Gulf of Mexico oil spill was many times the government figures

Researchers from Columbia University (NY, USA) conclude that the amount of oil released daily by BP's Deepwater Horizon well until the first cap was placed on June 15 was 56-68,000 barrels per day, maybe more. This is many times more than the official figures, which evolved from a ridiculous claim of of one thousand barrels to 19,000.

The total oil released to the environment is at least 4.4 million barrels, most of which is still there even if it has been hidden by the use of massive amounts of highly toxic dispersants, in what is the most massive environmental and public health scandal in US history and globally only comparable to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.

Possible variations in the flows from day to day lead to some uncertainty. Additionally, the analysis does not include other smaller plumes from several holes near the broken pipe, holes that are believed to have grown with time.

Lead author, Timothy Crone, developed his technique of optical plume velocimetry to study deep undersea thermal vents in the Pacific Ocean in 2006.

Source: Science Daily.

Reference: Timothy Crone and Maya Tolstoy, Magnitude of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak. Science 2010. Pay per view.

100 million Indians strike against liberalization

Besides French, Indians also went to general strike yesterday, with the main goal of blocking the growing prices of basic products, specially food and oil, and of stopping the sale-out of public companies.

While the figure is high, we should remember that India has some 1 billion inhabitants of which maybe half are actual workers. On the other hand, the wide spread of irregular economy and mafioso pressures of the capitalist class surely also influenced the outcome. So I admit it is difficult to judge if this figure represents a mere 20-30% of strikers (still a major figure, specially for such a large and heterogeneous country) or it is in fact a much larger fraction of the regular workers.

Whatever the case it seems that the impact was very irregular with maybe 99% success in communist-ruled states of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura and variable impact in other states. In Delhi and Mumbai, the strike was only apparent in the absence of rickshaws, whose drivers massively seconded the walk out. Other affected states were Manipur, Assam, Maharastra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh.

Sources: Insurgente, People's Daily, The Jakarta Post. The information I found is not too precise anyhow, so complementary accounts and links are welcome.

UN whitewashes the ecocide and genocide of Shell in Niger Delta

If BP is insulting and harming the US people and clearly manipulating the US government, go figure what can happen in a much poorer country like Nigeria!

But what about the United Nations? It seems that Royal Dutch Shell, the second largest company of the world and one with a very murky past (specially remembered for its support of the Apartheid regime in South Africa), is also perfectly able to buy its favors.

This is what Black Agenda Report denounced a few days ago: that the study by the UN Environmental Program, paid by Shell, blames locals and the guerrilla for 90% of polution and spills in the Delta Region, once known as Biafra. However it seems that it has backtracked and claims now that no official report is due until next year.

Whatever the case the situation in the Niger Delta, denounced by AI, may be even worse than that of the Gulf of Mexico, at least in many aspects.


The true scope of Niger River Delta pollution is catastrophic, with the equivalent of 9 to 13 million barrels of oil fouling the waterways, farmlands and mangrove forests of Africa's largest wetland. That's at least twice as much oil as escaped in the recent Gulf of Mexico disaster, thus ranking Nigeria and Shell as the number one oil polluters in the world (Glenn Ford at Black Agenda Report).

Richer than Bulgaria

The title of this article makes reference to one of the online comics I follow regularly, The Noob (a satire of massive online RP games), which, in a recent release, got the councilors of the starring Clichequest gaming company arguing about Blizzard (a real company that was recently in the news on gamers' privacy issues) as follows:

Boss (irate): We'll sue them!
Councilor 1: But they're richer than Bulgaria!
Councilor 2: I've heard that they have nuclear warheads.

Actually Blizzard is not richer than Bulgaria (and don't worry about their imaginary nukes, of course) but if they would have said richer than Mongolia, they would have been damn right.

And Blizzard is not any particularly large company. There are indeed about 150 corporations that are richer than Bulgaria, what means they are ten times richer or more than the gaming company (and Mongolia too).

I think this is an important point when we try to understand things such as capitalism, globalization and the reduced power of states. For some reason the pun got stuck in some corner of my head and, many weeks later, today, I decided to check what kind budgets actually manage large corporations, which corporations are these and how they compare with countries.

After some consideration, I think that company gross revenue figures compare well with state GDP (nominal) as both represent overall money flows, a measure of accountant if not truly objective nature (see my recent article on the magical nature of money maybe).

Wikipedia is of great help in these matters. I just had to compare their list of companies by revenue with their list of countries by GDP (nominal).

And I found that only a handful of countries are actually richer than Wal Mart, the largest company by this measure. And who says Wal Mart, easily says Exxon, Shell or BP, which are straight behind the commercial giant.

All them and many more are indeed richer than Bulgaria... and even richer than Sweden in the case of Wal Mart or richer than Finland in the case of BP. There are only 21 so-called sovereign countries richer than Wal Mart.

And as we run through the list of hyper-wealthy and therefore hyper-powerful companies, soon we reach some that we have never heard of. In place 18th is something called Glencore International AG, that, after clicking in the hotlink, happens to be dedicated to trading raw materials and such. This rather unknown company is richer than, not just Bulgaria, but also than New Zealand, Ukraine, Hungary or Algeria.

And by the way, the Wikipedia article is pretty much merciless with it: Glencore's history reads like a spy novel... tax evasion and illegal business in Iran... presidential pardon by Bill Clinton... dealing with rogue states... investments in Colombia... But well, I don't want to deal here too much in the peculiarities of specific companies, because surely they are all pretty much the same at the end of the day.

I will take instead as example instead a much more modest company, whose headquarters are located in my hometown and whose building (left) is still the tallest one by far in Bilbao. I'm talking of BBVA. I just chose it because it's a semi-local company, the pride of Basque bourgeoisie (though nowadays it is rather controlled by Spanish owners and has moved much of its infrastructure to Madrid).

