[kublikhan]

Head over to BuisinessWeek and check out the headlines. Every story is on the bleak economic picture. I don't recall ever seeing so much bad news:

MadOff Investor Commits Suicide

Home Prices And Sales Plummet

The Consumer Electronics Inventory Glut

The Rise Of The 4 Day Work Week

States In Worst Budget Trouble

World Bank: Russia May Need Help If Oil Falls More

Blunder: A New Age For Russia

Auto Bailout

AIG's Deal Machine Is Still In First Gear

I'll stop now before I fill up the entire page.....

[pedalling_faster]

World Bank: Russia May Need Help If Oil Falls More

part of US foreign policy in the '90's was to drive the price of oil down as a geo-political tool, to deprive nations like Russia of oil revenues.

Cold War policy 101, although the Cold War was supposed to have ended about sometimes during Bush 41's term.

[Revi]

It is amazing how much bad news is out there. It's like a Peak Oil
forum list. We don't even have to come to this site for our daily dose of doom. I think the rest of the world is getting it now.

[ReverseEngineer]

It is amazing how much bad news is out there. It's like a Peak Oil
forum list. We don't even have to come to this site for our daily dose of doom. I think the rest of the world is getting it now.

Remarkably, an astounding number of people STILL tell me, "Oh, its always like this. War and Rumours of War. People are always starving. Rich people are always getting away with murder" etc etc etc.

For most people, they simply will not acknowledge bad news until it hits them right over the head with a sledge hammer. The denial instinct is strong, you see it here on Doom Central PO.com even. No matter how cogently you go through the problems, SOMEBODY(won't mention any names) will argue with you and tell you no its not really so bad, just a recession with an L shaped graph like Roubini says. LOL.

When the rest of the world really DOES get it, that will be interesting. At the point the zeitgeist becomes not "we will come out of this eventually" but "we are DOOMED to 300 years of endless death and destruction", I think we will see even more Falling Stockbrokers and Postal events than we are seeing already.

How many people really are psychologically prepared for the fact that LAWKI is at an end, and they will about surely be in desperate poverty in a few years, if they are lucky enough to be alive? This is not an easy thing to wrap your mind around of course, we see the problem with it in the daily arguments here on PO.com.

It is coming out more and more in the MSM all the time though. You just can't can't keep a lid on Armageddon forever.

Reverse Engineer

[Cog]

I still see CNBC has those economists on that say by the second quarter we should be coming out of the recession. I don't know where they got their degree but they sure aren't seeing the economy that I am. If we do come out of this at all, we are talking years and not months.

[americandream]

Marx observed that capitalism moved in cycles of boom and bust, as the rise of each cycle was accompanied by a variety of innovations, in order to transcend the bust of the previous cycle, in a quest for growth.

More ominously however, he concluded that there would come a time when the system's inner contradictions of infinite growth versus finite capacity will no longer reconcile giving rise to a spontaneous will for change.

[dorlomin]

I think the rest of the world is getting it now.

Its like the fore shadowing in a symphony. They are percieving the shape of things to come.


They are most certainly not getting it.

[americandream]

I still see CNBC has those economists on that say by the second quarter we should be coming out of the recession. I don't know where they got their degree but they sure aren't seeing the economy that I am. If we do come out of this at all, we are talking years and not months.

We will come out of this.

I'm not entirely convinced that these are the final days of capitalism although I suspect that this is the beginning of the end for capitalism's propaganda advantage over marxism seeing as this is what I would term the point of capitalism's peaking.

Much like the peaking of oil and possibly due to the the onset of crude depletion, we are now on the downslope of the growth paradigm where each bust will be progressively more debilitating.

There are no certainties anymore other than the certainty of increasingly harder times for the majority of us.

[AlexdeLarge]

I still see CNBC has those economists on that say by the second quarter we should be coming out of the recession. I don't know where they got their degree but they sure aren't seeing the economy that I am. If we do come out of this at all, we are talking years and not months.

Pretty talking heads. Out only to sell products to the masses. Even if they are aware of the truth, they would not tell the public. They are just salespeople.

[Ache]

More ominously however, he concluded that there would come a time when the system's inner contradictions of infinite growth versus finite capacity will no longer reconcile giving rise to a spontaneous will for change.

Would you care to provide some links to where Marx ever mentioned infinite growth versus finite capacity

[ReverseEngineer]

More ominously however, he concluded that there would come a time when the system's inner contradictions of infinite growth versus finite capacity will no longer reconcile giving rise to a spontaneous will for change.

