A Death-Breeding Logic
The Market: the New Faith
By ERIC TOUSSAINT article link
May 10, 2010
(bold text emphasis added by MMr)
(cross-post from MM research)
Practically all political leaders - whether from the traditional Left or the Right, from the North or the South - have a quasi-religious faith in the market, especially the financial markets. Or rather, they themselves are the high priests of this religion. Every day in every country, anyone with a television or an Internet connection can attend mass and worship the market-god - in the form of stock exchange and financial market reports. The market-god sends his messages through television anchormen and the financial editors of daily newspapers. Today, this happens not only in OECD countries, but in most parts of the planet. Whether you are in Shangai or Dakar, Rio de Janeiro or Timbuktu, you can receive 'market signals'. Everywhere, governments have privatised and created the illusion that the population will be able to participate directly in market rituals (by buying shares) and reap the benefits in accordance with how well one interprets signals sent by the market-god. In actual fact, the small part of the working population that has acquired shares has no say over market tendencies.
In a few centuries, the history books might say that from the 1980s onwards a fetishist cult prospered. The dramatic rise of this cult will perhaps be associated with two heads of state, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It will be noted that, from the start, this cult had the backing of governments and powerful private financial interests. Indeed, for this cult to gain ground within the population, public and private media found it necessary to pay homage to it day in and day out.
The gods of this religion are the financial markets. Its temples are known as Stock Exchanges. Only the high priests and their acolytes can tread their holy ground.The faithful are called upon to commune with their market-god on television, on their computer screen, in the daily papers, on the radio or at the bank. Thanks to television, radio and the Internet even in the most remote parts of the planet, hundreds of millions of people who are deprived of the right to meet their basic needs, are also urged to celebrate the market-god. In the North, in newspapers read by a majority of workers, housewives and unemployed, an 'investment' section is published every day, even though the overwhelming majority of readers do not own a single share. Journalists are paid to help the faithful understand signals sent by the gods.
To heighten the power of the gods in the eyes of the faithful, commentators periodically declare that the gods have sent signals to governments to express their satisfaction or discontent. The Greek government and parliament have at last understood the message sent by the gods and adopted a drastic austerity plan that has the lower classes paying the price. But the gods are dissatisfied with Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. Their governments too will have to contribute their ritual offerings in the guise of strong antisocial measures.
The places where the gods are most likely to forcefully express their moods are Wall Street in New York, the City in London, and the Paris, Frankfurt and Tokyo stock exchanges. To gauge their moods, special indicators have been devised: the Dow Jones in New York, the Nikkei in Tokyo, the CAC40 in France, the Footsie in London, the Dax in Francfort,… To appease the gods, governments must sacrifice the Welfare State to the stock markets. They must also privatise public property.
Why are ordinary market operators given a religious aura? They are neither anonymous nor ethereal. They have names, addresses. They are the people in charge of the 200 biggest TNCs that control the world with the help of the G7, the G20 and institutions such as the IMF, which came back into the limelight thanks to the financial crisis. Next we also have the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, currently in a rather difficult predicament, but who knows, the gods might favour it again soon. Governments are no strangers to this situation; from Reagan and Thatcher onwards, they relinquished the means they had of controlling financial markets. The situation is now almost reversed: institutional investors (i.e. major banks, pension funds, insurance companies,hedge funds, etc.) received thousands of billions dollars from governments in the form of grants or loans to bail them out after the 2007-8 meltdown. The European Central Bank, the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England now lend them money on a daily basis at a lower rate than the capital inflation that institutional investors immediately use to speculate against the euro and against public money.
Money can cross borders without a single cent in taxes being levied. More than 3,000 billion dollars race around the planet every day. Less than 2 per cent of this amount is linked to actual trade in goods and services or to productive investments. More than 98 per cent is used for purely speculative operations mainly on currencies, on commodities, and on debt securities.
