the fed's considering another stimulus?

so recently the new york times published an article called "fed is torn on tipping point for action" in which they talk about how the fed (the federal reserve) met in june and said "...that unemployment would remain elevated for another five to six years..." but it was still contemplating the course of action it should take. obviously, the keynesians among them advocate another stimulus akin to the one passed in 2008 which only saw marginal success. the issue that the bankers of the fed and the members of the mises institute miss is that whether you pump money into the economy or whether you deregulate the result is the same (admittedly, one is more successful than the other[1]), a thwarted crisis for a while and then inflation and high unemployment come roaring back.

to fully understand this effect we will look to prof. dr. dr. h.c. wolfgang streeck's paper entitled "the crisis in context: democratic capitalism and its contradictions". as a preface, this paper sets to argue that that recessions can be, and have been, warded off but the mechanisms which produce them and are used to "stop" them are fundamentally the same and thus the crisis still comes rearing back. streeck also argues that the way these crises come about originally are from the conflict between democracy and capitalism.

what streeck argues, and is summarized nicely here, is that post world war ii when more countries were becoming democratic and we see an increase in federal income, citizens wanted a transition more towards a welfare state. with the post war money the state facilitated this transition and increase spending on public projects and entitlement programs. however, since these were still fundamentally based on the system of capital accumulation they were doomed to fail. later in the century trade unions were pushing on the government for less regulation and more economic freedom and this combined with increasing public debts brought down the keynesian system. then the oil shock came. following the oil shock we entered a period of stagflation. here, streeck says:

Today’s calamities were preceded by high inflation in the late 1960s and 1970s, rising public deficits in the 1980s, and growing private indebtedness in the 1990s and 2000s. In each case, governments were faced with popular demands for prosperity and security that were incompatible with market allocation. (streeck, 3)

during each of these areas of public indebtedness, the people demanded help and businesses demanded freedom. the issue was that the two were fundamentally incompatible and so a solution had to be found. the "solution" was found in an increasing of interest rates. this only temporarily solved the problem and thus, the fiscal legacy of the united states was a main talking point during the 1992 election. post election the government decided there was a new way to "solve" the problem: to shift the debt from the public sector to the private sector. this shift in debt was characterized by lower taxes for the wealthy and an increase in the poor's income. the problem was that the government then used it's freed up public monies to bail out banks. this, combined with financial deregulation of the banking sector led to risky investments and loans to people who couldn't pay them back. all of this culminated in 2008 with the crash of the housing market and the dumping of america into a recession.

now how does this tie into the fed's proposal to spend more public funds? well, assuming the fed does go along with this we will see increased job growth for a period, however, the u.s. government will slip more into debt and we will see the cycle again, a shifting of public debt over to private and nothing will get solved. this is the name of the game and until we rethink or notions of capital, economic growth, and goods and services, this pattern will continue.

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1: admittedly, keynesian principles are much better at holding off the oncoming onslaught yet they still fail in time. deregulation has empirically led to failures in banks and the crashing of economies. but that will be a post for another time.

my expansion on 'internationalist perspective's' "capitalism and genocide"

hello all! first let me preface this by asking you to ignore any "rambly-ness", it is late and i'm exhausted (this will probably go through many edits). now to the point, back in 2000 a modern marxist "think tank" called the internationalist perspective published a paper entitled capitalism and genocide. the paper attempts (and succeeds) to explain the genocides of the late 20th century (namely the extermination of the jews) in the context of class struggle and the law of value permeating all sectors of human existence. not only is this paper amazingly compelling but it simplifies some complex ideas down to the layman's level thus before proceeding i highly suggest you read it. 

in case you did not follow my advice allow me to summarize it and then state what i think it lacks. to begin with, the paper starts by extrapolating on georg lukacs' idea of the "reification" (basically the spreading of the law of value into all sectors of life) by saying that now not only have science and technology become quantifiable instruments of control and power, but human existence is subjected to the whims of capital and is used to further the cause of big capital. the author(s) then bring up h.g. adler's concept of an "administered man", a man that is treated solely as a thing to be used towards and end. the outcome of the aforementioned is what hannah arendt calls "a desk killer", a killer who works within the bureaucratic system "...who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project..."