Would you care to provide some links to where Marx ever mentioned infinite growth versus finite capacity

I couldn't find that with a Google search, but I did find this

Fictitious capital is that proportion of capital which cannot be simultaneously converted into existing use-values. It is an invention which is absolutely necessary for the growth of real capital, it constitutes the symbol of confidence in the future. It is a necessary but costly fiction, and sooner or later it crashes to earth.

Marx did not fully elaborate his views on credit and fictitious capital before his death. What he had written on the subject is presented by Engels in Volume III of Capital, particularly Part V. For example:

“... a large portion of this money-capital is always necessarily purely fictitious, that is, a title to value – just as paper money. In so far as money functions in the circuit of capital, it constitutes indeed, for a moment, money-capital; ... it exists only in the form of claims to capital. With the assumption made, the accumulation of these claims arises from actual accumulation, that is, from the transformation of the value of commodity-capital, etc., into money; but nevertheless the accumulation of these claims or titles as such differs from the actual accumulation from which it arises ....

“Prima facie loan capital always exists in the form of money, later as a claim to money, since the money in which it originally exists is now in the hands of the borrower in actual money-form. For the lender it has been transformed into a claim to money, into a title of ownership. The same mass of actual money can, therefore, represent very different masses of money-capital. ... With the growth of material wealth the class of money-capitalists grows; on the one hand, the number and the wealth of retiring capitalists, rentiers, increases; and on the other hand, the development of the credit system is promoted, thereby increasing the number of bankers, money-lenders, financiers, etc. With the development of the available money-capital, the quantity of interest-bearing paper, government securities, stocks, etc., also grows as we have previously shown. However, at the same time the demand for available money-capital also grows, the jobbers, who speculate with this paper, playing a prominent role on the money-market. If all the purchases and sales of this paper were only an expression of actual investments of capital, it would be correct to say that they could have no influence on the demand for loan capital, since when A sells his paper, he draws exactly as much money as B puts into the paper. But even if the paper itself exists though not the capital (at least not as money-capital) originally represented by it, it always creates pro tanto a new demand for such money-capital..” [Capital Volume III, Chapter 32]

Throughout its history, capitalism has experienced its business cycles. Roughly every ten years, the mass of fictitious capital grows while trade is good, and then, as the capacity of the workers to sustain the mass of hangers on reaches its limits, the downturn gathers momentum and fictitious capital is wiped out, and the cycle begins again.

Basically it defines all of Capitalism as a massive Ponzi Scheme, which it is of course. You can read further about the boom and bust cycles prior to the Great Depression and the aftermath of that inclucing WWII and Bretton Woods here:

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/f/i.htm

Though the words "finite" and "infinite aren't used, you can read it in the sutext of the principles here. The idea that you keep creating new money infinitely until the real base no longer supports the fictitious money, which is the finite limit to the growth.

Marxist economics actually are more accurate than Keynesian Economics, its not the principles that are so bad, its the general application that gets screwed up. However, you could make the case it doesn't screw up as awfully and with so much regularity as Capitalism does.

Be it known here for those that don't, I am NOT a Marxist or Communist, though you find me defending some of this stuff often enough. I'm a Tribalist who does not believe in money or property ownership. Large states under any system are bound to be corrupted. Given you DO have a large state though and have to manage a downspin, Marxist economics are WAY better than Keynesian economics.

Reverse Engineer

[IslandCrow]

One more headline for the list:

Cocoa prices hit 23 year high

This is for foreward contracts so should hit all the Easter egg production.

[InToWishin]

Death of a Nation
[flash width=425 height=344]http://www.youtube.com/v/jeK6spOIVro[/flash]

Post Soviet Union Russia loses much of its population
and develops major class discrepancies.

Who's next?

[vision-master]

Secret donor gives $1 million to Burnsville fire victims

Dozens of families left homeless after a fire at a Burnsville apartment complex have an early Christmas present waiting for them — a $1 million donation.

An anonymous donor contributed the money Tuesday to a community fund set up by the Goodman Group, the Chaska-based firm that owns and manages the Burncliff Apartments.

The contribution averages more than $15,000 for each of the 64 households left homeless by Monday's blaze, which displaced nearly 200 people.

http://www.twincities.com/news/ci_11299848?source=rss

[Cloud9]

Russian capitalism is where American capitalism was in the 1890's. They need to read Jefferson and come up with a Russian dream. Otherwise, they are going to become a Chineses colony.

