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What's Never Grappled With ...
We're heading for economic dictatorship. The whole of the West is falling into the economic black hole of permanent no-growth ... Forget about that dead parrot of a question – should we join the eurozone? The eurozone has officially joined us in a newly emerging international organisation: we are all now members of the Permanent No-growth Club. And the United States has just re-elected a president who seems determined to sign up too. No government in what used to be called "the free world" seems prepared to take the steps that can stop this inexorable decline. They are all busily telling their electorates that austerity is for other people (France), or that the piddling attempts they have made at it will solve the problem (Britain), or that taxing "the rich" will make it unnecessary for government to cut back its own spending (America). – Janet Daley/UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: Governments have got to stop fooling the people.
Free-Market Analysis: Janet Daley, a moderately conservative columnist for the UK Telegraph, has written a powerful article on the way Western governments are trending.
There is only one thing wrong with the article, a fundamental flaw, in our view. But first, let's review the article itself.
Daley points out that "recession" is the primary situation of Western countries currently. "This is the future: the long, meandering 'zig-zag' recovery to which the politicians and heads of central banks allude is just a euphemism for the end of economic life as we have known it."
She questions whether Western economies are in their second or third recession and points out that some people – leftists especially – will enjoy living "with that fixed, unchanging pie which must be divided up 'fairly' if social justice is to be achieved."
From her point of view, this is no way for Western economies to operate. The pie, she writes, ought to be getting bigger rather than smaller. But that's not the way the West is trending. Here's some more:
The only decisions to be made will involve how that given, unalterable sum is to be shared out – and those judgments will, of course, have to be made by the state since there will be no dynamic economic force outside of government to enter the equation. Wealth distribution will be the principal – virtually the only – significant function of political life. Is this Left-wing heaven?
... The total absence of economic growth would mean that the limitations on that distribution would be so severe as to require draconian legal enforcement: rationing, limits on the amount of currency that can be taken abroad, import restrictions and the kinds of penalties for economic crimes (undercutting, or "black market" selling practices) which have been unknown in the West since the end of the Second World War.
In this dystopian future there would have to be permanent austerity programmes. This would not only mean cutting government spending, which is what "austerity" means now, but the real kind: genuine falls in the standard of living of most working people, caused not just by frozen wages and the collapse in the value of savings (due to repeated bouts of money-printing), but also by the shortages of goods that will result from lack of investment and business expansion, not to mention the absence of cheaper goods from abroad due to import controls.
And it is not just day-to-day life that would be affected by the absence of growth in the economy. In the longer term, we can say good-bye to the technological innovations which have been spurred by competitive entrepreneurial activity, the medical advances funded by investment which an expanding economy can afford, and most poignantly perhaps, the social mobility that is made possible by increasing the reach of prosperity so that it includes ever-growing numbers of people.
In short, almost everything we have come to understand as progress. Farewell to all that. But this is not the end of it. When the economy of a country is dead, and its political life is consumed by artificial mechanisms of forced distribution, its wealth does not remain static: it actually contracts and diminishes in value.
This is a pretty good summary of what "progress" means these days – technological progress and increasing entrepreneurial activity – though it can be argued that such a definition contains its own questionable elements.
She goes on to discuss the way Germany handled its own no-growth dilemma when it reunified with East Germany and underwrote the failing East German currency. The result almost bankrupted Germany, she writes, but who will provide additional resources to the West as it "falls into the economic black hole of permanent no-growth"?
And why does she speak of "economic dictatorship"? Because when growth is static, wealth eventually declines, leading to political solutions to economic shrinkage. "Austerity," in other words.
In this vision of a future, resources will not suffice for society and, therefore, authoritarianism will be brought to bear. Resources – not growing – will be divvied up forcibly. "Democratic socialism with its 'soft redistribution' and exponential growth of government spending will have paved the way for the hard redistribution of diminished resources under economic dictatorship."
This is a good analysis of the repercussions of industrial stagnation but as we indicated at the beginning of this article, Ms. Daley's article contains a fundamental flaw.
The flaw is causation. As with many conservative or free-market arguments, the one made here does not explain how we've gotten to this place. Daley wants to blame it on "government" but that's a pretty simplistic answer.
