Good Evening Friends,

The various virtual and disaster mechanisms of capitalism,* we've been discussing, taken together, are known by different names by different people to describe the same, essentially vampiric or parasitical process. Noam Chomsky calls these things the theory of "really existing markets." Michael Parenti calls this the "third worldization of everywhere." Michel Chussudovsky calls this "The Globalization of Poverty." David Harvey calls this "accumulation by dispossession."

I would argue that this is the true meaning of reincarnation, along with Buddhism. We would call this process something like "immortality-seeking through the misappropriation of life-force."

It is right that we equate money with life-force. Our use of money comes to us through our worship of the gods. I would reccommend a great book to you about this by a man called Tad Crawford. The Secret Life of Money: Teaching Tales of Spending, Receiving, Saving, and Owing. published by G.P. Putnam's Sons. New York, 1994. He used myths, tales, and fables to help us - as it says in the inside jacket cover of the book - "free ourselves from this cultural obsession... by learning where money's deeper value lies in the world and in our psyches."

I mention this because I want to suggest that there is also a generational dynamic to virtual and disaster**** mechanisms. By that I mean that present generations feel the need to "fill the shoes" of the previous generation. Crawford gives an analysis of the film For Richer, For Poorer. Basically the father worked hard and made a fortune, which supported his wife and son in lavish style (pp. 123-126). The father uses different ways to try to get his son to become a success in his own right and not to be so dependent on him.

As Crawford points out: "The next generation inherits the money, but often lacks the ambition. It is difficult to find a reason to strive in the world. The wealth will take care of material needs, and the achievements of the parent can seldom be matched (p.124)."

I want to suggest that the various mechanisms of virtual capitalism** and corporate sponsorship of cultural events, which is motivated by the same impulse that drove the pharaohs to have the pyramids built, are motivated by this generational dynamic, an attempt of present and upcoming generations to "fill the shoes" of previous generations held up a paragons of productivity and significance in the world.

For example, we know that in his early business career, George W. Bush, was not as successful in the oil industry as his father, George H.W. Bush, therefore we could argue that 'virtual' responses were necessary - from both father and son - to try to "fill the gap" between the achievements of Bush 41 and Bush 43 in this area.***

Let's revisit corporate sponsorship of cultural activities. Let's go back to the "Pepsi-sponsored papal visits," "Molson concerts," "Izod zoos," and "Nike afterschool basketball programs." And let us not forget the Altoids "Curiously Strong Collection" art exhibition.

Let us ask ourselves: what do these companies have in common? They make products - while the top levels of these organization have been made rich from them - that are not exactly central to world progress, to say the least. The question, 'Is this all there is?' arises. Say you're one of these executives or CEOs and you go home to visit your family. And your mother says something like: 'You know, your cousin Bernard is a brain surgeon in Greenwich.' And there you are, in the business of trying to sell more beer, more candy, more sneakers, more soda than anybody else. You just have to get into other areas of endeavor. You just have to!








* Remember, what we have called 'virtual' and what Naomi Klein calls 'disaster' capitalism are two modalities that are triggered when so-called 'natural' capitalism runs up against its various structural barriers to constant expansion. When this happens, the frustration of the bourgeoisie, who do not want to be capitalists to start with (but who will grudgingly go along with it as long as expansion is continual), increases exponentially; and they degenerate into an Alice in Wonderland fantasy of imaginary, casino-like, higly speculative finance-driven economics, with its frantic merger-mania, or a kind of "Hulk Smash!" furious imperial aggression, to keep the growth going.

** We also looked at analysis from Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Bright-Sided, the third chapter, which gave some indication that capitalism might have roots in Calvinism. She made the suggestion even stronger in the introduction of her book when she invoked the sociologist Max Weber's book Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism. And I think this gives added credence to my feeling that capitalism, itself, was a reluctantly created system. Anyway, I said that another way to view the financialization of the economy was/is a way the bourgeoisie manages to work without working, and to say to "God," 'Look, see how much profit I have created. I have been productive. Bless me.'

*** footnote pending. I just have to get some information from a Molly Ivins book on George W. Bush. But what we can say now, is that with decreasing oil supply, it would have been structurally impossible for the younger Bush to duplicate his father's success, in concrete terms - at least on the domestic side - of decades earlier.

**** Here, we mean war as the ultimate disaster capitalism. You will recall that there where a lot of people who said that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was George W. Bush taking care of unfinished business of his father's. As Kevin Phillips wrote: "Controversial wars and geopolitical ambitions, after all, have frequently originated as dynastic ambitions," (Kevin Phillips. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, And The Politics of Deceit In The House of Bush. Viking Penguin, 2004. p.1 introduction).

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

At what price, Immortality? That is what we've been discussing.

You know, late in the nineteenth century, with industrialization of the United States corporations went from temporary, project-based entities to permanent concentrations of oligarchical power, or "private tyrannies," and so forth. Corporations became personalized, they became almost like people, as the expression goes. Perhaps both more than people because they are "immortal" and have limited liability. But this development was viewed with dismay by conservative legal scholars, who viewed the very existence of corporations, themselves, as an attack on market principles (1).

Let me just say, here, that corporations are, by definition, vampiric entities. We'll come back to that later.

Remember, "immortality" is not possible without robbing life-force from others. Mario Puzo opened his novel, The Godfather, with a quote from Balzac: "Behind every great fortune lies a crime." Indeed, Don Vito Corleone told his son, Santino: "A lawyer can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks." In Puzo's novel, The Last Don, Don Clericuzio told his oldest son, Giorgio, that he would be attending the Wharton School of Business, where he with the expressed purpose of learning how to steal money while staying within the law.

It was reported, in the late nineties, that over half the U.S. trade with Mexico, had been intrafirm, trade happening by companies - the movement of goods across borders, with themselves! This was up fifteen percent since the passage of NAFTA. In 1989 U.S.-owned plants in northern Mexico, employing few workers and with virtually no linkages to the Mexican economy (in other words, taking resources and subsidies but giving nothing to the host country), produced more than 33 percent of engine blocks used in U.S. cars and 75 percent of other essential components (2).

The post-NAFTA collapse of the Mexican economy in 1994 led to the increase of U.S.- Mexico "trade" and the subordination of Mexico into a service role for the U.S. economy, as a provider of very cheap manufactured goods, with industrial wages at one-tenth those in the U.S. (3). As a result, poverty increased almost as fast as the number of billionaires increased, and in 1999 up to half the population could not get enough food to eat; and yet the man who controlled the corn market remained on the list of Mexico's billionaires (4).

In the early WW II period, George Kennan, one of the most influential stategic planners, assigned each sector of the world its function. Africa was to be exploited by Europe for its reconstruction. A year earlier, a high-level planning study had urged '"that cooperative development of the cheap foodstuffs and raw materials of northern Africa could help forge Europen unity and create an economic base for continental recovery (5)."' Europe was to be reinvigorated by draining more life-force from Africa. Vampires are powerful, mysterious beings, and long-lived, potentially immortal. But they cannot survive in that form without drinking the blood of lowly mortals.

From 1945 on, the United States used Brazil as a '"testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development based solidly on capitalism."' The experiment, as it was conceived, was carried out with the '"best of intentions."' Foreign investors benefitted but planners '"sincerely believed"' that the people of Brazil would benefit as well. According to the business press, Brazil became '"the Latin American darling of the international business community" under military rule, while the World Bank reported that two-thirds of the population did not have enough food for normal physical activity. 1989 was a golden year for the business world, with profits having tripled over 1988, while industrial wages in Brazil, already among the lowest in the world, had declined another twenty percent (6).

Corporations are, by their nature, structurally vampiric on public resources. As you know, it was not the New Deal but World War Two, which pulled America out of the Great Depression.

The big worry of the business community was what were they going to do after the war. It was agreed generally, that without state intervention, the economy would head right back into depression. Industry, especially, aircraft could not exist in a pure, competitive, unsubsidized, actually free enterprise environment. Harry Truman's Air Force secretary said that the word to use was not 'subsidy' but 'security' (7). The Pentagon was thought to be a good way to socialize risk and transfer cost to the public. The same holds true for just about every dynamic sector of the economy: computers and electronics, automation, biotechnology, and communications (8).

One last illustration of "really existing free market theory." Two economists, Rob van Tulder and Winfried Ruigrock did a technical study which found that '"virtually all of the world's largest core firms have experienced a decisive influence from government policies and/or trade barriers on their strategy and competitive position"' and '"at least twenty companies in the 1993 Fortune 100 would not have survived at all as independent companies, if they had not been saved by their respective governments,"' through bailouts and state takeover (9). These were "zombie" organizations. Zombies are undead creatures as well, that persist unnaturally by eating Brains! Brains! Brains!, don't they?

