ECONOMIC TROUBLES, COMMITMENT TO SOLVE POVERTY

ECONOMIC TROUBLES, COMMITMENT TO SOLVE POVERTY

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Unbridled free market capitalism, the last stage of ‘late’ capitalism, has finally experienced a meltdown. The meltdown of 2007 through 2008 has shown that the system is unsustainable in the long run, and the search for a way out is too tough a task.

The market reforms being done to address them are failing, and that a downward spiral from the Northern ailing economies is threatening the global economy as a whole. Whether the economic decay and potential damages from a new fallout should lead to the folding up of commitments to solve poverty—to meet the UN’s Millenium Development Goals or MDG—is a subject of debates among legislators and bureaucrats.

One option that is being waged by the United Nations is to look at economic troubles as providing impetus for greater commitments to salve lingering poverty. Below is the report from the UNDP about this option.

[Philippines, 02 October 2011]

Source: http://www.beta.undp.org/undp/en/home/presscenter/pressreleases/2011/09/16/un-economic-troubles-make-delivery-on-anti-poverty-commitments-even-more-urgent.html

UN: Economic troubles make delivery on anti-poverty commitments even more urgent

16 September 2011

New York – Due to economic difficulties since the 2008 financial melt down, many developing countries need to channel an additional 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product to achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a UN report out today contends. But support from donors, although up sharply since the inauguration of the MDGs in the year 2000, none the less is falling short of agreed targets.

“This report challenges the international community and other stakeholders to intensify their efforts to realize the potential of the global partnership for development,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Kimoon, who launched the UN’s MDG Gap Task Force report today in New York.

“The stakes are high, but so are the rewards,” he added.

A deadlock in the Doha Round negotiations, for example, has frustrated opportunities for rapid advancement through trade, a traditional means by which nations lift themselves out of poverty, the report says. Agreements at the 2011 UN conference on the 48 Least Developed Countries (Istanbul) to step up market-opening and capacity-building measures offer one hopeful alternative, especially in

light of the lack of substantial improvements in market access of LDC exports since 2004.

The UN report also warns against trade protectionism in response to slow economic growth, as a self-defeating measure that would also penalize poor countries.

Official development assistance (ODA) from traditional donors has more than doubled since 2000, reaching a record $129 billion in2010. But the 2010 total still falls $21 billion short of commitments made in2005 at the G8 Summit in Glen eagles, the report finds, and is less than half of the total needed to fulfill the longstanding target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income of traditional donors.

Millennium Development Goal 8, covering the international partnership, aims to create an enabling environment for poverty eradication through a fair and open trading system, substantial increase in development assistance, poor-country debt relief and improved terms of access of the developing world to medicines and technology. (Goals 1 – 7 target hunger, extreme poverty, disease, environmental degradation and obstacles to the advancement of women and to achieving universal primary education.)

Removal of the burden of unsustainable debt from many poor countries is another area in which the international environment has improved since 2000. But recent financial turmoil has caused some backsliding. The report cites the International Monetary Fund’s identification of 19 developing countries that are in debt distress or at high risk, including eight that earlier benefited from debt relief.

Enter new donors and trading partners

Part of the slack in the delivery of international support has been taken up by developing countries, especially the dynamic emerging market economies.

By 2008, “South-South” cooperation flows had already reached$15 billion – a 78 per cent rise over a two-year period – and are still growing. The share of LDC exports to developing countries increased to 49 percent in 2009, up from 45 per cent in 2006, and China, for instance, pledged zero-tariffs on more goods imported from LDCs, as well as continued debt cancellation.

Also picking up steam are innovative means to raise resources for development finance, such as voluntary donations of one or two dollars on airline ticket purchases. Nevertheless, increased commitments from traditional donors are urgently required, the report says. And even before the financial turmoil of recent months, ODA budgets were pegged by the Development Assistance Committee members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to rise only by a modest 2 per cent per annum over the next three years, compared to 8 per cent during the previous triennium.

Poor countries work towards MDG targets on the ground

The Secretary-General is also urging developing nations tostep up efforts in the drive to reach the MDG targets by the 2015 deadline.

In a separate but related report prepared for the September session of the UN General Assembly (document A/66/126), he analyzes actions by developing countries that have underpinned substantial albeit uneven progress towards the Goals and are key to continued gains.

Macroeconomic policies need to support job creation as well as economic growth, says the report on “accelerating progress towards the Millennium Development Goals”. Unlocking the potential of agriculture and the rural sector is a key to advancement in low-income countries, and all developing countries need to explore new ways to ensure sustainable growth and manage environmental conditions. The Secretary-General also emphasizes increased coverage by social insurance programmes, application of a human rights and gender equality framework for MDG achievement, and good governance.

