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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-39
About “American desperation” (covers American endeavors against China, Syria and Venezuela):
Profitability, investment and the pandemic
I recommend read it in full, but here’s the key part:
So the world capitalist economy was already slipping into a recession (long overdue) before the coronavirus pandemic arrived. Why was this? Well, as Brian Green explained in the You Tube discussion that I had with him last week, the US economy had been in a credit-fuelled bubble for the last six years that enabled the economy to grow even though profitability has been falling along with investment in the ‘real’ economy. So, as Brian says, “the underlying health of the global capitalist economy was poor before the plague but was obscured by cheap money driving speculative gains which fed back into the economy”.
The links to the data and sources are in the article.
In my previous comment in yesterday’s post, I predicted that, if the USA is to survive these challenges to its status as the world’s sole superpower, it will emerge as a Pacific-oriented empire, focused on Japan and Australia. I also predicted that it would emerge as a more than ever Christian empire.
I forgot to put there that it would also emerge as an ever poorer and unequal Empire. Yes, even if the USA wins, it will lose, as the inner contradictions of the capitalist system would still be in place – as the article I link above explains.
The USA would still be the “World Empire” – but it would not be the vibrant and flourishing one of the post-war (1945-1975), but a duller, poorer and more obscure one. It would be a “Byzantine-era” USA.
We would thus have a nice division in the USA’s history: revolutionary period (1776-1865) (“transition crisis” 1861-1865), republic (1866-1945) (“transition crisis” in 1929-1945), high empire (1946-1975/1979, “transition crisis” 1974/5-1978/9), late empire (1975/9-2008/?, “transition crisis” 2009-?(2020/2?), “byzantine” empire (multipolarity?) (2020/2?-?).
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Well, this is an embarrassing news for the Japanese government/Japanese capitalists:
Japan’s drop in suicides may not hold as fallout from pandemic grows
The Japan Times – echoing official statements – has been propagandizing us that suicides would “skyrocket/spike” because of enforced lockdowns in Japan.
But – surprise, surprise – suicides have fallen.
The reason for that is very simple: most suicides in Japan are not the result of depression, but of excess workload (“karoshi”). The human body, through chronic sleep deprivation and long working journeys, induce its brain to rationalize suicide as a logical solution. It’s a pretty straightforward, scientifically demonstrated, biochemical reaction that happens in the brain.
Lockdowns ended those long period sleep deprivations among the Japanese working class, therefore ending the vicious cycles that induced many of the them to commit suicide.
I commented here a long time ago that, contrary to common sense, economic recession in capitalist societies raise – not lower – life expectancy. That’s because deaths by workplace accident, automobile accidents, heart attack induced by stress and other forms of violent death fall drastically (specially for men) because people tend to spend more time at home and sleep more and better. Yes, some people get depressed and commit suicide thanks to lockdowns, but their deaths are more than compensated to the millions who are spared from daily risks to their own lives, imposed by the capitalist mode of production.
Unless the Japanese government stops with financial help to the working classes as to induce financial insecurity to them, suicides will continue to fall in Japan. The reason the Japanese government is fearmongering its own people with suicide rates is very simple: financial insecurity is the main weapon of mature capitalism to impose labor discipline. The worker works (and cannot stop working) because he/she has periodic bills to pay. The Japanese capitalist class must make clear to the Japanese working class that the world where they are not working is worse than the world they are working.
Posted by: vk | May 17 2020 16:22 utc | 3
The Global Preparedness Monitoring board. Board: Grutland, Norway, ex WHO director. Dzau, Pres. Nat. Academy of Medecine, USA. Elias – he is the face of the Bill and M Gates Foundation and is all over the place. Farrar, dir. of Wellcome Trust, UK. Fauci. Gao, CDC China.
Conveners: World Bank and WHO. Mission: will play a critical role in advising about preparedness for health crises, highlight the relationship between key players, etc.
https://apps.who.int/gpmb/work.html
CEPI is an innovative global partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organisations launched in Davos in 2017 to develop vaccines to stop future epidemics. …. CEPI will advance vaccines against known threats through proof-of-concept and safety testing in humans and will establish investigational vaccine stockpiles before epidemics begin— “just in case”
CEPI is a Norwegian association, founded by the Gvmts of Norway and India. The board has 12 voting members: 4 investors (yes..), and 8 from industry, global health, science, finance. Amongst them,
Farrar, dir. of the Wellcome Trust. Peter Piot (of Aids fame), London School of Trop. med. Venkaya, from Takeda pharmaceutics.
Their funding comes from Gvmts., the Bill and M Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust…and:
All investors contributing to CEPI’s funding pool are invited to join our Investors Council.
https://cepi.net
There are others, but enough for now. These are the orgs taking care of our, the mopes, unaware citizens, health. The likes of Trump, Bojo, Macron, etc. know very little and are obviously completely out of their depth, contradicting themselves, veering between different policies, etc. Which suits those in the backroom fine, creating mega confusion is a plus.
