The current debate, in the UK and abroad, on the need to cut back the state in order to unleash the power of entrepreneurship and innovation in the private sector, builds upon a stark contrast that is repeatedly drawn by the media, business and libertarian politicians: a dynamic, creative competitive private sector versus a sluggish, bureaucratic, inert, `meddling’ public sector.

It is assumed that the private sector is inherently more innovative, more able to think out of the `box’ and to lead a country towards long-run innovation-led growth. But many examples in the history of innovation, entrepreneurship and competition, in different sectors and across different countries, paint a very different picture – of a risk taking innovative state – especially in the most uncertain phases of technological development and/or in the most risky sectors – versus a more inert private sector, which only invests (in innovation, in new start- ups, in networks) once the state has absorbed most of the uncertainty.

In the pharmaceutical industry it is the state- run labs that have been responsible for the discovery of the most radical new important drugs, with private pharma focused on the less risky slight variations of existing, `me too’, drugs (such as Viagra in different colours and dosages). In the USA and Europe, state funding has been responsible for most, if not all, general purpose technologies, i.e. those technologies that help achieve economy- wide growth (aviation, computers, electricity, internet, nanotechnology). The biotech revolution owes its success not to venture capital (as is commonly assumed) but to major inventions within the UK’s Medical Research Council and the US’s National Institute of Health, as well as pro-innovation regulations that have made it easier for these inventions to be commercialised. This has not been just a question of `research’, but of the state having the courage to think about completely new areas of development, invest its resources into uncertain territory, open multiple windows of exploration, fund early-stage risky research, create organisations dedicated to funding and supporting new start-ups, and formulate dynamic `networks’ between science, business and finance.

In most cases of the development of general purpose technology it has been the state that has gone against the grain, thought `out of the box’, risked large amounts of money; while the private sector has more often been wedded to the status quo, where short-run returns are inevitably more secure. Similar examples can be found in the creative sector, where, for example, innovative first-time directors can `enter’ the industry only through risky state-backed funds or state- owned broadcasters. In this sense, the state has played a role that goes beyond the Keynesian emphasis on taxation, subsidies, spending and regulation, and the Schumpeterian emphasis on creating the `right conditions’ for innovation and growth. It has played an active entrepreneurial role – envisioning new technological opportunities in high-growth areas; undertaking the very early risky investments that lay the groundwork for future exploration of these areas; funding new start-ups that commercialize the innovations; and in some cases even bringing the product to market.

The state has been fundamentally involved in generating radically new products and processes that have changed the way that businesses operate and citizens live – transforming economies forever, from the internet revolution to the biotech revolution to what (it is hoped) will be the green-tech revolution. A key way to tackle together smart and inclusive growth is to ensure that the gains from innovation are as collective as the risk-taking underlying it. In seeking innovation-led growth, it is fundamental to understand the important roles that both the public and private sector can play. This requires not only understanding the different ecologies between the public and private sector, but, especially, rethinking what it is that the public is bringing to that ecology. The claim that the public sector can at best incentivise private sector led innovation (through subsidies, tax reductions, carbon pricing, green investment banks and so on) is currently being propagated heavily in the UK, especially but not only in the face of the recent crisis and ensuing deficits. But this fails to account for the many examples in which the leading entrepreneurial force came from the state rather than from the private sector.

* Conversion of the U.S. dollar to silver and gold was suspended during the Civil War and discontinued entirely by 1972.  Covers the years for which full data are available (i.e., 1820 through 2009).

This analysis excludes, for what I hope are obvious reasons, the years covering America’s wars of existential crisis, i.e., the Civil War, World War I, World War II, when military spending as a % of GDP reached anamolous heights, ranging from over 3% and up to nearly 37% in 1942.  See details of calculations and source citations at the linked workbook.

This piece dutifully distributed by the Dystopia Diaries.

A growing number of states are seeking shiny new currencies made of silver and gold. Worried that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. dollar are on the brink of collapse, lawmakers from 13 states, including Minnesota, Tennessee, Iowa, South Carolina and Georgia, are seeking approval from their state governments to either issue their own alternative currency or explore it as an option. Just three years ago, only three states had similar proposals in place.

The Constitution bans states from printing their own paper money or issuing their own currency. But it allows the states to make “gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” To the state legislators who are proposing state-issued currencies, that means gold and silver are fair game, said Edwin Vieira, an alternative currency proponent and attorney specializing in Constitutional law.

A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.”Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred — whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics — is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

“We’ve come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures,” Berns says. “We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain.” …

Read more here.

