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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2022-197
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Climate justice:
> Don’t tell Africa that the world cannot afford the climate cost of its hydrocarbons — and then fire up coal stations whenever Europe feels an energy pinch. Don’t tell the poorest in the world that their marginal energy use will break the carbon budget — only to sign off on new domestic permits for oil and gas exploration. It gives the impression your citizens have more of a right to energy than Africans.
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Western development has unleashed climate catastrophe on my continent. Now, the rich countries’ green policies dictate that Africans should remain poor for the greater good. To compound the injustice, Africa’s hydrocarbons will be exploited after all — just not for Africans.
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The Western countries are unable to take politically difficult decisions that hurt domestically. Instead, they move the problem offshore, essentially dictating that the developing world must swallow the pill too bitter for their own voters’ palates. Africa didn’t cause the mess, yet we pay the price. <
China:
Manipulation:
Pakistan:
Syria:
Use as open (not Ukraine related) thread …
There is a recent lengthy interview with Michael Hudson where diverse people asked questions. The answers are in most cases wide ranging, including historical context, educative.
Here is a list of the topics covered for quick view. I included a few quotes I found interesting and or amusing but recommend the full replies which are loaded with insight, especially for us novices or for those who have not read his books.
*****
https://michael-hudson.com/2022/11/the-rentier-economy-is-a-free-lunch/
The Rentier Economy is a Free Lunch
By Michael Tuesday, November 8, 2022 Interviews
Question and answer transcript summary:
Q Book overview —The Destiny of Civilizations
Q About debt deflation
Q Re Productive debt bs unproductive debt
Q China has opted for industrialization and the U.S. corporate class clearly has not. Why is the U.S. so belligerent if it doesn’t even want an industrial system?
[00:17:35] Michael Hudson: Because it doesn’t want any other country to have an industrial system. Just like the West fought against communism threatening a new social system after the 1917 revolution, America’s terrified that if China can succeed by following the exact same policy that the United States got rich on in the late 19th century, then they might try to make America rich. And, oh my God, if they do that then there’s no more free lunch for the billionaires.
This is life and death for the billionaires. They make their money by exploiting the economy without producing. The Chinese billionaires make their money by producing and exploiting the economy. But they also produce a lot. And then they have to give up much of what they exploit. So the United States doesn’t want there to be any success in any country achieving prosperity in a way that doesn’t siphon off all of the income to the 1%.
Q Aboit the rise and fall of dollar hegemony
MH …the end of dollar hegemony occurred last year when the United States itself said if any country pursues a policy that we don’t like, we can grab all of the dollar reserves that they hold in the United States.
Q how do you see the interaction between major shareholders of large financial institutions and major shareholders of industrial enterprises..?
Q re Privatized monopolies and public well being
MH … in the United States the main utility beside money that’s been privatized is government. .. the function of government itself once it’s privatized is to make money for the donor class, which basically is the financial class and the monopoly class that finance creates. Banks have always been the mother of monopolies and the financial sector’s largest business market is in creating monopolies. So, you have basically the privatization of monopolies. the function of government itself once it’s privatized is to make money for the donor class, which basically is the financial class and the monopoly class that finance creates. Banks have always been the mother of monopolies and the financial sector’s largest business market is in creating monopolies. So, you have basically the privatization of monopolies.
And the monopoly rent of these monopolies is used for paying interest to the banks that finance the corporate raiders, or whoever wants to take over and buy these monopoly privileges.
Q About economic rent
Q what would a debt jubilee look like and how could it reverberate through society?
MH You want to make sure that you only cancel the bad debts and you don’t create a new rentier class. The idea is to look at the economy as a system and see what should the government receive as economic rent. And it can decide what is it going to receive for healthcare. The government… if the government took over the healthcare industry, it probably would not charge the prices that healthcare charges today. It would charge less. Same thing for housing. If housing were run like England ran its council housing before Margaret Thatcher, it would be very low. In Germany, Germany pays only 10% of its average family income for rent, not 30 or 40% as in the case of the United States.
That’s what used to make Germany, until last month, so competitive an economy. So, you’d restructure the economy so that it would only have debts that were socially necessary to keep the economy operating. Debts will begin to grow all over again.
