Category Archives: Capitalism

Suck It, Wall Street, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on January 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

The epic short squeeze in Gamestop and a few other ugly ducklings has been a joy to watch. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

In a blowout comedy for the ages, finance pirates take it up the clacker

In the fall of 2008, America’s wealthiest companies were in a pickle. Short-selling hedge funds, smelling blood as the global economy cratered, loaded up with bets against finance stocks, pouring downward pressure on teetering, hyper-leveraged firms like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. The free-market purists at the banks begged the government to stop the music, and when the S.E.C. complied with a ban on financial short sales, conventional wisdom let out a cheer.

“This will absolutely make a difference,” economist Peter Cardillo told CNN. “Now, if there is any good news, shorts will have to cover.”

At the time, poor beleaguered banks were victims, while hedge funds betting them down as the economy circled the drain were seen as antisocial monsters. “They are like looters after a hurricane,” seethed Andrew Cuomo, then-Attorney General of New York State, who “promised to intensify investigations into short selling abuses.” Senator John McCain, in the home stretch of his eventual landslide loss to Barack Obama, added that S.E.C. chairman Christopher Cox had “betrayed the public’s trust” by allowing “speculators and hedge funds” to “turn our markets into a casino.”

Fast forward thirteen years. The day-trading followers of a two-million-subscriber Reddit forum called “wallstreetbets” somewhat randomly decide to keep short-sellers from laying waste to a brick-and-mortar retail video game company called GameStop, betting it up in defiance of the Street. Worth just $6 four months ago, the stock went from $18.36 on the afternoon of the Capitol riot, to $43.03 on the 21st two weeks later, to $147.98 this past Tuesday the 26th, to an incredible $347.51 at the close of the next day, January 27th.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Capitalism, Collapse, Economy, Financial markets, Government, History, Humor, Money, Politics

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Is “Stakeholder Capitalism” Newspeak for Economic Fascism? by Mark Hornshaw

Posted on January 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

Under stakeholder capitalism, people with no economic interest in a company get to tell the people who do have an economic interest how to run their company. From Mark Hornshaw at activistpost.com:

Leaders of the World Economic Forum are seeking to implement a Great Reset of capitalism whereby “global stakeholders” cooperate to achieve “shared goals.” In the true spirit of not letting a crisis go to waste, they see the COVID-19 pandemic as presenting a unique opportunity to push their agenda.

“The level of cooperation and ambition this implies is unprecedented. But it is not some impossible dream,” World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab recently observed. “In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles.”

Of course, when they say “our lifestyles” they mean your lifestyle, not their own. Their preferred vehicle for achieving their goals is other people’s businesses. In short, what they want is for private businesses to serve the interests of their own curated list of stakeholders rather than (as they see it) concentrating on returning profits to business owners. They want governments to pass laws and tax regimes to cajole businesses towards their favored ends. Since this arrangement still involves a modicum of private ownership of the means of production, they call it “Stakeholder Capitalism.”

It is important to recognize the subversive use of language here. Such a system is all about sidelining the true stakeholders, and undermining capitalism. This is Orwellian Newspeak at its best, since it misuses the word “stakeholder” and is actually closer to economic fascism than capitalism.

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Let The Good Times Roll, by MN Gordon

Posted on January 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s nothing going on in America that’s historically anomalous. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

Let the good times roll
Let them knock you around
Let the good times roll
Let them make you a clown

– Good Times Roll, by The Cars

America’s Recline and Flail Goes On

The storming of the U.S. Capitol Building on Wednesday was a wacky and wild escapade.  But it shouldn’t be a surprise.  These things happen when a nation’s in decline.  And, as Wednesday demonstrated, America’s recline and flail goes on.

More telling is the fake outrage by politicians to score political points and justify additional control over the populace.  Chuck Schumer compared it to Pearl Harbor, calling it a date “in American history that will live forever in infamy.”  President-elect Joe Biden characterized it as “one of the darkest days in the history or our nation” and “an unprecedented assault on our democracy.”