Anti-piracy rhetoric holds that online piracy is a devastating force on the U.S. economy, responsible for the theft of between $200 billion and $250 billion per year and the loss of 750,000 good American jobs. “These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010,” write the economists over at Freakonomics.

But those numbers are wrong, the authors say, citing a breakdown by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez.

In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”

More recently, the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) placed the number at $58 billion; but that reporter is methodologically flawed, Mr. Sanchez and tech journalist Tim Lee have deconstructed, and is guilty of double-counting with results that “swell the estimate of piracy losses considerably.”…

[continues at BetaBeat]

When 300 men and women climb onto a rooftop and threaten to commit suicide in protest over denied compensation, it is impossible not to wonder how a company could lead its employees into such desperation.

But Foxconn did.

A little over a week ago, 300 employees at Foxconn’s Technology Park in Wuhan, China threatened their own lives because they were denied a vital pay increase. Foxconn told them they could either keep their jobs without it, or they could quit and be compensated.

Many chose to quit, but the company terminated the agreement, and none of the former workers received the promised compensation.

Production at the company was temporarily halted. It was not until 9 pm the next day that the town’s mayor was able to talk the 300 down from the roof.

Foxconn has been at the center of some considerably uncomfortable controversy over the last two years, after its high suicide rates and poor working conditions came to light. In total, it is thought 14 workers committed suicide in 2010.

Although previously the company’s suicide rate was well below the country’s average, it’s hard to downplay those numbers now.

Foxconn installed suicide nets at their factory last year, and workers in Chengdu are required to sign a “no suicide” pact in their contracts.

These are just a few of the many small details that add up to a more worrying whole…

More on ZDnet

Our politics are degraded and a laughing stock to the world. Our military is demoralized and degraded with soldiers urinating on dead civilians and awaiting deployment orders for the next illegal intervention.

Our education system has been degraded with standards falling and pervasive defunding. Our transportation system, ditto.

I could go on, but I don’t have to. We are all living the decline with downward mobility, joblessness and foreclosures, to cite a few trends that make life so miserable for so many.

Now, our godlike financial ratings agencies have decided to degrade nine countries struggling to fix their financial crisis. The decision by Standard and Poors (Best renamed, “It is now Standard to Be Poor”) to downgrade credit ratings for France, Italy, Austria and six other European countries signals those nations that Wall Street has them by the cojones. Their costs for borrowing will go up.

They are being warned: We are in Charge. Do as we say!

Unreported in all of this, is that many of the companies that loaned them the money are part of a US led financial oligarchy. The Credit agencies–the same ones that legitimated fraudulent sub prime lenders with no accountability—are part of the enforcement gang of today’s loan sharks who are squeezing Europe to pay up or else.

Its been reported that when Greece finally gets a huge new loan from the European Central Bank and the IMF, most of the money will only touch down in Athens before being wired directly to Hedge Funds based in London who pushed the debt out in the first place and demand to be repaid first.

The hell with Greece’s needs.

Interesting:  the Financial Times used the term “vengeance” in its report:

“The eurozone debt crisis returned with a vengeance on Friday as Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded France and Austria, two of the currency zone’s six triple A creditors, as well as other nations not in the top tier.”

S&P’s goal was not just about economics. It was political, to press Europe’s political leaders to move faster to please them—i.e., suspend democratic checks and balances if needs be, and do what Wall Street wants ASAP!

It was an act of bullying

It was also punitive because, according to Bloomberg, Europe was actually making progress in getting its house in order:

S&P acted at the end of a week in which signs grew that Europe’s woes may be cresting as borrowing costs fell, evidence of economic resilience emerged and the European Central Bank said it had quelled a credit crunch at banks.

…. The result is that refinancing costs for certain countries may remain “elevated” and credit availability and economic growth may fade, it said. …

“It’s not a catastrophe,” French Finance Minister Francois Baroin told France 2 television, noting his country now has the same rating as the U.S.

How reassuring. The US is getting the same treatment. The problem is that the more the  .001% financiers push, the more their borrowers may be forced to push back,

Bloomberg’s report ends with a quote about “dangers” that the article glosses over: “This decision could upset the positive developments we’ve seen in Europe in the last few weeks,” ECB Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said. “That’s the most dangerous thing in my view.”

In short, we are all in the same crunch, being pushed around by the same avaricious interests.

Call it what it is: a system of financial terrorism.

Europe is not simply a passive victim here–its elites have been collusive and complicit with the lenders, taking massive loans and often squandering the money

Satyajit Das, a brilliant author and derivatives expert, writes on NakedCapitalism.com:

“Europe is on a road to fiscal bondage.”

