Free Market Rhetoric

October 29th, 2011

There is a fundamental discord between people who are nominally for “free markets”, and those against, and because there is literally no common ground between them, indeed there is often a void where common ground should be, no forward progress is made.

Fortunately, both of these positions are wrong.

On the one hand, the free market’s most vocal supporters tend to ignore the finer points of free market theory, like the part about how free markets tend towards a diminution of rents, and how profits accrue to all factors of production.
On the other hand, opponents imagine more “freedom” only for the exploiters. They believe that “free markets” means that you are justified to do whatever you want as long as you can get away with it, and unable to imagine any alternative to the status quo, they often conclude that a free market will be worse in every way (unless you’re among that 1%).

The opponents are right to believe in this Wild West caricature because it’s exactly what will happen if you start gutting the social safety net without doing anything to fix the underlying problems. Whether unknowingly, the free market advocates ‘rhetoric is ultimately perceived as either justifying, or apologizing for, the status quo: they talk plainly about gutting social safety nets, with nary a mention of the underlying inequalities that make them necessary!

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to show people what they can’t see.

Another world is possible

Opponents often point to the present, and say “Look at the free market failing…”. Except, it’s not a free market. And it doesn’t become one just because you call it that. Then again, the proponents usually don’t have a response to this, other than parroting some “invisible hand” argument about how the market will magically self-regulate if only you get rid of all the regulations, first. But it also doesn’t magically become a free market if you haphazardly start stripping away regulations, either.

So both parties are working on a flawed model of what constitutes a free market.

Discourse, not Dogma

And although there is something to the “invisible hand” argument, it kinda sorta presupposes a free market in the first place. It is not a trump card and you can’t just pull it out every time someone challenges your position. If you don’t do anything to remedy the “too big to fail”, if you don’t do anything to remedy the “captured regulators” or the “lobbyists”, etc., you’ve created a free market in name only, which is NOT a free market.

these guys have no place in a truly free market

It’s not sufficient to just take away those things that interfere with a free market if you intend to leave in place all of the benefits (and handicaps) accrued under the old system of exploitation. You can’t leave untouched all of the institutional inefficiencies, corruptions, cronyism, all the accrued benefits from years or decades of favoritism & protectionism, etc., and expect the market to function at all like a truly free market.

An Example

I hope to demonstrate that the removal of the immediate condition is not sufficient to cure the accumulated injustices of centuries of abuse and subjugation. Sometimes it is easy to illustrate a point by way of example; consider the aftermath of the Civil War:

The institution of chattel slavery essentially dissolves overnight but the plantation owners keep their plantations, their fancy lifestyles, their estates, acres of land and livestock. Freed slaves were left with virtually nothing (since all that was theirs had previously been denied them). So the freed slaves end up as sharecroppers or very poorly paid workers — essentially slaves — having nothing with which to bargain but their labor, they are compelled by hunger to exchange their labor for whatever pittance their former masters will offer. Thus, injustice continues in a slightly different form

See where I’m going with this?

It is indisputably wrong for someone to argue that this outcome is the fault of the free market.

It is also indisputably wrong for a free market advocate to suggest that this is the natural result of a free market.

Yet almost every discussion of “free markets” centers around these two obviously and irrevocably incorrect assumptions.

We Are the 99%

October 26th, 2011

My friend Dave (no, not “my friend” as in “me”) wrote this poem in response to/solidarity with the occupy movement, and asked what I thought? Well, I thought it was good enough to re-post. Enjoy & share!

A disconnect of intellect
Separates 1 sect
Of society that has yet to see,
The reality of tyranny
Terrorizing our liberty
Infiltrating our democracy
By misinforming you and I
With black, bold-face headline lies,
From white papers and men with ties
To planes falling from the sky!
Shrouding us in guided fear,
Blurring what was once clear,
Promising the end is near
Watching middle-class disappear,
While the CEO’s always rising stock
Can feed and house a Detroit block,
Decayed and ruined from financial shock,
Trapped by bars, key and lock.

United we stand behind soldiers who fall,
The willing few who risk it all
By volunteer or government’s call,
The Constitution would be appalled
That this poem need be written at all,
Or, that power is reserved for political pull
Extorting from the Middle East
Black blood’s perpetual profitable feast,
Making war the sustainable beast
Politicians’ worry about second to least
Trumped only by those on Wall Street
Who take pride that our ends won’t meet,
Enjoying poverty in their discrete
Malcontent for our absent greed,
Contempt for those we cannot feed,
While we fight for basic needs,
We’re told to pick-up from the straps
Where our boots and courage overlap
With souls worn thin from wealth’s gap,
Powerless to escape the unnecessary trap

Of political divisiveness
Increasing dismissiveness,
Making people grow leery of alternative theories
The main-stream floods, banks with no hole in its paddles
We’re boat without steam left sinking in battle
No savior near on white mare’s saddle
No magnanimous rider who’s not an insider
Will build a bridge, or damn the creek flowing wider
Forcing us to drown or swim across.
For when we sink it’s not their loss
Since the 1% fit in one yacht,