Debts will always begin to grow over and over again. If you don’t ban interest, you permit debts to grow, but when they get so problematic that they threaten economic growth, then you have to write them down to a level where they will no longer prevent economic growth from occurring as they’re doing today.
Q that politicians, therefore government, are in the pockets of the rentier class, how do you think we could get rid of such rentier influence in order to implement socially oriented policies?
[00:43:43] Michael Hudson: That has never happened without a revolution. That’s the problem.
Q what are the steps we can take to fix the housing crisis?
Q the price of … economic liberty from dollar diplomacy
Q. some people have a lot of nostalgia for the post World War II social democracies of Europe….Thatcher’s process of privatizing in England. Could you talk about that?
Q About belief in partisan false dichotomy in USA
Q which of the public banking and monetary reform movements do you support, if any?
Q. Luke Parcher: We have a question here from Rasha…
MH: Oh, my God. I can’t even begin to answer that. The jargon is so misleading. Money has nothing to do with value. Money is debt. That’s the opposite of value. It’s a transfer of debt among people, it’s not a transfer of value…. Anyone who talks about money and value, you want to stop talking to them immediately. Because you know that it’s just going to be patter talk for propaganda.
Q Luke Parcher: So we have one here from Tom
MH: The question is so bizarre, I cannot answer it. It’s just how do you, how do you answer a swamp and straighten out what they’re saying to give them an answer? It’s a swamp. I can’t answer that.
Q [to what] would you [attribute] the price increases that we’ve seen today?
MH Very largely monopoly positions. … you want to look at the economy as a system. You don’t want to reduce everything to one-dimensional “here’s the price level”. You want to look at the multi-layered economy. What are the cost prices? What are the economic rents? What are the monopoly prices? What’s the tax system? You have to look at the economy as a system, not in a one-dimensional way. So, I can’t untangle all of the jumble any clearer than that.
Q About MMT
Q About IMF’s role in Ukraine
MH The IMF’s job is to make sure that the economy is impoverished and that all the money that it gives is to support the currency – to enable the kleptocrats, Kolomoyskyi and others, to take the Ukrainian currency they have and transfer it into dollars and pound sterling at a high exchange rate.
So they will lend Ukraine the dollars – essentially to support the hryvnia, however you pronounce its currency – and enable the kleptocrats to make money and then pull the rug out from under them if any alternatives to the Nazis take power. They want.to make sure that, once the kleptocrats have emptied out the economy, they can let the economy collapse.
They’re of course backing the new labor law president Zelensky has pushed, abolishing labor unions, abolishing the rights of labor to negotiate, and making basically the most fascist labor law in any country’s history. So the role of the IMF is to support client oligarchy, to get their money out of a country before there is a possibility of a leftwing government coming in, and then to deny all credit and organize a currency raid on the leftwing government, to say, “You see, socialism doesn’t work”.
The IMF is one of the institutions that is the arm of American hegemony, preventing economic growth occurring outside of the United States. Essentially the IMF is a… it’s a small office in the basement of the Pentagon, run by the neocons, to make sure that other countries cannot have any policy that would not let American firms come in and buy their raw materials and their natural resources and their monopolies.
So, think of the IMF as a tool of the military, but much more right wing than any general would dare to be.
Q 01:05:36] Virginia Cotts:…I just want to say, Michael, you wrote an article with the greatest title I’ve ever seen, which was something like the US Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century….
[01:06:02] Michael Hudson: Right. It was apparent what was going to happen at the very beginning. And I’m amazed that nobody else was writing about that. I’m not very good on military analysis. I can follow what Andrei Raevsky at the Saker says, and Moon of Alabama, and Andrei Martyanov. The one thing I can tell about military operations is the balance of payments aspects and how it all is spelled out.
[01:06:24] Virginia Cotts: Well… and you talked about how the three main sectors benefited.
[01:06:30] Michael Hudson: Yes. Oil is the key to American diplomacy. And I guess if we’re talking about American hegemony, it comes from America’s control of the oil trade. That was one of the reasons that America wanted to isolate first Venezuela, and then Russia, because if the only source of oil are companies controlled by the American oil majors, then…
Every economy needs energy to grow. And in every economy since the beginning of the industrial revolution, there’s a connection between the growth of GDP and energy use per capita. So I talk about the monopoly rent and the victim economy. If you can control oil then you can control, basically, the world economy.
