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Kettle Calling The Pot Black

By Jeff Berg

23 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

Martin Kettle has got to be fucking kidding. There have been no greater believers in utopian idealism than the business and financial classes throughout the West. So much so that they have used their hoards of cash to corrupt the entire discipline of economics. Not to mention co-opting every political party, globally eviscerating democracies legitimacy, and rolling back pretty much every progressive economic achievement of the last fifty years. And all for what? Why the 'invisible hand' of the market of course. For the all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, and perfect corrective of 'market forces'.

And what has this Utopianism wrought? Hyper consumption for the few. Mass extinctions for the many. An economic system that disallows governments the right to subsidize sustainability, but does allow the subsidy of hi-tech via the creation of weapons of mass destruction. E.g. America's transfer of $5 trillion since WWII from the middle class to the corporate class. For the creation of nukes alone! Don't y'all feel safer for it? Then of course there was the smashing of North Korea and South Vietnam. Wars so expensive that they destroyed Bretton Woods plunging us into the speculative finance vampire capitalism of today. But hey at least a bunch of fortunes were made by the makers of all those machines and munitions. So it wasn't a total waste eh? Money that they have turned around and used to perpetuate this cycle of wealth transfer and death.

More tonnage of bombs were dropped in those theaters of war than the whole of WWII. And not by a little. How many killed? Unknowable but it is in the multiple millions. And why? Well to stop that religion of course that Kettle is so smugly condescending about. And for what? Ostensibly to make the world safe for a system called democracy. A system that they were simultaneously busily killing. In reality of course to make the world safe for extractive companies. Be they miners or bankers.

Their rhetoric exalts their means and policies as the means of engendering the best of all possible worlds. It is unshakeable and omnipresent. It is in movies, P.R. advertising, books, classes, television, newspapers like the Guardian, and columnists like Kettle. And what is the upshot of this saturation penetration of the psyche of the West? A set of policies that they force on governments throughout the world via the 'Virtual Senate' of bonds and interest rates. So far removed from Adam Smith's writings and the needs of people as to put the suffering Stalin caused in the shade. Sure he was monster. And one of epic proportions. 'Duh' as the kids say today. But compared to the avalanche of ecological collapse that the West is at the forefront of unleashing he won't even be remembered in a hundred years. We may well not have any history at all to pass on.

But in return for this surely we at least had the 'best of all possible economic worlds' in return? Again as the kids say today, "Not so much.". Asset bubble after asset bubble. Massive transfers of wealth via the re-instituted mechanisms of a rentier class that it had taken 500 years to tame. (See Michael Hudson's work) More massive transfers of wealth from the many to the few via the oldest of social engineering thievery: Military spending and wars.

And all of this they justify by the invocation of their infallible high priest Adam Smith and modern day totems like Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. Their practices however bearing not even the slightest resemblance to what he actually wrote. As Chomsky puts it, "We are supposed to revere Smith, but we are not supposed to read him."

Kettle reminds me of nothing so much as he reminds me of Uncle Tom. So happy to be in the 'massahs' house, so relatively warm and comfy and safe, that he genuinely believes that the social hierarchy as it stands is the natural order of things.

Jeff Berg is a founding member of Post Carbon Toronto
www.postcarbontoronto.org



 



 

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