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The stock market, by and large, is a farce.

This is not to say that it does not have a purpose, because undoubtedly it does. This cannot and will not be denied, except by those who identify themselves as having anarchist traits.

Yet, it is still a farce. It is corrupt, it is short-sighted and it is riddled with problems. But in our “semi” capitalistic system, it is what we have. And we have to make the best of it.

This, however, does not stop us from striving to improve it. In fact, I believe this should be a major goal of Western society as a whole. The stock market, in tandem with the free market, has led to the most powerful economic engine this world has ever seen. Even if it is now riddled with disease, it is and will be for the foreseeable future a juggernaut in the economic landscape.

We should constantly strive to weed out corruption within the system and work towards improving the function of the markets as a whole. However, one issue that has once again been pushed to the forefront is the fact that Western markets are incredibly short sighted.

Many legal and financial experts have argued this point for years. The stock market’s obsession over quartering reporting has pushed it to its breaking point, driving companies to overemphasize the short-term, rather than the long-term, health of the company as a whole.

This irrational way of thinking has driven many companies to the point of bankruptcy, as many CEOs and executives know they have a short term life span within any given company. This drives them to push short-term profits, hoping to beat the next quarterly consensus—driving the price of shares up, and thus their golden parachute packages along with it.

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

Is Capitalism Killing Us?

August 18, 2018

Is Capitalism Killing Us?

Ecological economists, such as Herman E. Daly, stress that as the external costs of pollution and resource exhaustion are not included in Gross Domestic Product, we do not know whether an increase in GDP is a gain or a loss.

External costs are huge and growing larger. Historically, manufacturing and industrial corporations, corporate farming, city sewer systems, and other culprits have passed the costs of their activities onto the environment and third parties. Recently, there has been a spate of reports with many centering on Monsanto’s Roundup, whose principle ingredient, glyphosate, is believed to be a carcinogen.

A public health organization, the Environmental Working Group, recently reported that its tests found glyphosate in all but 2 of 45 children’s breakfast foods including granola, oats and snack bars made by Quaker, Kellogg and General Mills. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/16/weedkiller-cereal-monsanto-roundup-childrens-food

In Brazil tests have discovered that 83% of mothers’ breast milk contains glyphosate. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazil-Poisonous-Agrotoxin-Found-Over-80-of-Breast-Milk-Samples-in-Urucui-20180809-0008.html

The Munich Environmental Institute reported that 14 of the most widely selling German beers contain glyphosate. https://sustainablepulse.com/2016/02/25/german-beer-industry-in-shock-over-probable-carcinogen-glyphosate-contamination/#.W3XKtC-ZOGQ

Glyphosate has been found in Mexican farmers’ urine and in Mexican ground water. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486281/

Scientific American has reported that even Roundup’s “inert ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weed-whacking-herbicide-p/

A German toxicologist has accused the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment and the European Food Safety Authority of scientific fraud for accepting a Monsanto-led glyphosate Task Force conclusion that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/17307-german-toxicologist-accuses-eu-authorities-of-scientific-fraud-over-glyphosate-link-with-cancer

Controversy about these findings comes from the fact that industry-funded scientists report no link between glyphosate and cancer, whereas independent scientists do. This is hardly surprising as an industry-funded scientist has no independence and is unlikely to conclude the opposite of what he is hired to conclude.

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

Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”

August 4, 2018

Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”

The skyline of Manhattan at sunset in New York, May 23, 2018.

Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

THIS SUNDAY, THE entire New York Times Magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. Written by Nathaniel Rich, this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud. And lest there be any doubt that the implications of these decisions will be etched in geologic time, Rich’s words are punctuated with full-page aerial photographs by George Steinmetz that wrenchingly document the rapid unraveling of planetary systems, from the rushing water where Greenland ice used to be to massive algae blooms in China’s third largest lake.The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received. We have all heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home just doesn’t cut it as an urgent news story: “Climate change is too far off in the future”; “It’s inappropriate to talk about politics when people are losing their lives to hurricanes and fires”; “Journalists follow the news, they don’t make it — and politicians aren’t talking about climate change”; and of course: “Every time we try, it’s a ratings killer.”

None of the excuses can mask the dereliction of duty. It has always been possible for major media outlets to decide, all on their own, that planetary destabilization is a huge news story, very likely the most consequential of our time. They always had the capacity to harness the skills of their reporters and photographers to connect abstract science to lived extreme weather events.

