Social Parasitism In Humans (How Different Individuals In A Single Species Can Be)

counterfire |  It is not surprising that Marx’s concept of class is unpopular in the mainstream. Marx’s picture of a brutally divided society with organised robbery at its heart amounts to a devastating moral condemnation of capitalism. It also directly contradicts the various ways in which the establishment want us to understand the world we live in. Their preferred model of society is a giant market in which individuals interact freely and equally. In reality, of course, individuals are born into society with drastically different levels of wealth. Marx stressed however that it is the way production is organised that more than anything shapes society. ‘The arrangement of distribution’ he says in Capital, ‘is entirely dependent on the arrangement of production’. What people consume, even what people regard as needs, depends in the first instance on what is produced in any given society. The way the goods are distributed depends on the distribution of wealth, itself determined by one’s position in the productive process.

Politicians also like to tell us ‘we are all in it together.’ This illusion can only gain traction because the economy appears to operate independently of human will and control. The idea can’t survive contact with an understanding that the whole system is driven by a tiny minority forcing profit from the labour of the many. We are also told that capitalist investors are ‘wealth creators’. Looked at from the point of view of class, the capital that an investor brings to the table has been extracted – stolen – from past labour. The investor is simply recycling the spoils to make still more money.

Marxism also challenges the idea that capitalism will ‘lift up’ the poor over time. Capitalism has produced unimaginable wealth, but as Marx predicted, its drive to keep wages down means that for most of its existence the distribution of that wealth has become more and more unequal. Forty years of neoliberal capitalism has brought us to the extraordinary point at which just eight men are worth as much as half the world’s population. Marx’s analysis leads to the devastating conclusion that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. Generalised poverty and inequality are a necessary outcome of a system based on competition for profit.

The most radical aspect of all of Marx’s class analysis is however that it shows that in the process of conquering the world and achieving by far the highest levels of exploitation in history, capitalism has created its own nemesis, its own ‘grave digger’ in the working class. Marx believed workers had the potential to overthrow existing conditions for a number of reasons. The first was directly economic. The fact that workers are denied the material benefits of a more and more productive society gave them an immediate interest in resistance. The second was that the degradation experienced by most of humanity under capitalism was concentrated in the working class. The denial of human self-fulfilment, the ‘notorious crime of the whole of society’, was most acutely experienced in exploitation and its attendant alienation. Workers have through their experience the most acute consciousness of the immensely destructive and degrading capacities of capitalist accumulation.

Secondly, as well as having an interest in change, workers have the means to make it happen. Just as workers rely entirely on capitalists for their livelihood, capitalists are completely dependent on workers for their profits. Powerless as individuals, collectively, workers have immense potential power. As Marx put it, ‘of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself’. By forcing huge numbers of workers together at the point of production, capitalism creates a counter-power. Struggles over pay and conditions have the capacity to generalise into a political conflict between different class organisations:

Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination… If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages…In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.

Social Parasitism In Ants (How Different Individuals In A Single Species Can Be)

quantamagazine |  When the researcher Daniel Kronauer was still a postdoc in 2008, he traveled to Okinawa, Japan, for wild specimens of clonal raider ants (the species Ooceraea biroi). In the first colony he collected, he noticed two ants with a strange appearance. They were small like workers, but they also sported small wing buds, which was striking because usually only ant queens develop wings. What made this even stranger was that clonal raider ants don’t even have queens: In keeping with their name, these ants reproduce asexually, so all the ants in a colony are nearly perfect genetic clones.

Kronauer was intrigued by the miniature queens because they seemed so different from the other clonal raider ants even though he believed them to be the same species. But answers to his questions weren’t forthcoming, so he took some specimens, shot some photos for records and then moved on with his work.

A few years later, Kronauer established a lab at Rockefeller University and set up a colony of clonal raider ants for study. One day, his then-doctoral student Buck Trible found a few more of the odd miniature queens in that colony and decided to characterize them.

Trible found that the wings weren’t the ants’ only unusual characteristic. The strange ants also showed different social behaviors, had larger ovaries and laid twice as many eggs. Using genetic tools, he traced all of these changes to a 2.25-million-base-pair-long stretch of DNA. In the ordinary ants, the DNA on each of the two copies of their chromosome 13 was different. But in the miniature-queen ants, the two copies were identical.

