Friday, January 13, 2012

Anthony Hall

FROM EARTH TO PROPERTY

10 comments:

  1. best show ever. i'd never heard of AH but will read his book.

    3 books came to mind as i was listening: about enclosing the land, e p thompson's THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH WORKNG CLASS deals with how the ruling class got peasants to become factory workers in the world's first industrial state by denying them grazing/farming land. more generally on the topic of how we got from the commons to land-as-commodity is karl polanyi's epic THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION.

    about capitalism/imperialism and reified enemies, THE INDISPENSABLE OTHER, by saxton [cant remember first name, been a while.]

    all 3 of these are great books, and touch on topics discussed in the interview.

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  2. Interesting discussion.

    A couple of related points...
    It was mentioned that the CIA has a presence in all our media outlets but I want to point out that
    On February 9, 1917, Congressman Oscar Callaway inserted the following statement in the Congressional Record.
    "In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests. . . and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States. ______________

    So we have had almost a century of totally corrupted and filtered "news".

    _____________

    REgarding "private property" and Ron Paul's emphasis on it, I would mention that Ron Paul adheres to the libertarian "Austrian economics" and they have a very distorted view of private property as an absolute right, when the truth is it is a conditional right.
    My right to own an automobile does not give me the right to drive it on the sidewalk, and as a corollary: my right to own a factory does not give me the right to cheat my workers.

    Capitalism has been a tool of the moneyed elites/internationalists/globablists since this USA was founded. To me, the bottom-line defintion of capitalism is state-sponsored usury.

    Our US industries have been facilitated to move offshore since, for sure, the early 1970s. All of our "elected represenatives" have voted for laws that give tax breaks and many other financial advantages to big corporations for moving their operations (and our jobs) overseas. Ron Paul, years ago, voted for most favored nation status for China.

    It is all over with for elections. The current presidential race is an insulting joke. I would pray that we all, en masse, abstain from voting at all in that election.

    It is all over with for America's only real claim to greatness, the rule of law. Our government, lawyers and judges from the top all the way down to the smallest municipality are all purchased and totally corrupt. So please do not hope for some legal cases to get the top Wall Street banksters indicted and covicted.

    My blood starts boiling when I see Mitt Romney being peddled as a fine moral conservative Christian American. He is of the same scum level as Ivan Boeskey and Michael Milken and Steven Schwartman - corrporate raiders and mass job and industry destroyers to personal gain. Romney probably has personally put almost one hundred thousand Americans out of work!

    I am not a "Judeo-Christian" that it is said to be the faction and religious philosophy that founded the USA. To me, it is looking more and more like the basic founding prinicples were also some kind of deception, manipulation and corruption.

    I do believe there has been a "Plan" for many centuries to have a one world death and slavery system. Those who push this come from ALL political and religious perspectives. I think total control is the ultimate goal, not necessarily money alone.

    I will close with a definition of Ron Paul's, libertarians', Austrian economics.

    Max Keiser: As a professor now, is it possible in just a thirty second clip or so, is it possible to kind of summarize when people refer to Austrian economics what they are referring to.

    Dr. Michael Hudson: They hate the government and they want the centralized planning, but they want a centralized planning not in government but in the hands of bankers, and so they are trying to get actually Democrats, Democratic people, and the working class and the middle class to say ‘if you get rid of government controls, if you deregulate the banks, you don’t have consumer protection / production, you let the criminals take over. The criminals run the economy just wonderfully. Get rid of the government. Centralize planning in CitiBank, J.P.Morgan and Bank of America and you’ll have utopia.’ That’s insane but that’s what they believe.

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    2. You have no understanding of the Austrian view of private property. No Austrian ever anywhere in history has said any such thing as the FALSE distortion you present as their view. NONE of them believe that private property ownership gives them the right to drive cars on a sidewalk running over people...you need to wake up. Read Tom Woods, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, etc. Stop distorting the views of Libertarian-Austrians to fit some false personal perspective that you hold...you cannot just impose it on the views of others when you do not understand it.

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  3. @jeannon, liked what u said, particularly about voting [as emma goldman said--if it changed anything they would make it illegal], but disagree about factories.

    if u own the factory then u ARE cheating your workers. if they have to sell u their labor for less than the value their labor produces--and that is precisely what capitalism is--then u r exploiting them. every person has a right to full compensation for his/her labor. denial of this is the root cause of political and economic instability. the class struggle between capital and labor, which is braking out all over the world from wisconsin to tunisia to nigeria, is the cause of political turmoil. and our economic problems--the endless series of financial crisis since capitalism began--r the result of prices reflecting the cost of production PLUS the increase which represents the profit on the one hand, and the workers who produce the goods only receiving a wage on the other. how can people who get paid less than the price of the things they produce buy the things they produce? they cannot, it's impossible. if the price of everything that gets produced averages a dollar, and the average person earns only 75cents, cycles of overproduction followed by underproduction leading to cycles of inflation and deflation causing failures and layoffs and boons and busts etc. follow.

