What the hell does it take to get you lefties to celebrate a victory? c'mon man!!! Time for a victory celebration of some sorts what the hell do you people want? Now they are giving Bill shit after Brexit...
Yes true. But you just got rid of one unelected neo-liberal machine. You now can vote the others out & demand change https://t.co/ymwNHjZ449— Bill Mitchell (@billy_blog) June 24, 2016
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Matt, this is just the first battle of what will be a very long war. Voting to exit the EU does not mean we will in fact leave the EU, as strange as that may seem! Today, some of those leading the exit camp started to unveil what they mean by exit. And it is almost no different to full EU membership. There was all this banging on about free movement of people and how the UK was now at breaking point. Now the exiters claim there position was never to do anything about freedom of movement. You see, they only wanted to have the right to enforce "some measure" of freedom of movement, not that they would enforce this "small measure".
So all the xenophobia and anti-immigration paranoia whipped up by the right was a ruse. Anybody who had any sense knew that it was a ruse because they're all hardcore neoliberal austerians who believe in the rights of business not labour. The left exiters had a different argument altogether, but nobody listened to a word they said.
So the first battle was won: the one that unshackles us from the neoliberal EU constitution and institutions. There are many other battles now which must be fought. The newly emboldened right are gearing up for a bonfire of workers' rights, more austerity and more privatization.
Voting leave by its very nature would invariably strengthen the neoliberal right. But that step had to be taken. There was no way around that. Whether the left can get its act together is another matter. The parliamentary Labour Party, which is extremely neoliberal and narcissistic that it makes Trump seem positively humble, is so devoted to the EU that they are now taking steps to remove the current leader and replace him with a Blairite zombie. The argument, would you believe, is that Labour isn't pro-business, pro-neoliberal and pro-EU enough, and that under the amazing Blair the Labour Party won three general election but more importantly made this country a beacon of progress!
The Blairite Labouristas have total contempt for their membership, their voters and their country. Naturally, they would rather lose to the Tories, who are no different to them, than listen to their working class base - loud echoes of the US Democrats. The leadership of the Labour Party should firstly welcome a coup. That could initiate deselection of these MPs by the party executive or by the constituencies. Without a total purge of these neoliberal, neoconservative Blairite warmongers, the Labour Party will never reclaim the millions of voters and the vast swathes of the country who have gone over in droves to UKIP. Without a very radical leftwing party promising to bring prosperity to the wasteland that has become much of the UK, this country is heading for a lot of pain - breakup, political violence and a good deal of social violence. As I said in another thread, these neoliberal maniacs have initiated the breakup of a very old country and unleashed economic, social, political and constitutional mayhem. Many congratulations. There are words for this. Traitors is one. Treason is another.
I voted out and then got cold feet, not that my vote made any difference, my area voted in. But John's reply is reassuring, and Bill Mitchell is of course very knowledgeable.
I read the other day how most people tend to be a bit right wing, especially the floating voters. I would out this down to right wing propaganda, but the average person seems to be instinctually anti immigration and with an extreme dislike of people on welfare. The ruling class have got it made.
But with crowdfunding we could end up with a more balanced media and this could change millions voters preference when they are better informed. I hope so.
The Labour vote comes from two sources, the working class and the middleclass. The middleclass left are well educated and have well paid jobs on the whole.
Bill Mitchell and most of the MMT-ers tend to be from the Middle Class. When I watch them on YouTube I like their relaxed moderate style, so different to the spokesmen on the right, all bellicose and loudmouthed. Look at Peter Schiff?
Kaivey, we didn't have a choice. We did the right thing. And what's more, for the bloody fight ahead:
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more"
"But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage"
"Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English"
Kaivey, just remember we can only do what needs to be done if we are organised, with militant unions behind and in front of us, and with a political party agitating for the working class. If we can't do this, then quite frankly we are lambs to the slaughter. Make no mistake, the neoliberal vultures are circling, and their eyes are firmly fixed on the NHS, pensions, transport, education, etc.
They aim to make us into Greece or Latvia. In circumstances like this, the working class is just as likely to militate for the very neoliberal UKIP and Thatcherite Tory policies, which will inflict even more pain on the working class, as to make common cause with the unions and the left. So we need to get these desperate, suffering, confused and angry people to join our side.
How do you think the vast wastelands of the UK are going to react when they find out that voting to leave the EU will in fact make no difference to their lives? In actual fact their lives will be made worse because the newly empowered uber-neoliberal Tories will be further emboldened to push through their most radical pro-business, anti-worker policies while the Labour Party descends into recrimination, civil war and impotence? The Margaret Hodges, Chukka Umunnas and Liz Kendalls (taking their marching orders from the detestable Blair) are gearing up for a drawn out, acrimonious and exhausting war in order to replace the current Labour leadership with neoliberal Blairites. The Blairites are under the psychotic impression that it makes all the difference in the world if they push through the identical neoliberal policies that their identikit Tory brethren wish to push through. This is zombie tribalism.
It's not going to be a particularly pleasant few years. So we have a long hard road in front of us. That's the truth. No point in hiding it or shying away from it. All in all, we need to kick every neoliberal face in, every single Blairite and Thatcherite one of them, and that's only because we have a forgiving and gentle nature. Justice would involve far worse. After all, they happily watch Greeks die and calmly watch the rise of neo-Nazis parties if it means an extra penny profit.
Sounds like we agree on a lot of things, John. When I put out articles on this blog in future I'm going to try to remember to initial it, KV, or put Kevin.
Indeed current politics look like treacherous politicians manufacturing lines.