As Trible, Kronauer and their colleagues reported in March in Current Biology, all of the characteristics of the odd ants — the wings, the social behaviors and the reproductive traits — were caused by what geneticists call a supergene, a collection of genes that are inherited as a unit and are highly resistant to being broken up. At some point in their evolution, the ants had acquired a second copy of that supergene, and that chromosomal change had transformed their bodies and behaviors. The findings suggested a new mechanism for how complex combinations of body parts and behaviors can sometimes surface all at once in evolution: through a mutation that duplicates a supergene, toggling on entire suites of traits like strings of lights controlled by a light switch.

Ant researchers are excited by the work, and not just because it seems to solve a decades-old mystery about how at least one form of social parasitism evolves in the insects. The supergene discoveries may also help them pin down long-sought features in ants’ genetic architecture that make their colonies develop as hierarchical castes of queens and workers.

More broadly, the new study also offers insights into a fundamental evolutionary question about how different the individuals in a single species can be.

Debt Parasitism And The Collapse Of Antiquity

michael-hudson  |  The Collapse of Antiquity, the sequel to Michael Hudson’s “…and forgive them their debts,” is the latest in his trilogy on the history of debt. It describes how the dynamics of interest-bearing debt led to the rise of rentier oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome. This caused economic polarization, widespread austerity, revolts, wars and ultimately the collapse of Rome into serfdom and feudalism. That collapse bequeathed to the subsequent Western civilization a pro-creditor legal philosophy that has led to today’s creditor oligarchies.

In telling this story, The Collapse of Antiquity reveals the eerie parallels between the collapsing Roman world and today’s debt-burdened Western economies. 

Endorsements

“In this monumental work, Michael Hudson overturns what most of us were taught about Athens and Sparta, Greece and Rome, Caesar and Cicero, indeed about kings and republics. He exposes the roots of modern debt peonage and crises in the greed and violence of antiquity’s oligarch-creditors, embedded in their laws, which in the end destroyed the civilizations of classical antiquity.”
James K. Galbraith, author of Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe.

“In this fascinating book, Hudson explores the rise of the predatory rentier oligarchies of classical Greece and Rome. He makes a fascinating and persuasive case that the trap of debt led to the destruction of the peasantry, the states and ultimately even these civilizations.”
Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times.

“Michael Hudson is an old school, 19th-century classical economist who puts fact before theory. To read his new book, The Collapse of Antiquity, is to learn why and how it has come to pass that we live in a world in which the money owns the people, not the people who own the money. The clarity of Hudson’s thought is like water in a desert, his history lesson therefore a sad story that is a joy to read.”
Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Scope

The Collapse of Antiquity is vast in its sweep, covering:
• the transmission of interest-bearing debt from the Ancient Near East to the Mediterranean world, but without the “safety valve” of periodic royal Clean Slate debt cancellations to restore economic balance and prevent the emergence of creditor oligarchies;
• the rise of creditor and landholding oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome;
• classical antiquity’s debt crises and revolts, and the suppression, assassination and ultimate failure of reformers;
• the role played by greed, money-lust (wealth-addiction) and hubris, as analysed by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other ancient writers;
• Rome’s “End Time” collapse into serfdom and pro-creditor oligarchic legacy that continues to shape the West;
• the transformation of Christianity as it became Rome’s state religion, supporting the oligarchy, dropping the revolutionary early Christian calls for debt cancellation and changing the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer and “sin,” from a focus on the economic sphere to the personal sphere of individual egotism;
• how pro-creditor ideology distorts recent economic interpretations of antiquity, showing increasing sympathy with Rome’s oligarchic policies.

Backcover

Rome’s collapse was the forerunner of the debt crises, economic polarization and austerity caused by subsequent Western oligarchies. The West’s pro-creditor laws and ideology inherited from Rome make inevitable repeated debt crises, transferring control of property and government to financial oligarchies.

Classical antiquity’s great transition to the modern world lay in replacing kingship not with democracies but with oligarchies having a pro-creditor legal philosophy. That philosophy permits creditors to draw wealth, and thereby political power, into their own hands, without regard for restoring economic balance and long-term viability as occurred in the Ancient Near East through Clean Slates.

Rome’s legacy to subsequent Western civilization is thus the structure of creditor oligarchies, not democracy in the sense of social structures and policies promoting widespread prosperity.

 

CBDC Will Enable Bankster Transformation To Permanent Endoparasitism

ineteconomics  |  Fast forward to the period of low inflation and low growth after 2001. The real estate boom set in, and that’s when you really had the financialization of everything. Up to then, the practice had normally been that banks would make mortgage loans and either keep them on their own books or, even if they sold them, they would sell the whole mortgage to Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, or to the private sector. Then someone came up with the idea that if you carve the loans into tranches and sell the tranches separately, you might receive more money than if you sold the whole thing.

