Archive for the 'Monetary System' Category

The Bottom Line

Published on May 23, 2011 in Chomsky, Monetary System, Politics and Repost. Closed

“Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.”

- Excerpt from: Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky – 2002

All Others Pay Cash

Published on January 27, 2011 in Culture, G.K. Chesterton, Monetary System and Zentropa. Closed

When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything.

- G.K. Chesterton.

Do You Really Want To Know?

Published on January 19, 2011 in Éire, Monetary System, Politics and Video. Closed

Collapse

Published on December 29, 2010 in Environment, Monetary System and Video. Closed

Spiritual Richness

Published on December 8, 2010 in Health, Japan and Monetary System. Closed

Is This Your God?

Published on April 27, 2010 in Cinema, Culture, Monetary System and Video. Closed

Bankers, Banking / Thieves, Thievery

Published on April 23, 2010 in Monetary System. Closed

Delivering Oracles

Published on April 19, 2010 in Monetary System, Politics and Tolkien. Closed

The true equation is ‘democracy’ = government by world financiers…The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or what is most important of all, the banker of the backer. Enthroned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understood of the people.

- J.R.R. Tolkien Candour Magazine, 13 July 1956

Move Your Money

Published on April 19, 2010 in Monetary System, Politics, USA and Video. Closed

Bad Life At The Office

Published on April 10, 2010 in Monetary System. Closed

Outsiders

Published on March 30, 2010 in Art, Culture, Éire, Monetary System and Politics. Closed

“The Abbey Theatre is delighted to present the world premiere of OUTSIDERS by leading economist and commentator David McWilliams. … McWilliams believes Ireland’s political and social divide is not so much about rich and poor, young and old, urban and rural, but about Insiders and Outsiders. The Insiders – found in every village, town and city – are those with a stake in our country who believe that today’s status quo must be preserved at all costs. The Outsiders – who might live next door – are those who realise that the status quo is part of the problem.”

- Excerpt from the website linked above.

Identical Basis

Published on March 29, 2010 in Evola, Monetary System and Politics. Closed

In both individual and collective life the economic factor is today the most important, real, and decisive one. … An economic era is by definition fundamentally anarchic and anti-hierarchical; it represents a subversion of the normal order. … This subversive character is present in both Marxism and in its apparent antagonist, modern capitalism. The worst absurdity is for those who today claim to represent a political ‘Right’ to remain in the dark, overcast circle drawn by the demonic power of the economy—a circle inhabited by both Marxism and capitalism, along with a whole series of intermediate stages. Those today who line up against the forces of the Left should insist on this. Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic vision of life which is the basis of both systems is identical.

- Excerpt From: Men Among The Ruins, By Julius Evola

Sherwood Forest?

Published on March 25, 2010 in Monetary System and UK. Closed

Equality & Economic Freedom

Published on March 19, 2010 in Hilaire Belloc, Monetary System and Politics. Closed

It is all-important to note that the word “Capitalism” thus used as the name for the great evil which, in its maturity, threatens the very existence of our society does not signify the rights of property. It signifies rather an abuse of property; property developed into an unnatural top-heavy form, under which it cannot normally function, and only threatens disaster.

Capitalism no more means the affirmation of an an individual, or a family’s right to possess land , machinery, housing, clothing, reserves of food and the rest, than fatty degeneration of the heart means the normal function of the heart as the circulator of the blood in a healthy human body. Capitalism is an evil not because it defends the legal right to property, but because it is of its nature the use of that legal right for the defense of a privileged few against a much greater number who though free and equal citizens are without economic basis of their own.

Therefore the root evil which we roughly term “Capitalism” should more accurately be termed “Proletarianism”; for the characteristic of the bad state of Society which we call today “Capitalist”, is not the fact that the few own, but the fact that the many, though politically equal to their masters and free to exercise all the functions of a citizen, cannot enjoy full economic freedom.