That has been a key to the American policy. The Americans realized that if Europe cannot buy Russian oil anymore, or Venezuelan oil, then it’ll have to spend 10 times as much buying American liquified natural gas. This means the sanctions against Russia have ended German industrial supremacy. It has ended the German steel industry. It has ended German heavy industry.
They’re now going to be dependent thoroughly on the United States. And the euro is going to become a weakening satellite currency of the US dollar as a result of killing off the German economic and industrial leadership of the European economy, along with that of Italy and France.
Posted by: suzan | Nov 13 2022 17:24 utc | 16
@juliana
Thank you for your post and question.
First, an excerpt from the Cooke piece:
It was the legendary venerated Hermetica that had arrived in Florence. It had been transcribed by Greek-speaking people, somewhere between 100–300 CE, but from much earlier Egyptian texts. The discovery of papyri of Hermetic texts in central Egypt in the 1940s has shown them to be adaptions of material deriving from the ‘Intelligence of Re’ – The One – the all-pervading divine Mind, and therefore reflecting an intellectual tradition and science that reaches very far back in time.
What has this to do with Putin’s Valdai speech? Well, quite a lot – both by way of analogy, and by way of a warning too. For then – the 15th century – it too was a time of dark foreboding, as the swirling force of voracious Protestant literalism was barrelling into traditional Christianity – which, until then, had struggled to retain its seat between a literal world and that of inner illumination. Wherever traditional Christianity sought to make its vessels, critical doubt would follow behind, destroying them.
Open warfare between the Christian sects seemed inevitable – with consequences catastrophic for the western word.
Historian Francis Yates has suggested that the Pope quietly encouraged the translation of these Hermetic texts. The Pope hoped their central notion – that the root of reality, inhered in a multiple dimensionality and in the de-literalisation effected by thinking through image – might enable a synthesis to European factions on the brink of war.
Giulio Camillo, one of the most famous thinkers of the sixteenth century, writing on what ‘image’ might mean, says that the Hermetica “takes the image and similitude for the same thing, and the whole for the divine grade”.
This type of symbolic, rather than the literal interpretation of Christianity, created immense excitement and hope, at the time. The latter spread across Europe, including to the Protestant England – to John Dee, the greatest philosopher of his time, and Queen Elizabeth I’s close adviser.
It seemed to offer escape from the darkening clouds of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
As you know, am neither a Christian nor well versed in the doctrine. But some of the piece seems to make sense to me, although I might be misinterpreting.
Putin’s Valdai speech is long but the introductory section is mainly a critique of the unipolar approach assumes and insists that there can be only one way of doing things – our way – and if you don’t bend the knee we reserve the right to break your legs or, in the case of Russia and Russian culture, essentially cancel it.
This relates to ‘literalism’ which insists that there is only one correct way to interpret the scriptures, only one way of describing God etc.
So I think that’s the link to the speech which hopefully answers your question. (If not, try again!)
Now there are many other items of interest in the piece – at least for me. Most Buddhist schools accept something which can be described as Mind-Only or ‘primacy of mind’ viz how our reality is, or rather I should say how the nature of experience is for this tradition generally does not separate ‘reality’ from ‘experience’ since we cannot know a reality outside our realm of experience except as an abstraction constructed by word, concept which is not real.
Basically, modern society East and West has become materialist in the sense that we believe in a more or less single and consistent reality which is physical in nature. Anything not physical is not real. That includes mind which is widely regarded as an epiphenomenon of the body. Chemicals and synapses in the brain produce thoughts and images which we experience as something, just like we experience images on a movie screen, but it isn’t ‘real,’ just the produce of chemical reactions in the viscous flesh in our crania, aka brains. Thoughts and images may seem to be non-physical but that’s just an illusion, in fact they come from chemical interactions. Or something.
OK. But this gets us back to the One mentioned in the piece above: the ‘Intelligence of Re’ – The One – the all-pervading divine Mind.
