http://freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag/2012/01/the-most-influential-female-atheist-of-2011/

Seriously. It’s like a south American junta pinning medals on each other. Nauseating. And they believe it. 233 votes ::cough::

ManPersondate for all of godlessness.

What a sorry fucking state we’re in.

Destroy SOPA

Seriously, what is at stake is your right to interact; to criticise; to parody; to discuss.

SOPA/PIPA wants to give carte blanche censorship powers to the corporate sector.

No accountability. No responsibility.

The real target is you.

React or submit.

Hollywood creates nothing. Neither does the RIAA. Ask them – have they ever returned a cent to artists by suing dead people and single mothers? They will not answer. They are parasites. Dinosaurs that natural selection is removing from the biosphere. They have no function other than to serve themselves. Herein lies their desperation.

Destroy them.

They are worthless.

So are the politicians that are selling you out.

Register to vote – and remember who’s who.

Solon - rhymes with colon, the original defaulter

Apologies in advance. This is another dry and unamusing entry via the serendipity of my private reading and google. Just one of those things that if I don’t do right now, I will never do.

The earlier entry ruminated on the derangement of imaginary money that is not offset by actual capital creation, and the modern heresy of debt default – drilled into us as an unmentionable evil we are prohibited from even thinking about by the Mandarins of Globalisation.

I found some rather relevant blog posts, all revolving around the writings of one of our finest, and appallingly undervalued, contemporary minds, John Ralston Saul (website). This is to extend the previous discussion. These items expand far more competently than I could hope to and I have little to add -

Unsustainable Levels of Debt by John Ralston Saul

(via Les Stewart)

Stewart digs out some earlier works by Saul. These are the key observations to ground us back in reality -

1. The building up of unsustainable debt loads is a commonplace in history. There are several standard means of resolving the problem: execute the lenders, exile them, default outright or simply renegotiate to achieve partial default and low interest rates.
2. There is no example of a nation become rich by paying its debts.
3. There are dozens of examples of nations becoming rich by defaulting or renegotiating. This begins formally in the sixth century BC with Solon taking power in debt-crippled Athens. His organization of general default – “the shaking off of the burdens” – set the city-state on its road to democracy and prosperity. The Athens which is still remembered as the central inspiration of WESTERN CIVILIZATION was the direct product of a national default. One way or another most Western countries, including the United States, have done the same thing at some point. Most national defaults lead to sustained periods of prosperity.

Apart from the suggestion to shoot or exile (unrealistic in a globalised world unless you send them to Sudan) the scumbags that have created our quagmire, the key point to note is that, unknown to most people, the United States has defaulted previously, and has done so on many occassions. The world did not end and, as Stewart notes, the process of default usually led to an envigorated economy. Stewart proceeds to point out how the relation between public debt and personal property has effectively been flipped on its head by the collusion between financiers and politicians obsessed with “economic rationalism” over the last half century -

The question of national collateral was fully addressed in the eighteenth century when it became clear that an indebted people could not owe their national rights (their land and property) to a lender. The citizen’s natural and concrete rights took precedence over the lender’s abstract rights.

One of the most peculiar and insidious aspects of twentieth-century CORPORATISM has been an attempt to reverse this precedence. The managerial imperative suggests that national debts can be indirectly collateralized in several ways. Governments can be forced to sell national property to pay debts (PRIVATIZATION). They can also be pressed to transfer ownership of national property to lenders, as has been done in the Third World. — from Saul’s The Doubters Companion

These are the “austerity measures” being forced on those that can least afford them and our steadily disappearing pension funds – this is collective wealth being stolen from all to pay for imaginary interest generated by the continuous bailout processes. Essentially, institutionalised theft. Remember, unlike the days of the gold standard and similar equivalents that limited the issue of currency, the ever mounting debt burdens and accelerating interest rates generate money that is not offset by any real world wealth. It has to come from somewhere. Money is simply being printed, and the short term interest costs are financed by squeezing the public itself. Blood from a stone.

The next item revisits the history of early Athens, the cradle of our modern democracy, and how it came to be what it was by the Judgement of Solon, the original debt defaulter -

The judgement of Solon

(via Heresy Corner)

Even more interesting is the lesson Saul draws from Athens in the days of Solon. Athens in his day was in the midst of… I’m tempted to say a Greek-style debt crisis, but that would be doubly anachronistic. But yes, a Greek-style debt crisis. Archaic Athens was controlled by a financial elite, the Eupatridae, landowners who acted as bankers, lending money to poor farmers who, unable to pay it back, lost their land. “This debt situation spun further and further out of control.” Austerity and Draconian repression — Draco being the lawmaker responsible for the clampdowns — didn’t work. Faced with the final collapse of Athenisan society (and their rule) the Eupatridae sent for Solon:

Solon’s first act on taking power was to redeem all the forfeited land and to free all the enslaved citizens. This he did by fiat. That is to say, he legislated immediate default. The Athenians called it the shaking off of burdens, but in practical terms what he had done amounted to simply ripping up the debt papers.