– lizard thx for link will read
– trailer thrash, ha ha, yes. these ppl have power, or want it, meaning a fight against COVID is only useful as a for-profit endeavour.
– mina yes it was heavy on the pigs, an echo back to swine flu
Posted by: Noirette | May 17 2020 19:26 utc | 24
@Posted by: lizard | May 17 2020 17:23 utc | 11
“I have been reading about what you are discussing for many weeks at other virtual locations that haven’t engaged in trying to shut down speculation.
for those who still have a brain that can engage in critical thinking, this article is worth checking out, titled How Huxley’s X-Club Created Nature Magazine and Sabotaged Science for 150 years.”
Apropos your post delving into the historical undersides of ‘objective hard science’ publications, I should add/this more recent example: Robert Maxwell’s (ie. Mossad/ Brit/5 Eyes/USSR? tool, and father of pedo-blackmailer and longtime Epstein buddy Ghislaine Maxwell) acquisition and control (beginning from the ~1970’s (?)) of the Elsevier/ Pergamon Press scientific publishing empire.
“Elsevier says its primary goal is to facilitate the work of scientists and other researchers. An Elsevier rep noted that the company received 1.5m article 1980’s submissions last year, and published 420,000; 14 million scientists entrust Elsevier to publish their results, and 800,000 scientists donate their time to help them with editing and peer-review. “We help researchers be more productive and efficient,” Alicia Wise, senior vice president of global strategic networks, told me. “And that’s a win for research institutions, and for research funders like governments.” “
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
“The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.”
“The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.”
It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.
So, the Invisible Hand(s) apparently exerts political controls at the management level a large portion of scientific publication industry with a 36% profit margin, AND has the ability (ultimately, as a gatekeeper for what gets published) to guide/warp scientific output and scientific consensus on a myriad of disciplines and research areas.
What is not to love?
So it is not only the WaPo/NYT/Fake News we need to keep a skeptical eye on. Add “high impact” scientific journals to the list, including Science, Nature, Lancet, and others.
PS: Many of my posts have been getting disappeared [a la google], w/o explanation, from this site, so if this one interests you, I suggest you do a screen capture of it before it is also gone.
Posted by: gm | May 18 2020 2:07 utc | 54
RSH @ 49, I guess as this is an open thread I can answer your post, as politely as I can. For those of us who would agree with you on the science, as inadequately as we may, on the issue of ‘having a boss’ we wouldn’t.
That is not the point at all of our beliefs, diverse as they are, as humankind has the intelligence to think of things greater than ourselves. Being greater, wouldn’t they take our own perfections to the Nth degree? And a boss isn’t by any means that.
So come now, at least see the argument we propose. We take what we ourselves imagine to be the finest thing, be it beauty, mind, thought, compassion, love, fidelity – any of the virtues. And we say that this universe itself, a created thing, is larger than we can imagine, has laws of being that we cannot imagine, and its workings we are figuring out, the life and death of planets, the nearness of stars and their life cycles. All of this science has been telling us as we gaze upward and invent ways to look even further in. It’s amazing stuff! And even if we don’t last longer than an eyelash on a cosmic scale, less than that even, we have the intellect to see it and we have the heart to wonder at it. Where, where did these things, these elements of our souls, come from? They aren’t biologically necessary!
I say they are gifts from a greater mind, a greater heart, and they are gifts by which we ought to value our very existence! And if that one is greater — we cannot grasp that magnitude! If we could we would be the great ones so it isn’t possible!! Humility is fine but we are not beasts; we can see what science brings to light. Beasts can’t do that.
The Greeks at least knew to wonder. They didn’t have the science but they went as far as their minds would take them. Here’s what Pasternak says at the end of Dr. Zhivago:
“It has often happened in history that a lofty ideal has degenerated into crude materialism. Thus Greece gave way to Rome, and the Russian Enlightenment has become the Russian Revolution. There is a great difference between the two periods. Blok says somewhere, ‘We, the children of Russia’s terrible years.’ Blok meant this in a metaphorical, figurative sense. The children were not children, but the sons, the heirs, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible but sent from above, apocalyptic; that’s quite different. Now the metaphorical has become literal, children are children and the terrors are terrible, there you have the difference.”
I think we are on the materialistic downgrade of history. We are the metaphorical sons and daughters of the ideal. But just as for Russia there was an amazing enlightenment period before the cataclysm that brought down the Revolution (does anyone know that there was? I do!) — so too, beyond the materialism of this age there will be, for the children, the real children now born and growing in a different world, a new enlightenment period.
We build upon our enlightenments; we endure the materialistic downgrades. And so it goes. We need to look at them, the children, and look after them as much as we can. They are the future! I can see it in my grandchildren, they are the real children of the time, and they are beautiful.
And meanwhile maybe the wild things are having a quieter time too!
Posted by: juliania | May 18 2020 3:45 utc | 63
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