Capitalism can grow externally in terms of wars, foreign interventions and militarized accumulation. In fact, as UC Santa Barbara Sociologist William I. Robinson describes, global capitalism has become dependent on war-making to sustain itself. Or it can grow internally by intensifying privatization, destroying labor rights, human rights and environmental protections within existing capitalist markets in order to open up more avenues for profit. In this interview, Robinson describes it:

For 530 years now, since 1492, we’ve had outward expansion – constant waves of colonialism and imperialism, bringing more and more countries, more and more people into the system. Now every country- every community on the planet- is integrated directly or indirectly into global capitalism. There’s no more room for what I call extensive enlargement or outward expansion. The other mechanism that capitalism has to expand is what I call intensive expansion, meaning that you turn more and more sectors and spheres of society into opportunities for accumulation. That’s been privatization – you privatize education, healthcare, public infrastructure, and nature. You’re not opening up new territories but opening up new areas.

In either case, capitalist growth is the growth of poverty, the growth of social and political inequality, of human suffering, and the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems. We can see it on a global scale— everywhere capitalism has gone, the ecological commons have been destroyed. Indigenous people have been killed or displaced. Workers are enslaved or become alienated from their labor and exploited. And poverty has been created for masses of people where there was none before, while the commons and the public wealth have been privatized and consolidated by the top tier of the economy. . . . . “It’s Time to Call it What It Is: A Capitalism-Induced Ecological Crisis” by Erin McCarley.

Capitalism is predicated on growth, which is exactly the opposite of sustainability. Sustainability is predicated on stability with occasional contraction. There’s no reason for contraction to be particularly painful as long as it is in steady degrees and not all at once.

I.e. if population goes down 10% in a town where there are 12 restaurants, there’s still room for ten restaurants. In this same town, the decline in population means home prices will probably fall further – say 20%, or rather simply not appreciate. In relative terms, it means young couples will be able to buy larger apartments. If one looks at the films of the French New Wave in the sixties, middle class newlyweds in a good marriage were moving into 120 m2 and not the 55m2 one bedroom apartments they have now. France was supposed to be a poor country and the US and Canadian dollar were enormously value in French francs.

With a 120m2 apartment, the idea of having two or three children instead of a single child or none, becomes far more tempting. Hence, contraction effectively creates growth.

Of course for the capitalist, a temporary 20% decline in real estate prices or even a twelve years without growth in prices is simply unacceptable. This is the constant push for growth, even when that growth is destructive.

European countries are being told again that our populations are declining and hence we must accept whomever breaks through our borders (in the 90’s it wasn’t this way: it was hard to get into Europe on a permanent basis). Even to the point, we should encourage this migration. What is not discussed is how we should pay for the education and accommodation of these newcomers. It will pay for itself in growth, is what is thrown out blithely. In carefully chosen immigration, with selection for education, intelligence, cultural affinity this is true. But not when adding people whose skillset is not required and whose education is rudimentary. When one adds individuals with no cultural affinity it’s a recipe for trouble which creates angry ghettos, including the no-go zones of both Sweden and even earlier in France.

More crime does create growth – for insurance companies, police departments and prisons. But it reduces the quality of life and even the potential for real positive growth in the future.

In reality, it would be just fine if European populations fell to two-thirds of their peak and young working families could enjoy spacious homes in peaceful towns. Quality of life would go back up and there would be a desire to bring more babies into this attractive and comfortable environment. Contraction in this case is a natural phase of true growth.

This is not just theory. Europe over the last two thousand years has had many periods of increasing prosperity with the attendant increase in population. When population became too high for current conditions, sadly either disease or war reduced the population by as much as half within six months. To avoid enormous health crisis and/or massive wars, it’s important to control population and encourage occasional contraction. No one needs lebensraum in this case, no country suffers a critical shortage of essential resources.¹

VK explains how public opinion became the justification for policies which were pre-fabricated:

There’s an objective explanation for that.

In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of “public opinion”. This would become a hallmark of Western Civilization in the post-war.

The public opinion theory states that the masses don’t have an opinion for themselves or, if they have, it is sculpting/flexible. The dominant classes can, therefore, guide the masses like a shepherd, to its will.

Friedrich von Hayek – a colleague of Popper and father of British neoliberalism (the man behind Thatcher) – then developed on the issue, by proposing the institutionalization of public opinion. He proposed a system of three or four tiers of intellectuals which a capitalist society should have. The first tier is the capitalist class itself, who would govern the entire world anonymously, through secret meetings. These meetings would produce secret reports, whose ideas would be spread to the second tier. The second tier is the academia and the more prominent politicians and other political leaderships. The third tier is the basic education teachers, who would indoctrinate the children. The fourth tier is the MSM, whose job is to transform the ideas and opinions of the first tier into “common sense” (“public opinion”).

