended welfare state as the root of the problem.

Today, the world is obsessed with the slowdown in China and the woes of its stock market. Indeed, to some, what is happening in China may be a modern version of the American stock-market crash in 1929 – a shock that shakes the world. And it is not only the Chinese economy that has hit turbulence; Russia and Brazil are in much worse shape.

As globalization connects far-flung people and economies, the consequences are not always what was expected – or welcome. And, with the economic crisis becoming ever more global in nature, the next challenge for policymakers will be to try to mitigate its effects at home – and to contain their constituents’ impulse to reduce engagement with the rest of the world.

By now, it has become clear that every success story has its dark side, and that no economy is likely to continue to rocket upward indefinitely. But, to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, it is important to remember that every unhappy economy is unhappy in its own way, and that a fix for one country’s problems might not work for another’s.

Europe’s problems, for example, cannot be attributed to a simple, single cause – such as the adoption of a common currency. In the run-up to the euro crisis, Italy had undergone a long period of stagnation, while Spain had experienced an American-style housing bubble and Greece was suffering from too much government-fueled growth. The uniting factor was that each had adopted unsustainable policies that required corrective action.


Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/globalized-economic-crisis-by-harold-james-2015-09#f5oBvDqv7Zb9mM5A.99

 

We are all Greece

July 31, 2015

We are all Greece

6909168001_76655d538a_zThe cast of heroes and villains in Greece’s ongoing battle to save its economy varies depending on who’s telling the story. One simplified narrative depicts the German people as rich and callous overlords inflicting hardship on the downtrodden Greeks. The austerity measures they insist upon are essentially meant to punish the Greeks for spending too much on social programs for the sick and elderly.

In an opposing storyline, the Greeks have only themselves to blame: they lived beyond their means, evaded taxation, were generally corrupt, and irresponsibly piled up debts they simply could not repay. In this scenario the Germans are like parental figures administering discipline on the immature Greeks.

Neither of these narratives is accurate or helpful; rather than providing real insight, they merely serve to heighten nationalistic and xenophobic impulses in both countries. In order to make sense of what’s going on, we ­­need to go behind the scenes to look more broadly at the underpinnings of the crisis.

It is widely assumed that the European Union was formed in order to prevent conflict. This notion can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War, when well-intentioned statesmen promoted the notion that economic integration was a path to peace and harmony. And until this day many idealists support the EU for this reason. However, for many in my network – particularly in Scandinavia – it was clear from the beginning that the EU was primarily about big business.

Before countries were linked together into an economic union, Europe’s many regions were home to a great variety of cultures, languages and customs. But the Union erodes this rich diversity, which was born of human adaptation to different climates and ecological realities. The many borders, currencies, and differing regulations made trade difficult for big business, while the diversity of languages and cultural traditions put limits on mass marketing.

 

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BP Data Suggests We Are Reaching Peak Energy Demand

June 24, 2015

BP Data Suggests We Are Reaching Peak Energy Demand

Some people talk about peak energy (or oil) supply. They expect high prices and more demand than supply. Other people talk about energy demand hitting a peak many years from now, perhaps when most of us have electric cars.

Neither of these views is correct. The real situation is that we right now seem to be reaching peak energy demand through low commodity prices. I see evidence of this in the historical energy data recently updated by BP (BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015). Of course,

Growth in world energy consumption is clearly slowing. In fact, growth in energy consumption was only 0.9% in 2014. This is far below the 2.3% growth we would expect, based on recent past patterns. In fact, energy consumption in 2012 and 2013 also grew at lower than the expected 2.3% growth rate (2012 – 1.4%; 2013 – 1.8%).

Figure 1- Resource consumption by part of the world. Canada etc. grouping also includes Norway, Australia, and South Africa. Based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015 data.

Recently, I wrote that economic growth eventually runs into limits. The symptoms we should expect are similar to the patterns we have been seeing recently (Why We Have an Oversupply of Almost Everything (Oil, labor, capital, etc.)). It seems to me that the patterns in BP’s new data are also of the kind that we would expect to be seeing, if we are hitting limits that are causing low commodity prices.

One of our underlying problems is that energy costs that have risen faster than most worker’s wages since 2000. Another underlying problem has to do with globalization. Globalization provides a temporary benefit. In the last 20 years, we greatly ramped up globalization, but we are now losing the temporary benefit globalization brings. We find we again need to deal with the limits of a finite world and the constraints such a world places on growth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Six Tough Questions about the China Trade Deal

June 22, 2015

Six Tough Questions about the China Trade Deal

Gus Van Harten, author of ‘Sold Down the Yangtze,’ breaks down the FIPA’s impacts.