[InToWishin]

Secret donor gives $1 million to Burnsville fire victims

Dozens of families left homeless after a fire at a Burnsville apartment complex have an early Christmas present waiting for them — a $1 million donation.

An anonymous donor contributed the money Tuesday to a community fund set up by the Goodman Group, the Chaska-based firm that owns and manages the Burncliff Apartments.

The contribution averages more than $15,000 for each of the 64 households left homeless by Monday's blaze, which displaced nearly 200 people.

http://www.twincities.com/news/ci_11299848?source=rss

We need a bucket brigade of anonymous million dollar donations.

U.S. Initial Jobless Claims Rise to 26-Year High

Initial jobless claims increased more than forecast to 586,000, the most since November 1982, from a revised 556,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said today in Washington.

TOPWRAP 6-U.S. falls deeper into recession

Zavvi, the CDs, DVDs, gaming and books retailer, became the third British high street victim of the crisis in less than 24 hours.

Historic Pleasanton Hotel won't have happy New Year

A business that has long stood as a landmark to visitors entering Pleasanton's quaint historic Main Street shopping district will greet 2009 by shutting down.

[cube]

Marx observed that capitalism moved in cycles of boom and bust,...

Did he truly observed that?
If so then he should of became a day-trader.

[shortonoil]

americandream said:

We will come out of this.

I'm not entirely convinced that these are the final days of capitalism although I suspect that this is the beginning of the end for capitalism's propaganda advantage over marxism seeing as this is what I would term the point of capitalism's peaking.

We may come out of this, if one interprets something that may happen 40 years into the future as coming out. Any hope of anything sooner is a display of non quantitive hysteria backed by dissolute irrational optimism.

The US has lost 1/3 of its present net book value in the last 18 months from bond and equity declines. There is no argument worth mentioning that suggests that the outcome for the next 18 months is going to be any different. Global trade is in a state of collapse as seen by the 93% decline in the Dry Baltic index and 60% in container shipments. Japanese exports were dropping at an annual rate of 27% last month. The world's banking system is insolvent and is only being maintained by huge injections of liquidity from central banks. Those same central banks are now themselves rapidly approaching the tip over point.

We are witnessing not only an unprecedented economic dislocation, but a monetary unravelling which appears to be unrivaled in depth in modern history. The effects of the approaching end of the fossil fuel age, and the very predictable collapse of debt based fiat currencies are collaborating to produce a tsunami which is about to wash over modern civilization.

It is now apparent that no government, central bank or transglobal corporation can stand in the wake of the juggernaut of bankruptcies now preparing to cascade around the planet. To argue some arcane dictum about capitalism vs socialism is as vapid as discussing the dichotomy built into the propaganda machine's smoke vs mirrors.


Available Energy

[ReverseEngineer]

americandream said:

We will come out of this.

I'm not entirely convinced that these are the final days of capitalism although I suspect that this is the beginning of the end for capitalism's propaganda advantage over marxism seeing as this is what I would term the point of capitalism's peaking.

We may come out of this, if one interprets something that may happen 40 years into the future as coming out. Any hope of anything sooner is a display of non quantitive hysteria backed by dissolute irrational optimism.

The US has lost 1/3 of its present net book value in the last 18 months from bond and equity declines. There is no argument worth mentioning that suggests that the outcome for the next 18 months is going to be any different. Global trade is in a state of collapse as seen by the 93% decline in the Dry Baltic index and 60% in container shipments. Japanese exports were dropping at an annual rate of 27% last month. The world's banking system is insolvent and is only being maintained by huge injections of liquidity from central banks. Those same central banks are now themselves rapidly approaching the tip over point.

We are witnessing not only an unprecedented economic dislocation, but a monetary unravelling which appears to be unrivaled in depth in modern history. The effects of the approaching end of the fossil fuel age, and the very predictable collapse of debt based fiat currencies are collaborating to produce a tsunami which is about to wash over modern civilization.

It is now apparent that no government, central bank or transglobal corporation can stand in the wake of the juggernaut of bankruptcies now preparing to cascade around the planet. To argue some arcane dictum about capitalism vs socialism is as vapid as discussing the dichotomy built into the propaganda machine's smoke vs mirrors.


Available Energy

+1 Well said Short

Reverse Engineer