Addressing the need to close the gap on wide and affordable access to medicines (essential medicines are available in only 42 per cent of public sector facilities in developing countries, according to the Task Force report), countries such as India have stepped in by producing low-cost generic drugs.

“The case of India illustrates how intellectual property policy can be used to increase access to affordable HIV medicines in developing countries,” the UN report says. “The Indian pharmaceutical industry is highly export-oriented and, by utilizing the transition period, became a major supplier of generic medicine and low-cost ARVs to developing countries.”

The report was written by the Secretary-General’s MDG Gap Task Force, which brings together more than 20 UN agencies, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. At the Millennium Summit in 2000, world leaders pledged to “create an environment at the national and global levels conducive to development and to the elimination of poverty.” At an MDG Summit in September 2010, world leaders re-committed to strengthening the global partnership to “keep the promises.”

With only four more years until the target year, the report tells world leaders that it is “time to deliver.”

For more information, see www.un.org/esa/policy/mdggap

Contact Information

UN Department of Public Information

Timothy Wall,
Tel. +1 212 963 5851;
e-mail wallt@un.org
Wynne Boelt,
Tel. +1 212 963 8264;
e-mail boelt@un.orgUN

Development ProgrammeSandra Macharia,
Tel +1 212 906 5377;
e-mail sandra.macharia@undp.org

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EMERGING MARKETS JOCKEY FOR IMF ECHELON, FRENCH OLIGARCHIC PUPPET GETS POST

EMERGING MARKETS JOCKEY FOR IMF ECHELON, FRENCH OLIGARCHIC PUPPET GETS POST

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Emerging markets are currently contesting for top posts in the Jurassic IMF. The downfall of Strauss-Khan, former managing director of the said bank, highlighted the deep crisis that has beset the bank lately, a crisis that threatens its very own legitimacy.

My position about the IMF was clear since the middle of last decade yet: abolish the bank, and let the member nations concur a new global financial architecture. The IMF was used by Western financier oligarchs to bleed the 3^rd world to bone dry misery, it is a thug bank that clobbered member nations in order to fatten the purse of select financier families, and it continues to make members such as Greece suffer via forced austerity programs.

At any rate, just recently the French finance minister, Madame Legard, was selected to replace Strauss-Khan. What do we expect, that the evil Western financiers will permit the ‘Mandingo nations’ to get that juicy post?

Below is an update from the DevEx regarding the debates and actions by member nations regarding the Jurassic thug bank.

[Philippines, 03 July 2011]

From: DevEx – http://www.devex.com

In IMF Leadership Debate, Emerging Countries Renew Push for Greater Representation in International Forums

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the world’s top emerging economies, released on Wednesday (May 25) a joint statement where they dismissed as obsolete the existing convention of naming a European to the top job at the International Monetary Fund. The IMF directors from these countries stressed that the next IMF managing director should be the best candidate chosen through a merit-based and transparent process, not on the basis of nationality.

The joint statement is the latest, and perhaps most concrete and concerted, effort by emerging countries to assert their voice at IMF. Emerging and developing countries, particularly the so-called BRICS countries, have been pushing for more representation at IMF and a chance to have a candidate from their ranks lead the organization.

This push by emerging nations for a bigger say in IMF appears to be part of a broader campaign of middle-income countries for a more prominent role in the international community. China, for instance, continues to expand its assistance program in Africa, while India, Brazil and South Africa are also positioning themselves as “alternative” sources of development finance.

This campaign is not going unnoticed. The “traditional” donors, in particular, are beginning to recognize the changing global political and financial landscape: The United Kingdom recently indicated its intention to engage with emerging nations, while the United States has already entered into several partnerships with Brazil.

In IMF itself, emerging nations have been “victorious” in having European countries agree to cede some of their seats in the fund’s executive board in their favor. This deal, sealed in October 2010, increased the emerging countries' influence and voting power in the board, but they are still less influential than industrial countries, particularly the United States. Whether this increased clout will contribute to their campaign to end Europe’s dominance of IMF remains to be seen.

SCUTTLE EU NOW, BEFORE 4TH REICH OPTION AWAKENS!

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


Magandang hapon! Good afternoon!

I have no wish to intervene in the internal affairs of Europe. However, judging by the flow of events in the continent, from the signing of the earlier treaties through the monetary union and the Lisbon Treaty, there has been a clear sign of concurring agreements without the benefit of public consensus.

True, there were debates about the formation of the Union from its earlier days as an energy coalition through the birth of the Eurozone and finally the Lisbon Treaty. But the signing of treaties has been a monopoly of bureaucrats and technocrats who do not the least show accountability towards the great mass of struggling Europeans.

