The Capitalist Wreckers Show Trial
author: Brent Herbert
HypothesisIt seems to me that one of the big problems that exists in the world today is that people are to stubbornly opinionated and to dogmatically partisan. The solution to this problem would be to become more scientific, and that means converting stubborn opinion or dogmatic partisan positions into 'hypotheses' which can then be experimentally verified in the great laboratory of the social sciences, which is the world in which we live, and then the hypothesis can either be verified or refuted by examining the results of the experiment.
My hypothesis states that capitalism is currently experiencing another grave historical crisis of competition. The process has been underway for decades but due to increasingly reckless maneuvers this fact has been hidden by high growth rate figures and the profits generated by increasingly reckless short term schemes. So for example you would have NAFTA, which generates profits where there would not have been profits without NAFTA, doing so by lowering wages to five bucks an hour in some place like Mexico, but doing so at the long term expense of destroying markets by destroying jobs. This was then followed by the even more profitable move to China, and even lower wages, a solution that became so popular that NAFTA was quickly forgotten. This was then followed by various credit schemes to pump trillions of dollars of credit into the economy to make up for the gutting of the market place caused by the gutting of workers who otherwise would have shopped in the marketplace. This was also accompanied by increasingly risky gambling and the opening up of a big derivatives casino, and it is my hypothesis that toward the end of it all our corporations became gambling addicts and have been mainlining gambling money. The gambling scheme requires stable markets and stable stock prices, which then puts pressure onto corporations to meet their earnings expectations every single quarter, which they have done, but since the gambling scheme is a ponzi scheme and is also a bubble scheme (the bubble can only grow to a finite size) when the bubble pops then an enormous crisis develops for not only would corporations be facing the normal financial loss of a normally bad sequence of quarters, they would also be nailed with big gambling losses on top of it all when the market collapsed and all those gambling bets went sour.
I also conclude that the subprime mortgage scheme, which was designed to get more people into the housing market and thus create more 'equity' to backup more 'financials' by inflating a bubble, is also a cover story to draw attention away from all that gambling, which would also draw attention away from the crisis of competition that created the lack of profits which drove people to reckless gambling. For this reason the whole thing will be blamed on a subprime mortgage crisis. According to this story a handful of poorer black Americans somehow managed to put a bullet into the world economy by missing a few mortgage payments. Such a far fetched sounding story could only be plausible if the place was already so shaky and so unstable, and the place was on its last legs such that all it would take would be one small bullet and a handful of poor black Americans to take the whole thing down.
The G20The hypothesis of the G20, as articulated so well by George Bush last week, is that we have a case of hiccups, and that therefore people should not allow a few problems that lasted a few months to cause them grave concern.
Now the way a hypothesis is tested is in the laboratory. The prescription written up by the G20 consists of a return to a previous generation of liberalism, with more regulations and more rules and more oversight agencies watching over everything. This combined with other interventionist policies designed to inject trillions of dollars into the economy aimed at specific targets. Noticeably absent from the agenda were any real confidence building measures, for the politicians did not go anywhere near Pandora's unopened box, which contains something like one quadrillion dollars worth of derivatives gambling bets left over when the Casino started going bust. It would seem that our politicians decided to go for a Red Green solution, and just wrap around Pandora's box a few times with a roll of duct tape and hope that holds the lid tightly shut. This might explain why the Federal Reserve has decided to pump out an extra two trillion dollars worth of liquidity at the time of the G20 summit, for given the lack of confidence building measures coming out of the summit, it is most likely that burned finger investors will probably keep the trillions of liquidity that was pumped out of the system during the stock market stampede for the exits and that these trillions of liquidity will now be found hidden under floorboards or stuffed inside of mattresses. These burned finger investors were so desperate to get out of the place that they were actually willing to tip the doorman a few trillions bucks to open the exit door, which gives a person some idea of just how serious they were about getting out, and therefore we should expect no investments from them until such a time as Pandora's box is opened, thus dispelling the terrifying mystery, one way or the other, or until some time after the lid blows right off Pandora's box and then the place has some time for all the flames to die down and all the dust to settle, and then we would expect the place to be booming again sometime around the year 2020.
Experimental ValidationAccording to the G20 we seem to have a bad case of hiccups caused by 'fraud and manipulation' which requires liberal regulations so as to preserve the 'free market'. According to my hypothesis what we have is a disaster caused by the competition of the 'free market' and so therefore our politicians are prescribing a dose of political poison as a supposed cure.
Now I am not interested in getting involved in a dogmatic opinionated quarrel. I intend to be objective and scientific in my approach, and so therefore I prefer to run this experiment in the social sciences upon the real world, and then await the experimental results. If I am correct then ruinous destruction will come upon us. Disaster follows disaster, ruin follows ruin, as the economy gets flushed down the toilet like a swirling turd. The correct cure then would be the exact opposite of 'free market capitalism' and would instead be found in centralized monopoly capitalism, which would then be centrally planned and more rational than the ruinous anarchy and the Fred Flintstone mastadon hunt that has burned the capitalist system to the ground over and over and over again since its birth, or the answer would be found in some kind of socialism. Given the balance of powers and the existing social situation, the most probable outcome would be centrally planned monopoly capitalism.
The Capitalist Wreckers Show TrialStudents of history would be familiar with the Stalinist show trials in the old Soviet Union, when those people who were responsible for wrecking the Soviet economy were put on trial and strung up by their necks. It turns out that these dreadful wreckers who were responsible for everything that was going wrong in the Soviet Union were also the former leaders of the Russian Revolution, who had now become treasonous capitalist roaders, and since it was the policy of Stalin to hold periodic purges by finding someone to string up from a lamp post so as to satisfy public anger about this, that or the other, and since it was also the policy of Stalin to kill every last revolutionary in the country, or pack them all off to Siberia to contain the plague, you can see that the wreckers show trials allowed Stalin to kill, or attempt to kill, two birds with one stone.
