The Killing Business

Why again is it that they hate us so? Oh yes, for our freedoms.

Wall falls but myths endure

Though the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is nearly upon us I've noticed that celebratory gestures commemorating this event from the usual quarters seem a bit strained. Why the long faces? I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the crumbling facade of capitalism, of which Margaret Thatcher famously declared There Is No Alternative, lay somewhere near the reason. Two years into its worst crisis since the Great Depression has exposed "capitalism" as practiced over the past 30 years in the US and among its acolytes as a ponzi scheme and cruel hoax on the overwhelming majority of people. Kind of spoils the party I guess.

Conventional wisdom encourages the belief that the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the "defeat of socialism" as a practical ideology. This popular fiction rests on the central conceit that socialism was the really existing system of the USSR and its Eastern European satellites and not a form of state capitalism. Phil Gasper explores this theme in the following essay published in Socialist Worker.
An excerpt:

The collapse of Communism--or, more accurately, Stalinism--in the Eastern bloc did result in triumphalism among supporters of Western-style capitalism, and it led to widespread demoralization among large sections of the left because they shared the belief that these regimes were in some sense socialist or "workers' states."

But this characterization of the Eastern European countries was based on the assumption that socialism can be defined in terms of state ownership of the economy. Since in all of them, the economy had been largely state-run since the late 1940s, it followed that they were socialist, no matter what their other imperfections.

The rest...

Meanwhile on the Wall Street fraud front...

Commercial real estate is the next shoe to drop in our ongoing financial crisis and in order to protect the reckless the (alleged) regulatory agencies who did such a bang up job as the underlying conditions for the present debacle developed, have relaxed the accounting requirements for banks holding the notes on those underwater shopping malls littering the country. And in whose face are these time-bombs set to blow up in the not too distant future? You guested it, the taxpayer.

Dirty Laundry

Every once in a great while a member of the ruling class or, more often than not, one of its lackeys will find themselves grappling with their conscience and succumb to its influence. John Perkins faithfully served his masters for decades as an economist for a US based consulting and engineering firm that specialized in convincing the ruling elites of developing nations to take on massive debt in the form of World Bank and/or IMF loans for construction projects of negligible indigenous economic benefit but a source of windfall profits for western corporations and their investors. Perkins lays out all of the sordid details in his memoir Confessions of an Economic Hit-man but provides a handy Cliff-Notes version in this interview:

Big Government

I’m always amused when I hear complaints about “big government” (wink to Rue St. Michael) and how if only it would stop hampering “innovation” with its incessant meddling we’d all be on Peach Street for damn sure. When will this myth die the bloody death it so richly deserves? Oh well, maybe this little nugget courtesy of Naked Capitalism will help clear the air for those who still, even after Big Government was last seen shoveling tax dollars like a son-of-a-bitch into the coffers of the insolvent financial institutions primarily responsible for destroying the world economy, think Big Government serves anything but the ruling elite:

Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Geithner’s team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps — insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations….

Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.

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The Dog -&-(dead)Pony-Show

Joe Bagent checks in with an amusing update on the state of Obama's America. An excerpt:

Somewhere in the smoking wreckage [of the US economy] lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.
-Joe Bagent

The rest...

Do yourself a solid

... and read Ladypoverty.