There are those I feature approvingly within narrowly defined parameters and despite views on other matters I find dangerously misguided or even abhorrent. Take Owen Jones. His humanist failure to see the dirty war on Syria for what it truly is; viz, after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya the move of …
an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington. (US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2)
… and, worse, his pugnacious ad hominems on men and women better informed and less blind to the nature of modern imperialism made Owen and his colleague George Monbiot the subject of my post of seven years ago today: Monbiot, Syria and Universalism, November 16, 2017
Yet George pens fiercely forensic pieces on the environment. Through his linking of ecocide to big money, few have done more to advance ‘green’ thinking from the narcissistically and point-scoringly personal to a focus on the logic of wealth creation driven not by human need but by those of profit and accumulation.
For his part Owen has, alone in corporate media, been outstanding on Israel’s genocidal regime and, even more important, Western complicity in crimes against humanity. Witness his podcast on last week’s Goebbelsian coverage of what happened in Amsterdam, and his willingness to take on Zionists – here and here – on their own turf.
It is right and necessary to castigate George’s failure to see both ecocide and carnage in the Middle East as products of the same life negating forces. Ditto Owen’s to see how Syria was and remains vital both to a Zionist expansionism once half hidden but now brazenly declared …
… and to the recklessness of a dying hence triply dangerous empire attempting at whatever cost to tighten its faltering grip on the Middle East/Western Asia.
I’m simply making a case, in these times of political juveniles laying down red lines right, left and centre – “if he’s wrong on 9/11 or Covid or the nature of the Soviet Union then he’s not worth listening to on anything at all!” – for not throwing baby out with bathwater.
That’s why I continue to feature Judge Napolitano. Despite his “small government” position, the man’s willingness to interrogate empire propaganda narratives regardless of where that takes him get my backing. Ditto, since they bring a wealth of experience to bear on the most pressing matters of our time, men like Scott Ritter and John Mearsheimer – despite both voicing a view I find erroneous:
I’m aware of the power of the Israel Lobby but have long been wary of its overstatement, often in anti-Semitic tones, by those fixated on the notion that America Fights Israel’s Wars. If it does, rest assured that’s to advance the interests of US elites. (US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 3) 1
And it’s why I, a Marxist, feature social conservatives like Gilbert Doctorow and Simplicius the Thinker, and urge readers to see for themselves what another conservative, one Vladimir Putin, is saying. All are vastly better informed and saner of perspective than (a low bar I grant you) the outpourings of every segment of Western corporate media on the most important and urgent issues of our times. 2
My general point made, some might say laboured, it’s time I got down to today’s specific topic. Professor Richard Murphy – accountant and tax specialist, modern monetary theory advocate and bird-watching Quaker – frequently irritates me with his know-nothing takes on “Putin’s war in Ukraine”; takes he neither defends nor retracts but stubbornly reiterates despite challenges from the more clued up of his own followers. Ditto his blindness, inter alia, to the truth that fiat currencies like dollar and sterling are premised on a fast unravelling Western imperialism.
In spite of these gaping flaws he’s consistently on the nail re the neoliberal economic illiteracy of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, both in Opposition and in office. It’s a measure of its dismal and multifaceted failures that a Conservative Party now under a far Right leader who makes Liz Truss look sensible and the late Mrs Thatcher a moderate – and which in any case should be glumly contemplating, after all that’s gone down since 2019, a decade or three in opposition – may very well win Britain’s next general election.
Over to the prof, and his assessment just yesterday of Starmer’s Chancellor of the Exchequer:
Rachel Reeves really is a very big threat to the well-being of this country
As Rachel Reeves made clear in her Mansion House speech last night, she wants to relax banking regulations. Big bonuses will be back, paid sooner than has been permitted of late. The aim is to increase risk-taking in financial services. She is issuing new remit letters to the Bank of England and others, emphasising that this is her expectation …
Aristotle said money cannot be made from money. His reasoning was clear. Value is created from the production of goods and services that meet needs. Bankers cannot do that. No one can eat money.
The counterargument is that banking and financial services facilitate the aggregation of capital, to release productive capacity. I disagree with that claim in a modern fiat-currency economy. Banks are the primary source of capital for many companies where growth is likely. But they do not aggregate depositor money to make loans. Instead, they make loans out of funds created under licence from a government-run central bank. Bankers, as most people understand them, do not therefore lend depositor funds. Reeves has fallen for a fallacy that her former employers at the Bank of England have admitted is not true.
Investment bankers might fulfil this task of aggregating capital, to some degree, but bankers as most people know them do not.
So what do banks do? Fundamentally, three things.
First, they charge massively for loaned funds created costlessly by them. The return on their government-given right to do so is phenomenal; an oligopolistic exploitation of millions in the UK and beyond.
Second, they use the capital provided by depositors to speculate. This is not a creative process. It is gambling. The net contribution to society is negative, the returns biased toward those with most capital. The upward redistribution of resources within society exacerbates the inequalities created by the core banking function.
Third, they supposedly advise others with aggregated financial capital, such as pension funds. In this role, they, and others in the financial services sector, face three major problems.
Firstly, they are not competent to advise on productive use of capital since bankers and financial specialists have never engaged in such activities.
Secondly, bankers only understand financial capital, which is fundamentally different to productive capital, and the ability to differentiate the two has been almost entirely lost, at least within the City.
Third, since bankers only take a microeconomic and financial view of the world, and accounting still fails to recognise the cost of externalities created by capital when used by companies, the advice provided by bankers is inevitably counter-productive to the necessary goal of achieving climate stability upon which human life depends.
Despite all this, Rachel Reeves went out of her way in her speech to describe the financial services sector as ‘the crown jewel in our economy’. This is total nonsense because there is literally nothing the financial sector can do to add value to the economy without there being opportunities to do so within the remainder of the economy. In other words, the financial service sector Rachel Reeves describes can only have a parasitic role, extracting value from the real productive value of the economy created entirely outside the walls of the City of London. Reeves appears unaware of this …
Read the full post – preferably from the vantage of the wider perspective of a Radhika Desai, a Richard Wolff or a Michael Hudson – as Professor Murphy homes in, case-in-point fashion, on local authority pension funds to tease out the extent, both scary and depressing, of ignorance informing Ms Reeves’ thinking.
And, alas, her actions.
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- To be clear, neither Scott Ritter nor John Mearsheimer have ever to my knowledge voiced antisemitic sentiments. The same cannot be said of all who say Israel rules the USA.
- A post or series of posts is overdue on how this year’s elections in Europe and America have ignored entirely “the most important and urgent issue of our time” – the irreversible decline of Western supremacy and failure of any mainstream leader to acknowledge and articulate the beginnings of a grown-up response to the same.