Having released both the people and the nation from their paper chains, he was able to re-establish the social balance. From there he went on to create a code of fair laws (in place of Draco’s) and to lay the foundation for a democratic constitution. Athens immediately began its rise to glory, spewing out ideas, theatre, sculpture and architecture, democratic concepts and concrete riches.

This is largely a forgotten snippet of history, and one I suspect the technocrat snake oil merchants applying various “fixes” to the mess they created in the GFC don’t want widely known. But consider the vast amount of money disappearing into the void of the credit/debt market that is never seen again – money that does not generate any corresponding wealth via capital, but only devalues itself via the cancer of arbitrary interest rates – and consider what the result would be if that wealth were used instead to rebuild economies on a clean slate. Is default really that bad? Of course it is – it is heresy. So say the gurus.

The last item I want to share is an essay from the great man himself, largely a concise preview of his 2005 book The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World, from Harper’s Magazine March 2004 -

The Collapse of Globalism: and the Rebirth of Nationalism

You have to be stoned to fully appreciate it.

The last high/low-light was a testament to the joys of the ubiquitous $2 shops that largely support the bulk of sweatshop labour in the third world. Ma pulled apart a crassmass bonbon with my 3 yo nephew and it exploded with an anticlimactic pop and the usual tissue paper hat and junk gift fell out which junior gleefully grappled and pulled apart. The “gift” fell out – a flimsy plastic case full of sewing needles. I thought one of the others was a bit dangerous for kids, a cork screw. But fucking sewing needles? In children’s crassmass crackers? Those wacky Chinese sweatshop entrepreneurs. No harm was done in this case – Ma was paying attention. But the lesson of the day is never trust anything you buy at those junk shops, especially where kids are involved.

Another gem fell into my lap a few days ago in digitised format. A copy of Bill Cosby’s contribution to the War on Drugs – the 1972 Grammy Award winning (best kids album) Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs, which I actually do possess on vinyl. Personally, I have never heard a record better suited for being ripped off your tits. It leaves Cheech & Chong for dead. Back in my pothead days, this thing was glued to our turntable. Genuine crowd pleaser. It’s somewhat of a collector’s item nowadays. Here’s a couple of the choicer samples. Happy new year to non-baboons everywhere. Regular programming will resume shortly.

Info: Long out of print, never made it to CD – vinyl and casette only. Mint editions of vinyl start at around $US85 (Ebay). Used from around $45 (Amazon).

Don't they look sweet?

[previous]

Present -

Good on ya baby -

For Sacha:

Lipstick -

Revolution -

YOU’RE TALKING CRAP WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN?

YOU SOUND JUST LIKE A POLITICIAN

STICK IT UP YOUR REVOLUTION

SO YOU THINK THE TIME IS NEAR?

ROCK-N-ROLL MAY BE NO SOLUTION

BUT THAT’S WHAT I WANNA HEAR

NANANANANA ROCK-N-ROLL

For Herman:

Batman -

TV glue -

Degenerate Boy-

All Over Now -

Best for last. For Ana and Daisy:

Oxford Street Nick -

By Bruce Everett

Thanks for self-identifying Bruce.

I’m sick of this financial crisis. All of us, each and every one of us, bar the financial Mandarins that are “fixing” the mess they created, are being butt-fucked into the ground. “Austerity measures” are sold as some kind of panacea. Our wages are frozen. Inflation outstrips any miserly “indexed” gains grudgingly granted. Meanwhile, reports of “performance bonuses” to our financial overlords are back to pre-meltdown levels, often lump sums far in excess of what any of us will earn in a lifetime.

The approach to remedy this status quo seems an absurdist black comedy. It’s like watching a sinking ship being bailed out with teaspoons. As one example, the poor long suffering Greeks, where “austerity” measures are biting the hardest and, as always, hitting those already on a subsistence existence the worst.

In what can only be described as an economic Grand Guignol performance piece to rub salt into the wounds, in November Lucas Papademos, a career financier and former vice president of the European Central Bank, was promoted to head the Greek Provisional Government to replace George Papandreou’s failed Panhellenic Socialist Movement. A fox had been placed in charge of the hen house.

But nowhere does logic fail more than with the endless stream of financial bailouts to economies teetering on the brink of collapse. Can somebody please explain exactly how this improves anything?

• A country is in danger of financial default because it is incapable of meeting it’s debt obligations
• That country is given a slab of money to shore up the crisis, thus adding to the debt that has caused the existing problem
• Due to being bailed out, that country’s credit rating is then lowered, thus increasing interest rates on the increased debt level
• Lather, rinse, repeat.