Government is actually a collection of people and government policy is usually determined – even in modern, Western countries – by groups of people operating BEHIND government: Kingmakers they used to be called.
These days we call them the power elite and in our view they practice a kind of directed history. The current elites are obviously globalist in nature and wish to create internationalism.
Part of the agenda seems to be a deliberate reduction in the living standards of the West to facilitate world government. If this is the case, then all the reasoned arguments about austerity, entrepreneurship, etc. will not have an impact on the course of the West. This is being decided in the circles of the powerful, not via democratic political actions.
Conclusion: Modern central banking societies are artificial creations and thus it seems safe to observe that their booms and busts are at least predictable. In other words, what is happening today is taking place via design. And that's something Ms. Daley has yet to grapple with.
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Posted by Danny B on 11/20/12 10:05 PM
@Speedy, excellent posts. Speaking of technology from awful countries, have you look at Scenar and Cosmodic from Russia?
Click to view link
They are offshoots from the work of Antione Priore and Royal Rife. Supposed to cure anything.
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Posted by Danny B on 11/20/12 10:05 PM
@Speedy, excellent posts. Speaking of technology from awful countries, have you look at Scenar and Cosmodic from Russia?
Click to view link
They are offshoots from the work of Antione Priore and Royal Rife. Supposed to cure anything.
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Posted by speedygonzales on 11/20/12 09:03 AM
John F. Kennedy and All Those "isms"
Although nowadays there are ideological capitalists - people who support a set of ideas about the economic benefits and importance of "free markets" - the term capitalism was first used to describe a system of private investment and industry with little governmental control which emerged, without an ideological basis, in the Netherlands and Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. A "capitalist" was an individual who invested money (or capital) in a given business venture.
Click to view link
http://www.whale.to/b/allen_b1.html
Fascist! A word that is thrown around all too commonly in today's political debates and partisan quibbling that is common among the cable 'news networks.' A flip of the channel on any night to CNN, FOX, Headline News or other similar programs reveals time slots devoted to the latest celebrity scandal or any other unimportant story. So what defines a fascist society? I believe that in fact, the fascist structure of government is what enables these attributes to manifest themselves. That fascist structure of government begins with the co-option of corporate and government interests becoming one in the same. This is the primary transition in the nature and operation of the government apparatus. Corporate power is not so much as protected; it is one in the same as government power. Hence the government is an extension of the corporate powerbrokers in society.
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A democracy is a system of government in which not only the voice of the people is heard but the interests and well being of all citizens are paramount. The existence of classes poses a serious problem for democracy, since classes presuppose contradictory interests in different parts (the different classes) of the society. But capitalist society is premised on class-diametrically opposed interests for owners and workers, the exploitation of labor for investors'/employers' profit. The agenda of capitalism is to downgrade skilled workers, create a willingness to work for lower wages, deny sustenance to single parents, and so forth. That is a remarkably anti-democratic agenda.
A fully functioning political democracy could not tolerate a capitalist economy. The power elite knows this, which is why the U.S. government has tried to subvert democracy in every country in which U.S. capitalists have tried to exploit resources and labor. A country in which the people as a whole actually make decisions about their common destiny would, of course, not permit such exploitation. "Democracy subverts capitalism": it works on diametrically opposed principles of the value of human life and the worth of collective decision-making. The power elites does not have to take the same extreme steps in the U.S. because, as Domhoff explains throughout his book, and Parenti as well, it has already taken control of the "democratic" forms of the political system and has reduced political culture to mere "consumption" of the ideology of individualism and consumerism.
The corporations which form the foundations of its economy function more like autocracies. Main point is that these two models - capitalism and democracy - seem innately opposed to each other, and that a society couldn't at heart be both. This could explain a lot of the corporate bribing and electoral fraud that goes on in the US and other purported democracies; the drive for supremacy that capitalism creates would effectively undermine any true efforts at democracy.
Doctrines of capitalism are in laissez-faire which was applied during Potato Famine in Ireland or India Mutiny- see book The Late Victorian Holocaust. For democracy it is Austrian School.
Yep. Pravda and Izvestia were just naive painters compare to PBS and NPR art of propaganda in Salvator Dali art.
