Debt: The first five thousand years

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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Elihu » Fri Sep 23, 2011 12:43 pm

The enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8 do not expressly authorize the federal government to run an obligatory pension program.

check:

review by the "politically" independent judicial body of the Supreme Court of the United States. And SCOTUS ruled that ... The Constitution does not prohibit such cooperation."
because he was "in" on the "cooperation". which party was he a member of? know why we kicked the russians' a$$? because all they could come up with was one party...(oh wait)...

without causing known or significant harm to those people or the states they live in
. do foreigners count?

They can be redeemed by the Social Security Administration for no other purpose.
let us pray redemption never fails....
But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
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Justified & Ancient

Postby IanEye » Sun Sep 25, 2011 9:02 am

*




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Was it a case of more money than sense that led Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, formerly of the KLF, to burn 1 million pounds sterling on the Isle of Jura in 1994? It’s a question neither man has fully answered.

After the event, both said they wouldn’t talk about it for twenty-three years. Since then, Drummond has spoken about it twice: once in 2000, when he said he was unrepentent; then in 2004, when he admitted to the BBC he regretted burning the cash.

The money allegedly came from royalties Drummond and Cauty made through the success of their band the KLF - the world’s most successful band in 1991. After retiring from music, Drummond and Cauty reunited the K Foundation, and established an award for the “worst artist of the year”, which they gave as a £40,000 prize to that year’s Turner Prize winner, Rachel Whiteread.

The following year, the pair carried out their biggest stunt - burning a million quid of their own money.

Was it real? Did they actually burn a million? Or, was the money bogus?




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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Saurian Tail » Tue Sep 27, 2011 11:48 pm

It seems to me that the most important contribution of Graber's article is to unwind the mythology surrounding the emergence of the use of the various forms of money. In fact, Graber says that we have got the story precisely in reverse. Trading my cows for your chickens is a myth that never happened. The inconvenience of this system did not cause the invention of "money" because humans were never so stupid to make this sort of system a central feature of transaction.

Rather we start with the very human idea of the balance sheet. You have something I need, you give it to me, and I have a social debt that I feel pressure to balance. Because this sort of social pressure only works well in very small groups, increasing population and social complexity led directly to systems of credit which Graber says emerged into history as completely existing systems! He then goes on to say that coinage is a system closely tied to violence and that trading cows for chickens only happens in the worst of times! Whoa!

With this more accurate historical map in hand, it becomes clear that the problem is not virtual money. Likewise, it becomes clear that the answer is not a "return" to the gold standard or some sort of system of direct trade. Rather, the problem is the lack of a proper social contract. The problem is "It is only in the current era ... that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors."

This leads to the rather empowering realization that virtual money is not evil. In fact, it appears that virtual money is a realistic substitute for social balance sheets that govern real human interactions. The reason it is so empowering is because somewhere in my brain there was the idea that the only way to remove evil from the system was to eliminate virtual money and "go back" to something more closely resembling direct exchange. How impossible is that? But now I see that historically there is nothing like that to "go back" to. The story is just wrong.

So if virtual money is not evil in and of itself ... it puts the evil part squarely in the lap of the sociopaths who have broken the social contract and dehumanized the system (and in turn, individual human sovereignty and dignity). It is not virtual money that is incompatible with individual freedom and creativity ... it is Empire that is incompatible with these things.
"Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him." -Carl Jung
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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Sep 28, 2011 12:58 am

Saurian Tail wrote:It seems to me that the most important contribution of Graber's article is to unwind the mythology surrounding the emergence of the use of the various forms of money. In fact, Graber says that we have got the story precisely in reverse. Trading my cows for your chickens is a myth that never happened. The inconvenience of this system did not cause the invention of "money" because humans were never so stupid to make this sort of system a central feature of transaction.

Rather we start with the very human idea of the balance sheet. You have something I need, you give it to me, and I have a social debt that I feel pressure to balance. Because this sort of social pressure only works well in very small groups, increasing population and social complexity led directly to systems of credit which Graber says emerged into history as completely existing systems! He then goes on to say that coinage is a system closely tied to violence and that trading cows for chickens only happens in the worst of times! Whoa!

With this more accurate historical map in hand, it becomes clear that the problem is not virtual money. Likewise, it becomes clear that the answer is not a "return" to the gold standard or some sort of system of direct trade. Rather, the problem is the lack of a proper social contract. The problem is "It is only in the current era ... that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors."

