Keith - I'm afraid I wasn't paying attention when I first encountered the allegation about catalytic converters, General Motors, Johnson-Matthey, and some then not very valuable shares in platinum mines. I think it was in the late lamented motorcycle magazine AWoL. I was half hoping you could supply some detail ...
The list archives might be able to, if not directly then you could pick up some leads to follow further.
I've long understood the inappropriateness of using the term "free market" to describe corporate capitalism.
But it's been so successful, journalists spout it with the jerk of a knee, Joe Bloggs has a high opinion of it. You'd think it means "free of fascism" rather than free of regulation. The advantage is that it gives us a "level playing field" which the big guys get to tip their way without the machine yelling "Tilt".
>From a previous message:
> Whatever could be wrong with "free trade"? Sounds so equitable and democratic. But the winds of free trade favour the ships with the biggest sails, and sink the rest. The "magic of the marketplace" and the "Invisible Hand" don't bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number - on the contrary, in an unregulated marketplace, goods will inevitably be driven towards those with excess funds (the wealthy) and away from those with no means (the poor and needy). As we can see, worldwide.
The other side of the same coin:
In a message dated 6/23/05 2:09:09 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< mass poverty and hunger are the collateral damage
of neoliberal "wealth creation" (read "wealth extraction, poverty creation") >>
more like an essential ingredient in the process. anywhere you find people
impoverished and marginalized in their own land, if they aren't kept on the
brink of survival then they'll start thinking about how to kick out the thieves
and parasites.
... It also requires a large reserve pool of readily exploitable factory fodder, or just any kind of fodder, people who'll do virtually anything at any price to get some food for their kids and are all too aware of the hundreds or thousands waiting to take their place - they know they're "the lucky ones".
Now what was all that again about "border industries"? Rings bells eh Dawie?
The suits spout about the benefits of being untrammelled, and doubtless most of them believe it. What really benefits them is a rather draconian regulatory environment with which they have an exclusive ability to comply.
Yes.
Surely there is the odd suit that understands that?
Many I think. But they're operating within the context of the primacy of the bottom line, in fact required by law to give priority to the bottom line. But in human terms that's the behaviour of a psychopath. Yet the corporations - the thing itself, whatever it is, not the people who work for it - have more human rights than humans do.
Corporations have different personalities, some are more benign than others, and maybe they tend to attract more of the "odd suits" as a result. Maybe there's scope for evolution in that, and maybe some of the suits also think so, especially right now, when a lot of people are waking up to a lot of things they can't ignore any longer.
We get emails from high-placed executives in transnational corporations. They tell us of their families and their children, of their dreams, sometimes of projects they do in their spare time (gardening! - very subversive!), but the reason they write is that they want to make a difference.
Unless we speculate that the corporate organizational structure is sufficiently complex to manifest a form of rudimentary and ruthless intelligence that does understand that - the sort of sly stupidity one associates with monsters in mythology.
I'm sure there's that too. Not necessarily stupid.
I'm alliterating today. Oh, now I'm assonating!
:-)
But the ability to play chess is not that uncommon. If lots of people can think a few moves ahead, why not corporate strategists?
I think any strategist can think a few moves ahead. But we all have our blindspots, and the corporate worldview has many, many of them peculiar to corporations.
And if lots of people can second-guess other people thinking a few moves ahead ...
There are lots of signs of that happening in this context. The Internet turns out to be the great leveller of unlevel playing fields.
We all know which are the monster corporations, the top corporate criminals year after year, no use trying to evolve or reform or rehabilitate them, they're the problem and they have to go, and so does their entire neo-liberal "playing field".
The idea that that will necessarily destroy the whole structure of world or Western or American civilisation and life-as-we-know-it with it doesn't hold a lot of water. Nobody needs the corporate criminals.
Economics and sanity are not incompatible. Time for sane economics, methinks.
Hey, I've got a suit. I even wore it once. Required for a job I was commissioned for. Very high-quality suit, tailormade in Hong Kong. Only it wasn't tailormade for me. I bought it for $20 at the Oxfam shop in Central District. The women running the shop recognised a hopeless case when they saw one and took pity on me. They chose the suit, and a couple of ties, sent me to an ace tailor they knew to alter it to fit me, gave me lots of good advice on suits and the wearing of them. I guess they were used to doing the same thing for their husbands.
I had another suit, but that was in 1969. My dog Max ate it so I decided he probably knew best and gave up on suits. He ate my tie too.
Best
Keith
-Dawie
----- Original Message ----
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Sent: Friday, 23 February, 2007 2:48:24 AM
Subject: Biofuel Digest, Vol 22, Issue 77
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Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Meanwhile - Biodiesel start-up hauls in $214 million
Message: 2
Hello Dawie
>Why am I getting the impression that Industry is bending over
>backwards to discredit the whole biofuel idea by applying it in the
>worst possible way? Are they preparing the ground for getting it
>banned?
Hm. It's probably instinctive for big-time suits to favour the
stamping out of small, local, independent outfits, then they can
consolidate the market too, as they put it. Especially when they
can't out-compete the small guys (if they even try). They misquote
Adam Smith and emit noble flatulences about the magic of the
marketplace but what they like is total control, not healthy
competition. Prohibition sure had a lot to do with that. Your seeds
example is a good one and it's already QED, even without terminator.
