With Global Capitalism Exposed as a Sham, All the Global Elite Have Left Is Pure Force

That's right folks. You can't even protest what has gone wrong in the global economy or what will go wrong. You have no say. "De facto martial law". A combat battalion from Iraq to protect the G20 leaders in Pittsburgh from having to witness any protest.

It will only get worse. The leaders of the global economy are completed detached from the people and reality. They are incapable of fixing anything. They caused the collapse. Read the financial news and you can see everything coming apart. Peacenik doesn't think one battalion is going to be enough.

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted September 22, 2009.

Delegates from the world's wealthiest nations gather this week for G-20, walled off from protesters by a National Guard combat battalion recently returned from Iraq.

The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can't blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.

Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do-stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.

"The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong," said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. "This is what this meeting is about."

Read on...

The Zero Growth Mind

Yes the world is returning to a zero growth or negative growth future very soon. Agriculturally and financially. But it won't be idylic. All the projections for the present and the near future are based on growth. Economies can't survive with zero growth. Capitalism demands growth. Right now the bailouts and stimulus programs are creating an illusion of growth. But it is winding down in a hurry. Watch Obama's speech about the economy tonight. Peacenik will. Will Obama mention growth? Will he tell the truth? Will he tell people how to survive in a zero growth world? Can one survive in a zero growth world?

Posted by Ugo Bardi on September 14, 2009

Ancient peasants lived, mostly, in a "zero growth" world and, perhaps, in the future we'll return to a condition in which the finiteness of resources is an obvious fact of life. We see in this painting a group of 19th century Dutch peasants as painted by Vincent Van Gogh, who had an uncanny capability of showing not just the exterior aspect of things but also their inner reality ("The potato eaters", 1885, the Van Gogh museum, Amsterdam)

We often think that we have a problem of scarcity of resources. It is not so: scarcity is not absolute. Whether we have enough of something or not depends on our perception of what we need. And, because we seem to think that we never have enough, we tend to use what we have faster than it can be replaced. It is the phenomenon called "overexploitation" or "overshoot". It is the main problem that we are facing and it is all because of the way the human mind works. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, overexploitation is all in the brain of the exploiter.

Nate Hagens has argued several times in "The Oil Drum" that the human mind is geared for growth (see, for instance here ). Apparently, we act on the basis of a series of neurotransmitters (e.g. dopamine) that make us search for continuously renewed stimulation. This way of functioning of the human mind is what generates our tendency of "discounting the future", that is of giving a lower value to the future than to the present. This rapidly declining discount function is the key of the mechanism of overexploitation.

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Punditman Goes Back to School for an Afternoon (Virtually)

Ayn Rand defends an ethic which is remarkable for its absence of any obligation towards others, only towards oneself. As if by magic, this spirits away multiple forms of interdependence, power relations, and abuses of power, and the violence and injustices which poison human existence and against which in real life the appeal to reason is ineffective.
-François Flahault

punditman says...

Punditman read the other day that Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is flying off the shelves and this at first seemed to him counter-intuitive. Ayn Rand is the founder of the philosophy known as Objectivism. She was a Russian emigre who had witnessed and experienced first-hand, repression by the Bolsheviks. Her 1957 novel depicts persecuted, over-taxed, over-regulated capitalists, inventors and innovators as going on strike against society's socialistic unproductive leeches who are incapable of survival without these brilliant businessmen to lead them.

To refresh his hazy memory on this literary icon, Punditman embarked on a little research and by the end of it his head was ready to explode. Readers may find this link helpful in aquainting one's self with the Randian legacy. For all you lazy unproductive leeches who don't follow Punditman's links (sarcasm, ok?), here is a quote from Ayn Rand at the end of that article:

"Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen." “The invasion of an enslaved country," Rand maintains "is morally justified only when and if the conquerors establish a free social system."

She died in 1982. Would she have bought into the nonsense about bestowing freedom in Iraq, or would she have been smart enough to see through the statist-corporate lies?

Other research has revealed these choice quotes from Rand, hero to Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, Brangelina, other Hollywood gliterati, sports stars and celebs everywhere:

"I am for an absolute laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy."

"If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, harmony, and justice among men."

Rand also testified in 1947 as a "friendly witness" during the United States House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings during the McCarthy era.

Rand's ideas still hold sway because there are those who believe that the current crisis is a result of over-regulation, not greed. Mystery therefore solved as to why her ideas resonate with some.

Thus Rand, who opposed altruism, foreign aid and philanthropy, would have also been against saving failed capitalists. According to many of her online disciples, she would have railed against the Bush and Obama bailouts of failed enterprises. That is about the only appealing Randian notion Punditman could find in his web sojourns, although he arrives at it from a completely different direction than the objectivist. One article quoted an acqaintance of Ayn Rand as saying she was not a nice person. Probably not.

Clearly, Ayn Rand was a no-holds-barred ideologue who felt that people were basically greedy and selfish and that egoism and "reason" should rule. There are many "objectivists" out there who still hang on her every thought. Some even tried to set up a society in Costa Rica, but failed.

Perhaps instead, the Randinistas should just drink beer with some of Punditman's old Marxist-Leninist associates from University days, because ideologues of all stripes seem to have a certain common personality trait: bullheadedness. But Punditman will not be joining their ilk; he no longer sits in a Grad lounge somewhere listening to two sides feign dialectics as they talk past one another while espousing largely impractical philosophies.

Does this mean Punditman is happy? Now there's a philosophical question worth pursuing.

The Economic Crisis Isn't All Bad; It's a Chance for Us and Obama to Reimagine How We Live Our Lives

By Benjamin R. Barber, The Nation. Posted January 28, 2009.

Capitalism is on its knees and now we have a chance to create higher ideals beyond career climbing and mindless consumerism.

As America, recession mired, enters the hope-inspired age of Barack Obama, a silent but fateful struggle for the soul of capitalism is being waged. Can the market system finally be made to serve us? Or will we continue to serve it? George W. Bush argued that the crisis is "not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system." But while it is going too far to declare that capitalism is dead, George Soros is right when he says that "there is something fundamentally wrong" with the market theory that stands behind the global economy, a "defect" that is "inherent in the system."

The issue is not the death of capitalism but what kind of capitalism -- standing in which relationship to culture, to democracy and to life? President Obama's Rubinite economic team seems designed to reassure rather than innovate, its members set to fix what they broke. But even if they succeed, will they do more than merely restore capitalism to the status quo ante, resurrecting all the defects that led to the current debacle?

Read on...

This is a pretty upbeat article, but Peacenik isn't convinced that Capitalism can be rejuvenated in any form. It would be nice to think the world was civilized enough to work through and possibly benefit from the economic crisis. But too many people are going to lose too much that they have come to believe they are entitled to. The present system has been tainted by too much corruption. Too many Ponzi Schemes. Too many lies. But the author is right, something new is coming. The status quo is finished.