Now that the Eurozone is in trouble, which further threatens the continent with a gigantic crash that could be worst than the USA’s, the prospects of more Draconian measures of implementation and austerity measures imposed on member countries are getting more real.

Let us just hope that the increasing chaos of events in the EU won’t lead to the dreaded hyper-inflation, an ailment that crippled the late Weimar Republic and paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power. Already, the doors of Europe are opening for new fascist movements arising, movements that could very well serve the interest of the bureaucrats & technocrats working for the fat financiers led by the House of Rothschild.

If there is any unsolicited advise I can offer to the Europeans, it is this: scuttle the Union now while there’s still time. A gigantic maelstrom is gathering in your backyard, which could lead to the rise of a 4th Reich of sorts.

Let me share to you a past blog article about the 4th Reich possibility.

[Philippines, 24 May 2010]


4TH REICH IS A TRANS-ATLANTIC 2-HEADED TOTALITARIAN MONSTER

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago
Good morning, Fellows across the globe!
Let me continue to write awareness-raising materials about peace, cooperation and development, by focusing on the machinations of the financier oligarchs. The Empire is rising again, the logic being that it is a most fit governance machine for global oligarchic games and forthcoming conflicts.
Guessing gamers have been busy releasing speculations about the next financiers’ great war, and the state machinery that will undertake it. Lacking sophistication in political economy, the guessing gamers end up with superstitious sloganeering and fear-mongering, or reactive behaviors that hardly possess merit and serious attention by the more adroit minds of younger generations.
Following the historic patterns of Empire formations, it has always proved fruitful to wage synchronized conflicts and fatten the oligarchic purses in the process, if an empire formation would do the hot-work jobs for the oligarchs. The last Empire that did the massive aggression for the Anglo-Dutch oligarchs was dubbed as 3rd Reich by its created abomination, Hitler & Nazi movement.
The same Anglo-Dutch financiers, who control at least 80% of the world’s total financial flows, are itching to create a 4th Reich totalitarian state. It is time for a great war, the result of which will flatten the economies and enterprises of contending nations. The wrecked enterprises will then be bought at dirt cheap price by the same oligarchs, and the flattened economies funded back to life by the same financiers.
The question is, just exactly what oligarchic state formations to employ? The EU and USA each produce over 22% of the world gross product, or altogether produce 45% of GDP. The Anglo-Dutch financiers, on the other hand, control over 80% of the global financial flows. Using such data, it is very easy to see the congruence of continental economies and financier interests.
In my analysis, using a combination of institutional analysis and political economy, the combined EU-USA force would be excellent for creating the draconian 4th Reich. Of course, the possibility of a North American Union can be examined, but such a Union doesn’t have the purse power to leverage political strength, do understand this. On the other hand, the EU cannot impose its will on the USA without public dissent being aroused to hell fires, and so no USA-EU political integration is in the offing.
The web of institutional arrangements will see a mega-alliance of USA-controlled North America and a Brussels-based European Union. The trans-Atlantic alliance is a last-ditch effort of the same financiers to exhibit muscle power over the planet, and only the USA-EU axis remains as the loyal consenter to the financier machinations. Japan can still veer away from the axis, while the emerging markets’ giants—China, India, Brazil—are beyond the ambit of such machinations.
The institutional plan calls for the implementation of the final treaty in Europe, the Lisbon Treaty, that will see the advanced unification of the continent. Synchronically, a North American Union, with a common currency called Amero, will replace the NAFTA, complete the political unification process, and form the American bulwark of the new fascist axis. That done, the 4th Reich will be in place, rock-solid in armaments and awash with liquidities for more ambitious, gigantic war efforts.
Part of the governance innovations will be to abolish nations in both continents. Region-states will rise to replace the nations, each region being almost of equal population and size. With no more nations in Europe, the nuclear arsenal of France and UK will be placed in the custody of Brussels, thus transforming Brussels into a nuclear power overnight.
Transformed into police states, both continents will then wage population-control campaigns in the neighborhoods. Gangster groups will logically be deputized to augment police in searching for guns, drugs, insurgent evidences, terrorist cells, petty criminals, and other perceived enemies of the state. Those young ones engaging in binge drinking and sex orgy parties will also most likely be apprehended.
To accelerate public compliance toward the new order, riots can be engineered in cities across both continents. Food price hikes, oil price hikes, massive unemployment, social welfare cuts, overnight hyper-inflation are the most contentious issues that easily inflame quiet neighborhoods into angry urban mobs. Any high school student taking up a subject on sociology can very facilely see this possibility today. It has already been tried and tested across the globe in fact most recently.
While the continental backyards are being provided draconian order by police forces, the military assets will then flex their muscles for huge wars overseas. To ensure that competing regions and continents will be mowed down fast, inter-regional wars will be engineered. The Sunni-Israel versus Iran-Shiite war is now on the pipeline, waiting for a go-signal, a conflict that will see the weakening of the Semitic military establishments and economies, thus paving the way for less costly involvement there.
Other continents will surely see their own war fireworks fanned to the maximum most likely. It would be an instructive work to analyze and forecast the shaping of events there. For instance, the China-Taiwan and inter-Korean conflicts may ensue again on their 2nd phases. Japanese aggression may also be pursued on a 2nd phase, which could see the Japanese islands devastated with nukes combined with the Tesla Earthquake Machine to put an abrupt end to its zealous militarism.
To cap the article, it is a Trans-Atlantic 4th Reich that is now fast rising. How fast the citizens of both America and Europe can neutralize the abominations now shaping up in their backyards remains to be observed. One this is sure here: it doesn’t matter who will be president of the USA or EU. The financiers and their paid technocratic-political subalterns have already ensured that the oligarchy is in control of the situation.
[Writ 22 June 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]