Schumer and Biden conveniently overlook the irony of their statements.  They may be accurate.  But only for reasons they never intended.  Lost in the ruckus was any candid consideration of election counting shenanigans.  This is the real assault on democracy that will forever live in infamy.

But, again, proper perspective must be maintained.  A fraud election should come as no surprise.  These things happen when a nation’s in decline.  We don’t like it.  But these are the facts.

At the same time, the nation’s leaders have little clue what’s going on.  Schumer.  Pelosi.  McConnell.  All the clowns in Congress.  They think that with that ogre Trump out of the way, they can let the good times roll again.  They know not what they face.

How wealth is created and naturally dispersed is complex and multifaceted.  Attempts to explain it, like attempts to explain the development of the human embryo, are generally lacking.  Nonetheless, for amusement and the benefit of members of Congress who may be reading, the following rough attempt is extended.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Debt, Government

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The Great Reset, Part III: Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics

Posted on January 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

China is the model for the Great Reset. From Michael Rectenwald at mises.org:

Part 1

Part II

The title of this essay represents a play on the Chinese Communist Party’s description of its economy. Several decades ago, when China’s growing reliance on the for-profit sectors of its economy could no longer be credibly denied by the CCP, its leadership approved the slogan “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe the Chinese economic system.1 Formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the phrase became an essential component the CCP’s attempt to rationalize Chinese capitalist development under a socialist-communist political system.

According to the party, the growing privatization of the Chinese economy was to be a temporary phase—lasting as long as a hundred years according to some party leaders—on the way to a classless society of full socialism-communism. The party leaders claimed, and still maintain, that socialism with Chinese characteristics was necessary in China’s case because China was a “backward” agrarian country when communism was introduced—too early, it was suggested. China needed a cap­italist booster shot.

With the slogan, the party was able to argue that China had been an exception to the orthodox Marxist position that social­ism arrives only after the development of capitalism—although Marx himself deviated from his own formula late in life. At the same time, the slogan allowed the CCP to confirm the ortho­dox Marxist position. China’s communist revolution had come before developed industrial capitalism—an exception to orthodox Marxism. Capitalism was thus introduced into China’s economic system later—a confirmation of orthodox Marxism.

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State or Private Law Society On Dealing With Corona, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Posted on January 4, 2021 | 2 comments

Freedom works better than coercion for just about every state of the human condition, including epidemics and pandemics. From Hans-Hermann Hoppe at lewrockwell.com:

Thomas Jacob: Professor Hoppe, you are known as a critic of the state and of political centralization. Doesn’t the coronavirus prove that central states and central government regulations are necessary?

On the contrary.

Of course, the various central states and international organizations, such as the EU or the WHO, have tried to use the COVID-19 pandemic to their own advantage, i.e., to expand their power over their respective subjects; to try out how far one can go with ordering other people around in the face of an initially vague and then systematically dramatized danger of a global epidemic. And the extent to which this has succeeded, up to and including a general house arrest, is frightening.

But if the course of current events has demonstrated anything, it is not how necessary or efficient central authorities and decisions are, but conversely how critically important decentralized decisions and decision-makers are.

The danger emanating from an epidemic is never the same everywhere, for everyone, at the same time. The situation in France is different than that in Germany or Congo, and conditions in China are not the same as in Japan. And within diverse countries, the threat level differs from region to region, from one city to another, between urban and rural areas, depending on the demographic and cultural composition of the population. Moreover, there is a whole range of greatly differing assessments and proposals concerning what and what not to do in the face of this threat level, all put forward by equally “certified scientific experts.” Therefore, any centralized, nationwide (in extreme cases, worldwide) measure to avert danger – a “one-size-fits-all” model – must from the outset seem absurd and inappropriate.