One such organization was Lockheed, which was saved from collapse by massive goverment by massive loan guarantees. The same study pointed out that government intervention, which has "been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries... has played a key role in the development and diffusion of many products and process innovations - particularly in aerospace, electronics, modern agriculture, materials technologies, energy, and transportation technology,"' as well as telecommunications and information technologies generally, and in earlier periods, textiles, steel, and energy. Government policies '"have been an overwhelming force in shaping the strategies and competitiveness of the world's largest firms."' Other technical studies reached the same conclusions (10).

All references came from Profits Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Noam Chomsky. Seven Stories Press. New York, Toronto, London, 1999.

1) p.97

2) p.110

3) p.110

4) pp. 27-28

5) p.113

6) p.27

7) pp.36-37

8) p.37

9) p.38

10) p.38

I'll continue a little later on.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

As you know, for every idea we develop in this blog, our starting point is always the same: Man is the desire to become God (because we "exist without justification," which we seek by trying to "become" God in various ways, and depending upon our success, we feel ourselves in tune with some kind of universal law, which seems to come from outside ourselves).

We have been talking about the amassing of wealth and its ostentatious display, specifically in the form of corporate sponsorship projects of cultural events, not unlike what the Egyptian pharaohs had been up to, as well as the other ancient Near Eastern "divine" rulers, as a kind of immortality-seeking.

We looked at a case study of the company called Altoids (the makers of the curiously strong breath mint candy) as an example; and we conjectured that, though they are a billion dollar concern, no doubt, that there was, nevertheless, a felt feeling of frivolousness within the decision-making hierarchy as a whole about their place in the world, given the nature of their product (which is another mark against capitalism, as it marginalizes, alienates, and even trivializes people, even inflicting harmful spiritual and psychological effects upon sections of the economic ruling block, who appear to benefit the most from the system.

We theorized that this alienation created a desperation within them to "make my mark on the world," and so forth. You'll recall that Altoids purchased the works of art of twenty up and coming artists for two-hundred-fifty thousand dollars, and promoted the art showing as the Curiously Strong Collection. And so on and so forth.

But, again, what is the ultimate goal of corporate sponsorship: the "Molson concerts, Pepsi-sponsored papal visits, Izod zoos, and Nike after-school basketball programs?"
Answer: to create the collective mindset that believes that "everything from small community events to large religious gatherings are believed to '"need a sponsor,"' to get off the ground[.]" And as Leslie Savan, author of The Sponsored Life said: "we become collectively convinced not that coporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity" (Klein, Naomi. NoLogo. Tenth Anniversary edition, p.35).

Some of them want to become gods of culture.

We said before that the pursuit of immortality involves the taking of life-force from others. Immortality is not a cost-free, gift. This is what a vampire is about. This is what a zombie is about. This process is worse than destructive, in that people are prevented from finding their own souls to begin with. This, we identified as the case in the play, Death of a Salesman (psychological reincarnation); and this is true in other less severe ways in which parents to "live through" their children.

What are the advertising-free childhood movements all about? They are about the recognition that incessant corporate advertising, aimed at children, not only indoctrinates them with consumption-based values, but also plays an impedimentary role in preventing children from finding their own souls. Children are seen to be victimized by the relentless marketing and advertising.

The privatization of public forums like papal visits and zoos, creates, I think, an un-democratizing effect on communities, de-politicizes and de-intellectualizes them, makes them passive spectators not participants in the public square, and prevents them from finding their own souls. To return to advertising to children, the transaction that happens between the child, the television, and the corporation, is the direct robbing of life-force of the child to enhance the life-force of the corporation, their profits. Some people see it as something like a vampiric process because a child's internal landscape has not reached maturity.

That there can be no immortality without robbing life-force from others, is true of the family dynamic (Death of a Salesman); is a crucial recognition which, in part, accounts for the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism); is true for corporate advertising, branding, and its ultimate end point, corporate sponsorship; and it is true for the day-to-day reality of the broader, global political economy.

I'll go on with this tomorrow.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

NoLogo. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Naomi Klein. Picador. New York, 2000, 2002, 2009. pp. 31 & 34-35.

"Cultural products are the all-time favorite plaything of the powerful, tossed from wealthy statesmen such as Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, who set up the poet Horace in a writing estate in 33 B.C., and from rulers like Francis I and the Medici family, whose love of the arts bolstered the status of Renaissance painters in the sixtenth century. Though the degree of meddling varies, our culture was built on compromises between nations of public good and the personal, political, and financial ambitions of the rich and powerful.

"When sponsorship took off as a stand-in for public funds in the mid-eighties, many corporations that had been experimenting with the practice ceased to see sponsorship as a hybrid of philanthropy and image promotion and began to treat it more purely as a marketing tool, and a highly effective one at that. As its promotional value grew - and as dependency on sponsorship revenue increased in the cultural industries - the delicate dynamic between sponsors and the sponsored began to shift, with many corporations becoming more ambitious in their demands for grander acknowledgements and control, even buying events outright. Molson and Miller beer, ..., are no longer satisfied with having their logos on banners at rock concerts. Instead, they have pioneered a new kind of sponsored concert in which the blue-chip stars who perform are entirely upstaged by their hosting brand. And while corporate sponsorship has long been a mainstay in museums and galleries, when Phillip Morris - owned Altoids mints decided in January 1999 that it wanted to get into the game, it cut out the middleman. Rather than sponsoring an existing show, the company spent $250,000 to buy works by twenty emerging artiststs and launch its own Curiously Strong Collection, a traveling art exhibition that plays on the Altoids marketing slogan, "curiously strong mints." Chris Pedd, Altoids brand manager, said, "We decided to take it to the next level."

"These companies are part of a larger phenomenon explained by Lesa Ukman, executive editor of the International Events Group Sponsorship Project, the industry's bible: "From MasterCard and Dannon to Phoenix Home Life and LaSalle Bank, companies are buying properties and creating their own events. This is not because they want to get into the business. It's because proposals sponsors receive don't fit their requirements or because they've had negative experiences buying into someone else's gig." There is a certain logic to this progression: first, a select group of manufacturers transcend their connection to earthbound products, then, with marketing elevated as the pinnacle of their businesses, they attempt to alter marketing's social status as a commercial interruption and replace it with seamless integration.

"The most insidious effect of this shift is that after a few years of Molson concerts, Pepsi-sponsored papal visits, Izod zoos and Nike after-school basketball programs, everything from small community events to large religious gatherings are believed to "need a sponsor," to get off the ground; August 1999, for instance, saw the first-ever private wedding with corporate sponsorship. This is what Leslie Savan, author of The Sponsored Life, describes as symptom number one of the sponsored mindset: we become collectively convinced not that corporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity."

And some of them want to be gods of culture. In the case of Molson and Miller, both purveyors of intoxicating beverages, and their sponsorship of music concerts, one thinks of the goat-footed god, Pan. I will deconstruct the above passage tomorrow.

It is this above passage that I would identify as the core thesis of Naomi Klein's book. To make the population "collectively convinced" that "creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity," is the underlying reason why the corporate sector of the "ruling block," (as I have also heard the bourgeoisie referred to) engages in branding, in the first place (remember, we talked a little bit about branding previously), and then decides to "take it to the next level," by sponsoring various cultural events.

This is the God-drive that is afraid of death, that seeks immortality, that wants to be remembered by as many generations as possible, after one is dead. We all have this drive, but unlike corporations, the only means of "living on" in some way, available to ninety-nine percent of the world's population is to reproduce ourselves biologically, by having children.

Even in individual cases like this, the God-drive can be corrupted. We talked about this before. In his book, Family Secrets (which I actually listened to on audio tape), family therapist, John Bradshaw referred to Carl Jung, who said something to the effect that the greatest danger to children is the unlived life of the parents.

Suppose, said Bradshaw, you have a man who spends hours playing baseball in the backyard with his young son. He hits fly balls to the boy, so that he can practice "his" fielding skills. What a great dad, right? How can you not admire a man who spends so much time with his boy.

Bradshaw refers to a poem written by a fellow called Craig Sanchez, about the emotional abuse that can come to a boy playing baseball with his dad - under the wrong circumstances. Bradshaw recited a couple lines of the poem, which is seen from the boy's point of view. The boy's angst and desperation is communicated. The feeling of the boy is that he just has to catch it. "I'm so lucky to have a dad like this. The other boys don't have a dad like this," and so forth. But the boy is near-sighted, he can barely see the fly balls, much less catch them. He really would rather be doing something else with his dad, like catching butterflies or something.

This father was a lover of baseball. He had had dreams of being a major leaguer but he wasn't quite good enough to go beyond college ball, or he suffered a preemptive injury, something like that, and his ambitions in that direction was disappointed. But he couldn't let it go. He was determined to have his dream realized through his son. This is classic, of course.

