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Global Power and Global Government: Evolution and Revolution of the Central Banking System Part 1
Andrew Gavin Marshall, Centre for Research on Globalisation
Humanity is on the verge of entering into the most tumultuous period in our history. The prospects of a global depression, the likes of which have never been seen before; a truly global war, on a scale never before imagined; and societal collapse, for which nations of the world are building totalitarian police states to control populations; are increasing by the day. The major global trend forecasters are sounding the alarms on economic depression, war, a return to fascism and a total reorganization of society. Through crisis, we are seeing the reorganization of the global political economy, and the transformation of capitalism into a totalitarian capitalist world government. Capitalism has never stayed the same through its history; it has always changed and will continue to do so. Its changes are explained and analyzed through political-economic theory, both mainstream theory and critical. The changes are undertaken over years, decades and centuries. The next phase of capitalism is one in which the world moves to a state-controlled economic system, much like China, of totalitarian capitalism.
Submitted by Steven Lesh, who writes:
This is a major essay covering, among other things, why economics as practiced today has little if any relevance. For starters, the author observes that economics has always been ‘political economics’. Sometime around the start of the 20th century, ‘somebody’ engineered a separation between political and economics in the offical, approved version of the subject. Before Marshall says “Central banking, however, is the pinnacle of the capitalist system..”, he has already said “Debt is the source of all power and wealth for the central banking system – as they do not actually produce any tradable good, such as industry; nor do they provide any necessary service, such as government.” Marshall explains that while capitalism requires growth (possibly, but debatable – what about creative destruction, negawatts, etc?), all banking, i.e. our current debt-based monetary system, requires is the expansion of debt. The consequences for ‘peak oil’, other forms of resource depletion and the enviroment may be the same. But the distinction is important.
Whatever your leanings in the politcal sphere, whatever you think you know about economics, this is an important essay.
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I find the tone of this whole essay overly dogmatic, but the historical review seems thorough and well-referenced. I look forward to seeing more of this series. – KS
(21 July 2009)
Candide’s Garden
Wolfram Eilenberger, Spiegel Online International
Anyone who now wants to talk about the future of Europe must first grasp the fact that we are — at this moment — experiencing a European utopia that has been cultivated for millennia.
The dogma-free, democratic marketplace of ideas, for which Socrates gave his life in Athens, is today a communicative reality in which hundreds of millions of citizens are actively taking part. The spirit of scientific methodology and veracity embodied by Bacon, Descartes, and Newton as a measure of the collective interpretation of the world is driving a community of researchers that is unique in its diversity. The federal confederacy based on fundamental human rights that Erasmus and Kant envisaged as the “kingdom of ends” is now our political order. The collective safeguarding of physical and intellectual basic rights that Aristotle recognized as the foundation of every polity, and the ethically concerned liberalism of Adam Smith are guiding the logic of our economic activity. And finally, the vision of a secular, active, multilingual life elevated by Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe as the core of what it means to be human accurately describes our cultural existence today as nascent Europeans.
We are not dealing here with poetry or philosophical pipe dreams, but rather an empirically demonstrable reality. The European Union in the year 2009 represents a world-historical optimum. Never before have 500 million people united under a single political order been better off. Never before have they been as free, as healthy, or as well educated; and never before have they been as peaceful. To be sure, it is the systemic improbability of this state of affairs that lends a certain credence to the current pessimism about the future.
A World of Autarchic Zones
To formulate a prognosis for European development within the global context we must reconsider two common assumptions about the future of globalization. First, the process of the compression of global time and space as the formative feature of recent globalization will not continue. Recent decades have been marked by a compression of global time, within which each event can be chronologically observed, communicated, and evaluated at any location throughout the world in real time. This panoptic process is now complete and is irreversible. However, it is difficult to see what technologies, except maybe teleporting, could contribute to a more connected and synchronized world.
The last thirty years have also had a world-historical significance with regard to the compression of global space: international mobility has become a mass phenomenon; the globe has become circumnavigable within 36 hours for every citizen and commodity of the industrialized world. This process will not just slow, it will be reversed. By 2030 the social, political, and economic significance of spatial distance will have increased. Put simply, the world will become bigger again.
Instead of a globalized world economy that crosses continental barriers with ease, we will see continental autarchic zones being formed that will be shaped by the military defense of the basic resources available in each zone. We will thus see the logic of imperial expansion replaced by an aspiration to autarchic inclusion (already the EU strategy). The internal market of each zone will reassume economic primacy. This process does not have to end in war. It could well take an ordered course and lead to a multipolar equilibrium, the stability of which — like that of the Cold War — is guaranteed by an awareness of what military options are not available.
