[Marxism-Thaxis] weather in Detroit
Yea, its kind of nice down here in Florida . . .76. WL. ^^ CB : My bad. When you said you hated the weather in Detroit, I thought you were in it visiting. (smile) In a message dated 3/6/2009 3:23:39 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, cdb1003 at prodigy.net writes: Man, I hate the weather in Detroit. WL. ^ CB: In the ex-motor city,it's been a really cold winter, with record snow, but today it's like spring ! Feels good ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Are you really a champion of the poorest sectors of the ...
Waistline2 The issue is always what is wrong rather than who is wrong. Labeling people haters . . . left haters, who do not support Obama the person and the Obama presidency in a country where the working class is so and devisive and sectarian that the majority refuse to vote at all, is what is wrong. ^^ CB: I was responding to you writing about me ( who) was penning away about Obama's increasing unemployment benefits. One good criticism of who deserves another (smile) As far as left-haters, on these lists the issue of motive in interpreting the events since O's election is pertinent. I regularly read posts that interpret the glass as half empty when it could be interpreted as half-full. ^ I see no reason what so ever to praise (my exact word) Obama or his administration for extending unemployment benefits to the exact same degree and the exact same way done under the Bush W. administration. ^^^ CB: I do. It's what's going on on these 'left lists these days. It's just another praise added to opening up stem cell research, pay equity for women, the budget reversing Reaganism, announcement of the withdrawal of the troops from Iraq, stimulus package. That's the context. The unemployment thing is not isolated. Also, O's admin did two things Bush didn't do. $25 more per week, and no tax on first $2,500. Plus, they did it right away. And it is very important to keep up popular support for Obama, counter the propaganda from Kramer and the Wall Street mouthpieces, Limbaugh. We're in an ongoing struggle, campaign. It didn't end with the election campaign. The little things are like little pieces of campaign literature handed out at the polls or door to door. So, I'd say you're wrong on what is do be done right now. ^^^ The issue I wrote about was not an addition $100 a month, but deals with a completely different realm: a measure of what took place under the Bush W. administration, CB: So, why would you criticize the praise of the $100 a month and the tax break , which was more than what Bush did. Plus, I don't think Bush did it at the beginning of his presidency. I have to check. No reason to criticize the praise of Obama for doing something good 'cause Bush did it. ^^^ the precedence of the past and the art of the possible. It is imperative that communist always stay one step ahead along the path the working class must travel as its spontaneous movement and its self discovery of itself as a class. The LENS to use in traveling this path is that if the lowest section of the workers as their interest intersect and find expression in the political sphere. ^ CB: In this case. one step ahead along that path is to rally the working class to support Obama. In case you didn't notice the bourgeoisie are rallying against his first pro-working class moves. The ultra-left is stumbling into joining Kramer, Santelli and Limbaugh ^^ What is wrong is praising the Obama administration and the one hand; and condemnation of comrades - let haters, whose opinion might disagree with someone's else opinion. ^^ CB: See above. See discussion several weeks ago posts on Lenin's polemics against the ultra-left. We have the same task today. ^^ To begin with it is impossible to save capital without saving those workers connected to it as the unity of productive forces and production relations. To preserve this unity it is necessary to increase demand and I shall never approach or suggest negotiating from a standpoint that my enemies are doing me or mine a favor, . . with a concession, as such. . ^ CB: You have a different attitude toward the Obama event than I do. I think we should rally the working class in support of him. It's true it's because it's the best we have right now, but , there you go. It's sort of like supporting Coleman Young as Mayor. ^ ^ . The real issue is over concentrating on private sector jobs - as government spending or socially necessary means of life. The pouring of trillions of dollars down the rabbit hole of modern speculative finance is designed to starve the workers of these needed funds. ^ CB: Well, yeah, that more later The issue is not me or who I am, rather the issue is how are comrades to frame the current struggle of the working class. Towards this end a doctrine is being put forth as the strategy and tactics of using class intersection as a measure of the complex fight unfolding. This is what is missing in assessments of the Obama administration and the existing correlations of forces in the Senate. Further comrades cannot be sectarian for fighting to establish a communist polarity in the political sphere. Which side are you on is not a conception of Democrats or Republicans but workers and capitalist. WL. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Are you really a champion of the poorest sectors of the ...
