critique of loon theories around banking/money creation/the federal reserve

[butchersapron]

Not really, the west still consumes and imports huge amounts of industrially manufactured commodities, which underpins capitalism generally. This service sector, post-industrial economy we have in the UK is a niche within a globalised economy, only possible because "western" capital can use China as an export platform and then sell those commodities nack to the British/western markets that otherwise would be manufactured domestically. In the West or Britain, perhaps other sectors of the economy "generate more capital", the City probably does outweigh industry in GDP, but that industrial capacity in China does generate a huge amount of capital for what are nominally "western" multi-national enterprises, even though they aren't geographically in the West. It's not a "post-industrial" society because it's dependent upon an industrial base elsewhere in the world, and it's incredibly eurocentric to just pretend it doesn't exist and we've got beyond industrial capitalism because of de-industrialisation in parts of your own back yard. Even the likes of Daniel Bell didn't try making this argument you're making.

We haven't gone beyond industrial wage-slavery, we've just outsourced production to another part of the world, and heavily automated the bits of the industrial manufacturing economy that remain. Productivity for example in Germany, industrially, has gone up steadily all throughout the 80's and 90's, so the de-industrialisation arguments there focus not on the ability of German industry to make money, but the fact they've managed to increase productivity whilst steadily reducing the numbers of workers required to achieve it. Furthermore, big "German" companies use a supply chain that relies on outsourcing to parts of the third world, to take advantage of cheap labour, which again generates capital for the "West" although wage-slavery and the surplus value and all that horrible stuff takes place out of sight, out of mind, in the global south.

This means that the way in which "de-indutrialisation" is spoken of in that particular chunk of the 1st world refers to the proportion of people employed in industrial manufacturing jobs, and the growth of service sector as a proportion of the workforce, rather than the decline of overall industrial production. It's different in Britain, because we don't retain a large industrial manufacturing capacity like the Germans (although the end of british industry is often routinely overstated in arguments -we still manufacture a lot here on the sly) and the state decided in the 80's to replace that with a massive financial sector called the City of London and a low-productivity, low-wage, tertiary economy attached to it.



I'll let you know when i've finsihed having my fun. I'm snowed in so I'm going nowhere today

It's almost like you have to look at capital in its totality or some crazy shit like that.

 

[butchersapron]

For a bit, it's the middle of the night here.

See what being firm does? Take note new parents.

 

[TruXta]

Because, in this context, "especially" means "in special cases."

So to a literate person, both the allegedly 'archaic' meaning number 1, and the indisputably non-archaic meaning number 2 say that I am right.



For a bit, it's the middle of the night here.

For an English prof your comprehension skills are pretty damn shit. Especially means in particular. Everyone knows that. Maybe you do too.

 

[phildwyer]

For an English prof your comprehension skills are pretty damn shit. Especially means in particular. Everyone knows that. Maybe you do too.

That's what I fucking said it means.

You're all nutters on here.

 

[TruXta]

That's what I fucking said it means.

You're all nutters on here.

If you did you chose just about the worst way there is to make that point. You said especially means "in special cases", as if it's a rare case. It's not. You prick.

 

[SpineyNorman]

No. What stinks is your attempt, and those of your ilk, to link anti-semitism to anti-capitalism. That's what's really dangerous.

You're not anticapitalist. To be an anticapitalist you'd have to first know what capitalism is.

 

[phildwyer]

You said especially means "in special cases"

Darling, "in special cases" means the same thing as "in particular." I'm sorry, but it just does. No point crying over the matter, or disputing it, or being angry about it. That's just the way it has to be I'm afraid.

 

[TruXta]

Darling, "in special cases" means the same thing as "in particular." I'm sorry, but it just does. No point crying over the matter, or disputing it, or being angry about it. That's just the way it has to be I'm afraid.

You're raving. Get some sleep ffs.

 

[butchersapron]

Are any of these conspiraloons actually left-wing? Do any of them identify as left? As anti-capitalist? As anti-market? I can't actually think of a single on that does - i hear all sorts of libertarian, or anti-capital but pro-market or pro-real capitalism or a whole range of other confused idiocies, but none that i can think of who think they are on our side.

 

[SpineyNorman]

That's exactly what I'm saying it is.

Can't you see that, seriously?

But how does capitalism exploit the workers?

 

[sihhi]

The combined repertoire of the phil/jazzz erotology is missing only a named scapegoat. For now.

It's interesting that the magazine and mass movement (Father Coughlin's Social Justice) Jazzz said had all the answers to our problems had we listened to it in the 1930s also published this kind of stuff:

They're Jews and Jewesses. It's not anti-semitic - it's anti-dictatorship - because these people were Stalin-fiends and wanted tyranny and used their Yiddish connections and culture as a vector.