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The Dystopian Western World, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on December 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

Just because nobody but Trump partisans wants to look at the actual evidence of election fraud doesn’t mean the evidence isn’t real. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

The West is living the worst of Orwell’s 1984 and Raspail’s Camp of the Saints

As the second decade of the 21st century comes to an end, democracy and free speech no longer exist in the Western World.  In all its respects, Western civilization no longer exists.

In the United States, which poses as the model for democracy, a presidential election has just been stolen in full view of everyone.  There is expert testimony by qualified experts about how the voting machines and software were used to bias the vote count for Biden.  There are hundreds of signed affidvits of eyewitnesses who saw the fraudulent use of mail-in ballots to boost Biden’s vote count.  We know for facts that dead people were voted, illegal aliens were voted, out of state residents were voted, and some precincts had more votes cast than there are registered voters and even residents in the precincts.

Despite the abundance of evidence, except for members of state legislatures in some of the swing states, no one is acquainted with the evidence.  The presstitutes speak with one voice and deny that any evidence exists.  So do the Democrat election officials in the Democrat-controlled counties in the swing states where the presidential election was stolen.  The courts have refused to even look at the evidence.  The presstitutes misrepresent the courts’ refusals to examine the evidence as the judiciary’s ruling against the validity of the evidence despite the fact that no court has looked at the evidence.  

The level of hostility of Biden supporters toward those who protest the electoral fraud is extraordinary.  Biden supporters threaten Trump supporters with loss of employment and with arrest and prosecution.  Tucker Carlson on Fox News reviews the extraordinary situation here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5ki6S-WsKU  

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The Deracination of the Western World, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on December 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

Woke idiocy and totalitarianism is canceling white people and the civilization they built. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

The Western World has entered a Dark Age from which it is unlikely to emerge intact.  In Europe nations once based on distinct ethnicity have opened their borders to mass immigration of unassimilable peoples, thus destroying their internal unity.  These same nations have also abandoned their sovereignty. The US, EU, and Globalism preside over Europe. The main European countries no longer consist of nation states.  In France citizens who complain of the marginalization of the French people in their own country are prosecuted. In Germany they are branded Nazis and subjected to legal threats.  Germany doesn’t even permit its citizens to express opinions with which Jews disagree. Having just completed a two and a half year prison sentence for Holocaust denial, 92 year old Ursula Haverbeck has been convicted again  by German courts for doubting aspects of the Holocaust in a 2018 interview. In Greece a nationalist political party, Golden Dawn, was declared racist, xenophobic, and fascist, charged with running a criminal organization and had its leaders and its members in the Greek government arrested and sentenced to prison. The ethnic base of European countries has been effectively silenced.

In the US the Democrat Party has just stolen a presidential election. Seventy-five percent of Republicans and even 30 percent of Democrats can see that the election was stolen.  They can also see that the presstitutes denied from the earliest moment all evidence of electoral theft without investigating a bit of it. They have witnessed state election officials and the judiciary bless the theft.  The American Establishment has closed ranks to rid itself of a non-establishment outsider, a president who dared to represent the people instead of the elites and their agendas. Getting rid of Trump also got rid of democracy, thus advancing the elite’s agenda of globalism.

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Reclaiming Our Western Civilization, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on December 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

Whatever it’s flaws, Western Civilization has also had many magnificent accomplishments. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

The dismantling of Western civilization ran from the middle of the Enlightenment to about 1967. Since then, it has been aggressively uprooted and burnt. (See FMP #90 and here for details.) Western civilization still continues in the hearts and minds of many Westerners, and some local institutions retain their souls, but the central institutions are lost. The large and centralized entities of the modern West oppose Western civilization.

That said and accepted, the darkness emanating from American and European power centers has made one thing very clear: They are NOT Western civilization. They are, in fact, wildly separated from it. And that, in its way, is a blessing: It allows us to clarify what Western civilization really was.

