The national equity imho consists of a share of the global equity, and the global equity consists of... micro and macro organisms that make life sustainable. There is nothing else, no substitute. If you ain't got food and water -- and a climate conducive to long-term reproduction of same -- then you ain't got Nuffin. The whole complex casino game of currency and commerce is merely a frothy exuberance riding on the surface (and the hyperexploitation) of the abundance of life processes. When those processes fail -- or are vandalised and sabotaged -- the casino is over, and so is everything else we recognise as "civilisation." It seems so simple. And yet those life processes are failing and being sabotaged on all sides, yet the headlines continue to be all about imaginary money units and their better management.
Lehman's criminality is on the front page, while the criminality of governments in cahoots with liquidationist resource-extractors is buried in the third section or not mentioned at all (except in the increasingly elegiac and despairing academic and "green" press). Earnest discussions continue everywhere about the more just distribution of cowrie shells, while the essential resources like food and water (whose distribution those cowrie shells is supposed to enable) are eroding rapidly.
I suppose the pictures is not quite so bad as I paint it -- Elinor Ostrom is one economist who seems to get it -- the management of the planetary commons is the defining problem of our time. The Post-Autistic economics school has a clue or two also.
The concept of national equity is powerful, but imho it must be tied to the robustness of biotic systems. When national equity is based sanely on the quantity and quality of real national resources -- on the hectarage of healthy forest, the microbial count per cubic inch of arable soil, the health of streams and rivers, the health of coastal fish populations, the depth of topsoil -- then it might make some sense... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
There's nothing equitable about the uniquely toxic Joint Stock Limited Liability Company as an enterprise model, particularly in its Public - stock exchange traded and absentee landlord - manifestation.
The key - as I have been banging on about here since I came - is a 'Not for Loss' legal and financial model based upon mutualist partnership principles, and upon location, energy and knowledge as the Commons that underpin the Economy.
I think that Peter Barnes' Capitalism 3.0 gets a lot right in this regard, but he unfortunately appears to advocate the legal model of Trust law, which was IMHO invented by lawyers for lawyers, and retains the management/agency problem of Company law.
Everything I have read (and it's not enough) of Ostrom's thinking is consistent with my perspective. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
I find it harder and harder to engage seriously in debates about the management and meaning of imaginary money-units... Until the balance sheets reflect enormous game-altering, life-altering losses such as (e.g.!) the mass die-off of forests, it doesn't matter how the books are managed, the brick wall still looms ahead.
I am glad that Lehman is on the front page, because that situation highlights the extent to which the organs of our society have been captured by a parasitic financial elite. Governments have to be the instrument for aligning the operation of the economy with the needs of the bio-sphere, not a tool of corporations for perpetuating their wealth capture games.
Edward Harrison, a prominent financial blogger, recently said:
I am being to conclude that no meaningful financial reform can occur absent an absolute collapse in the global economy and the financial system.
I've just been reading T C Boyle's wickedly funny, frankly heartbreaking A Friend of the Earth -- not much optimism there, but a lot of smouldering Swiftian wit. Anyone but me suspect that Boyle and Neal Stephenson somehow influenced one another, uni- or bi-directionally?
I've also been watching the herring fishery. The herring are not doing well up here in the NW of N America. And yet it is still perfectly legal during the spawning season to fish for roe, i.e. to catch and slaughter female herring, gutting them for their roe -- which is a delicacy commanding a high price in Japan. The rest of the fish (males, the carcasses of females) are ground up for cat food, fertiliser, etc.
It's beyond insane to be "harvesting" the pregnant (OK, they fertilise externally, but egg-bearing anyway) females of a species that's already struggling.
It's also quite legal, and the local papers crow happily about the tonnage caught, quotas met in a day or less, vast amounts of money made.