It's not even the largest company of Spain (that's Telefónica, where I once worked) not even the largest bank either (Banco Santander is) and only ranks 129th globally, having a fraction of the wealth of Wal Mart or BP. But, uh-oh, it's still richer than Bulgaria (and Sudan, Oman, Syria, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Serbia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Latvia, Jordan, Jamaica or Botswana)

So does that mean that mean that if Mr. Francisco González, executive chairman of BBVA, meets Mr. Georgi Parvanov, President of Bulgaria, are they equals? Protocolarily the answer is no way but in practical terms they are indeed.

And, moving the scenario to the other side of the Atlantic, what does that mean when the Governor of Louisiana, for instance, a state with a GDP of 168 billion USD (roughly like Pakistan or Nigeria) meets the CEO of BP, whose revenue is of some 246 billion USD?

I'll leave the answer open.

Louisiana oil disaster: the more I read/watch, the more pessimistic I am

In theory they have capped it and that's about it. In practice it is extremely worrisome that they are systematically falsifying, hiding, photoshopping the truth.

Like this bubbling methane seep captured yesterday by one of BP ROVs but hidden by something as simple as darkening the image:



It's just an example. There's a lot more really depressing and hidden-under-the-carpet stuff at Florida Oil Spill Law and Alexander Higgins' blogs. You have to like research journalism though.

It is also worrisome, beyond the immediate disaster the consequences that the lack of a grassroots political organization of the working class can carry: millions of people are being affected by this, including not just the disaster as such but criminal mismanagement at all levels, directly affecting health and jobs, as well as the whole ecological balance of one of the most diverse seas on which these rely and where is the response?

There is only limited response because there are not class organizations beyond unions and sectorial activist groups in the USA. As some member of the fishing community of Louisiana put it already months ago: "we are expendable". It only matters to pretend that everything is under control and to minimize losses to the big corporations.

Even if the doomsday scenario forecast by several people of the oceanic bottom ripping off and causing a huge tsunami and releasing cataclysmic amounts of usually frozen methane to the atmosphere fails to happen (I really hope so), the damage caused by corporate interests is already immense and will grow in the following months as the remainder and future residues of oil and corexit poison spread around. This should warrant people going out to the streets in protest at least every other weekend... but nobody is mobilizing this anger and frustration and the corporative masters and their politician and judiciary minions do as they please therefore.

Money, debt, magic...

The Chaotist current (a rare esoteric school of thought of the second half of the 20th century) provided me with some useful tools to understand the nature of Reality and how magic (or magick as they spell it) is nothing but the ability to persuade others as in the case of publicity (or of course the more classic but otherwise similar case of illusionism). In this sense it is a useful break up with the dominance of rationalism and materialism in modern thought helping us, once you get pass their esoteric formalisms, which are nothing but a cover up, a misleading cue and/or an elaborate joke, to understand the deep reality behind mere objectivism. That is the mental or subjective reality and the social reality that arises from the interaction of these subjectivities.

Another contemporary current that heavily dwelt in the importance of subjectivity but from a Marxist and more rationalist and revolutionary perspective, was Situationism. That's the kind of forces that LSD and the like liberated, I guess.

Maybe the most important concept I appropriated from Chaotism is that of godform, which, as I understand it, means some concept believed by many to be true, turning to have some sort of life of its own, not being fully controllable by anyone in particular. Typical cases of godforms are, of course, gods or equivalents such as Yaveh, Vishnu, Zeus, Allah, 'God' (Deus), Buddha, Tao, Baron Samedi, Pachamama, Yemaya, etc.

Regardless of their values and connection with aspects of reality or interactions between them, what really imbues them of a life of sorts is the belief of their followers. They feed on faith and die off when people stops believing in them.

Ideologies are also godforms, again regardless of their goodness or evilness: they feed on faith and can die off if people stops believing in them. Only the most powerful magi (some prophets, messiahs, caliphs, popes, buddhas, ayatollahs, master propagandists or great revolutionary leaders) can have some control over them, however, human life span is rather brief, while that of godforms transiting the social continuum can be much longer (though eternal is just an exaggerated claim).

But the godform of our time above all others is Money. As everyone with a critical mind who has studied Economics (as I did for some time) knows this discipline is not any science but a doctrine and dogma. Of course, it has some scientific elements of sorts, nothing can exist against the daily reality check, but these are just tools for the main objective of the discipline that is to create a cult around certain school of economics, namely liberalism.

Money as such is merely a token of debt, which by virtue of its token nature can be circulated more easily than merchandises. I produce something with my recognized work and I get paid in said tokens, which represent social debt in my favor which I can the spend in things I need or desire. It requires some historical developments such as social and economical complexity and private property, but otherwise it is that simple. Either it is a consensus valuable item, such as cows, salt, shells or gold, or it is guaranteed by the power of social organization itself, namely the state, in which case it can be perfectly a paper note or even a mere accountancy annotation on a register, which is what you use nowadays when you write down a check or pay with a debit card.

But their token or merely accountancy nature makes control of money, such an important social and economic tool, a key resort of power. You can gain control of money by accumulating it but the real power is in issuing it. There are two ways of issuing money: physically creating it, which is normally a privilege of the state (though historically often subcontracted to private minters), or virtually creating it by means of accountancy magic (i.e. lending well beyond what one has, a privilege of banks mostly). The differences between the various types of effective money supply are typically called M1, M2, M3 and by other similar names (M1 means physical cash plus "real" accounts while M3 means the whole amount of virtual money circulating in accountancy annotations). M3 can be many times M1, as you can see in this graphic for the Eurozone (the USA does not anymore publish M3 figures, surely to hide some grave economic facts caused by over-printing and over-lending by the Fed):

There are much worse cases than EU, indeed, specially in regard to disparate growth of M3 in comparison to M1 and M2. As the exclusive components of M3-M2 are almost never in the hands of common people (as well as most of M2-M1), the disparate growth of this kind of virtual inflationary money supply generally means that the elite becomes richer while the commoners lose.