It worked out for a while that way and that’s why everyone did it. That opened the door to the financialization of everything.

LP: What does this concept, the “financialization of everything,” entail?

WT: That’s when you start treating everything like it could be a bank liability — auto loans, credit card loans, and the like. You treat them the same way as the new mortgage credit – carving them up into tranches with different levels of credit risk and interest rates attached and selling them off as chunks instead of altogether as one block.

A New York securities lawyer friend and I used to speculate that we could even securitize and sell air rights in New York. That way you would be selling the blue sky itself! Obviously an absurd concept, but I assure you that people likely gave serious thought to it.

LP: How is the current banking crisis an outcome of the process of financialization?

WT: In several ways. Going back to the ‘70s and ‘80s, Walter Wriston at Citibank introduced the concept of “brokered deposits,” certificates of deposit that could be negotiated in the secondary market and resold. Nobody ever thought of doing that before. Traditionally, you took out a deposit in the bank, a CD account, and you kept it. That was that. You could borrow against it at the bank, but you didn’t go try to sell that to somebody else.

Thanks to that process of creating brokered deposits, the liability side of the bank’s balance sheet became financialized. The FDIC eventually put limits on the percentage of deposits that one bank could have that were brokered deposits because they were viewed as non-core deposits, quick-to-flee money, money that won’t be there in time of need, etc. That’s very much like what we’re seeing today.

On the asset side, banks like Silicon Valley and Signature were loaded up with things like mortgage-backed securities and also long-term Treasuries. They were doing that just to have the appearance of liquidity, the appearance of risk-free assets while ignoring so-called duration risks, that is, exposure to interest rate problems the longer the term of the bond or other obligation that you’re holding. By ignoring these issues, banks like Silicon Valley, First Republic, and Signature painted themselves into a corner. They have brokered deposits chasing the highest yield funding assets that have embedded risk that is not recognized in the kind of accounting they wanted to see.

Are These Banksters Ecto Or Endo Parasites To You Peasant Hosts?

newindianexpress  | The UBS acquisition of Credit Suisse requires the Swiss National Bank to assume certain risks. It will provide a Swiss Franc 100 billion ($108 billion) liquidity line backed by an enigmatically titled government default guarantee, presumably in addition to the earlier credit support. The Swiss government is also providing a loss guarantee on certain assets of up to Swiss Franc 9 billion ($9.7 billion), which operates after UBS bears the first Swiss Franc 5 billion ($5.4 billion) of losses.

The state can underwrite bank liabilities including all deposits as some countries did after 2008. As US Treasury Secretary Yellen reluctantly admitted to Congress, the extension of FDIC coverage was contingent on US officials and regulators determining systemic risk as happened with SVB and Signature. Another alternative is to recapitalise banks with public money as was done after 2008 or finance the removal of distressed or toxic assets from bank books.

Socialisation of losses is politically and financially expensive.

Despite protestations to the contrary, the dismal truth is that in a major financial crisis, lenders to and owners of systemic large banks will be bailed out to some extent.

European supervisors have been critical of the US decision to break with its own standard of guaranteeing only the first $250,000 of deposits by invoking a systemic risk exception while excluding SVB as too small to be required to comply with the higher standards applicable to larger banks. There now exist voluminous manuals on handling bank collapses such as imposing losses on owners, bondholders and other unsecured creditors, including depositors with funds exceeding guarantee limit, as well as resolution plans designed to minimise the fallout from failures. Prepared by expensive consultants, they serve the essential function of satisfying regulatory checklists. Theoretically sound reforms are not consistently followed in practice. Under fire in trenches, regulators concentrate on more practical priorities.

The debate about bank regulation misses a central point. Since the 1980s, the economic system has become addicted to borrowing-funded consumption and investment. Bank credit is central to this process. Some recommendations propose a drastic reduction in bank leverage from the current 10-to-1 to a mere 3-to1. The resulting contraction would have serious implications for economic activity and asset values.

In Annie Hall, Woody Allen cannot have his brother, who thinks he is a chicken, treated by a psychiatrist because the family needs the eggs. Banking regulation flounders on the same logic.

As in all crises, commentators have reached for the 150-year-old dictum of Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street that a central bank's job is "to lend in a panic on every kind of current security, or every sort on which money is ordinarily and usually lent."

Central bankers are certainly lending, although advancing funds based on the face value of securities with much lower market values would not seem to be what the former editor of The Economist had in mind. It also ignores the final part of the statement that such actions "may not save the bank; but if it do not, nothing will save it."

Banks everywhere remain exposed. US regional banks, especially those with a high proportion of uninsured deposits, remain under pressure.