In a message dated 3/7/2009 12:38:24 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, cdb1...@prodigy.net writes: Waistline2 The issue is always what is wrong rather than who is wrong. Labeling people haters . . . left haters, who do not support Obama the person and the Obama presidency in a country where the working class is so and devisive and sectarian that the majority refuse to vote at all, is what is wrong. ^^ CB: I was responding to you writing about me ( who) was penning away about Obama's increasing unemployment benefits. One good criticism of who deserves another (smile) As far as left-haters, on these lists the issue of motive in interpreting the events since O's election is pertinent. I regularly read posts that interpret the glass as half empty when it could be interpreted as half-full. ^ I see no reason what so ever to praise (my exact word) Obama or his administration for extending unemployment benefits to the exact same degree and the exact same way done under the Bush W. administration. ^^^ CB: I do. It's what's going on on these 'left lists these days. It's just another praise added to opening up stem cell research, pay equity for women, the budget reversing Reaganism, announcement of the withdrawal of the troops from Iraq, stimulus package. That's the context. The unemployment thing is not isolated. Also, O's admin did two things Bush didn't do. $25 more per week, and no tax on first $2,500. Plus, they did it right away. And it is very important to keep up popular support for Obama, counter the propaganda from Kramer and the Wall Street mouthpieces, Limbaugh. We're in an ongoing struggle, campaign. It didn't end with the election campaign. The little things are like little pieces of campaign literature handed out at the polls or door to door. So, I'd say you're wrong on what is do be done right now. ^^^ The issue I wrote about was not an addition $100 a month, but deals with a completely different realm: a measure of what took place under the Bush W. administration, CB: So, why would you criticize the praise of the $100 a month and the tax break , which was more than what Bush did. Plus, I don't think Bush did it at the beginning of his presidency. I have to check. No reason to criticize the praise of Obama for doing something good 'cause Bush did it. ^^^ the precedence of the past and the art of the possible. It is imperative that communist always stay one step ahead along the path the working class must travel as its spontaneous movement and its self discovery of itself as a class. The LENS to use in traveling this path is that if the lowest section of the workers as their interest intersect and find expression in the political sphere. ^ CB: In this case. one step ahead along that path is to rally the working class to support Obama. In case you didn't notice the bourgeoisie are rallying against his first pro-working class moves. The ultra-left is stumbling into joining Kramer, Santelli and Limbaugh ^^ What is wrong is praising the Obama administration and the one hand; and condemnation of comrades - let haters, whose opinion might disagree with someone's else opinion. ^^ CB: See above. See discussion several weeks ago posts on Lenin's polemics against the ultra-left. We have the same task today. ^^ To begin with it is impossible to save capital without saving those workers connected to it as the unity of productive forces and production relations. To preserve this unity it is necessary to increase demand and I shall never approach or suggest negotiating from a standpoint that my enemies are doing me or mine a favor, . . with a concession, as such. . ^ CB: You have a different attitude toward the Obama event than I do. I think we should rally the working class in support of him. It's true it's because it's the best we have right now, but , there you go. It's sort of like supporting Coleman Young as Mayor. ^ ^ .. The real issue is over concentrating on private sector jobs - as government spending or socially necessary means of life. The pouring of trillions of dollars down the rabbit hole of modern speculative finance is designed to starve the workers of these needed funds. ^ CB: Well, yeah, that more later The issue is not me or who I am, rather the issue is how are comrades to frame the current struggle of the working class. Towards this end a doctrine is being put forth as the strategy and tactics of using class intersection as a measure of the complex fight unfolding. This is what is missing in assessments of the Obama administration and the existing correlations of forces in the Senate. Further comrades cannot be sectarian for fighting to establish a communist polarity in the political sphere. Which side are you on
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Are you really a champion of the poorest sectors of the ...