“Financially futile, economically erroneous, politically puzzling and socially irresponsible, the December 2011 European summit was a failure. Only the attending leaders and their acolytes believe otherwise. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s post-summit homilies about the “long run”, “running a marathon” and “more Europe” rang hollow.

The proposed plan is fundamentally flawed. It made no attempt to tackle the real issues – the level of debt, how to reduce it, how to meet funding requirements or how to restore growth. Most importantly there were no new funds committed to the exercise.

The centerpiece of the new plan was a commitment to a new legally enforceable “fiscal compact” requiring government budgets to be balanced or in surplus, with the annual structural deficit not to exceed 0.5% of nominal Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”).

The language was Orwellian and incomprehensible in equal measure.”

While some get the stick, others enjoy the carrots.

Matt Taibbi reports: “Newspapers in Colorado today are reporting that the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, will be closed to the public from today through Monday at noon.

Why? Because a local squire has apparently decided to rent out all 94 rooms of the hotel for three-plus days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

The hotel’s general manager, Tony DiLucia, would say only that the party was being thrown by a “nice family,” but newspapers are now reporting that the Daddy of the lucky little gal is one Jeffrey Verschleiser, currently an executive with Goldman, Sachs.”

He was also an executive and the now departed Bear Stearns, This particular “nice” padre was part of a double dipping scheme exposed in the Atlantic:

The traders were essentially double-dipping — getting paid twice on the deal. How was this possible? Once the security was sold, they didn’t have a legal claim to get cash back from the bad loans — that claim belonged to bond investors — but they did so anyway and kept the money. Thus, Bear was cheating the investors they promised to have sold a safe product out of their cash. According to former Bear Stearns and EMC traders and analysts who spoke with The Atlantic, Nierenberg and Verschleiser were the decision-makers for the double dipping scheme.

Scratch beneath the surface and all the old players and financial gangsters come into view in an internationally interconnected and manipulated system

Unless something is done by those outside the system —a more powerful global Occupy Movement for starters—we will all be on what Satyajit Das also calls “The road To Nowhere.”

News Dissector Danny Schechter writes the newsdissector.com blog. His new book is Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street. His latest film is Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

There is an “unhealthy correlation” between the building of skyscrapers and subsequent financial crashes, according to Barclays Capital.

Examples include the Empire State building, built as the Great Depression was under way, and the current world’s tallest, the Burj Khalifa, built just before Dubai almost went bust. China is currently the biggest builder of skyscrapers, the bank said. India also has 14 skyscrapers under construction.

“Often the world’s tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction,” Barclays Capital analysts said.

The bank noted that the world’s first skyscraper, the Equitable Life building in New York, was completed in 1873 and coincided with a five-year recession. It was demolished in 1912.

Other examples include Chicago’s Willis Tower (which was formerly known as the Sears Tower) in 1974, just as there was an oil shock and the US dollar’s peg to gold was abandoned. And Malaysia’s Petronas Towers in 1997, which coincided with the Asian financial crisis. The findings might be a concern for Londoners, who are currently seeing the construction of what will be Western Europe’s tallest building, the Shard.

Investors should be most concerned about China, which is currently building 53% of all the tall buildings in the world, the bank said.

A lending boom following the global financial crisis in 2008 pushed prices higher in the world’s second largest economy.

In a separate report, JPMorgan Chase said that the Chinese property market could drop by as much as 20% in value in the country’s major cities within the next 12 to 18 months.

In India, billionaire Mukesh Ambani built his own skyscraper in Mumbai – a 27-storey residence believed to be the world’s most expensive home.

Donald Rumsfeld

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in the New York Times:

Could there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O’Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country’s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.

He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that “There are known knowns… there are known unknowns … there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was “unknown knowns.”

What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational exuberance or excess optimism. Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to “unknow.”

Unknown knowns were everywhere, from Wall Street to Brussels, from the Pentagon to Penn State. Ireland merely happened to offer an extreme case, where “everyone knew.” They just chose to forget that they knew — about the way that Irish banks ran wild, how easy credit fueled a monstrous explosion of property prices and speculative house-building. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister at the time of the rapid economic growth, merely boasted, “The boom is getting boomier,” preferring to unknow the truth that booms always go bust.

Beginning in 2008, the skies were lighted up by financial conflagrations, from Lehman Brothers to the Royal Bank of Scotland. These were dramatic enough — but were they unforeseeable or unknowable? What kind of willful obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea? An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who obviously can never repay it…

Read more here.

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it.

The very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. At first, this imagining took a mostly grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of a period of anarchic violence and misery. And still it might, with the Eurozone teetering on the edge of collapse as I write. But more recently, the spread of global protest from Cairo to Madrid to Madison to Wall Street has given the Left some reason to timidly raise its hopes for a better future after capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” In that spirit I offer a thought experiment, an attempt to make sense of our possible futures. These are a few of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail …

Read the rest at Jacobin

On Thursday night, it will be December 29 when they go to bed and Saturday Dec 31 when they wake up — meaning they’ll skip Friday forever.

This neat bit of time travel is the result of a very contemporary concern: trade and economic relations with Pacific neighbors Australia and New Zealand, who are currently nearly a day ahead on the clock. Now, with the disappearance of Friday, Samoa will shift west of the international dateline and share the same date and time as its two key partners.

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi explained: “In doing business (now) with New Zealand and Australia we’re losing out on two working days a week,” the London Times reported. “While it’s Friday here, it’s Saturday in New Zealand and when we’re at church Sunday, they’re already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane.”

Read More: Herald Sun

The history of Christianity is like a treasure chest for anyone who is fond of contradictions. The Gospels bicker with each other by relating similar tales in very different ways. But even more obviously, Christianity has often so dramatically departed from the words attributed to Jesus as to make you wonder how these glaring contradictions can be justified. Jesus tells you to “Love your enemies” and “Turn the other cheek”? So let’s show how much we love Jesus by waging crusades, inquisitions, witch-hunts, and brutal campaigns of repression against anyone who doesn’t love Him as much as we do. Jesus’s pacifism has drowned in the hyper-violence that has characterized much of Christian history.

But—we may object—most Christians alive today seem to have lost the bloodthirsty enthusiasm of their ancestors, and are no longer inclined to exterminate non-Christians. Even though it is true enough that chopping the unbelievers’ heads off may no longer be a popular pastime, the vast majority of Christians still conveniently forget about another theme that was central to Jesus’s ideology, and structure their lives in direct opposition to it. Jesus, in fact, was one of the most anti-capitalist thinkers this side of Karl Marx. Yet, most Christians are capitalists. What gives?

The concept of capitalism may have not existed in its modern forms during Jesus’s times, but Jesus’s words about accumulation of wealth leave little to the imagination. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all report Jesus saying: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

Damn … does it get any blunter than this?

Just to make sure we are paying attention, Jesus hammers the same point over and over, repeating multiple times his condemnation of accumulation of wealth. We find him telling wannabe followers to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor (in case you are wondering, this made some decide that following Jesus was not such a hot idea anymore). In another passage, he categorically states that you can’t serve God and wealth at the same time. Elsewhere he warns us to focus on spiritual wealth rather than material wealth, and not to “store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy …” In yet a different occasion, he tells “Woe to the rich for you have received your consolation.” And in a series of sentences that are as antithetical to spirit of capitalism as they come, he advises his followers not to make any plans about the future in regards to food and shelter, since God will take care of everyone’s basic needs.

Considering how insistent Jesus is on this topic, it is with little surprise that we find out in other parts of the New Testament how his early followers shared everything among each other, and nearly eliminated private property.

In the face of this ultra-radical stance about wealth by their founder, it would be easy to conclude that most Christians live by making vows of poverty and shunning wealth like the plague. But that’s not quite the way things play out. God may be cool—most modern Christians think—but so is gold. Why should we have to choose one over the other? Ever since the Protestant Reformation, any qualms any Christian may have had about chasing good, old-fashioned cash began to fade. Many Catholics had maintained a theology frowning on accumulation of wealth, but simply had chosen to ignore it in practice. Plenty of Protestants, instead, decided to feel better about the whole thing and banish hypocrisy by reinventing the economic ideology of Christianity. Step one was to conveniently skip the many, many passages mentioned above. Step two was to focus instead on the biblical passages (mostly in the Old Testament) approving of wealth. Step three was to argue that since nothing in the world happens without God willing it, economic success (or the lack of thereof) is a quantifiable way to judge how much God does or does not favor you.

Voilà! The tables are turned and suddenly the obsession for money making has been recycled as a perfectly acceptable Christian endeavor. In the theology endorsed by some Christians (particularly those espousing the quintessential American “gospel of prosperity”) accumulating wealth is not only justifiable but almost a Christian duty since material prosperity is God’s reward for His faithful followers. The obvious corollary is that if you are poor, instead, it is probably because God hates your guts.

What makes this hijacking of Jesus’s message even funnier are the ways in which the God & Gold enthusiasts have tried to claim that Jesus was himself wealthy. Only the rich—they reason—could afford to travel around like he did and not work. But my all time favorite is the argument that Roman soldiers gambled for the right to take Jesus’s underwear after he died suggesting he was so rich that even his underwear was made of very expensive materials.

Really? Is that what this theology hangs by? Jesus underwear? Memo to self: if I ever try to justify my beliefs by appealing to a divine pair of underwear, it’s time to admit defeat.

“Are they real?” That’s the question people usually ask when they hear for the first time of the “Citigroup Plutonomy Memos.” The sad truth is: Yes, they are real, and instead of being discussed on mainstream media outlets all over America and beyond, Citigroup was surprisingly successful so far in suppressing these memos, using their lawyers to issue takedown-notices whenever these memos were being made available for download on the internet.

So what are we talking about? In 2005 and 2006, several analysts at Citigroup took a very, very close look at the economic inequalities within the USA and other countries and wrote two memos which were addressed to their very wealthy customers. If there is one group of people who need to know the truth about what is really going on within the society and the economy, minus the propaganda, then it’s businesspeople who have a lot of money to invest, and who want to invest wisely.

So Citigroup did their duty and published two explosive memos, which should have become mainstream news, but eventually did not. The first memo is dated October 16, 2005 (35 pages) and is titled: “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances”.

Read More: Politicalgates

The production of the iPhone offers one of the best examples of the logic and operation of these transnational corporate controlled cross border production networks.

Not surprisingly, the division of profits, as shown below, reflects the overall hierarchy that structures this and other cross border production networks.

VATICAN CITY (RNS)— Noting a “rising sense of frustration” at the worldwide economic recession, Pope Benedict XVI said that a more just and peaceful world requires “adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth.”

The pope’s words appeared in his message for the World Day of Peace 2012, released on Friday (Dec. 16) at the Vatican.

The message laments that “some currents of modern culture, built upon rationalist and individualist economic principles, have cut off the concept of justice from its transcendent roots, detaching it from charity and solidarity.”

Authentic education, Benedict writes, teaches the proper use of freedom with “respect for oneself and others, including those whose way of being and living differs greatly from one’s own.”

Read More: Huffington Post

Alabama farmers have proposed using prisoners to work their fields to replace migrants who fled the state after it passed the country’s harshest anti-immigration law, officials said Tuesday.

The Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industry officials met Tuesday in Mobile with farmers to discuss their proposal. A statement by the department said the meeting with the farmers was convened “to help solve the chronic labor shortages created by Alabama’s new immigration law.”

Known as HB56, the new law requires local police to verify the immigration status of anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country illegally.

The law touched off an exodus of mainly Hispanic workers who moved to other states because of fears of being deported, prompting complaints by farm and construction industry groups of a shortage of workers in one of the poorest US states.

Photo: David Shankbone (CC)

J. D. Suss writes on Stories, Essays, Detritus:

Economics 101 teaches that the quantity of a product or service is determined by the demand, which is reflected by its price and is a function of its quality.

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement might be deconstructed using this same analysis:

The number and size of Occupations worldwide can be determined by the demand, reflected by the price we pay for sympathizing and participating—a direct result of discerning the quality of the values it promotes.

The individual making such a discernment wants an assurance of its quality before committing to the OWS Movement. He or she does not want to be bamboozled by some phony color revolution sponsored by a hidden power elite, or a false flag operation carried out by its governmental minions. An individual requires a solid basis upon which to make a reasoned choice that this Movement is in his or her best interests.

If the masses can be steered into demanding what the World Order has been cooking up for at least a hundred years or more—a one-world, socialist dictatorship—then they are simply silly putty in the NWO hands. (Witness the so-called “Arab Spring.”)

G.K. Chesterton has written that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” What’s Wrong with the World, p. 48 (1910). If we transpose “capitalism” (or even “democracy”) in place of “Christianity” we grasp a certain truth that has been eluding the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and many (if not most) of their sympathizers. Has capitalism really ever been given a fair shake—or has it been undermined almost from the start?

Capitalism is a system that allows any man or woman to produce a product or service, which is then vetted by a free market of buyers which determines how much buyers are willing to pay for that product or service. It puts the freedom to choose in the hands of the People—the freedom of sellers to produce and sell, and buyers to inspect and buy, viz., the freedom of both to possess and use money to do as they see fit.

But subverted capitalism is not capitalism at all. The most insidious example of subverted capitalism is corporate “capitalism,” also termed crony, predatory, or crisis “capitalism.” Corporate “capitalism” is not capitalism at all. What is it then? The modern corporation aggregates large amounts of capital in order to make a profit for a shareholder class that expects maximum income. To operate, it forms a semi-monopolistic structure. Its purpose is to dominate a market in order to dictate price by limiting quality according to its own profit-based analysis – buyers be damned! This is not capitalism it is a corporate command economy, viz., private socialism. It is public socialism to the extent that government is involved, and this unholy alliance can be referred to as a “corpocracy.” A corpocracy is a mixture of private and public socialism, i.e., some monolithic WE decides what products and services are allowed into the market, their price, quality, and quantity.

