Category Archives: Economics/Class Relations

What Has (State) Government Done to Our Money? Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

Is your state destroying your money?

Federal policy and the privately owned Federal Reserve System are the root causes of inflation, instability, and currency devaluation. However, states can take some steps to protect their citizens from the ill effects of America’s unbacked paper money system.

The 2018 Sound Money Index is the first index of its kind, ranking all 50 states using 9 different criteria to determine which states have implemented the most pro-sound money policies in the country.

The complete 2018 Sound Money Index is available here: https://www.moneymetals.com/guides/sound-money-index

Jp Cortez is a graduate of Auburn University and a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina. He is the Policy Director of the Sound Money Defense League, an organization working to bring back gold and silver as America’s constitutional money. Follow him on twitter, @JpCortez27

 

Dr. Engelhardt: Economy Beholden to Fed Interest Rate Policy; Here’s One Way Gold Could Reach $14,000+… Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

Mike Gleason: It is my privilege now to welcome in Dr. Lucas Engelhardt associate professor of economics at Kent State University. Dr. Engelhardt is an Austrian economist who has been a guest lecturer at the Mises Institute and in his teaching specializes in macro-economics in the examination of the business cycle, and it’s certainly a real pleasure to have him on with us today. Lucas, thanks so much for taking the time and welcome.

Dr. Lucas Engelhardt: Well thank you for having me on.

Mike Gleason: Well, I’m excited to have you on today because there is a lot to discuss with you. For starters I think a good place to begin is the business cycle. Now, but before we get into the misunderstandings that the Keynesians seems to have about this, explain the business cycle if you would and why it’s important in order to have a proper understanding of monetary policy.

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Money, Fake Money, and Sound Money Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations • Tags:

By Jp Cortez, Sound Money Defense League

Americans no longer carry gold and silver money in our pockets and purses as our grandparents did. But we still carry the history, legacy, and spirit of those gold and silver coins in our language.

“Sound money” embodies a clear message recognized for centuries around the world. It describes the musical, metallic ring of a gold, silver, or copper coin dropped on any hard surface of glass, stone, wood, or metal.

Sound money literally refers to real wealth, with a natural, unmistakable signature of authenticity, as opposed to the paper, plastic, and electronic debt instruments used almost exclusively today.

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Dr. Engelhardt: Economy Beholden to Fed Interest Rate Policy; Here’s One Way Gold Could Reach $14,000+… Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

Mike Gleason: It is my privilege now to welcome in Dr. Lucas Engelhardt associate professor of economics at Kent State University. Dr. Engelhardt is an Austrian economist who has been a guest lecturer at the Mises Institute and in his teaching specializes in macro-economics in the examination of the business cycle, and it’s certainly a real pleasure to have him on with us today. Lucas, thanks so much for taking the time and welcome.

Dr. Lucas Engelhardt: Well thank you for having me on.

Mike Gleason: Well, I’m excited to have you on today because there is a lot to discuss with you. For starters I think a good place to begin is the business cycle. Now, but before we get into the misunderstandings that the Keynesians seems to have about this, explain the business cycle if you would and why it’s important in order to have a proper understanding of monetary policy.

Dr. Lucas Engelhardt: Sure. Now, as you mentioned, I come from the Austrian economic framework. And Austrian economics describes the business cycle as the consequence of manipulations happening in the money supply, specifically in credit markets. So, starting from that point, so how the business cycle happens is that we have somebody in the banking system. We know in modern America it would be the Federal Reserve is generally responsible for this. Decides to push down interest rates, normally to stimulate the economy.

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The Present and Future of the LP (and the Problem of “Libertarian Socialism”) Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Tom Woods interviews Joshua Smith on the libertarian capitalist vs libertarian socialist conflict in the Libertarian Party. Listen here.

Joshua Smith, who secured a spot on the Libertarian National Committee at the party’s recent convention, joins me to discuss the party’s present and future, the controversy with “libertarian socialists,” and much more.

Alt-Right Showdown: We can do better than this… Hard times in USA 4

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right

It’s interesting to see people from the Communist Left like Caleb Maupin and Jason Unruhe saying the things that I have been saying for 20 years, e.g. that progressive liberalism is simply the self-legitimating ideology of imperialism, that “social justice” activists are just middle class and college student hobbyists, that the “Left” in its present incarnation views the traditional working class as its primary enemy, that the “far right” comes closer to being an actual opposition force, that the working class is being reproletarianized, that the “anti-fascist” left has become the new McCarthyites, that the antifa and anarcho-leftoids are the shock troops of the liberal establishment, etc etc.