You know we talked about this in connection with the Arthur Miller play, Death of a Salesman. I said that the play was an extreme example of the secular equivalent of reincarnation. After Willie Loman is buried and the family, including friend 'Uncle' Charlie convene at the Loman home, there is a point in which Hap says that Willie, his and Biff's father, "had a good dream," and that he was going to stay in New York (he rejected his brother Biff's offer to go out west with him to perhaps start a ranch), and "win it for him."

I said that Hap might as well have said, "I am Willie Loman now." Willie Loman had reincarnated in the body of his neglected second child, Hap. The exact personality dimensions of the father had been duplicated in the son - to a degree very far beyond the normal ways in which parents influence their children.

Willie has destroyed his son. Actually, to say that the salesman 'destroyed' is too kind, because to say that one is destroyed is to presupposes that he existed in a meaningfully independent way to begin with. Hap did not. He never developed his own personality. He never found his own soul.

Buddhism, having come out of Hinduism, accepted the belief in reincarnation. But the founder of Buddhism thought that the cycle of life-death-rebirth should and must be broken. I'm just speculating here, but there seems to have been the recognition that "immortality" cannot come except by taking the life-force of others.

What is the vampire lore all about? One doesn't just get to live "forever" for no price. Vampires must kill to live, must drink other people's blood. But at least, in these cases, people had previously lived. The process that occasionally happens in families, with the example about the baseball dad, I gave, for instance, and certainly the tragic tale of the Loman family, is even more insidious. The person, in a real sense, is prevented from 'living' in the first place.

Let's return to the passage I quoted from Naomi Klein's NoLogo. Sponsorship of cultural events, in addition to being an expression of the God-drive that seeks "immortality," much like the pyramids did for the pharaohs and so forth, this is also one of the classic ways in which New Money seeks to become Old Money. This is the way in which the ruling block has traditionally sought to become "part of something larger than myself," and so forth. You know, this is the strategy that The Godfather Vito Corleone pursued to come in from the cold, or as Don Clericuzio said, for he and his "family" to "disappear into the lawful world and enjoy our wealth without fear."

But this fear has many dimensions, as we have seen. The ruling block are not just motivated by fear of the "law."

Let's go back to the case of Altoids breath mints. Altoids are candy, right? I doubt they would put it that way, for obvious reasons.

Friends, there is something almost noble about being a candy maker, making fudge and all kind of delicious treats that give children, and let's admit it, the rest of us joy. To drive an ice cream truck in the summer is a beneficent service; like having a small shop where you delight your patronage with homemade taffy, fudge, pumpkin, banana, and sweet potato ice cream. There is joy and meaning to be found in sharing such simple pleasures with others. Indeed, this is certainly why the multinational concerns buy small businesses with comfortable, reassurring brand identities - which they desire to assimilate onto themselves.

This ideological concern must have been what drove Phillip Morris to buy Kraft in 1988 for 12.6 billion dollars, six times what it was supposed to be worth on paper (Klein, Tenth Anniversay Edition, NoLogo). After all, Kraft is a name that makes one feel all warm inside, right?

But let's return to the Altoids case. For some people, merely assimilating warmer and fuzzier brands in related areas is not nearly enough, and is even beside the point.

The people at the Altoids corporation, who make the seven, eight, nine figure salaries: go to work everyday in their handmade, tailored suits; drive the slickest, most fashionable, most expensive European cars, send their children to the "best" schools, and so forth. No one can reproach them. Their material success is proof to all that they are "doing something right," and indeed, even that their parents "must've done something right," in accordance with some law of the universe and so forth.

But we can imagine, in individuals working at Altoids, a little voice inside them saying things like: You make Candy! That's what you do, you make candy. Is this what you went $175,000 in the hole for at the Ivy Leagues, majoring in English Lit for? To knock your head against the wall constantly trying to convince the public that these breath mints are really different and superior to thousands of exactly similar products on the market?

Sooner or later the question comes: Is this all there is? The answer the ruling block who head corporations is, no. The institutional way they try to find "greater fulfilment," is to sponsor cultural events, to try to become gods of culture. After all, was there ever a god of candy?

The corporate response has devastating social consequences, as Naomi Klein lays out in the form of plant closures and massive layoffs (often demanded by shareholders), deindustrialization, offshoring, "sweatshop" conditions abroad, the descent of sectors of the population into poverty and homelessness, and the like. But corporate sponsorship also has "spiritual" consequences, in that this form of immortality-seeking (as all forms of immortality-seeking) needs as its fuel the life-force of others. At what price, immortality?

Corporate sponsorship then, as the end result of branding, in addition to the practical social consequences referred to, also plays a part in impeding individuals and communities from finding their own souls.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

I want to pick up on the thread from yesterday. I can't resist.

As you knew prior to this blog, no doubt, and as we have learned and are learning, there are many, many ways to analyze the political economy: different schools of thought depending on political ideology, "left, right, and center," as it were; different disciplinary approaches, in general terms, quantitative or qualitative in nature; different indices, I believe the term is, that are examined and given more or less weight; different assessment of specific problems, their origin, their nature, and prescriptions for their solution.

And so on and so forth.

There are many different approaches to formulating class theory, as far as how the economic classes relate to each other and the world. We are specifically concerned, here, with how the ruling class, the bourgeoisie relate to each other and the world.

Our approach is literary-mythological-philosophical and it is based on the God-drive. Man is the desire to become God. It is the central idea supporting every argument I have made and, I think, will make in this blog.

If one looks at the corporate world, you can say that they, as a whole, are trying to become gods. I said so yesterday with respect to the recently passed "historic" healthcare legislation, which contains the mandate. All Americans will be required to purchase corporate health insurance (Remember that even the "robust public option" was eliminated).

I said that there will come a time - if it hasn't come already- when, deep in the mythological imagination of the collective consciousness of this sector of the bourgeoisie, they come to see themselves as our very life-givers and sustainers. Gods of medicine and health. Apollo, Dionysus.

The ruling class are trying to become other kinds of gods. The best way I can bring this home is to use Olympian terms. Some of the corporate bourgeoisie want to become Gods of War. Think of Blackwater and Dyncorp and Halliburton and other military contractors. Ares, Athena.

Some of them try to become elemental gods: oil, water, electricity, coal. The utility companies and "Big Oil" corporations. We might think of Poseidon and Zeus, here. When this "green" economy takes off, no doubt these corporate elemental gods will take on solar and wind aspects. Hydroelectric power makes one think of a fusion of Poseidon and Zeus.

Some of them want to become gods of "wisdom," or learning. Think of the parent company of any charter school or private school. I believe Athena and Apollo were, both, also divinities of wisdom.

Some of them want to be gods of the land, agricultural abundance. Archer Daniels Midland. The Supermarket to the World. Big corporate, heavily state-subsized agribusiness. I'm sure there's at least one god for this from the pantheon, but my Greek mythology isn't all it could be. I think Apollo, again, as the sun-god has a role to play.....

Some of them want to become gods of communication. All you have to do is recall the telecommunications act that Clinton signed taking off the antitrust limitations on media consolidation, and the handful of corporate conglomerates that were the main beneficiaries. One thinks of the fleet-footed Hermes.

What about finance? What is the relationship of the bankers and financial institutions to the rest of the economic ruling class? I like to think of Hephaestus (I believe that is how the name is spelled), the forge of the gods in the Greek pantheon. Hephaestus was a very important god. He made the thunder bolts of Zeus; the sun rays and chariots of Apollo; the weapons and armor of Athena. And so on.

Hephaestus enabled the gods in a very important way. His creations helped the other gods extend their power. This has certainly been one of the traditional roles of the bankers, which is so obvious as to preclude any need for comment. Finance and industrial companies intermingle. Production-based companies engage in finance as a means of making money, when their product isn't doing so well on the free market, for whatever reason. Financial institutions buy companies to acutally produce physical goods and services.

In all mythologies there is a trickster god, who works his mischief on both gods and mortal alike. For example, it is said that the financial institutions, in collusion with the bond rating agencies, certainly "put one over" on various large sized institutional investors of one kind or another, with the bundled, "toxic" subprime mortgage -backed securities.

There is a wonderful quote I need to retrieve from Naomi Klein's tenth anniversay edition of her book, NoLogo about branding, and specifically the God-drive present in corporate sponsorship of cultural events.

Let me just end with this. All of these things I've mentioned, are a corruption of the God-drive.*

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

I will pick up on the thread I was following another time. Now just want to say a word about this healthcare bill, passed by the House of Representatives. It is my understanding that if the Senate passes the bill with no changes, it will be delivered to president Obama's desk, where it will get his signature.

The feature that bothers me the most is this mandate. People have to buy the private health insurance companies product. If they don't, they will face fines. Many of you will disagree but I do not think it is hyperbole to say that it is a tax of human beings for living. I am less interested in critiquing the legislation from a left political point of view, than in considering how this mandate fits into the basic theme we have been developing over this blog, and which can be summed up in one sentence: Man is the desire to become God.