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

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

July 4, 2018

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

In our next installments, we will continue exploring the rise of Surveillance Capitalism and the implications of Amazon-fueled spying technology, both in the workplace and in U.S. city streets.

“Capitalism is a system that seeks to transgress all boundaries in its production and sale of commodities, commodifying everything in existence, which today, in the age of monopoly-finance capital and surveillance capitalism, means intruding into every aspect of existence,” John Bellamy Foster told MPN.

SEATTLE – This year may go down in history as a turning-point when the world finally woke up to the dark side of the ubiquitous presence of popular Silicon Valley companies in our daily lives. One can only hope so, at least.

From Amazon to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and PayPal – among others – revelations poured out confirming the ongoing abuse of user data by monopolistic corporations, as well as their growing role as vendors of surveillance technology to the U.S. police state, military, and migrant detention agencies.

In March, the lid was blown off of the violation of user data on Facebook, with Cambridge Analytica mining user information for the purpose of providing millions of detailed “psychological profiles” to the Trump campaign, among others. Scarcely two weeks later, the Google campus was in an uproar over the development of its “Project Maven,” which was building an AI-fueled platform to vastly upgrade the automatic targeting abilities of the U.S. military’s global drone fleet. Faced with public outrage and internal dissent, the companypulled out of bidding to renew its Pentagon contract, which ends next year.

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

Population: what’s the problem?

July 3, 2018

Population: what’s the problem?

Apologies for the clickbait-y title. My question isn’t a rhetorical one intended to suggest that human population levels aren’t a problem. I don’t doubt they are. But it seems to me much less clear than a lot of people seem to think exactly what kind of problem they are, and what – if anything – could or should be done about it, which is what I want to aim at in this post. I raised these issues in my last post of 2017, which prompted some lively debate. But neither the post itself nor the comments under it quite nailed the issue for me, so here goes with another attempt.

1. Of proximal and underlying causation

In a recent article by the evergreen George Monbiot bemoaning plastic pollution in the oceans, the first comment under the line had this to say: “Two answers – population control and capitalism control – but no takers…not even George!”

It strikes me that this response is spot on…and also entirely misses the point. It’s spot on because although plastic pollution in the oceans is an immediate problem, it has deeper underlying causes which are summarily encapsulated by the words ‘population’ and ‘capitalism’ about as well as by any others. I think it’s a bit unfair to accuse George of not being a ‘taker’, since part of the point of his article was to suggest that self-fuelling economic growth – ‘capitalism’ by another name – is intrinsically destructive of the environment. Still, it’s surely true that without large global populations subject to the forces of capitalist commodification, the problem of plastic in the ocean would be very much less severe than it presently is.

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

Foundation of Anti-Imperialism

June 12, 2018

Foundation of Anti-Imperialism

The United States has had a policy of imperialism beginning after the Civil War. The US way of war, developed against Indigenous peoples, spread worldwide as the US sought to extend its power through military force, economic dominance and diplomatic hegemony.

Imperialism is driven by what Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. identified at the end of his life, the triple evils of racism, capitalism, and militarism. Lenin described imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. Imperialism has justified mass slaughter, resulting in the US killing 20 million people since WW II. The People of the United States must say ‘no’ to imperialism.

Advocacy against imperialism is needed to prevent confusion around US militarism. The US disguises imperialism by attacking so-called “dictatorial” leaders who “use violence against their own people.” This results in Orwellian-phrased “humanitarian” wars – violence by US surrogates inside a country, massive funding to create opposition against a government or economic sanctions that cause widespread suffering.

The propaganda justifying these abuses hides the real intent — expansion of US domination so US corporations can profit from resources and cheap labor under a US-friendly government. People confused by this rhetoric sometimes repeat the propagandistic claims of US imperialists and help justify US intervention.

Why US Imperialism Must Be Opposed Today

US imperialism is aggressively working on almost every continent through militarism, regime change, corporate trade agreements, economic blockades and creating indebtedness. The destruction of Libya, in an illegal “humanitarian” war, and the destruction of Iraq, in a falsely justified war, where both leaders were brutally assassinated, highlight the necessity of being clearly anti-imperialist.

There are many countries suffering from US imperialism today. Here are just a few:

Syria: Every president since the 1940s has sought to dominate Syria and has had specific plans for regime change.

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

George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage; A friendly critique

May 7, 2018

George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage; A friendly critique

Few have made a more commendable contribution to saving the planet than George Monbiot. His recent book, Out of the Wreckage, continues the effort and puts forward many important ideas…but I believe there are problems with his diagnosis and his remedy.