CB: You have a different attitude toward the Obama event than I do. I think we should rally the working class in support of him. It's true it's because it's the best we have right now, but , there you go. It's sort of like supporting Coleman Young as Mayor. Reply What is the Marxist perspective of our current economic, social and political environment of which Barack Obama is a part? What correlation of class forces and intersection allowed for Obama to be elected president? What is the practice of the working class movement forming the framework by which Obama the person as President to be weighed, measured and assessed? What are the spontaneous demands of that section of the working class in motion that President Obama and the entire institutional political sphere responding to? What phase of the process of social revolution currently exists? What is the role of communists in the social process? America is undergoing a profound political, economic and social collapse. Collapse does not mean no one is working or that the political system and social relations have been shattered and no longer operate. When a society undergoes collapse . . . . revolutionary collapse, this means the old ways of doing things and the old social relations of the previous period is undergoing transformation. Specifically the old platform or infrastructure relations that held society together is straining and collapsing as society attempts to leap to a new infrastructure relations. This was the case with the Civil rights movement, which in the first and last instance, had as its impetus the tractor or the mechanization of agriculture and pushing 11 million sharecroppers off of the land and first into Southern small towns and cities and then to the North where these folks would take their place in the industrial social order. The tractor was introduced by International Harvester in 1939. One can shift backwards through history and see - in retrospect, how every deepening quantitative boundary in the mechanization of agriculture had its corresponding and intensifying advance in the political struggle as the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights movement was a social movement for economic and social justice; for the expansion of political liberty. The old society constituted on the basis of Jim Crow segregation collapsed. First this old society was breached, then shattered and finally swept away by a cross section of American society (class intersection), but all of this was dependent upon and corresponded with changes in the means of production. The Marxist conception of collapse and revolutionary collapse is not the ideology of any damn thing can happen or one damn thing after another but transformation; the dialectic of the leap or the transition from one kind of society configuration to another. This Marxist understanding gives us the ideological conviction to wage the never ending struggle with the bourgeois power. America is undergoing the early stages of revolutionary collapse. Specifically, incremental qualitative changes in the productive forces begin polarizing and unraveling all classes and class fragments as society strains to adjust and reorient itself around a new technological regime. This reorientation appears as fight and attack by all classes and class fragments against the existing regime. Each class and class fragment is seeking to achieve reorganization and stability on a new basis, but this stability cannot be achieved because the property relations prevent the completion of the leap. Further, the private ownership of socially necessary property, prevents the fullest development of the new technological regime in servicing the socially necessary means of life for the masses. Consequently, a spontaneous series of chain reactions by various sectors of society, from various points of view, is destroying - unraveling, the society political infrastructure and social relations created during the industrial era. That is why the fascist and Republican have becomes so outspoken and adamant in their condemnation of any change. The real political fascist in government very well understand the social process. What emerges in the political sphere is the competing of different classes and class fragments with intersecting interest and this clash and struggle is called the class struggle that drives society forward. This class struggle revealed itself in a tiny way during the campaign phase of the Presidential election. It was a historically specific alignment of social forces that allowed Obama to best Senator Clinton as the Democratic Party nominee for President and then best Senator John McCain. Some view this alignment as white people doing the right thing - one damn thing after another, or waging the heroic struggle against racism. I do not. What
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Are you really a champion of the poorest sectors of the ...
CB: In this case. one step ahead along that path is to rally the working class to support Obama. In case you didn't notice the bourgeoisie are rallying against his first pro-working class moves. The ultra-left is stumbling into joining Kramer, Santelli and Limbaugh Comment Simply produce one piece of the ulta left that stumbles into supporting . . . joining Kramer, Santelli and Limbaugh. If you can not produce any evidence then stop fighting straw men of your own creation to justify your endless attack against the left. Produce the evidence. WL. **Need a job? Find employment help in your area. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agenciesncid=emlcntusyelp0005) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] How Cash Starved States Can Create their Own Credit
How Cash Starved States Can Create their Own Credit
by Ellen Brown
Global Research (March 03 2009)
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils;
for time is the greatest innovator. --- Francis Bacon
On February 19 2009, California narrowly
escaped bankruptcy, when
Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger put on
his Terminator hat and held the
state senate in lockdown mode until they signed a very controversial
budget {1}. If the vote had failed, the state
was going to be reduced to
paying its employees in IOUs. California avoided bankruptcy for the time
being, but 46 of fifty states are insolvent
and could be filing Chapter
Nine bankruptcy proceedings in the next two years {2}.
One of the four states that is not
insolvent is an unlikely candidate
for the distinction - North Dakota. As Michigan management consultant
Charles Fleetham observed last
month in an article distributed to his
local media:
North Dakota is a sparsely
populated state of less than 700,000, known
for cold weather, isolated farmers and a hit movie - Fargo. Yet, for
some reason it defies the
real estate cliche of location, location,
location. Since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56%, personal income has
grown 43%, and wages
have grown 34%. This year the state has a budget
surplus of $1.2 billion!
What does the State of North Dakota
have that other states don't? The
answer seems to be: its own bank.
In fact, North Dakota has the only
state-owned bank in the nation.