CRIMINALIZE FRAUDULENT POLLS SURVEYS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Poll experts are intellectual prostitutes. This is the most precise attribution we can give to the “experts” who conducted the poll surveys in this country, and probably in other countries as well. It is now turning out that they are experts in doctoring data and are in league with the criminal forgers at Recto Avenue in old Manila.

As it now appears, poll surveys are not exactly meant to reflect the state of voters’ perception at the time they were conducted. The PulseAsia, for instance, is owned by Raffy Lopa, a Kamag-anak Inc. (blood relative) of Noynoy Aquino who is running as a presidential candidate for the Liberal Party.

Can we expect fair game from the poll survey companies, notably the PulseAsia and Social Weather Stations? Now that it is becoming much clearer that the surveys rig public perception results to favor certain personalities and political blocs, we may rest assure of the result of the coming 2010 elections.

We do wonder whether the research personnel of the said companies did conduct field work in the other regions of the country for data gathering. It is getting clearer that no such actual field works are done, the same field works largely concentrated in metropolitan Manila.

The survey results are purely forged data. Being disinformative, the results are pure insidious LIES.

It may be high time for the state to investigate dubious researches, with the maximum aim of criminalizing fraudulent research. The public better raise eyebrows whenever the SWS and PulseAsia publish results from hereon.

Observably, commercial sex workers sell only their bodies for money, while intellectual prostitutes sell their souls to the highest bidders. Thus said, those intellectual prostitutes are as obnoxious as filthy swine.

[Philippines, 03 May 2010.]
[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com, UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com]

CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY: CAN IT SURVIVE THE COMING ‘TECHNOTRONIC’ CAPITALISM?

Bro. Erle Frayne Argonza

‘Late’ capitalism, this current phase that replaced the ‘monopoly’ capitalism of the pre-war era, is now DEAD. As elucidated by Jurgen Habermas, thinker of the Frankfurt school, capitalism was able to move to its present state but only with massive state planning/intervention. State intervention had since the early 70s been relaxed, via globalization, but this only created monstrous predatory finance that hastened the collapse of the system.

As already elaborated in previous articles, the system is now DEAD. In the late 1990s yet, we Fellows of the Independent Review (a circle of economists and experts in Manila) were of the opinion that the system will be dead in couples of years. The ‘virtual economy’ based on magical statistics, speculation, fictitiously valued investments, and conspicuous consumption, can never be sustained, and is bound to crash and die. It was just a matter of time, as we all noted in 2000 (the last time I met the Fellows), before the bubble will burst somewhere (we forecast it will the USA) and the global economy will come crashing down…And it did, beginning last 2007 yet. That descent to the marshes of death is still going on today.

As I also declared in some previous articles, capitalism can still survive, though no longer the ‘late’ capitalism of state planning-to-globalization era. It will be a capitalism in an era of state terror heretofore unparalleled: ‘technotronic’ capitalism in the aegis of global police-state. Nation-states are enemies of the global oligarchy which will re-engineer the world by destroying nations (aftermath of atrocious World War III and global synarchy) and replacing them with city-states and region-states.
If corporate social responsibility or CSR will survive the times, it must be re-tooled at this juncture when the tumultuous changes are gathering winds. Failure to do so, many CSR pursuits will disappear in time, while only those CSR platforms of the most powerful and wealthy oligarchs can survive. All the CSR formats of today can last in relevance maybe till 2040 at the most, after which my forecast is their relevance will have reached its end.

