Revolutions Rock Thanks To The Internet

In all revolutionary cycles there lies a fundamental basis which creates these events: sudden food and fuel hikes due to bad harvests or various disruptions especially credit bubble collapses.  Credit bubbles happen because of various systems revolutions.  That is, when a new industry or manufacturing or labor market opens up, there is this sudden surge in profits which in turn, fuel the credit markets which need some sort of capital reserve in order to lend money.  Thus, we have credit bubbles every 30-50 years.  The latest one developed thanks to the opening up of one half of the world’s workers to international manufacturing exploitation coupled with the computer revolution, the latest part being the internet revolution.

Like all previous ‘revolutionary changes’ in the monetary/industrial/labor sector, the internet revolution is creating actual revolutions since the most revolutionary part of the internet happens to be how little it can be controlled by a very few people (though they are trying as hard as possible to change this!) and how it is a mass media form as it spreads across the world.

The impact of this revolutionary change in communications systems from cell phones to the internet is becoming clearer by the hour.  All the photos and videos of actual physical rebellions are instantly broadcast with no filtering by rich media owners to the rest of the planet.  We see in picture after picture, hands holding up cell phones to record actual events.  The fact that we can now see all of this instantly is a great and wonderful thing.  No one is there to explain to us what is going on and this is a good thing since most explanations by media mouthpieces are propaganda or outright lies.

China clearly illustrates how the government can’t totally close down the internet without damaging the economy severely.  Every time the dictator Hu loosens restrictions on information, the Chinese rush in to use it to circumvent the government’s censors.  The US media is every bit as censored as the Chinese media, perhaps even more so.  The internet makes our own media owners very, very uncomfortable especially when the iron wall of misinformation about the Arab and Muslim world is breached.

On to today’s musings about how foreign events affect the US in so many ways thanks to our vast and failing empire and free trade:  Foreign Investment Ebbs in India, and Questions Begin – NYTimes.com

 

• …earlier this week BP announced that it would buy into oil and gas fields here for $7.2 billion, which would be the largest foreign investment yet in India….Privately, business executives complain that Indian officials are adept at proclaiming their commitment to free markets but delay specific measures to ease restrictions. Doing so is politically difficult in India because many politicians, labor unions and civil society groups prefer government spending and domestic protectionism over further economic liberalization.

 

• In the retail industry, for instance, the country still bars foreigners from owning stores that sell more than one brand of products. That restriction, meant to protect India’s many small shopkeepers, prevents Wal-Mart, Tesco and others from selling to India’s growing consumer class. In recent months, Indian officials have sent conflicting signals about whether the government intends to ease that policy.

The systems that are destroying US communities is rushing into other countries to do the same thing there.  My little town of Berlin, NY, used to have a hardware store, two grocery stores, a pharmacy, many small shops as well as manufacturing businesses.  All are rapidly vanishing leaving a dying ember of a village.  All over the US, this is happening.  We used to have three gas stations and now have one, for example.  The destruction of the village system is part of the mega-movements of modern cheap energy transportation systems.

India is happy to take over say, a quarter of the world’s steel markets thanks to cheap shipping and cheap labor.  But is scared of destroying the huge village system that is the backbone of society there.  Like in China, there is this massive population of over half a billion people scattered across the land.  In many countries which have embraced the US/UK ‘kill all villages’ economic model are seeing most people moving into the cities, sometimes more than 75% of the population.  In the US, many of our ‘exurban’ areas are simply bedroom communities with box stores, not small shops.  Villages, on the other hand, grew up around commerce points for farmers and small factories.

So most Americans do not live in small villages, they live in city-extensions called suburbs. Which often have little commercial value outside of the city center’s cause of being.  The suburbs are basically machines for removing businesses from the center to ‘safer’ areas with less crime and better schools.

As with the entire world, Indian trade unions rally over food prices:

• At least 40,000 people took part, according to Delhi police, though organisers put the number at about 100,000. Marchers came from trade unions linked both with the opposition Communist Party and with the governing Congress Party. Many carried red Communist flags showing a hammer and sickle as they made their way down streets decorated in Communist Party posters.

One of the great tragedies of communism is its inability to embrace democracy.  The same is true of the oligarch ideologies.  For example, the US prevented many people from voting for many generations.  Slaves, women, religious minorities were all cut out of the political system.  It took many long, grueling battles to win the right to vote.  Today, we get to vote only to see our ‘representatives’ torn from our hands by lobbyists.  Thus, rising voter rage.