The book is an excellent short, clear account of several of the core faults in consumer-capitalist society, and the alternatives advocated are admirable. George’s focal concern is the loss of community, and the cause is, as we know, neo-liberalism. He puts this in terms of the “story” that dominates thinking. Today the taken for granted background story about society is that it is made of competitive, self-interest-maximizing individuals, and therefore our basic institutions and processes are geared to a struggle to accumulate private wealth, rather than to encouraging concern for each other and improving the welfare of all. Thatcher went further, instructing us that there is not even any such thing as society, only individuals. George begins by rightly contradicting such vicious nonsense, pointing out that humans are fundamentally nice, altruistic, caring and cooperative, but we have allowed these dispositions to be overridden primarily by an economic system that obliges us to behave differently.

He gives heavy and convincing documentation of- this theme. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with several indicators of the sad state of affairs. “ … this age of atomization breeds anxiety, discontent and unhappiness.” (p. 18.) “An epidemic of loneliness is sweeping the world.” (p. 16.) Chapter 3 deals with the way neoliberalism has caused the social damage that has accumulated over the last forty years.

But my first concern with the book is that disastrous as it is, neo-liberalism isn’t the main problem confronting us and likely to destroy us.

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

What Lies Beyond Capitalism and Socialism?

May 2, 2018

What Lies Beyond Capitalism and Socialism?

The status quo, in all its various forms, is dominated by incentives that strengthen the centralization of wealth and power.

As longtime readers know, my work aims to 1) explain why the status quo — the socio-economic-political system we inhabit — is unsustainable, divisive, and doomed to collapse under its own weight and 2) sketch out an alternative Mode of Production/way of living that is sustainable, consumes far less resources while providing for the needs of the human populace — not just for our material daily bread but for positive social roles, purpose, hope, meaning and opportunity, needs that are by and large ignored or marginalized in the current system.

One cognitive/emotional roadblock I encounter is the nearly universal assumption that there are only two systems: the State (government) or the Market (free trade/ free enterprise). This divide plays out politically as the Right (capitalism, favoring markets) and the Left (socialism, favoring the state). Everything from Communism to Libertarianism can be placed on this spectrum.

But what if the State and the Market are the sources of our unsustainability?What if they are intrinsically incapable of fixing what’s broken?

The roadblock here is adherents to one camp or the other are emotionally attached to their ideological choice, to the point that these ideological attachments have a quasi-religious character.

Believers in the market as the solution to virtually any problem refuse to accept any limits on the market’s efficacy, and believers in greater state power/control refuse to accept any limits on the state’s efficacy.

I often feel like I’ve been transported back to the 30 Years War between Catholics and Protestants in the 1600s.

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

Direct Democracy – Is it Possible?

March 13, 2018

Direct Democracy – Is it Possible?

The advancement in technology today certainly allows us to scrap the Republican form of government with pretend representation of the people by career politicians. There is no reason we cannot vote from home on every bill and that no bill may be merged with any other subject matter. There should be no sneaking spending for military tucked inside a Clean Water Act. Direct Democracy can work ONLY if it respects a Bill of Rights that precludes SOCIALISM no matter how noble the goals. It must also EXCLUDE all legislation to do with religious morals so no outlawing abortion or even prostitution no matter how much it will offend some. Do not forget that is another religious group get control, they will reverse it and retaliate again their opposition. No law will EVER eliminate either action and the most one can do is to restrict where it is and require a license to ensure it is conducted in a safe environment and leave God to judge.

Every tourist who has ventured to Amsterdam visits the famous red light district where girls are in shop windows typically wearing bathing suits (not naked). The street is packed probably with 99% tourists rather than customers, but it is famous, safe for both the people and the girls, and certainly a curiosity. They are not walking down the streets as they still do in LA, New York, Chicago, or Boston. Girls are not abducted and forced into prostitution. There have been movies on that subject like TAKEN, which are very real.