- Excerpt From: The Crisis of Civilization, by Hilaire Belloc

Enforced Enjoyment

Published on March 11, 2010 in Culture, Jean Baudrillard and Monetary System. Closed

One of the strongest proofs that the principle and finality of consumption is not enjoyment or pleasure is that that is now something which is forced upon us, something institutionalized, not as a right or a pleasure but as the duty of the citizen.

The puritan regarded himself, his own person, as a business to be made to prosper for the greater glory of God. His ‘personal’ qualities, his ‘character’, which he spent his life producing, were for him a capital to be invested opportunely, to be managed without speculation or waste. Conversely, but in the same way, consumerist man [l’homme- consomateur] regards enjoyment as an obligation; he sees himself as an enjoyment and satisfaction business. He sees it as his duty to be happy, loving, adulating/adulated, charming/charmed, participative, euphoric and dynamic. This is the principle of maximizing existence by multiplying contacts and relationships, by intense use of signs and objects, by systematic exploitation of all potentialities of enjoyment.

There is no question for the consumer, for the modern citizen, of evading this enforced happiness and enjoyment, which is the equivalent in the new ethics of the traditional imperative to labour and produce. Modern man spends less and less of his life in production within work and more and more of it in production and continual innovation of his own needs and well-being. He must constantly see to it that all his potentialities , all his consumer capacities are mobilized. If he forgets to do so, he will be gently and insistently reminded that he has no right not to be happy. It is not, then, true that he is passive. He is engaged in – has to engage in – continual activity. If not, he would run the risk of being content with what he has and becoming asocial.

Hence the revival of a universal curiosity (a concept to be explored further) in respect of cookery, culture, science, religion, sexuality, etc. ‘Try Jesus!’ runs an American slogan. You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of ‘missing’ something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whiskey, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some ‘sensation’. It is no longer desire or even ‘taste’, or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease – it is the ‘fun morality’ or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full one’s potential for thrills or gratification.

- Excerpt From: The Consumer Society – Myths and Structures, by Jean Baudrillard

Defence & Aggression

Published on February 14, 2010 in Alexander Dugin, Culture, Monetary System and Politics. Closed

In the modern world the break has occurred with the centuries-old traditions, that fully turned over the mental and social structures of the modern humankind in comparison with the long millenniums of the past. “Enlightenment”, humanism, rationalism and other “progressist” tendencies put forward the system of estimations and values, fully contradicting the basic orientations of the traditional society. This certainly (and maybe in the most expressive way) touched upon the principle of aggression. The European Age of Enlightenment implanted in people a one-sided view of the aggression, a view from the victim’s point exclusively.

The light side of that phenomenon, based on the will to the Absolute, to attaining the total character, to the maximum extension of a subject up to the sphere of the Divine, discontinued being understandable, concrete and ontologically rooted, and, consequently, was identified with the “survival”, with atavism, with inertial barbarism, with the temporal and in the main rectifiable defect of the civilization. Having lost its metaphysical legitimacy, the aggression became to be perceived as unlawful transgressing the integrity of what was proclaimed the supreme value in itself – a human individual, society, being etc. Hence follows all “natural right” tendency, which has been developed starting from the times of Rousseau. For the existential expansion discontinued being metaphysically justified, the victim put in its own claims to the “total security”, that is to the artificial and raised to the highest ethical imperative defence from aggression. The aggression was in fact outlawed. With this, in particular, the general “democratic” legal statue, which prohibits the propaganda of war, is connected.

It turned to be possible to change the cultural and social foundations of the society, whereas it was naturally beyond anyone’s powers to change the basic tendencies of both cosmos and human beings. Therefore the aggression never disappeared either from history, or from the everyday life, or from the wild nature. It just began to be perceived as the evil, as one limited being’s claim on utilizing another one, which arises spontaneously from time to time.

For the process of subject’s totalization was excluded, the aggression became to be considered as merely quantitative acquiring, piling external subjects, as the trivial and vulgar selfishness, as the fatal “life struggle”. Therefore all of the aggression became to gradually be reduced to merely economic sphere and all its manifestations in other spheres were strictly blamed by “public opinion”. “Total security” and “human rights” were from then on guaranteed by transference of the aggression into the sphere of the abstract material standards – money, capital.

