How the Princelings and the Bankers got on top (and we paid for it)
Dick Eastman
designer and humanitarian I know of was
R. Buckminster Fuller. He understood these
times before we even got here.
May what we read below bond us "synergistically"
(Fuller's term, meaning stronger, more effective
and fundamentally beyond the mere sum of parts
taken seperately).
Dick Eastman
Yakima
Every man is responsible to very other man.
========^============================
From: Jon Chance
Subject: (Bucky Fuller's) A Brief Description of Everything
Written in 1973, this is one of the founding documents
of the US Citizens Executive Administration
(CEA-USA - born on the 25th of January, 2001).
Jon Chance
chiefofsta...@usa.net
http://egroups.com/group/cea-usa
=======^==============================
COSMIC COSTING (1973)
by Buckminster Fuller
http://bfi.org
http://cinetopia.net
HAMILTON VS JEFFERSON
In the decades immediately following America's successful
1776 revolution, a group of political strategists led by
Alexander Hamilton persuaded the Congress of the United
States that it was not the intention of the founders of
the republic that their government should have any capital-
wealth-initiating capability [public monetary system].
Wealth, they maintained, was a mysterious reality that
emanated exclusively from inherited fortunes and the
private ventures of large landowners. There were no
government or public inspections of the nature of their
wealth other than the self-evident land and the publicly
registered deeds of ownership.
All the U.S. Government's financial needs, said the
Hamiltonians, must be underwritten by funds from these
for the first time exclusive, self-accredited, wealthy
individuals, loaned to the government through the wealthy
citizens "banks," and must be repaid to their banks by the
government with funds raised by taxation from the people.
DEBT VS WEALTH
And this exclusively negative, politically sustained
interpretation provides the legal precedent for today's
limited liability privilege of bank's and insurance
corporations to loan out at interest to humanity (as
government of individuals) the very same earnings and
savings deposits that humanity had entrusted to the banks
and insurers for safekeeping.
Unauthorized by the depositors and unbeknownst to them,
the banks have been loaning out the deposits of the
borrowers themselves. Thus the banks are "justified" by
precedent in paying exclusively to themselves the interest
earned on the deposits.
DECEPTION VS BIOLOGY
Since the deposited monies are not biological, those monies
cannot actually multiply in physical-energy fact. The
"interest" earnings were predicated historically on the use
of cattle as currency -- a real currency that did indeed
multiply its numbers biologically.
That present paper and metal money cannot multiply the so-
called earnings of interest on it, means automatic increase
of the number of dollars in respect to the true wealth of
life-support items for which the money is exchanged. Thus
interest charges on non-biological money automatically
deflate the value of the money.
The banks' continuing escalation of discount and interest
rates progressively devalues humanity's commonwealth equity
while siphoning over the deposited wealth into the banks'
credit accounts, so that the depositors' realized funds of
later years have only a fraction of the buying power they
had commanded at the time of deposit.
The banks of 1970 have all but abandoned their specious
representation, popularly advertised until the time of the
1929 crash, that suggested that the individual's consistent
bank-deposited savings would continually grow, ultimately
to provide handsomely for the individual's old-age needs.
But the myth persists as a popular concept and as a
psychological drive [especially with stock-market bubbles].
CRASH & DEPRESSION
The American banker's "wealth bluffing" poker hands were
"called" for the first time in the 1929-1933 stock-market
crash and Depression. Their empty-handedness occurred
because:
(1) the banks themselves had no real wealth, and
(2) the banks had used the depositors' funds as investments
elsewhere in "non-liquid cash" ventures.
These frozen resources brought about unmeetable "runs" and
bankruptcy of the banks.
After Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the U.S. government
reopened the "banks" with public knowledge of the fact that
the people's deposits were now being guaranteed only by the
people's government, and not by the bankers or by private-
enterprise wealth.
The banks and their managers, "owners," and employees were
then put under stiff government regulation. Thus the U.S.
Congress and administration socialized the banking system,
but without saying so in a forthright manner. The people's
government, and not the bankers, became the guarantor of
last recourse.
The reestablishment of the "banks" were restored by the New
Deal only because people were accustomed to placing their
savings in the safekeeping of banks, considering them less
subject to robbery than when hidden under mattresses. The
Roosevelt administration found it easier to yield to this
popularly conditioned reflex than to re-educate the people
on economics. The public of 1933 knew little or nothing of
the Alexander Hamilton fiscal coup of a century earlier.
THE WARFARE STATE
The U.S. Reconstitution Finance Corporation -- which
rehabilitated and refurbished the prime industrial
production corporations such as U.S. Steel -- plus World
War II further confused the socioeconomic issues that were
already too complex for omni-specialized society to
understand.
Most of the humans who remember the great crash bankruptcy,
which peaked to a 5,000 failed-bank crescendo in late 1932,
are now dead, and the New Deal's invention of non-banker
banks, with postal-clerk status bank employees, has been
perpetuated and transformed, through enormous political
maneuvering and obscure economic semantics.
As a consequence, the bank stockholders have succeeded in
regaining their debt-exploiting prerogatives, thereby
running the U.S. national debt [1973] to a record $400
billion "owed" to them on the books with intensely
interesting "interest" to the banks, insurance companies,
and their bond-buying customers. The annual interest on
this is [was] $21 billion. [The U.S. national trade debt
is now over $6 trillion with respectively preposterous
interest payments.]
BANKRUPTCY & SOVEREIGNTY
The U.S. national-debt service of $21 billion interest was
equal, pre-Nixon, to one-half the value of all the monetary
gold in the world. With the U.S. dollar in 1972
realistically deflated 50 percent by true world-market,
international-trading value, the Nixon $21 billion
public-debt interest is [was] annually equal in value only
to one-eighth the world's monetary gold.