But maybe more important than all these esoterisms of the Economic "science" it is the fact that bankers can lend money they do not own (they lend on account of your deposited money) and that gives them key control over all the monetary flux, specially if they act with some consensus (oligopoly) and have the complicity of the states, much more if they meet regularly at global level (Davos, Trilateral Commission, etc.) and have secretariats and offices to ensure that their wishes come true (IMF, OCDE, World Bank, etc.).

Where do I want to go? Actually I mostly wanted to introduce a couple of economic articles published at Global Research:

Zoltan Zigedy writes from Hungary on the debt trap imposed by the IMF to his country (and so many others - I recently mentioned India for example)

For decades, left critics of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have maintained that the IMF is merely a tool for enforcing the interests of financial elites, especially those in the US. Predictably, this view has been scornfully dismissed by those in power and their media lackeys who posture the institution as the benefactor of needy countries. The persistent history of the IMF’s extortionate funding, linked to austere cuts in social spending, is simply dismissed as pressing fiscal responsibility on countries lacking the spine to address their profligacy. Such are the myths that sustain faith in global capitalism.

But a close look at the IMF in action reveals the politics lurking behind its high-sounding mission statements. Read the whole article...

It is painfully ironic that Hungary, the poster child of EU and IMF draconian deficit contention policies and former socialist bloc recycling to capitalism is subject to such a extortion by the imperial financial oligarchy.

Naturally this is raising nostalgia for communism because, whatever the faults and limitations of the old system, nobody ended up begging in the streets or having to live on welfare for lack of jobs.

It reminds me when, 21 or 22 years ago, I went on a visit to the European Parliament with people of the movement against the Leizaran highway (as unpaid and informal journalist for an alternative news agency). Besides of our host, we were welcomed and briefed by some liberal MEP who said that EU was ready to welcome specifically Hungary "if they adopted democracy". I had to ask an uncomfortable question: what if Hungary adopted democracy but kept a socialist economic system? He replied that in that case they could not enter EU because blah blah market economy blah blah.

I had to ask, you know. I was barely 20 but I knew already that it was not a matter of mere formal democracy.

The other article, by Ellen Brown, is quite curious because it is an apology of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia... before it was privatized.

The bank was created with zero capital and a small loan from the government on the quite reasonable belief that central banks are backed by the whole wealth of the country (i.e. by the moral authority of the government as social organizer and representation). It was the only bank with zero capital, yet it worked perfectly well (what illustrates well the virtual and faith-based nature of money).

But woe! The bank not only lent at low rates to private financiers, as most central banks do, but it also lent to the general public at similarly low rates and kept a reputation as "the people's bank" until its privatization 15 years ago. Of course, that's considered "socialist" by Thatcherian/Reaganist standards but it's what used to work and therefore it is being demanded again.

Indian economy seen from Mexico

Economist Alejandro Nadal writes in La Jornada (found at La Haine) about the Indian miracle, its horrors and limitations. I translate here the whole text because I feel it is very worth reading.

The economy of India keeps high rates of growth since some years ago and for many it is an example to follow. It is said that the experience of the subcontinent is evidence that Neoliberalism can work. Reality is very different: the evolution of Indian economy is a pathological process that feeds on social inequality and environmental destruction.

India kept a modest growth after independence in 1947. The project of industrialization sustained a reduced but stable expansion (4%) between 1950 and 1980. The income per capita increased an average of 1.3% yearly in that period. The commercial balance remained with a permanent deficit and the economy was closed to the trade and capital flows.

The global debt crisis in the 1980s submitted India to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund and in the 1990s neoliberal style reforms were imposed, what meant a radical turn in economic policy. In the last ten years India had an average annual growth of 6.8%. International press has presented this as an economical miracle.

In these years inequality and poverty have worsened in India. Today 42% of that country's people (1.173 billion) lives with less than one dollar per day. 75% lives with two dollars a day and the economic model is not going to revert such an unequal structure.

In spite of the growth rates of 6-7%, the increase of formal unemployment in India is minimal and does not go beyond a yearly 1% growth. By the way, that means that economic expansion is built on most important productivity increases. This is related to the strategy of orienting investment towards exports, what requires bringing salary costs down to minimums in order to be able to compete. For that reason the rationalization of productive chains is accompanied of strong cuts in employment.

In spite of the miracle in growth rates, India keeps a chronic deficit in its external accounts and needs to finance it. For that purpose it has chosen to receive capital flows, both in form of direct foreign investment as portfolio investments (short term capital). But this implies an enormous cost: macroeconomic policies must respect game rules that have nothing to do with the needs of the Indian people.

Monetary policy is dominated by the need to attract capital to the Indian economic space. This implies keeping high interest rates. Besides, only the privileged ones have access to credit, all this imprinting a regressive hue to distribution of wealth by privileging the active portfolio of the wealthiest strata and deepening inequality. That is why it is irrelevant: what matters is to keep the flow of capital that allows financing the external deficit.

All this implies that India has now the highest reserves in history (some 230 billion dollars). In this it resembles China, but the difference is that the latter has a huge surplus in its trade balance while India suffers a chronic deficit. Indian reserves are not such: they are a resource that can evaporate at any moment.

Fiscal policy is ruled by the dogma of balanced budget and, as capital owners must not be incommoded in order not to affect investments, the fiscal balance is achieved cutting social expenditure and reducing the amount of resources for environmental preservation.