This leads to the rather empowering realization that virtual money is not evil. In fact, it appears that virtual money is a realistic substitute for social balance sheets that govern real human interactions. The reason it is so empowering is because somewhere in my brain there was the idea that the only way to remove evil from the system was to eliminate virtual money and "go back" to something more closely resembling direct exchange. How impossible is that? But now I see that historically there is nothing like that to "go back" to. The story is just wrong.

So if virtual money is not evil in and of itself ... it puts the evil part squarely in the lap of the sociopaths who have broken the social contract and dehumanized the system (and in turn, individual human sovereignty and dignity). It is not virtual money that is incompatible with individual freedom and creativity ... it is Empire that is incompatible with these things.


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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Elihu » Wed Sep 28, 2011 10:39 am

A good reputation is more valuable than costly perfume. and the day you die is better than the day you are born. Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties. After all, everyone dies - so the living should take this to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for sadness has a refining influence on us. A wise person thinks a lot about death, while a fool thinks only about having a good time. Better to be criticized by a wise person than to be praised by a fool. A fool's laughter is quickly gone, like thorns crackling in a fire. This also is meaningless. Extortion turns wise people into fools, and bribes corrupt the heart. Finishing is better than starting. Patience is better than pride. Control your temper, for anger labels you a fool. Don't long for "the good old days." This is not wise. Wisdom is even better when you have money. Both are a benefit as you go through life. Wisdom and money can get you almost anything, but only wisdom can save your life. ECCLESIASTES 7 1-12
Last edited by Elihu on Wed Sep 28, 2011 3:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Wed Sep 28, 2011 2:58 pm

"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Sounder » Fri Oct 07, 2011 2:07 pm

This if from the comments section of the Daily Bail, here: http://dailybail.com/home/former-ceo-jo ... monst.html


People realize that four Wall Street investment banks issue 95% of all derivatives contracts like collateralized debt obligations. That these banks are deemed "too big to fail" and that for every contract there are two parties to the contract. The money to pay these contracts when the economy retracts comes not from the investment banks or investors but from taxpayers. By allowing them to issue unlimited derivatives AND backing the payment of those contracts with the American taxpayer these banks have effectively CAPTURED THE MONETARY SYSTEM. All money printed from now on will only be used to pay these contracts every time we hit a recession. The economy will never expand again, there will never be new jobs until the economy collapses during a recession and all money printed is used to pay derivative contract holders or the banks will fail. This is it, there is no reason to bother trying to do anything anymore, one class of Americans in one industry will now get everything because they will receive all the money printed from now on.

Think about it.

Oct 7, 2011 at 8:15 AM | Dave Mowers

This interests me because it points out a basic truth about bankers. They make money by selling debt and if debt is guarantied to be paid by a third party then there are no limits or inhibitions to their selling of the debt. Back in the seventies when Chase was awash in Arab petro dollars, they realized the lucrative promise in selling debt to South American tin horn dictators. Their tax abatement's, income stream and adjustable rates insured a payoff long before the debt was actually paid. When they were finally paid it was via the U.S. taxpayer and land grants from the victim country to the Nature Conservancy. (With the deeds held by Rockefeller, natch.)

It is a sad fact that Power resides in the ability to make other people pay the debts that in a just world would remain with the issuer.

This nut will not be cracked within the context of any vertically oriented authority distribution system.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Elihu » Fri Oct 07, 2011 2:40 pm

Sounder wrote:This interests me because it points out a basic truth about bankers. They make money by selling debt and if debt is guarantied to be paid by a third party then there are no limits or inhibitions to their selling of the debt.


yo.

It is a sad fact that Power resides in the ability to make other people pay the debts that in a just world would remain with the issuer.
This nut will not be cracked within the context of any vertically oriented authority distribution system.


x-ref the gold thread.
But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Sounder » Fri Oct 07, 2011 5:52 pm

Elihu, I am not up on the gold thread but, to be short, being as gold seems to be largely in the hands of the 1%' Er's, it seems that a 'gold' standard may be a fall back position to economic collapse.