This obscurely managed, complex system of wealth now
promises again to bankrupt the U.S. people, whose
presidential elections can only be won through corrupting,
multimillion-dollar TV-time-buying campaigns [and electronic
manipulation of privately controlled, proprietary vote-
counting machinery]. This could bring about the end of a
sovereign United States and swift emergence of its people
as world citizens.
Unnoticed among all the world-political-crisis news, the
155 largest industrial corporations born and developed in
the United States had committed 80 percent of their wealth
to operations outside of the United States. They have gone
"world"; they have their own world inter-accounting, which
transcends politico-economic sovereign accounting.
FEUDALISM VS COMMONWEALTH
In order for a world-around democracy to prosper, world
society must learn how to prosper; world society must learn
how all this came about.
We discover that, historically, the exclusively agricultural
accounting system now being ineptly applied to the word
industrialization began with a sovereign's claim to the
lands established by his conquering "deeds or arms."
Public recognition of the claims was secured by the
sovereign's continued and ever-increasing armed might. The
sovereign of his or her assignees then issued paper deeds
to great lands to pay for the armed deeds of their
comrades-in-arms who became the lords of all the conquered
lands other than the king's.
This landlordism, or land ownership, was originally
dispensed from deeds of war. Then the great landlords
loaned or sold parcels of their lands to share-cropping
farmers who had to pay the landlord a tithe, or rent, and
"interest" out of the wealth produced by nature within
which to store the grains collected in the basket (fiscus
is Latin for basket; thus the fiscal year is that which
winds up within the basketed measuring the net grains
harvested).
The real pay-off, or course, was in regenerative metabolic
increments of the botanical photosynthetic impoundment of
Sun radiation and hydrocarbon molecules' structuring and
proliferation through hydrogenic and biological inter-
accommodations.
Obviously none of this natural, wealth-regenerating and
multiplying process was accreditable to the landlords.
COERCION VS COOPERATION
Yet the sovereigns and landlords imposed themselves by force
into the metabolic wealth-harvesting and sharing equation
even earlier in history.
Nomadic tribal herders -- after wandering the seemingly
infinite wilderness for millions of years, as their semi-
domesticated cattle led them to verdant pastures -- found
the once free, open land being gradually claimed,
proclaimed, and patrolled by the most powerful armed
warlords, who suggested that the herder needed "protection"
for their defenseless flocks and herds, which were
tantalizingly stealable wealth.
The roving, sword-brandishing strongmen imposed their
"protection" on all comers within their realms and battled
with other strongmen to increase their respective
territories.
Finally, the herders were forced to "buy" the lands they
roam from the lords who sold the herders their "own"
special ranches. The ranches were sold at prices far beyond
the herders' total savings in skins or total livestock
value, so the landlords "loaned" the herder the down-payment
purchasing price to acquire the ranch while the lord took
back, and held as collateral, a number of heads of the
herders' cattle.
INTEREST & CAPITAL
From collateral, the lord took as "payment in kind" both
the annual reduction in total purchase price and -- to cover
"interest" -- the young cattle bred seasonally.
The word capital (capita in Latin, originally referring to
heads of cattle) was thus derived. The herder hopefully
earned (i.e. bred) enough additional heads of cattle
eventually to pay off the landlord in kind.
In later millenniums the herder could sell his cattle in
exchange for the landlord's inanimate, non-herding money in
the form of coins and thus repay the landlord or traffic in
other goods, all of which had fallen prey to the landlord's
"protection."
During the interim the cattle deposited as collateral
continued to breed, and the newborn cattle became basic
"interest" claimed unilaterally by the landlord and
appropriated exclusively to his own account.
THE BIRTH OF MONEY
Metallic coin money was invented only four millenniums ago
when ships capable of sustaining sea commerce were
developed.
It became impractical for traders to carry aboard ship
cattle with which to negotiate, so coins with patterns of
sovereign conquerors gradually became negotiable.
Both phonetic spellings and coined money were the
"inventions of necessity" of the Phoenicians. Overseas
traders needed negotiability written words with which to
contract long-term trading arrangements between people who
never came into direct contact with one another and knew
little or nothing of the language, conditions, and resources
prevailing in the mystically far-apart lands of those with
whom they traded. The Phoenecian's phonetic alphabet
provided graphic symbols for sounds, and thus made
possible the spelling out of any language's sound words.
After a millennium or so of high-seas battling, of sea
lords, such as the Vikings (Veekings) and other great
pirate-fleet operators who imposed their "protection" on
great empires, the Veeking Phoenicians, or Fenecians,
became the Benetians of Venezia.
Shakespeare's merchant of Venice, and this attempt to
substitute human flesh for live cattle flesh as collateral
for the banker's trade "accommodations," dramatizes the
nonsense of equating that which is biologically productive
and the "protector's" non-productive metallic money.
Society no longer equates the "protection"-imposing
racketeer with the banking establishment. But this long-
ago, muscle-warped concept of wealth, and the unjust and
lethally conclusive way in which it was established ("to
whom this and that belonged"), was developed over the
millenniums in just this manner.
THE DEATH OF MONEY
Considered independently of yesterday's dubious claim, the
Exclusively biological premises of the agrarian era are
utterly inapplicable to the new, inanimate, industrial
metabolics. >
The difference is that existing between failure-prone,
local agricultural metabolics and the never-failing
eternally inter-regenerative, radiation-mass-radiation-mass
recycling that characterizes the fail-proof metabolics of a
universe and its increasing availability to humanity aboard
planet Earth.
Only through the human mind does the inexhaustible cosmic
wealth become increasingly available for local terrestrial
evolution. This harnessing of eternally inexhaustible
energy into human-task powering can be factually accounted
for as part of the irreversibly amplifying inventory of
metaphysical know-how.
ENERGY & INFORMATION
The commonwealth of Universe consists entirely of:
(1) physical energy, either in its associative phase as matter,
or in its disassociative phase as radiation (both of which
phases are eternally and completely inter-transforming
without any overall loss by the universe), and
(2) abstract, weightless metaphysical laws, knowledge of which,
and know-how to employ which, constitute humanity's most
unique faculty.