The opening to foreign investment is done by giving concessions to extractive, lumber and touristic industries. This causes the expropriation of the lands in which the minerals are found (iron in Chattisgarh, bauxite in Orissa, etc.) or which are covered by dense forests, which are easily accessible commercial wealth. Many of those lands are the home of aboriginal peoples or adivasi (Sanskrit word meaning first inhabitants of the forest). The adivasi are less than 8% of Indian population but they are 40% of the people deprived from valleys, hills and river basins. The cession of their lands to the megacorporations in extractive and touristic industries is one of the most violent traits of the neoliberal miracle in India.

Economist Amit Badhuri, professor emeritus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has described this process as predatory growth. It must be said it is not any metaphor: it is in effect a complex economical and political process in which the losers give their way of life to a growth that privileges only a few and cannot raise the level of life of the majority.

The parallel with Mexico is extraordinary. Actually the only different thing are growth rates. All the rest is identical: the same model, the same injustice.

Corn syrup causes obesity

This is not "breaking news" because I read it some months ago but I totally forgot commenting about. It is anyhow something that has become part of my daily routine when in the supermarket: checking that whatever sweets I may buy do not have glucose syrup, which is the official term by which high-fructose corn syrup is marketed officially over here (EU normative, I presume), in spite of having more fructose than glucose.

From Science Daily (where you can read more details):

"When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."

High fructose corn syrup is widespread in industrial foods, from sodas to cookies and nearly everything sweet because it is cheap (thanks to US subsidies to maize production), is sweeter than regular sugar (sucrose) and is easier to mix because of its liquid state. However there are still some brands that just use normal sugar.

Academic reference: Miriam E. Bocarsly et al., High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels. Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, 2010. Pay per view.

Could the Louisiana catastrophe had been prevented by a unionized workforce?

That is what In Defense of Marxism seems to think and to me their arguments are self-evident:

Much is said in the news about the disastrous situation that now exists in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. An ecological disaster of gigantic proportions has been created by the profit motive, which is what drives the BP executives. However, were the company to be thoroughly unionised, with workers’ representatives controlling every level of safety, this disaster could have been averted.

Amidst the acres of newsprint about the Deepwater Horizon blowout little has been said about those who are most affected - the BP workforce.

The mood in Sunbury, in the BP head offices, is a mixture of denial and anxiety, expressed in a bitter gallows humour and blunt cynicism. Long-term employees have had several decades of management cock-ups, re-organisations, cut backs, more re-organisations, and more cut-backs. Everywhere, whether in the office decor or the lines on people’s faces, are the symptoms of 20 years of lucrative deals at the top which eventually have brought this company to its knees. Nobody - nobody - is surprised at what has happened. Every long term employee knows what lies behind this disaster. Since the 1990s the company has been running on thin air, vital services have been outsourced, and quality, like the pipelines, has decayed. "The new paradigm", the Thatcherite policy of cutting to the bone and outsourcing to the cheapest bidder, has turned into the old paradigm - long hours, poor quality, insecurity and stress.

Read full article at IDOM.


________________________

Update (Jul 25): You may also want to read this article of similar content at RandomPottins: If they had listened to workers, maybe there'd have been no disaster, and BP would not need to be "buying" scientists. (Suggested by Joe, at comments).

Old comrades call for the restitution of Socialism in China

The sad evolution of P.R. China into a capitalist authoritarian state wrapped in the red banner and the portraits of Mao is maybe producing some benefits in terms of absolute growth but largely at the expense of the workers and the communist project.

This is something evident to all since the massacre of Tian An Men and the repression against the Worker Movement it brought. However this is not lacking in contradictions and there is a clear growth of dissatisfaction and struggles within China. Often this alienation and explotation turns into suicides but worker strikes are also a growing trend.

Now five old high ranking comrades have published a manifesto demanding the restoration of workers' power in China.

The full article can be read at the China Study Group (among many other sites). In it the five old comrades demand:

1. Support for the workers on strike at Honda and other factories.
2. Force Foxconn and other abusive companies to respect human rights and worker diginity.
3. That official unions stand with the workers and not against them.
4. Government, specially local government, must protect workers.
5. Restoration of the working class as the leading force of the country, according to the constitution.

It is evident to me, as apparently to the authors of this manifesto, that the rapid economic growth of China along with the evolution towards Capitalism has brought severe contradictions to the East Asian power and that these contradictions are already exploding even if in a limited and repressed way. This means that, unless the state is able to recycle itself into a state that serves the people, as used to be the case, a revolution is at the gates.

This is just another symptom.

Psychic octopus prefers commie oysters

According to Facebook, which we know is the measure of all things and never ever lies, the famous German psychic octopus Paul, who accurately predicted the defeat of Germany and the Netherlands by Spain in the World Cup, among other stuff, has decided that Capitalism is doomed and Communism will overcome.



An analyst from Goldman Sachs speaking on condition of anonymity to this blog declared: it is obvious that the octopus prefers the color red and there is nothing psychic about it, Capitalism has triumphed and nothing will stop us from ruling the World forever, that is: until the total extinction of humankind in a few decades. Mwahahahahahahahahaha!

A less insane source, my little niece to be precise, declared: do you think I'm dumb? It's photoshopped!

However this blogger has not been able to confirm or deny the authenticity of the photo, as the psychic octopus is unavailable for comment. A press conference with direct translation from Common Octopus to German is scheduled for July 31. It is speculated that it will include a medium session with the immortal soul of Karl Marx himself, who was born a few kilometers away from where Paul hatched.

But anyhow, sincerely, I predicted that myself. So why am I not famous?!

Sources: Facebook, Ciudad Futura

Basque class division in figures

According to Iñaki Gil de San Vicente, 1.30% of Southern Basques have 44.4% of the country's GDP (not counting real state). In raw numbers that means that 36,000 Basques have almost half of the wealth created collectively by some 2,776,000 people.