Only my opinion of course.
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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Elihu » Thu Oct 13, 2011 4:05 pm

Sounder wrote:being as gold seems to be largely in the hands of the 1%' Er's,
the existence of a large roughly quantifiable private hoard is inferred.
it seems that a 'gold' standard may be a fall back position to economic collapse
the only fall-back position there is and the collapse part a certainty if the growth in that hoard is not reversed ie, voluntarily dis-hoarded. hence gold (and silver) as money by putting them into circulation. the us gov is still the legal custodian of 8300 tons of the people's gold. it's all on the books. it could be done. and it would begin the process of liquidating and stabilizing all fiat debt in the world today. in an orderly (if not painless) fashion. and it would likely end the wars too.

Only my opinion of course.
ditto and appreciated.
But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Nov 26, 2011 12:45 am

.

I've learned that Graeber was not only involved in the pre-planning for OWS but also coined its powerful if partly misleading slogan, "We are the 99 percent." When he spoke on the first day, Sept. 17th -- when what has already happened seemed like a slim hope, and I doubted the protest would be allowed to last one night -- he was asked for his own "one demand," and said: debt jubilee.

Today I discovered a Bernard Harcourt, who makes some important related points about the myth of the free market, so I've decided to stick him here and maybe revive this thread for any who haven't read it. (read it!) The first bit, from Harper's, an interview about his book critiquing the Chicago School (as a Chicago professor), was published 11 days before OWS started. He draws out the paradox of their philosophy with regard to the state (useless in economics, necessary for repression outside the market) and resolves what it really means. The second piece, published a month later, is as explicit and knowledgeable an endorsement of OWS as you will find in the NYT, in the usually little-read column they reserve for philosophers.


http://harpers.org/archive/2011/09/hbc-90008208

September 8, 9:53 AM, 2011

“The Illusion of Free Markets”: Six Questions for Bernard Harcourt

By Scott Horton

University of Chicago professor Bernard Harcourt is a student, but not a follower, of the Chicago School, an academic movement that has had a profound effect on America in the period since World War II, pushing the country aggressively toward an embrace of neoliberal ideas about economics and politics. In his latest book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order, Harcourt probes deeply into some of the contradictions inherent in the thought of the Chicago School, and exposes a striking historical parallel to its work. I put six questions to Harcourt about his new book:

1. Your book builds off an intriguing study of the eighteenth-century French Physiocrats — François Quesnay, Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière, and others — in which you suggest that their theories of economics closely parallel what we have come to think of as the Chicago School. What exactly are the parallels, and how did this idea come about?

Image
Bernard Harcourt

It’s the messianic belief in natural order in economics — in spontaneous order, as Friedrich von Hayek called it — or today in the efficiency of free markets, conjoined with a faith in strong government to deal with those who are outside the natural order — who are out-of-order, or disorderly. It’s the combination of those two paradoxical tenets — of government incompetence when it comes to regulating the economy and government competence when it comes to policing and punishing — that links these thinkers. Undoubtedly there were others before the Physiocrats who brought the idea of natural order into economics — Pierre de Boisguilbert, for instance, or the Scholastics with their notion of “just price.” But Quesnay and his disciples, especially Le Mercier, did so with a doggedness, obsession, and passion that would change the way people thought — a doggedness and obsession, I should add, that resembles the persistence of Hayek or Richard Epstein. It’s that maniacal, quasi-religious faith in natural orderliness or today market efficiency that ties these thinkers together.

For both the Physiocrats and the Chicago School, there is an orderly inside but also an outside — and for those outside, there is the iron fist of the state. The Physiocrats called for “legal despotism.” “The only object of man-made, positive law is to punish severely men whose passions are out-of-order,” Quesnay wrote in 1767. These two paradoxical tenets were joined together for the Physiocrats, and you can hear it well, again, in Quesnay: “All that is required for the prosperity of a nation is to allow men to freely cultivate the earth to the greatest possible success, and to preserve society from thieves and rogues [“des voleurs et des méchants”]. The first task is governed by self-interest; the second is ensured by civil government.” Looking back at Quesnay’s writings offers us a kind of recul— a French term for stepping back to see better — on how the idea of natural order would evolve into the invisible hand and laissez-faire, later into spontaneous order, and ultimately into a theory of free markets. By the same token, it lets us see better how the idea of legal despotism evolved into a theory of the state as “night watchman,” into Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison, and finally into Richard Posner’s argument that the “major function of criminal law in a capitalist society” is to prevent “market-bypassing.” To be sure, the language and rhetoric has metamorphosed over two centuries. But the logic — the structure of the argument — is the same.