Since first, the physical cannot "wear out" or decrease and,
second, the know-how can only increase, wealth, consisting
entirely and only of the physical and metaphysical, can
only increase.
WASTE VS EFFICIENCY
Throughout the multi-millions of years of humanity's known
presence aboard planet Earth -- until the inception a
century ago of applied science's conversion of water-wheel
and steam-engine power through electro-magnetic
regenerators distantly delivered by wire to electric-motor
driven or heated or refrigerated tools -- 99 percent of the
total energy consumed and used by humanity was consumed as
food to power both humans and domestic animals.
In the U.S.A., in 1971, only 1 percent of all the energy
consumed was in the form of food to support muscle-
accomplished work, while 99 percent of the energy was
consumed by inanimate power-driven tools and electro-
chemical processes.
Twenty percent of all the inanimate energy was consumed by
automobiles; that is, the American automobiles consumed
twenty times as much energy as that going to feed
Americans. In America, at all times, 2 million cars are
halted at stoplights with their engines running. This
means that the equivalent of 200 million horses are
jumping up and down going nowhere.
While human metabolic processes are far from 100 percent
efficient in converting food energy to realized foot-
pounds of work, humanity's ignorant, sheepish waste of
both its muscle power and technological power is
horrendous.
Mechanical efficiency is expressed in relative percentages
of work realized per units of energy consumed: water wheels
are 90 percent; fuel cells, 80 percent; jet engines, 60
percent; turbines, 30 percent; reciprocating engines,
15 percent.
But as operated, all the work that humanity gets out of its
technology is 5 percent of the potential 100 percent energy
consumed. Only one-twentieth of all the energy consumed by
humanity-produced physical work is either useful or
wasteful.
BLACK GOLD
Out of every 100 barrels of petroleum distributed and
consumed by world society today, 80 barrels are completely
wasted, going into powering machines and processes that,
averaged overall, are 80 percent inefficient.
Scientific calculation shows that the amount of time and
energy invested by nature to produce one gallon of
petroleum, "safety deposited" in subterranean oil wells,
when calculated in foot-pounds of work and chemical time
converted into kilowatt-hours and at the present commercial
rates at which electricity is sold, amounts to approximately
$1 million per gallon of petroleum as cosmically developed
prior to its discovery and exploitation by humans.
When humans discovered the petroleum, they wrongly assumed
that it was absolutely free and belonged to the finder.
Humans take into account only the cost of pumping,
processing, and distributing oil. Anyone should be able to
sell a million dollars for fifty cents!
NATURAL WEALTH
Only cosmic costing [ecological taxation and distribution]
properly accounts for the entirely biological evolution and
cosmic inter-transformative regeneration in general, as
well as for the parts played gravitationally and
radiationally in the astro-totality within which our
minuscule planet Earth and its minuscule star, the Sun,
are inter-functionally secreted.
Cosmic costing makes utterly ludicrous the selfish and
fearfully contrived "wealth" games being reverentially
played by humanity aboard Earth.
SOLAR POWER
Fortunately, the Sun does not demand for all the energy
that it delivers by radiation to Earth in the overall
cosmic scheme, which is trying to make humanity a success
despite its overwhelming ignorance and fear.
The stars -- the Sun -- are trying to tell humanity to awake
and prosper and to consciously assume the important cosmic
responsibilities for which it was designed. Since
realization and fulfillment of that responsibility involve
evolutionary discovery by humanity of the cosmic stature
of its mind and the inconsequentiality of its muscle, the
planting of humans on Earth may not bear fruit.
AWARENESS OR OBLIVION
When Universe is developing important functional
dependencies, she does not put all her embryos in the same
locale. So poor is the probability of self-discovery by
humans of the infinite potential of the mind and the
relative triviality of muscle power that nature must have
planted a myriad of humanity seedlings on a myriad of
planets.
The first manifestation that humanity may make good on
this planet is the serious introduction of cosmic costing
into the mainstream deliberations of Earthians.
It completely eliminates the economic validity of
bankruptcy accounting, except when humans make the mistake
of trying to hoard or withdraw critical "capital" assets
from productive functioning. It is akin to attempting to
withdraw one of the stars from the celestial system. Into
what universe, other than the cosmic totality, may the
star be transferred?
Every atom and electron is an essential part of the
eternally regenerative, ergo totally inexhaustible,
(but always locally ebbing and flooding),
pulsative Universe.
ELECT YOURSELF! ACT LOCALLY - ACT GLOBALLY.
Citizens Executive Administration
of the United States of America
http://egroups.com/group/cea-usa
=====^=============================
Jay Fenello
www.Fenello.com
"When one does not see what one does not see, one
does not even see that one is blind" -- Paul Veyne
"Aligning With Purpose Discussion" list.
awpd-su...@yahoogroups.com
www.AligningWithPurpose.com
Dick Eastman
--------------------
Boudewijn Wegerif, along with Michael Chossudovsky and Herman Daly, is known
around the world as a humanitarian exposer of the criminality and extreme
caustic anti-social economic and political conduct of the finance-capitalism
globalism and that international monetary system designed specifically so
that deviant elite can fleece and milk the rest of humanity like work
animals on their global plantation (which we have already become.). The
impact of these thinkers has been profound. (How I aspire to be D'Artagnan
to these anti-globalist Three Musketeers!)
Here are two editions of Wegerif's monetary policy newsletter, Money Matters
(NOT about investing -- that type, please go away -- it is about monetary
and political reforms that will set mankind free, as we once thought we were
free.).
Dick Eastman
Yakima
Every man is responsible to every other man
====^=========================
Money Matters-- 13 July 2001 (2,800 words)
Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs
* * * * * * * *
Dear list member,
I have been reading Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs (Vintage
paperback, 1985) - a great book; surely a classic; with this important
message: Wealth creation happens in innovative cities and their hinterlands.