We have to put a stop to this death-breeding logic. We have to develop a new financial discipline, to expropriate the financial sector and exert social democratic control on all financial matters, to tax all institutional investors (which triggered and then profited from the crisis) heavily, to audit and cancel public debts, to implement a distributive tax reform, to drastically reduce working hours so as to offer more jobs while maintaining wages at their current level... In short, we must launch an anticapitalist project.
Translated by Raghu Krishnan in collaboration with Vicki Briault, Christine Pagnoulle and Judith Harris.
Eric Toussaint, Doctor in Political Science (University of Liege and University of Paris VIII), is president of president of the Committee for the Cancellation of Third World Debt – Belgium www.cadtm.org , author of The World Bank: A Critical Primer, Pluto, London, 2008.
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MM Book 2 Chapter 7-17
The currency of ** LOVE ** is our means of exchange [of everything !!] – 1 Cor 14:40 “let *all* things be done decently [honestly] and in order”; GOD IS LOVE, AND SO ARE WE !! – we are the children of LOVE; the kingdom of LOVE is within us; the gospel of LOVE is truth – the tribulation [the curse] arrives *because* of us [the "great transgression"], NOT in spite of us !! – the very fact that we have something to write about [the curses] is because of our failure as the COG, the people of God, as God’s “House of Prayer” [** discerning, petitioning, bringing God's will on the earth **] !! — the Nation(-State) is actually the “physical church” and indeed the brethren [citizens] have been made merchandise of !! — the secular priests are the imposed leaders [ie., the politicians, CEO's, etc., the social elite]; the business guru’s [the prophets of profit]; the economists, the scholars [the theologians]; BUSINESS IS CLAIMED AS [HAS CLAIMED; IMPOSED ON US AS] ABSOLUTE RELIGION; A DEMANDING, UNFORGIVING, UNLOVING GOD — what we actually employ in the western nations [Israel] is “democratic-fascism”, an elected face/mask on a fascist systemic [a system of government characterized by rigid one-party (business party) dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized governmental control (the SAGE-MIIM); belligerent (bellicose, warlike; a readiness to fight) nationalism, racism, and militarism, etc.]; BUSINESS IS BELLIGERENCY [the state of being at war, or of being recognized as a belligerent (belligerence: aggressively hostile attitude, nature or quality); business is an adversarial covenant designed to employ, produce and secure an artificially contrived resource (money)] — LOVE AS ABSOLUTE MODE [pure form; way of being] AND SYSTEMIC, IS NULLIFIED, IS MADE ABSENT [withheld, restrained, negated] FROM PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL ISRAEL; BUSINESS AS ETHOS IS THE ANTITHESIS [exactly opposite and opposed; an opposition of thought (psychosis)] OF GOD’S LOVE !!
1 John 4:17. Herein is *our love made perfect*, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: ** because as he is, so are we in this world ** [** WE MUST BE AS GOD IN THIS WORLD ** = OUR LOVE MADE PERFECT !!]
[** CHRIST COME IN THE FLESH, OUR FLESH **].
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The Private Agency that Owns and Controls the World
MM Addendum 1-3
Who are the privileged and powerful, those whom the SAGE count as their very own ?? – those who own and direct the Federal Reserve, the central banks, the financial houses, the TNCs, the manufacturing and mining conglomerates, the media and entertainment industries, the PR firms, the agribusiness and life science firms, the public policy institutions (the think-tanks and universities), and the legal and medical establishments are what is meant by the “owning class,” the Fortune 500’s, etc. – the “ruling elites” or “ruling class” are the politically active portion of the “owning class” – they and their faithful acolytes and scribes compose the Business Roundtable, the Business Council, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations, etc., they direct the World Bank and the IMF and set the conditions for the WTO – from their ranks are recruited the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury, National Security Advisors and CIA Directors, and, indeed, U.S. Senators, Presidents, and Vice Presidents – for the very top positions of state in the US/UK/EU, the ruling class is mostly self-recruiting – the SAGE are those who direct the “ruling elite” (those “holding power”), they are the “guardian elite” (“holding authority”), the self-appointed royalty of the privileged.
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