Now, how it all came about, that’s a fascinating story that journeys through Hayek and natural law for the libertarians such as Richard Epstein, and through Bentham for the utilitarians and the pragmatists, such as Becker and Posner. They all came together thanks to the writings of my dear colleague Ronald Coase (who repeatedly scolds me that he was never part of the Chicago School). But to understand all this, I think I’ll refer you to the long chapter on the Chicago School in the book itself.

2. You suggest that members of the Chicago School, particularly Richard Posner, have drawn on the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher-statesman Cesare Beccaria in a way that falls short of fully understanding him. What did they miss?

They missed his economics! It’s not entirely surprising, given that Beccaria’s economic writings have been forgotten by history and never translated into English. But Beccaria was primarily an economist. Joseph Schumpeter referred to him as the “Italian Adam Smith” — but in importance only. His economics, as you will see, were radically different than Smith’s.

Beccaria was an adamant regulator, not just of proportional punishment, but of commerce and trade as well. The same year he published On Crimes and Punishments, he was computing algorithms for the optimal tariffs to augment the wealth of the prince. There was a perfect consistency in Beccaria’s thought that led him from his cameralist beliefs to a regulatory conception of criminal law, and that allowed him to see that markets are policed in the same way that we police the streets. He would teach his economics students about policing and finance in the same breath.

Becker and Posner drew heavily on Beccaria’s punishment writings. In fact, Beccaria had articulated most of the important law-and-economics insights in the criminal area by 1764 (from marginal deterrence, to the trade-off between length and certainty of punishment, to the use of mathematical algorithms to solve criminal law questions). But they missed his cameralism and mercantilism, and as a result embraced an internal inconsistency: a strict, Beccarian regulatory framework for criminal law, but a hands-off approach to free-market exchange.

3. You’ve leveled sharp criticism at some of your most prominent colleagues in Hyde Park. How has this affected your relationship with them?

One of the most remarkable things about the University of Chicago is that we genuinely prize ideas and criticism. Hyde Park is truly extraordinary for the intensity of its life of the mind. We dish it out hard — harder than anywhere else I’ve been. But with that comes a certain mutual understanding and respect: we want to hear each other’s best criticism, and we value it.

I know for myself that my work has consistently sharpened in Hyde Park as I’ve had to respond to my colleagues’ criticisms — and let me tell you, they have been pointed. The presentation of my Chicago School chapter at the University of Chicago faculty workshop was at times explosive. But I value that tremendously and believe that Becker, Epstein, Posner, and others value it as well.

As for what they say about me among themselves, well, I’ve no idea! But frankly, that’s secondary. Getting it right matters more. Each year our entering class at the University of Chicago adopts a motto. My favorite one goes, “It’s all fine and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?” That’s by far the most important — getting it right, both in practice and in theory.

4. You show us that Le Mercier talked about limiting the role of government in the marketplace, yet when he was dispatched to govern Martinique he proved heavy-handed. Likewise you seem to think that libertarians, especially right libertarians, talk a good game about small government, but that if they got their hands on the rudder they might be harsh rulers. What’s your evidence for this proposition?

True-blooded right libertarians have never gotten their hands on the rudder in part because they eschew the kind of political compromise that’s required for electoral politics. Thinkers like Hayek, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and for that matter Richard Epstein have had extraordinary intellectual influence, but have never been given the opportunity to steer the ship. To predict what would happen, you’d have to look at someone like Ronald Reagan, the rhetorical champion of small government — which would confirm my point. President Reagan was the great initiator of our national debt crisis. He tripled the debt, increasing it by $1.9 trillion, and set us on our present course of massive deficits. More to the point, he oversaw the prison buildup and the war on drugs. He and his attorney general, Edwin Meese, put us on the path to mass incarceration. Reagan spoke of limited government, but put into practice that paradoxical — and expensive — alchemy of purported privatization and the police state.

5. You associate neoliberal concepts with the staggering rise of the U.S. prison industry. Are you arguing that the move toward a privatized prison industry has unleashed market forces that drive an expanding business — as we saw recently when prison-services corporations were found to be behind lobbying efforts for harsh measures to incarcerate immigrants who are “out of status” — or do you have a different take on the issue?

