Greece Just Defaulted on Its Debt

On May 9.

I don’t understand why the corporate media is not covering this because it’s huge news. If you own Greek bonds, bottom line is you ain’t gonna get paid back. You’re left holding the bag, and a lot of these folks are going to have to eat a Hell of a lot of money.

Excellent news! I have said for a long time now that this is the only solution. The alternatives is decades of debt bondage, radical reductions in wages, benefits and living standards, the actual selling off of Greek national territory (there were discussions of selling some Greek islands to the banksters). Austerity doesn’t work. All it does is prolong recessions and depressions. Why is austerity proposed as any kind of remedy for anything when a state is in recession or depression. It doesn’t help a single thing. All it does is make everything that much worse.

The only possible reason that austerity is advocated during recessions and depressions is as a weapon of class war. The upper classes see the recession or depression as a perfect chance to wage class war on the classes below them. They can shrink the state, reduce benefits and wages and dramatically reduce the standards of living for the bottom 80% of the population. And where does the money the 80% lost go? It goes to the banksters and the rich, to the 1%.

As we can see with the demands of the Greeks to sell off their islands, it’s no longer necessary to invade countries in order to conquer territory. Now the rich can conquer territory via usury, without even firing a shot. So today’s rich are like the imperial conquerors of times past. Our most recent example was the fascists of World War 2. Today’s rich mimic the Axis Powers as they try to annex foreign lands via usury.

However the downside to the Greek default is serious. The money is owed to French and German banks which are undercapitalized, probably illegally, as it is. They are too big to fail, as the saying goes, and they will need to be bailed in some Euro version of TARP. After which there will probably be a credit crunch.

And Portugal and Ireland are surely waiting in the wings. One wonders how much longer they can hold out, especially with the enticing example of Greece in front of them. I predict Portugal will be next, and I am quite sure they will default. There’s really nothing else for them to do.

Just a few days ago, Greece held elections. The pro-austerity parties got trounced in a drubbing of historic dimensions. I will have more to write on that later.

“Libya – Setback for Anti-Imperialist Struggle,” by Peter Tobin

Peter Tobin is a sometime contributor to this site. Unlike me, Peter is a real Communist through and through. Right now, he is in Nepal working with the Maoists there, spending much of his time at party headquarters. There is a lot going on there right now, but I have not been writing about it much.

Unlike Peter, I’m just a socialist. As Communists are part of the wide spectrum of the Left, we more or less support them, but we also support the rest of the Left too, all the way to social democracy and even US-style liberalism. I figure we are all one big happy family.

LIBYA – SETBACK FOR ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE

Gaddafi, lynched like Saddam Hussein, whatever his twists and turns of the last ten years, redeemed himself at the end, by dying fighting imperialism. The record shows that over the 42 years of his regime, he used Libya’s oil wealth against Western Imperialism, led by the US and its local military outpost – the white Zionist colony, Israel.

He utilized ‘terrorist’ methods that Arab militants found was the only military avenue of resistance open to them, a position that no Communist would criticize; it is for oppressed people to choose their way of struggle, according to their circumstances.

Therefore Gaddafi’s Libya bank-rolled many Palestinian resistance groups, and for decades was the most militant Arab leader on the Palestinian question, among Saudi Arabian lip-servers, Jordanian vacillators, or outright Egyptian traitors like Sadat and Mubarak after him.
He also came to see the African dimension, and uniquely for an Arab leader substantially funded the Organization of African Unity (OAU); an act of solidarity with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, a recognition that their sufferings under Western imperialism were no different from those of the Arab masses – genocide, dispossession, theft of natural resources and brutal colonial or neo-colonial rule.

Gaddafi was also a strong financial and political supporter of the African National Congress (ANC) when the West labeled it a ‘Communist terror’ group. The fact that the first person Mandela visited outside South Africa was Gaddafi shows the depth of his, and the ANC’s, gratitude. He will be mourned there as a mark of their continuing respect.

ROMANTIC & RUTHLESS NATIONALIST

Gaddafi’s attempt, as a devout Muslim, to counter the cultural imperialism of the West led to a radical interpretation of the Koran, which saw the ‘Ummah” (the body of the striving faithful) as the Arab masses desiring/requiring socialism. Hence the ‘Jamayriah,’ proposed in the ‘Green Book’ – an Islamist parody, a riposte and rival to Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ and ‘Red Revolution.’

He furthermore thought, until the millennium, at least, that he could build ‘Green socialism in one country,’ staving off imperialist designs on Libya’s oil wealth and the deadly enmity of all the pro-Western Arab regimes, led by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. His state tried to mobilize the masses through popular devolving committees. However, he had no formal role within the power structure, acting as a last ‘adviser/guru’ issues and policy.