By the year 2050, when populations will have leveled down to a census target of 2 Billion warm bodies, a figure that will be more manageable to the global elites, every member of society will be chipped and provided for. By that time, there will be no further need for ideological movements as Pied Pipers of the new system. Everyone else will be programmed by the system, from cradle to grave the chipped Manchurian Candidate or MC will be provided for. Poverty will end by then, the Millenium Development Goal of the UN will be finally met (the UN will be transformed into the tyrannical global state headed by a global Bonaparte, armed with its own police/military forces), and then will end the ‘sustainable development’ or ‘social development’ pursuits of ‘late’ capitalism.

The chipped Manchurian Candidate or MC will be half-human half-machine hybrid, and will be well provided for as mentioned. Population will be totally controlled, weak and senior members of the population will be ‘oven-baked’ or eliminated, natality will be controlled following China’s pattern of today, criminality will be almost nil, and no one will ever be poor again. Hybrid-human behavior can be easily modified using those advanced cybernetic prototype programs past 2050, and so nobody can fool around with the system.

Tell me, fellows, in a situation such as that coming context of advanced cybernetics or ‘technotronics’ (machine-controlled humans), what need will there be for CSR? Maybe CSR will go back to Victorian Era philanthropy practices, whereby wealthy sponsors will fund the theaters and chipped performers whose performances will be perfected all the more by cybernetics. The staff of the CSR formats of that era, if indeed applicable, will be chipped as well, like those outfits that will be funded because they will perform before the oligarchic-intellectual crowd by then.

When that next capitalist system comes, there will be no more activists or revolutionaries save for those who will proclaim Hallelujah forever to the radically altered, new system. Libertarian activists will be the species of yesteryears, the CSR proto-activism of today will be consigned to history, and anybody who will go against the system will be easily eliminated by sentinel robots of the most advanced prototypes.

Let me end with the challenge: CSR better retool now and reshape its image if it desires to exceed its institutional career. Now is the time.

[28 August 2008,Quezon City, MetroManila]

GLOBAL TOTALITARIAN POLICE-STATE & TECHNOTRONIC SOCIETY: EXTENDING CAPITALIST LIFE

Bro. Erle Frayne Argonza

Let me go back to the question of what lies ahead of us—when ‘late’ capitalism dies and yet capitalism will be extended. I am not discounting the possibility that capitalism’s life span will be extended, but this will no longer be ‘late’ capital, just to remind everyone.

You better fasten your seat belts, as the stormy days ahead will come for sure, and as this heraldry from me will sound as stormy already as those times ahead. Stormy heraldry, because (a) you will not come to like it and that (b) its impact will be so nauseating and revolting that you’d rather sedate yourself most quickly with wine, liquor, pot or anything that can reduce that revulsion. I forgot, for the fundamentalists, you’d pray for hours to allay your fears.

By the time ‘late’ capital arrived up to the current juncture, or roughly the whole of the post-Great Depression era, the following developments have come about:

· State intervention/planning was infused into the system. Post-war former colonies proceeded on their industrial development tracks along this dirigist market model. The USA and Europe were saved from collapsing, emerging markets appeared.

· Market reforms were later introduced, bringing back free market and free trade principles. Centrally planned economies China and Vietnam infused market reforms to construct a ‘social market’ model, while former socialist states folded up in Eastern Europe and 3rd world states.

· The era of ‘mad economics’ resulted from the system integration efforts of ‘instrumental reason’. The dividing line between the rational and the mad in decision-making and system maintenance was effectively deconstructed and erased. In esoteric-mystical argot, this era is the period of the Demonic Mind, the era of Anti-Christ.

· ‘Virtual economy’ based on predatory financial practices of creating values from out of money flows (rather than from concrete production) was exemplified by ‘bubble economies’. Bubble bursts were followed by destructive, catastrophic crises and shrinkages of affected economies.

· Nation-states’ economies came to be integrated into a single economy, via globalization. A planetary economy was already institutionalized, yet no planetary state exists to regulate conduct of commerce and business at a global level. The contradiction between the norms of the planetary economy and the interests of the nation-state has led in no small measure to the fragmentation of nation-states and emergence of mini-states. Globalization has been undermining the nation-state in general.

· All of such developments will hyper-converge in the months ahead in a general system crisis characterized by hyper-inflation, great depression, and total system collapse. As the economist Lyndon LaRouche correctly perceived, that collapse phase is now taking place at a rapid rate.

· Wars and hostilities are intensifying across the globe. Surrogate wars of world powers have also been rehearsed, such as the Georgia-Russia conflict. All of these conflicts will hyper-converge in a World War III or intercontinental war, the duration of which no one can forecast so easily.

