China, The BRICs and Emerging Markets Continue To Teeter On The Precipice - Part One

The world is once again warming up.  Moody’s just downgraded the outlook for the health care industry to negative (No doubt because of Obamacare regardless of spin to the contrary.  A failure of this system would be a good thing in the long run.  In a bout of irony, Obama, in his endless central-planner’s arrogance, has likely provided the impetus for that to happen.), the U.S. has another debt ceiling issue coming up, China’s massive bubble is teetering with a potential major default and emerging market economies, currencies and financial markets continue to be under extreme pressure. 

I’m going to break this subject into multiple posts for readability.  Let me start with some background necessary for the next post.   You may wonder how any of this is relevant to the title of this post but it most certainly is.   The content below is necessary to appreciate the next post.   If the topic of the global economy interest you, bear with me.  You will certainly see the direct realities of today’s global economy and an update on its collapse by understanding this post in relation to the next.  It will make the world so much clearer than most people have probably ever seen it.  Onto the post…..

Communism varies from state to state.   It takes on local prejudices, traditions and factors as does all state violence.  That includes the manifestation of state violence that is class-based corporate capitalism.   Today’s communist China and the former communist Soviet Union are two very different manifestations of communism and state violence.  As noted on here in past posts, the competitive rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was driven primarily by differing economic ideology and the western capitalism plutocracy’s attempt to maintain its system of class. 

Class-based, western capitalists vehemently despised the classless Soviet economic system.  Why is that?  Was it the subjugation of the human spirit that state-forced communism created?   Well, that’s quite dubious since corporate capitalism uses many of the same methods to achieve a similar end.   There are two glaring reasons why the people in the west were fed so much hate-spewing propaganda about the Soviet Union.   Mind you, there was plenty to fault about any repressive and brutal system of control including communism.   But, then ask black, minority and poor Americans,  single parents or countless others about the repression and brutality of western capitalism with Robber Barons, slave labor, ghettos (state-created concentration or internment camps), child labor, corporate brutality, endless state violence used to enforce this unjust class-based system, etc.   Ask those on the African or Asian continent about European corporate capitalism and its effects over the last three hundred years.  How many tens of millions of people died directly or indirectly because of the corporate state?  That doesn’t even include its endless wars driven by the need for more that murdered millions more.   How many have suffered under the violence of the corporate capitalist state?  The violence of western capitalist “democracies” certainly compares to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, communist China or other equally despotic forms of statism in its exploitation of resources, people and the planet.   

The two glaring reasons for such a hatred in the west of the Soviet Union were -  1)  It was a threat to class-based corporate capitalism, especially in western Europe.  The Soviet Union proved that class was not needed for society to create its own wealth, its own capital and its own modern, industrial society.  In other words, the Soviet system exposed the class-based predators at the top of corporate capitalism and private capital as being moochers and parasites rather than necessary for the survival of the species or the survival of any economic system.  Let alone a democratic one.  And, 2)  because the Soviet Union created its own wealth, there was no need for class-based, private foreign capital in its development.   That means class-based, foreign private capital was shut out of the Soviet Union.  It is the plunder of class-based, private, rent-seeking foreign capital that has allowed the western capitalist aristocracy to loot and pillage foreign lands for the last three hundred years.   It is this looting and pillaging that has allowed class-based, corporate capitalism to survive.   The Soviet Union threatened the very survival of that system for without an ever-greater ability to loot the world, the capitalist aristocracy would collapse.

Up until the last one hundred-odd years, that class-based looting and pillaging was primarily the exclusive domain of western European class-based, corporate capitalist societies and the lords, kings, queens and aristocratic families who used state violence to achieve their plunder and power.   You know, the same class-based, plundering, war-mongering, predatory, exploitative criminals we fought a Revolutionary War against.

Now, some may argue that the Soviet Union provided the  boogeyman needed for the corporate military-industrial complex to survive and thrive.  And, I have actually written of this truth in the past.  But, the military-industrial complex is really part and parcel to the two reasons cited above.   The military-industrial complex is simply an extension of corporate capitalism’s class-based state violence.

It is dubious that the threat of the Soviet Union was to freedom and democracy.  If humanity were truly free in class-based, western corporate capitalist societies, no competing form of socioeconomic system or forms of violent statism could ever threaten that freedom.  If I am truly free, what is the appeal of being subjugated under a dumbed-down, forced equality in every aspect of our being that is state communism?  Meh.   A free mind is able to appreciate the stillness of being rather than the want of power and control that is the basis for any form of state violence including communism or corporate capitalism.  

