[MD] Free Speech

[William Robinson]

Gav provided the link to the President of Iran's Blog last Wednesday.

Contrary to early expectations the open letter the American people was not
completely covered up by the American news media. A scewed version of a
story appeared in the L A Times last Thursday. Buried on page A10.

My reading of the open letter show it to be reasonable.  Many of the values
expressed in the open letter to the American people could have been written
by our own founding fathers. See for your self by visiting the link Gav
provided last Wednesday. Unless you are fluent in Farsi. Press the English
button and then read the contents of the letter.

These are the words of one of the major players, who will need to be
negotiated with if American is ever able to extract itself from the
increasingly untenable situation that is evolving in Iraq.

My response to this situation is best expressed by Peter Montague whose
letter I adopt and present herein:

 By Peter Montague
In releasing their report, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scientific
board of directors
did not mince words: "At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning.
Human activity
is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of
the planet's
ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for
granted," *they said .*

Here we continue describing the new world that has evolved during the past
50 years.

In the past 50 years, corporations have grown almost unimaginably
influential. Originally
invented as a way for entrepreneurs to raise capital from strangers,
publicly-traded corporations
have proven to be extraordinarily successful and they have grown steadily,
year by year.
In many cases, growing bigger has become their main purpose.

In the past 50 years -- between 1955 and 2004 -- large corporations came to
thoroughly
dominate the U.S. economy. In 1955, sales of the Fortune
500<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_500>corporations accounted
for 1/3 of gross domestic product (GDP). By 2004, sales of the Fortune 500
amounted
to 2/3rds of GDP, a major consolidation of wealth and power. [1, pg.
22<http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-1576753611-0>]


Peter Barnes -- co-founder of the Working Assets Long Distance phone company
-- describes
some additional changes that have occurred during the past 50 years. In his
must-read new
book, Capitalism 3.0; A Guide to Reclaiming the
Commons<http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-1576753611-0>,
Barnes points out that, 50 years ago
capitalism entered a new phase. Up to that time, people had wanted more
goods than the
economy could supply. After 1950, there was essentially no limit to what
corporations
could produce. Their new problem was finding buyers.

Others have remarked on this shift as well. In 1967 in The New Industrial
State <http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-112211236x-1>, John Kenneth
Galbraith observed that large corporations require stability and so they
must control both
supply and demand. To control demand, they manufacture wants. In 1950,
everyone's basic
physical needs could be met, so to promote growth, corporations had to learn
to manufacture
desire. Physical wants are limited but, properly stimulated, desires can
become infinite.

You might ask, given that the economy can now satisfy everyone's physical
needs, providing
the basics of a good life, why do we need to manufacture desire to stimulate
growth?
Because growth is what provides return on investment.

The amount of money available for profitable investment expands
exponentially year after year.
Therefore, it is essential to keep demand (desire) growing apace -- to
create new opportunities
for investors to earn a decent rate of return year after year. The U.S. spent
$263 billion on
advertising<http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/accommodation_food_other_services/services.pdf>
in 2004, largely to stimulate desire. Despite this, production continues to
outpace effective demand.

In his book, The Return of Depression
Economics<http://www.powells.com/biblio/16-039304839x-2>(1999),
Princeton economist Paul Krugman
pointed out that inadequate demand (the flip side of overproduction) is now
a worldwide
problem. He wrote, "What does it mean to say that depression economics has
returned?
Essentially it means that for the first time in two generations [50 years],
failures on the demand
side of the economy -- insufficient private spending to make use of
available productive capacity
-- have become the clear and present limitation on prosperity for a large
part of the world." (pg. 155)
Overcapacity is chronic.

In the U.S., there have been two major responses to declining opportunities
for a decent return
on investment. One solution has been to invent new ways of manipulating
money. As Peter Barnes
points out, today "the world is awash with capital, most of it devoted to
speculation."

If we take Barne's word "speculation" to mean, loosely, the manipulation of
money itself for
profit, then speculators have indeed grown more important in the
U.S.economy in the last 50 years.
Corporate profits of the financial
industry<http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/15feb20061000/www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/2006/B91.xls>in
the
U.S. in 1959 were 15% of total corporate profits;
by 2004 the financial industry's profits represented 36% of total
U.S.corporate profits. In round
numbers, manipulating money now accounts for 40% of all corporate profits.

The second major response to limited investment opportunities has been
"globalization" --
creation of a new set of rules that essentially erase national borders, so
that materials and
capital are now free to flow to wherever costs are lowest. Now if investors
see an opportunity
to gain a decent return by, say, manufacturing toothpicks by cutting down
Indonesian rain forests,
they are free to move their money there instantaneously to take advantage of
the opportunity.
Within the U.S., this has worked out well for investors but it has not been
quite so beneficial
for the working class or the middle class. As an editorial writer for the
New York Times pointed
out in 2002 <http://www.precaution.org/lib/globalization.020818.htm>,
"Globalization has been good for the United States, but even in this
country, the
gains go disproportionately to the wealthy and to big business."
Globalization has been one of the
factors that has consolidated wealth in fewer and fewer hands in recent
years.[2]

Globalization also helps explain another important feature of the new world
-- the expanding
U.S. military. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pointed out in
1998 in an article<http://www.precaution.org/lib/global_market_needs_hidden_fist.19980418.htm>
about the global spread of electronic inventions, "The hidden hand of the
global market would
never work without the hidden fist. And the hidden fist that keeps the world
safe for Silicon Valley's
technologies to flourish is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy
and Marine Corps..."
The current U.S. military budget of $450 billion -- equal to the military
budgets of all other
nations combined -- is another aspect of the need to keep growth going, to
create opportunities for investors.

As a result of these trends in the past 50 years, 5% of the U.S. population
now owns more private
wealth<http://www.precaution.org/lib/inequality_in_the_us.030501.htm>
than the other 95%.

Naturally, this 5% has gained outsized power to go with its outsized wealth.
No one begrudges the fortunate
their fortunes (almost all of us think it is better to be rich than not
rich), but democracy assumes that
everyone has approximately equal standing. Our system of governance is
legitimized by the premise,
one person, one vote, not one dollar, one vote. Since money talks -- or, in
the case of the top 5%,
money screams -- we can no longer say we have even the pretense of a
democracy <http://www.powells.com/biblio/7-0767905342-2>. Instead,
we have a plutocracy<http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_phillips.html>--
rule by wealth -- and one wholly devoted to economic growth.

As economist Herman Daly
observed<http://www.precaution.org/lib/steady_state_economy_and_peak_oil.060509.txt>not
long ago, we now have a "religious commitment to growth
as the central organizing principle of society. Even as growth becomes
uneconomic we think we must
continue with it because it is the central myth, the social glue that holds
our society together."
 So even though economic growth is shredding the biosphere, causing more
harm than good (which is
what Daly means when he says growth has become "uneconomic"), it is heresy
to try to imagine a
different way of being on the planet.

This is a uniquely modern puzzle -- we have a deep religious commitment to
an idea that was once true,
but is now false, and which is destroying the future.
[To be continued but not next week.



On 12/3/06, LARAMIE LOEWEN <jeffersonrank1 at msn.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> Jim Marino has posted some important information at his blog
> today.  Please
> share this with as many people as you know.  You will be helping to
> uncover
> the most insidious fraud in history!
>
> http://9-11themotherofallblackoperations.blogspot.com<
> http://9-11themotherofallblackoperations.blogspot.com/>
>
> Cheers,
> Laramie
>
> P.S. Make no mistake, it's irrepressible DQ they are after.
> moq_discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
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