Nation states, and more grotesquely regional blocs like the EU and NAFTA,
are political entities in which wealth creation is distorted and undone -
the economic distortions being short-term to serve the ambitions of a power
elite.
This message comes through clearly in Jane Jacobs' book, with concrete
examples of success and failure from right round the globe, interspersed
with pearls of wisdom. (excerpts below)
Thus, on page 39: "Economic life develops by grace of innovating; it expands
by grace of import-replacing. These two master economic processes are
closely related, both being functions of city economics." And on page 41:
"Any settlement that becomes good at import-replacing becomes a city."
Below are further excerpts, ending with a crucial question for economic and
monetary reform. Will we see the emergence of free city economies as nation
states and the regional blocs collapse?
There is not enough in the excerpts for an answer. I have given titbits from
the meal, not the meal itself. My aim is to excite (or aggravate) you into
buying the book, as food for thought leading to an informed answer to the
critical question.
In friendship,
Boudewijn Wegerif,
Monetary Studies Programme
Box 83, 669 22 Deje, Sweden
Tel: +46.552.10327
The Monetary Studies Programme prepares commentaries and study material on
the psychology and history of money. Through the Money Matters mailing list,
information is spread about monetary reform and the growing movement for a
positive economic future, freed from debt oppression and money making for
its own sake ..., and works closely with the members' owned, interest-free
bank JAK (www.jak.se).
Excerpts from
CITIES AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS by Jane Jacobs (Vintage Books, 1985):
FROM CHAPTER ONE, FOOL'S PARADISE
Page 6: Macro-economics - large-scale economics - is the branch of learning
entrusted with the theory and practice of understanding and fostering
national and international economies. It is a shambles.
Pages 27/28: We do not understand how to catalyse development in backward
economies, and we do not understand how to prevent developed economies from
sliding into backwardness themselves: two sides of the same mystery.
One thing we do know by now because events have rubbed our faces in it:
it would be rash to suppose that macro-economics, as it stands today, has
useful guidance for us. Several centuries of hard, ingenious thought about
supply and demand chasing each other around, tails in their mouths, have
told us almost nothing about the rise and decline of wealth. We must find
more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have
tried to use so far. Choosing among the existing schools of thought is
bootless. We are on our own.
FROM CHAPTER TWO, BACK TO REALITY
Pages 29-31: . . . we must be suspicious that some basic assumption or other
is in error, most likely an assumption so much taken for granted that it
escapes identification and skepticism.
Macro-economic theory does contain such an assumption. It is the idea
that national economies are useful entities for understanding how economic
life works and what its structure may be: that national economies and not
some other entity provide the fundamental data for marco-economic analysis.
The assumption is about four centuries old, coming down to us from the early
mercantile economists . . .
According to the theory they propounded, wealth consists of gold, and
gold is amassed as a nation manages to sell more goods than it buys (hence
the designation 'mercantilist' for this thinking), in the process piling up
national treasure . . .
In due course Adam Smith, in his great work of 1776, An Enquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, redefined wealth as production
(supply) for purposes of consumption (demand) and sought its source not in
mines of gold or silver but in capital and labor, and in domestic trade as
well as in foreign or imperial trade . . .
But Smith failed to question everything that came to him ready-made. For
example, he accepted without comment the mercantilist tautology that nations
are the salient entities for understanding the structure of economic life.
As far as one can tell from his writings, he gave that point no thought but
took it so much for granted that he used it as his point of departure . . .
In the two centuries since Smith published, most of what he wrote has
been questioned and much has been amplified, elaborated and modified. But
the one thing not questioned has been the same idea Smith himself failed to
question: the old mercantilist tautology that nations are the salient
entities for understanding the structure of economic life. Ever since, that
same notion has continued to be taken for granted.
Page 32: Once we remove the blinders of the mercantilist tautology and try
looking at the real economic world in its own right rather than as a
dependent artifact of politics, we can't avoid seeing that most nations are
composed of collections of grab bags of very different economies, rich ones
and poor ones within the same nation.
We can't avoid seeing, too, that among all the various types of
economies, cities are unique in their ability to shape and reshape the
economies of other settlements, including those far removed from them
geographically.
Page 35: Distinctions between city economies and the potpourris we call
national economies are important not only for getting a grip on realities;
they are of the essence where practical attempts to reshape economic life
are concerned. For example, failures to make such distinctions are directly
responsible for many wildly expensive economic debacles in backward
countries, debacles which have resulted from the failure to observe that the
all-important function of import-replacing and import-substitution is in
real life a specifically city function, rather than something a "national
economy" can be made to do.
Page 38: Cities that replace imports significantly replace not only finished
goods but, concurrently, many, many items of producers' goods and services.
They do it in swiftly emerging, logical chains. For example, first comes the
local processing of fruit preserves that were formerly imported, then the
production of jars or wrappings formerly imported for which there was no
local market of producers until the first step had been taken . . . When
Tokyo went into the bicycle business, first came repair work cannibalizing
imported bicycles, then manufacture of some of the parts most in demand for
repair work, then manufacture of still more parts, finally assembly of the
whole, Tokyo-made bicycles. And almost as soon as Tokyo began exporting
bicycles to other Japanese cities, there arose in some of those customer
cities much the same process of replacing bicycles imported from Tokyo,
rather than from abroad, as had happened with many items sent from city to
city in the United States.