My argument, as I’ve clarified over at Balkinization, is not that privatization or other neoliberal policies are responsible for mass incarceration (though they have undoubtedly contributed). In the book, I demonstrate instead how neoliberal ideas were born — and remain today — joined at the hip with the Big Brother state. The idea that the government is incompetent except when it comes to policing has facilitated the slide to mass incarceration. That mindset makes it difficult to pass economic regulation, but easy to multiply criminal offenses and increase the severity of punishment. Or, as Posner has written, to send only the poor to prison (the wealthy can be fined) and provide only “a bare-bones system” of indigent defense (anything more would be inefficient).

I focus on the role of ideas not to disparage the importance of policies like the war on drugs, truth-in-sentencing, or law-and-order politics, but to refocus attention on how theories shape our practices. That paradoxical way of thinking has facilitated penal excess, certainly during the past forty years of neoliberalism, but also when the penitentiary was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century — a period historians now refer to as “the Market Revolution.” Periods of strong belief in free-market ideals have gone hand in hand with the birth and escalation of the prison system.

6. In the latest rounds of discussion about raising the federal debt ceiling there was a remarkable resistance to accepting the costs that flow from simultaneously waging three wars and increasing defense spending, even as Republicans chanted a small-government, if not a no-government, mantra. Doesn’t this point to an inherently untenable contradiction in Chicago School thought, at least as it is interpreted by political leaders?

Yes, you see where I’m headed! In another book, I will need to extend the analysis to national security — the other domain where big government is perceived as inherently legitimate and competent. I’ve been tracking defense spending over at Balkinization, and it is staggering. Defense represents about 20 percent of the federal budget and 50 percent of the discretionary portion of the budget. The United States is spending more on defense than we’ve spent since World War II, and now accounts for 50 percent of the world’s military expenditures. Defense spending is one of our largest stimulus programs, yet it is never discussed in those terms. That’s the product of that paradoxical opposition between natural economic order and government competence in the realm of security. Prisons and armies, domestic tranquility and national security — you are right, sadly, the two play a similar role in American public discourse.



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October 13, 2011, 4:15 pm

Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Political Disobedience’

By BERNARD E. HARCOURT


Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.
With the Cold War decades behind us, a new paradigm of political resistance has emerged.

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.

When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.

And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ . . . What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.

One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.

This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”
Lucas Jackson/ReutersA protest march through the financial district of New York on October 12.

The central point, of course, is that it takes both a big government and the illusion of free markets to achieve such massive redistribution. If you take a look at the tattered posters at Zuccotti Park, you’ll see that many are intensely anti-government and just as many stridently oppose big government.

Occupy Wall Street is surely right in holding the old ideologies to account. The truth is, as I’ve argued in a book, “The Illusion of Free Markets,” and recently in Harper’s magazine, there never have been and never will be free markets. All markets are man-made, constructed, regulated and administered by often-complex mechanisms that necessarily distribute wealth — that inevitably distribute wealth — in large and small ways. Tax incentives for domestic oil production and lower capital gains rates are obvious illustrations. But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets. The mere existence of a privately chartered organization like the Chicago Board of Trade, which required the state of Illinois to criminalize and forcibly shut down competing bucket shops, has huge redistributional wealth effects on farmers and consumers — and, of course, bankers, brokers and dealers.

The semantic games — the talk of deregulation rather than reregulation — would have been entertaining had it not been for their devastating effects. As the sociologist Douglas Massey minutely documents in “Categorically Unequal,” after decades of improvement, the income gap between the richest and poorest in this country has dramatically widened since the 1970s, resulting in what social scientists now refer to as U-curve of increasing inequality. Recent reports from the Census Bureau confirm this, with new evidence last month that “the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.” Today, 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics in this country — more than 1 in 4 — live in poverty; and 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated.

It’s these outcomes that have pushed so many in New York City and across the nation to this new form of political disobedience. It’s a new type of resistance to politics tout court — to making policy demands, to playing the political games, to partisan politics, to old-fashioned ideology. It bears a similarity to what Michel Foucault referred to as “critique:” resistance to being governed “in this manner,” or what he dubbed “voluntary insubordination” or, better yet, as a word play on the famous expression of Etienne de la Boétie, “voluntary unservitude.”