So, going back to the issue, if the ‘virtual economy’ cannot be sustained and its collapse will bring the final death blow on ‘late’ capital, is it possible to extend capitalism’s life span? Yes, the possibility is very likely. But the context emerging from the resolution of the general global crisis will hardly resemble what you’ve ever seen before nor imagine.

First of all, the consolidation of the system and attempts to prolong it can never take place without draconian police state tactics. As Lenin correctly emphasized, the dividing line between liberalism and fascism is a superficial one. Neo-fascism will become the political modality in order to save capitalism and bring it to its next phase. State terror heretofore untold will unravel the old order of things and bring the ‘new world order’ into place, resulting to pogroms that will dwarf both Hitler’s ‘final solution’ and Stalin’s ‘purges’ combined.

The possibility of a global state will finally become granite rock, with the United Nations most likely the base for creating that global regulatory mechanism governed by a demonic ‘world rule of law’. This global state will have its own military and police forces, and will have no qualms in quelling dissent and enforcing global fiats in order to bring forth the ‘new world order’.

The global corporations of the moment, whose assets and revenues are already so huge that they dwarf those of nation-states’, will all the more become gigantic. The same corporations will then declare their respective turfs among region-states and city-states that will be created from the dismantled nations. Each mega-corporation will be endowed with its own private army, akin to the British East India Company or BEIC of old, of professional mercenaries beholden to no state but to the corporation, but which can be mandated by the global state to engage hostile forces in other regions and cities.

The era of New Feudalism will then ensue from the social and urban-ecological arrangements emerging. The era of ancient Florence, Venice, or city-states with their own respective armies and ruled by powerful commercial families, will come back though in more sophisticated vogue.
The competing powerful & wealthy city-states will then give rise to new conflicts in the form of ‘wars of the cities’, much akin to the ancient Greek city-states’ conflicts. Before this century’s end, no more nations shall exist, but rather a world of cities and regions integrated largely through the mediative and regulative planetary state. Weaker cities and regions will become the vassals of powerful cities and corporate groups, at a time when technology will even be more revolutionary. The New Feudalism will be based on an integration of capital and information, contrasted to the Old Feudalism that was based on land.

As soon as 3rd phase cybernetics will conclude, and probably a 4th phase will begin, which will all the more erase the barrier between human and machine, the envisioned Technotronic Society will become the manifest order. Cyborgs and machines will then become perfected and endowed with quasi-human intelligence, while those humans with weak minds will be totally controlled via perfected chips, mega-computers, and new cybernetic systems. Large numbers of subhuman ‘Manchurian candidates’ or MCs will become the docile slave labor of the day, well fed and provided for, but whose behavior will be totally programmed and re-programmable.
That technoronic society of the neo-feudal capitalist ‘new world order’, or simply Technotronic capitalism, was fitfully described and forecast in the film series Matrix and Terminator. As 3rd phase cybernetics is advancing today in laboratory incubators of the North, cybernetics that will dismantle the barrier between human and machine, the possibility of an early arrival of that dreaded machine-controlled ‘new world order’ has become concrete. The question is no longer ‘will technotronics come’, but rather ‘when will it come’? Matrix and Terminator are no film fantasies but are rather scientific extrapolations based on existing and developing cybernetic principles.

So, fellows out there, would you count yourself among the fanatical supporters of ‘capitalist life-span extension’, or would you rather opt for a new economy & society other than the ‘new world order’ that has been engineered by the global oligarchy? Or, would you rather be silent about the matter, as the ‘silence of the lambs’ means the Keynesian “In the long run, all of us will be dead!” Caput!

Let me now end here. Suffice that I shared my notes about the possible extension of the favorite economy of the pro-capitalists or the most abhorred society by capitalism’s detractors. At least I didn’t fail to show you the possibilities, I being a sociologist and economist who learned from my thinker mentors the craft of social forecasting or ‘futurology’.

Till next writing! Adios! Adieu! Paalam! Farewell!

[23 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila.]

CAPITALISM’S DEMISE: WHAT WENT WRONG?

Erle Frayne Argonza

To all fellow men and women out there who may have deep fondness for the liberal capitalist model of economic adaptation, I hope that you can make some adjustments in your cognitive banks. Capitalism is not a permanent facet of human life, but merely one among various epochs that will come to pass. Only impermanence is sacrosanct in the cosmos, so please refrain from singing hallelujah to a world system that is on its death knell as I articulated in a previous article.

And please refrain from swallowing hook-line-&-sinker the contentious propaganda of Francis Fukuyama about the ‘end of history’, that accordingly history had concluded with the galvanization of liberal capitalism, that history makes no more sense. Fukuyama’s theory is a slapstick narrative of hyper-valuation of the ‘mad economics’ of late capitalism and hypo-statization of reality that has no relation at all to the real in the world out there. Fukuyama had taken as ‘real’ what is actually ‘virtual’, and froze time much like unto a fairy tale of timelessness, of history-less Nietzschean moment that is fit more for infants than for adult humans.