In order to fund the banksters, the governmental part of the monolithic WE taxes your income on the “dollars” from your private labor. These “dollars” are currently called “federal reserve notes” and are used to pay the interest on the money the government borrows from the Federal Reserve. A note is a promise to pay. “Promises to pay” are in fact debt instruments. They are absolutely not true dollars as contemplated in the U.S. Constitution. All of this nonsense is capitalism turned on its head.

Probably one of the few times we enjoyed real capitalism in this country was in the 1840s, when Pres. Andrew Jackson terminated the central bank (what he termed “a den of vipers”). That period was one of incredible growth and plenty for all. But, predictably, it was subverted by the unscrupulous interests of modern corporatism.

Libertarians would have us believe that business can have free reign over all; that government should not interfere whatsoever in the affairs of the individual, including the business sector. And this is essentially what we have had in commerce, beginning with the dismantling of the regulatory function of government in the Reagan years and that culminated in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. All of this deregulation allowed banks to run amok, leading to the current meltdown. Ralph Nader has pointed out two weaknesses of libertarianism: consumer protection and labor unions do not figure into its ideal system—and where does environmental protection enter into the calculus?

Government needs to ensure that the individual retains his or her ability to compete in the marketplace. The regulatory role of all three branches of government is to preserve the rule of law; viz., a rule of law that secures individual liberty by protecting individuals from the depredations of corporate dominance of the marketplace (and from any and all crony government alliances). In commerce, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission probably have the lion’s share of the executive regulatory roles. Let them be what they were instituted to be: watchdogs for the People.

I judge a healthy economic climate by the number of individual enterprises and mom-and-pops businesses I see as I walk down the streets of any town, not by the number of corporate, cookie-cutter franchises that litter the urban-suburban sprawl in the U.S. If the modern corporation cannot be put back into its cage by relegating it to what traditional corporate entities once were, then they must be closely scrutinized under the law to protect the People from its Goliath-like influences in commerce and in politics. Free legislatures from the overwhelming influence of the monied (read “corpocracy”) class! Let the courts actually be the arbiters of fairness and justice for individuals, instead of enforcers for the corpocracy’s values-vacuum-laws! And while we’re at it, free the press from oppressive control by the forces of corpocracy! Ideally, capitalism can only operate within the free flow of information, with real investigative reporting, instead of mind control by presstitutes!

Chesterton’s Christianity, like true capitalism, might be given a fair chance. True capitalism is closer to the precepts of individual freedom than is socialism—by a long shot. Thus, regaining true capitalism should be a professed value of the OWS Movement. And while we’re at it, OWSers (and all the forces of corpocracy)—be sure to remember to give peace a chance!

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Jonathan D. Suss is a cultural mutant multi-career virtuoso (blues piano player and singer, woodworker, poet/writer, one-time military officer, lawyer, English professor, and Ph.D. in Humanties) who is bereft of ambition to “be anything” in this phony baloney world—secular or otherwise. He is always on the look-out for an enlightened patrone from deep in the woods or from the plutocratic elite who also “sees thru the world” and may wish to join forces to further worthwhile underdog agendas by performing weird tasks, such as piercing the veil of corpocracy. Some of his ideas can be further studied at http://spyoptaelip.blogspot.com and he can be contacted at theo4b@gmail.com.

More than 1,000 Occupy Wall Street protesters blocked cargo trucks at some of the West Coast’s busiest ports Monday, forcing terminals in Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore., and Longview, Wash., to halt operations.

While the protests attracted far fewer people than the 10,000 who turned out Nov. 2 to shut down Oakland’s port, organizers declared victory and promised more demonstrations to come.

“The truckers are still here, but there’s nobody here to unload their stuff,” protest organizer Boots Riley said. “We shut down the Port of Oakland for the daytime shift and we’re coming back in the evening. Mission accomplished.”

Organizers called for the “Shutdown Wall Street on the Waterfront” protests, hoping the day of demonstrations would cut into the profits of the corporations that run the docks and send a message that their movement was not over.

More: CBS News

Denmark is trying to wean its people off butter by imposing a hefty “fat tax,” but their neighbors across the Skagerrak in Norway can’t get enough of the golden goodness. A diet fad in the Scandinavian country has depleted the nation’s supply of butter. While we’d use the term “diet” lightly, the newest craze is a low-carb, high-fat feeding frenzy that has put a strain on Norway’s butter supply.