Page 39: Import-replacing is now, as it always has been, a city process for
good practical reasons. In the first place, the replacement of former
imports is impossible to achieve economically, skillfully and flexibly -
meaning in ways suitable to the time and place - except in a settlement that
is already versatile enough at production to possess the necessary
foundation for the new and added production work. Cities can build up that
kind of versatility, often very rapidly, in part as a result of their
already existing export work (if it is reasonably diversified), in part as a
result of their previous simpler achievements in import-replacing, and in
part through the complex symbiotic relationships formed among their various
producers. In the second place, city markets - whether of consumers or
producers - are at once diverse and concentrated. These two qualities of the
local market make production of many kinds of goods and services
economically feasible that would not be feasible in rural places, company
towns or little market towns, and most especially so at the time production
of former imports is just starting up and getting a first foothold in its
markets.
Pages 42/43: It is important, if we are to understand the rise and decline
of wealth, for us not to be fuzzy about an abstraction like "expansion" but
to be concrete and specific about how expansion occurs and of what it
consists. The expansion that derives from city import-replacing consists
specifically of these five forms of growth: abruptly enlarged city markets
for new and different kinds of imports consisting largely of rural goods and
of innovations being produced in other cities; abruptly increased numbers
and kinds of jobs in the import-replacing city; increased transplants of
city work into non-urban locations as older enterprises are crowded out; new
uses for technology, particularly to increase rural production and
productivity; and growth of city capital.
These five great forces exert far-reaching effects outside of
import-replacing cities as well as within them, ultimately rippling out even
to the remotest places . . .
A city economy which does not or cannot replace domestic imports with its
own production is feeble at best, and helpless at worst, when it comes to
replacing foreign imports.
Pages 43/44: Another unfortunate consequence of preoccupation with
national economies is that development experts do not think of
import-replacing as the city process it is.
Thinking of it instead as a national process, they often advocate that
already completely developed factories (producing foreign imports, of
course) be set down arbitrarily any place - in little towns, in the
countryside, usually wherever jobs are badly needed. All this, although it
goes under the name of import-replacing or import substitution, is remote
from the realities of where and how the feat of replacing imports is
successfully pulled off in the real world: so remote from the realities that
such schemes can, and indeed have, bankrupted countries instead of helping
them to prosper. Such are the practical penalties - that fall indirectly
upon us all - when well-intentioned and learned people commit such a mild
little sin as taking for granted old and unexamined assumptions like the
mercantile tautology that nations are salient entities for understanding
economic life.
FROM CHAPTER THREE, CITIES OWN REGIONS
Page 47: To see what happens when all the (five above) forces are brought to
bear upon the city's own hinterland or region, let us look at one Japanese
hamlet which formerly was outside the Tokyo city region. (From here Jane
Jacobs goes on to describe the transformations within a village that came to
be absorbed by Tokyo, and which is given the name Shinohata.)
Page 49: The fates that befall traditional rural settlements tend to be drab
and dispiriting when only one or another of the great city forces impinges
upon them. Changing markets might well have meant worse poverty for
Shinohata if the changes only meant declining demand for its traditional
cash crops, as indeed markets for silk cocoons have declined. The pull of
distant city jobs might simply have depopulated it . . . A heavy influx if
city technology to save farm labor, taken only by itself, might have left
most of its people idle. A single transplanted city factory might have made
Shinohata a company town. Or it might have come mainly to live on outside
earnings, either earnings sent back home by sons, daughters or husbands who
had left, or welfare subsidies of some sort.
In the event, however, Shinohata's fate after 1955 was radically
different from any of these and from its own past as well. The moment
Tokyo's expanding city region reached out to embrace Shinohata, all five
forces of expansion came to bear on it, each force interplaying with the
others.
FROM CHAPTER FOUR, SUPPLY REGIONS
Page 59: (Supply regions) are disproportionately shaped by the markets of
distant cities. (They) are often poor, and thus the stultification of their
economies is often attributed to their poverty, but a rich supply region is
as stunted and stultified as a poor one. The shortcomings of these regions
go deeper than poverty. Indeed, sooner or later the shortcomings compel
poverty.
Uruguay, as an example, was an unusually rich supply region for several
generations. (Things began to go wrong for once rich Uruguay from about
1953.)
Page 71: The second flaw of the efficiency argument is that supply regions
are not efficient in any case. That is why they are commonly so poor or else
are subsidised. To be sure, their specialities are sometimes (not always)
efficiently produced. But this is not the same as saying these economies are
efficient. An economy that contains few different sorts of niches for
people's differing skills, interests and imaginatiuons is not efficient. An
economy that is unresourceful and unadaptable is not efficient. An economy
that can fill few of the needs of its own people and producers is not
efficient. To say that Uruguay, "the Switzerland of South America", was more
efficient because more specialized than the economy of Switzerland is to
stand reality on its head.
FROM CHAPTER TWELVE, TRANSACTIONS OF DECLINE
Page 193: The trouble with transfer payments and other subsidies as means of
keeping economic life chugging away is that, feeding voraciously upon city
earnings as they do, they reduce intercity trade in favor of trade between
cities and inert economies; divert earned city imports to economies that
cannot replace imports; and reduce cities' abilities to serve as good
customers for one another's innovations. Subsidies milked from cities are
for these reasons profoundly antidevelopment transactions.
FROM CHAPTER THIRTEEN, THE PREDICAMENT
Page 205: To be sure, people in northern and southern Japan are far better
off economically than they were in the past. Nevertheless, these are poor
economies relative to those of central Japan and have persisted in remaining
so. Their troubled officials note that in some mysterious way development
has passed them by.
So it has. The solution, of course, would be the emergence of
import-replacing cities in these regions too. But this hasn't happened, and
as time passes it becomes increasingly unlikely that it will. By now,
potential import-replacing cities in the stunted regions would need tariffs
or their equivalent on products from the larger and more developed cities in
central Japan, such as the cities of central Japan themselves once required
tariffs to set them going on replacing imports from the then more highly
developed cities of America and Europe.
Pages 214 - 216: Is there any kind of radical intervention of discontinuity
other than transactions of decline to which nations might resort, to contend
with their inexorable, built-in cumulative instabilities? Theoretically
there may be another way out, but only theoretically . . .