Neocons and Liberals Join Forces to Fight Populism Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Uncategorized

The liberal ruling classes circle the wages against revolts by the reactionary peasantry. Shades of the 19th century.

By Paul Gottfried

The American Conservative

For several months, an alliance has been forming between the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the neoliberal Center for American Progress (CAP). It’s the sort of kumbaya not witnessed since wartime Washington a decade ago.

A press release from CAP on May 10 blares: “CAP and AEI Team up to Defend Democracy and Transatlantic Partnership.” The same joyous tidings accompanied a public statement issued by AEI on July 31, which stressed that the alliance was meant to resist “the populist assault on the transatlantic community” for the purpose of “defending democracy.”

Although, according to Vikram Singh, a senior fellow at CAP, the two partners “often disagree on important policy questions,” they have been driven together “at a time when the character of our societies is at stake.” This burgeoning cooperation underscores that “our commitment to democracy and core democratic principles is stronger than ever.” Since both documents fling around the terms “democracy” and “liberal democracy” to justify a meddlesome foreign policy, we may safely assume that the neocons are behind this project. Neocons for some time now have prefixed their intended aggressions with “democracy” and “liberal democracy” the way the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs during the 16th and 17th centuries stuck the word “holy” into the names of their wartime alliances. Closer to our time, communist governments favored the use of “people’s democracy” to indicate that they were the good guys. Presumably the neocons have now picked up this habit of nomenclature.

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On the new undesirables of the West Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Uncategorized

An excellent piece of class/caste analysis from a Marxist/Maoist perspective. This is more or less what I have been saying for decades. Genuine Communists are always so refreshing when compared with the usual SJW/Antifa/IDPol/weenie Leftist types.

Maoist Rebel News

Editor: The following is a post that was written by someone I know who wishes to remain anonymous. We will call him “Comrade M”. It seeks to ask questions regarding NEETS, incels, “forever alones” and the like. Can we consider them a new group of undesirables? What is their relationship to the class structure of the first world?

Jason Unruhe

In the 1800’s, Karl Marx’s ideas were groundbreaking. Even more so than laying the foundations for scientific socialism, Karl Marx described the inner machinations of the capitalist system on both the sociological and economic level better than any previous economist, philosopher or social-scientist.

Even though Marx’s ideas were correct for his day, he lived in a rapidly changing global society. By the time of the Bolshevik revolution, the world had already changed in many ways. So Lenin and the Bolsheviks came along, and devised Marxism-Leninism. They “updated” Marxism, both to be current with the times, and also to encompass the collective experiences of the international communist movement since Marx and Engels passed away. At the time, the majority of the Communist movement belonged to a revisionist grouping called the “2nd international”, which upheld a generally revisionist, chauvinist line. The 2nd Internationale advocated for both social-imperialism and “evolutionary” socialism, or “social-democracy” which would become another stagnant neo-liberal trend in the modern day. At their worst, the 2nd international went as far as to defend the atrocity of Colonialism, eg, in the case of the old Workers Party of Belgium, which proposed the nationalization of land, resources, and people of the Congo for the benefit of the European Proletariat.

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China is Treating Africa The Same Way European Colonists Did Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Panos Mourdoukoutas

Forbes

The reason China is in Africa is simple; to exploit the people and take their resources. It’s the same thing European colonists did during mercantile times, except worse. The corporations owned by the Chinese state are trying to turn Africa into another Chinese continent. They are squeezing Africa for everything it is worth.

This is the view several African politicians have. The Zambian politician Michael Sata was one of them. At least he was before being elected President of Zambia in 2011. He wrote a paper presented to Harvard University in 2007 that said “European colonial exploitation in comparison to Chinese exploitation appears benign, because even though the commercial exploitation was just as bad, the colonial agents also invested in social and economic infrastructure services Chinese investment, on the other hand, is focused on taking out of Africa as much as can be taken out, without any regard to the welfare of the local people.”