I say 'attempt to kill two birds' because in the beginning people bought into all of Stalin's show trials, but the time he tried to pull that stunt on the most famous leaders of the Russian Revolution, that time he went to far and a lot of people began to catch on to the way he operated. The way the scam operated is that Stalin would send out the secret police to tyrannize the place, the people would complain, and would cry out that if only Stalin knew, if only their complaints could somehow bypass all the crooks around Stalin who kept the great leader in the dark, then 'Poppa' (as Stalin was affectionately called) would put a stop to such abuses. After a suitable amount of time, Stalin would hold a purge and kill a bunch of secret service agents, and the leaders of the secret service, and he would also kill a bunch of top politicians so that the people could see that he was getting rid of those dirty plotters who had kept him in the dark for years.
If you put a cup to the wall and listen you will make note of the fact that the time is getting ripe for a capitalist wrecker's show trial, for people are screaming bloody murder about the gangster bankers who wrecked our otherwise lovely system with their looting and their wild greedy schemes. I prefer to humanize bankers, and according to my interpretation, as people find themselves going down on a sinking raft, they start bailing water like mad, and throwing anything heavy, such as a regulation, overboard. As the end grows nearer, and the day of the apocalypse approaches, you would expect them to become increasingly reckless. Therefore according to hypothesis that we have a world full of greedy dirty bankers, we have a bad case of hiccups, and according to my interpretation we have the beginnings of the great depression and the much feared battle of economic Armageddon is at hand.
If we see the world's bankers appearing round the clock on CNN as part of a televised capitalist wrecker's show trial, while the audience boos and hisses and throws popcorn at the screen as those bankers walk into the docket wearing their orange prison jump suits with leg irons and hand cuffs, this would not be the first time that bankers took the fall. At the Bretton Woods conference in the 1940s a bunch of liberal regulations were passed, and the summit concluded with the statement that with these new rules it would no longer be possible for a bunch of bankers to wreck the economy and cause another great depression like they had just done in the 1930s.
I wish that I could believe that all the bankers of the world were greedy pigs and gangsters, because I feel such an enormous relief as if a great boulder was being lifted up off of my shoulders when I adjust my viewpoint to agree with the viewpoint of everyone else, for it then turns out that all we have here is a rather nasty case of hiccups, and once we get past that business of stringing up bankers from lamp poles, and we all become liberal Democrats once again, then everything will be just fine.
Revolutionary 'Direct Action'At the present time there are these kids dressed up in black hoodies who call themselves Anarchists who have decided that 'the time for talking is over' and that it is now time for 'direct action', and so now those kids are out throwing rocks through the windows of banks, and perhaps they will next be lighting piles of greasy rags on fire and burning banks right to the ground.
You may have watched the brief clip on You Tube were the President Elect Obama spoke about creating some kind of brand new national police force. Now this makes a person wonder why suddenly we need a brand new national policing force, when we already have police, and there are outfits such as the FBI that already exist, and now suddenly we need a brand new national cop service, for some reason or another. He didn't say why. He just said we needed one and would be getting one because apparently it is something we need right now.
Now every country has its Nazis. In Germany Hitler could never get more than one third of the vote when that songbird was forced to rely only upon his silver tongue. Hitler then came to power when he was undemocratically lofted up into power by the German elites. America of course also has some Nazis as well, and that normally wouldn't be a big problem, unless an historical time rolls around when suddenly people start thinking that a Nazi has good ideas and then suddenly even people who are not Nazis start listening to a Nazi, for Nazis have answers, you see, and no one else does, and since not having an answer is not an option, suddenly a Nazi looks like an answer.
You might recall how Hitler created a new police force in Germany, the Gestapo, right after some lone wolf anarchist terrorist burned down the Reichstag. At the time this crippling blow was dealt to the system, the people working in that joint had to sort through the rubble and maybe pluck out a picture of the wife and the dog, and then they all had to move over the Opera House and pick up on business over there, because they were no longer able to carry on with business at the Reichstag, because it had been burned to the ground by some Anarchist.
Now I am not mentioning all this because I am attempting to talk some lone wolf Anarchist groups out of burning down banks, because you cannot stop an Anarchist, and in any case it doesn't matter and a person might as well not even bother trying to stop an Anarchist, for as history shows, if an Anarchist did not exist, then Hitler would have to invent one. Therefore, when the next Anarchist act of direct action takes place we will all have to do that thing that everyone does at such time, when we worry, always worry while asking ourselves 'was it that Anarchist, or was it a Nazi?'.
Ted BundyIt is my approach to humanize bankers, and I also humanize capitalists, but I do not recommend that anyone make the mistake of humanizing that fractional percentage of the human population who are sociopaths, like Ted Bundy. Boy, would that be a mistake.
Now how do we deal with Ted? Now what I am going to propose here is pie in the sky idealistic stuff, but even so, it is the correct solution. What we want to do is the create a social environment where wearing horns and a long pointed tail is not the latest fashion accessory, because everyone is wearing one. This would then neutralize Ted by forcing him to wear a ball cap and tuck his tail by hiding down his pant legs.
This brings up interesting questions concerning the social and cultural influences that mold human behavior, causing people to become feuding partisans with dogmatic opinions, as just one example, and thus leads us to ponder the question of the ways in which human beings become enablers of their own oppressors.
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Unbelievably, in the face of all the evidence, we still have "Free Market" Doctor Frankenstein's popping up pushing their discredited degregulation snake oil!! A Pox on Wall Street.