The radical discontinuity would thus be division of the single
sovereignty into a family of smaller sovereignties, not after things had
reached a stage of breakdown and disintegration, but long before while
things were still going reasonably well . . . In this utopian fantasy, young
sovereignties splitting off from the parent nations would be told, in
effect, "Good luck to you independence! . . . We won't discriminate against
you in our trade, and if you should need to raise tariff barriers against
our manufactured goods to get a start, we will put up with it without
rancour."
A chief advantage, although not the only one, of this unlikely national
behavior would be multiplication of currencies. The technical difficulties
and inconveniences that would entail are surmountable, increasingly so with
the aid of computers, instantaneous communication systems and such devices
as credit cards which - even in their current rudimentary and limited uses
(Jane Jacobs was writing in the early 1980s) - are already convenient for
simultaneous transactions involving diverse currencies . . .
The difficulty, rather, is precisely that multiplicities of currencies
imply multiplicity of sovereignties - indeed, would only be cosmetic
currencies otherwise, like the Scottish pound, which is the English pound
with different pictures. Thus the type of discontinuity as an alternative to
transactions of decline would be at the expense of the unified nation . . .
With almost no exceptions, our current nations came into being in the
first place through bloody military force. Most have been held together from
time to time by bloodshed. Many are still held together so . . .
The mystique of the nation is the powerful, gruesome glamour of human
sacrifice. To betray the nation is to betray all that shed blood: to do so
to be better off economically would seem to render the most glorious pages
of national history mere sound and fury. Virtually all national governments,
it seems fair to say, and most citizens would sooner decline and decay
unified, true to the sacrifices by which their unity was won, than prosper
and develop in division. Even separatists, when they manage to gain
sovereignties of their own, bitterly resist any further division; perhaps
sovereignties with a separatist history most of all. That is why my
suggested alternative to transactions of decline is theoretical only.
(OR IS IT?)
=====^================
* * * * * * * * *
Dear list member,
I will be away, in England mainly, till early August - so there will be no
Money Matters postings in the coming weeks.
Some of you may have noticed that I am no longer sending postings on current
affairs that have no direct relevance to money matters. I am having to
focus. This is hard because almost every day something comes through that I
feel impelled to forward. This relates particularly to the information I
receive from Robert Rodvick (Rob...@uniserve.com) on the war that is now
inevitable in the Middle East. The Jew in me is appalled at what is being
done to the Palestinians, and grateful to the few Israeli voices that are
speaking out strongly against it.
On Monday, 9 July, Robert sent this from Gideon Levy: "What would happen if
the Palestinian cabinet were to meet and afterward press reports spoke of
the existence of a list of 26 to 30 senior officers of the Israeli Defence
Force (IDF) who were being targeted for liquidation? . . . What would happen
is that Israel would stir up a tremendous world-wide fuss. We would brand
that cabinet a 'regime of terror' - and rightly so. In the middle of last
week (Israel) decided to extend 'the strikes against Palestinian terror
activists'. The decision was made public, as was the list of between 26 and
30 names of people who are targeted for liquidation . . . Admitting to
carrying out liquidations and their transformation into official policy are
another stage in Israel's moral deterioration."
And on Wednesday Robert sent news items from the Middle East about Iranian
troops targeting rockets on Israel from positions in southern Lebanon; and
about Syria and Israel being on a 'warpath'.
Now today I hear from friends at the Shiller Institute's Stockholm office
(s...@nysol.se --
http://www.larouchepub.com) that the Institute has reliable insider
information that Ariel Sharon came to power with a war plan to use Hamas as
a tool for destabilizing Jordan, ultimately overthrowing King Abdullah II
and establishing Jordan as a 'Palestinian homeland' under Hamas control. "To
this end, Sharon, who was instrumental in the launching of the Hamas
movement earlier in his career, has dispatched his son as a personal
back-channel emissary to the Islamist group. Key Hamas personnel have
already been infiltrated into Jordan, in preparation for Sharon's
provocation of a new general Mideast war--in the days or weeks ahead, the
sources said."
If there is something to this, I am sure that news of it will be coming
through from Robert Rodvick in due course. For those of you who want to be
kept well informed on developments in the Middle East, the Balkans and
elsewhere where the beasts of war are flexing their arms, I strongly
recommend you ask Robert Rodvick to be included on his mailing list.
I also strongly recommend Jean Hudon's Earth Rainbow Network for balanced
information on trouble spots, black ops, genetic manipulation, and, yes,
positive developments, too. You can write to Jean at
globalv...@cybernaute.com.
With those recommendations on record, I feel easier about focusing on Money
Matters in future. The list is growing. You are one of now 286 subscribers.
Sometime soon I will start a Money Matters e-group through Yahoo, with a
linked web-site. It is a pleasure developing the service, for so long as the
feedback I receive suggests that it is wanted.
And BTW, I do have one other list, my HUMOUR list, for sending good quotes
and jokes to about fifty family and friends, once a week or fortnight or so.
If you want to be on that list, too, let me know. So long as we are still
able to laugh, there is still hope for the world.
Yesterday afternoon I spent four hours in a sweat lodge, at the Agnsbacka
Summer Festival in Molkom nearby, where I have given talks on the psychology
of money. In preparing us for the sweat lodge, the facilitator from New
Mexico spoke about how we repress not only anger, but, in fact, more
strenuously, joy, prayer, praise and the thank yous to life. "Once anger is
out in the open it is easy to hold on to it for days into weeks," he said.
"Yet how difficult we find it to stay with joy when that breaks through the
barriers."
Quite a thought, which I am pleased to pass on.
In friendship,
Boudewijn Wegerif
Monetary Studies Programme
Box 83, 669 22 Deje, Sweden
Tel: +46.552.10327
This case study deals with the dilemma
of a country that was one of the first to bear
the full force of medicine prescribed by the
ruling school of economics.