If this concept of “political disobedience” is accurate and resonates, then Occupy Wall Street will continue to resist making a handful of policy demands because it would have little effect on the constant regulations that redistribute wealth to the top. The movement will also continue to resist Cold War ideologies from Friedrich Hayek to Maoism — as well as their pale imitations and sequels, from the Chicago School 2.0 to Alain Badiou and Zizek’s attempt to shoehorn all political resistance into a “communist hypothesis.”

On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.

In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.

Bernard E. Harcourt is chair of the political science department and professor of law at The University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently “The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order.”

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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Allegro » Sun Jan 01, 2012 2:51 am

.
Using Debt to Crush Democracy:
How Financiers Are Waging Warfare Against Nations

Recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies and crushing national self-determination.
— Michael Hudson's Blog | December 6, 2011 | This article appeared in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011.

    Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

    Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by canceling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

    Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts [1]. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

    By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.

    This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

    Near Eastern rulers proclaimed Clean Slates to preserve economic balance

    Charging interest on advances of goods or money was not originally intended to polarize economies. First administered early in the third millennium BC as a contractual arrangement by Sumer’s temples and palaces with merchants and entrepreneurs who typically worked in the royal bureaucracy, interest at 20% (doubling the principal in five years) was supposed to approximate a fair share of the returns from long-distance trade or leasing land and other public assets such as workshops, boats and ale houses.

    As the practice was privatized by royal collectors of user fees and rents, “divine kingship” protected agrarian debtors. Hammurabi’s laws (c. 1750 BC) cancelled their debts in times of flood or drought. All the rulers of his Babylonian dynasty began their first full year on the throne by cancelling agrarian debts so as to clear out payment arrears by proclaiming a clean slate. Bondservants, land or crop rights and other pledges were returned to the debtors to “restore order” in an idealized “original” condition of balance. This practice survived in the Jubilee Year of Mosaic Law in Leviticus 25.

    The logic was clear enough. Ancient societies needed to field armies to defend their land, and this required liberating indebted citizens from bondage. Hammurabi’s laws protected charioteers and other fighters from being reduced to debt bondage, and blocked creditors from taking the crops of tenants on royal and other public lands and on communal land that owed manpower and military service to the palace.

    [FIVE MORE PAGES.]
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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Thu Jan 05, 2012 8:57 pm

Weather Ballons posted this in the video-links only thread, and I like it so much that I'm cross-posting it here.





"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

OWS Photo Essay

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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby eyeno » Thu Jan 05, 2012 9:35 pm

Allegro wrote:.
Using Debt to Crush Democracy:
How Financiers Are Waging Warfare Against Nations

Recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies and crushing national self-determination.
— Michael Hudson's Blog | December 6, 2011 | This article appeared in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011.

    Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.


    [FIVE MORE PAGES.]



^^^^Thanx for that allegro. I read all of it. Very good reading.
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Re: Debt: The first five thousand years

Postby Sounder » Fri Jan 06, 2012 7:23 pm

How come no one wants to buy my bad debts?


http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28426

Bob Chapman wrote…
The ECB last week began the process of making loans worth $640 billion to 523 banks. For collateral they’ll accept anything including what is known as toxic waste, virtually worthless bonds containing mortgages and the bonds of near bankrupt nations. In essence the ECB is doing what the Fed has been doing and calling it something else. As you can see almost all bankers and politicians are deceivers. This is a long-term financing operation, LTRO, which directly funds, whereas the Fed funds via market intervention.

The ECB expects borrowers to bolster their balance sheets and to buy Europe’s version of toxic waste, sovereign debt, out of the market. We do not expect the latter to perform as perceived, even though with little risk a bank can buy Spanish and Italian bonds and net 4%. At the end of February more loans will be offered to repeat the process. What you are seeing is the leveraging of the purchase of foreign toxic waste with each succeeding auction. This is an end run on quantitative easing. It could easily hand banks a net 30% return for doing virtually nothing, at the same time bail the banks out, these very same banks that caused all these problems in the first place. It is called double your money in three years. A gift from euro zone taxpayers. This also shows you how easy it was to end run German taxpayers that wanted all of this stopped. This is an extremely important point. It shows you how little the bureaucrats in the EU and euro zone think of the constituents in any of the member countries.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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