Needless to say that there is not even a "robust public option." In any event, "God," as I have mentioned a time or two before, is not the ultimate owner of all wealth and all authority, not by virtue of being a capitalist or a democrat (small d). These things are "His" as a result of God being God, the creator and sustainer of the universe and all life in it, and so forth.

"He" does not have to submit himself to "free market" principles or parliamentary procedures. The ruling class seek to duplicate for themselves this state of affairs, as much as possible. This is the God-drive, if you will. We all have it and it expresses itself in a near infinity of ways, good, bad, and indifferent. Hold that thought.

Now, the bill does offer improvements to the healthcare situation. Insurers will no longer be able to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. They will no longer be able to throw people off coverage for chronic illness. They have to pay out a significantly larger share of their profits to paying out claims, and so forth.

Minor hiccups for them. Inconveniences. For example, I'm sure these corporations will develop derivative instruments to "spread the risk" of those policy holders. But the profits will be spectacular, dazzling, stupendous, and so forth. The thing is the power!

Power is infinitely more important to the bourgeoisie than money. Think of it, just by being alive and living in America, we are required to pay tribute to them! And I know that deep within the mythological imagination of this section of the bourgeoisie, as a result of this, they will come to see themselves as our sustainers, and in time our authors. Remember I said that since Man is the desire to become God, corporations want to displace and become, not destroy, goverment; and government wants the church to say they are divinely authorized. But do to this "revolving door" of Washington, government and the corporate boardroom are increasingly intertwined.

Any minor abrogations on profits going forward for the insurance companies, through some technical policies, will be magnificently outweighed by the euphoria of the realization of the God-drive for them. Indeed, this may even cause them to be more "generous." Perhaps they won't work so hard to deny people coverage and throw people off coverage for pre-existing conditions and chronic illness. Perhaps they will come to think they can be divinely magnanimous.

It could happen. Maybe.

Good Night

wingedcentaur

Friends,

Previously, before talking about Calvinism, we were talking about the relationship of finance to the real economy. I compared it to the metabolism of the body. Finance is the metabolism and the real economy is the body.

Just as the metabolism has to work harder when the quality and/or quantity of nutrients are lacking, so too is it for finance with respect to the real economy.

We also said that the system goes through its cycles of anorexia/bulimia. The system periodically looks at itself in the mirror and says "I'm too fat," no matter how virtually skeletal it is, and goes on a severe austerity program. This means a wave of "entitlement reform," in other words, heavy cuts in all manner of social spending, public infrastructure, perhaps, tax raises (but not on the rich because they might leave the jurisdiction and take all their jobs with them), and cuts in other kinds of public services.

The anorexic will swim for ten miles, get on the treadmill for two hours, walk another twenty miles, do a thousand jumping jacks.

We also said, previously, that finance, as an entity can be compared to some kind of intelligent, slug-like creatures, who move from body to body, parasitic on it but also making the body capable of superhuman strength and speed. We find this theme, often in science fiction. There is a science fiction writer called Octavia E. Butler who wrote among many other works, Wildseed and Mind of My Mind, that featured a character called Doro (who was not a slug but a disembodied human consciousness) who functioned in a vaguely, somewhat similar way. He had no body of his own, it was slain when he was a very young boy, but his mind survived. He was a kind of psychic vampire, in a way.

Anyway, even though I can't think of an exactly proper example right now, I'm sure you know that this is a feature in some science fiction and fantasy. But the parasite enables the body to perform at such a level because it makes its nervous system work in a radically different way; and consequently, the smart slugs burn through the bodies very rapidly, and in a matter of weeks or months, the slugs have to find new bodies. They have to constantly hop from body to body. Keep that in mind.

We used this analogy to suggest that when two people debate economics with one another, oftentimes they are having two different conversations at the same time. There is a difference between a strong, dynamic economy and a healthy one. The two are actually not necessarily the same. To know this is true all we have to do, as I mentioned before, is to think about a 6'8, 385lb NFL offensive lineman. He is chiseled. He is thoroughly ripped and cut. He is outwardly impressive, massively powerful, unstoppable and so forth.

Suppose we learn that he's using steroids. He can train much harder and longer, of course. He can recover much more quickly that he would have been able to do without them. His muscles are like steel. He becomes a legend. Outwardly, he is a tower of power, the "very picture of health." What can possibly be wrong with such a specimen?

But the steroid wreck havoc with his hormones, cause impotence. They may weaken his bones, cause kidney failure and so forth. We understand that sooner or later the internal decay will bring him down.

Hurricane Katrina and the fallen bridge in Minnesota were examples of the effects of increasing internal decay, even though the American economy seemed exceptionally dynamic during the 1990s. Outwardly the economy was dynamic but unhealthy. The bones and internal organs of the state grew weaker. So, a moderate hurricane hit New Orleans and the levies broke and the event was more calamitous than it needed to be, by everyone's agreement. A bridge falls in Minnesota. And so on and so forth.

In the next post we're going to talk a little about finance as a body-possessing, sentient slug, who moves from body to body; relate this to the John Bellamy Foster article in Monthly Review concerning the age of monopoly finance capital; and then use these conclusions to evaluate "new world order" theory.

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

And now a word about Calvinism in America.

"Looking west, the early settlers saw not the promise of abundance, only a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men. In the gloom of the old-growth forests and surrounded by the indigenous '"wild men,"' the settlers must have felt as hemmed in as they had been in crowded England. And if Calvinism offered no individual reassurance, it at least exalted the group, the congregation. You might not be saved yourself, but you were part of a social entity set apart by its rigorous spiritual discipline - and set above all those who were unclean, untamed, and unchurched" (Barbara Ehrenreich. Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company. New York, 2009. p.78).

A grim picture, that. But wait, "the sun'll come out tomorrow..."

"In the early nineteenth century, the cloud's of Calvinist gloom were just beginning to break. Forests were yielding to roads and eventually railroads. The native peoples slunk westward or succumbed to European diseases. With the nation rapidly expanding, fortunes could be made overnight, or just as readily lost. In this tumultous new age of possibility, people of all sorts began to reimagine the human condition and reject the punitive religion of their forebears (Ehrenreich, p.78). And this environment gave rise to New Thought or the New Thought Movement (p.79).

Isn't this the way capitalism behaves generally? Take the first quote. The capitalists rather sullenly go about the business of producing surplus product or profit with the limited resources available to them. When one thing or another happens to exponentially expand the availability of either natural resources and/or markets or some new invention comes along, the system gets giddy. The propaganda overtakes the actual worth of the content, bubbles occur.

Can't countries be said, in their founding, to go through development bubbles? This time it will be different. We'll never fall off. Our glory shall be everlasting.

"Elements of Calvinism, without the theology persisted and even flourished in American culture well into the late twentieth century and beyond. The middle and upper classes came to see busyness for its own sake as a mark of status in the 1980s and 1990s, which was convenient, because employers were demanding more and more of them, especially once new technologies ended the division between work and private life: the cell phone is always within reach; the laptop comes home every evening. "'Multitasking'" entered the vocabulary , along with the new problem of '"workaholism"' (Ehrenreich, p.76).

"While earlier elites had flaunted their leisure, the comfortable classes of our own time are eager to display evidence of their exhaustion - always '"in the loop,"' always available for the conference call, always ready to go '"the extra mile"' (p.76).

Let me suggest something to you: the very nature of capitalism today, with finance, even speculative finance, so dominant, suggests the influence of both Calvinism and radical anti-Calvinism at the same time. In other words, finance and the propaganda that props up its legitimacy represent "work" without the work.

In addition to the manipulations we've touched on by the financial sector and so forth, there is also the collusion of the government branch of the bourgeoisie.

One aspect of what Kevin Phillips called "Bullnomics" is ".. the warping since the 1990s, by some arguments, intentional, of the collection and presentation of U.S. economic data to make it more market-supportive" (Kevin Phillips. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and The Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Viking,, 2008, pp.79-80). Also, a guy won the Nobel Prize in economics, proclaiming that unrestricted short selling was necessary for efficient markets (pp.77-78).

Academia helped out with the Efficient Market Hypothesis: the idea that at every moment shares priced themselves in the market by attracting the input of all information relevant to their value. Further price changes depended on further information. And Modern Portfolio Theory emphasized that it was less risky to invest in the entire spectrum of stocks instead of trying to pick them one by one (Phillips. Bad Money, p.74).

The elite propagated an ethos of market populism which seemed to provide a radical re-categorization of reality. All workers became '"businesspeople."' There was "one dollar, one vote" nonsense, and the "market consensus" was made to seem the high point of Western Civilization (p.75). In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s stock market averages were driven by high levels of mergers, reorganizations, and leveraged buyouts, and "under the new Internal Revenue provisions of the 1980s, debt seemed rational from a tax standpoint, rather than immoral and indulgent" (Phillips, Bad Money, pp.75-76).