Therefore, it’s not a case where the Western journalists are being fooled. Their job was never to inform the public. When they publish a lie about, say, Iran trying to kill an American ambassador in South Africa, they are not telling a lie in their eyes: they are telling an underlying truth through one thousand lies. The objective here is to convince (“teach”) the American masses it is good for the USA if Iran was invaded and destroyed (which is a truth). They are like the modern Christian God, who teach its subjects the Truth through “mysterious ways”.

Often these policies should be unpopular, like going to war. The first time general public brainwashing via the mass media were used at full strength was in the run up to the second world war. There were many German Americans and the non-German American was firmly isolationist.

In the run up to World War One, German Americans suffered repression and intimidation something similar in kind if not in degree to what the Nazis perpetrated on German Jews in the thirties.

The concert halls stopped playing the music of German composers. German language programs were banned in high schools, along with German-language church services and publications. Books were burned, German dogs were slaughtered, and many food items were rechristened (for instance, sauerkraut was officially re-dubbed “liberty cabbage”). Germans and German Americans also felt the change in small, personal incidents. In some instances, “hand-shakes became less friendly than they used to be,” but many were publicly assaulted, tarred and feathered, or even lynched.

Similar treatment was also dished out to Japanese Americans, including internment in isolated concentration camps

The end result is that rather than elevating public opinion when considering truth, the thinking man or woman should disregard public opinion. Public opinion is manufactured and worthless in seeking any kind of truth. Public opinion’s value is only as a weapon against one’s political opponent.

Current US Domestic Politics

Conservatives fighting back against the mass media are acting correctly. Mass propaganda and corporate support of racial strife and gender conflicts are an attempt to dehumanise and disenfranchise the majority of US citizens. Mainstream publications like Cosmopolitan are advocating disenfranchising white women who don’t agree with their leftist or race-driven policies. The world Americans live in these days seems as strange as the Wonderland into which Alice one afternoon fell.

One only has to look at the examples of Rwanda (Hutu vs Tutsi), South Africa (blacks vs whites/coloureds) and the Ukraine (Ukrainian vs Russian) to see where this kind of dehumanisation ends. Already police are being murdered in cold blood, drivers are being shot, businesses are being burned or looted, children are being assaulted. And this is just the beginning.

Ironically intolerance cannot be tolerated. Intolerance is a self-feeding fire which quickly turns into a funeral pyre for those within reach of its flames.

White people are certainly not bad. Black people are not saints. Neither are whites. The issue which should be disturbing citizens is not race, colour or sexuality but the privilege of the rich and of corporations. Everyone outside of a tiny sliver of the population is being pushed into feudal serfdom while that sliver of the population allocate to themselves the privilege of barons or kings. The USA does suffer so much from a racism issue but a resource distribution problem. The middle-class, both upper, middle and lower, have slowly watched the erosion of their wealth while endless trillions are spent on foreign wars.

There’s an almost endless cornucopia of education, medical treatment, infrastructure and R&D which could have been funded with those squandered trillions.

If the money had been spent on internal projects instead of foreign wars, the money would be gone but that infrastructure and education would still be here, yielding dividends instead of additional expenses and more bodybags.

We are surrounded by screens full of voices that are always lying to us, and experts wonder why we’re so crazy and miserable all the time.

The screens tell us, “This is a perfectly normal and sane way of doing things. It is perfectly normal and sane to strip the earth bare and poison the air and the water in an economic system which requires infinite growth on a finite planet. People who say otherwise are raving lunatics!” And the social engineers wonder why there’s increasing disaffection and alienation among the populace.

The screens tell us, “Just spend your time in this world turning the gears of the machine and you will be happy. The machine is your friend. The machine takes care of you. Work hard pulling its levers and greasing its cogs until you are old and you will gain satisfaction,” and then they wonder why we’re all gobbling up antidepressants like candy.

The screens tell us, “We need to drop explosives on Nation X because they need Freedom and Democracy™. We know we said that about Nation Y and Nation Z and that went terribly wrong, but that’s because it wasn’t managed properly. Trust that it is good and proper for the citizens of Nation X to be killed with bombs and bullets,” and then they wonder why people keep snapping and committing mass shootings.

The screens tell us, “You are crazy and stupid if you want a functioning healthcare system. Are you trying to put our billionaires and military out of business?” and then they wonder why people are becoming paranoid and angry.

