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ciaoidea (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
Check the Gcredit Project :)
natdavi (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
HAHA this is so true! Laizzes nu faire you stupid government!
zsylvana (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
We can assert with confidence that the present system cannot survive.What we cannot predict is which order will be chosen to replace it,because it will be the result of an infinity of individual pressures.Sooner or later,a new system will became.This will not be a capitalist system but it may be far worse (more polarizing hierarchical)or better (relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian) than such a system.The choice of a new system is the major worldwide political struggle of our times.
zsylvana (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
Of course everyone is asking what has triggered this depression. Is it the derivatives, which Warren Buffett called "financial weapons of mass destruction"? Or is it the subprime mortgages? Or is it oil speculators?
zsylvana (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
The capitalist world-economy has had, for several hundred years at least, two major forms of cyclical swings. One is the so-called Kondratieff cycles that historically were 50-60 years in length. And the other is the hegemonic cycles which are much longer.
In terms of the hegemonic cycles, the United States was a rising contender for hegemony as of 1873, achieved full hegemonic dominance in 1945, and has been slowly declining since the 1970s.
zsylvana (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
Some learned the lessons of previous Kondratieff B-phases, and the powers that be thought they could beat the system. But there are intrinsic limits to doing this. And we have now reached them, as Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke are learning to their chagrin and probably amazement.
zsylvana (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
This time, it will not be so easy, probably impossible, to avert the worst. In the past, once a depression wreaked its havoc, the world-economy picked up again, on the basis of innovations that could be quasi-monopolized for a while. So, when people say that the stock market will rise again, this is what they are thinking will happen, this time as in the past, after all the damage has been done to the world's populations. And maybe it will, in a few years or so.
zsylvana (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
There´s something new that may interfere cyclical pattern that has sustained the capitalist system for some 500 years.The structural trends interfere with the cyclical patterns.The structural features of capitalism as world-system operate by certain rules that can be drawn on a chart as a moving upward equilibrium.The problem,as with all structural equilibria of all systems is that over time the curves tend to move far from equilibrium and it becomes impossible bring them back to equilibrium
zsylvana (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
What has made the system move so far from equilibrium? In very brief, it is because over 500 years the three basic costs of capitalist production - personnel, inputs, and taxation - have steadily risen as a percentage of possible sales price, such that today they make it impossible to obtain the large profits from quasi-monopolized production that have always been the basis of significant capital accumulation.
ctrphield (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
That's what I was thinking! He thought it was beer! So gross... |
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