Majorityrights Central > Category: Economics & Finance

So what is Max Keiser about?  OK, he’s the best in the media on the power and criminality of the banks.  No question.  But is he just a left-leaning enemy of the money-changers?  I think probably so.

Here is the latest offering of the Keiser Report, dated the 12th November.  Goes a bit wild over George Osborne.  Gives Mike Gravel and his Direct Democracy initiative an easy ride.

From yesterday:

On 6th April this year Katerina Kitidi and Aris Hatzistefanou released their documentary Debtocracy into the gathering popular protest in Greece.  Public viewings were organised in the central square of most Greek cities, and the film has played its part in educating Greeks to the nature of the neoliberal project and its system of credit, debt, and endless payment.  It contains some damning commentary.  But it is shot through with the hypocrisies of the socialist left.  It does not visit the destruction of personal freedom and the end of self-improvement which debt-slavery implies, these not being issues of interest to radical left intellectuals.  In the same vein it does not venture an opinion upon neoliberalism’s sister project of the Third Worldization of European peoplehood.  Even with a partial political analysis, though, it is plainly the left which will gain when the demos withdraws political legitimacy from the current political class.  Nationalism is not competing at this heavyweight level.

The film is 1 hour 14 mins, but it bowls along at a good pace and will repay your time.  Its message, in the end, is simple: don’t pay.

by Graham Lister

The latest phase of the liberal world-order is best described as neo-liberalism. However as recent events have suggested the neo-liberal order appears to be rather unstable. One key issue is the burgeoning disparity between the declared self-conception and aims of neo-liberalism and its real-world consequences. With Greece in mind, I have jotted down some thoughts.

1 – The neo-liberal state is expected to allow markets to operate without interference yet pro-actively create a good climate for business and behave as a competitive entity in global affairs. In its latter role it has to work as a collective corporation, and solve the problem of how to maintain citizen loyalty. Nationalism is an obvious answer, but in all forms, is profoundly antagonistic to the neo-liberal agenda (Globalization etc.). The serious forms of nationalism required for states to remain as functional entities gets in the way of global ‘universal’ market freedoms more generally.

2 – Coercive and authoritarian enforcement of market discipline sits very uneasily with ideas of individual freedoms. The more neo-liberalism veers to the former the more it undermines its legitimacy and reveals its profoundly anti-democratic character. This contradiction is paralleled by the ever greater asymmetries in the power relations between corporations and ordinary individuals in both the workplace and our living space (or life-world). It is one thing to maintain that my health-care is my personal responsibility but quite another in practice if the only way I can satisfy my needs in a rigged market is by paying exorbitant premiums to inefficient, gargantuan, highly bureaucratized but also highly profitable corporations. When these companies have the power to decide what illnesses they will and will not cover and can even define new categories of illness to match new drugs on the market, something is very wrong indeed. If things start to go badly this balancing act is highly likely to topple.

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by Alexander Baron

According to a recent UK survey, four people out of five polled believe the long-term unemployed should be compelled to do (unpaid) community work to qualify for their benefits – an idea known to Americans as workfare, and one that has long been more than a belief on the other side of the Pond. Now that Nick Clegg’s alternative vote idea has been well and truly routed, and David Cameron’s hand has been strengthened, there is a real possibility of something like this happening. The concept of the undeserving poor is of course one that predates workfare by a fair few centuries, and was what resulted in a now thankfully long defunct institution known as the workhouse.

The idea that the majority or a large minority of the unemployed are “scroungers” is a mindset that is hard to dispel, but there are distinctly unpleasant consequences of endorsing it. If the unemployed are put to work for a pittance, then real wages are depressed and real jobs lost; the unions have long realised this, which is the major reason they have always opposed such schemes here.

David Cameron’s much vaunted “big society”, a concept which only he seems to understand, is based on the same philosophy. When he talks about people volunteering, what he really means is working for nothing. A graphic example of that has recently come to light with the revelation that many senior police officers who have been forcibly retired by West Midlands Police have been invited back. As unpaid special constables.

When Margaret Thatcher succeeded James Callaghan as Prime Minister in May 1979, one of her first acts was to award the police a massive pay rise, probably sensing she would need them on her side in the coming confrontation with the unions. It may be now that the police officers who were enthusiastically bashing heads on the anti-G20 protests have a change of heart.

All this is a matter of record and speculation, because what the unemployed need is not jobs but livelihood, indeed, we already have far too many jobs. One of the first things the new administration announced was the axing of 192 quangos. Which begs the question, if we don’t need them now, why did we need them before?

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by Alexander Baron

Back in the 1990s I spent a considerable amount of time reading the entire backfile of the Jewish Chronicle for the Nazi era, mostly but not exclusively at Colindale. Although I skimmed over a lot of the advertisements and local news, I read and took in most of the significant stories from 1933-45. Actually, I went back to the 1920s and beyond, and forward into the 1950s and beyond the other way, but the story with which I am concerned here appeared in the issue for October 25, 1935. On page 9, an editorial called Scrap the Transfer Agreement! made one of the most bizarre claims against the Nazis I have ever seen.

No, it had nothing to do with “gas chambers”, not at this early date, nor with pogroms, nor was it the usual whining and wailing about how wonderful are the Jews and how everybody has it in for them.  No, it was something much more profound than that. The wicked Nazis were accused of engaging in a most sinister plot to undermine Palestinian Jews … by subsidising them.

Here is the offending paragraph:

These tainted German goods are often being sold … at … far below cost price, thanks to the German export bonus; and the infant industries of Palestine cannot compete with them. Worse still, the Transfer Agreement, by forcing Jewish merchants and commercial houses to buy or sell German products on pain of financial ruin, and at the same time offering substantial advantages for such practices, is … debasing the life of Palestinian Jewry.

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by Martin Hutchinson

A poll last week showed that 71% of Americans don’t want Congress to raise the debt ceiling from its current $14.3 trillion, a level that the total of outstanding debt is expected to hit in March. According to conventional pundits, this is extraordinarily irresponsible, leading to a U.S. default on its outstanding debt. Yet as with many ideas the Beltway pundits claim are irresponsible, when examined more closely the idea has some merits for ordinary people.

For a start, while the Fed’s policy of quantitative easing is in effect, with the Fed buying $75 billion of Treasuries each month, the debt limit does not need to be increased in respect of these purchases. Instead of buying Treasuries in large amounts, and printing money in order to do so, the Fed can simply hand the Treasury the money it prints and allow it to spend it as it wishes. That doesn’t actually require Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to back a truck up to the Treasury building and unload box after box of $100 bills – everything is done by book entry. (If it did mean that, and a provision was made that the Fed chairman himself had to schlep the boxes, we might finally have a proper control over money creation – of course the politicians would simply respond by nominating a professional weightlifter as Fed Chairman!)

This would not work for very long; within a year or two it would produce hyper-inflation, turning the U.S. into the 1923 Weimar Republic. It should be emphasized however that economically it represents no change in policy from the current one. In the old days, there would have been a difference in that the Treasury would under the current system have printed up $75 billion worth of beautifully engraved bonds per month, giving employment to worthy printers and engravers. In today’s book-entry world, even this minuscule economic difference would be lost. If current policies continue, the Weimar Republic’s fate lies ahead of us anyway.

A second alternative response to the debt ceiling, with a similar economic effect, would be to fund government spending through subprime mortgages guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Since these would be guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, not technically part of the government, they would not count against the government’s debt ceiling. It might be objected that financing say a tank or a road through Fannie and Freddie would be outside their legal mandate, and that a tank in particular would be unlikely to make the mortgage payments.

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Thanks to Alexander Baron for the link.