It's interesting that the link Jazzz uses to insert further empty nonsense includes the description: 'The macroeconomic statistics hide the reality of life for ordinary Icelanders. Higher taxes, spending cuts and a wave of repossessions have left many distraught.'
It is - as close as we can see it - the anti-banking scenario Jazzz aspires to via the anti-semitic conspiracist ideas.

 

[frogwoman]

because they don't give the workers the full value of their labour-power, they don't give them enough so they can buy back what they've produced, they take most of it for themselves and give them back a small amount.

this has got nothing to do with usury

 

[Delroy Booth]

Are any of these conspiraloons actually left-wing? Do any of them identify as left? As anti-capitalist? As anti-market? I can't actually think of a single on that does - i hear all sorts of libertarian, or anti-capital but pro-market or pro-real capitalism or a whole range of other confused idiocies, but none that i can think of who think they are on our side.

The interesting bit is how the far-right here and now has to dress itself in rhetoric stolen off the 90's left, it's worded in this strange Rage Against the Machine-anarchist and Chomskyish platitudes, but it's actually just a buttress of conservatism, complete with xenophobia, barely concealed anti-semitic tropes rebranded, and all the other reactionary bollocks. It's all Bill Hicks and Noam Chomsky until suddenly "it's the wrong type of capitalism" comes up, it's like clockwork, and then it turns into the fucking tea party. Positive Money are the ones on it most successfully over here.

In a way I'm almost glad it exists cox it's like a honey pot drawing away some of the worst cranks from the organised left. They can have 'em.

 

[frogwoman]

"doubtful" ffs. and "jewesses"

what is the matter with these people, what kind of mind do you have to have to think in such a way.



was Coughlin the one who talked about "kike killers" or am i thinking of somebody else? i can't remember every word of the book i read about this stuff.

 

[sihhi]

Love and human partnership. What is it? Everyone talks about it, writes about it, watches films about it. But do we have any evidence that it actually exists other than certain vested interests saying it exists? Of course not, it's wholly fictitious. It's something Valentine's, anniversary and Mothering Sunday card makers produce and keep the system going. But they're essentially fraudsters organising them to keep the delusion going - all we have are pieces of pulped wood exchanged and cross-exchanged ritually. And always growing - why do the number of Valentine's Day card designs keep on growing? They're conjured out of thin air.
These card makers make immense profits - profiting out of the misery and loneliness of poor saps who send them to their Valentines, or people who are enslaved to the thought of feeling empty when they are alone, of having to be a couple. Can anyone actually tell me how love is not a completely fraudulent enterprise? Join the dots. No. The Truth will set you free.

 

[frogwoman]

Love and human partnership. What is it? Everyone talks about it, writes about it, watches films about it. But do we have any evidence that it actually exists other than certain vested interests saying it exists? Of course not, it's wholly fictitious. It's something Valentine's, anniversary and Mothering Sunday card makers produce and keep the system going. But they're essentially fraudsters organising them to keep the delusion going - all we have are pieces of pulped wood exchanged and cross-exchanged ritually. And always growing - why do the number of Valentine's Day card designs keep on growing? They're conjured out of thin air.
These card makers make immense profits - profiting out of the misery and loneliness of poor saps who send them to their Valentines, or people who are enslaved to the thought of feeling empty when they are alone, of having to be a couple. Can anyone actually tell me how love is not a completely fraudulent enterprise? Join the dots. No. The Truth will set you free.

these people would, destroy this because caring about each other is a sign of weakness, destroy any kind of concern people have for one another, they tried to do this in the 30s by cutting the bonds that people had to each others neighbours and friends by the introduction of certain laws etc, making it impossible for them to have a sort of shared social life or community solidarity.

 

[sihhi]

what is the matter with these people, what kind of mind do you have to have to think in such a way.

It's the standard palette of American populism. Communism or socialism is a massive threat to it - hence it has to be blocked and firewalled by being cast as foreign. I doubt whether the "doubtful" were Jewish but it's a way of their saying we don't like these people who talk about class struggle.

was Coughlin the one who talked about "kike killers" or am i thinking of somebody else? i can't remember every word of the book i read about this stuff

No the Kike Killer itself was a one-arm club (known as a billy in the US) a personal safety device patented and sold as such by another quasi-fascist James True who until the very end was a devout supporter of the German American Bund (wholly Nazified), strong supporter of Italy and Germany even after 1942. It was aimed at defending yourself from the Jewish criminal underworld operating in places like Detroit, Boston and New York. You got a discount if you were a subscriber to the magazine. He managed to not be arrested for most of the war until 1944, unlike the Minnesota truck drivers who were put away early, even though he claimed he was fighting against the "Talmudic dictatorship" to return America to a true republic. Incidentally he also was a proponent of LOCAL BANKS!
What Coughlin's movement did was at its height in 1938-1940 with the threat of war approaching attempt to purge Jews from any kind of public office. Hence I believe one campaign fixated upon Jewish policemen - a tiny minority - as being 'killer kikes'. The racial taunt 'Christ-killer kike' was probably also shortened to 'killer kike' in a general sense.