Meanwhile there is an official figure of 12.7% unemployment (surely much higher in fact because this figure only includes those in the official unemployment office, which is almost useless to find job) and 40% of people (1,110,000 Basques) has incomes under 1069 euros per month, which is considered officially the poverty line (life is quite expensive here, specially housing), many of them on what is called the "social salary" which is a subsidy of 650 euros per family (only slightly higher if you have children), less than what costs the usual rent of a cheap apartment (700 euros or higher per month).

The GDP per capita in the Western Basque Country (Navarre must be close if not higher but I lack the exact data) was 31,110 euros (2008), making a rough total of 86.4 billion euros (or some 120 billion USD in 2009) for the whole southern Basque Country. What means (a bit roughly) that the 40% of Basques under the poverty line are getting less than 41% of their theoretical share of the GDP.

Meanwhile, that tiny elite of 36,000 rich Basques own collectively some 38.4 billion euros, more than one million euros each (average).

So while the bulk of the citizenry is getting through life with less than 13,000 euros per year, a tiny oligarchy enjoys one million each. A hundred or more times what the common poor Basque has.

I know that elsewhere it can be much worse (for example here it is mentioned that a Chilean worker can earn as little as $182 per month, with the official minimal salary being of $312, $250 after taxes, less than the effective cost of housing) but I wanted to calculate and write down these figures, just for the record.

The financial coup and the end of Europe as we know it

Economist Michael Hudson has a new article at Counterpunch (Spanish language version at Sin Permiso) analyzing what he bluntly describes as financial coup.

Some key paragraphs:

A balanced budget in an economic downturn means shrinkage for the private sector. Coming as the Western economies move into a debt deflation, the policy means shrinking markets for goods and services – all to support banking claims on the “real” economy.

(...) The idea is to create an artificial financial crisis, to come in and “save” it by imposing on Europe and North America a “Greek-style” cutbacks in social security and pensions.

(...) It is diametrically opposed to the original liberalism of Adam Smith and his successors. The idea of a free market in the 19th century was one free from predatory rentier financial and property claims. Today, an Ayn-Rand-style “free market” is a market free for predators. The world is being treated to a travesty of liberalism and free markets.

(...) Latvia is the prime example. Despite a plunge of over 20 per cent in its GDP, its central bankers are running a budget surplus, in the hope of lowering wage rates.

(...) Beyond merely shrinking the economy, the neoliberal aim is to change the shape of the trajectory along which Western civilization has been moving for the past two centuries. It is nothing less than to roll back Social Security and pensions for labor, health care, education and other public spending, to dismantle the social welfare state, the Progressive Era and even classical liberalism.

(...) The problem is that there is not enough economic surplus available to pay the financial sector on its bad loans while also paying pensions and social security. Something has to give.

(...)

What really is causing the financial and fiscal squeeze, of course, is the fact that that government funding is now needed to compensate the financial sector for what promises to be year after year of losses as loans go bad in economies that are all loaned up and sinking into negative equity.

(...)

This is not the familiar old 19th-century class war of industrial employers against labor, although that is part of what is happening. It is above all a war of the financial sector against the “real” economy: industry as well as labor.

(...)

Latvia has been held out as the poster child for what the EU is recommending for Greece and the other southern EU countries in trouble: Slashing public spending on education and health has reduced public-sector wages by 30 per cent, and they are still falling. Property prices have fallen by 70 percent – and homeowners and their extended family of co-signers are liable for the negative equity, plunging them into a life of debt peonage if they do not take the hint and emigrate.

(...)

The explanation, of course, is that today’s economic planning is not being done by elected representatives. Planning authority has been relinquished to the hands of “independent” central banks, which in turn act as the lobbyists for commercial banks selling their product – debt. From the central bank’s vantage point, the “economic problem” is how to keep commercial banks and other financial institutions solvent in a post-bubble economy. How can they get paid for debts that are beyond the ability of many people to pay, in an environment of rising defaults?

(...)

This is why I say that Europe is dying. If its trajectory is not changed, the EU must succumb to a financial coup d’êtat rolling back the past three centuries of Enlightenment social philosophy. The question is whether a break-up is now the only way to recover its social democratic ideals from the banks that have taken over its central planning organs.

I could add many things but would be mere extensions on this analysis. Sadly enough, Hudson is right and, unless the People of Europe reacts very strongly, the continent will be plunged in a matter of years into the most dystopic scenario with the vast majority of citizens dumped into misery conditions, industries fleeing or dying out and mafias running the only remnants of the economy.

The corruption of the parliamentary representation system, with nearly all politicians being nothing but puppets of their financial patrons and with nearly no free media surviving, plus the destruction of effective state sovereignty is leaving Europe (and the World) on the hands of the big bankers, who have only one goal: to keep their profits high for as long as possible, concentrating all the wealth in their hands, without any real plan for the future other than that.

Capitalism has taken off its mask. It still tries to sell workers' austerity as something "good" but in fact they have no project whatsoever anymore. The Cold War illusion of welfare under capitalist conditions is all but dead now: class war has become very real.

But by the moment at least, the bad news is that the oligarchs are winning the war. For how long?

Human existence: ownership versus community

This is something I woke up chewing on. And I think it's an important understanding of the human condition.

Let's go by parts.


Paleolithic primitive communism

As we know, most of the existence of our species and genus, of humankind, of the very evolution that shaped our being, happened in a hunter-gatherer context that has been called primitive communism because all was (is still in a few cases) shared. Working individually was unproductive and accumulation of wealth impossible. Hence individuals could be only understood within communities and communities were highly dependent on their individual components, whose abilities and knowledge (or potential for them in the case of the young ones) were the most precious assets that could be held, not by any individual but by the community as a whole. The other asset was maybe territory but this was a diffuse collective possession anyhow.

The only individually held property was surely stuff like weapons and tools and decorative objects such as necklaces. And as the economy was totally based on sharing (giving and taking freely as a matter of course) even these minor elements of private property were not important.

Even child care was shared to a great extent, so not even children were from this or that mother (or parents) but belonged fundamentally to the community.