The reality is communism propped up corporate capitalism and vice versa.  Both would have almost certainly collapsed long ago without one propping up the other.  The existence of both provided a false meme that allowed both systems to maintain control.  The Soviet Union controlled the masses by instilling fear of the United States in its people and vice versa.  This fear, nothing more than another manifestation of state violence, assured that the masses conformed to supporting the power of the state while subjugating their own rights and freedoms in the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union.  This false meme is the exact same one that props up the illegitimate Democratic and Republican Parties in the U.S.   That is, a society is kept ignorant and often stupid by accepting the same fear-based memes perpetuated by the two political parties in our nation.  Memes used to divide the masses who are unwilling to think for themselves and, in the process, take responsibility for their fears while the state benefits at our expense. 

I don’t want to get off track here so back to the Soviet Union.  The European royal families and private capitalist power structures maintained their control over Europe long after they lost the political battle to some form of democracy or republicanism.  But they maintained what mattered most.  That is, private banking, private money creation and private capital.  These economic forces then allowed kings, queens, birthright privilege and the long lineage of family power to maintain its grip on European states.  In corporate capitalism and the corporate state, private for-profit capital is only subservient to the force of the state.   In other words, human rights and freedoms are subjugated to class-based, private, rent-seeking interests that, combined with state violence, have always controlled much of western Europe since the advent of kings and lords.  Always.     

For all of its warts and murdering state violence, the Soviet Union proved that humanity doesn’t need class or a privileged aristocracy to subjugate us to any system of predatory surplus value and rent extraction to create wealth for people or a nation.  Mind you, there were hundreds of trillions of dollars and class-based power beyond imagination at stake in making the Soviet Union a boogeyman. (In today’s dollar terms.)  Do you think that was worth killing for?  Worth going to war for?  Worth exploiting the masses or destroying democracy for?  Maybe you don’t but it certainly is for those of class rank and privilege.  It is the only reason war has ever existed.   It is the only reason the state exists.  War exists to serve class and violence is the state’s reason for being.  Combining the two is what we call free market corporate capitalism and the corporate state.

Even with all of its imbalances and internal contradictions, including butchering tens of millions of its own people, the Soviet Union was still one of the wealthiest, advanced nations in human history.  At least as determined through the eyes of statism.   Through statism because all of that wealth was not created for its citizens but for the violent force of the state.  Yet none of that wealth was created by an aristocratic, class-based predatory system of private capital but by domestic, classless, public capital.   As an aside, it also wasn’t created by the nonsensical concept of “savings” as so many economic idiots in today’s system believe is a necessary component to creating wealth.  Hence the endless boogeyman of America being broke, and thus having to accept the capitalist aristocracy’s forced austerity.   The U.S. is far from broke.  It is wildly wealthy.  Money is not wealth as I have noted ad nauseam.   Money is an institution of the ego or a system of control.  More lies and bullshit from the corporate state aristocracy.  

The Soviet’s wealth was created by bootstrapping.   The Soviet Union created its own wealth by educating its society and embracing a crash program in science and the monetization of science employed to build a modern, industrial society.   Now, what they may have created was a dystopian society, but there is a pony in here beyond dystopia.  You should be able to clearly recognize it.   

The Soviet Union is one of the very few societies in the last few hundred years that has created its own capital essentially out of thin air.   Because reality is that humanity is the source of all capital.   Not rent-seeking aristocratic predators who mooch off of society’s productive people and engage in parasitic, renter activities.  That reality of private, class-based capital being unnecessary, exposed by the Soviet Union, is a major threat to the existing power structures that have dominated the world for hundreds of years. 

Of course, the most well-known society to create its own capital during this time was the United States.   The Soviet Union and the U.S. achieved their ends through different means although both were bootstrapping efforts.  There certainly is some overlap involved as well.  The U.S. originally achieved this through the embrace of the natural talents of human expression and a free mind’s innate desire to create and produce.  In other words, through state force and violence being too limited to stop people from being naturally-productive.  Yes, that included some degree of science and education.  But, in our society, dictates of forced state education and capitalist/communist corporate work weren’t the primary factor in the creation of our nation’s capital.  It was the free and natural talents of people who then expressed themselves through craft, creativity, invention and production.  Free and natural talents that aren’t always “improved” through more state-based education.  

