And people are thinking he's going to end the war and start FDR-era public works projects? HA! It took millions of angry protesters and thousands of active communists to convince FDR to do that. What makes you think it's happening today? There's a price to pay for ignoring history my friends.

But I'm not looking to convince anybody. At this point, I'm just laying the groundwork for the proof of my prophetic nature. We'll see what happens.]]>http://mrbiggs.net/2008-10-13T21:54:50 But this new dynamic was locked in a new system, capitalism, whose sole motive for production was profit. He scientifically worked out that this dynamic would lead to new contradictions and crises, market crashes, financial collapse, the inability to sell products to an impoverished population. This would lead humanity to a new crux where only the working class could overthrow society and establish socialism, where a working class government can direct the economy.

The absence of a working class movement makes capitalism no less likely to crash. The difference is, with the financial industry firmly straddling the planet, we're seeing a banker's socialism, with government doling out profits to the banks in an organized fashion.

The differences between this and Roosevelt's New Deal are a good case study. Roosevelt passed this legislation not just to resolve the depression, he did this at a time when the working class was pushing for revolution. So he passed all sorts of legislation to appease worker's most pressing issues - social security, labor organization, public jobs programs, etc. Today, without that kind of social pressure, it's all going straight to the banks.

So when Marx says communism is the riddle of history solved, and I heartily agree with him, this is what he's talking about - one way or another, capitalism cannot stand and something must be born out of the collapse. The health or deformity of this birth is up to us.]]>http://mrbiggs.net/2008-10-01T14:03:20 One needs to understand this maxim not as a piece of propaganda, but a law of social dynamics, much like universal gravitation or the theory of relativity are laws of physics. Then one can see the future progression of our society as clear as daylight.

And if we apply this rule to the last eight years of economic progression in this country, and we can cut through all the BS moralizing about how bankers were behaving "irresponsibly" and get to the truth of the situation. The fact is, capitalism is running out of profitable areas to exploit. The world's been taken over. The forces of production have been pushed as far as they can go, and although invention will always carry us further (like the internet), it'll be nowhere near the revolutionizing of labor and production that went on through WWII.

So, you have larger and larger amounts of capital chasing fewer and fewer profitable investments. This has been alleviated somewhat by making currency slightly inflationary, which makes zero profit investments inherently better than holding onto cash. But still, the Economist pointed out for a good period of time this decade, real interest rate was negative - meaning it was less than the rate of inflation. So if you kept your money in the bank to earn interest, it would buy less in a year than it buys right now.

Now just connect a couple of dots, and you can see how everybody starts piling their money into real estate and commodities. Why not just buy that item now and hoard it rather than put your money in a bank?

The problem is, when demand changes on anything, and there's no other profitable place for investors to put their money, they start making money on betting that the price will go up. So this little bit of hoarding led to a lot of speculation.

On an institutional level, the eternal goad of the profit motive has led banks to finance this speculative binge, be it real estate or commodities. After all, where else are they going to put their money?

And if the larger banks could see through all this and the inevitable doom on the horizon, the smaller banks couldn't afford to think long term. They had to make money at that moment, they had to do it by being more competitive for the next guy. Which, on a side note, explains the enormous executive pay for such failing companies - they were just getting insurance on a doomed ship.

And Marx said the above about Capital, but at his time he was talking about industrial capital. At least that corresponded to real industry. When Lenin said that all industrial capital was being taken over by finance capital, at least the banks were running real industry. Today, the banks no longer invest in industry, as it's ceased to be as profiable as these get-rich-quick schemes they've invested in. Even GM is finding its financing division more profitable than its manufacturing.

So when Lenin hailed the opening of the 20th century as the stage of finance capital and imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, we are now seeing the decay of this final stage.

And it's not going to be pretty. The finance industry, like a dying vampire, can only subsist off vast transfusions of cash from the government. And it's not going to trickle down to anybody. Meanwhile, a billion people in the world are now officially starving, a direct consequence of speculation in food prices. That number will increase. And if a federal bailout will revive the world's financial system, it won't result in any real improvement for the human race which subsists under it.

Such economic conditions worldwide are a mirror of the preconditions for the economic collapse in Germany in the 20s. So what we are about to see is a global re-enactment of those catastrophic times.