Whether or not

This is our country! For which you fought,
For the classroom in which you taught
The simple beauty of free thought,
The Achilles heel to being bought.
Though government paid persons bails,
No one human is too big to fail
Or small enough to escape the jail
Stifling justice’s disgraceful wail,
With death sentence or life in cell.
The highest price is paid in blood
By bomb, bullet and nature’s flood.
Not by those who wear white collars,
Who own the banks and political scholars,
Talking heads, confusing words for dollars,
Censoring choices for our selection,
Diluting truth and fair election –
An anonymous, executive, backdoor connection –
Buried beneath its strategic intention
Lay 99% seeking release from the tension,
Without a paycheck or a pension,
Or even an unemployment extension!
Denied by those with luxuries’ leisure,
Free from debt and property seizure,
From war abroad and at home,
To those who can’t secure a loan,
Leasing life, liberty never owned –
In exchange to be left alone.

99% of the blue collar power
Can rebuild towers in hours
If water is fed to withering flowers,
Its pollen and petals kept as ours,
With thorns, stigma, style, and stem,
Its pistil to protect us from men,
Soliciting our brethren,
Be a spring of sacrificial lambs,
Patriots! Die, but live and be damned.
A people misled to understand,
Year by year, wars with no end;
Fear by fear, our rights apprehend.
The use of liberties amongst civil men
Silenced as rogue, political dissent!
Drowned by noise of the absurd,
The banished black sheep of the herd.
Curiosity? Killed, by the cat
For questioning how it got fat,
Why our soldiers still lay flat
By will of the aristocrat,
Who celebrate corporate goals
And the sale of our souls –
Only at a convenient price –
Not the blood of men, but that of mice.

Now is the time to exchange the blood,
Build an Ark and reverse the flood
Of shameless corporate and political power
Suffocating blue into hopeless collar –
Second by second, hour by hour,
We, the People, grow into a beautiful flower.
Black, gay, woman or white,
History is the enemy we fight
Against indifference toward our rights,
Uniquely human versus corporate might.
They may preach peace from private steeples,
But cowards are cunning and often evil,
They lobby to make sure it’s legal,
The 99’s voice is no longer feeble

Because

P.

People

E.

Everywhere

A.

Are

C.

Created

E.

Equal.

Has Libya Been Liberated?

October 21st, 2011

The final image of this revolution for me will be the image of Qaddafi beaten and bloodied being harassed and tormented by his captors, what we can imagine was only moments before he was put to death. That is the only image people should see for which NATO is responsible, but it will not be the image that is produced for world consumption.

What the world has witnessed in Libya is not the rosy push to democracy that everyone is being led to believe, rather it is a nation being pushed into armed lawlessness by outside forces, the prime example being the a summary execution of deposed leader, Mommar Qaddafi — an extrajudicial murder which was at least tacitly supported by NATO.

Qaddafi wasn’t killed in a crossfire, nor a firefight or gun battle as some headlines have suggested. Instead, the video clearly shows him alive in captivity (being beaten and harassed, no less), yet he turns up dead with bullets in his head, chest and stomach while in custody.

What we are left with now, is a country which has no functional government and as we have seen in most armed struggles in the African continent or elsewhere (Afghanistan comes to mind) what is likely to occur is the birth of warlords (Somalia, Sudan) as there is a huge population that is now armed with no real prospect of de-arming them.

We are likely to witness a cycle of violence as these factions, at odds with whatever puppets are put in place, struggle for power. This wasn’t a legitimate military action, despite the fact that is being portrayed as one there is no command structure; there are no rules for them. This has been displayed countless times in their revolution, through the looting of buildings as well as the murder of African migrant workers in the country who did not have the means to leave when the fighting broke out. The murder of the Africans which has been well documented and criticized by the African Union is committed under the guise of killing mercenaries.

All of these, lawless actions which NATO has been complicit in promoting and encouraging (like blowing up water pipelines, and then the factories that make the replacement pipes). Contrast this with Qaddafi’s Libya. Qaddafi’s Libya had the highest standard of living of any African country…

Sirte, before NATO bombing

… although the prosperity was short-lived once NATO came to play.

Sirte, after NATO bombing

Qaddafi was also responsible for keeping the oil industry profits going to the people instead of multinational corporations (although not for long).

Certainly, Qaddafi did some terrible things, and he deserved to be tried for his crimes, but this was an extra-judicial murder, sponsored and supported by all the NATO allies whose companies will certainly benefit from their direct intervention in regime change and infrastructure reconstruction.

How quickly the world forgets what a great ally Qaddafi was in the “War on Terror” – as recently as two years ago – yet overnight he became a pariah for the United States and other former imperial powers to scapegoat and divert attention away from some of the more real problems in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

no third solution

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