The fish are only in the news because of the dollars they are worth. It should be the other way around: the money should only be in the news to the extent that it's an indicator of how scarce the fish are becoming. But it's good news you see, that wealthy Japanese businessmen are willing to pay so much for herring roe -- it's good news that Japan has fished out its own home waters (making herring roe so scarce and valuable) and is now bribing Canadians to do likewise. It's good news that fish populations are declining, because that makes each tonne caught worth so much more. It's great that the catch is worth shipping by air to Japan, the planes each contributing their little bit, flight by flight, to the climate vandalism that lays one more pressure on the struggling species. And so on.
Because value = scarcity. So creating scarcity = creating value! So let's celebrate the destruction of our biotic wealth, because the market price per unit for the last pathetic scraps will be so high...
Don't even get me started on farmed salmon. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
As I stood on the oily gravel in front of Gunther's Garage, I thought of the defense satellites whizzing overhead. And how somewhere over the Middle East, killer drones are being operated remotely by Americans in Nevada bunkers, as virtual and as removed from the blood and fire as any computer game. Both the real and the virtual warfare flourish, both fed on virtual money of the banking elites. If real money -- money not based upon endless future debt in an imaginary world of unlimited growth and perpetual war -- were required, neither would exist.For now though, the capitalist growth-bot will march on unimpeded by the greater mass of Americans. Until it crashes. It is very hard to imagine capitalism being brought down by the uncomplaining masses below, who draw sustenance from it and offer their sons and daughters to its wars without complaint.On the other hand, the inevitability of its collapse from within, due to its utter unsustainability, is heartening in a grim way. Billions will suffer. It seems the faceless laboring masses never make even a small gain, even an inadvertent one, without immense suffering. And even when they do, any advantage they gain is financialised in the virtual economy by the elites, and loaned back to them at compound interest, then tranched for more virtual profits, and on and on and on. Such is the architecture of our sickness.Money for nuthin'Defenders of capitalism claim that there can be no real economy, no real material value created by the real people on Main Street, without the financing of Wall Street's virtual economy. Allegedly, they are so intertwined as to be the same thing, which they are, and that no other way of doings things is possible, which is patently untrue. The storyline goes that without virtual economy financing from Wall Street, without the ever-expanding debt that drives the quest for limitless growth, the world would end. So strong is this hallucination that capitalist theoreticians such as Guy Sorman say, "even in this time of financial crisis, the global benefits of the new financial markets have surpassed their costs."What the fuck globe are ya living on Guy?
As I stood on the oily gravel in front of Gunther's Garage, I thought of the defense satellites whizzing overhead. And how somewhere over the Middle East, killer drones are being operated remotely by Americans in Nevada bunkers, as virtual and as removed from the blood and fire as any computer game. Both the real and the virtual warfare flourish, both fed on virtual money of the banking elites. If real money -- money not based upon endless future debt in an imaginary world of unlimited growth and perpetual war -- were required, neither would exist.
For now though, the capitalist growth-bot will march on unimpeded by the greater mass of Americans. Until it crashes. It is very hard to imagine capitalism being brought down by the uncomplaining masses below, who draw sustenance from it and offer their sons and daughters to its wars without complaint.
On the other hand, the inevitability of its collapse from within, due to its utter unsustainability, is heartening in a grim way. Billions will suffer. It seems the faceless laboring masses never make even a small gain, even an inadvertent one, without immense suffering. And even when they do, any advantage they gain is financialised in the virtual economy by the elites, and loaned back to them at compound interest, then tranched for more virtual profits, and on and on and on. Such is the architecture of our sickness.
Money for nuthin'
Defenders of capitalism claim that there can be no real economy, no real material value created by the real people on Main Street, without the financing of Wall Street's virtual economy. Allegedly, they are so intertwined as to be the same thing, which they are, and that no other way of doings things is possible, which is patently untrue. The storyline goes that without virtual economy financing from Wall Street, without the ever-expanding debt that drives the quest for limitless growth, the world would end. So strong is this hallucination that capitalist theoreticians such as Guy Sorman say, "even in this time of financial crisis, the global benefits of the new financial markets have surpassed their costs."
What the fuck globe are ya living on Guy?
tell it joe... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