At the moment it feels like being in an aquarium
from which oxygen is being extracted. First the
fishes float to the surface, then with more oxygen
depletion, the mind stops functioning normally.
Sri Lanka is a small country and therefore balance
can be restored if its case receives publicity.
Best wishes,
--wendell
BEYOND FRACTURED MARKET IN SRI LANKA
---------------------------
Seven quotes from business
leader Hemaka Amarasuriya
and commentary
---------------------------
Commentary by Wendell W. Solomons
July 2001; 2,100 words; email:solo...@slt.lk
TV often shows up the brand name 'SINGER' emblazoned on
the clothes of Sri Lanka's world class cricket teams.
The regional head of Singer is Hemaka Amarasuriya and his
picture appears on the July 2001 cover of 'Lanka Monthly
Digest.' The cover also bears the caption of its interview
with Amarasuriya -- A FRACTURED ECONOMY.
The magazine interviews Hemaka Amarasuriya because he
is among figures looked up to by the business sector.
In the interview, Amarasuriya makes careful assertions.
In response to questions from the interviewer, he does
not -- for instance -- choose to walk to the battle of
public versus private sector along the gangplank laid
out in the textbook.
(1) Amarasuriya states instead:
"If the government is doing a good job, it need
not move out. We cannot have a general principle which
says privatise everything. The private sector has its
inefficiencies, even corruption, so one should not point
a finger at the public sector alone."
Amarasuriya speaks from career, hands-on, private sector
experience.
(2) In response to the interviewer's question on socially
responsible business, Amarasuriya says:
"I'm afraid that most businessmen always look at
some comparative advantage that might accrue to
them. They are basically selfish and look to some
comparative advantage."
Interviewer Sumadhu Weerawarna pointedly asks whether
Amarasuriya perceives the business community coming
forward as a pressure group to influence politicians.
Amarasuriya restates:
"Not at all. They are generally bent on their own
selfish interests. And that's the truth."
-------------Italicised researcher comment ---------------
After all, in using the name 'private' sector we
predefine that the interests concerned are private.
Though macabre, in a true life context it is possi-ble
for a mind bent on putting sand in the gears to push
individual interests into misapprehension, civil war or
riot.
It is in the garb of cheerleader and friend to the private
sector that social engineer Milton Friedman (facultative
leader since 1976) charges every government school as being
socialist. He asks for blanket privatisation of all such
schools. He casts a large image on the world with shadow
boxing.
His 30-year influence on World Bank and IMF policy
began in particular with the TV movie, "Free to Choose."
He promised freedom. He called for privatisation not merely
as old nostrum -- but as we have witnessed in practice, as
driving mania. His puffery 'for the private sector' sows
the seeds of destructive moral of dog-eat-dog anarchism and
social vivisection in World Bank and IMF targeted countries.
One of Friedman's many technocrat followers, World Bank Chief
Economist Lawrence Summers (elevated to U.S. Secretary of State
in the Clinton administration,) comes out against any public
and private sector cooperation.
However, such coordination is commonplace in the U.S. though not
often featured on mogul-owned network TV. It is not transparent.
It is executed every day through expensive professional lobbyists
in Washington D.C. paid by business corporations to make
Congressmen and Senators mind company interests.
As a result of such interventions, U.S. manufacturing historically
lost ground to energy-sparing Germany and Japan. The latter two
countries owe their recent, spectacular economic growth to more
transparent than U.S. public-private sector co-determination.
Their methods of cooperation have been copiously documented by
numerous books and newsmagazines. "The Search for Excellence"
authored by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman rose to best-seller
rank and promoted Japanese practices to U.S. managers. The
U.S. Malcolm Baldridge award for quality in industry attempts
to emulate Japanese systems.
The literature has evaded single-minded people like the former
World Bank Chief Economist who hammer out policy for developing
and reconstructing economies. For Russia the latter tabooed
co-determination in development. His words of disparagement came
out in VOA editorial of April 9, 1998, entitled "RUSSIA SHOULD
AVOID ASIAN MODEL." There, Dr Summers decidedly cautions:
'...Russia against the model some Asian States have followed.
That model favors the centralized coordination of economic
activity over decentralized market incentives. It also
involves Government targeting of particular industries.
The result has been what some call "crony capitalism." '
-----------------------------------------------------------
The idea that Amarasuriya advances is transparent co-ordination
of goals as in the case of the successful German and Japanese
models.
(3) Amarasuriya suggests one method of cooperation via a
think-tank comprising senior businessmen. Amarasuriya adds:
"There must be an ongoing dialogue between the state
apparatus and the think-tank".
(4) As far as division of duties in the two sectors is concerned,
Amarasuriya does not propose an all-government orientation but
clearly defines the following in Sri Lanka's context:
"My formula would be to shrink the public sector
as much as possible and advance the private
sector. But there are key sectors that the public
sector should control. I, for one, believe that
utilities should be in the hands of the public
sector for some more time."
(5) For developing new economic and industrial activity,
Amarasuriya suggests investing:
"...more in research and development, and marketing.
These are the areas we are traditionally weak in. We
must also have greater confidence and belief in ourselves,
and our natural and inherent talents. As businessmen we
are very strong within the country but do not want to
venture into exports. Everybody can produce generic
products but if we can produce niche products which
would be able to enter into a specialised but smaller
segment of the market -- this would be lucrative."
Restoring 'confidence and belief in ourselves' is an important
behest. It proposes setting aside the demonising of society,
that the Friedman model has bequeathed to Sri Lanka. Machiavelli
plagiarist Thomas Hobbes -- an older ideologue of social hatred --
called society a war of each against the other. Sri Lanka is the
first country (commencing in 1977) where Friedman's work has been
thoroughly field tested to prove Friedman a prince of disorder, a
prince of the disruption of cooperation, a prince of social
misapprehension and bickering, a prince of the disruption of civil
society (deeper elaboration of this theme is available in the Ayn
Rand text at www.geocities.com/athens/7842/wcindex.htm.)