Hence we evolved to have individual adaptative traits that were fit for cooperative work in small tightly knit communities. Communicating powers such as language and gestures, emotions such as love and shame, behaviors such as spontaneous altruism, all evolved for that cooperative purpose. We are natural born communists.


Neolithic and Industrial new orders

Things changed however as the Neolithic Revolution allowed for surplus production, accumulation of some wealth and eventually some specialization in diverse roles like warriors, priests (bureaucrats), specialized artisans and traders. The process was not immediate (early Neolithic sites still show no such distinctions) but took place almost everywhere sooner or later. As result some classes (occasionally converted in hereditary castes), specially warriors and priests, took control over the huge masses of farmers and benefited from their collective surplus in a dynamic that oscillated between symbiosis and parasitism but that really tended to the latter.

For several millennia this "neolithic with aristocratic rule" was the main socio-economic system. Again this changed with the Industrial Revolution, which allowed much more effective economy, generating larger surplus and allowing the development of other classes at the expense of the traditional ones. From the masses of farmers and the less numerous but more qualified artisans, arose the working class, now mostly dedicated to secondary (industrial) and tertiary (transport, services) economy. Farming gradually became a minor, residual, industrialized occupation. From the much smaller group of traders, and absorbing a good deal of the classical upper classes, whose previous accumulation of wealth was recycled into the new system, arose the bourgeoisie. Humankind had arrived to Capitalism.


Individualism

Both processes of "modernization" are different in many aspects but the economical basis and the psycho-social impact on us is largely similar: we are being deprived from our natural economy and social system and for that the natural community must be destroyed and the individual must be created.

This process has been often detected and sometimes denounced as a common activity of missionaries wherever tightly knit (tribal) communities still exist. The preachers, ideological avant-guard of the new "individualist" order, persuade the locals that they are not just members of a tribe and clan but whole individual beings, with individual souls bound to individual destinies even after death.

The process is of course imperfect because it is not so easy to destroy ethnic identities but, overall and in the long run, it tends to succeed, creating amorphous pseudo-communities of individuals with competing individual interests all under the umbrella of a huge apparatus, both political-legal (state and supra-state alliances) and economical (Capitalism).

Unlike in a natural communist society, such as those that can still be found among some surviving hunter-gatherers, individual property becomes central. It can be said, and this was what really got me thinking this morning, that the individual is defined by his/her property (or lack of it). And society largely qualifies you on such grounds.

Thanks to the virtual codification we call money, property does not need anymore to be just real state or material objects such as a ship or a gold hoard, it can be a bank account or deeds of some sort. But in any case it is property what makes the individual and the main measure of his/her value in our twisted reality.

Of course, there's another element that cannot be easily quantified: personal attributes, such as knowledge, skill, creativity, intelligence, sociability, health, beauty, fertility, etc. They can sometimes be monetized but their essence largely escapes the wealth scale. I'd call these traits personality rather than individuality, because they make what we can call the person, as opposed to the individual and his/her supposedly intrinsic egoism. They cannot be accumulated, they cannot be transfered except by altruistic deeds such as biological reproduction (genes) and social reproduction (memes) and while they can sometimes be used to accumulate wealth to some extent they are not really central to this process but pretty much peripheral and pre-Neolithic/pre-Industrial in nature.

While Capital, of course, also tries to grab the personalities and include them in their system somehow, these are nearly impossible to capitalize. I cannot sell you shares of my intelligence, you cannot sell me a fraction of your creativity or your beauty. At most you can rent it as a proletarian (work for a salary, as a physical or intellectual prostitute). However continuous rent of such attributes generally causes them to grow dry because these traits have not evolved for mere selfishness and because the alienation involved in the work process typically corrupts the soul, rending it arid and unproductive.

Luckily for Capital there are many souls to be raped for a few crumbs. Not all are for sale but there's always some, many surely, who are desperate enough to be bribed.

But I'm deviating from the main issue a bit. A necessary deviation maybe anyhow.


Conclussion

The key point I meant to expose in this, somewhat self-evident, essay is how we humans, at least most of us (studies seem to demonstrate that there is a natural born parasitic minority but they are a tiny fraction anyhow), have evolved for sharing, for communism, but that the socio-economical reality we are involved in since birth forces us to become individuals, stimulating our selfishness and deprecating our cooperative skills, which are largely laid waste (or at best recycled in a tainted form within the capitalist production system).

After all, what I'm talking here is of alienation. But surely in a wider sense than Marx did: not just alienation of the worker from his/her product but alienation of the person from his/her community.

Now immersed in what surely is the final crisis of Capitalism, we are forced to search for alternatives and our only valid reference is our own human nature, something that cannot really be altered so easily and something that is, at least to a very large extent, cooperative. Of course I'm talking of Communism. Not the so-called "communism" in the Stalinist systems of Russia and China, which are largely nothing but a state-directed bourgeois revolution, with a more advanced theoretical ideology but with similar practices to right-wing pseudo-socialist systems such as fascism, but something else.

Something else that must be deeply democratic at grassroots level, but democratic not only in the political aspect but also in the economical and communicational ones. There are no models, we have to create it from scratch... and that scratch is our human nature.

China: communist or capitalist?

For me there's no doubt: it's capitalism under a "socialist" pretext, much like Mussolini's fascism and such, but anyhow, the following lecture by Fred Weston from In Defense of Marxism is a very interesting dip in the twists of this difficult-to-define type of system.

It's a long video, not sure of the exact time but probably more than an hour, however it's very worth watching (or just listening as you would with an audio) and the lecture as such takes only a little more than half of it, the rest being questions and answers on more or less related matters.



