Ecological economists such as Herman Daly write that the more full the world becomes, the higher are the social or external costs of production.
Social or external costs are costs of production that are not captured in the price of the products. For example, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that result from chemicals used in agriculture are not included as costs in agricultural production. The price of food does not include the damage to the Gulf.
Do people exist to serve the economy or does the economy exist to serve people?
This question came to me as the left side of my brain was reading Thomas Piketty’s important new book Capital in the 21st Century while the right side of my brain watched the news.
In the first part of this Global Power Project series, I examined the origins and early evolution of the International Monetary Conference, an annual meeting (to be held June 1-3 in Munich) of several hundred of the world’s most influential bankers who gather in secrecy with the finance ministers, regulators and central bankers o
War is America‘s main export. Without it, the USA is nothing. It’s economy depends on it.
Let’s take a look at the tip of a very deep iceberg.
The movement to break away from Wall Street and form publicly-owned banks continues to gain momentum. But enthusiasts are deterred by claims that a state-owned bank would violate constitutional prohibitions against “lending the credit of the state.”
California’s constitution is typical. It states in Section 17: “The State shall not in any manner loan its credit, nor shall it subscribe to, or be interested in the stock of any company, association, or corporation . . . .”
Last week, in Part 1 of the Global Power Project’s investigations into the machinery behind the International Monetary Conference, I examined the history and evolution of the IMC from its founding by the American Bankers Association in 1954 to the global financial and monetary disruptions of the late 1970s.
“Any government with both the power and the will to remedy the major defects of the capitalist system would have the power and the will to abolish it altogether” said economist Joan Robinson analyzing the situation a generation ago. But her words are a call to create such a government now. Our global problem is not only a perpetually war making empire but also the economic basis of its imperial system. The evidence seemed clear to only some scholars in the past, but it is becoming more obvious to anyone who notes the signs of breakdown in the present.
a whole lot of writing going on, but no more shaking . . . rattling the cages
I’ll get to the school and the yard and the fights in a minute. But . . . .
Okay, a guest on the “alternative radio show” in Portland, KBOO-FM.
Not since the US and EU took over Eastern Europe, including the Baltic countries, East Germany, Poland, and the Balkans and converted them into military outposts of NATO and economic vassals, have the Western powers moved so aggressively to seize a strategic country, such as the Ukraine, posing an existential threat to Russia.
