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