RESISTANCE HOME & ABROAD

Libyan society, with a population of around 4 million, has not moved very far beyond four major ethnic groups into a cohesive voluntary civil society. It never was a nation, but always a collection of disputatious tribes, unified by Islam, if little else.

Hence, it was easily overcome by the modern industrial Italian state, looking for its ‘place in the sun,’ building an overseas empire with a series of incursions into Libya and subsequently Abyssinia, and in the former achieving imperial status in 1934. (Like clan Ireland fell to Strongbow & Henry II in 1169/71, and Native Americans fell to the white European colonizers on the North-American continent.)

The urban centres, mainly Benghazi and Tripoli, have a substantial free-market private sector with bourgeois and petit-bourgeois strata swollen by subsidies from oil revenues, and a largely Western educated, professional, media and technological elite, many of whom are culturally and ideologically hegemonized by bourgeois ideas, mores, and values.

This class has been prominent in all imperialist backed populist movements of the last few years – Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, Burma, to list a few. They hang their hats on the ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Democracy’ banners against media demonised, ‘authentic’ villains , straight from Holly/Bollywood central casting.

Well – Gaddafi, in this gallery of Western ‘baddies’ was the baddest of them all! When Bin Laden was still wondering which of his father’s wives was his mother, Muhammar was Number One hate figure in Western media circles.

ECCENTRICITIES & ENTHUSIASMS

Take his relations with UK governments; he became convinced in the 1980′s that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) was fighting a struggle of national liberation against British imperialism in the six counties of Ulster, one that reignited in 1969. I don’t intend to go into the pros and cons of this issue here, but the result was Libya that provided the PIRA with guns and most importantly, the new advanced Czech, plastic dynamite – Semtex.

This was a key factor in keeping the war going for another decade. PIRA did not bomb the million Protestants, loyal to Britain, into a republic, but they did bomb them to the negotiating table, as was graphically demonstrated by the effect of the campaign launched against the British homeland; the biggest attack devastating the entire square mile of London’s financial centre and seriously shaking the morale of the British Establishment.

Adams and Morrison would not be sitting on the Northern Ireland Executive were it not for his decisive, practical assistance, and the Provisional Sein Fein, both political and military wings, are also in his debt and owe his family condolences.

Another example – a tiny Trotskyite sect – the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) convinced Gaddafi that it was the authentic voice of the British Revolution, and seizure of state power was certain within a few years. All that was needed was a propaganda machine to convey ‘Bolshevik-Leninist-Trotskyist truth’ to the awaiting proletarian masses, eager to get on with the revolution by sweeping away their existing ‘reformist,’ ‘Stalinist’ leadership!

Gaddafi gave these buffoons millions, enabling them to produce a glossy daily newspaper, Newsline, something the entire British left wing movement, vastly outnumbering this semi-religious playgroup, could only match with the CPGB’s revisionist, economist, humanist, peacenik, plodding ‘Morning Star’, itself topped up by Moscow money in all events.

I cite these to show the weakness of charismatic leader systems – individuals who can act impulsively, emotionally, quixotically, often misguidedly and with impunity.

BONAPARTISM IN ARAB SOCIETIES

Certainly the cult of personality plays a progressive role in certain situations, the cult around Gaddafi, that caused him to become such a hate-figure in Western ruling, and thence through to popular circles, was because he stood up to the Americans/Zionists in Palestine, their stooges in the Arab League, and the West via OPEC to secure better prices for oil producers.

When you are so reviled by the Evil Empires of the West, then you must be doing something right?

But the truth is that the steam ran out of his ‘Green Revolution’ years ago, a national identity was never truly forged, with rural remaining tribal, and urban compromised by the developed world’s bourgeois culture – ‘psychologically colonized’ – as Franz Fanon, the formidable Algerian Marxist, put it, an ideological comprador class.

This class encompasses those successfully duped into believing that Western bourgeois democracy and capitalism express universal human values, demonstrating such a circle of perfection, as to constitute, in the words of the right-wing American ideologue, Fukuyama, parodying Hegel, the ‘end of history’.

Whereas Communists argue that Western, specifically Anglo-Saxon, global command, is a purely transitory, historical contingency, a stage like feudalism to be transcended, as Mao said, in the dialectical ‘action and reaction’ that has marked human society from pre-history.

Make no mistake, from General Ataturk, (four years after he kicked the bejasus out of the British ANZAC Dardanelles invasion) and the Young Turk movement, establishing modern, secular Turkey in 1919 out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, to the Baathist secular socialist message of Aflaq in Syria, to the great Colonel Nasser, and also to the comparatively long-lived Baathist-type regimes of Syria, Algeria and Iraq – all were genuine anti-imperialists, who achieved much for their societies.

Syria is ‘last man standing’ and the next immediate target for the imperialists and Zionists. Where it not for these regimes, the Palestinian cause would have been completely lost, and Lebanon would have been Balkanized. That is why they have incurred the enmity of the American-led West; it is simply a question of settling geopolitical accounts hiding behind the flag of ‘Human Rights’ – ‘Liberty’ – ‘Freedom’ and ‘democracy’.

But, as with charismatic systems, military ones, however progressive, have limitations, as there is ultimately no authority, institutional or popular, to which they are answerable. The reason it occurred in the Arab world was because the army was the only modern institution in society, equipped, not only with access to superior killing equipment, but with modern linguistic, cultural and political influences.

From Lenin’s support for Ataturk, against the imperialist 1919 Versailles carve-up of the Middle East, Communists have supported these progressive anti-imperialist struggles, while recognizing the limitations outlined above, and their often explicit anti-Communism. The fact is these regimes have faded and crumbled, under the pressure from growing Western economic and military post-1945 superiority.

They have, and are, being picked off one-by-one. Gaddafi is just the latest, demonstrating that these forces can no longer carry forward the struggle against imperialism – the dog has barked, but the caravan has moved on. In this century, only revolutionary Communism can successfully challenge imperialism, because it is the only polity and ideology that recognizes the primacy of the people and unleashes their historical potential.

Like Baathism, of which he is a Islamist mutation, the road ran out for Gaddafi; his desperate attempts to make peace with Western imperialists, get rid of his ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ accept responsibility for Lockerbie, etc and avoid Saddam’s fate, have come to naught.

That’s the flexibility of the bourgeois democratic system – one day Tony Blair will come and hug you, another day one of his replacements will come and kill you (and your children – for good measure).

His Libya, like Saddam’s Iraq, was trashed and bombed, only the lies and the military modalities were different – against the former – to save the world from ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction” and latter – to save civilians from being massacred by a ‘evil regime’, in the hands of a certifiable ‘lunatic.’ The euphemism ‘humanitarian mission’ covers military aggression and invasion.

Both were lies based on the strategy of ‘Liberal Interventionism,’ another euphemism, propounded following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, that abandoned the prohibition enacted in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years War in Europe against invading countries whose regimes you do not approve in order to replace them with more amenable ones.

The UN mandate to ‘protect civilians’ by enforcing a ‘no-fly zone’ did not sanction regime change, arming opposition forces, giving those forces close air support or assassinating the Head of State. NATO’s decisive intervention even exceeded the bounds of trans-national bourgeois jurisprudence with, among others, Gareth Evans, the co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty condemning the aggression, stating it was not allowed for under the explicit legal terms of the mandate.

This time also, America agreed the job be sub-let out to its junior partners-in-crime; principally Britain and France. The Secret Services of all NATO states were active in promoting the civil war, by arming and financially supporting a plethora of tribal, Islamic and comprador opposition groups who have they have shown themselves to be such an undisciplined, murderous Quisling rabble that they would not have succeeded without the sustained brutal NATO air assault.

Even so, we will see if Libyan patriots take Colonel Muhammar Gaddafi’s death as the end of hostilities? We will see if Gaddfiism has left any deep roots in Libyan society, or whether, like his ashes, it is blown away into the desert sands. He is probably the last effective member of a tough breed of nationalist Arab Bonapartist leaders who made history in the 20th century. The specific circumstances under which this genus flourished no longer apply, because imperialism is extinguishing its conditions of existence.

Successful Arab resistance, however, does continue, as Hamas and Hezbollah have shown, and while they are nominally Muslim organizations, albeit of Sunni and Shiite dispensations respectively, they are nonetheless closer to being genuine mass movements drawn from their peoples, and they are giving the Zionist/fascist US/Israeli expansionists a military run for their money.

WAR CRIMES FOR OIL

Like Iraq, this is about oil; it is about securing a crucial natural resource, which enables a decadent, gluttonous, wasteful consumer-capitalist, commodity-obsessed, Western society to continue dancing on the edge of a volcano at the expense of the rest of the World.

To a secondary extent, it is about the constant need, in an economy with a huge military-industrial complex, to test rapidly evolving military equipment on a real enemy – the more defenceless the better. War is continuous under imperialism, and the US leads the way as chief warmonger. Now it is even a great video game for the militarily-minded armchair warrior retard.

The French philosopher Baudrillard said of the 1990 attack on Iraq, it was: “a virtual reality war” designed for a society, with a popular culture saturated by violent imagery and corrupted by generations of imperial slavery, genocide and brutality against the peoples outside the ‘First-World’ heartlands, and with the technological capacity to participate and gloat in the death and suffering of peoples in far-away lands, without in any way suffering retribution, or even the threat of it. (Drones watching Drones?)

The German Communist playwright Brecht in ‘The Three Penny Opera,’ has a policeman and a criminal reminisce about the great times they had serving in the British Army on the Indian sub-continent:

(German)                          (Eng. trans.)
“und es begegnete,                “and when they met
Inhnen ‘ne neue Rasse             a new race
‘ne braune oder blasé,            a brown, or a white one
Dann machen sie vielleicht        They’d probably make
Daraus ihr Beefsteak Tartar       Mincemeat outta them.”

NATO’s war crime against the Libyan people, however dressed up in modern ‘PR-speak,’ is another blood-soaked imperial adventure, driven by greed and treachery, where the flags of the NATO aggressors against the Libyan people are better described as butchers’ aprons, and the so-called ‘liberators’ of Libya are no more than imperialist running dogs, (with the exception among anti-Gaddafi forces being the Jihadists who have their own anti-Western combined Anti-Arab secularist/heretic agenda.)

Finally, Gaddafi’s brutal termination shows again that the default position against Western gangster imperialism, however and wherever it is manifest, is People’s War. Between the international proletariat and the bourgeoisie there can be stalemate, realignment, defeat or victory– but never compromise or agreement.

1) I have not discussed the events in Libya in relation to its distinct Maghreb identity within the Arab nation, comprising the states across North Africa; Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia. Even here, Gaddaffi’s Islamic faith make him stand out among the leaders who emerged in the anti-colonial struggles of mid-century. Ben Barka, Ben Bella, Bourguiba &c. were all secular cosmopolitan civilian politicians. The best authority on this is the Marxist-Leninist political economist Samir Amin.

2) There is no reference on the Libyan civil war in relation to the ‘Arab Spring’, because I do not think there is homogeneity among the recent regional upsurges. In this light, I think the Libyan situation is uniquely important (even from its next-door neighbor, Tunisia), as it closes a chapter on an historical period of resistance to imperialist hegemony in the Middle East. Communists can draw precise lessons from it.

Death in Belfast

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, there is a cemetery. A most curious cemetery at that. Like many cemeteries, this one has a wall. But unlike all other cemeteries, this wall is entirely underground. Yes, there is an underground wall separating the Protestants from the Catholics. Even in death, they shall not mingle. Now that’s some real hate.

IRA Video

Good stuff. Freedom fighters resisting the British occupation of Ireland, just like the Palestinians resist the Israeli occupation of their homeland. The Irish people deserve the right to self-determination. The Good Friday agreement will never allow that, so it’s crap. The IRA often gives warnings for its bombs too, but of all of the armed movements of Europe, they’ve been the most hardcore. They kill young Catholic cops, apparently as “traitors.” That’s messed up.

 

Do the Rich Deliberately Destroy the State?

Yes they do.

They always have, they do now, and they always will. It’s one of those rules of political science.

People ask me if the rightwingers and the rich actually believed that trickle down economics would stimulate the economy. Who knows? Stimulus spending does a great job of stimulating the economy, but the trickle down people hate it. The rich and the rightwing are not interested in stimulating the economy. They deliberately blew up the economy few years ago, and they don’t even care.

The rich are always rich no matter what the economy is like. They could care less about the economy. They could care less about the unemployment rate. Have you noticed recently that with this ruined economy, the corporations have been posting record profits nonetheless? Have you noticed the stock market is going gangbusters while the nation sighs and heaves in its death throes? This is all that important to the rich – profits and stock prices. As long as those are booming along, the country can go to Hell for all they care.

The rich are the enemy of the nation.

They always have been. Patriot and rich man are oxymorons. If there’s money to be made dealing the enemies of the homeland, the rich will sell out the homeland for a song. During colonial times, the rich always sided with the colonists who raped and ruined the land and the people for the colonial loot. The rich made deals with the colonial rapers so they got a cut of the ruination of the nation.

During anticolonial battles, the rich sided with the colonists. The rich Jews in the Arab World in particular sided with the colonists and opposed decolonization. The Algerian Jews supported the French. The Lebanese Christians supported the French.

In Indochina, the rich supported the French in the war and then sided with the neocolonial Americans during the Vietnam War. In Palestine, the rich Palestinians have always been willing to sell out the homeland in a heartbeat. The rich Palestinians think that the Palestinian nationalist and anticolonialist (anti-Zionist) movement is bad for business. They’ve been trying to cut a crappy deal with the Zionists forever to sell out the homeland.

The rich are always traitors.

The Korean rich collaborated with the Japanese colonists in Korea. After 1945, most of the rich traitors fled to South Korea. The leading elite of South Korea has always been made up of the worst traitors and collaborators with the Japanese. In contrast, those who fought against the Japanese fled to the north, so North Korea at least has had the reputation of heroism in the anti-colonial war, which they have played up.

Trickle down economics doesn’t even work. It’s just a wealth redistribution project, and in many cases, it doesn’t even grow the economy very well, as all it does is hollow it out.

It’s just good for rich people and big businesses. All the money flows to the top. Friedmanomics (trickle down) has been tried all over the world for decades. All it does is cause a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 80% to the top 20% of society, which is why the rich are all for it. At the same time, it severely guts the state through privatization and revenue loss. At some point, it totally blows up the economy and ruins everything, as we just saw here in the US. It’s inherently unstable, and you get wild runs and booms and then horrible crashes.

The nations that have tried Friedmanomics in the most extreme form have been the most ruined by it. Chile was wrecked by the Chicago Boys in the most radical economic experiment of the modern era.

Poland, Lithuania and Latvia elected hardline Friedmanite neoliberals, and all three nations have been badly hammered in the latest downturn. Latvia has been wrecked. Wages plunged by 30% – actually, the Friedmanites cheered this on and said it was one of their major goals. Poland has 19% unemployment and a battered public sector. The public sector has been burned out in Latvia and Lithuania. In Latvia, the economy plunged 24%. Most educated Latvians are leaving the country – there is a huge brain drain going on.

Ireland introduced radical neoliberal reforms, including a nearly zero income tax for corporations. They deregulated the banking sector. The result was that the entire Irish banking system collapsed, and now the Irish will have to pay off the bankers for decades of debt slavery to the bankers, the masters of the world. Furthermore, the Irish state has been gutted and wages have crashed.

People ask me if the rich establishment wrecked the state on purpose. They can’t believe that the rich would do something like that.

Of course they will. They rich will always or nearly always try to destroy the state.

They want to privatize as much of society as possible and pay as few taxes as possible. The rich have always been this way. I have seen a document from Italy in the 1300′s that describes the mindset of the businessman: he wants the state to get out of way and do as little as possible in society. All the state does is interfere with his money making project. For the businessman, it’s always the least state that’s the best state.

The rich actually want to wreck the state.

They want to defund it. Look at the 3rd World. Everywhere in the 3rd World, you have a wrecked, defunded, anemic state. That is because the rich run most 3rd World countries and this is their project – a minimal state. The 3rd World rich also pay almost no taxes, so there is no money to run the state.

The result of the defunded state is your typical 3rd World shithole, but the rich don’t care that they live in a shithole for some reason. They just buy a 4 by 4, a mansion with razor wire and armed guards, bottled water, a generator, and they’re ready to go. They have their fancy private schools for the kids and fancy doctors for when they get sick. Everyone else can drop dead and go to Hell.

The rich don’t need the state for anything.

All they want is cops and army. Everything else is useless and might as well be privatized.

They even hate public education, and they are trying to destroy that too, but they will not succeed. What we will end up with here in the US is ruined pubic education which is underfunded and terrible like we have in the Turd World. Anyone with any sense would put their kids in private school. All the rich send their kids to private schools, so they hate public education. They get taxed for it, but they don’t use it. They won’t succeed in getting rid of public education in the US, but they will radically defund it.

The rich don’t like anything the government does. Nothing, nada, zip, zilch. There’ s nothing in it for them, and they have to pay tons of taxes. They really resent it.

Neoliberalism Kills Ireland

Ireland’s austerity program is going very well.

Housing prices are continuing to crash downwards, falling a further 10%.

The deficit is going through the roof and national debt is expected to exceed GDP by 2013, when it will reach 113% of GDP.

Precisely zero jobs are being created.

At the same time, state spending has been obliterated.

The state is prepared to sell off more and more of the people’s assets to corporate sharks, including forests, ports and state energy companies.

Wages for 90% of the population are plummeting like rocks, while prices are rising due to speculation.

All of this, incredibly, is precisely according to plan! Huh?

This is all being done to benefit the banksters.

There was actually a way out of this mess without going this horrible route – that is, leaving the EU, taking the banksters to take a hike and more or less doing as Iceland did, but that was not done, because, apparently, the banksters rule the world. Or at least Ireland.

I would like to point out that during the Irish boom times of “the Celtic Tiger” that the disgusting media wrote so much about, the average Irishman did not see much wealth. Only a small group at the top, possibly 20%, really made out well. In fact, the average Joe got screwed because the price of housing went through the roof and he was forced to buy and overpriced home. There were also quite a few IT jobs created, but those are all history now too, gone to China and India they are.

A number of Irish banks, mostly dealing in commercial real estate, went under in the crisis. Large property developers also got creamed. Incredibly, it seems that not only the banks but also the developers were bailed out. All losses were transferred to the state, while the zillionaires got to keep their fortunes and the state simply took their businesses off the books.

The plan apparently is to pay off the banksters and developers over time on the backs of the gasping and groaning Irish people. But it looks like it could be years if not decades until the debt is paid off, or possibly, given the enormity of the debt, like the 3rd World debt crisis, it is simply unpayable. So we see 3rd World IMF style austerity coming to Europe itself.

Ireland really ought to raise the 12.5% corporate tax rate but for some reason, they won’t do that. They’d rather beggar the commoners. It was this low rate that caused all that capital to flow into Ireland in the first place, causing a bubble and blowing up the economy.

Neoliberalism, over time, tends to destroy both the economy and society. I guess the rich and the corporations don’t care about society. When have they ever? But why blow up the economy. Neoliberalism in its pure form results in a massive shift upwards from the lower 80% to the top 20% of earners, as a good general rule. The top 5% and especially the top 1% benefit in particular. There is a massive shift in wealth also from labor to capital in the form of business and corporations.

So apparently it’s worth it to destroy the economy and ruin society as long as I get rich in the process.

Such is the glorious mindset of corporations, businessmen and the rich and upper middle classes. Wonderful people!

Austerity in the UK

Austerity in the UK is failing horribly, or possibly it is doing exactly what it is supposed to.

If it was supposed to jump start the economy (this is what deficit hawk scum always claim austerity does) then it failed miserably. If it was supposed to wreck the economy, then it succeeded.

Massive austerity measures, equaling those under Thatcher, and possibly even exceeding Thatcher’s, have recently been shoved through in the UK. The result is what all the sane people like me predicted – economic ruin. The measures were pushed through in the middle of a recession, and they are resulting in a serious economic crash, surely a double dip recession, and possibly a Major Depression, but apparently this is all part of the plan!

Austerity measures are specifically designed to wreck the economies of any nation that undergoes them. True, after a while, the economy starts to grow again, but usually after a massive crash. In Latvia, poster child for neoliberal economics, the economy crashed by 25%, but this was part of the plan!

Apparently the destruction of government social spending (which capitalists everywhere on Earth hate with every ounce of their being) combined with the utter immiseration of wages makes the economic destruction worth it. Also, the economic depression is usually accompanied, via austerity, by a massive shift in wealth from the bottom 80% to the top 20%, so the rich figure that it all works out.

Devastating economic recessions, depressions and killer austerity measures have followed neoliberal economics everywhere it has gone, as night follows day.

As economic ruin spreads across the UK, according to plan apparently, the government, predictably, blames it on the weather.

The situation in Ireland is much worse and will be dealt with in another post. Brutal austerity measures have resulted, of course, in an explosion of the deficit and debt. The deficit is now over 100% of GDP, due exclusively to austerity. The economy lies in ruins.

Previously, Ireland was a neoliberal poster boy. They slashed their corporate taxes to near zero to attract corporate sharks from all over the globe. In the end, they went the way of most all neoliberal poster children. Economic ruin, depression, smashed wages, mass unemployment, gutted government spending, with the prospect of years or maybe decades before the sun shines again.

All Our Base Belongs to Them

I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theory, but it helps to have a framework to look at the world in. It makes things so much clearer.

Nevertheless, I am always leery of theories that say that all the problems in the world are due to the Jews or the New World Order or Barack Obama or the Left or the Black Helicopters or the International Communist Conspiracy or whoever.

Nevertheless, I am starting to look favorably on one particular conspiracy theory, if you want to look at it that way.

This is it:

Parasitical Finance Capital (PFC), or the Banksters, run the world.

It isn’t completely true, of course, but there is more to it than there is to most other conspiracy theories.

The more I try to analyze the US, the more I conclude that PFC controls America. They control both the Democratic and Republican parties. They control almost the entire US media, or at least, the US media is 100% behind them. They control the Barack Obama Administration lock, stock and barrel. The Republican Party is clearly owned by PFC. But so are the Democrats.

One thing is for sure, no one can go against PFC in the US. If you do, you will be destroyed. PFC will utilize their owned or bought and paid for media to destroy you. And your campaign contributions will dry up. Obama plans to raise $1 billion to run in 2012. Much of it will come from PFC. All or almost all of Obama’s economic advisors were from the PFC sector. So the PFC sector was writing Obama’s economic plans.

The problem is all of the rest of US capitalism is in bed with PFC for some odd reason, despite the fact that PFC creates no real wealth whatsoever and is only a gambling casino in the sky. PFC destroyed the US economy and most of the economies of the world. They took out untold numbers of US businesses. Nevertheless, the entire US business community is solidly behind the bankster criminals.

When we look over to Europe, we see that the austerity programs being implemented across the continent are being drawn up exclusively by the PFC sector. What happened in many countries like Greece and Ireland is that PFC made bad bets on various institutions, especially Greek and Irish banks. A bad bet is a bad bet.

In general, this PFC sector is on the continent, mostly the wealthy leech class in places like France and Germany. Instead of telling the rich PFC leeches to take a hike and eat their losses (the proper response), PFC on the continent demands to be paid back for its bad bets in the Irish and Greek finance casinos. The working class or Greece and Ireland, along with Greek and Irish society, will be destroyed for years, possibly decades to come, to pay off the losses of the rich at their finance casinos.

But why is that as it should be? Should not the rich eat their losses for their gambles? As it is, PFC has rigged the game. If they win, they win and sock away the billions. If they lose, we pay them off for their losses with wage, benefit and program cuts that result in misery, illness and death for countless little people.

If the rich are not paid back for their bad bets, what is the worst that could happen? A few banks might fail here and there. Big deal. I say let them fail.

On a similar note, any time we try to tax or regulate the PFC sector in the US, they threaten to go overseas. Why don’t we just call these rats on their bluff? Many to most of our industries have already taken off. What’s one more? Let em go to China or wherever! The loss of some US industries was painful, but one wonders just how painful it would be to lose such a parasitical industry that has done nothing but rip off society and bleed America dry.

What about the 3rd World? Who rules the 3rd World? A good case can be made that PFC substantially rules the 3rd World via the World Bank and the IMF (whose leaders are of guess what ethnic group). The World Bank and the IMF are essentially consortia of all the banksters on Earth, mostly operating out of the West and especially the US. PFC, via the World Bank and the IMF (essentially arms of Wall Street) have been destroying the 3rd World for decades now.

Everywhere these banks have gone, they have left ruins in their path. Disease,infant mortality and death rates have climbed, while life expectancy has dropped. Education has been left in ruins. Medical care has been decimated, and schools have closed all over the 3rd world. Workers have been forced to take savage benefit and pay cuts, and public property has been sold off to a few of the filthy rich.

All state programs to help people have been gutted. This is all done to benefit these two banks, the IMF and the World Bank, which are more or less run out of the White House and Wall Street.

The Banksters rule the world.

It’s a bit simplistic, but there does seem to be something to it, does there not?

Official Language Lunacy

Repost from the old site.

As a linguist who has actually worked in the field as a professional linguist (and anthropologist) I happen to know quite a bit about official language laws around the world.

Most countries of the world have at least one official language. In Latin America, it is generally Spanish. In Africa, it is often a colonial language along with one or more large national languages. India has about 13 official languages, often one for each state, with English and Hindi given some prominence. In Israel, believe it or not, Arabic and Hebrew are official languages.

The official languages of the Philippines are Tagalog and English. In Europe, the official language tends to be the main language of the country – German in Germany, Portuguese in Portugal, Dutch in Holland, etc. Sometimes, a smaller regional language is also designated an official (regional) language, but these are mostly just used in a certain area.

Some European countries have many official languages, without apparent problems. The Netherlands has 13 official languages, if you can believe that. Finland has 2, Swedish and Finnish. The UK has three – French (Channel Islands), Welsh and English. Switzerland has three – French, German, Italian and Romansch. Belgium has French, German and Dutch. Ireland has Irish and English.

Having more than one official language in most or all cases has not caused any problems with separatism. Where separatism exists, it was present or even worse while the regional language was being suppressed. Separatism will exist in some cases whether you repress it by force or if you allow autonomy to flower.

The French are pretty terrible about this – as French is the only official language in France and the French are bigots towards other languages. In Canada, French is an official language in Quebec, but they have been speaking French in Quebec before there was a Canada. French is an indigenous language there. The Turks and some Arab states are bigoted about Turkish and Arabic.

In general, though, official languages are not much of a source of problem in most of the world, only where they are used as instruments of the ultranationalist chauvinism described above. And why should not everyone in Turkey, France and some Arab states just speak Turkish, French and Arabic only?

Well, maybe they should, but they also have a right to speak their regional language, because the Bretons and Basques were speaking Breton and Basque long before there was a France. The Kurds have been speaking Kurdish in Turkey for thousands of years before there was a Turkish state. The Kurds and Assyrians in Iraq and Syria spoke their languages for thousands of years before there was an Iraq or Syria.

Many countries have quite a few official languages. As noted, India has 13. South Africa has 11 official languages. Adopting quite a few languages as official has not been much of a problem for most countries, though Americans probably think it is stupid or crazy.

Which brings us to the United States. Official language policy has sadly fallen to the same lunatic forces that have taken over our immigration debate. Do we have an official language in the US? No, we do not, but many states do. About 30 states have designated English as the official language, New Mexico has designated Spanish an official language and Hawaii has designated Hawaiian as an official language.

Is it rational for Hawaiian to be an official language of Hawaii? Sure, it’s been spoken there for hundreds of years before we stole the place. Spanish in New Mexico? Sure. When New Mexico was admitted to the Union, a large percentage of the population were Spanish speakers of Spanish, not Mexican, heritage.

There are many Indian languages in the US, but most of them are dying, and many are already dead. They have few speakers and in no case do they make up a large percentage of a state’s speakers.

Nor do we have a situation similar to New Mexico anywhere else in the US. When California was admitted to the US, there were some Spanish-speaking Californios (only .1% of the population of Mexico lived in California when it was a part of Mexico), but they were quite outnumbered by then by English-speakers flooding in with the Gold Rush.

The vast majority of Spanish speakers in California are relatively recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America, legal and illegal, with some second language speakers like me. I am not aware of any case anywhere on Earth where the language of a recent wave of immigrants has been granted official status. If you know of one, let me know.

The vast majority of the people in the US speak English. According to global norms, English should be the official language of the United States. In most of the sane world, that would be a noncontroversial view, and speaking as a linguist, it would be linguistically justified. Yet for some reason, people who advocate English as the official language of the US are derided as bigots!

This is completely bizarre. In the vast majority of the world, making the language of the vast majority of citizens the, or an, official language is a boring and mundane decision. Rarely is the specter of racism raised.

If we can make English an official language of the US without appealing to the language bigots or nativists, let’s do it. English as an, or the, official language need not be the same as English-only. I don’t see why governments at all levels and any businesses could not continue to provide notices and services in other languages for recent immigrants if English was an official language – it’s a rational and humanitarian thing to do.

Andrew Cuomo, Reactionary Worm

Here.

I am serious, Democrats are just as bad as Republicans anymore. Jerry Brown is Rand Paul is John Boehner is Barack Obama is, well, you do the math.

They are all peas in a pod. Dedicated to the destruction of government. All on board with this “government is the enemy” shit. Cuomo is obviously part of the “get government so small we can drown it in a bathtub” crowd. So was Republican Bill (“the era of Big Government is over”) Clinton. They’re all the same. They only differ on the speed at which government needs to be dismantled and destroyed. Democrats want to destroy rather slowly. Republicans opt for the kill it now and kill it completely approach.

In Europe it is the same. Both the “Left” and the “Right” are going in for all out austerity to pay off the rich and the banks for their bad gambles. The Irish people, and Irish society, will be destroyed for decades in order to pay back rich investors on the Continent who made bad bets on Irish banks.

The rich making gambles on economic matters needs to be treated the same as Joe Blow making a bad gamble at the local Indian casino. No! The rich do not always need to be paid off for their bad bets. Let the rich eat their bad bets. So a few German banks go down. Good riddance to bad rubbish!

The Irish, and the Greeks, should have simply left the EU, defaulted on their debts and told the rich to shove it! We are witnessing the same here in the US. All of these massive budget and government cuts are mostly so that the rich and the Corporate Enemy can have their tax cuts and especially so they can be bailed out of their bad gambles.

As much as I hate Arab dictatorships, at least they are pro-people in a sense. Arab dictators in recent days have increased salaries and pensions and lowered food prices, all in an effort to stay in power. The dictators are no good, but it is interesting that at least they try to engage in pro-people actions to stay in power.

When do states in the West ever do anything pro-people anymore? Never. All states in the West do is attack the people and side with the enemies of the people, the Rich Class Enemy and Corporate Enemy. At least in Europe the people fight when their class enemies attack them.

Americans will never fight, ever. Even if the rich and the corporations start to kill them (already happening, check out Death Panels in Arizona) and starve them, Americans will cheer as they are slowly killed by lack of medical care and starved by lack of food. Americans will march their diseased, emaciated, malnourished bodies off the to the local Tea Party rally to call for more starvation and lack of health care.

Americans deserve to die, honestly, they really do. No sympathy for the suicidal who cheer their murderers.