Uhuh. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? This is not a financial system, or economics. It’s a fucking loan sharking operation. And the only people that seem to understand this are the apes at the top of the financial system that are pulling all the strings. Our politicians are either bought and in their pockets, or too stupid to understand it. And the poor schmucks on the street? Well, we just have to eat our gruel and be grateful for it.

Consider the nature of debt with compound interest. From the cesspit of lies -

These are the most basic formulas:

The above calculates the future value (FV) of an investment’s present value (PV) accruing at a fixed interest rate (i) for n periods.

It’s really junior high school math, at least outside of the US, but for those without sufficient numeracy skills, suffice it to say that for any value of n greater than zero, the repayment is always greater than the loan. What this means is that money gets printed. That which does not exist, *poof*, gets created out of nothing¹. This is also called inflation. And what inflation does is devalue what the dollar in your pocket can buy. Just ruminate on that for a bit. There is of course no shortage of economists out there that are ready to pounce on me and tear me to shreds for this observation, but it will have little to do with the validity of my assertions and everything to do with committing the heresy of explaining it in such simple language. I guess economists have more in common with baboons than you would at first assume.

Now look at this cycle of bailouts. There is no realistic end in sight. Teaspoons and the Titanic. The debts of these borderline economies (PV, or “present value”) – and the number of such economies keeps rising – grows with each bailout, and each bailout increases i (or the “fixed interest rate”) due to a lowering of their credit rating. This cycle causes their overall obligations (FV, or “future value”) to grow exponentially, not linearly. Again, ruminate on that. Squeezing blood from a stone.

And the killer, where it affects all of us, is that all of this is imaginary money with no corresponding wealth generation (see note 1 below again) – sooner or later, the dollar in your pocket loses an amount of value relative to the interest that has been incurred. Everyone is a loser – everyone, of course, except those who run this extortion racket and who’s rate of return on private investments far outstrips the rate of inflation they create.

Now if you are not conversant with the issues that arise from infinite growth within finite systems, then please leave this blog and never darken it again. For the rest of you, I tend to liken this cycle of bailouts that propped up the US (and probably will again) and is currently trying to hold Europe together, as akin to driving a dynamite truck full speed down a dead end tunnel with the headlights off and hoping for the best. It is expecting this cycle of debt and imaginary money to be infinitely sustainable in a system that has been shown to be very, very finite.

Mention the phrase “printing money” to any politician and they will have a seizure whilst decrying it for the evil that it is and babbling about the Weimar Republic and World War 2. Yet that is precisely what is happening – this endless debt cycle is doing nothing other than print imaginary money for financial speculators around the globe. This is the world’s biggest rigged horserace that only the über-rich can bet on. The winnings are siphoned out of all of our pockets using all manner of sleight of hand, and these “bailouts” play a major role.

This cannot go on forever. It is not eternally sustainable. The collapse of the US mortgage market was just a taste of what happens when infinite usury suddenly bloats and exhausts its finite space².

And if mentioning printed money doesn’t kill your politicians, try using “global default”. Where permissable, you’ll be locked away for eternity as insane. But what is so wrong about the idea? Really? Look at the alternatives that we are playing with. Can anyone, using simple terms, explain how its death throes will be a lesser evil? Is there an economist anywhere that can speak plain English? Isn’t biting the bullet earlier, rather than later, worth a teeny weeny bit of consideration?

Footnote – No I haven’t forgotten about The Naked Emperor and his baboons. Folks that know me know I go MIA from mid-December to January each year due to the freakshow that this time of year invokes and do little more than check email, look at tits and play poker when opportunity arises. Regular programming will resume shortly. The baboons can consider it a crassmass present – I have given them the impression that they have scared me into a cave a la bin Laden. Sorry, fuck you, but no. It’s just given be a wealth of new idiocy to work with.

¹ – In the days of the gold standard, the only way that more money could be created was by digging up more gold. Money was not imaginary, it needed to relate to reality. Minor 2oth century potholes such as World War 1 and the Great Depression saw the gold standard entirely abandoned globally and replaced virtually everywhere by fiat money systems – “Fiat money is money that derives its value from government regulation or law” (via the cesspit). While this system was not as rigid as the gold standard, it was still predominantly governed by real factors such as GDP. This in turn has been abandoned over the last few decades in the western world as, led by the US, our economies transitioned from being “production based” to “debt based” economies. This is where our woes began. Anybody that believes we live in a “capitalist” system is kidding themselves. We are not governed by “capitalists” but by “speculators” – financial houses that create nothing and instead bet on rigged horse races with your money. Yes, it really is as simple as that. Their profits are created via imaginary money without creating any corresponding public wealth to pay for it. It *is* printing money.

² – All the more inexcusable given the precedent of the ’80s savings and loans crisis. Absolutely nothing had been learned -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis