Wednesday, October 01, 2008

It's 1979 all over again

A correspondent, in response to my previous post, writes...


"Che(e)r up,old fruit, it might never happen!(but probably will)"


As it happens, I'm actually quite keen on 'it' happening


The recent consumerist binge proved once again, if ever it were needed, that selling and buying useless shit doesn't make people happy and fucks up their environment and other people in its production

So, if this system does break down I don't think we'll be losing very much in the long run

And, more importantly, we really could do with some decent music (and cinema - I saw
Ironman last night - how shit was that!?)

Vapid, superficial, self-indulgent times make for vapid, superficial, self-indulgent tunes


So, I was delighted to discover, via a Youtube link someone sent me, that ska warriors The Specials have apparently reformed in anticipation of the impending Global Economic Apocalypse...





though their line up appears to have changed a little since their glory days back in 1979...




.

44 comments:

paul said...

One way of looking at 'it' is that it has always been happening. 'It' is just coming home, after its world travels, for a visit.
Nothing we face can compare with the vile, unspeakable evils 'we' have visited on other places in recent times.
I am a little more pessimistic, as world wars seem to be a viable answer to some in such times, especially as the current beneficiaries would do anything rather than surrender one scintilla of their gains.
One stumbling block is the limited field of view of those outside the eminently sensible and now proven loon mindset. Everything they took for granted is crumbling, and nothing is there to take its place.
They actually think that a cameron/obama is their only option which, to a certain extent, it structurally is.

Anonymous said...

so stef,

what are we going to replace the fucked up corrupt form om capitalism we now live under??

I believe I know a better alternative.

C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), a Scottish-born engineer, who worked for a number of American and British companies in the early years of the twentieth century, was the founder of the modern monetary reform movement. My own interest in monetary reform dates from discovering Douglas’s ideas through a reprint of A.R. Orage’s articles about them in Orage’s publication The New Age dating from the 1920s.

Douglas pointed out that modern industry can readily produce enough goods to meet the needs of everyone in society, but that the reason we sink further into debt, while at the same time we are driven to produce more and more, is because of the nature of industrial production combined with the monopoly on money-creation held by the banking system.


C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), a Scottish-born engineer, who worked for a number of American and British companies in the early years of the twentieth century, was the founder of the modern monetary reform movement. My own interest in monetary reform dates from discovering Douglas’s ideas through a reprint of A.R. Orage’s articles about them in Orage’s publication The New Age dating from the 1920s.

Douglas pointed out that modern industry can readily produce enough goods to meet the needs of everyone in society, but that the reason we sink further into debt, while at the same time we are driven to produce more and more, is because of the nature of industrial production combined with the monopoly on money-creation held by the banking system.

Douglas elaborated that for various reasons having to do with the process of production over time, there is always a gap in monetary terms between the value of what is manufactured and the purchasing power needed to consume it. Regarding the factors which cause this gap, Douglas wrote as follows in a 1932 pamphlet, The Old and the New Economics: “Categorically, there are at least the following five causes of a deficiency of purchasing power as compared with collective prices of goods for sale: 1) Money profits collected from the public (interest is profit on an intangible); 2) Savings; i.e., mere abstention from buying; 3) Investment of savings in new works, which create a new cost without fresh purchasing power; 4) Difference of circuit velocity between cost liquidation and price creation which results in charges being carried over into prices from a previous cost accountancy cycle. Practically all plant charges are of this nature, and all payments for material brought in from a previous wage cycle are of the same nature; 5) Deflation; i.e., sale of securities by banks and recall of loans.”

Such factors apply in full to the present state of every developed modern economy, including the U.S. and Canada, which uses bank-created debt as the method to fill the gap between production, as denoted by GDP; i.e., prices, and the available purchasing power to consume it, consisting of income from wages, salaries, and dividends.

This was commented on in a communication to the author from a Canadian expert on Social Credit who wrote: “The present system attempts to ‘bridge’ this widening disparity by the creation and issue of money as bank loans for consumption and/or for superfluous and increasingly destructive (e.g., war goods) capital production. Debt issued in such a manner does not finally liquidate financial cost but, in an inflationary manner, merely transfers such financial costs as an additional charge to be recovered in the prices generated by future cycles of production.” (May 17, 2007)

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

sorry about that last post.my copy and paste took more info than I intended.

maybe you could delete the excess info

Stef said...

Douglas died in his home in Fearnan, Scotland.

Stef said...

/ kidding

Stef said...

Encyclopedia > C. H. Douglas

Major C. H. (Clifford Hugh) Douglas MIMechE, MIEE, (January 20, 1879-September 29, 1952) son of Hugh Douglas and Louisa Horfdern, was a Scottish engineer and pioneer of the Social credit concept. He graduated from Cambridge University, with an honours degree in mathematics. He worked for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation of America, was the Reconstruction Engineer for the British Westinghouse Company in India, deputy Chief Engineer of the Buenos Aires and Pacific Railway Company, Railway Engineer of the London Post Office (Tube) Railway and Assistant Superintendent of the RAF Factory, Farnborough during World War I. He appeared as a witness before the Canadian Banking Enquiry in 1923 and before the Macmillan Committee in 1930.

It was while he was reorganising the work of RAF Farnborough during World War I that Douglas noticed that the weekly total costs incurred were greater than the sums paid out for wages, salaries and dividends. This seemed to contradict the theory put forth by classic Ricardian economics, that all costs are distributed simultaneously as purchasing power. Ricardian economics is an economic model of international trade introduced by David Ricardo to explain the pattern and the gains from trade in terms of comparative advantage. ...


Douglas collected data from over a hundred large British businesses and found that in every case except that of companies heading for bankruptcy, the sums paid out in salaries, wages and dividends were always less than the total costs incurred each week. Notice of closure stuck on the door of a computer store the day after its parent company, Granville Technology Group Ltd, declared bankruptcy (strictly, administration - see text) in the UK. Bankruptcy is a legally declared inability or impairment of ability of an individual or organization to pay their creditors. ...


He published his observations and conclusions in an article in the English Review where he suggested: "That we are living under a system of accountancy which renders the delivery of the nation's goods and services to itself a technical impossibility."


Social Credit is an economic theory and a social movement which started in the early 1920s, inspiring the Canadian social credit movement and New Zealand's Social Credit Political League. Douglas also travelled and lectured on Social Credit in Japan and Norway. Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala. ... The 1920s were a decade sometimes referred to as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties, usually applied to America. ... The Canadian social credit movement was a Canadian political movement originally based on the Social Credit theory of Major C. H. Douglas. ... One of the several logos used during the history of the Social Credit Party The New Zealand Social Credit Party (sometimes called Socred) was a political party which served as the countrys third party from the 1950s through into the 1980s. ...


Douglas died in his home in Fearnan, Scotland.

Stef said...

One stumbling block is the limited field of view of those outside the eminently sensible and now proven loon mindset. Everything they took for granted is crumbling, and nothing is there to take its place.

spot on

and, as we know, the system has not yet begun to crumble

Anonymous said...

Hard to find info on the Major.

I found this article however.

I found this article however.

I think he was regarded as a bit of a fruitcake at the time,even anti semitic at one point.

Anonymous said...

worth reading the Majors bio, he was a remarkable fellow by all accounts,,,certainly no fruitcake!!

Anonymous said...

What seems amazing is the extent to
which Douglas’s thought has been
simply ignored. In spite of his having
been one of the most talented writers and
brilliant critics of the Twentieth Century,
one can scarcely find a mention of him
in decades of indices to the London
Times. And today, while their shelves
are filled with tomes on the obsolete and
hate-filled doctrines of Karl Marx,
booksellers refuse to display the works
of Douglas, whose philosophy,
respectful of the individual, held promise
of achieving social harmony and whose
policy was to make the vast productive
potential of modern industrial nations
serve rather than dominate man, to give
him economic security accompanied by
greater freedom to exercise his initiative
and develop his personality. Douglas
maintained that his proposals would
produce these results--and no one ever
succeeded in seriously refuting his
claim.


yes we wouldn´t want the masses top latch on to this guys ideas eh!!!

fuck we´ll just pretend he did not exist.

Anonymous said...

ok one last snippet about the Major.

Some indication of Douglas’s stature as
an economist can be obtained from the
tribute paid him by the brilliant English
editor and economist, A.R. Orage. “His
knowledge of economics was
extraordinary,” wrote Orage, “and from
our very first conversation everything he
said concerning finance in its relation to
industry--and, indeed, to industrial
civilization as a whole--gave me the
impression of a master-mind perfectly
informed upon its special subject; after
years of the closest association with him,
my first impression has only been
intensified. In the score of interviews we
had together with Bankers, Professors of
Economics, Politicians and
Businessmen, I never saw him so much
as at a moment’s loss of complete
mastery of his subject. Among no matter
what experts he made them look and talk
like children.”

Stef said...

TBH I personally don't have a favoured alternative

I am certain that any system which incorporates usury is inherently wrong and whilst I am an agnostic I do believe that love of money is the root of (mostly) all evil

there have been plenty of people who've tried to come up with alternative, more equitable systems and it would be just peachy if more people started thinking along those lines and thrashed something out

The current crisis certainly has put paid to the deliberate and well-promoted lie that the current incarnation of not so free market capitalism is the least worst system people can come up with

Stef said...

as for Marxism, it's getting a bit long in the tooth now and could possibly do with an update

Marx 2.0?

paul said...

Interesting counterpunch piece:
Effective this week, if this bailout proposal would have passed in its current form, these firms would have had a new best friend at the Fed that was going to let them hold zero reserves for transactions.

The final frontier, fractional reserve banking without those annoying reserves

Anonymous said...

The saddest thing is, the 'plan' is to try and restore the old system. It is hoped people/Risk Management companies/banks/corps/Rockerfellers etc. etc. will once again be able to ‘play the market’.

The whole system doesn't deserve to have ANY new life breathed into its old rotting corpse. Attempts to do so are not because it's in the interests of people like you or I. No. It's because that system will help those damn thieves and gamblers who it benefited from it before.

Meanwhile the misery and biting oppression across the world will continue unabated.

Most people should ask yourselves this... What were you doing when the old system collapsed - how idly did you stand when they tried to restore it? Same Q goes for totalitarian state. Sadly such a question is miles off from ever entering the heads of most people.

Anonymous said...

Where are the thoughts beyond this current spell? There isn't any.

People are too focused on the soupe du jour. Stumbling from one aspect of the economic scam to the other.

Anonymous said...

"There isn't any.
"
- bar Stef's earlier comment that is (and sporadic instances of a few other loons out there).

It would be nice if the afore mntioned loons could throw out a few ideas on new better systems. Kind of a 'loon think tank' worthy of the name.

Who knows what might become of them???

Yrs hoping against hopelessness...
lw

paul said...

You could start us off with a slightly easier one...

Anonymous said...

The current administration is like a retreating army, applying a scorched earth policy, burning the crops behind them, and fleeing with as much loot as they can.

What is happening is only the restoration of the old regime after a time of (neo-conservative) revolution.

Welcome back to 1979 indeed.

Anonymous said...

Remember you conspiraloon classics:

"The process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Or like a global economic collapse.

Some catastrophic events can be engineered, others can be predicted.

Get ready to welcome the providential man.

Anonymous said...

paul. Are you asking me for serious suggestions?

Anonymous said...

LOL anon 22:41 (01 October 2008 20:31)

Anonymous said...

What is Capitalism?
C.H. Douglas

'When two opposing forces of sufficient magnitude push transversely at either end of a plank--or problem--it revolves: there is Revolution...'

The Pyramid of Power
C. H. Douglas

'At various well-defined epochs in the history of civilisation there has occurred such a clash of apparently irreconcilable ideas as has at this time most definitely come upon us.....[there] is a clear indication that a general re-arrangement is imminent...'

Anonymous said...

Audio: C.H Douglas - "The Causes of War"

well worth listening too.

link at the bottom of the page.

http://douglassocialcredit.com/douglas.php

Anonymous said...

Max Keiser nails it again.

Afshin Rattansi, Max Keiser & Prof. Philip Brenner on $700bn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1mk6MIMiCk

paul said...

paul. Are you asking me for serious suggestions?
No,I thought you were asking others a rather tough question...
I have very little idea how to implement changes in such an effectively led faith system, but I do think desirable outcomes are perfectly viable if enough people can be freed from the iron mask of neo liberalism and accept that common wealth comes from thought and will, not empire and economic superstitions.
That, together with dealing with an experienced, highly competent and extremely tenacious ruling class,I think, is the really tough part.
In broad terms I think we need a peace economy, like a wartime one but without the ends and means of war.
God knows there's enough (but not too much) for everybody to do.
One without standing armies abroad, which doesn't care about unlicensed drugs,is fiercely exploitative of unproductive speculation, concentrates on home markets, believes in education over training, implements currency controls, is vigilant against predatory organisation and aims for the de-financialisation of everyday life.
That'd do me and its all been done before.

Stef said...

In broad terms I think we need a peace economy, like a wartime one but without the ends and means of war.

Nicely put

In the words of the Bard of Woking...

What you see is what you get
Youve made your bed, you better lie in it
You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust
Youll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns

And the public wants what the public gets
But I dont get what this society wants
Im going underground, (going underground)
Well the brass bands play and feet start to pound
Going underground, (going underground)
[so] let the boys all sing and the boys all shout for tomorrow

We talk and talk until my head explodes
I turn on the news and my body froze
The braying sheep on my tv screen
Make this boy shout, make this boy scream

Stef said...

1980 not 1979 but near enough

Stef said...

...the idea of some kind of parallel universe Medical Environmental Educational complex corrupting and manipulating the political process to stimulate demand for and the production of nice, fluffy things really does tickle me

/ pictures Sterlyn Hayden sitting in the White House Peace Room ranting about the dialysis machine gap with the Russians

/ smiles

Anonymous said...

Its all becoming clear now why the Patriot act etc etc have been passed.

This financial crash has been seen for a long time by the freaks in power.
It will make it easier for them to lock you up should you step out of line too much.

The mission of the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) program is to provide military users a flexible and responsive capability to find, track and monitor events and activities of interest on a continuous basis in areas of interest.

The overall objective is to increase situational awareness and understanding enabling an ability to find and fix critical events in a large area in enough time to influence events. ARGUS - IS provides military users an "eyes-on" persistent wide area surveillance capability to support tactical users in a dynamic battlespace or urban environment.

Anonymous said...

fuckin link don´t work here it is again

http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/argus/argus.asp

Anonymous said...

A better Specials clip, Rude Bwoys galore...

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_LDvwPXpThM

Barnacle Bill said...

stef I have always felt that Bush's actions have been at the behest of his backers - Corporate America.
What is probably the largest component of this Corporation?
The defense industry.
Hence the fact that most of his presidency America has been at war in some form or another, whilst to finance this he has had to allow the banking sector free reign.
So whilst Bush has been channeling billions to his pals in the defense sector his eye has been off what the boys in the banking sector have been up to.
Now all of a sudden he has become aware the good old banking boys have bet all the country's wealth on black and red has popped up instead!
Hence all the brown stuff is hitting the fans over on Wall Street as they fear the boys with the baseball bats might be calling soon, and these boys have slanted eyes.

Anonymous said...

Crisis isn't going to destabilize the elite's power base, it will only reinforce it. Look at the history of the (last) great depression; FDR rode that to four terms in office (the only president arrogant enough to do so), and while there did more to strengthen centralized government than anyone since, with the people's full support. The government/public's response to 9/11 is an even more obvious example. Crisis and leviathan explains the process. Anyone care to explain why we shouldn't expect the situation to worsen, given the historical response?

Anonymous said...

Voters are rightly furious at the proposal to spend $700,000,000,000 that the government doesn't have to bail out Wall Street bankers who created the current economic crisis in the first place. But why then aren't we concerned about the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve is pumping into the system? Or the trillions missing from the Pentagon? Or the quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble.

good video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM79QpaxvOs&eurl=http://911blogger.com/

Anonymous said...

Cheer up, it isn't so bad!

See here: wallstrip.com

(I would like to see her getting the long end of the economy stick...)

Stef said...

"Julie Alexandria is the host of Wallstrip and likes fearless buyers, gold, and real estate"

Oh dear

Stef said...

This unsuitable for work Youtube clip did cheer me up though

mostly because I find that sort of thing of funny

Stef said...

A better Specials clip, Rude Bwoys galore...

So there are

On 30 March 2008 Terry Hall stated that The Specials would be reforming for tour dates in Autumn 2008, and possibly for some recording.[1] This was officially confirmed on 7 April 2008.[2]

On 6th September 2008, six members of the band performed on the Main Stage at the Bestival as the 'Surprise Act'. As Jerry Dammers did not play at the festival and owns the trademark rights to the name "The Specials", the group was billed as "Terry Hall and Friends".


Jerry Dammers can go f*** himself

Stef said...

@not anon

ta for the links

Anonymous said...

The Amero - North American Currency

yes folks a new super currency on its way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hiPrsc9g98

paul said...

A rather clear eyed assessment here and one I am reluctantly in sympathy with
One of the wonders of the modern world is how we can set vague, long term targets for 'difficult' problems such as the poor having enough to eat in ,say, 2030, yet the whole system can be remade/remodelled ('kicking over the chessboard')in such a short time.

Everything that was a 'law of nature' a year ago is now repealed.

I don't think many of us are adequately trained to cope with such nimble,contingent rationality, or the ruthlessness that lies behind it.

Buy Fluoride!

<rambling again but then its a funny old time/>

Stef said...

what are your options when the rest of the world realises your money is worth shit and your only significant export product is violence?