In other words, no real value was added for all that frantic activity. To continue.

"That same decade [the 80s] saw corporate raiders posture as outsiders tackling a bloated '"corpocracy,"' as promoters of the ability of the small to challenge the big, and as standard-bearers of a '"a democratization of capital"' that unlocked shareholder value" (p.76). Stock indexes rose as did fees and profits as a result of these manipulations. Speculators enjoyed a new respectability for the way they made markets efficient by helping them assimilate new information, and by providing liquidity when needed, and so forth. Hedge funds mushroomed. Assets under management rose from several hundred billion in 1997 to 1.81 trillion in late 2007; but this underestimated their value because leverage increased it by "some disconcerting multiplier" (Phillips, Bad Money, p.77).

Derivatives. Many of them had been pioneered by "mathmaticians and other academics," who invoked efficiency theory to proclaim them a "reliable and essential risk management tools" (Phillips, p.77). To return to statistics a moment, the government plays game with measuring the rate of inflation as well as the true unemployment rate (pp.80-89). Goverment also seems to make desperate claims about the volume of trade.*

Taken together, don't these things point to the bourgeoisie, as a whole, under the influence of both Calvinism and radical anti-Calvinism simultaneously? The forsaking of the blase making of stuff combined with its replacement with virtual economic activity, which implores "God" (Yes, God. Remember greed always comes from fear) to bless them, that they deserved to be blessed, based on their "productivity," the great wealth they have "created." Work without work.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,



I hope you are all safe and warm during this small or minor hurricane.



I would like to pick up on a point, with some amplification, that I made before. I said that, historically, wherever we look and wherever there was an advanced, monetarized economy, you saw a disdain of the merchants/moneylender coming from the elite of society, even though this commerce sector helped the aristocracy accumulate their wealth. I talked about what I consider to be the reason for this. This is certainly true for the west, as we shall see in more detail, and Christianity might have been a contributing factor; but what accounts for the universality of this tendency?



In China during the period called the "age of warring states," of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., these events culminated in the establishment of the Ch'in empire in 221 B.C., which ruled over more people than the Roman hegemony ever did (Harman, Chris. A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. Verso. London, New York, 1999. p.55). The class that seems to have done the most to make this achievement possible were the "big merchant entrepreneurs. This was a new social class within a new social formation (Chris Harman, p.56).



Harman said that the influence of the merchants was powerful, proof of this being that the richest of them became chancellor to the future emperor in 250 B.C. He was given land comprising 100,000 households and surrounded himself with an entourage of 3,000 scholars (p.57).



My view is that he and others like him were probably "tokens," a select few whom the powers-that-be of the state - that branch of the aristocratic bourgeoisie - thought could be spruced up and made presentable.



Because, at the same time the state relentlessly attacked the merchants, as Harman points out, under the Ch'in and Han dynasties (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.). The first Han emperor, for example, did not allow the merchants to wear silk or ride in carriages. Neither their children nor their grandchildren were allowed to serve in government. The state took direct control of the salt and iron industries in order to ensure the profits were monopolized by the empire to suppress '"rich traders and rich merchants.'" Furthermore, higher taxes were levied on trading profits than on agriculture; and the wealth of merchants who were found trying to evade taxes was confiscated. The state's contention, in official document after official document, that these measures were taken in defense of the poor, are the kind of predictable self justification that we really should not take seriously (Chris Harman, p.57).



By the late Sung period there was a shift in the attitude of the state toward the merchants. Many of the restrictions that had previously controlled their behavior had fallen into disuse. And yet, a representative of the old guard, who pinned for the good old days could complain about the lack of "'control over the merchants. They enjoy a luxurious way of life, living on dainty foods of delicious rice and meat, owning handsome houses and many carts, adorning their wives and children with pearls and jade, and dressing their slaves in white silk. In the morning they think about how to make a fortune, and in the evening they devise means of fleecing the poor'" (p.112).

Now, surely this high official who made this remark, was living exactly this lifestyle himself, if not to an even higher degree of excess. What's going on here? This remark reminds me of that scene in the movie The Godfather and the novel, when Don Corleones oldest son, Santino (Sonny), who presiding over the "family business," while Vito Corleone recovers from his gunshot wounds.

The Godfather is shot because of his refusal to become involved in the narcotics trade, which the other families are eager to participate in, in partnership with a man called Sollozo. Vito Corleones refusal is taken to be an impediment to the business opportunities of the other families. A coalition seems to have authorized the attempted but failed hit on The Godfather. Sonny expresses his determination to be avenged. He is willing to go to war with all the other Five Families of New York and completely paralyze "business" until they hand over Sollozo.

As all the families are at war with each other, "going to the mattresses" and so forth, control over the numbers running operations in New York have grown lax. Too many low-level hoods have grabbed up too much control of these various street-level gambling ventures. Santino talks about the blacks "up in Harlem" having a good time driving around in their big cars and the like, their heads and egos swelled with their seemingly new found wealth and power. It was time to decisively re-establish the firm guiding hand of the Corleone Family.

So, the high official of the late Sung period and Sonny Corleone are both saying that the new people were getting "too big for their britches."

When the Arab empire was a century old the non-Arab Muslims were the majority population in the cities and the key to its industry and trade - which the Arab merchants had abandoned to become a new, wealthy, leisure class. Even though these non-Arabs had growing influence as administrators, they were still discriminated against in different ways (Harman, A People's History of the World, p.128).

I would guess, here, that these groups were discriminated against, at least as much for being merchants as for being non-Arabs, maybe even more so in reality.

Chris Harman wrote: "The Abbasid revolution created space for the expansion of trade and enabled the urban middle classes to influence the functioning of the state. But real power remained with groups which were still essentially parasitic on production carried out by others. The royal court increasingly adopted the traditional trappings of an oriental monarchy, with vast expenditures designed to feed the egos of its rulers and to impress its subjects" (p.131).

One of those "trappings of an oriental monarchy" was the ideology of divine justification of their rule and the prerogatives they were able to arrogate unto themselves as a result. The existence of a merchant/moneylender class, too visibly prominent, tended to put some tarnish to this self-image.

Now let's go back to Calvinism in America.

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

All of my references for this post will come from the book, Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. New York, 2009.

We're going to talk about the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism, discussed in chapter three of Ehrenreich's book, labelled "The Dark Roots of American Optimism." As you know, I've been saying that capitalism, despite all outward appearances, is an economic system somewhat reluctantly created by the upper classes and definitely reluctantly engaged in by the rest of us - but we'll come to that another time.

The thesis of the book is very well captured in the subtitle: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking (both religious and secular) has undermined America. This is not the place to discuss the argument, which I am entirely in sympathy with, by the way. But Ehrenreich opens chapter three with a question. Why did Americans, in such large numbers, adopt the uniquely sunny, self-gratifying view of the world?

Answer: because they had tried its opposite, Calvinism, and rejected it - sort of. The white settlers who came to New England brought the harsh, unforgiving ideology of Calvinism with them. Ehrenreich quotes literary scholar, Ann Douglas in saying that its God was '"utterly lawless,"' an all-powerful entity who '"reveals his hatred of his creatures, not his love for them,"' (pp.74-75).

This Calvinist God maintained a heaven but spaces for departed souls were limited. Those who got in had been selected before birth through a process called predestination. The job for the living was to constantly examine the '"loathsome abominations that lie in the bosom,"' in order to uproot sinful thoughts that are a sure sign of damnation. The only relief (not salvation because one never knew) was labor of the spiritual or physical type, such as building up farms and businesses. Idleness and pleasure seeking was considered a deep sin (p.75).

The exhortation to meditate daily, hourly, about what a sinful, wicked creature man is, that got himself expelled from the Garden of Eden is the infinite version of the classic upper middle class dictum of a parent who banished her child to her room for some infraction to "think about what you've done." Only, think about it FOREVER!

Let me say, here, this was the formal doctrine of Calvinism. This is what people were required to say they believed. I could be wrong but I can't imagine that individuals, within the privacy of their own self-image, being anything but confident of their own place in heaven (either that they are one of the predestined or that surely The Lord would open up just one more space for them). I understand that the work, physical and spiritual (but then again, as we know much physical work is spiritual or ideological) serves as repentance, a kind of self-flagellation. But wouldn't they have done so, holding out the hope, that each of them like Job (not employment but the man called 'Job' in the Bible) would be restored to glory and prosperity through their faithfulness? Of course the road would be hard and fraught with peril and all that, and so on and so forth. There undoubtedly would be much fear involved. Remember I told you, in thinking about the GREED of Wall Street and the like, that greed always comes from fear. This is a part of the legacy of Calvinism in America. We exist without justification and therefore we are the desire to become God, to assure ourselves that either God or some aspects of infinite capacity exist, so that we can know that we are "doing the right thing" in life. One thing was certain, if you weren't "productive" surely you were marked as one of the damned.