Based on these assumptions, two conclusions can be drawn for Europe. First, strengthening the EU confederation remains the only rational way forward, although this only makes sense if it entails the formation of a (nuclear armed) European army. Second, no comparable state formation is better equipped and structured to deal with the new era of autarchic zones than Europe.
In cultural terms, Europe is equipped with a plurality of languages that lends itself to innovation as well as a global lingua franca: English (though by 2030 Spanish will be the European Union’s second main language). It is not burdened by any politically effective fundamentalisms, and Europe’s communications and transportation infrastructure leads the world. The thesis of a relative optimum also holds in demographic terms. Overall European demographic decline is not critical. Shortages can be supplemented — because Europe can afford it — by highly selective immigration policies. And European children born today, who will constitute the core of our labor force in 2030, are the world’s healthiest.
Furthermore, Europe is optimally suited to the autarchic era in ecological-economic terms. As an internal market, Europe has the capacity to establish an equilibrium that ensures relative prosperity. It has an agricultural system that has been sustainably diversified over millennia (again, as an exclusive autarchic zone) and that will continue to have access to sufficient water. And whatever the concrete effects of climate change prove to be in the coming half-century, a united Europe will as a whole be the least disadvantaged by them. Not even Europe’s cultural self-characterization as one world power among many will need adjustment.
(22 July 2009)
I find the tone of this essay rather self-congratulatory, isolationist, and frankly, somewhat scary in its calm and collected call for a “nuclear-armed Europe”, but I find it quite interesting that Dr. Eilenberger seems to be taking the opposite tack to Mr. Marshall on which sorts of government(s) the world is heading for! I also take issue with the statement that “…the ethically concerned liberalism of Adam Smith are guiding the logic of our economic activity.” As Gavin Marshall points out, Adam Smith’s economic philosophy seen in context might be much more “ethically concerned” than it is commonly perceived to be now, but the “logic” of the current free market seems to be much more concerned with shareholder profits than ethics. Of course, since the worst effects of current American and EU free trade policies are evidenced in the developing world, these can be taken as some of that “..dreadful news from other parts of the world” that will occasionally force itself in behind the “walls” of the well-fed and protected EU “garden”. – KS
Resilient Cities – planners post their visions (Book review)
Russ Grayson, Pacific Edge
Book review – Newman P, Beatley T, Boyer H; 2009; Resilient Cities – responding to peak oil and climate change; Island Press, Washington DC.
A couple weeks ago, I received a phone call from a woman in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. She wanted to know if the Department could use a short piece from something I had written in a set of guidelines they were producing. The guidelines, she explained, were for other levels of government and institutions to use when thinking about how to make communities more resilient. It was then that it dawned on me just how far this notion of resilient communities has gone and how broad is the depth of interest in it…
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Necessary reading
This is exactly the sort of book Transition Initiative people and their fellow travelers, permaculturists, should take the time to read. The synchronous peak oil-climate change challenge to our resource intensive cities is analysed, as is the nature of the climatic and energy threats. After creating a typology of four urban future scenarios, the authors go on to describe visions and hopes for sustainable cities. What is good is that there are many examples of positive responses drawn from Australia.
What is also of interest, to those active in the permaculture and Transition movements, anyway, is the revelation of how permaculture is perceived by planning and design professionals working in education and sustainability practice. The authors certainly take permaculture seriously, however they remain critical of its approach to an oil-depleted and climatically-altered future for our cities.
Why this is important is because these people are influential. They frame thinking about permaculture and affect how others perceive it. Permaculture, Transitions and related approaches to sustainable development at the community level all circulate in the public marketplace for ideas, something that makes how they are perceived critical to their future opportunities.
This is revealed in the chapter describing four scenarios for the future of cities. Drawing up scenarios is a way of thinking about the future that has now been in use for decades and has been adopted by a range of organisations in society, including business. One of its advantages is that it engages the imagination to envision alternative futures based on current and likely events and trends, as well as unexpected events, and allows you to step out along exploratory pathways of the imagination in considering how things could unfold from different starting conditions and how they might be responded to.
What becomes clear as you read the book is that the authors are familiar with the different scenarios, including those of Richard Heinberg and David Holmgren. Heinberg, an American, toured with David Holmgren several years ago to alert Australian audiences to the challenge offered by the peaking of global oil supplies. The authors have done their research and, to that, they add their extensive and more than credible knowledge developed of years of experience.
The four urban scenarios the authors explore are: collapse, ruralisation, the divided city and the resilient city. Transition and permaculture interests might wonder why the ruralised city and the resilient city are treated separately, for surely they are the same? Hasn’t permaculture’s Bill Mollison and David Holmgren painted them as such? Well, it turns out that they are not the same and that, for the authors, the resilient city is the preferred future…
(11 July 2009)
Contributed by Hopedance Magazine editor Bob Banner
And again…different visions of the future…- KS