Source: In Defense of Marxism

Notice: I do not necesarily agree with all the details or viewpoints of Weston and, of course, I have no affiliation with the International Marxist Tendency, which is the political organization behind IDM (in fact I hold no affiliation to any single organization at this period of my life, though I do have sympathies and dislikes, of course). In any case I reckon that IDM has good information on class struggle worldwide and also generally good analysis that I share to at least some extent. One thing that I appreciate is that they communicate in a language that is not pretentiously erudite (as happens with some, let's say, "elitist pseudo-Marxists") and that they seem to acknowledge the natural diversity of the real struggles of the working class for dignity and self-rule.

Eurozone's problem is Germany

Interesting review by Prof. Vincenç Navarro at his blog[es] on how the real problem of the Eurozone is not really the rather normal finances of peripheral countries but in the lack of demand of the central countries, notably Germany.

Germany, supposedly the economic engine of the EU, has been pretty low in the last decade, with small GDP growth figures and high unemployment. What is worse: the domestic demand of Germany has been lower than the peripheral countries now being punished for precisely sustaining the economy of the Eurozone (and specially of Germany itself) with their demand.

This is because Germany, still with a social-democrat government then, chose not to use the huge surplus that conversion to the euro generated to increase its domestic economy by rising salaries (and hence demand) but to speculate in the peripheral countries feeding the housing bubble and the deficit escalation.

Germany is in fact the wealthy but savy cousin who wants to sell commodities to their less well off relatives. And oddly enough, it has worked for a while, thanks to German (and French) credit. But logically this was untenable in the long run and now the Germans (and the French) want their money back by any means, what implies the destruction of the demand for German products.

As I said before, Mr. Volkswagen: how do you expect us to buy your cars if we work for misery salaries and pensions?

Navarro mentions that Oskar Lafontaine, then minister of economy and now co-leader of the growing communist Die Linke party, left Schröeder's government and the SDP for that reason. Lafontaine proposed instead a more balanced approach, increasing the income of German workers and hence the internal demand, what would have created a much more balanced EU and not this neocolonial engender designed for Mr. Volkswagen exporting until the demand runs dry (what is happening right now).

So what really needs to be fixed is that historical error that highly imbalanced the demand in the Eurozone. The demand by Germany and other Eurozone countries need to rise, what probably means increasing local salaries.

That does not mean that other barbarities like the Spanish housing bubble do not need to be addressed, they do. In fact Spaniards could work for less or demand more commodities if housing prices were not so extremely high, and that's a good reason to explode this bubble. But that would cause serious trouble to banks, who have invested heavily in this worthless excercise of financial engineering.

That's after all the real problem we have in EU: if we do what is logical (explode bubbles, restore a healthy demand by rising income), then banks would sink. Nobody cares about that except banks themselves, because they can always be replaced by other more serious banks, private or public. Of course some private investors would suffer but most people would be unscathed.

But the interest of the people does not matter to policy-makers, specially as EU is anything but a democracy, so Brussels and the Eurozone oligarchs have decided that it's best to make people pay for the errors of the banks and re-level the Eurozone demand to misery levels by lowering income and making sure that the banks are paid back.

This is extremely short-sighted: it's bread for today and hunger for tomorrow. Even for the bankers. If there is only a very low demand in the Eurozone, then Mr. Volksvagen (my imaginary archetype of European capitalists) won't be able to sell nearly anything and the economy will become stagnant for a very very long time.

The problem is clear: who dares to hang the bell from the cat's (banks') neck? It's much needed if we want to avoid Europe from sinking into misery and self-destruction.

Nobody? Then I think I know where the first socialist revolution of the 21st century will happen.

Zionist and Popists control the USA

The people of the USA made a revolution of sorts some 240 years ago... but since then they have been very sheepish, specially since Hollywood and such became a feature. That means that the system works (or used to), no doubt: people are brainwashed and fed and there's absolutely no room for political dissidence, which is dubbed "anti-Americanism" and either ghettoed or jailed.

Panem et circensis. If it worked for the Roman oligarchs, why not now? But unlike in Rome, for whom the word "socialism" meant nothing, in this Empire the price of bread, opium and mass entertainment keeps going up...

Worse: after the criminal abuses of Bush Jr. and camarilla, including a self-inflicted murderous attack against US soil in 2001 to rally the masses around the Imperial-Zionist war project, a lot of people was really fed up. Most of them got alligned with Obama, who offered "hope", "change" and a fresh face and discourse.

But the US political system, as all the others in the West, is designed for change not to be possible and for politicians to be mere puppets of the corporations, who control the media and the parties and nearly everything else.

This status quo in favor of a handful of oligarchs was ratified by the Supreme Court recently, giving corporations civil rights that mean that as "virtual persons" they can contribute money to politics (bribe politicians more effectivey and officially) just like any other John Doe.

In essence all the political machinery is in the hands of corporations, regardless of whether this or that party or politician rules.

This of course means that they are in the hands of the political agents that control corporations, notably the Zionist International but also other such hierarchies as the Opus Dei, a Catholic order conceived as a brainwashing cult for profit and that has controlled the authoritarian and obscurantist Church of Rome for the last many many decades, since Karol Wojtila rose to the throne of Peter.

Obama is not different: his 'change' is nowhere to be seen (no plan for Guantamo's closure, a government full of rabid Zionists like Rahm Emmanuel, support for terrorist regimes like the ones in Mexico, Colombia and Honduras, not to mention Israel), the 'hope' he managed to sell is vanishing like a bad headache.

I say all this because I was reading yesterday to James Petras on the appointment of Elena Kagan, a totally grey unexperienced attorney but with the right Zionist connections, to the Supreme Court of the North American republic. It's something very much unbelievable if you think on it: such a powerful and alegedly prestigious organ as the Supreme Court filled with carpetbaggers of a foreign lobby? What has become of the proud republic?

I fear that the answer is: a mere puppet of multinational corporative power, no mater who is in charge.