(6) Desk officers of the IMF are ingrained pupils of Friedman.
Amarasuriya registers the following complaint, which deals mainly
with the web of Goods and Services Tax (GST) on which every life,
young or old, is now stuck:
"I think the government is hooked on a failed
International Monetary Fund (IMF) strategy of
indirect taxes, which has been a disaster
world-wide."
(7) Amarasuriya also says:
"I feel we have got lost in a political quagmire,
which has taken the country backwards. What I suggest
is that we start out as if the country was born today,
and go on from that point."
-------------Italicised researcher comment ---------------
To read deeply into the interview suggests that business
leaders like Amarasuriya perceive a need to sweep clear
from deck the 25-year model imposed by loan salesmen on the
World Bank and IMF for 'structural adjustment' of emergent
nations. As President Lincoln pointed out, "You can't fool
all the people all the time." At some point in time, men in
business will discover that current 'structural adjustment'
is tuned to invoke in countries a quagmire of debt.
In Milton Friedman's mind there has been no question as to whom
the IMF serves. Two decades after perception control with his
"Free to Choose" movie, he confessed in a live CNN interview
in August 1998:
"We speak about the IMF bailing out ... Thailand; the IMF
isn't bailing out Thailand. It isn't bailing out the poor
people in Thailand now suffering from the recession they're
in. It's bailing out the bankers in New York and in London,
and Berlin who made loans to Thailand."
A fractured economy is one that must ask for loans and pay
interest to bankers who are already rich. It has no other
purpose in the day books of the world's old money houses.
Here now is an excerpt from the University of Ottawa's
Dr. Michel Chossudovsky.
'More importantly, the banks and speculators
want access to the details of IMF negotiations with
member governments which will enable them to
carefully position their assaults in financial
markets both prior and in the wake of an IMF
bailout agreement ...
'The world's largest banks and brokerage houses
are both creditors and institutional speculators.
In the present context, they contribute (through
their speculative assaults) to destabilizing
national currencies thereby boosting the volume of
dollar denominated debts. They then reappear as
creditors with a view to collecting these debts.
'Finally, they are called in as "policy advisors"
or consultants in the IMF-World Bank sponsored
"bankruptcy programs" of which they are the
ultimate beneficiaries.
'In Indonesia, for instance, amidst street rioting
and in the wake of Suharto's resignation, the
privatization of key sectors of the Indonesian
economy ordered by the IMF was entrusted to eight
of the World's largest merchant banks including
Lehman Brothers, Credit Suisse-First Boston,
Goldman Sachs and UBS/SBC Warburg Dillon Read.
'The World's largest money managers set countries
on fire and are then called in as firemen (under
the IMF "rescue plan") to extinguish the blaze." '
For Wall Street, Dr Chossudovsky clarifies that the "Big Six"
COMMERCIAL banks include Chase Manhattan, Bank America,
Citicorp and J. P. Morgan.
Wall Street's "Big Five" MERCHANT banks include Goldman-Sachs,
Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Salomon Smith Barney.
The above institutions are often treated as a single finance-capital
cartel for they are seen to divide markets and act in unison. A table
with twelve chairs will seat the heads of all.
Such a unity of finance capital can only be countervailed in the
ultimate by an equivalent balancing force. In the absence of a
balancing force, Milton Friedman permits himself to laughingly run
with the fox and hunt with the hounds. In the 'Wall Street Journal'
of October 13, 1998, he continues to jibe (though ill-fatedly at the
expense of his own disciples, career officers at the World Bank and
IMF):
"The present crisis is not the result of market
failure. Rather, it is the result of governments
intervening in or seeking to supersede the market,
both internally via loans, subsidies, or taxes and
other handicaps, and externally via the IMF, the
World Bank and other international agencies. We do
not need more powerful government agencies
spending still more of the taxpayers' money, with
limited or nonexistent accountability. That would
simply be throwing good money after bad. We need
government, both within the nations and
internationally, to get out of the way and let the
market work. The more that people spend or lend
their own money, and the less they spend or lend
taxpayer money, the better."
There is an attempt to claim that the Unseen Hand that guides
the markets is -- competition. Another person, New York Times
journalist Thomas Friedman on March 29, 1999, reveals other
aspects of this "desired" Unseen Hand:
"For globalization to work, America can't be
afraid to act like the almighty superpower that
it is...The hidden hand of the market will never
work without the hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot
flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer
of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the
world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is
called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine
Corps."
None of the business establishments above are allowed
to pose a threat to the hidden fist of finance capital
control. Microsoft, prime suppler of Silicon Valley's
software, is being examined by U.S. courts under
anti-trust legislation for its software platform can
merge with and interlope on bank software.
The round table of global financial control has, however,
evaded investigation by anti-trust court or tribunal.
Such investigations might reveal that a veritable
fist-full of players are seated at the table because
wires lead out of Wall Street managing agency boardrooms
outwards to old, traditional money houses such as:
(1) Rothschild Banks of London and Berlin;
(2) Lazard Brothers Bank of Paris;
(3) Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy;
(4) Warburg Bank of Hamburg and Amsterdam;
(5) Kuhn, Loeb Bank of New York.
The last named entity is controlled by the descendants
of Rabbi Schiff who lived with the Warburgs and Rothschilds
in the same large house in Frankfurt-on-the-Maine in the
18th Century. These house residents enjoyed the confidence
of the previously established Openheimer money clan.
If the clans seemed to have maintained the status of a
perennial, creeping vine between centuries, to that has
contributed first-cousin marriage and other blood
practices, some of which are proscribed to the West's
citizens. Finally, in social terms we may be speaking
of a handful of clans with more leverage than in
pharaonic Egypt because this is a world of 6 billion
people -- PROVIDED clan leverage is kept a hidden fist
by mogul perception control via global TV programming.
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