“Sales all of a sudden just soared,” Lars Galtung, head of communications at TINE, the country’s biggest farmer-owned cooperative, told Reuters. “Twenty percent in October then thirty percent in November.” The fat fad coupled with a summer that saw a major reduction in milk production spells empty supermarket dairy fridges. This year’s wet summer ruined animal feed, reducing cows’ outputs to 25 million liters less than last year. As a result, this year’s hot Christmas item isn’t the iPad or an Angry Birds game; it’s much more primitive: butter …

Read More: TIME

Agence France-Presse, via MSN News

Large-scale strikes have hit China in recent weeks, as workers resentful about low salaries or lay-offs face off with employers juggling high costs and exports hit by lower demand from the debt-burdened West.

Politburo member Zhou Yongkang said authorities needed to improve their system of “social management”, including increasing “community-level” manpower.

“In the face of the negative impact of the market economy, we have not formed a complete system of social management,” Zhou said in a Friday speech to officials reported by the state Xinhua news agency at the weekend.

“It is urgent that we build a social management system with Chinese characteristics to match our socialist market economy.” China’s economy grew by 9.1 percent in the third quarter, down from 9.5 percent in the previous quarter.  Manufacturing — a key engine of growth — slumped to its lowest level in nearly three years last month, amid slowing demand from the European Union and the United States.

Beijing has started to implement measures to boost lending and spur growth in the world’s second largest economy.

Read More: Agence France-Presse, via MSN News

* A Further Observation from the Dystopia Diaries — a Glossa McGonagalica: What — you weren’t thinking you could run an export economy under an austerity-induced global demand slump, were you?

The gulf between the rich and the poor continues to grow exponentially and stands to “unravel the social contract in many countries,” according to a report released Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 17 out of 22 countries the OECD measured, income inequality has risen steadily for more than three decades and now sits at the highest levels in recent history. The study found the average income of the richest 10% of a population is nine times that of the poorest 10%. The income gap in “traditionally egalitarian countries” like Demark and Sweden rose from 5 to 1 in the 80’s to 6 to 1 today, and in America, the income gap is a staggering 14 to 1.

Inequality in wages and salaries is the largest contributing factor to the rise in income disparity. Other factors include an increase in part time work and declining collective bargaining agreements between workers and employers; disparity between workers with higher technological skills and those without; and regulatory reforms that created mainly low wage jobs.

In the United States, the richest 1% bring home an average of $1.3 million after taxes. The poorest 20% take in just $17,700. During the same period of time (1980–2008), the income tax rate dropped from 70% to 35%. Redistribution of income by taxes and benefits offset less than 10% of market income inequality. While the hours of low wage workers increased by more than 20% over the past decades, overall earnings inequality still rose “moderately” due to the low level of the minimum wage.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

“Seriously, do you expect a better opportunity to extract concessions from your enemies than when they lay begging, bleeding at your feet?” —Liam McGonagle

In case you were in the washroom when ‘Jersey Shore’ was interrupted with this late-breaking newstory:  Ben Bernancke just committed the U.S. to provide the European Central Bank (”ECB”) with an unlimited line of credit.

That’s right, a brand new bailout.  Structurally along the lines that Business Insider had warned us about in September, but much more ambitious; that article had postulated a trifling $1 trillion, not the bottomless pit we’re actually being presented with.

The basic deal is that we hand dollars over to the ECB in exchange for Euros, the value of which, has become highly dubious to say the least. The ECB will in turn invest those dollars in large corporate banks to bolster balance sheets they themselves ruined through reckless underwriting practices and constant pressures for tax holidays and austerity measures.

Boun Natale e felice anni nouvi, Mario!

This is being billed as a stopgap measure to compensate for the fact that the genius architects of the Eurozone couldn’t be bothered to implement a fiscal coordination authority in their new currency. Must have seemed reasonable at the time.  We’d seen the end of history, after all.  Just like American civil liberties after 9/11, all the rules had changed.  The new era of seamlessly integrated global markets had pushed the capitalism’s cycle of inevitable liquidity crises into the dustbin of history, right?

But is it really stopgap? While similarly available currency swap loans had been available for some time previous, the duration of the current arrangement (i.e., a 50% reduction in the interest rate) is through January 2013, and is unlimited in amount. Meaning that the commitment is bounded in no way by the current supply of U.S. dollars.  So, at least theoretically, the U.S. will end up printing the dollars it will be obligated to provide incompetent European bankers.