- Excerpt From: The Knight Templars of The Proletariat, by Alexander Dugin

First As A Tragedy…

Published on February 12, 2010 in Culture, Literature, Monetary System, Politics, Slovenia, USA and Zizek. Closed

Free Trade

Published on February 9, 2010 in Maurice Allais and Monetary System. Closed

The goal of global free trade is to create a global market for goods, services, capital and labour. The principle is that anything can be manufactured anywhere in the world and sold anywhere else. The global free trade has become a sacrosanct principle of modern economic theory, a universal dogma, true religion that it is forbidden to question the premise.

Almost all economists and politicians are totally dominated, and to tell the truth / indeed enchanted by this doctrine. This doctrine is sustained daily by all the medias that control more or less openly multinational beneficiaries of global free trade. Advocates of the new doctrine confuse the profitability of multinationals with a healthy global economy. They come to the conclusion that the profits of big multinationals and their level of stock prices are a reliable indicator of a healthy economy and society.

In fact, what we see is that international trade is dominated by the interests of multinationals and not by the interests of nations as a whole. What we see is that the global economy is organised for the benefit of multinationals, not to satisfy the basic / fundamental needs of national communities.

Today there are two distinct economies: that of large corporations and the one of the nations. Their interests are not only different. They are antagonistic. As multinationals relocate their production to regions with lower wages in exchange, they destroy jobs in their own national economy. In this system, the losers are not only those who lose their jobs because of offshoring, but also all those who lose their jobs because their employer has not outsourced, ends up ruined. They are also all those whose wages are reduced by competition from low wage countries.

The winners are those who can obtain huge profits using virtually inexhaustible sources of very cheap labour. These are the companies that relocate that can pay lower wages, and those with capital to invest where labour is cheaper and they can ensure a better return. It is the leaders of multinational corporations and their shareholders who are in favor of global free trade. They are the ones who actually get richer. In reality we must distinguish between the interest of groups that dominate politics, administration, public affairs and from the interests of the people. The real needs of each country are by de facto subordinated to the interests of multinationals, and indeed the interests of executives of multinational companies.

This insane system is maintained only through the complicity of political leaders. It is them, ultimately, and them alone, who are responsible for the consequences of global free trade because it is them by their function who are responsible for defining the institutional framework of economies.

In France the supporters of global free trade point out that thanks to cheap imports from low wage countries prices in supermarkets have been considerably lowered. This is indeed what we see, but, like Frederic Bastiat once said, what is not seen is the corresponding increase in the number of unemployed who have to be supported and whose benefits are financed by increased taxes. What is not seen, it is also the progressive destruction of the industry.

- Maurice Allais

Man No Longer Takes Interest

Published on February 9, 2010 in Culture, Emil Cioran, Monetary System and Romania. Closed

“Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor – all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man’s center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one’s inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things.”

- Excerpt From: On The Heights of Despair, by Emil Cioran

Mutuo Sociale

Published on January 11, 2010 in Casapound, Italy and Monetary System. Closed

“Being strangled by a house mortgage house not have happen with the Mutuo Sociale.”

This is the text of the manifesto posted on silhouettes depicting men strangled and hung from their ties today. These were placed in front of banks by the militants of Casapound Italy, in the city of Brindisi.

The action aims to raise public and institutional awareness with regards to problem of families who are unable to make monthly mortgage payments on their first home. At first sight one sees a poster reading, “Your friend the bank will betray you” this is to emphasize that today the stability of the employees is undermined by the principle that one has to be willing to endure so called “workplace flexibility” due to the pressure of the economic crisis.

The proposal of the “Mutuo Soiciale” bill prepared by Casapound Italy, has been received unanimously by the City Council of Viterbo, ensuring that every Italian family can meet the basic need of shelter by recognizing the right to home ownership that is in “compliance” with housing standards, and obtained without bureaucratic speculation. The ability to obtain this should not come from private lenders but from public institutions with the option to suspend repayment due to loss of income, redundancy being an example.