The state legislature established the
Bank of North Dakota in 1919. Fleetham writes that the bank was set up
to free farmers and small businessmen
from the clutches of out-of-state
bankers and railroad men. By law,
the state must deposit all its funds
in the bank, and the state guarantees its deposits. Three elected
officials oversee the bank: the governor,
the attorney general, and the
commissioner of agriculture. The bank's stated mission is to deliver
sound financial services that promote
agriculture, commerce and industry
in North Dakota. The bank operates as a bankers' bank, partnering with
private banks to loan money to farmers,
real estate developers, schools
and small businesses. It loans money
to students (over 184,000
outstanding loans), and it purchases
municipal bonds from public
institutions.
Still, you may ask, how does that
solve the solvency problem? Isn't the
state still limited to spending only
the money it has? The answer is no.
Certified, card-carrying bankers are
allowed to do something nobody else
can do: they can create credit with
accounting entries on their books.
A License to Create Money
Under the fractional reserve lending system,
banks are allowed to
extend credit (create money as loans)
in a sum equal to many times their
deposit base. Congressman Jerry Voorhis,
writing in 1973, explained it
like this:
[F]or every $1 or $1.50 which people -
or the government - deposit in a
bank, the banking system can create
out of thin air and by the stroke of
a pen some $10 of checkbook money
or demand deposits. It can lend all
that $10 into circulation at interest just
so long as it has the $1 or a
little more in reserve to back it up. {3}
That banks actually create money with
accounting entries was confirmed
in a revealing booklet published by the
Chicago Federal Reserve titled
Modern Money Mechanics {2}. The
booklet was periodically revised until
1992, when it had reached fifty pages
long. On page 49 of the 1992
edition, it states:
With a uniform ten percent reserve
requirement, a $1 increase in
reserves would support $10 of additional
transaction accounts [loans
created as deposits in borrowers' accounts] {4}.
The ten percent reserve requirement is
now largely obsolete, in part
because banks have figured out how to
get around it with such devices as
overnight sweeps. What chiefly limits
bank lending today is the eight
percent capital requirement imposed
by the Bank for International
Settlements, the head of the private global central banking system in
Basel, Switzerland. With an eight
percent capital requirement, a state
with its own bank could fan its revenues
into 12.5 times their face
value in loans (100 ÷ 8 = 12.5). And
since the state would actually own
the bank, it would not have to worry about shareholders or profits. It
could lend to creditworthy borrowers
at very low interest, perhaps
limited only to a service charge covering
its costs; and it could lend
to itself or to its municipal governments
at as low as zero percent
interest. If these loans were rolled over
indefinitely, the effect would
be the same as creating new, debt-free money.
Dangerously inflationary? Not if the
money were used to create new goods
and services. Price inflation results only
when demand (money) exceeds
supply (goods and services). When they
increase together, prices
remain stable.
Today we are in a dangerous deflationary
spiral, as lending has dried up
and asset values have plummeted. The
monopoly on
[Marxism-Thaxis] Obama says US may reach out to Taliban
Obama Says US May Reach Out to Taliban http://news.aol.com/article/obama-afghanistan-taliban/373693 CB:If I was Obama , I'd say to the Taliban look bros, obviously, you are some bad motherfuckers because even Alexander couldn't conquer y'all, or was it that Alexander was the only one who conquered y'all. Whatever. But look , don't you realize that chimpanzees have more sense than you do in that they know that you can't disrespect females like you are. You dig ? You are dumber than apes when it come to the girls. So why not drop the extraordinary anti-women total bullshit and peace out ? ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Are you really a champion of the poorest sectors of the
...Ralph Dumain Charles lost his mind a long time ago. But he has gotten really bad in recent months. After you have partaken too much of what the CP is serving, you get the itis. A lot of words are wasted wrangling in sectarian environments. ^^^ CB: Ah Ralph has been caused to take up the issue of sectarianism. Guess where his mind got to that. (smile) Perhaps some people feel the need to prove they're not being fooled, by denouncing bourgeois politicians. Others, proving they are not sectarian, act as if self-deception and confusion is the way to act practically and make necessary compromises. But once one knows a bourgeois politician is a bourgeois politician, one can move on to delineate clearly and precisely the situation to be dealt with. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Which side are you on ?
