Into the Void

Interdependence is the key word.
Enlightened interdependence.
Life in all its rich variety,
“take a little, leave a little”…
However: by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process

THEY ALWAYS TAKE MORE THAN THEY NEED.
– William S. Burroughs
“Words of Advice for Young People”
From Hallucination Engine by Material.

This spoken-word piece by William S. Burroughs (backed up by the avant-garde group Material) totally sums up the top-down, free-market, TOXIC version of Capitalism that is practiced in the world of multinational corporations.

I worked for Tyco Electronics when Dennis Kozlowski was spending my pay raises on company-paid million-dollar birthday parties for his wife.

Here is what is happening:

Capitalism only works as long as there is growth. So what happens when there is no more? Well, first off your shareholders get seriously pissed off. It is against the law to piss off your shareholders, even if it means screwing over your employees and your customers.

• You can raise prices.
• You can reduce quality.
• You can lay off employees, or pay them less. Younger employees want less money and don’t use their medical benefits. Great idea!
• You can use advertising tricks to give you an edge over your competitors.
• You can take over or merge with your competitors. During the process, roll over some existing debt into the transaction.
• Play accounting games.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hang out with the vampires.

Got this email from a friend. I howled with laughter when I read it. See the next post for my response.

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. . .

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully
Minister of Treasury Paulson

The obverse of the Swiss 1000-franc note, showing the Grim Reaper.

“I don’t know what money is today, and I don’t think anybody at the Fed does either.”
Richard Pratt,
Chairman of the Board of the Federal Home Loan Bank, 1982

“American democracy was founded on the principle, stressed by James Madison in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, that the primary function of government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority. Thus he warned that in England, the only quasi-democratic model of the day, if the general population were allowed a say in public affairs, they would implement agrarian reform or other atrocities, and that the American system must be carefully crafted to avoid such crimes against the rights of property, which must be defended (in fact, must prevail).”
Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism & Hope for the Future, May 1995

“Capitalism works because most of us have swallowed these two big lies:
1) Society is best organized when people look after their own self-interest at the expense of everyone else’s. In fact, this is human nature.
2) A healthy economy can only be based on ever-expanding consumption and production. This can go on forever. Science will overcome all obstacles to the continuation of this process.”
Boog Highberger
“The Two Big Lies of Capitalist Economics”

“What is property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since neither property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by labor – that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the work of someone else…”

by Michael Bakunin, THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM

“The most prominent characteristic of capitalism is the wage system, which in brief amounts to this:- A man, or a group of men, possessing the necessary capital, starts some industrial enterprise; he undertakes to supply the factory or workshops with raw material, to organize production, to pay the employees a fixed wage, and lastly, to pocket the surplus value or profits, under pretext of recouping himself for managing the concern, for running the risks it may involve, and for the fluctuations of price in the market value of the wares
PETER KROPOTKIN, THE CONQUEST OF BREAD

“For my part, I must confess, I never could conceive that an all-wise, just, and benevolent Being would contrive one Part of his Plan to be so contradictory to the other, as here supposed;- that is, would lay us under one Obligation as to Morals, and another as to Trade…”
Dean of Gloucester, Josiah Tucker (1712-1799), A Study In The History Of Economics