Vince Cable and I talked quite a bit at one time. Then he got into government and things changed and fault lines appeared. Well, so be it, but Vince spoke a lot of sense today when, according to the Guardian:
In keynote speech at Lib Dem conference, business secretary says reduction in inequality is needed to turn economy around as UK faces 'economic equivalent of war'
He's right. That is the state we face.
It's why I've been writing about nationalising banks.
The right (none of them from George Osborne to the lunatic fringes of his own party and on through UKIP to the libertarians) don't get this. It's as if they've massively overdosed on Hayek: a sharp bit of economic grief is good for us all they say - and didn't you know (they say) that all those unemployed are so either becasue a) they want to be or b) the state forced them to be and if only it stopped interfering in the economy all would be OK?
Well, Vince has this right. First, Hayek and those neoliberals who share his belief in markets if not al his solutions got things fundamentally wrong: there's no such thing as a market equilibrium for a start (shocking to those who are true believers, I know and a bit like denying the virgin birth as far as they're concerned - but much more far fetched when it comes to the conditions needed to believe it true).
So three things follow. First, Cable is right to challenge Osborne's policy of non-intervention from which only the rich can win (and that's his intention, of course). Second, we need to prepare for chaos, and failure to do so is gross irresponsibility. Third, don't be calm - get very, very angry with those on the right who are stupid enough to say everything is OK when it glaringly obviously isn't.
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It’s always been a war. It’s been that way for centuries. It’s between the people behind the banks who control the money supply and everyone else. It’s becoming overt now is the only new element,and that’s only new to us. It’s been widely known in periods of history before but that knowledge was forgotten before our day. Let’s hope this time we can break the cycle.
BB
I think the economic crisis is not “like a war” or the “economic equivalent of war”, it is a war. It’s the conceptual metaphor at the very core of capitalism. You’ll recall Carl von Clausewitz, “Rather than comparing [war] to art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities…”
In his 2001 book ‘The Shape of a Pocket’, by John Berger there’s an essay entitled ‘Against the Great Defeat of the World’. In it, Berger comments upon a letter written by Subcomandante Marcos in south-east Mexico two years earlier and published around the world.
“He (Marcos) sees the planet today as the battlefield of a Fourth World War. (The Third was the so called Cold War.) The aim of the belligerents is the conquest of the entire world through the market. The arsenals are financial; there are nevertheless millions of people being maimed or killed every moment. The aim of those waging the war is to rule the world from new, abstract power centres – megapoles of the market, which will be subject to no control except that of the logic of investment. Meanwhile nine-tenths of the women and men living on the planet live with the jagged pieces that do not fit.”
Berger then goes on to summarise the fragments, the pieces that do not fit. I quote it at length (though slightly edited and with you indulgence Richard) as it reads like the ConDem agenda or the consequences of the current dominant narrative.
“The first piece he named has a dollar sign on it and is green. The piece consists of the new concentration of global wealth in fewer and fewer hands and the unprecedented extension of hopeless poverties.
The second piece is triangular and consists of a lie. The new order claims to rationalise and modernise production and human endeavour. In reality it is a return to the barbarism of the beginnings of the industrial revolution, with the important difference this time round that the barbarism is unchecked by any opposing ethical consideration or principle.
The third piece is round like a vicious circle. It consists of enforced emigration. The more enterprising of those who have nothing try to emigrate to survive. Yet the new order works night and day according to the principle that anybody who does not produce, who does not consume, and who has no money to put into a bank, is redundant. So the emigrants, the landless, the homeless are treated as the waste matter of the system: to be eliminated.
The fourth piece is rectangular like a mirror. It consists of an ongoing exchange between the commercial banks and the world racketeers, for crime too has been globalised.
The fifth piece is more or less a pentagon. It consists of physical repression. The Nation
States under the new order have lost their economic independence, their political initiative and their sovereignty. The new task of the Nation States is to manage what is allotted to them, to protect the interests of the market’s megaenterprises and, above all, to control and police the redundant.
The sixth piece is the shape of a scribble and consists of breakages. On one hand, the new order does away with frontiers and distances by the instantaneous telecommunication … and deals, by obligatory free trade zones, and by the imposition everywhere of the single unquestionable law of the market; and on the other hand, it provokes fragmentation and the proliferation of frontiers by its undermining of the Nation State…
The seventh piece of the puzzle has the shape of a pocket, and consists of all the various pockets of resistance against the new order which are developing across the globe. The many pockets do not have a common political programme as such. How could they, existing as they do in the broken puzzle? Yet their heterogeneity may be a promise. What they have in common is their defence of the redundant, the next-to-be-eliminated, and their belief that the Fourth World War is a crime against humanity.
The seven pieces will never fit together to make any sense.”