Kagan with her mentors (from the Spanish version of the article at La Haine)

One detail that Petras insists on is the fact that of the 9 members of this Supreme Court, there is not one who is not Catholic or Jewish. Six Catholics and three Jews in a nation that is mostly Protestant and where Jews represent barely 2% of the population (but about 50% of the wealthy and powerful). Where are the Protestant judges? Where are the agnostic judges? The Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim judges?

They just don't seem to exist. Surely some of those had much more brillian careers than Kagan (not difficult, really) but they seem to lack the right connections to climb the ladder.

As Petras says, this smells to barn. You could say I am just bitching (sure I am, why not?) but it's more serious than that: it means that the system, which should represent the people of the USA is not working as it should. The people have become just an amorphous mass to be rallied by the media at election campaigns and not anymore any real actor of US politics. The twin-single-party system does not allow for any dissidence to be articulated in a way that has the slightest chance within the system. Many of those genuine believers in democracy were rallied after Obama in the last election, they even created a short-lived popular movement of sorts... but what is left of that? You put all your hopes in a man who later betrays them for some unspeakable interest such as Zionism.

And then what? Despair.

Where's the grassroots movement that rallied behind the Obama illussion? Why are not them demanding their "leader" and Congress to fulfill their promises? Is a downgraded healthcare system all they could hope for? Is this what they fought for?

I doubt it.

Spanish budget cuts less than quarterly benefits of just four companies

I'd say this is a very relevant figure: it means that taxing these companies 25% on benefits would allow the government to keep spending. As there are many more companies, the tax could be much lower, of course.

According to the labour union Basque Workers' Solidarity (ELA), just four large Spanish companies, Banco Santander, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), Telefónica and ENDESA, earned in the last quarter more (6.6 billion euros) than the local IMF's puppet, Rodríguez Zapatero, aims to cut in public spending this year (five billion euros).

But instead of taxing them, the government gives them public aid: 61 billion that would have been much better spent in much needed pensions, direct public investment and unemployment aid.

This is an outraging situation not restricted to Spain. In fact it's the generalized abuse in which EU countries, following US lead, have fallen in: tax the poor to give to the rich.

Nothing less than 3.7 trillion euros have been gifted to the banks after squeezing them from the public. And now they say it's time to cut welfare and salaries. Are we dumb or what?!

The public aid to banks reaches the 12% of the European GDP and is going to reach as much as 22%.

Meanhiwle stocks sink anyhow... I wonder if some remnant of common sense in the brains of the vampires is telling them that this rape is just the last untenable bubble and that they are going to even devour the very states and imperial that allow their mere existence. If so, it doesn't matter if you sell or buy because neither kind of paper is going to be worth anymore.

You know I have very bad opinion of Capitalism but something I never really expected it to do was to suicide in this stupid way. I though they'd fight till the last penny but seems that they prefer to destroy all society as long as they can have their dose of benefits today.

Damn junkies! They can never think of tomorrow!

Source: Gara[es].

The reality of Capitalism

In these days when the Spanish government bows to Emperor Barack I and his court of EU and IMF bureaucrats, cutting the budget in anything but police and military spending, it's good to know what are these promoting at the expense of the common citizen.

Argentine sociologist, Atilio A. Boron, explains at his blog[es] with facts what is Capitalism. I use his data here with my own comments:

Population: 6.8 billion. Almost 100% live in Capitalist areas (with very few exceptions nowadays). Of which:

• 1 billion (15%) are chronically undernourished
• 2 billion (29%) have no access to medicines
• 884 millions (13%) have no access to edible water
• 924 millions (14%) have no home or live in precarious ones (slums)
• 1.6 billion (24%) have no electricity
• 2.5 billion (37%) have no sanitation
• 774 million adults are illiterate
• 18 millions die (are murdered by the system) every year because of poverty, most of them children under 5.
• 218 million children (5-17 y.o.) work under slavery conditions in dangerous or degrading jobs such as soldiers, prostitutes, servants, agriculture, construction or the textile industry.
• 25% of people have only 0.9% of all wealth, while 10% owns 71%. Data from 2002, when it had worsened in relation to 1998. It's most likely that the gap today is much wider.
• In this 1998-2002 period the wealthiest 10% increased their wealth in 6.7%, fraction that, if distributed, would double the incomes of 70% of people, saving many many lives (and activating the market a lot).
  

He concludes:

After five centuries of existence this is what Capitalism has to offer. What do are we waiting to change the system? If Humankind has a future it will be Socialist. Under Capitalism instead there will be future for nobody, not for the poor and not for the rich. F. Engels' sentence, which is also R. Luxemburg's one: 'Socialism of barbarism' is today more real than ever before. No society can survive when its vital drive is greed and its engine is profit. Sooner or later it causes social disintegration, environmental destruction, political decadence and moral crisis. We are still in time but we cannot wait for too long.

How the working class is taxed and the rich get away with their loot

Based on data from Ciudad Futura[es].

In the Kingdom of Spain:

• Workers declare raw salaries averaging 18.400 euros (14 monthly pays of 1314 euros)
• Company owners declare income averaging 13.525 euros (14 monthly pays of 966 euros)

Naive conclusion: capitalists are poor charitable souls who sacrifice for their workers and the economy, getting a Greek salary for that. They live in slums typically.

Reality: they declare as little as they can, earning many times what the Tax Office is told.

This is confirmed by the following data:

• In Spain only 727 individuals have patrimonies over 10 million euros, according to the Tax Office
• In Spain 5270 individuals have patrimonies over 10 million euros, according to Banif (Banco Santander)

It is hence estimated that the Spanish Tax Office fails to collect 90 billion euros every year, enough to multiply by 28 times the Education budget (anyhow just a way to pay tithes to the Catholic Church) or the Health and Social Policies budget.

Black money circulating in Spain beyond state reaches is estimated in 245 billion euros. The black market level in Spain seems to be 10 times higher to the Eurozone average.