The real issue is over concentrating on private sector jobs - as government spending or socially necessary means of life. The pouring of trillions of dollars down the rabbit hole of modern speculative finance is designed to starve the workers of these needed funds. ^ CB: Well, yeah, that more later WL: The issue is not me or who I am, rather the issue is how are comrades to frame the current struggle of the working class. ^^ CB: Well, yeuuuh. Is you is or is you ain't ain't the issue. I figured that out 30 years ago. And some comrades around here are not framing the current struggles of the working class correctly. when they fail to see that Obama is the leader of the working class right now. Stuff like O is the CEO of the capitalists is bad framing. Hisotric, maybe world historic erroneous framing. ^ Towards this end a doctrine is being put forth as the strategy and tactics of using class intersection as a measure of the complex fight unfolding. This is what is missing in assessments of the Obama administration and the existing correlations of forces in the Senate. ^ CB: Reiterate ^ Further comrades cannot be sectarian for fighting to establish a communist polarity in the political sphere. ^^ CB: Yes they can. A communist polarity is premature and sectarian right now. We need a popular front, all peoples front. ^^ Which side are you on is not a conception of Democrats or Republicans but workers and capitalist. WL. ^^^ CB: Wrong. Right now the Democrats of Obama is the side to be on. Which side are you on ? ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Are you really a champion of the poorest sectors of the
...Waistline2 at aol.com Waistline2 at aol.com Sat Mar 7 14:46:29 MST 2009 * Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Are you really a champion of the poorest sectors of the ... * Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Are you really a champion of the poorest sectors of the ... * Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] CB: You have a different attitude toward the Obama event than I do. I think we should rally the working class in support of him. It's true it's because it's the best we have right now, but , there you go. It's sort of like supporting Coleman Young as Mayor. Reply What is the Marxist perspective of our current economic, social and political environment of which Barack Obama is a part? ^ CB: It's do what you can to help O. ^ What correlation of class forces and intersection allowed for Obama to be elected president? ^^ CB: A significant anti-racist, White , Brown and Black, pro-working people ( working class and middle class) coalition. An anti-war, anti-rightwing, anti-Bush, anti-Reaganite coalition. What is the practice of the working class movement forming the framework by which Obama the person as President to be weighed, measured and assessed? ^^^ CB: Electoral practice, which must be converted to People's lobbyist practice. Not so much the person but the leader , the emblem can be weighed as heavy, measured as breaking through a quantitative barrier , and capable of breaking through more. Assessed as high reformist potential. ^6 ^^ What are the spontaneous demands of that section of the working class in motion that President Obama and the entire institutional political sphere responding to? ^ CB: Anti-war, anti-racist, the rational kernel of American humanism. ^^ What phase of the process of social revolution currently exists? ^ CB: Very early social rev, moderate reformism but potentially radical because of deep pentup contradictions for at least 30 years, with few reformist resolutions in at least 30 years. ^ What is the role of communists in the social process? ^ CB: In the concrete circumstance join the Obama crowd and don't stand out. Mingle and go with O-flow ^^ America is undergoing a profound political, economic and social collapse. Collapse does not mean no one is working or that the political system and social relations have been shattered and no longer operate. When a society undergoes collapse . . . . revolutionary collapse, this means the old ways of doing things and the old social relations of the previous period is undergoing transformation. Specifically the old platform or infrastructure relations that held society together is straining and collapsing as society attempts to leap to a new infrastructure relations. ^^ CB Uhhuh ^ This was the case with the Civil rights movement, which in the first and last instance, had as its impetus the tractor or the mechanization of agriculture and pushing 11 million sharecroppers off of the land and first into Southern small towns and cities and then to the North where these folks would take their place in the industrial social order. The tractor was introduced by International Harvester in 1939. One can shift backwards through history and see - in retrospect, how every deepening quantitative boundary in the mechanization of agriculture had its corresponding and intensifying advance in the political struggle as the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights movement was a social movement for economic and social justice; for the expansion of political liberty. The old society constituted on the basis of Jim Crow segregation collapsed. First this old society was breached, then shattered and finally swept away by a cross section of American society (class intersection), but all of this was dependent upon and corresponded with changes in the means of production. ^^ CB: And executed in the last especially by the Johnson Democratic Party. ^^ The Marxist conception of collapse and revolutionary collapse is not the ideology of any damn thing can happen or one damn thing after another but transformation; the dialectic of the leap or the transition from one kind of society configuration to another. This Marxist understanding gives us the ideological conviction to wage the never ending struggle with the bourgeois power. ^ CB: Well, at some point we aim to end it... in the final conflict ^^ America is undergoing the early stages of revolutionary collapse. CB: Revolutions are not collapses. Collapses hold potential for revolution to be made out of them, if the ruling class can't rule in the old way and the ruled won't be ruled any longer in the old way. We aren't there yet. But the masses are mulling over the situation in ways that are no reflected much in the
