Boom and Busted Cliff

http://workandwealth.com/

end of summary from Lindy Davies

♦and so comes the bailout… EMn

it’s not a radical’s job to try to find a way to keep the apparatus of government or the apparatus of global finance capital running efficiently. Our only job is to demand that people be freed of the coercive and exploitative demands of both.)…if the government repudiates its debts then they may no longer be willing to buy up government bonds in the future. Now, this might seem like a bad thing if you think it’s important to make sure that the US government is always able to issue more bonds in order to raise more money. But how desirable or even acceptable that is is going to look will depend (in part) on how desirable or even acceptable you think it is for the US government to have lots of ready cash…the overwhelmingly dominant function of government, in everything it does, is overwhelming dominance; it is characteristically an institution of violence against the governed, not a service to them. Charles Johnson 

 Government debt (financed state capitalism) for centrally planned pet projects of shiny-rimmed “national security” etc. is not anything I signed up to pay for. But like a “bagman and gunman” the parasite’s expenses became “our” debt. Is the gentrification of the world a business-plan? The debt is illegitimate. The state is not my agent. Yet my money is demanded to pay the interest on bonds and beyond for a parasitic minority’s ponzi scheme called state capitalism. Let it crash and burn off the fiscal cliff, and suffer the justice of the “free” market rather than perpetuate the criminal journey of riding the saw-blade of booms and busts.

the government incurred obligations without knowing for sure that it would have the money to pay its bills. Why is it allowed to do that? Oh, that’s right. It’s the government. Sheldon Richman

Big Brother is WWWatching You

Democractic Alternantives

Democracy was blasted in two earlier posts (here and here). Is there a better way? Democracy will always have the ills cited in those earlier posts, with perhaps the exception of the information problem, but nonetheless it is not as though democracy is bad as noted earlier either, just not really democratic as democracy stops with the vote, after this point, as Proudhon noted, "the anti-democratic work begins."

When I first discovered anarchism I had lots of misconceptions (I'm sure I'm probably still harboring a few depending on which variety of anarchist you ask). One thing (of many things) I had trouble conceptualizing was where action and change would cross consensus and democracy. Programming myself to hate government blinded me to the viability of democracy when consensus is not practical, as well as the difference between state and government, or perhaps state and *governance.*

The Ostrom's taught me a great deal about how to successfully manage commons. In a similar fashion much of the talk below taught me how to see democracy a little differently  Like Ostrom's wisdom, Cindy Milstein, and Stephen Shalom made me feel better about consensus and 'democracy'.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3D82D71342FF00E5

FTP

Robert Anton Wilson-- Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy

source

...Absolutists of all sorts — not just the Natural Law theorists — have always wanted to abolish disagreements by finding “one truth” valid for all participants in the life experience. Because each brain makes its own transactions with energy, turning energy into such “signals” as it can decode in its habitual grid, this totalitarian dream of uniformity seems neurologically impossible. Each of us “is” the Master who makes the grass green, and each of us makes it brighter or duller green depending on how awake we are or how deeply we are hypnotized or depressed. The case for individualism rests entirely on the fact that, each individual being neurologically-experimentally unique, each individual, however “queer” or “perverse” or “alien” they may seem to local prejudice, probably knows something that no other individual has ever noticed. We all have something to learn from one another, if we stop trying to ram our dogmas down everybody else’s throat and listen to one another occasionally.

“Subjectivism,” then, applies more to the Absolutists that to modern post-relativity and post-quantum thinkers. The Absolutist has found one way of organizing energy into signals — one model — which has become his or her favorite brain program. This model, being a brain product, retains autobiographical (subjective) elements, and the Absolutist is deluded in projecting it outward and calling it “reality.” The “modern” view seems more “objective” in saying, at each point, “Well, that model may have some value, but let’s look back at the energy continuum and see if we can decode more signals, and make a bigger or better model.” The Absolutist, insisting that his/her current model contains all truth, appears not only more subjective, but unconscious of his/her subjectivity, and thus “bewitched” or hypnotized by the model. In insisting that his “one true model” or Idol should be satisfactory to all other brains, and especially in the favorite Absolutist error of assuming that all other brains which do not accept this “one true model” as the only possible model must be illogical or dishonest and somehow nasty, the Absolutist always tends toward totalitarianism, even in sailing under the flag of libertarianism.

Blake said, “One Law for the Lion and Ox is tyranny.” But even more, one “truth” for the Lion and Ox is impossible. There will always be different lanes for different brains, different scenes for different genes, different strokes for different folks.

We can negotiate meaningfully when we understand those neurological facts. When we think we have the “one true model,” we cannot negotiate but only quarrel, and, in politics, usually we fight and kill....