Fukuyama epitomizes the ‘mad economics’ of all those Pied Pipers of the global oligarchy for whom he works, and his discourse is akin to the ‘mad discourse’ so described by the late Michel Foucault. The ‘mad economics’ of Friedman, Hayek, Fukuyama, and all those technocrats who serve as processors and bagmen for the global oligarchy, is precisely symptomatic of that colossal ailment of a world system, and as we all know, madness can never salve ailments but rather hasten the system’s death. Caput! Blow your horns, prepare dirges to this Dead One!

Unless that you yourselves have become maddened by the seemingly infinite monies flowing unto your purses as you are among the beneficiaries of ‘late’ capital, unless that you are indeed now suffering from combined maladies of sociopathy and schizophrenia, unless that sanity had departed from thee forever, please heed the last plea of your own conscience where sanity had retreated: CAPITALISM IS DEAD! No amount of propagandizing, of contorted interpretations, can ever change the course of history at this juncture, as we are all headed for a TOTAL SYSTEM COLLAPSE in the months ahead. Read that please: MONTHS AHEAD, not years ahead.

What went wrong with capitalism? I’m sure all of you fellows knew what went wrong, do I even need to answer that? Your previous thinker mentors, among economists and sociologists, forewarned you all of the forthcoming demise of capitalism, but you paid nary an attention to those brilliant minds as you were so engrossed in your ‘conspicuous consumption’, behaving more like some infantile EATERS or as anthropoids rather than as thinking and spiritually evolving humans. You are all very much human, so please consistently behave like one, and begin by listening to the Inner Voice of your conscience, for that voice is your soul’s.
Let me summarize the diagnostics, forewarnings and/or prophecies of our thinker mentors from the West, and I’d stress WEST because there are some other thinker mentors from the EAST and SOUTH whose peregrinations are so recondite they are not so easily digestible. Let me just stress the WEST as this is what is common to us all. So let me re-echo the thinkers and their theories:

· Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: The internal contradictions between the private nature of capital (ownership of means of production) and the social nature of production. The ‘crisis of overproduction’ and the ‘law of the falling rate of profit’ are attendant patterns. Social revolution results, then the alternative society will be constructed.

· Max Weber: Industrial capitalism’s granite product, the bureaucracy, led to dehumanization. He never forecast though whether this dehumanizing system can be sustained—but please read between the lines. (His contemporary Emile Durkheim had a similar observation about ‘anomie’ or normless state of urban/industrial society.)

· Thorsten Veblen: The end-phase of industrial capitalism is markedly pathological. ‘Conspicuous consumption’ is the disease of this phase, the toxic behavior from the ruling class that later filtered down to the emerging middle class.

· Joseph Schumpeter: The internal contradiction between the desire for profit and the revolutionary character of innovation. The demise of capitalism will see the possibility of the technical class taking over society and build that alternative system later.

· Daniel Bell: The ‘post-industrial’ society had already been born right inside capitalism. A distinct modality in itself, post-industrialism will eventually prevail in a system that isn’t capitalist (or money economy) but rather knowledge-based. The ‘service worker’ had arrived on the social landscape, the prototype class of the future.

· Theodore Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse: ‘Late’ capital is characterized by the pervasiveness of ‘instrumental reason’, where reason is used to justify the non-rational (‘madness’ in Foucault’s argot), where state planning/intervention was infused into a system that scorned intervention.

· Alvin Toffler: Both capitalism and socialism are based on hoarding, both are variants of the same industrial society of yesteryears, both are based on ‘2nd wave’ capital-intensive technologies and non-renewable energy sources. The ‘post-industrial’ society is altogether distinct, isn’t based on hoarding, production-consumption (‘prosumer’) is based on ‘3rd wave’ knowledge-intensive technologies and renewable energy sources, knowledge cannot be hoarded.

I need not articulate further, do I? They all converged on one theme: capitalism is transitory, it bred social maladies (alienation, dehumanization, anomie, conspicuous consumption,…), is systemically flawed, and will be dismantled at sometime in the future.

No matter how delimited their theories maybe, as they all proceeded from certain perspectives (they were all ‘paradigm’-based in the jargon of Thomas Kuhn), they all proclaimed—in either tacit or explicit fashion—the coming demise of the system. They weren’t as silly as Fukuyama who popularized seemingly ‘satanic verses’ (distorted precepts) about a non-changing, permanent economic landscape called ‘liberal capitalism’, but were rather so adroit at social forecasting that they saw a vision of the future as they were articulating on their empirical observations of the present society.