And what is was, was a beautiful thing. And to establish this point, please remember that Christian Europe inherited some 20 million slaves from Rome, and by about 900 AD slavery had been eradicated from the continent. (See FMP #70 for details.) Never before, in all of human history, had slavery been eradicated on that scale.

Western civilization has been a massive blessing to the world. The centralized powers making it clear that they have no part in it has made it easier for us to see.

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The Great Pretext…for Dystopia, by Diana Johnstone

Posted on November 27, 2020 | 1 comment

If a reset of the entire globe managed by the Davos crowd doesn’t sound like you’re vision of utopia or heaven on earth, you’re not alone. From Diana Johnstone at unz.com:

In their World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret bring us the voice of would-be Global Governance.

Viewing the virtual-reality film “Collisions” at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2016. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as harbinger of their proposed socioeconomic upheaval suggests that if Covid-19 hadn’t come along by accident, they would have created it (had they been able).

In fact, World Economic Forum founder Schwab was already energetically hyping the Great Reset, using climate change as the triggering crisis, before the latest coronavirus outbreak provided him with an even more immediate pretext for touting his plans to remake the world.

The authors start right in by proclaiming that “the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” that radical changes will shape a “new normal.” We ourselves will be transformed. “Many of our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like will be shattered in the process.”

Throughout the book, the authors seem to gloat over the presumed effects of widespread “fear” of the virus, which is supposed to condition people to desire the radical changes they envisage. They employ technocratic psychobabble to announce that the pandemic is already transforming the human mentality to conform to the new reality they consider inevitable.

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Will the Technocratic Coup Succeed? by Alastair Crooke

Posted on November 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

The global elites have been planning their creeping coup towards global governance for quite some time. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

“We’re not going back to the same economy”, Fed Chair Powell said recently: “We’re recovering, but to a different economy, and it will be one that is more leveraged to technology – and I worry that it’s going to make it even more difficult than it was, for many workers.” Klaus Schwab, the Davos Chair, was more blunt: “Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed [earlier]. We … will be surprised by both the rapidity and unexpected nature of these changes – as they conflate with each other, they will provoke cascading effects and unforeseen outcomes”. Schwab makes it clear that the western élite will not allow life to return to normal, suggesting that rolling lockdowns and other restrictions may become permanent.

‘Recovering to a different economy’? Well, actually the creeping ‘coup’ has been residing in plain view for quite a while. The changes have been less noticed – partly because western élites have stuck fast to the free market narrative, whilst incrementally shifting over the decades to an oligarchical economy blossoming alongside the free market economy. Yet it has been an important metamorphose, for it has laid the ground-work for a more fundamental fusion of interests of business oligarchy and government. This fusion used to be called the ‘administrative state’, and was widely practiced in 19th Century Europe.

If we want to understand the roots to this ‘quiet coup’, we need to return to the ethos that emerged from WW2. It was ‘never again’ in terms of that terrible wartime bloodshed, and it encapsulated the notion that the spilt blood should be somehow ‘redeemed’ by moving to fairer, more equitable societies. These latter sentiments turned activist, culminating in the 1960s – an occurrence that frightened U.S. business élites.

The élites moved their ‘counter-revolution’. They lobbied; they lobbied hard, evolving their lobbying enterprise into an ‘industrial scale’ enterprise, employing ‘brigades’ of lawyers and encompassing big money. And now, trillions of dollars are at stake: K Street (the lobbying HQ in Washington) is where the legislative ‘sausage’ is actually assembled, and not the U.S. Congress. It is external to Congress, to whom it is ‘sold’ in a mutually beneficial exchange.

Gradually, one segment of the erstwhile radical Boomers quietly folded themselves into the new Big Corporate ethos, whilst another part entered into politics, eventually going on to become the nation’s political leaders. It is not hard to see how a common zeitgeist might emerge. It is half-heartedly woke, big corporate in outlook, and committed to the notion of élite ‘scientifically administered’ rule.

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