The Chinese equivalent of One is Heaven (versus Earth and Man).
The Christian (at least early Christian?) equivalent is God (versus God the Son and God the Holy Ghost).
Why is Mind One? Because, being unphysical, it is not bound by dimensions of time or place. It is all-pervasive, without form but with intelligence/awareness/experience quotient. (Making God not external to ourselves or ourselves separate from God. Not possible. This is similar to how Buddhist sometimes say that the only difference between a confused sentient being and a Buddha is that a Buddha sees clearly the nature of confusion/obscuration.)
On a simple, individual observable level you are always experiencing various things in visual, auditory and other sense fields. These things are both particular and multifarious. Each leaf on each tree moves in a particular way. Each sound they make is particular. Each dog bark in the distance is different, as is each cloud, changing moment by moment. These phenomena are the Many but they all happen within the One which is the awareness-Mind field in which they are experienced. It is always there in the background, it never changes. You have never had any experience without this open, measureless field being there. You can witness scenes of light comedy or dark murder appearing in your gaze and the primordial always-there field of awareness accommodates each in the same way.
So the awareness-experience of the One Mind principle is also the vector through which we all experience the Many (or Earth in the Chinese lingo or perhaps Son in Christianity but there am not so sure since Christian symbology and language I always find a little confusing and in any case there is no need to try to make them all relate except sometimes where they clearly do, so why not).
So there is an irony in these two streams of thought that I found interesting. The One Mind notion allows for multiplicity, creativity, flexibility, variability because the One accommodates and welcomes the Many. But the Hegemon model is insisting that all must bow down to the same one way of doing and perceiving. This is similar to certain periods in the history of the Western Churches (I know less than nothing about the East and every time I have tried to read about it I cannot understand a word so my sense is that it is best to be born into it) when it became extremely dogmatic and tyrannical.
Putin is arguing for a type of international political reality that accommodates differences and variability just like hermetic view welcomes. Just like your garden welcomes no end of flowers, grasses, trees, birds, insects and sounds. Nature is not monistic in the sense of trying to control everything all the time although there does seem to be a bias towards creativity, fecundity, manifestation, growth, celebration even (flowers and butterflies, blue skies, dawn, the songs of birds and insects). It is philosophically ironic that a direct gnosis of the One Mind principle leads to an immediate appreciation of the limitlessly multifarious Many, whereas the political imposition of the materialist-based hegemon whose ultimate destination I believe is always satanic totalitarian tyranny – a perverse type of One principle.
How can materialism be described as a form of satanic One principle? Physicality is actually just a concept slathered onto reality which is always experienced in Mind (or Heart if you prefer, or some say Spirit/Shen). But if you stick only to the abstract designation (that it is physical matter comprised of various subatomic particles and no more etc.) you freeze everything with this label by making Many into One and turn it into no more than a dead mechanical series of movements following genetic code – or whatever.
Strangely it is a greater spiritual awareness of the aliveness of Space-Mind which accomodates all manifestation so it is far less hegemonic. So trying to make matter the One ends up stultifying everything whereas making multifarious manifest matter something which arises within the boundless, measureless, timeless One of Mind is liberating, creative, flowering, delightful. This underlying materialist view I think is the modern secular equivalent of the religious literalism in the article. Remember back then the Church traditions defined reality in ways that most modern people do not experience or understand. So by insisting on only certain interpretations of the teachings or views of God or whatever they were positing an external reality separate from the individual and in so doing banishing the creativity of individual experience from acceptable spiritual experience which in turn became pre-determined, pre-defined, pre-measured by concept. Deadly. Just like the Hegemonic approach. Except I think that approach is rooted in materialism rather than Christian literalism even though both share similar styles of mentality.
At least that’s my take on some of the themes in the speech and the article, which caused me to go back to the speech. I still didn’t get through it all again yet because of other things today (- I finally got my main car back after going through 5 months of infuriating Mexican surrealist hell! It’s still a piece of junk but at least it now drives!) But I found the article really neat in linking such deep-rooted arcane issues which have played important parts in European history with Putin’s recent speech.
Posted by: Scorpion | Nov 14 2022 1:55 utc | 41
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