The thing of great importance here is, people must survive.  Rising food and fuel prices which are partially due to a host of heavily subsidized hedge funds and international investment banks, rescued by the US, UK and EU, driving up prices.  This, in turn, is literal gasoline being thrown on a billion funeral pyres.  People who can endure many things can’t endure this.  And they have someone to blame, it isn’t the weather or the Hubbert Oil Peak.  It is speculators.

The revolution actually began in Iceland, spread to Greece and on to other EU nations during the winter with England being convulsed by uprisings recently.  Suddenly, the rest of the world began to seriously erupt.  Now, it is stretching throughout Africa:  Zimbabwe Prof Arrested, Tortured for Watching Viral Vids | Danger Room | Wired.com.  The professor teaches law and was conducting a class on how world revolutions grow.

Zimbabwe is a key country to me.  It is the most recent and vicious example of what happens when a ruling elite tries to print money to fix economic difficulties which are really a problem of wealth distribution and the effects of kleptocracy systems.  Here in the US, there are armies of people who think, if we just get rid of the Fed, we can then merrily print money and lend it to ourselves at ZIRP rates and we would find Eden, not Total Zimbabwe Hell.

During the Zimbabwe hyperinflation years (only three years!) I saw virtually no news about this in the US media.  England had significantly more news since Zimbabwe is part of the Commonwealth system, sort of.  But here in the US, it was one of many things censored via no one paying any attention.  Krugman, for example, nearly totally ignored this unfolding fiat currency catastrophe.

So few Americans learned the harsh lessons about money printing.  The very concept of ‘what is money’ is still debated here on a level of childishness that would astonish Victorians who had a much better idea of what this is all about.  Why have we lost this dynamic information in the first place?

Convenience: we like the idea of simply printing money till the crows strip the carcass bare!  We want the illusion of wealth, not true capital production via economic activity that has a capitalist basis.  True capitalists exist in the Chinese dictatorship, not here in our struggling democracy.

Like in the US, Europeans fling themselves from one useless political party to the other, the yin/yang of right and left leads nowhere so long as there isn’t a revolutionary change in understanding how things work:  Ireland election: Angry Irish voters expected to pummel ruling party.  In the US, we saw the GOP surge back into power only to see them cut social systems to the bone which will trigger a true revolution in five years or so.

Here is what it looks like:  Riot police and photographer on fire after petrol bombs thrown in Athens during general strike – Telegraph:  Athens continues to burn.   So does Mexico only in that case, it is narco-warfare.

The workers of Mexico were crushed and the last election was filled with fraud which barely let into power a US puppet who upped the ante in the drug wars which led to the deaths of 35,000 people.  Look at that number!  Wow.  Mexico’s workers are on the verge of exploding into action now that inflation is ravaging them pretty seriously.

Here is a chart from the government about the decline and fall of the US as a manufacturing power:  http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/historical/gands.pdf

The green parts of this chart are when we ran surpluses, the red is deficits.  Note that the ‘services’ side during the sixties was all negative but since then, positive.  It is a huge part of our trade profits.  But the goods side was all in the green in the sixties and moved into the deficit side after 1975, never to see a positive number again.

This is the great destruction of all US manufacturing that has steadily destroyed jobs in the US.  As unrest grows here, we shall see more and more young people enter the labor market only to discover, there are no jobs for them and they will first do the default job: drugs.  Like Mexico, this will lead to armed confrontations that will grow as despair grows.

When Roosevelt became President and had huge unemployment to wrangle with, the very first thing he did was stop Prohibition so he wouldn’t have an army of booze insurrectionists fighting him tooth and nail like we see in Mexico today.

When Obama came into office, not only did he not stop the War on Drugs which is destroying the inner cities and destroying the black population who resorts to drug sales because of the lack of manufacturing jobs, he didn’t stop the wars, either.  He continued everything as if nothing has changed.

We are in the middle of a Great Depression and no one has changed any courses at all.  What is especially irritating is, Obama ran on ‘Change’…and then didn’t change a single, solitary thing.

This is what causes revolutions: resistance to obvious changes.  In a theoretical world, you can starve people to death, give them no jobs, no hope and no security and get away with it.  In the real world, there is an often violent reaction.  Sensible people recognize this and curb things that will cause violent revolutions.  Sane people protect everyone so they can prosper and have some happiness.

Logical people recognize there are limits on everything in the universe but not on human greed so it has to be limited in artificial ways.  Letting it go run free is most dangerous as well as stupid.  We also know from history that repressive, slave states might last hundreds of years but they freeze into place socially, artistically and mentally and become airless museum pieces.  The best societies are dynamic, democratic and curious.  This means, lots of education, open communication systems and public discourse about public and social matters.

Which is what the Web is all about, incidentally.  Truly revolutionary.  Truly a world forum for ideas.  What an amazing thing this is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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