In his new book, Sold Down the Yangtze, trade law expert and Osgoode law professor Gus Van Harten takes apart the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA) with China, detailing how he perceives the Harper government sold out Canada’s national interests and awarded Chinese investors “an enclave legal status” in Canada.

In a conversation with Andrew Nikiforuk, Van Harten answered six questions about the trade agreement, which the Harper government finalized last year.

Andrew Nikiforuk: Investor-state arbitration is a new tool in the relentless economic march of globalization. What new threats does this foreign investor protection system pose to a democracy?

Gus Van Harten: In Canada, we can elect a government, and the government is subject to the Constitution and Canadian laws, as interpreted by Canadian courts. That’s our democracy.

But the federal government is signing more and more trade agreements that expand a system of “investor-state arbitration,” or what I describe in the book as a world pseudo court. The purpose of the pseudo court is to protect foreign investors, meaning usually the world’s wealthiest companies and people, from the rest of us. Instead of public courts, you now have private lawyers sitting as “arbitrators” with the power to decide how much Canadians must pay to compensate foreign investors for our country’s decisions.

Basically, the power of Canada’s legislatures and judges is being shifted to large companies and wealthy individuals and to a small group of lawyers. The shift is anti-democratic because it will be very difficult for future governments to reverse. Even so, governments can still do things to limit the damage, as I explain in the book.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Richard Duncan: The Real Risk Of A Coming Multi-Decade Global Depression

April 6, 2015

Richard Duncan: The Real Risk Of A Coming Multi-Decade Global Depression

One that unwinds the past 50 years of globalization

Richard Duncan, author of The Dollar Crisis and The New Depression: The Breakdown Of The Paper Money Economy, isn’t mincing words about the risks he sees ahead for the world economy.

Essentially, he sees the past 50 years of economic prosperity fueled by globalization and easy credit in serious danger of being unwound, as the doomed monetary policies currently being pursued by the word’s central banks result in a massive multi-decade depression that spans the globe.

The first version of The Dollar Crisis, the hardback, came out in 2003, so I wrote it in 2002. And at that time, the dollar against gold was $300. So the dollar has lost more than 75% of its value since The Dollar Crisis was written, and I don’t think it’s going to stop here. I expect it to continue to lose value over the years and decades ahead.

But what we’re seeing is that the real theme of The Dollar Crisis was that the post-Bretton Woods international monetary system was fundamentally flawed because it couldn’t prevent trade imbalances between countries. And the US had developed an enormous trade deficit with the rest of the world and this blew the trade surplus countries like Japan and China into bubbles. And then, the dollars boomeranged back into the United States and blew it into a bubble, as well. I didn’t know when the housing bubble was going to pop in the US but I knew it would. And I wrote in The Dollar Crisis that when it did, we would have a severe global economic recession/depression that would involve a systemic banking sector crisis in the United States and necessitate trillion-dollar budget deficits and unorthodox monetary policy to prevent a Great Depression from occurring.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Organizing Against Tyranny

February 5, 2015

Organizing Against Tyranny

My work and my thoughts lately have turned toward a now constant focus on the concepts of organization, more in respect to underlying philosophy rather than hard, fast rules and structures. If you are one of the slithering acolytes of political theory elitist Saul Alinsky (and you haven’t felt the inclination to jump face first into the nearest punji pit), then the primary tool of organization for you is to lie, and to lie often. Tricking people into action using false premises, telling people what they want to hear rather than opening their eyes to reality, is perhaps the easiest way to build a movement. Of course, that movement will eventually destroy itself as the lies begin to inhibit progress rather than inspire it. But in most cases, by the time the organization self-destructs it has already been exploited for the nefarious purpose it was intended.

For the liberty movement, the movement against globalization and forced centralization of financial and political power, lies are simply not an option. The internationalists have already cornered the market on lies, so we must take a completely contrary approach. We must organize around the truth, no matter how painful it happens to be. This is a much more difficult prospect, one many people don’t understand or appreciate.