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GOP Congressman Investigates Undisclosed Gold Market Intervention by China and the Exchange Stabilization Fund Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations

Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV) Calls Out Fed & Treasury for Dodging Questions on Gold Activities

Washington, DC (July 31, 2018) – A member of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee is calling out the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury for dodging questions about their activities involving America’s gold reserves.

In a letter dated July 27, Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) wrote to Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, after receiving perfunctory responses to his April 24th letter, noting “a few questions were either not addressed at all or not fully addressed.”

In particular, the Fed and Treasury would not articulate any U.S. policy toward gold and refused to comment on historical U.S. State Department documents pointing to a U.S. policy of “driving gold out of the world financial system in favor of the Federal Reserve Note or Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.”

In his follow-up letter, Rep. Mooney provided evidence of involvement by the Exchange Stabilization Fund in the gold market and called attention to “the recent correlation of the gold price with the price of the Chinese yuan and the valuation of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.”

“Do these correlations reflect surreptitious intervention in the U.S. currency markets by China and currency manipulation by China?” Mooney asked.

Mooney also provided a 2009 letter from then Fed Governor Kevin M. Warsh acknowledging the existence of Fed documents on gold swaps (while simultaneously refusing to provide them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee).

Mooney asked Chairman Powell to reconcile the Marsh acknowledgement with his July 12, 2018, letter, including Powell’s assertion that “The Fed does not engage, nor has it ever engaged, in gold swaps.”

Rep. Mooney noted the Treasury did not appropriately answer his question regarding prior audits of America’s gold reserves.  In his July 11, 2018 response, Acting Assistant Treasury Secretary Brad Bailey merely discussed audits of gold compartment seals, and Mooney responded that a cursory examination of seals is “neither an inventory nor an audit of our nation’s gold.”

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The Latin Americanization of the United States 2

by • American Decline, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized

By Keith Preston

Everyone knows that one of the principal grievances of the right-wing involves the substantial amount of immigration from Latin America to the United States that has taken place in recent decades. The commonly voiced concern is that the traditional “white” (Northern European) majority will lose its majority status, and that persons of Latin American ancestry (combined with people of color generally) will become the demographic majority. Whether this is good or bad is an individual value judgment, but the criticisms often obscure other, perhaps more substantive ways in which the United States is coming to resemble Latin America.

The traditional class system of Latin America is one where the very rich plutocratic elites live in opulence and luxury, and rule over an impoverished working class, an extraordinarily large underclass of the extreme poor and permanently unemployed, and a small middle class of professionals and technocrats. This is precisely the same kind of class system that the United States is developing, particularly in California which is widely considered to be the bellwether of the nation.

In traditional Latin American societies, the elite rule for the sake of pursing their own class interests, without any pretense of interest in the needs of the masses. To the degree that elections are held at all, the candidates are merely functionaries of the plutocracy. US politics is rapidly coming to resemble this model.

The police and the army are the traditionally dominant force in Latin American societies, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the military industrial complex and police state have assumed a comparable role in the United States.

The one noticeable difference is that in many traditional Latin American societies, the Catholic Church hierarchy provided the ruling class with its self-legitimating ideology. In the United States, organized religion is becoming an increasingly marginal force with the new self-legitimating ideology of the state being the totalitarian humanist ideology of the new clerisy.

Interestingly, Latin America has experienced a great deal of liberalization and progress in the past few decades, while the United States has increasingly gone backward. Perhaps Americans need to start emigrating to Latin America.

Image result for latin american dictatorships

An Anarchist Survey of Amazon: Crashing the Party and Amazon Go Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

It’s Going Down

Since the conclusion of our previous survey, two interesting events occurred in various Amazon facilities. In one instance, a fulfillment center was torched in the British Midlands. In another instance, coordinated strikes hit Amazon in Germany and Northern Italy. All of this preceded the holiday sales blitz and threw Amazon into internal chaos. At the end of the holiday season, all Amazon could tout was its toxic accomplishment of shipping one billion commodities and selling “tens of millions” of talking Alexa units. When the shopping extravaganza was over, the corporate employees of Amazon were rewarded with a lavish spectacle to sooth their overworked souls.

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In Praise of Jeff Bezos Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Sean Gabb

According to a report on the BBC website, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is the richest man in the world, with an alleged personal fortune of £113bn. The usual suspects have raised their arms in outrage at the news. Oxfam drew fresh attention to its report from 2017, in which it called “for a fundamental change in the way we manage our economies so that they work for all people, and not just a fortunate few.” A few weeks earlier, The Guardian had lamented:

Amazon’s website is, in the west, the dominant platform for online retail sales…. This is bad for democracy. Commerce ought to reside in markets governed by regulations set by democratic political process not those chosen by the world’s richest man, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos.