Free and natural talents are often subjugated and beaten down by the aristocracy and corporate power as has generally been the case throughout “civilized” European history.   Just as they were in the Soviet Union.  There is absolutely no way corporations can extract or exploit, for profit, the unique abilities of all people.  Especially when those abilities are focused on improving our individual lives and our local communities rather than corporate rent extraction and profit.   So, the only method of survival for the corporate state is suppression and subjugation of human expression, talent and merit; dumbing-down citizens through corporate state force.  That is, human freedom is a threat to class-based corporate capitalism just as it is in communism.  Communism and corporate capitalism makes us stupid.

At some point that all started to change very substantially in our nation.  Corporations and class came to dominate and enslave people through the force of the state as they always have in Europe; the reason why millions fled Europe for the New World.   We really don’t have a clear view why.   Was it European aristocratic meddling in our politics?  Because the American model of freedom was certainly a threat to their class-based corporate states.  Was it foreign banking interests?  Was it the American wealthy aristocracy that had a desire to create a European-type class-based society to protect their power?  Or, was it just the age-old evils of greed, power, money, control, etc  that arise any time there is an opportunity for control and exploitation?   We have a limited view of reality.   But, in reference to the Soviet Union, the U.S. has always been a relatively uneducated society as defined by state-based education.  Throughout most of our history, we have had low graduation rates.    Is state-based education, or lack thereof, really the driving factor in our failure in our society to “compete” as Obama and other neoliberals would have us believe?   Is that why our cities often look like war zones?   Because we can’t compete?  Meh.   Who said we had to go to economic boot camp, more and more of today’s universities, to learn the skills of economic warfare to compete on behalf of our corporate masters?   Why must I compete for my own economic freedom?  For a meal on my plate and a roof over my head?  Isn’t that a paradox?   I’m quite certain our society has the skills we need to survive, even thrive, although those certainly may not be the skills our corporate masters wish us to have. 

We certainly don’t want an ignorant, uneducated society but who said getting a college degree to serve your masters isn’t a form of ignorance?  Universities were not founded as boot camps for corporation.  They were founded upon the free exchange of liberal democratic ideals and the search for knowledge and truth. 

Regardless, the evidence of not being “educated” as the reason why the U.S. socioeconomic system is collapsing, and it is collapsing, and why real unemployment and underemployment is probably around 100 million people, is far from compelling.  Frankly, it can be easily disproven.  In other words, Obama and the U.S. aristocracy that continually batter us with false memes that we aren’t “competitive”, and thus are doomed to be underemployed and unemployed is pure bulloney.   What skills do these bureaucrats have that we don’t?  Please do tell.  Lying?  Manipulating?  Fast talking?  Deception?  Selling out?  I’m bored with hearing that we aren’t smart enough or educated enough so tens of millions are forced to live in squalor while often ignorant or very “average to below average skilled” corporate and political bureaucrats live like royalty.   These memes are nothing more than manipulation or ignorance themselves.   That should be of no surprise.  Those in our society that perpetuate this system of class and injustice are often the most “educated” or credentialed while being the most ignorant and incompetent. 

The intent of Soviet educational programs was substantially based on defeating the west through technological superiority.  Both sides saw the differences between the west and the Soviet Union as a competition of  ideologies.  One set out to defeat the other and vice versa.  A competition that exploited and subjugated the masses to win their statist economic and political wars.   In the process both were really nothing more than  examples of state violence that subjugated people to a dumbed-down system of control.  By the way, I would argue that the same state violence as it pertains to education is now at work in the U.S. today.  That the U.S. corporate state seeks to subjugate its citizens into a forced educational system that serves the power of class, private capital and the corporate state rather than serves the needs of its citizens, freedom or our communities.   Just like the Soviet Union.  And, the fact that we now herd masses of people into the corporate state university system as a requirement for economic survival is not a sign of an enlightened, aware, educated society but rather a sign of  mainstream ignorance perpetuated by class-based beliefs.    How’s that working out for you? 

Class and bureaucrats, aka moochers and parasites, love “educational” credentials.  Even if you may actually not be learning anything of value to your journey.  Well, other than how to conform or serve your corporate masters.  I’m certified in this or degreed in that.  They love credentials because they offer little else in the form of creativity,  industriousness,  inventiveness or other forms of human expression.  So, they value pieces of paper rather than merit.  We certainly need education of some form for those working in the sciences, medicine and some other fields, be that on the job or university or self-taught is really irrelevant.  But we are the most credentialed society in history.  You need a certification or degree to blow your nose.   It is no coincidence that we are also the most incompetent.   By the way, shoving more and more people through the university system requires that we relax standards.   Credentialed in no way, shape or form should be confused with competent.   Credentials have replaced merit in the dumbed-down corporate state.  