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Posted by speedygonzales on 11/20/12 08:41 AM
Here we go: Dutch Minister of Safety and Justice asked the Parliament of the Netherlands to pass a law allowing police to obtain warrants to do the following:
Install malware on targets' private computers
Conduct remote searches on local and foreign computers to collect evidence
Delete data on remote computers in order to disable the accessibility of 'illegal files.'
Requesting assistance from the country where the targetted computer(s) were located would be "preferred" but possibly not required. These proposals are alarming, could have extremely problematic consequences, and may violate European human rights law. As if that wasn't troubling enough, lurking in this letter was a request for something more extreme:
If the location of a particular computer cannot be determined, the Dutch police would be able to break in without ever contacting foreign authorities.
What would cause the 'location of a particular computer' not to be determinable?
Click to view link
"This whiteboard animation shows what happened when Hitler lied to get elected and people don't care or pay attention to the lies of their leaders, until they do care... " Check this out
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Of the three Nazi concentration camps located near the town of Auschwitz, the Auschwitz III camp, also known as Monowitz, was the most important to the Nazis because of its factories which were essential to the German war effort. The Monowitz industrial complex was built by Auschwitz inmates, beginning in April 1941. Initially, the workers walked from the Auschwitz main camp to the building site, a distance of 4 - 6 kilometers each way.
Click to view link
Always remember that industrial park of IG Farben in Auschwitz was build with Warburg's Deutsche bank money. Half on the board of directors of IG Farben were from Federal Reserve.
Click to view link
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Edwin Black:"IBM and the Holocaust" book is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
EXTRAORDINARY. A fascinating book creating controversy all across the country. Edwin Black applied his established investigative journalism techniques to history. The result is an extraordinary book: The Transfer Agreement.Bill Kurtis,CBS Morning News
A tragedy such as World War I, with all its horrors, was destined by the very nature of its vast dimensions toproduce occasional good results along with an infinitely greater number of disastrous situations. So world needs more of this:
Click to view link
Much has already been written about Roosevelt's campaign of deception and outright lies in getting the United States to intervene in the Second World War prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Click to view link
"I hope I have made it clear why you can say bye-bye to the technologies that actually benefit the people. You can still count on the technologies that are simplistic in nature, such as those developed by Fascist Germany or Soviet Union. The technologies of death and destruction - this is the only kind of technologies the governments without free markets can provide for you."
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Posted by dave jr on 11/20/12 08:12 AM
People and business can survive; even thrive in a "no growth" environment. What absolutely can NOT survive with out growth are ponzi schemes and in fact, fiat, fractional reserve central banking. The "money" supply itself requires constant growth to reap a portion for the masters.
So we see the elite now grappling with possible solutions. THEIR solutions. Carbon tax? A reset by war and collapse? Nationalized banking by police state?
Either way, we shouldn't be shy. Redistribution is confiscation, outright theft, criminal and embarrassingly shameful no matter how pretty the pathetic trolls of the elite wrap it.
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Posted by Danny B on 11/19/12 11:55 PM
@ Mava, I'm not sure what country you live in but, the free market is still alive and well in America. Portions of the market are highly distorted but, that doesn't mean that all is lost. There are $ trillions in capital looking for a "home". Money is pouring into junk bonds because yield is gone,, due to the artificially low interest rates
Click to view link
"this is the only kind of technologies the governments without free markets can provide for you."
Also untrue. Here are 3 technologies sponsored by DARPA;
Click to view link
Click to view link
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Here is a list of DARPA projects.
Click to view link
ALL of them have great potential for spin-offs.
It's true that organized crime has taken over banks, and therefore GOV.
Click to view link
That doesn't mean that investors can't move their capital.
True, their capital is always at risk. That's just the risk of having criminals in charge.
"Harry Reid already has a bill on his desk which requires that all pension plans (except for the unions, of course), 401Ks, and IRAs be converted to annuities from the government. This pile of cash represents the largest pile of readily available cash in the world right now"
Click to view link
So, while the West is circling the drain, that doesn't mean that progress in technology will come to a stop.
Rockefeller said that the internet shouldn't have been invented.