 

[sihhi]

Ron Paul is, weirdly, quite popular in the US (or was) with people who were into stuff like legalising cannabis etc, as an "alternative" candidate.

Ron Paul's forums see Henry Ford's publications as a sensible source - because he was/is on the same side - against the Fed.

 

[J Ed]

It's interesting that the magazine and mass movement (Father Coughlin's Social Justice) Jazzz said had all the answers to our problems had we listened to it in the 1930s also published this kind of stuff:

They're Jews and Jewesses. It's not anti-semitic - it's anti-dictatorship - because these people were Stalin-fiends and wanted tyranny and used their Yiddish connections and culture as a vector.

It's interesting that the link Jazzz uses to insert further empty nonsense includes the description: 'The macroeconomic statistics hide the reality of life for ordinary Icelanders. Higher taxes, spending cuts and a wave of repossessions have left many distraught.'
It is - as close as we can see it - the anti-banking scenario Jazzz aspires to via the anti-semitic conspiracist ideas.

The 'doubtful' description is weird, did Ford catch the 'doubtfuls' eating bagels or something?

 

[sihhi]

The 'doubtful' description is weird, did Ford catch the 'doubtfuls' eating bagels or something?

It's Coughlin not Ford, but yes it's sort of weird. It means they weren't Jewish and almost certainly white Americans but since their line in the ASU is in support of general worker-student joint struggle, they need to be sullied/dirtied. If they were black they would be 'Negro'.

The pointing out of 'doubtful' is precisely how anti-semitic conspiracism operates... if someone is behaving in a pro-banker/pro-Jewish ie communist or anti-racist fashion, their origins might show themselves as Jewish, hence it's better to be safe rather than sorry and consider them Crypto-Christians keeping their true faith hidden, or "converts".

 

[frogwoman]

It's the standard palette of American populism. Communism or socialism is a massive threat to it - hence it has to be blocked and firewalled by being cast as foreign. I doubt whether the "doubtful" were Jewish but it's a way of their saying we don't like these people who talk about class struggle.



No the Kike Killer itself was a one-arm club (known as a billy in the US) a personal safety device patented and sold as such by another quasi-fascist James True who until the very end was a devout supporter of the German American Bund (wholly Nazified), strong supporter of Italy and Germany even after 1942. It was aimed at defending yourself from the Jewish criminal underworld operating in places like Detroit, Boston and New York. You got a discount if you were a subscriber to the magazine. He managed to not be arrested for most of the war until 1944, unlike the Minnesota truck drivers who were put away early, even though he claimed he was fighting against the "Talmudic dictatorship" to return America to a true republic. Incidentally he also was a proponent of LOCAL BANKS!
What Coughlin's movement did was at its height in 1938-1940 with the threat of war approaching attempt to purge Jews from any kind of public office. Hence I believe one campaign fixated upon Jewish policemen - a tiny minority - as being 'killer kikes'. The racial taunt 'Christ-killer kike' was probably also shortened to 'killer kike' in a general sense.

that's absolutely nauseating.

 

[J Ed]

This might be a bit off topic but the talk about populist right-wing anti-capitalism reminds me of something else that I've noticed some Occupy people talking about what they call a 'resource-based economy'? The 'resource-based economy' idea seems to be some sort of a front/ideological spin-off of the Zeitgeist movement and its proponents' rhetoric seems very similar to what's being discussed here but they add rhetoric which is eerily similar to 20th Century 'Scientific Socialism'.

 

[butchersapron]

That's exactly what it is. The SPGB in their only conscious bit of activism in the last 50 years have decided to hold joint events with these loons. Lots of past discussion on here.

 

[phildwyer]

the capitalist system itself, which is the exploitation of the workers for surplus value.

That's exactly what I'm saying it is.

Can't you see that, seriously?

No I can't you're going on about usury and stuff whereas the entire essence of capitalism is employer/employee relations.

You can't see that's what I'm saying here? Really?

Capitalism is the alienation of human activity in the illusory form of money, and the attribution of magical properties to that illusory form. Enslavement and proletarianization work equally well for expropriation, capital doesn't care much either way.