I have often told the story about flying back from London with my girlfriend into JFK and I went to the curb waiting for the car and she went to the bathroom. There was a very famous Supermodel I did not know at the time standing there and she started to chat. I had flown in on the Concord and she knew that but she had stiletto high-heels and a very short leather mini-skirt. I did not notice her on the plane so I assumed she was a hooker looking to pick up passengers when they land in NYC, which is very common. When my girlfriend came out and saw me talking to her she got jealous. She said I can’t leave you alone for 5 minutes you are talking to a supermodel. I said what are you talking about? She was a hooker! I was just being polite! She then said she was on the plane. Based on the provocative dress, it seemed to me like the standard hooker uniform in New York City. I remember staying the Excelsior Hotel on the Via Vittorio Veneto during the 1970s and having to push through prostitutes just trying to walk down the street to go to dinner. NYC 42nd street used to be that way as well.

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

Socialism Always Moves to Tyranny

February 21, 2018

Socialism Always Moves to Tyranny

The economic message taught in most universities is very distorted. It universally teaches children to judge economic systems from the perspective of their victims. They will endlessly point out the impoverished people and the devastation of the climate as proof that capitalism is evil and that we need government to intervene. We have economist after economist talking always about income disparity as an evil implying that everyone should earn close to the same – one income fits all.

Socialism is a Sin

As they always point a finger at the rich and covet whatever they have in direct violation of the Ten Commandments, politicians are elevated to a pedestal and championed as our savior ignoring how they too leave office clothed in riches and the fool is always the person who buys into the whole political-economic-socialist agenda.

Hillary Clinton saw nothing wrong with renting a house for $50,000 a week in the Hamptons hamlet of Amagansett. I know a lot of wealthy people who would not spend that much to rent a house for a vacation for just one week. It was Hillary during the campaign who pointed to the fact that Trump was a billionaire and said: “Think of what we could do with that!”

Then we have Obama – another champion of the poor. He bought a house in DC and paid $8.1 million. Of course, there was the scheming Obama who turned to real corruption to buy a house for $1.6 million BEFORE he was a Senator. He cut a deal with an indicted felon who bought a property for $625,000 and then sold it to Obama for $104,500 as Obama said it was fair value – right!. Obama has magically earned millions from public service.

Then there is Obama’s famous Rolex watch. His watch is a Rolex Cellini, the cheap version which tells time-only. It is a white gold case and a classic alligator strap which goes for $15,200.

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

Flying Blind, Part 2: The Destruction Of Honest Price Discovery And Its Consequences

January 26, 2018

Flying Blind, Part 2: The Destruction Of Honest Price Discovery And Its Consequences

In Part 1 we noted that the real evil of Bubble Finance is not merely that it leads to bubble crashes, of which there is surely a doozy just around the bend; or that speculators get the painful deserts they fully deserve, which is coming big time, too; or even that the retail homegamers are always drawn into the slaughter at the very end, as is playing out in spades once again. Daily.

Given enough time, in fact, markets do bounce back because capitalism has a inherent urge to grow, thereby generating higher output, incomes, profits, wealth and stock indices. That means, in turn, investors eventually do recover from bubble crashes—notwithstanding the tendency of homegamers and professional speculators alike to sell at panic lows and jump back in after most of the profits have been made—or even at panic highs like the present.

Instead, the real economic iniquity of central bank driven Bubble Finance is that it destroys all the pricing signals that are essential to financial discipline on both ends of the Acela Corridor. And as quaint at it may sound, discipline is the sine qua non of long-term stability and sustainable gains in productivity, living standards and real wealth.

The pols of the Imperial City should be petrified, therefore, by the prospect of borrowing $1.2 trillion during the upcoming fiscal year (FY 2019) at a rate of 6.o% of GDP during month #111 through month #123 of the business expansion; and doing so at the very time the central bank is pivoting to an unprecedented spell of QT (quantitative tightening), involving the disgorgement of up to $2 trillion of its elephantine balance sheet back into the bond market.

Even as a matter of economics 101, the forthcoming $1.8 trillion of combined bond supply from the sales of the US Treasury ($1.2 trillion) and the QT-disgorgement of the Fed ($600 billion) is self-evidently enough to monkey-hammer the existing supply/demand balances, and thereby send yields soaring.

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

It’s Time to Retire “Capitalism”

January 19, 2018

It’s Time to Retire “Capitalism”

Our current socio-economic system is nothing but the application of force on the many to enforce the skims, scams and privileges of the self-serving few.

I’ve placed the word capitalism in quotation marks to reflect the reality that this word now covers a wide spectrum of economic activities, very little of which is actually capitalism as classically defined. As I have explained here for over a decade, the U.S. economy is dominated by cartels and quasi-monopolies that are enforced by the Central State, a state-cartel system of financialized rentier skims that has no overlap with Adam Smith’s free market, free enterprise concept,i.e. classical capitalism.