My view is that Mr Bezos, together with Bill Gates and various other people whose names it will be briefer to let my readers guess than for me to enumerate, is one of the greatest men alive. He has increased the wealth and happiness of countless millions. He is helping to bring into being a world that, just one generation ago, the boldest science fiction writers were cautious to describe. He has earned every penny of his great fortune.

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Keith Preston: Trump’s trade war a ‘double-edged sword’ Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Press TV. Listen here.

US President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policy with China and Europe is a “double-edged sword,” bolstering domestic manufacturing and narrowing the trade deficit while hitting the American consumer with rising prices, says an analyst.

“Tariffs on imports have multiple economic effects and depending on what kind of economic values you assign to a particular policy, they can be beneficial or they could be negative,” Keith Preston, chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, said in an interview. More…

EVACUATING UTOPIA: A History of Christian Anarchism Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Lecture delivered by Wayne John Sturgeon at the second international conference of the National-Anarchist Movement, England, June 23, 2018.

“Isn’t the world already

At Peace and aren’t we

The only warring faction?”

-Crass

Improvements made straight roads,

but the crooked roads without improvement,

are the roads of genius.

-William Blake

INTRODUCTION

I would like to begin this lecture with a quote from a contemporary theologian, Alasdair Macintyre, who made the following candid observation in reference to our own times, when writing on the fall of the western Roman Empire:

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Utah, Texas, and Wyoming Top 2018’s ‘Sound Money Index,’ Which Was Just Released by the Sound Money Defense League Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags:

Utah, Texas, and Wyoming Top 2018’s ‘Sound Money Index,’ Which Was Just Released by the Sound Money Defense League

The 2018 Sound Money Index is the first index of its kind, ranking all 50 states using 9 indicators to determine which states offer the most pro-sound money environment in the country

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Keith Preston: US relies on military–industrial complex for manufacturing jobs Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Military, Uncategorized • Tags:

Press TV. Listen here.

The United States relies on the country’s military–industrial complex for manufacturing and factory employment, an American analyst in Virginia says.

Maintaining the massive US arms industry is motivated not just by military purposes, but also for preserving American jobs and economic growth, said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“The military–industrial complex…is a central component of the United States economic system,” Preston told Press TV on Thursday.

“Military production is a big part of the economy,” he said. “Essentially they’re not so much because they serve any military purpose as much as someone is getting paid for producing the weapons or they’re the source of preserving jobs and employment either within the military or within the civilian sector.”

US manufacturing, and in particular by the US arms industry, has always relied on government funding in one form or another.

Roughly 10 percent of the $2.2 trillion in factory output in the United States goes into the production of weapons sold mainly to the US Defense Department for use by the armed forces.

The US military is planning to install a massive radar that officials say is designed to identify missile attacks against the US mainland, Military.com reported Wednesday.

The $1 billion system is supposed to spot incoming missile warheads fired for Hawaii and other US states and send the information to ground-based interceptor missile systems in Alaska, which will then try to shoot them down, the report said.

Experts have argued that a larger face would allow the radar to distinguish between warheads and decoys more precisely.

The news of comes fays after Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, met in Singapore earlier this month and issued a declaration agreeing to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Robert Stark talks about The YIMBY Movement & The Alt-Center 1

by • Economics/Class Relations, Environment, Left and Right, Race and Ethnicity, Science and Technology • Tags: ,

The Stark Truth. Listen here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Stark joined with Cartrell Payne(aka The Adventure Kid) to discuss the YIMBY movement, the Alt-Center, and how those issues relate.