What would be the real purpose of all that industry otherwise? Ehrenreich makes reference to a book, which I must read sometime, called Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. She says that the thesis of the book is that capitalism has its roots in the grim, punitive outlook of Calvinist Protestantism, which required people to defer gratification and resist all pleasurable temptations in favor of hard work and the accumulation of wealth (p.8).

You know, I said I was going to stick to one book in this post. But I should have known I was telling a lie. But in chapter nine of his book Wealth and Democracy (2002) Kevin Phillips refers to a book by Edward Chancellor called Devil Take the Hindmost - which I had heard of before but had mistakenly thought was an old English literary novel or epic poem like Milton's Paradise Lost. But no, it is a history of financial speculation.

It seems that the stock market, itself, is gambling. It has its roots in carnivals, gambling, and other "frolics." What Phillips calls the "dignity and hierarchy," "16th century equivalent of pinstripes" was nowhere to be seen. Phillips quoted the English historian Simon Schama, who observed about the early Amsterdam stock exchange, for example, that '"such was its reputation as an undignified bazaar that the great lords of capital who themselves enjoyed substantial dividend income from share trading disdained to set foot in the place, delegating the daily business of buying and selling to professional brokers."' Until the London financial boom of the 1690s, Phillips says, the word 'broker' meant "procurer" or "pimp." And so-called blue chip stocks take their name from the color of the most expensive chips in the Monte Carlo casinos (p.347).

Now, as you know, in addition to the traditional New Money/Old Money dynamic, which seems to have been universal, remarkably so, there is the traditional distaste that the upper classes, the levels of aristocracy and monarchy, and so forth, have invariably shown to the merchant/moneylender sector, apart from the New Money/Old Money paradigm, somewhat. This is so even though the moneylenders were a crucial tool in helping the upper classes accumulate their own wealth. This is so, for this overtly commercial sector (and that is the key word 'overtly'). This is so no matter how wealthy they were; in fact, I think that the wealthier they moneylenders were, the more they were disdained by the upper classes. In other words, I think the wealth of the overtly commercial sector may have had an inverse relationship to their social acceptance within the upper levels of society. And this is so no matter where we look.

Why?

Because no one wants his plumbing to show. No one wants the pipes and fixtures visible. It is aesthetically unacceptable. These fixtures must be concealed behind walls. Similarly, I think, the overtly commercial sector was the plumbing, the actual organs of wealth accumulation of the elites, made obscenely visible. The richer these people became the more prominently, and obscenely - from the point of view of the elites - they were, the more they refuted the elite's view of themselves that they would have liked to hold on to. You see, the very existence of the commerce sector refuted the myth that a certain elect of humanity were super wealthy almost beyond imagining because it is the will of God; in this view, the aristocracy and monarchy are where they are by divine favor, certainly nothing so tawdry as capitalism.

The merchant/moneylender class internalized this feeling, of course, and developed a kind of inferiority complex. They tried to relieve this by redeeming, if you will, of their families and themselves, by marrying off their children into "older," "more established" families, preferably those with titles.

This kind of thing was certainly going on in the 1920s, with American parents of aspiring debutantes sending photos of their daughters to magazines in England, France, and Italy that covered the international society beat. The publication of these photos signalled that the girls were open to wooing from European men, preferably those with titles. The situation was one in which "more than a few" European men, members of the minor nobility who were "pecuniarily embarassed," [I suppose this means they lost it all to speculation] - were seeking rich American heiresses for marriage (Larry Samuel. Rich: The Rise and Fall of American Wealth Culture. Amacom - American Management Association, 2009. pp. 57-58).

This is an arrangement in which both parties gain. The broke aristocrat would gain money - albeit by marrying someone he probably wouldn't have given a second look, in class terms, under normal circumstances - and thus re-establishes an integrated view of himself as set apart from the unwashed masses in glory and wealth. The family of the rich, New Money heiress, would gain "respectability."

Let's proceed. Again, with Phillips. In northern Europe, around 1500, financial markets followed seasonal fairs all around. Medina del Campo, which Kevin Phillips says was the de facto financial capital of sixteenth century Spain, was where royal bankers went to pay the king's debts and arrange his loans. These fairs were popular gatherings were granted exemptions by the church (an elite institution at that time, after all) on trade and finance. By the late seventeenth century the carnival was in decline and was replaced by permanent stock exchanges (Wealth and Democracy, p.348).

In such an environment anything and everything seems possible, anything and everything seems negotiable, anything and everything might be bought, anything and everything, and perhaps everyone seems to have "his price." Even the forgiveness of sins could be bought, even spiritual absolution. It's important to note, here, that John Calvin was born in 1509 and died in 1564, and he reacted to this corruption, as it seemed, to him, to manifest itself in the church. He did not want to start a social revolution or anything radical like that.

So, we see that financialization has a very long pedigree. Perhaps it rose up right alongside capitalism from the beginning. And so, ideologically, Calvinism, then, would tend to turn people away from the faux production of this "virtual" capitalism, to concrete production, to "real" economic activity. Today, in the aftermath of this crisis, we see and hear various commentators on the political economy calling for the re-regulation of financial markets; and this might be understood as an attempted reimposition of financial and economic (because remember, non-industrial firms also tend to lose their discipline and engage in an excessive amount of - as Kevin Phillips has also termed it - "paper entrepreneurialism) Calvinism.

Let's go to another post and finish up with Calvinism in America.

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

I want to make a brief interruption of our present mode of analysis to mention Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 2009). This book, particularly the chapter called "The Dark Roots of American Optimism," will be very helpful to our understanding.

I have been laying out the highly counterintuitive thesis that the capitalist ruling class actually does not like capitalism very much; and they view it, in fact, as a lower form of existence, like the "agents" in The Matrix. They desperately seek to escape this form of existence, after all the kings and aristocracy of old did not have to toil in order to be wealthy, to own practically all the wealth of the land, in fact. They were wealthy simply by virtue of their position.

I have been saying that capitalism is a system reluctantly constructed by the western ruling classes, though I admit I am not yet clear as to the precise political history. It would seem from the outside that capitalism has enriched them marvelously; but I don't think they necessarily see it that way. It's nothing like the serious wealth to be gained from a return, as much as possible, to the conditions that allowed the monarchs and aristocracy to have their staggering wealth. Remember that list I cited from the Wall Street Journal (1999) from Kevin Phillips book, Wealth and Democracy, of the fifty riches people of the previous thousand years? Most were kings, popes, bankers to kings and popes, traders under official license, conqueror-rulers. Only one, Bill Gates, was an actual capitalist, barely, but will come back to that.

Their visible dislike of capitalism is manifest in the traditional, worldwide sociological New Money-Old Money tension. I have said that New Money always wants to become Old Money, just as quickly as possible - which is why they practice capitalism as viciously as they do. They want to grow really rich as soon as possible so that they may expand into the realm of Old Money, free at last, as soon as possible. Financialization, I said, is one way of achieving this as quickly as possible, of "aging" their wealth as soon as possible. I said that when capitalism hits its natural limits to expansion, one of two modalities are triggered, so it seems to me: virtual and disaster capitalisms. Financialization is virtual capitalism.

Anyway, we'll talk a little about what Ehrenreich has to say about Calvinism next time.

wingedcentaur

Friends,

This talk of steroids leads us into the third prong of this particular cycle of analysis. At the end of it we are going to consider the abstract universal human quality of nationalism, and ask if all of the socioeconomic classes feel equally bound by nationalism. We also want to put this into context of something called the New World Order idea. This, I think, is usually ignored by most of the left as "conspiracy theory." But let us see if we can establish a hypothetical basis for it.

In his article in the monthly review, John Bellamy Foster summarized the findings of Paul Sweezy and another scholar called Harry Magdoff on the matter of credit: "Among the forces countering the tendency to stagnation, none has been more important or less understood by economic analysts than the growth, beginning in the 1960s and rapidly gaining momentum after the severe recession of the mid-1970s, of the country's debt structure (government, corporate, and individual) at a pace far exceeding the sluggish expansion of the underlying 'real' economy. The result has been the emergence of an unprecedentedly huge and fragile financial superstructure subject to the stresses and strains that increasingly threaten the stability of the economy as a whole."

Now, we have already talked about credit as the great enabling mechanism of class mimicry. Let's take our friend, the six-foot, three hundred pound man. We have him in the room, with no food but water, and we're making him do exercises. Suppose now we ease up on him a little. Every fourth day we give him a bucket of fried chicken. Every third day after that we give him a three liter bottle of grape soda and a jumbo bag of cheeseburger-flavored Doritos (Yes, they make cheeseburger-flavored Doritos, now!). And suppose we let him have some amphetamines or other chemical stimulants to keep our guy going, to take his mind off the fact that he is still being very, very poorly nourished, and rested for that matter.