    you say u have a right to own a factory--in other words a right to private property, i say i have a right to public property--to co-own, along with my fellow citizens, the means by which we as a society produce the things we need. and i have a right to b fully compensated for the work i do, and not have to b beholding to a rich capitalist for my livelihood.

    the solution is public ownership of land and industry with the workers running their respective industries, with wages equalized for everybody
    and prices set in direct proportion to wages so that no harmful surpluses r produced and nobody goes without. everybody shares equally in labor and its product.

    there's a word for this, it's called socialism. now i say let's present capitalism and socialism to the people and put it to a binding vote and see which a majority prefers.

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  4. Socialism is a sincere, benevolent, idealist theory, but it doesn’t work without force. Under socialism the government takes from each according to their ability and gives to others according to their need. Everyone is controlled by the government; the government is controlled by politicians, and politicians are bought and sold by wealthy men and corporations. That is why Andrew Carnegie, and other men of great wealth, favor socialism.

    I do not like the monopoly capitalism we have and I do not like socialism. I have heard there is something called distributism but not even sure that is the solution.

    The rich, whom we will always have with us, will not act morally. Problem is we all are weak and sinful creatures and money is a temptation that most of us cannot handle. We become avaricious and uncaring about our fellow man. Wjat matters is how you got your wealth and how you use it. Unfortunately most fail the test. Those who pass the test get a cross or a little trip to Dallas.

    That is the problem. Ownership of private property is an important extension or part of being full human in my opinion. Collectivism and socialism destroys the individual.

    Here is how Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw described socialism in his "The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism."

    "I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under Socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well."

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    1. David and Jeannon, you have both made excellent comments here. I think that terms like "socialism" can be interpreted many ways. I believe it is best understood as the government functioning to advance the general welfare of its citizens, which is illustrated by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation, and a living wage. None of those involve coercion and all of them promote the general welfare.

      Unregulated capitalism is an inherently exploitative system, which falls under the category of limited utilitarianism as a moral theory. Check out an article of mine about this, entitled "Are Corporations inherently Corrupt?", http://www.opednews.com/articles/Are-Corporations-Inherentl-by-Jim-Fetzer-100124-129.html I think there's also a version on Veterans Today. Then we can continue the conversation.

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  5. @Jeannon,

    like what u said again, but just two quick points.

    1, capitalism is collectivist. it brings people together and forces them to work together. the difference between cap' and soc' is that in the latter the people who produce the wealth get to keep it all, and get to elect their bosses and have a vote in factory policies/practices etc. unless u r advocating a return to a pre-industrial society, work will always be a collectivized affair, socialist or not.

    it's also the case that even the most authoritarian of socialists [say lenin] believed that once capitalism was dispatched to the dustbin of history, that government will eventually wither away. [we anarchists want to 'wither' it now.] so it is not quite fair to equate socialism with government

    2, there have long been two types of socialism, one that is 'authoritarian' [mainly marxists], and another 'libertarian' or anarchist. the latter group [myself included] is as distrustful of government and state coercion as u r. there is even a strain which supports free markets [that is AFTER capitalism has been abolished], it's called mutualism' or 'market socialism.' the issue of capitalism v socialism is not one of strong, big government versus the opposite, but is more accurately stated as privately owned economy v publicly owned, for-profit v non-profit.

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  6. @jeannon, part two.

    u quote hudson above, if u haven't you might want to read his SUPERIMPERIALISM, made quite an impression on me when i was a young man.

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  7. Thanks for comments from Dave and Dr. Fetzer.

    I have not read Dr. Fetzer's article yet but think he will therein shine light on the farce of "corporate personhood,"

    I am not sure I am intellectually "up to" a debate about capitalism v. socialism and not sure this is the place to have that debate.

    I would just point out that "socialism" as dreamed of by Karl Marx and Edward Mandell House has never worked in world history, nor has any other form of socialism "worked." I believe in limited government and I guess am an "anti-federalist" but by no means am I an anarchist. I know the nature of man and in order to live peacefully together we need some government.

    To me capitalism is state-sponsored usury. I am a Christian of the Roman Catholic variety. I am also a "conspiracy theorist" who believes there has been a plan for centuries for a one world death and slavery system.
    Economic and policial systems have to do with the "social order" and "social justice". The Church should be speaking out not only about economics but also about the plan to cut Social Security, but the American Church has been subverted by the same basic black operation as has the entire American republic.

    The Catholic position is the position of Dante. Dante put sodomites and usurers in the same circle in hell.

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