these three things "...can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at Hiroshima."

then, the concept of bio power and the obsolescence of man are added. these two respectively basically mean that one part of a society is considered a threat to the whole and therefore must be alienated (more on this later) and that man is being overcome by machines, being a dead weigh of sorts to big capital.

now, while this paper is great at explaining the possibility and ultimately fundamental necessity of mass murder (read the paper to fully see why), it speaks about real events in the abstract. the problem with this is that it never shows how all this unfolded within the context of nazi germany and that is what i will attempt to do. 

by this point i'm assuming you've read the paper but if not, just go read from "While the reification..." onward, i'll try to explain this the best i can but some foreknowledge is needed. in the wake of world war 1 the allies coerced germany into signing what is called "the treaty of versailles". this treaty, among other things, forced germany to pay massive amounts of money to the allied forces which in turn plunged the german economy into a depression. during this time inflation ran rampant, people were living in extreme poverty, it is the marxist class struggle at it's finest. then...wham! a bright faced, brilliant speaker named adolf hitler comes along. he, to use language from capitalism and genocide, pointed out the cause of these woes as being "the other", the outside group, the jewish people. during times of extreme crises leaders will resort to maintaining control over the masses that if assembled could overthrow them by means of what antonio gramsci terms as hegemony, the leadership of the people mobilized for a goal. what leaders do during times like this is subvert the masses and cause them to focus their energy's away from the root cause of the problem (capitalism) and towards a biological instinct, a fear of the other. then, the leaders, namely hitler, convince the majority to strive for a "pure community", a world free from the other. by the state cooping any hope of change and focusing the negative energies of the people away from the root and towards the other, big capital successfully maintains its survival which is contingent on domination and hegemony. in the words of the internationalist perspective:

One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over broad strata of the population, including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the monstrous impact of capitalism upon their lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing",  at the point of production, insecurity and poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and its population.

thus it goes, the tale of big capital redirecting the people's attention away from the root of the problem towards what is deemed "the other".

"How to Get FREE LAND in 5 easy steps: A handy guide for imperialists and other reasonable individuals"

1. Eliminate Native People.
Choose the most appropriate strategies: disease, criminalization/incarceration, blood quantum, cultural genocide/forced assimilation, forced out-migration, cultivate poverty, just kill them.

2. Replace All Aspects of Native Society with Your Own.
Examples: Government & Law, Economy, Religion, Culture.
Useful code-words: Progress, Modernization, Development, Inevitable.

3. Invent Legal Instruments That Allow You to Claim Ownership of Native Lands.
Examples: Treaties (you don’t have to honor them), Annexation (doesn’t have to be legal), Referendum (rig the vote).

4. Control History
Write history the way you want people to believe it and teach it in all the schools (misinformation OK; eventually people forget what really happened).  Commemorate official history with celebrations, statues and honorific naming.  Call the whole process ‘democracy’.  Call opposing viewpoints lies and revisionism.

5. Done!  Enjoy Your New Land!^*
Remember: You’ve worked hard; you deserve everything you’ve taken.  “To the victors, the spoils!”
*  Empire requires constant maintenance (repeat steps 1-4).  Failure to do so may lead to loss of control.

originally from the pinky show (comic no longer hosted), accessed at mrzine.

thoughts on the fourth

so last night i was at my towns fireworks and as i was looking at all the people there, be they rich or poor, being so happy and (to be very cliche and reference my own blog's title) it made me think of this quotation by žižek:

Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are [the occupy wall street protestors]  giving all of us red ink. -slavoj žižek

this quotation i thought accurately represented what i saw, blissful ignorance. now, i don't mean ignorance in a derogatory way at all, all i mean is that most of those people (i would assume) can't imagine a true alternative to our current system. sure you can imagine a huge, controlling government or a stateless society but one can't easily imagine a society free from the limitations of capital. and since people cannot imagine a true alternative to capital they lack "the language to articulate...[their] non-freedom" since to understand the woes of something, you must also understand the lack of those very woes. and it is for this reason that those people still support the system that causes the aforementioned woes. maybe next fourth things will be different.