Topics:

California Senator Scott Wiener’s housing-transit measure Derailed
Factions of the YIMBY movement including left leaning housing advocates, real estate developers, and the Market Urbanist
Left Wing anti-gentrification activists and their alliance with NIMBY’s
Cartrell’s observations on gentrification in Memphis, Tennessee
The hypocrisy of pro-immigration Limousine Liberal NIMBY’s, and how that combination exacerbates the housing crisis
How the YIMBY movement is also very pro immigration
Income Inequality in California and the mass exodus of the middle class
The film Falling Down which is set in LA in the early 90’s and a warning of a dystopian future
What makes California great and can it be saved?
The New Great Migration of Black Americans back to The South
White Middle Class Conservative NIMBY’s, their motivations, and how they are sabotaging their own self interest
Why YIMBYism and immigration restriction are compatible, and why the Alt-Center should take up those causes
Why YIMBYs need to address aesthetic concerns
Why YIMBYism is compatible with environmental and historic preservation
Citylab and City Journal; their writings on urbanism and political agendas
Why mass transit is inefficient in LA and other Sun Belt cities
The political and cultural flaws of both Blue and Red States
A vision of an Alt Center which include alternative economics, pro middle class policies, New Urbanism, environmentalism, SWPL culture, and socially centrist
Cartrell’s political orientation as an Old School Southern Democrat minus the racism
Cartrell’s critique of both the Black Liberal Establishment and Black Conservatives
Conservative views on the poor and police issues and Conservative Class Cucks
The early 20th Century Populist movement
Norman Mailer’s plan for breaking up New York City which addressed both the concerns of the Left and the Right

Robert Stark talks to Giovanni Dannato about Pragmatic Dissidence Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right • Tags: ,

The Stark Truth. Listen here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Giovanni Dannato blogs at Colony of Commodus and is the author of APOSTASY and A Kingdom For the Introvert. Follow Giovanni on Twitter.

Topics:

Giovanni’s New Alt-Dissident Fantasy Fiction
The theme of Heaven and Hell as an analogy for those who are within the system and those outside of it
The importance of creating a cultural vision beyond political policies
Alt-Centrist Scum Will Rise
The importance of focusing on what works over having a rigid ideology
There’s No Power Without “Downward Distribution”
How wealth distribution has a history going back to Ancient Mesopotamia
The flaws of conservative individualism and why people must co-operate as tribes
The limited demographic of conservationism and how to create a broader coalition
Rejecting both Right Wing Social Darwinism and Left Wing Egalitarianism
How to effectively distribute wealth(ex. Smart Socialism and State Capitalism)
How to effectively take care of mediocre people and the “losers” of society
Why economic “handouts” are necessary to gain political support and maintain a functional society
How better urban planning can address economic and class problems
The concept of the urban gene shredder and how to address it
The importance of having a leisure economy for innovation
The need for a specialized economy that utilizes a wide variety of personality types

Forget the Russophobia/Russophilia: There is Only One System 6

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

In recent times, there has been a great deal of concentration on Russia as either the embodiment of evil, or as humankind’s last best hope. Russia is being portrayed by Democrats as the puppetmasters behind Trumpism, by the “antifascists” as the new headquarters of world fascism, and by some on the Right as the saviors of (pick one) the white man, traditional values, Christianity, etc. Meanwhile, some on the far Left have assumed a Cold War-era stance by proclaiming Russia to be the leadership of the global anti-imperialist resistance.

All of these points of view are wrong. The reality is that Russia is merely another player in the global-super-capitalist empire. How can a nation that is a member of the G20, and which holds a permanent seat on the UN Security Council be anything else? It is true that Russia has become increasingly resurgent in recent years after the dismal period of the 1990s. But Russia is still a long way from having the power it had even during the Soviet era (which was only made possible by Western aid in the first place), much less presenting a credible threat to American hegemony.

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Trans Mountain pipeline opponents vow to keep fighting Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized • Tags:

Apparently, this is what “progressive” government looks like under Justin Trudeau’s totalitarian humanist regime.

By Justine Calma

Grist.Org

Canada is coughing up $3.5 billion to buy the floundering Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project from Kinder Morgan. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had vowed “to get that pipeline built,” but pipeline resistance groups aren’t backing down, either.

“This is a declaration of war against indigenous people because they’re not recognizing our own sovereignty,” says Kanahus Manuel, a Secwepemc midwife and mother of four. “So we are putting on our war paint and we are putting on our battle gear and we’re going to fight.”

The Houston-based company had stopped all non-essential spending on the project last month after facing broad opposition from environmental groups, indigenous communities, and the province of British Columbia. Canada says it plans to fund construction of the project until it can find another buyer to take over. If completed, it would nearly triple the pipeline’s capacity to transport crude and refined oil from Alberta to B.C.

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