 

[phildwyer]

Love and human partnership. What is it? Everyone talks about it, writes about it, watches films about it. But do we have any evidence that it actually exists other than certain vested interests saying it exists? Of course not, it's wholly fictitious. It's something Valentine's, anniversary and Mothering Sunday card makers produce and keep the system going. But they're essentially fraudsters organising them to keep the delusion going - all we have are pieces of pulped wood exchanged and cross-exchanged ritually. And always growing - why do the number of Valentine's Day card designs keep on growing? They're conjured out of thin air.
These card makers make immense profits - profiting out of the misery and loneliness of poor saps who send them to their Valentines, or people who are enslaved to the thought of feeling empty when they are alone, of having to be a couple. Can anyone actually tell me how love is not a completely fraudulent enterprise? Join the dots. No. The Truth will set you free.

Money and love are both human ideas, thus part of culture rather than nature.

Disaster always ensues when a part of culture is mistaken for and/or treated as a part of nature, which is what usury/capitalism does by pretending that money can reproduce autonomously.

Being a mechanism of naturalization, capital also makes this absurdly unnatural belief appear to be perfectly natural.

It's equally true of love, money or any other part of human culture: disaster results if they are regarded as natural.

 

[sihhi]

that's absolutely nauseating.

One interesting thing about True is that one of his early associates was Edward F. Sullivan - also a strong supporter of the German-American Bund. He becomes the first Chief Investigator of the House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1938 - and begins using reports and compilations of such lists - Jew, not Jew, Jew - as part of the basis of the investigations into Communism in Hollywood and the Federal Writers Project - particularly heavily examining the "foreign-born".

What's important in the general picture about the Fed conspiracy - which is what this OP is about - is how pro-American farmer, pro-American labourer it is. It becomes a central plank of the US isolationist movement - doing what phildwyer hopes will happen the merging of 'left' Democrats with 'one nation' Republicans.

So by 1941 you have its leaders in Congress such as John Rankin explaining that Ameica must continue to supply industrial products to Nazi Europe on the same footing as anti-Nazi footing. Because Jewish bankers "first crucified the German Republic and in doing so they created Hitler. He is their baby. Hitler never would have been heard of if it had not been for these elements swarming into Germany and undermining the German Republic."
He attacks support for anti-Nazi states as a plot of interventionists being manipulated by the "international" Jews who are "making the greatest blunder since the Crucifixion" by inviting anti-semitism upon them (as the Irish who refuse to denounce the IRA are inviting anti-Irish measures upon them etc etc). There's the constant stressing of the difference between "the international Jew, whether he is an international banker or an international Communist, and the American Jew who makes this his home, who is trying to build up and defend his country, and who must now suffer for the misconduct of these international Jews who are always stirring up trouble for them."

The second part of the anti-Federal Reserve conspiracism is international communist-banker collusion conspiracism (not used on boards like this for obvious reasons). Those nations deemed by phildwyer to be heading out of the clutches of banking and usury - Islamic ones and Eastern ones - are showing a way forward. So when class-based forces try to overcome this "non-usurious" system by social struggle (which might have spin off effects like the creation of "usury-based" fractional reserve banks) - they become useful idiots for the fraudster banks and potential fraudsters themselves.

 

[phildwyer]

It's the standard palette of American populism. Communism or socialism is a massive threat to it - hence it has to be blocked and firewalled by being cast as foreign. I doubt whether the "doubtful" were Jewish but it's a way of their saying we don't like these people who talk about class struggle.

It's got nothing to do with America. Communism was constructed as Jewish throughout the world.

 

[J Ed]

It's got nothing to do with America. Communism was constructed as Jewish throughout the world.

I don't think he's arguing at all that anti-Semitic tropes are particular to right-wing American populism, just that they are prevalent.

 

[phildwyer]

Those nations deemed by phildwyer to be heading out of the clutches of banking and usury - Islamic ones and Eastern ones - are showing a way forward. So when class-based forces try to overcome this "non-usurious" system by social struggle (which might have spin off effects like the creation of "usury-based" fractional reserve banks) - they become useful idiots for the fraudster banks and potential fraudsters themselves.

Which "class-based forces" are these? The bourgeoisie who took to the streets against the mullahs in Iran? Because I don't see any other "class-based forces" at work in the Islamic world. The bitter experience of the Turkish urban/intellectual Left in the 70s, when they sent their cadres into the villages to lecture the peasants on materialism and class struggle, with the entirely predictable results we see today, should be a warning.

 

[phildwyer]

I don't think he's arguing at all that anti-Semitic tropes are particular to right-wing American populism, just that they are prevalent.

They're prevalent in just about everything in C19th and early C20th culture, once you start looking for them. Very prevalent in constructions of capitalism and communism alike, as in Hitler's notorious speech about the "two brothers, Moishe and Isidore..."

We don't need them in this discussion. Anyone trying to introduce them into this discussion should be excluded from it.