This is what passes for “capitalism” in modern-day America: the super-rich get super-richer, a thin slice of technocrats, speculators and entrepreneurs advance their wealth and the vast majority lose ground or stagnate:

Here’s another snapshot of state-financier “capitalism” in modern-day America: the centralized organs of the state (the quasi-public Federal Reserve) creates trillions of dollars and hands the nearly free money to financiers, insiders and speculators, all of whom benefit immensely as this flood of cash pushes stocks into the stratosphere:

There are other versions of “capitalism” that are equally rapacious, all of which are iterations of crony-capitalism: gangster-capitalism, theocratic-capitalism, colonial-capitalism, and so on.

The key feature of these forms of organized pillage that mask their predatory nature by claiming to be “capitalist” is they ruthlessly suppress the three core dynamics of classical capitalism:

1. Competition

2. Open/free markets

3. Free flow of capital in all its forms (financial, social, intellectual, etc.)

The only way the few can pillage the many is if the many are denied access to competition, open markets and freely flowing capital.

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

The American system is not capitalism

January 17, 2018

The American system is not capitalism

One of the great myths of our time is that America is a capitalistic country. It is not, and has not been close to capitalistic for more than 150 years.

Capitalism is a social system in which an individual’s rights, including his rights to own property, are recognized and all property is privately owned. In a capitalistic society, governments acknowledge that individuals and companies can and should compete for their own economic gain, and the prices of goods and services are determined by the free market. The role of government in capitalistic societies is to ensure that markets function without interference and to protect individuals from fraud and/or the use of physical force by others.

Capitalism is not about greed. Capitalism is about human freedom, or as we term it, personal liberty. As Adam Smith posited in Wealth of Nations, when individuals are permitted to pursue their self-interest through markets, they are amazingly good at finding ways of bettering not only themselves but society as well.

In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand writes:

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control… In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions, and interests dictate.

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

If You Don’t Trust People, Then You Shouldn’t Trust Politics

December 28, 2017

If You Don’t Trust People, Then You Shouldn’t Trust Politics

If people can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, why would those same people be trusted to make decisions for the rest of us?

“Ordinary people can’t be trusted to make the right decisions about what’s best for themselves and others. That’s why we need government to decide for them.”

“And who will we trust to decide who these government officials are?”

“Ordinary people, of course. It’s only fair.”

I hope you see the irony here.

I also hope you see the irony in expressing mistrust in human nature while also expressing faith in the idea that human nature will somehow become trustworthy when those humans work for the government. If people can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, why would those same people be trusted to make decisions for the rest of us? This line of thinking has never made sense to me, and I hope it starts to make a little less sense to you.

Here’s one of my favorite clips where the economist Milton Friedman addresses this fallacy in response to Phil Donahue’s concerns about capitalistic greed:

The way we’re going to move forward in this world is not by finding a person who’s good enough to make bad systems work, but by investing in systems that incentivize even the bad person to make himself or herself accountable to creating value for others. And I know of no other system like that other than the free market.

If you’re interested in hearing me elaborate on this theme, check out this talk I gave at The Nassau Institute & The University of The Bahamas on the power of free markets and why we need to look beyond politics if we truly want to create a freer society:

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

Systems That Suck Less

December 27, 2017

Systems That Suck Less

Last week’s post on political economy attracted plenty of disagreement. Now of course this came as no surprise, and it was also not exactly surprising that most of the disagreement took the shape of strident claims that I’d used the wrong definition of socialism. That’s actually worth addressing here, because it will help clear the ground for this week’s discussion.

The definition I used, for those who weren’t here last week, is that socialism is the system of political economy in which the means of production are owned by the national government. Is that the only possible definition of socialism, or the only definition that’s ever been used? Of course not. The meanings of words are not handed down from on high by God or somebody; the meanings of words are always contested among competing points of view, and when a word has become as loaded with raw emotions as the word “socialism” has, you can bet that every one of the definitions you’ll be offered is slanted in one direction or another.

That’s just as true of the definition I’ve offered, of course, as it is of any other. I want to talk about who owns the means of production in society, since this is arguably the most important issue in political economy, and it so happens that socialism, capitalism, and many other systems can be defined quite neatly in this way. A century ago, when it was still acceptable to talk about systems of political economy other than capitalism and socialism, the definition I’ve proposed was one of the most common. You don’t hear it very often now, and there’s a reason for that.

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

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