The Soviet industrial economy experienced far greater growth rates than the U.S. for most of its existence. It certainly wasn’t a lack of growth or the bureaucrat’s love of efficiency that led to its failure.  But, that growth was primarily for the benefit of the state power as opposed to the benefit of a free society.  The masses were turned into dumbed-down, anonymous conformists assimilated by the Soviet Borg - take note free market corporate capitalists.   85% of the employment in the U.S. produces no wealth.  Instead, these are rent-extracting, assimilation Borg jobs endorsed by the state and used by capitalist power structures to loot and pillage our society’s public coffers, it’s wage slaves and the world.   Beyond that, the vast majority of jobs in our society are useless jobs made up to take the place of collapsing capital-creating employment.   They are capital-consuming jobs.  That is, the mythical doing-each-other’s-laundry service economy that enslaves our society to endless poverty wages and dumbed-down consumerism, aka endless spending, to keep this Ponzi Scheme going.  

The Soviet Union failed due to its basic structure, a system of state violence and control, and all of the associated internal contradictions.  Just like those that have always existed in class-based corporate capitalism.   And, without a new boogeyman, the corporate state is going to fail.  That attempted boogeyman of terrorism and the trillions of dollars spent waging wars on invisible enemies and spying on all of humanity is waning.  So, who’s next?  Well, long time readers will know the next boogeyman is China.   it must be a large enough and formidable enough enemy to consume the resources and attention of this monstrosity.    Mind you, with regards to the above comments about corporate capitalism propping up communism and vice versa, communist China too would have failed were it not for the temporarily habitation or propping up of corporate capitalism.  You know, just like Nazi Germany.  More on that in the next post. 

In closing, and mildly off topic with regards to the next post, it kind of makes you wonder.  Or, maybe it should.  Kind of makes you wonder why class-based European capitalist states allowed the introduction of unions into their societies.  And why they granted reasonably liberal social programs to society.   Was it really out of the goodness of their predatory and victimizing hearts?  Or, was it a fear of classless Soviet communism being right next door?  And if they didn’t bend on providing basic dignities and living wages to their wage slave citizens,  that communism would walk right over to western Europe and sack class rank, title and birthright privilege that is the corporate state?  

Well, we certainly can safely assume it wasn’t goodness that made them see the light of giving just enough to their chattel to ameliorate them.  Because the European aristocracy continued to plunder and murder tens of millions of people in Asia and Africa colonized under their subjugated, class-based corporate state rule.    Kind of makes you wonder why the European capitalists are now in the process of unraveling all of those “gains” made by the “little people” in their societies.  Well, the easy explanation is that class-based, corporate capitalism and the corporate state possibly believes it has reached a level of hegemony with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the capture of Chinese communism by western, foreign, class-based for-profit capital.  In other words, with no potential threats to capitalist power, there is no reason to pretend to be good and decent human beings.  They can be who they really are.  That is, pathological, evil, parasitic plutocrats. 

It also makes you wonder what forms of treason are possibly at work in our nation.  Is the destruction of the United States democracy and its ability to create its own capital seen as necessary by the Old World European corporate state aristocracy?  And, did European parasitic predators play a role in the failure of our nation because it was a threat to their very existence?   Or, is it just the plain old power-mad delusions of ambition and ego that our society has always embraced to varying degrees?   Regardless, remember this.  Class-based, corporate capitalism is an invention of the European feudal system of class, title, kings, lords and birthright privilege.  It is no more American than communism.  And it clearly is not democratic economics.   In fact, we fought a war to ride ourselves of our European capitalist masters.  That was indelibly imprinted in the minds of Americans for quite a long period of time.  Which is a major reason why we resisted being drawn into the European aristocracy’s endless wars of profit. 

Yet, somehow our society has been brainwashed into believing the corporate state, its endless wars, it’s endless creation of misery for the masses and its propping up of a predatory, pathological class is part and parcel to our nation’s founding and to our democracy.  Nothing could be further from the truth.   Our founders were highly suspicious of the concept of permanent corporations and corporations in general given their experience with European kings, class, private for-profit capital and their looting corporations. 

Here is what we do know as fact.  When the European aristocracy lost their political control to the masses, they were able to cling to what really mattered.  That is, the rich families, royalty and aristocracy of Europe held onto their economic empires through corporate capitalist control and through private banking/money creation.  That has allowed their illegitimacy to survive.   Has allowed class to survive in democracy.  We call it free market corporate capitalism.  A system where the subjugated masses have to compete under the guise of wage slavery against the most inhumane and oppressive examples of state violence in the world today.  That includes China. 

Onto the global economy update in part two.