Click to view link
But, IT WAS. There isn't yet total control. Modern communication makes control ever more difficult. People still invest and make a profit. It's just more difficult.
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Posted by mava on 11/19/12 09:25 PM
Danny B,
Technology does not matter.
Or, rather, without free market, the technology not only cannot be applied, it can't even be developed.
This is because the free markets determine which technology is to be funded for the development, and where it is to be applied as well.
Without free market, there is no answer to those questions. In other words, we do know the answer, but only collectively, all the people together. No, you can not, say, make a referendum and find out, because we are people, and hence, we lie.
We lie to ourselves most of the time, and we lie to others all the time. The only answer that can be considered as true is the one tested through and through. But, we can not afford testing, because only few errors will bankrupt us all. There are to many variants to even guess which technologies should be tested.
This is why we test new technologies by having private investors to fund projects with their own money, but only those projects that they think are worthy. When they fail, they lose their money. When they win, we all benefit - the investors by the profits, and all of us by the emergence of new technologies.
I hope I have made it clear why you can say bye-bye to the technologies that actually benefit the people. You can still count on the technologies that are simplistic in nature, such as those developed by Fascist Germany or Soviet Union. The technologies of death and destruction - this is the only kind of technologies the governments without free markets can provide for you.
This time might be a boon for the scientist. They naturally gravitate to the government, as the government funds anything, not just the technologies that promote better level of life. The government also fails in most of the projects, and there is a cost of that failing - the general level of life going down, - but at least as the scientist are concerned, - their paycheck is solid.
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Posted by Danny B on 11/19/12 07:15 PM
It's always amusing when non-technical people try to make predictions for the future.
Our world is controlled by technology. It changes so fast the Encyclopedia Britannica gave up on printing a paper edition. Still, there's always a fool willing to give an opinion based on ignorance.
Nano technology is going to make our present world obsolete.
Click to view link
It will completely change our energy picture.
Click to view link
It will allow us to do more with less. It is difficult to say when these new technologies will be allowed to flourish.
In the near term, we will also benefit from "free" energy. It won't be free, of course but, it will be very cheap. Everybody is working on alternatives to carbon energy.
One company in particular is very interesting. Terawatt. One of the principals is;
Judge William Webster
(Professional Consultant and Strategic Advisor)
Milbank Tweed Hadley & Mc Cloy
Background:
Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
A few of the others are very heavyweight too.
They have posted graphs of their testing results that show impressive torque gains.
Click to view link
One unit in and three units out. Varies with rpm.
You can bet that Webster has a few secrets hidden away.
There are numerous other technologies that are emergent. It remains to be see when they will be implemented.
The PTB are currently executing a forced moult on the world. After the credit collapse, we will see what emerges.
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Posted by Spectator on 11/19/12 05:21 PM
Actually, her whole article "grappled with it". I am mystified by your criticism.
Reply from The Daily Bell
She grappled with the directed history of the power elite? Where?
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Posted by rossbcan on 11/19/12 03:16 PM
All of us, elites included are and will continue to grapple with the real constarints of the grim reaper of "Mathematics of Rule":
Click to view link
Rulers, by nature, rule to their advantage. When all others are disadvantaged, where do you think they will forcefully turn to for resources? Seems that, if rulers want their cake and to eat it too, it is "population reduction" for the rest of us, before we eat them.
If we must triage, lets not be fools fighting with each other (self-triage). Let's point our wrath at those whom have and continue to earn it. Get the causation and the identity of the choosers correct.
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Posted by Saffire29979 on 11/19/12 02:10 PM
Hey DB, here's a particularly juicy article for you to sink your teeth into:
Click to view link
The World Bank warns climate change could devastate the global economy.
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Posted by 1776 on 11/19/12 01:46 PM
Published on Oct 26, 2012 This whiteboard animation shows what happened when Hitler lied to get elected and people don't care or pay attention to the lies of their leaders, until they do care... and at that point, it is too late. Parts of this video are narrated by a man who served as a German soldier and a German woman who lived right by the railroad tracks the cattle trains ran on that carried the Jews to their deaths.
How Do You Kill 11 Million People?
Click to view link