CP, the Charoen Pokphand Group, East Asia's Tysons, having themselves
virtually caused the bird flu epidemic and spread it far and wide,
then used it as an opportunity to wipe out the remaining small-scale
poultry operators in countries like Thailand and Vietnam by claiming
against all the evidence that the small outdoor flocks were the cause
of the disease and were spreading it. The governments kow-towed, as
usual, and CP's market share went up from 60% to 80% or whatever.
Well, hey, that's progress. Never mind a few million more destroyed
livelihoods and about a billion murdered chickens, as long as it
makes a nice omelette for CP. There's not exactly a shortage of such
examples.
I'm sure Big Biofuels would like to ban homebrewers and the local
operators, Graham Noyes or not, but I doubt they're out to get
biodiesel itself banned, they'd rather take it over. People have been
saying that here for a long time, that there's not much difference
between Big Biofuels and Big Oil, they'll shove us out of the picture
and take it over. World Energy is backed by Gulf Oil, they've got a
deal with Dow over big-time biodiesel production and so on, almost
all the big guys are involved now.
But I don't think they're about to shove us little guys out of the
picture, it's too late for that, we're suitably out of control, IMHO.
It's hard for them to see that the big central top-down model they're
so accustomed to just won't work with biofuels, or not for long
anyway, for instance not once you have to start paying the carbon
costs of transporting the stuff all that way, feedstock in, biofuel
out. Not sustainable, no more so than the big central industrialised
monocrop production that's their oilwell. Not sustainable means it
doesn't have a future, no matter how many millions of dollars you
chuck at it.
By comparison, a US Army report says the US Army won't be able to
fight future wars to secure oil supplies without diversifying the
military's energy supplies, especially into renewables. "The [U.S.]
military needs to take major steps to increase energy efficiency,
make a 'massive expansion' in renewable energy purchases, and move
toward a vast increase in renewable distributed generation, including
photovoltaic, solar thermal, microturbines, and biomass energy
sources," the report said. "Renewables tend to be a more local or
regional commodity and except for a few instances, not necessarily a
global resource that is traded between nations," it said. (Full
report <<http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA440265>http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA440265>)
I'm sure they're right, that's more or less what we've been saying.
But it hasn't sunk in a lot down Wall Street way. Probably not at the
Pentagon either.
Same issue as food, and food miles.
<http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html#foodmiles>http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html#foodmiles
Enter Slow Food, exit, eventually, Tysons. I wonder if there's a
faster growing market sector than the local food market, worldwide. I
wonder why nobody notices (not). Well, not quite nobody.
One of the groups we work with here in Japan, basically an organics
group, started calling biodiesel "Slow Fuel", and I think it spread.
In Japanese it lacks the inference that it makes your car go slow,
unfortunate because otherwise it's a good metaphor.
But I wouldn't expect the long-lunches brigade at places like World
Energy or Imperium Renewables or the NBB to see it that way until
they're forced.
>It is how they've operated before. Just look at catalytic converters
>and platinum interests.
Uh-huh? Do tell.
Now there's apparently a thin film of platinum over the entire globe,
as well as palladium and rhodium, the other metals used in catalytic
converters. Anyway the sources of these metals are running out aren't
they? Russia's palladium is running out, or did already.
>The GMO thing is just about ripe. Industry wants to sell terminator
>genes: that's all the whole thing is about. If they simply introduce
>terminator seeds they will generate a lot of resentment. Everyone
>will be trying any alternative, and that might just kill the whole
>commercial seed industry. So, Industry makes it a health and safety
>issue, not a small-farming human rights issue. They get people so
>scared about their GMOs going invasive - doubtless having gone to a
>lot of trouble to develop GMOs that are sure to go invasive - that
>they can rely on environmentalists who should know better to insist
>on terminator genes! That way they can turn around and say, "We
>didn't want to sell terminator genes, but those damned
>self-righteous environmentalists are forcing us."
>
>It is the first rule of industrial politics: always make it someone
>else's fault. That way the moral high ground is used against the
>party that holds it.
>
>See the pattern. Don't fall for it. Spread the word.
Such a pattern certainly exists. On the other hand, as Napoleon said,
"Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by
incompetence."
This is what Adam Smith said:
>Going back two centuries, economists have worried about what Adam
>Smith described as the tendency of chieftains in a market system "to
>deceive and even to oppress the public".
>
>"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment
>and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the
>public, or in some contrivance to raise prices" ("Wealth of
>Nations"). He said businessmen always yearn to escape from price
>competition through collusion.
>
>He didn't like corporations and governments either. He viewed
>government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to
>subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate
>monopolies. "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the
>security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of
>the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property
>against those who have none at all.'"
>
>"Adam Smith commented in 1776 that the only trades that justified
>incorporation were banking, insurance, canal building and
>waterworks. He believed it was contrary to the public interest for
>any other businesses or trades to be incorporated and that all
>should be run as partnerships."
This is what the Wise Old Man of the Homestead list said:
"Small-scale capitalism works out fine, but as scale increases the
departure from real capitalism becomes more pronounced - profits are
privatized, but costs are socialized. The attendant repair and
maintenance are left to succeeding generations if possible, if not,
to present low and middle income taxpayers."
Corporatism is not capitalism, it's feudalism in a suit. It's time
for people like Fritz Schumacher and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen to
have their day, Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss are long past their
use-by date.
Imperium Renewables indeed, what a name. LOL!
Best
Keith
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