What if we are regressing to a more primitive state of affairs where political capital is concentrated at urban centres? The nation-state slowly disappearing giving to the raise of city-states and feudalism again. Feudalism not like the one of the middle ages, but closer to that of ancient civilisations.
The rest of the land is left for good, as a wasteland to be exploited and sucked of resources to keep this monstruos urban centres and their bureaucratic and oligarchic classes going. The decay in many areas all around the West outside of the urban centres is patent from 4 decades of destructive policy.
Capitalism has outlived it's usefulness: it has served over the period of several centuries to replace the old aristocracy with a new aristocracy, and now is the moment for the new aristocracy to perpetuate it's position while decadence happen. I'm not talking about a 'conspiracy', but an inevitable zeitgeist that happens due to a 'race to the bottom' and stagnating wealth pie. We can observe that net wealth been decreasing for the 90% percentile of the population, that social mobility has been eroded, and that middle class is slowly disappearing. all are signs of this zeitgeist.
There is people who have been joking about London gaining independence, but if this joke becomes a reality and starts to resonate it will be the beginning of the end of the current era. Oligarchs then will become new aristocrats and consolidate their wealth while they maintain a well oiled bureaucratic machine to consolidate their power at urban centres while the rest slide into poverty.
The other option is the second 'Gilded Age' where the nation states will remain but their sole function will be to consolidate power and wealth at the top. What makes me think about the first option is that the current path looks like to be one of stagnation and decay, in this sense maintenance of large empires is ineffectual as we all collectively drop to lower energy states (decreasing networks complexity), in this context it makes sense for activity to increasingly concentrate on urban centres instead of maintaining order and control over vast networks and spaces.
"to be exploited and sucked of resources to keep this monstruos urban centres and their bureaucratic and oligarchic classes going."
That's definitely happening over here... over here its in where I traverse in the northern old urban industrial cities/urban communities...
These places need MASSIVE re-investment they are 100+ years old and need major renovation or demo and re-build they are completely depreciated...
Matt I think the raise of diversity and all the beautiful "small" and "middle" sized things means thriving ecosystems, while the concentration and homogenisation means the drop to lower metastable energy states (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability). You can see it in the removal
Societies are dynamic nonlinear systems which move between different metastable states due to feedback loops, 'moron rulers' is a strong positive feedback loop. I believe most human societies which have collapsed up to day had 'moron rulers' as one of the feedback loops which led to their decay.
In this context we see how the destruction of a strong economic structure (built by networks of small and middle sized organisations and institutions), lack of proper effective government bodies supporting those structures, concentration of wealth, homogenisation of society and culture due to disappearing communities and large bureaucracies at urban centers, etc. is an attempt to maintain a decaying state.
A profound difference separates equilibrium from non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Equilibrium thermodynamics ignores the time-courses of physical processes. In contrast, non-equilibrium thermodynamics attempts to describe their time-courses in continuous detail.
Mainstream economists are always searching for the lost holy grail of 'equilibrium' ignoring the thermodynamic reality that governs our universe: there is no real equilibrium, we just 'flow' between states all the times, what they are looking for are 'local thermodynamic equilibrium'. So we could have over some regions of space, if we considered urban centres those regions, apparent equilibrium, while what is happening over the hood is that there are energy transfers from non-urban environment in different forms (people, raw materials and manufactured goods, food, etc.).
Then you get 75% of people voting for the status quo in urban centres like London, NY, etc. while the immense majority of abandoned wastelands are decaying and falling on "Trumpism" (vote 'middlefinger' to the status quo).
Is not a generational divide, but is also a spacial divide due to unmaintenable complex networks (due to feedback loops, in this case 'stupid policy') and higher energy states over large regions
Whether the left can get its act together is another matter. John
The endless oscillation between Right and Left means that neither has a stable solution.
So how about we try something different for a change? Such as ethical money and credit creation? Something that neither Right nor Left has ever embraced to my knowledge.
In the tractable neoclassical model equilibrium is static and linear. "In the long run" means that time can safely be ignored since it doesn't really matter. Same with money neutrality. Government intrusion disrupts the law of least action delivering efficient outcomes by preventing market forces of supply and demand from acting efficiently through its distorting influence on the field.
It's the model of a machine rather than an organism. Because modeling dynamic non-linear systems that are characteristic of living systems is hard.
Government intrusion disrupts ... Tom Hickey
Government neglect disrupts too, neglect such as failing to provide an inherently risk-free storage and transaction service in its fiat for all citizens - leaving them to the mercy of usurers.
Is fiat for all citizens or merely for a usury cartel of depository institutions? If/when physical fiat is abolished this question will be as stark as can be since then only depository institutions shall be able to deal with fiat in the private sector.
In the standard neoclassical model (based on loanable funds and money neutrality) the only effect of fiscal policy is inflationary. Government cannot stimulate the real economy using fiscal owing to Ricardian equivalence and crowding out.
In the standard neoclassical model (based on loanable funds and money neutrality) the only effect of fiscal policy is inflationary. Tom Hickey
Then where does money come from to begin with if not from deficit spending?
Then where does money come from to begin with if not from deficit spending?
Assumes a gold standard where money is dug out of the ground and functions like any other commodity including labor time. So there is a lump of money and also a lump of labor.
So there is a lump of money and also a lump of labor. Tom Hickey
A lump of a largely useless metal, you mean. Gold is not money unless by government fiat and then it's just needlessly expensive fiat.
It's odd that Jesus pointed out the nature of fiat ("Render to Caesar ...") nearly 2000 years ago but some still don't get it.
Bill has spoken:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=33894
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