There are a lot of complaints in the movement about the lack of what they consider effective organization, and the frustration is in some ways beginning to evolve into fear. Here are some core inconsistencies I believe are at the heart of organizational problems within the liberty movement and what we can do to solve them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The Only Road Out Of Davos

January 20, 2015

The Only Road Out Of Davos

After 6+ (BIG +) years of deepening poverty and rising stock markets, of creative accounting, of QE and ultralow interest rates, of extend and pretend and outright propaganda and of what have you, all of which have led us to where we are today, facing yet more rounds of stumbling from crisis into multiple crises, it would seem clear that the model, if not the mold, is broken. In order to fix it, let alone replace it altogether, we need to understand to what extent it is broken. And to do that, we first need to know what exactly the model is.

Now, it would be tempting, even seem logical, to consult with the people who designed and built the model. Who, after all, not only claim to be the only ones capable of fixing the broken mold, but who also have occupied all positions of power that have any say in the process. But that’s less obvious than it may seem. Because, mind you, the model is broken. They built a flawed model. Or rather, they built one that works for them, for some, but not for the rest of us.

There are gatherings and festivities ongoing in Davos. Only some are invited: the rich, the powerful and their court jesters. Those who profited most from the broken model. They’re least likely to fix it, they won’t even admit to it being broken. It works just fine for them. The people in Davos believe in one model only, the one of ever increasing centralization and globalization, because that’s the model that got them where they are.

That means that what’s in their interest is 180º removed from what’s in your interest. And it means that whatever these people propose you do, you should probably do the exact opposite.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

This Has Utterly Corrupted Our Economy |

November 15, 2014

This Has Utterly Corrupted Our Economy |.

The Power of Simple Ideas …

Not much market action on Wednesday. The Dow was flat. Gold was flat. TV screens are flat. Some singers are flat. Cakes come out flat. Tires go flat. Prizefighters are laid out flat. Dead men, too. Sooner or later, we all go flat.

One of our favorite columnists, Thomas Friedman, wrote a book about it, The World Is Flat. You can count on Friedman. He’s bound to have something to say on almost any subject.

He has so many thoughts because they come so cheaply to him. He is not a deep thinker. He is in over his head in a parking lot puddle.

But we have no quarrel with superficial thoughts. They are better in many ways. Easier to understand and repeat at dinner parties. And much more easily put to service by men of action.

That’s the real benefit of all superficial thinking: It’s the unleaded gas that purposeful jackasses put in their tanks. Forget the nuances. Ignore the paradoxes. Don’t overthink it. Give them a simple idea, and they can use it to make a grand mess of anything.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

charles hugh smith-Globalization = Permanent Instability

October 30, 2014

charles hugh smith-Globalization = Permanent Instability.

Globalization continually creates imbalances that fuel a perpetual instability that gradually impoverishes every sector other than global capital.

Globalization has two guaranteed consequences: permanent instability and endless boom-and-bust cycles. As noted in Forget “Free Trade”–Focus on Capital Flows, the key engine of globalization is mobile capital: capital that can borrow money for next to nothing in one nation and then move that capital to other nations where yields are higher and opportunities for exploitation riper.

This mobility of capital is an enormous benefit to the owners of the capital, but it creates extraordinary instability for those who are not as mobile. When mobile capital encounters anything that reduces profits–higher taxes and rising labor costs, competition or restrictive regulations–it closes factories and fires its workers in that locale and shifts to another locale with greater opportunities for high returns.

The workers left behind have limited means to replace the lost wages, and the local government often has few resources to repair any damage left by the exploitation of resources. The advantage of mobility is reserved for capital, and to the relatively limited cohort of workers who can immigrate to other nations to find work.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

charles hugh smith-Forget “Free Trade”–Focus on Capital Flows

October 28, 2014

charles hugh smith-Forget “Free Trade”–Focus on Capital Flows.

In a world dominated by mobile capital, mobile capital is the comparative advantage.

Defenders and critics of “free trade” and globalization tend to present the issue as either/or: it’s inherently good or bad. In the real world, it’s not that simple. The confusion starts with defining free trade (and by extension, globalization).

In the classical definition of free trade espoused by 18th century British economist David Ricardo, trade is generally thought of as goods being shipped from one nation to another to take advantage of what Ricardo termed comparative advantage: nations would benefit by exporting whatever they produced efficiently and importing what they did not produce efficiently.

While Ricardo’s concept of free trade is intuitively appealing because it is win-win for importer and exporter, it doesn’t describe the consequences of themobility of capital. Capital–cash, credit, tools and the intangible capital of expertise–moves freely around the globe seeking the highest possible return, pursuing the prime directive of capital: expand or die.

Capital that fails to expand will stagnate or shrink. If the contraction continues unchecked, the capital eventually vanishes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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