So, fellows out there, prepare for the months and years ahead. We are headed towards those stormy months, years, maybe even decades. How the future society will come to shape is not easy to forecast. “Something blurs the Force, darkens our sight of the future,” declared a Jedi Master in the Star Wars cinema fame. Let me end right here.

[Writ 22 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila.]

ANOTHER GREAT DEPRESSION COMING AS FINANCIAL SYSTEM ENDS

Bro. Erle Frayne Argonza

Is the global economy moving downward towards a devastating collapse?

If we employ a long-term Kondratieff cycle to model the world economy, we can see that the period beginning in 1935 approximately (when the big market economies US-UK-Germany moved towards another cycle of growth approximately after the Great Depression) should have ended around 1995 approximately, after which comes another great depression.

As early as 1989, ramblings of a global collapse began to murmur in the US economy. Mexico, Japan, Argentina, and other economies followed in the 1990s, while Europe went through a general low-growth trend that was the most sustainable for the continent as a whole. Then came the Asian meltdown of 1997. Then the USA again went through a recession in 2001, a pattern that has been repeated again from 2008 to the present. It seems that the pillars of the world economy couldn’t get out of a short-term crisis without having to crash back to another episode of short-term crisis altogether.

Is it really a ‘short-term’ crisis in the first place? Or is it in fact a ‘systemic crisis’, and that the financial downspin the Northern economic pillars are going through could very well be the terminal phase of a very long cycle of growth that began after the end yet of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648)? That in fact, several long-wave Kondratieff cycles have already passed over since that time, and that finally the system is DEAD in the wood?
Well, not only the financial system but the whole of CAPITALISM is already on its death throes.

Those oligarchs behind the systems now dying won’t see the system they built die down just like that without “bringing down the other houses” with them, it seems. Which means that, right after the terminal phase of the system, another huge, catastrophic war will come, which will later see another Westphalian-type treaty or so that will re-carve the contours of polities into a Post-Westphalian totalitarian technotronic global order.

Below is a briefer from the Executive Intelligence Review that summarizes the issue at hand.

[18 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila. Thanks to Executive Intelligence Review database news.]
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End of the Line for Financial System; Bankruptcy Issue Raised

Aug. 10, 2008 (EIRNS)—The death of the financial system was the implicit subject of several articles in the financial press over the weekend, reflecting the way reality is setting in and attitudes are changing.

"Investment banking is dying," was the blunt statement by William Cohan, in a op-ed in today's Washington Post entitled "The End of the Masters of the Universe?" Cohan says that the revenue streams of the investment banks are drying up, and that there is genuine fear in the corridors of power on Wall Street.

"We have a banking crisis and an agency crisis and a mortgage crisis and a coming credit card crisis. We've never seen anything like that before. And it all seems to be coming home to roost at the same time. That's never happened either," Charles Geisst, a professor of finance at Manhattan University, told yesterday's Washington Post. He said the Great Depression was the last time the financial markets were hammered by such a variety of factors, adding: "But we did not even have credit cards in the 1930s; there was no such thing as student loans."

The specter of generalized bankruptcy was raised by Yale finance professor Robert J. Shiller in an op-ed in the New York Times. Citing the failure of Bear Stearns and the government measures to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Shiller asks, "What if the next case is worse? No one in government seems to feel a responsibility for warning about such possibilities and formulating a detailed policy for dealing with them." Shiller says that "Bankruptcy law is a good place to start. After all, the dreaded financial meltdown would amount to a wave of bankruptcies.... What would happen to the economy if hedge funds had to liquidate, one after another, in a financial crisis? We need to rethink the theory and practice of bankruptcy, given the new complexities."

Shiller points to the inherent limitations in current bankruptcy laws, which were largely drawn to protect narrow financial interests, and are poorly suited to deal with systemic problems, when a "subsidized system of triage would be needed to identify which companies should be saved, with the main criterion being the possible economic impact of their liquidation."

These comments, taken as a whole, represent the way discussions of the "unthinkable" are beginning to percolate, and converge upon the outlook of Lyndon LaRouche. Shiller's mention of triage by bankruptcy echoes the emergency measures proposed by LaRouche, of putting the financial system itself through bankruptcy, protecting the population with a firewall, and freezing the financial paper while we determine what debts will, and won't, be honored. Whatever Shiller may think about LaRouche's proposals, he is implicitly admitting that the system is finished, and that we must prepare for its demise, making decisions on the basis of the interests of society, and not merely the narrow interests of financial institutions. Reality is setting in, and reality leads inexorably to the policies outlined by LaRouche.