When the implications of this development had finally settled in, and I’d had a chance to change into a clean pair of trousers and shower up a bit, I settled to thinking. Two paradoxically conflicting corollaries floated to the surface:

1.  Nobody, I mean NOBODY, seems to have learned the lesson of the previous bailout regimes or Quantitative Easing programmes, namely that the size of the money supply in-and-of-itself is of distant, secondary importance to the circulation of currency.  Or, to put it in layman’s language: BANKERS DON’T DRIVE THE ECONOMY, CONSUMERS DO.

2.  The bizarre occurrence of one nation printing money to manage the fiscal problems of another demonstrates exactly the sort of international commitment and cooperation that would be necessary to curb the irresponsible corporate leeching that led to these problems in the first place.  You know what I’m talking about, that old mantra of the defeatist traitor:  “But if we try to regulate corporations effectively, they’ll just pull of stakes and move the show overseas!”

As this incident suggests, it is effective government that provides the necessary stability for corporations to exist. If so-called “populist” Tea Baggers in the House had the brains to realize this, they’d take this opportunity to make corporate elites pay their fair share of the burden:  i.e., more historically reasonable income tax rates and a tax on idle wealth. Seriously, do you expect a better opportunity to extract concessions from your enemies than when they lay begging, bleeding at your feet?

Sadly, neither of these realizations seems likely to amount to much. This is the era of greasy hacks like Newt Gingrich are seen as “transformational leaders” [1] and the worthless empty suit Obama tries to slide turds like this past us whilst simultaneously telling the American people that their “moment is NOW“. To date, the most vigorous response I’ve seen on this issue has been Ron Paul, condemning the Fed for taking this action unilaterally.

Which, quite frankly, whilst being a step in the right direction, is nowhere good enough. Paul was asleep at the wheel on this issue in September, wasting our time with penny-ante Solyndra b*llsh*t. And nowhere do I see him calling for greater international government cooperation to curb the unaccountable multinational banks who are the primary beneficiaries of these abuses.  No mention anywhere of any increased corporate oversight, or fair transaction or property tax on the parasitic financial sector that destroys 80 cents in GDP out of every $1 that we give them.  Overall, even after grading on a curve, I just can’t give Paul any grade higher than a “D-”.  Try harder.

Footnote
[1] Newt’s constant use of the word “transformational” is equal parts insult, comedy and tragedy. There’s one reason that dried up old carpet-bagging whore never got “born again” into the Evangelical movement he so lustily courts on the campaign trail:  He’d leave a toxic oil slick in the baptismal pool.  The only thing Gingrish ever transformed is my dinner into vomit.

Another heaping helping of Hades, from Dystopia Diaries

Economics is at the start of a revolution that is traceable to an unexpected source: medical schools and their research facilities. Neuroscience — the science of how the brain, that physical organ inside one’s head, really works — is beginning to change the way we think about how people make decisions. These findings will inevitably change the way we think about how economies function. In short, we are at the dawn of “neuroeconomics”.

Efforts to link neuroscience to economics have occurred mostly in just the last few years, and the growth of neuroeconomics is still in its early stages. But its nascence follows a pattern: revolutions in science tend to come from completely unexpected places. A field of science can turn barren if no fundamentally new approaches to research are on the horizon. Scholars can become so trapped in their methods — in the language and assumptions of the accepted approach to their discipline — that their research becomes repetitive or trivial.

Then something exciting comes along from someone who was never involved with these methods — some new idea that attracts young scholars and a few iconoclastic old scholars, who are willing to learn a different science and its different research methods. At a certain moment in this process, a scientific revolution is born.

Read more here.

Remember the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program with which the federal government came to the rescue of faltering banks in 2008? Well, according to a Bloomberg report, that was just a fraction of the financial help the Federal Reserve Bank wound up doling out to troubled lenders. The real total was reportedly closer to $8 trillion, after you add up benefits outside TARP, including emergency loans given at below-market rates:

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

Bloomberg came up with that number after reviewing “29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions.” Bloomberg adds, “The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day.” That’s nearly twice the amount made public in TARP.

Given the state of the global economy, it might not surprise you to learn that psychopaths may be controlling the world. Not violent criminals, but corporate psychopaths who nonetheless have a genetically inherited biochemical condition that prevents them from feeling normal human empathy.

Scientific research is revealing that 21st century financial institutions with a high rate of turnover and expanding global power have become highly attractive to psychopathic individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and the companies they work for.

A peer-reviewed theoretical paper titled “The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis” details how highly placed psychopaths in the banking sector may have nearly brought down the world economy through their own inherent inability to care about the consequences of their actions …

Read more here.