Again, in the article, Foster wrote: "Economic stagnation, in this sense, should not be confused with technological or consumer-product stagnation. Indeed, the constant development of the technology of production that characterizes capitalism in general (including its monopoly stage) only increases the productive potential of the system, intensifying its overaccumulation tendencies. The system could concievably be rescued from its economic doldrums under these circumstances by the appearance of an epoch-making innovation on the scale of the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile, in terms of total economic-geographical effects - generating a vast demand for new investment, independent of existing income constraints. Yet no such epoch-making innovation, Baran and Sweezy argued, was on the horizon.

Very good. Now let's turn to our third metaphorical analogy in this analysis. We should think of the elite finance sector as a whole (non-financial industrial firms also engage in financial speculation as well) like a sentient, slug-like, human body possessing, well, slug. This self-aware organism, that usually looks like a head of brocoli, enables the human body, it possesses, to perform superhuman feats of strength and speed, by making its metabolism and nervous system work very differently than it normally would.

As a result, the symbiot literally takes many decades off the life of the human being, as the creature uses up the body at a vastly accelerated rate. When the body is all burned up, the symbiot must move on and possess another body.

"... in terms of total economic geographical effects - generating a vast demand for new investment, independent of existing income constraints. Yet no such epoch-making innovation, Baran and Sweezy argued, was on the horizon."

The financial sector, as a whole, is like such a sentient, body possessing, slug-like creature, enabling the U.S. economy to perform remarkable feats of external dynamism, vigor, and power, all while inexorably undermining its health.

To be continued.

wingedcentaur

Guess who?

You know, there is something else that could be appreciated more, I think, and that there was absolutely no sight of in the nineties.

There is a difference between a strong economy and a healthy economy. I'm really not playing games with semantics. A strong economy and a healthy one might be one in the same, but not necessarily so.

There is a difference between a strong economy and a healthy economy; in the same way there is a difference between a man of bulging muscles, steroided-up, who can benchpress five hundred pounds in the gym; and another man, healthy, who may or may not be able to do the same.

I understand anabolic steroids have distressing consequences for the internal health of an individual: hormonal imbalance, impotency, organ damage, and the like. As you are hyped up on the 'roids, you may not notice as early as you might otherwise do, that you liver and kidneys are shutting down, your heart is growing larger, and so forth. You are so charged with you external physical power, that your muscle-bound triumphalism masks the inner decay.

So, for example, emphasis on the appearance of external dynamism (any way it could be managed), contributes to, or at least, blinds one to internal decay; just as over-devotion to the "free market" caused the bones of the state to grow more and more brittle, as nobody seemed to notice; and therefore, that bridge in Minnesota collapses and a moderate hurricane struck New Orleans, and the levies broke, allowing for far more injury, loss of life, and property damage than was necessary. And we always hear how the American public transport system, especially the trains, are relics compared to the European and Japanese systems. And on and on, so on and so forth.

wingedcentaur

Friends,

You know, in the nineties, there was a formula I used to hear people use to describe themselves politically. They would say: "I'm a social liberal and a fiscal conservative." Remember that? However, that can't be right! This is impossible, in fact.

If you look carefully at what they meant by 'social' I think you will find that the word is 'legal.' They should say that they are fiscal conservatives, social moderate/conservatives, and legal liberals. One supposes legal liberals would be for things like: Affirmative Action, Gay Rights (including the right for gays to serve openly in the U.S. military), Abortion Rights, Muticulturalism, Path-to-Legalization of undocumented workers, and the like.

What makes these things legal instead of social, is the fact that one's advocacy of them does not require the public treasury to spend money to address these problems. All that is presumably required is an elevating of the public "consciousness," and so forth. There is no need or desire to call for economic justice to address these, real concerns. Indeed, in the nineties, the concept of economic justice had no place in the neoliberal consensus in the nineties, or at any other time of the sway of the Washington Consensus.

But when we talk about homelessness, joblessness, the need to bolster public education (social liberal/fiscal conservatives drift into the rightward direction of school vouchers), the growing income and wealth gap between the haves and have-nots, the minimum wage (and how about a living wage?), and the like, we are getting into an area of public policy that asks the public treasury to spend money to fix these problems. But such social spending runs counter to the fiscal conservatism of the social liberal/fiscal conservatives. It was in the nineties, remember, when we first began to hear the gentler term - for giving the shaft to the poor and working class - of "entitlement reform."

It was these "socially liberal/fiscally conservative" creatures who popularized that term, if I'm not mistaken, centrist Democratic National Committee types. This distinction is important, because, as I said, the concept of economic justice was nonexistent in the prevailing ideology of the go-go nineties. Nineteen nineties, that is. It was all about economic freedom. Freedom would somehow make the free market just, and so forth. Their fiscal conservatism, left or right, put much more focus on paying down the national debt, balancing the budget, making up revenue shortfalls, and the like.

This distillation of legal liberalism is significant, too, because Slavoj Zizek (remember, the Slovenian philosopher I told you about?) says that what is wrong with the left's response to capitalism today, in general, is its narrowly legalistic terms, which fails to ask the big, basic questions anymore about income distribution, natural resources, what should the allocation of public funds be, how should workplaces be organized, and so forth.

wingedcentaur

Friends,

I know of no clinical psychological study concerning the effects of starvation on an individual. Probably only the Nazis did such things. But what if we took a six-foot tall, three hundred pound man, somewhat flabby, and put him into a room, without food of any kind but we'll be nice and give him water. Suppose we required him to do regular calisthenics (this exercise should be considered analogous to the invariably rising productivity of the workers even in the midst of downsizings with flat wages but rising profits for executives.

So, our guy is locked in a room with only water, no food, and yet required to exercise. The total absence of food should be equated with deindustrialization, no inputs. There might come a point as the starved, exercising body strips away most of the fat and muscle definition is at its height. At this point he might look into the window and say to himself: "Damn, I'm ripped! I am so cut!"

This small window of euphoria is analagous to the height of some kind of national "bubble," that is before the process of starvation marches on and continues to eat away muscle, then bone, then nerve fiber, and the like, until death. A bubble is junk food, the substitution of real productive value with hype about "The Next Big Thing." One could say that what keeps the U.S. economy going in the midst of deindustrialization, are the bubbles of various kinds.


What about capitalism's anorexic/bulimic tendencies? The system tends to look at itself in the mirror and say: "I'm fat!!" then goes running for fifteen miles, swims endless laps around an Olympic size pool, runs on the treadmill for two hours, does aerobics, paints the garage, and then eats a bowl of soup. This mere bowl of broth symbolizes the severe pairing back of social spending by the government during times of crisis when state, local, and the federal government don't collect as much taxes from the financial sector, whom it may have to rescue for some reason or other.

This anorexia is also exemplified in the way in which private industry seems to relentlessly offshore plants, put downward pressure on wages and benefits of workers, and so forth to "trim the fat," and do whatever they have to do to "reduce labor costs," as well as shareholder return. That is also the bowl of soup. But productivity must go up, working hours must go up. This is the torturous, self-flagellating exercise regimen.

But the system also likes to "binge and purge." The system goes into paroxysms and gorge itself on the next big thing or bubble. In this phase the system doesn't even bother looking at itself in the mirror. It runs to the bathroom, sticks its finger down its throat and purges.... productive capacity overseas to various locations where labor costs are much lower and health and human safety standards are much more relaxed - like the anorexic, afraid of putting on weight.

But this constant self-induced vomitting, I hear, brings up stomach acid which wears away at the lining of the throat.

Let's return to the "dual reality" John Bellamy Foster referred to, of stagnant growth on the one hand, and the fact of, the way ".... the system has found new ways of reproducing itself,..." Stagnation and financialization which gives capitalism its appearance of dynamism.

I remember how, in the eighties people expressed concern about offshoring and the flattening of wages, as plant owners steadfastly, stubbornly, and one could tell, defensively, maintained that they were doing what they had to do to compete with overseas producers whose labor costs were much lower. I'm fat. Remember I told you about the analysis of Dr. Rick Wolf? For one hundred fifty years American capitalism underwent an unprecedented continued expansion with worker wages, productivity, and profits for bosses went up every decade. And there was a sweet spot between 1945 and 1975, in which American capitalism stood alone uncontested, with the economies of Europe and Japan having to be rebuilt by buying American products. But that stopped in the seventies as those shattered societies recovered and starting competing and out-competing U.S. industry.