[fvplayer src=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP_SdjD5ms” splash=”https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wTP_SdjD5ms/maxresdefault.jpg” caption=”Invasion of the Body Snatchers (12/12) Movie CLIP – The Scream (1978) HD”]

All of Western culture is at this point ethically bankrupt and barren. We no longer exist in harmony with the animals and the Earth. We spend most of our existence just making our world worse. It’s sad we couldn’t do better.

via ZeroHedge (lots of libertarian comments there)
original on Medium
Caitlin Johnstone on Facebook, Twitter

Caitlin Johnstone should get herself a website as all three of those platforms could be shut down under her feet.

And this at a time that their society is struggling with crumbling infrastructure, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, an opiate crisis, literally unpayable debts (USD 20 trillion and counting) and unfunded pensions.

Six of the top ten are American technology billionaires (1. Jeff Bezos, 2. Bill Gates, 4. Mark Zuckerberg, 8. Larry Ellison, 9. Larry Page, 10. Sergei Brin). There are no European tech billionaires. SAP co-founder Hasso Platner is the first European technology billionaire at place 101.

The change among the richest people in the world indicates that the Americans are winning in the game of tilting the financial table in their direction. Just like as Hollywood dominates the motion picture industry due to corruption and distribution (not quality) so do American companies dominate tech, due to financial game playing, IP laws and crooked lawyers. Again, quality is not the issue and indeed due to versions of the Patriot Act and an absence of any privacy, the USA is the last place either Asians or Europeans should be buying their software.

Effectively, by tilting the table, the Americans are stealing from all of us.

And fellow Americans too.

PS. The Chinese make a significant appearance in the top fifty billionaires in technology. Like the Americans, the Chinese don’t really play by the rules, or rather write their own rules around IP. Based on American IP privateering, who can blame the Chinese?

An investment retirement guru is convinced that millennials don’t know how to invest and are missing the opportunity of a lifetime to invest their money in a stock market.¹ which has never been more overpriced (ridiculous multiples) since 1929.

I have been stunned recently by some of the discussions I have had with some of my own children’s friends and relatives about finances and investing towards a more secure financial future….in talking to my own son, he states that his friends (ages 25-40) are afraid of the markets…. Some are even putting cash in a safety deposit box! If there is ONE thing I can never mention enough is that if you want to have a secure financial future, YOU need to save as much as you can, as soon as you can for as long as you can. Along with that, is to spend LESS than you have coming in, forever. Even if you do not invest a dime in the markets, you will do better than nearly 70% of our population!

I can agree with the Dickensian final sentence.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

While the stock market beats keep your money in cash in safety deposit boxes, I would not agree that the stock market is the way to secure your retirement. Strategic real estate investment would be a more prudent strategy.²

Investing in Real Estate instead

The retirement guru’s suggestion about compound interest suffers from poor data. Assuming 8% returns is wildly optimistic. The United States has just come back from a huge real estate scare in 2008 where prices dropped by as much as half. Otherwise alternative retirement advice to the young would be to buy a first property in which to live as soon as possible. When you’ve paid off most of that, buy an investment property. When you’ve paid off that it will be time to upgrade your principal residence and later time to buy another investment property.

You would hit retirement with between three and ten properties, an income and the ability to trade down your principal residence. And your money will never have been in the hands of someone else.

Millennials’ Hatred of Wealth

In the ensuing discussion, a woman called Qfactor blames the inability of millennials to save on their hatred for wealth. An economic version of “they hate us for our freedoms”.

Sadly, there is a cultural component to the Millennial generation that makes them think having money is a bad thing. If you’re rich, you’re evil. Corporations are evil, conservative politicians are evil, etc. Happily, these kids will probably inherit more from their parents than any previous generation, and once they find themselves rolling in wealth, they’ll realize that they want to preserve it for their own children. At least that’s what I hope for my daughter’s sake…
No toys for me, but my partner bought a plane last year. I do love to travel, but I have an annual budget for that already and it’s built into my retirement income projection. I’m just stunned sometimes at my daughter and her friends, though. They seem to think that there is moral superiority to being a burden on society because at least you’re not a horrible rich person hoarding money from others. It’s a complete misunderstanding of the American principle of independence and self-sustaining income.

Qfactor’s comments are exceptionally amusing and unintentionally self-mocking. Qfactor’s daughter has a vision of a better world where wealth is distributed more equally and power is taken from corporations. According to Qfactor, this is wrong. Qfactor is a modest woman. Her modest love is travel. She owns a private plane but it’s okay as it belongs to her partner. Based on Qfactor’s capacity for self-delusion, it looks like America has finally reached the end of the line.

Roman Empire and America

The tales from Rome were accurate. Rome had entered into a cycle of opulence, decadence and corruption, from which it would never recover. Something like the United States now. The good news for Americans is that it took hundreds of years to bring about the fall of Rome. The bad news for Americans is that human development is travelling about eight times faster in the last fifty years so the last forty years count as 320 years.

