Stop Imperialism

Dude, your being slandered by McAfee.

McAfee® Web Site Reputation

Access to ‘http://stopimperialism.com/’ is being monitored

Great episode, don’t let your guard down on democracy now & occupy. They haven’t changed and are not letting a crisis go to waste given a chance to promote climate change and color revs. Always happy to donate what I can to your work.

Thank God you’re back, Eric! Your prolonged absence caused me to imagine you’d been swept away by the hurricane. Happily that was not the case, as I’d spotted your appearances on RT dating from teh beginning of November. I guess you’re just plain busy these days.

Thanks for your remark to “your libertarian friends” concerning the free markets, by the way. Its my experience that hardly any libertarians can properly define what a “free market” should be. They will generally cite a philosophical definition, which the so-called progressives are wont to disparage.

This is not to defame either group (which happen to be your core listeners!). Its important for everyone who engages in discussions about markets to know there is a very BIG difference between a free market and a market free-for-all.

I like to define the latter as a place of chaos where the most powerful cheater can leverage his way to a fortune at the utter expense of all other participants — rather like what goes on in the markets right now!

A “Free market” by contrast is one where the concept of PRICE DISCOVERY is allowed to happen without interference. Price discovery is very important. The price reflects the sum of many individual pieces of information: supply, demand, current conditions, future trends, access, denial, history, and logistics.

All those forces work to discover a common value for an item.

A more and more common theme is that somebody is always being screwed in the marketplace: either the buyer is stealing from the seller or the seller is cheater the buyer.

This does not happen in a “free market”, which can be as small as a handshake between two people: the buyer is satisfied with the price he paid, and the seller is satisfied with the sale he made.

However, anything that interrupts “price discovery,” or manipulates it to someone’s advantage or disadvantage, is a problem for both the buyer and the seller.

Then, neither is satisfied because there is inherent distrust between the parties. And this is what’s happening right now in the markets where the too-big-to-fail bankers and their broker accomplices are manipulating markets left and right with their credit leveraging, high-frequency trading algorithms, and spurious derivatives.

To be honest, the more the pundits talk about the dangers of free markets, the less they are free, but actually in the grips of a plutocratic banker mafia.

So, a real free market could have no regulations other than the very simplest one of all — honest representation of a product — and an incorruptible task force to bring justice to anyone who missold a product.

Sadly, we have too many regulations pockmarked with loopholes big enough for 747s to fly through, and absolutely NO backbone in the prosecutor’s offices at the DOJ.

Until this changes, we are all at the unforgiving disposal of the “Market Free-for-All”.

On GMO, I had the displeasure of stumbling into a debate about where its acceptable libertarian philosophy to require Monsanto to label its products. After all, shouldn’t they be free to do as they please?

I refused to participate in such an inane debate. The most elegant rebuttal might be this:

“Monsanto has more trial lawyers on its payroll than research scientists.”

There is no concept of freedom in a multinational corporation that uses brutal legal tyranny to amass its profits. Monsanto is the posterchild of what I call the LEXOCRACY, a government by and for lawyers. In such a govenrment, whosoever controls enough lawyers wins. Period.

Finally, on ECOWAS, you are correct in characterizing them as a tool of Western Imperialism. Though officially the U.N. peacekeeping mission for the West African states, its troops and officials are dominated by the French-speaking West African nations, whose dictators take orders from Paris.

The situation in Mali is today almost exactly what it was a century ago when the French first arrived. And the Quai d’Orsay likes it that way!

Being a Cristina Fernández de Kirchner voter and supporter, I have to make a little correction in what otherwise is a very excellent analysis.

Maybe Argentina’s inflation rate is not 25% per year, but not too much low than that. Of course private economists don’t have the means to calculate it and say bullshit. But for sure in Argentina we can live with 25% of inflation. If not, how can workers have nominal wages increases of more than 25% every year?

But the causes of inflation (for me) are the structure of industrial firms. Extremely concentrated and foreign. That’s why they give wages increases and automatically translate that increase to prices (even in advance).

Sorry for my bad English.