Offshoring was one of those aspects of the changing economy that capitalists seemed to poutily defend. But by the nineties the chattering classes were extolling the virtues of offshoring as one of the innumerable positive aspects of globalization, remember? They said that this process, somehow, made the economy more efficient (I'm fat). Thomas Friedman, the New York Times journalist said that the world was flat and that no two countries that had McDonalds ever went to war, (it was all about the healing power in international relations of shared commerce). Francis Fukayama said that history had come to an end. Ronald Reagan, in the eighties, of course, had said that "Government is not the answer to our problems. Government is the problem." And Bill Clinton had said that "The era of big government is over," and signed what many regard as a highly punitive welfare reform bill worthy of The Gipper himself, signed the Financial Services Modernization Act which killed Glass-Steagal, which in the thirties, had prevented the merger of commercial and speculative investment banks, remember? And didn't he sign telecommunications legislation which opened the floodgates to the unprecedented concentration of all media in fewer and fewer gigantic multinational corporate hands?

In other words, the nineties saw the cementing of the neoliberal consensus, or Washington Consensus. Also, remember, the nineties saw the rise of the tech or Internet bubble. And then it burst. What is the bursting of a bubble analogous to in terms of human biological functionality? Well, suppose one ate ten pounds of food, but the quality of the food is such that one evacuates, say, eight-and-a-half pounds of.................................. waste. Sorry to go on with this base analogy but what goes down the toilet bowl? Scores of small businesses, "start ups," taking the hopes and dreams of thousands upon thousands who have lost their jobs from those and even more established companies.

Also, it is my understanding that bubble periods are always accompanied by financialization. And of finance itself, Kevin Phillips wrote, again, in Wealth and Democracy (2002): "Speculative heydays pull in large middle class participation, fueling themes about the democratization of money and investment, at least until the bubble pops" pxxi - introduction. This is part of what I have previously referred to as the Ring of Sauron dynamic, remember?

Also, we must note that increased investment, perhaps from a broader base of the population, also responded and fueled layoffs of workers. Again, Kevin Phillips.

"Pressure to maximize profits and stock prices by cutting employees came both from top management and from Wall Street and institutional investors, the latter responding to yardsticks that a single layoff added $60,000 to future year bottom line earnings. If layoffs and downsizings continued even as profits set records in the nineties, that was because the layoffs and downsizings were often the reason for the profits" (Wealth and Democracy, p.150). Finance will finance itself in the space where there is no productive action to enable. And in this we see, in microcosm, the national tendency to bulimia, binge and purge, as well as the anorexic tendency, since, no doubt, worker productivity (those workers left at the job) must rise to "pick up the slack."

wingedcentaur

Friends,

Its time to add this next mode of analysis. I am going to focus on finance capital and preeminence of finance as the driving force of capitalism today, and therefore what many think of as a new phase of capitalism. I'm going to use three metaphors.

A) finance as the metabolism of the body of the nation's political economy in advanced capitalist nations

B) the U.S. economy as being prone to bouts of anorexia/bulimia

C) the financial sector, as a whole, likened to an invasive parasite that takes control of bodies, possesses them, if you will, and indeed, makes these bodies capable of superhuman feats of strength and speed (but alas, burns through the bodies at an exponentially increased rate, such that they have find another body in a span of time of weeks and months rather than the several decades of a normal, average human lifespan. This is a plot point in much science fiction.

Think about the symbiot species of the Trill species of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Think about the Tok'ra and Gau'oold (whatever) of that series based on the movie about the Stargate SG-1 (whatever). If anyone is familiar with the novels of Octavia E. Butler, think about the character of Doro in Wildseed and Mind of My Mind.

And I want to do all of this in connection with an article the Monthly Review called The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital by John Bellamy Foster.

monthlyreview.org/100201foster.php

Foster began by citing an article he wroter for Monthly Review in 2006 called "Monopoly-Finance Capital," written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary, of what is apparently a seminal work in this particular area of analysis, called Monopoly Capital by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. The question he posed in the 2006 article, Foster had raised the question: Has capitalism mutated into another stage beyond that which Baran and Sweezy identified?

Two points.

1) Stagnation has worsened, he wrote. The problem of capital accumulation continues. He talked about the tendency of capitalism to oversaturate the market, to produce goods that are far in excess of the number of people who care to and/or have the means to buy.

2) and yet on the other hand, the system has found "...new ways of reproducing itself, and capital has paradoxically even prospered within this impasse, through the explosive growth of finance..."

We might say that the housing bubble crisis is an example of this one-two punch. Why were so many people given so many sub prime loans, Alt A loans, and ninja (no income, no job, no asset verification) loans? - stagnation (1), right? Because there were not enough low-risk borrowers to satisfy the needs of the system or the body of the system (2).

Finance is to the economy of an advanced capitalist society, what the metabolism is to the body. The metabolism is the engine that converts food into energy for the body to operate efficiently and store fat reserves. Finance is the metabolism and the economy as a whole is the body. Finance acts like the metabolism by taking a person looking for a home loan, a car loan, student loan, or loan to start a new business (presumably most of the applicants are "upstanding citizens" and all that), and circulating them into and through the system, and "adding value" to their society by starting a "home" and raising children and the like, creating jobs, and driving back and forth to school, home, and work, and so on.

When you try to sustain the body on a regular intake of low quality "junk" food, the metabolism has to work harder to retrieve anything of value from such intake. The sub prime crisis is an example of this. Here we begin the slide into virtual capitalism.

When food is restricted altogether, then the metabolism will force the body to feed upon itself in a desperate attempt to survive. What everyone agrees is the extremely speculative nature of finance is a consequence of and contributes to what is called the deindustrialization of a society.

In his 2002 book, Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips wrote, in the introduction, "... the present wealth of the United States is tied not only to government assistance, public policy, and technology, but to the umbrella spread by more than a half century of American global economic hegemony. Eventually, however, the previous world economic leaders proved vulnerable not only to excesses of financialization but to transfer of technological advantage. These can dissipate a global industrial primacy in as little as a single generation. War and terrorism add to the risk" p.xx.

In this way finance must finance something, even if it is only itself. I'll continue with this next time.

wingedcentaur

Good Afternoon Friends,

Where is capitalism headed today? I know I said I would move on to something else - and I will... in time. But I'd like to add another dimension to our multiphasic analysis. I've talked about the idea that Man is the desire to become God, and it is this truth, in my opinion, that fuels the capitalist dynamic: human beings tendency to mimic the classes above themselves, facilitated through the agency of credit, and expressed, for example, in the huge demand for black market "knock off" designer shoes, apparel, and the like, with the aim of projecting to the world a higher level of prosperity than you actually enjoy; all of the classes pursue the top one percent or top 0.1 percent, who seek to attain the "holy grail" of having "more money than God;" and in pursuing God in this debased way there are implications: God is presumably the possessor of all wealth by virtue of simply being God, who is not bound to tiresome "free market" principles; God is not a capitalist. Capitalism is irrelevant to God; So, the bourgeoisie, counterintuitively, I claim, feel capitalism as a constraining force, a necessary evil they have to endure - for a time before they can make their move, hopefully, toward seriously divine wealth (and this is so for the nominally religious, agnostic, and atheist); and we might also add that they seem to view democracy as a hassle, another impediment to their wealth creation and protection.

Man's desire to become God, as we have passed this through the various filters, led us to consider the traditional worldwide New Money-Old Money dynamic, that seems to have been in operation throughout time, all over the globe. We suggested that the underlying reason why Old Money always regarded New Money as uncouth, barely civilized, and the like, is because New Money is an uncomfortable reminder to Old Money of the more mortal origins of their own wealth. It is for this reason that New Money always, always, always wants and seeks to become Old Money (or God-Money). This is so whether we're looking at Don Corleone or some other "legitimate" businessman.

New Money is capitalist and Old Money is not, it has transcended or escaped capitalism. New Money tries to escape capitalism in at least two traditional ways. First, they marry into Old (God) Money families. The second way they try to quicken the "aging" process of their wealth is by financialization (and branding which is its twin) - and which is one of the alternative phases of economic growth I referred to as virtual capitalism, triggered when "natural" capitalism hits it natural political, social, economic, legal, and geographical limits to indefinite expansion.

This is both an expression of the bourgeoisie's frustration with the limits of, what to them, is a lower form of existence (like those "agents" of the system in The Matrix), and the impatience to take the next step to the immortality of their wealth (and therefore, to a lesser extent, themselves). Therefore, I claim, that crises in capitalism are the result of the capitalist ruling class, en masse, trying to flee capitalism, like a mass prison break - which is as destabilizing to the system, as is a mass prison break is destabilizing to a prison.

But remember that Man (all men and women) are the desire to become God, in various ways, but also in the pursuit of wealth, as I have described. Therefore, all of us, have our role to play and responsibility for what Slavoj Zizek (remember that Slovenian philosopher I told you about?) would call this dynamic of 'subjective violence.'

Let's move this to another post.

wingedcentaur