Qfactor’s daughter is largely right. North America consumes more than a quarter of the physical energy and the wealth generated by the world just to continue to exist. The United States has the least efficient health care system among first world nations. The United States has both the most prisoners in the world in sheer numbers and leads even by percentage of the population incarcerated (ahead of Russia, China, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba – what does that say about human rights). The ocean is literally drowning in plastic and slowly being poisoned. The ocean!

Qfactor loves her travel, buys airplanes and blames her daughter (she shouldn’t take it personally, Qfactor is the symptom and not the cause – just the concrete example). It’s not the millennials who are at fault – it’s those of us who knew better and chose not to do it or fight for it. The previous generation get a partial pass as they were fighting Hitler and did much to even the social system after the second world war – giving most of our parents the chance to do succeed. Success that we are busying trying to restrict again to only the children of the privileged.

Roman Slaves vs the H-1B and Service Jobs

Mick challenged my characterisation of the modern United States with Ancient Rome:

You are repeating a myth, promoted by conservative Roman thinkers, such as Cicero, or Augustus, for their own political purposes (purposes which are too complex to explain here shortly). Later on this same myth was kept alive by Christian thinkers in an attempt to justify their own anti-pagan campaigns.

It seems to me his characterisation of the Roman situation applies just as well to the United States of today as to Ancient Rome:

What is true in the myth is that because Romans imported so much slaves, many free farmers went bankrupt and this created a class of unemployed people who flocked into the capital, living dependent of donations from the rich people and the state.
What created this unemployed mass in the capital was ever increasing wealth disparity and the institution of slavery, not some mythical moral failure. The people who had money, bought slaves, and since the slaves worked for free, the free farmers could not compete against their work and went out of work. Then their lands were bought by the rich who sent slaves to farm them. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. (A nice predecessor for automation, btw).”

Mick notes the process is similar to automation. It’s also similar to outsourcing and to the H-1B exemption visas (which undercut American born programmers and devalue the not inconsiderable expense of a first rate technical education). Effectively Rome’s free farmers are today’s small businessmen and the “deplorables” living in flyover country. The same problems with Senate, Congress and the Presidency exist. Since unlimited corporate donation was permitted in 2014, effectively the United States live in a plutocracy of the multinational.

Anyone working a low-end service job today is effectively a slave. If the parents (or a rich aunt) have money, they can buy a modern slave out of slavery by giving him or her an education and opening some doors. Slaves were occasionally freed in Ancient Rome as well.

Noblesse Oblige or Revolution

What the elite of the United States seems to have forgotten (or never to have understood) is the concept of noblesse oblige. Those of us who are fortunate are ethically obliged to try to improve the lot of those less fortunate. That’s the core social contract of a healthy society.

Fairness can be implemented through either private (Henry Ford, the fair wage) or public means (European socialism) – the important element is the attempt to equal the playing field and the understanding of the rich that when they take too much they cripple society and cultivate revolution. Disparity is just too damn expensive in both material terms (crime, prisons, court systems) and quality of life (violent crime, no-go zones, police state).

The really rich think they are exempt from these quality of life issues thanks to high fences and private security. Ask John Paul Getty, sr, jr and III how that turned out. They would give you an earful. Or Roman Polanski when his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was taken from him. There are no fences high enough or security tight enough to ensure quality of life in a society wracked by disparity.

Retirement: we’re worried about our retirement (and for good reason), while other (working) people cannot feed their families tonight. It remains that land/property title will be the last of the investment categories to fail (apart from physical gold, although good luck with safe storage on that one). Hence even if you are a pessimist about the direction of modern society, rather than owning a large stock portfolio, it would be more prudent to slowly amass real estate through your working life.

None of this rules out speculative investment (bitcoin) or strategic investment (big medium term investments in sectors you know well for professional reasons).

Really Long Term Investment

Millennials like Qfactor’s daughter who believes that the current plutocratic and corrupt political structure needs reform and that we must de-fetishise consumption are the only ones fighting the good fight. Until we rebuilt our economic system on ecologically sound principles we are fighting each other over a shrinking prize. The amount of potable fresh water accessible to the cities of the world has fallen by about 30% in my lifetime, thanks to industry, transport and in North America, most of all fracking.

United States politicians are falling over each other to defang and destaff the EPA (it started long before Trump). Apparently Americans don’t need clean water. The US solution for the looming pension shortfall: kill everyone over fifty with cancer via water mains or via pesticides in your food. Killing and disposing of tens of millions of near retirement citizens is an enormous logistical challenge. What better way to do so than via the water mains and grocery shelves.

The millennials better come up with a better economic system than plutocratic war capitalism or the world they hand on to their children will be unrecognisable.