European banks, in Germany, Italy and smaller Euro-zone economies, may be susceptible because of poor profitability, lack of essential scale, questionable loan quality and the residual scar tissue from the 2011 debt crisis.

Emerging market banks' loan books face the test of an economic slowdown. There are specific sectoral concerns such as the exposure of Chinese banks to the property sector which has necessitated significant ($460 billion) state support.

Contagion may spread across a hyper-connected financial system from country to country and from smaller to larger more systematically important banks. Declining share prices and credit ratings downgrades combined with a slowdown in inter-bank transactions, as credit risk managers become increasingly cautious, will transmit stress across global markets.

For the moment, whether the third banking crisis in two decades remains contained is a matter of faith and belief. Financial markets will test policymakers' resolve in the coming days and weeks.

Mexican Workers Assemble North American Automobiles In Mexico For $3.00/HR

NYTimes | “Everybody who sources from China understands that there’s no way to get around that Pacific Ocean — there’s no technology for that,” said Raine Mahdi, founder of Zipfox, a San Diego-based company that links factories in Mexico with American companies seeking alternatives to Asia. “There’s always this push from customers: ‘Can you get it here faster?’”

During the first 10 months of last year, Mexico exported $382 billion of goods to the United States, an increase of more than 20 percent over the same period in 2021, according to U.S. census data. Since 2019, American imports of Mexican goods have swelled by more than one-fourth.

In 2021, American investors put more money into Mexico — buying companies and financing projects — than into China, according to an analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute.

China will almost certainly remain a central component of manufacturing for years to come, say trade experts. But the shift toward Mexico represents a marginal reapportionment of the world’s manufacturing capacity amid recognition of volatile hazards — from geopolitical realignments to the intensifying challenges of climate change.

“It’s not about deglobalization,” said Michael Burns, managing partner at Murray Hill Group, an investment firm focused on the supply chain. “It’s the next stage of globalization that is focused on regional networks.”

That Mexico looms as a potential means of cushioning Americans from the pitfalls of globalization amounts to a development rich in historical irony.

Three decades ago, Ross Perot, the business magnate then running for president, warned of “a giant sucking sound going south” in depicting Mexico as a job-capturing threat to American livelihoods.

“The reality is that Mexico is the solution to some of our challenges,” said Shannon K. O’Neil, a Latin America specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Trade that is closer by from Canada or Mexico is much more likely to create and protect U.S. jobs.”

Given that the United States, Mexico and Canada operate within an expansive trade zone, their supply chains are often intertwined. Each contributes parts and raw materials used in finished goods by the others. Cars assembled in Mexico, for example, draw heavily on parts produced at factories in the United States.

Overall, some 40 percent of the value of Mexico’s exports to the United States consists of parts and components made at American plants, according to a seminal research paper. Yet only 4 percent of imports from China are American-made.

 

2nd Only To George Soros In The Volume Of Bribes Paid To Democrats..,

WaPo  |   Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old wunderkind of cryptocurrency, spent tens of millions of dollars over the past year trying to reshape how Washington and the world think about finance.

The crypto exchange he founded, FTX, had become an industry-dominating business in just three years, valued at $32 billion as recently as January. He amassed political clout in an even bigger hurry, emerging from obscurity to become the second-biggest Democratic donor in the midterm elections.

By Friday, the money and the clout had disappeared: Bankman-Fried resigned from FTX, which then filed for bankruptcy. And Bankman-Fried was left facing harrowing questions about his role in the most catastrophic collapse the notoriously volatile crypto industry has so far seen.

When Bankman-Fried was just 28, he built a platform that offered investors easy access to buying, selling and stashing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The offshore exchange allowed investors to place risky bets not allowed in the United States, though it was easy enough for American users to find workarounds; a U.S. affiliate offered limited services. With a massive marketing push — including a flashy Super Bowl ad and naming rights to the Miami Heat arena — he sought to make crypto trading a mainstream pastime.

Meanwhile, he was using his newfound political clout to sell Washington on a regulatory regime that promised to work to his advantage. The contrasts were glaring and never easily reconciled: As crypto’s self-appointed ambassador to Washington, Bankman-Fried was pressing for federal regulation even as he dodged U.S. oversight from his corporate headquarters in the Bahamas.

The executive acknowledged that FTX’s aggressive lobbying made him an outlier in crypto. “Outside of us, there weren’t many people engaging,” Bankman-Fried said in an interview last month with The Washington Post. “I think that means we have to do a better job as an industry more generally engaging.”

In March, he appeared at the House Democratic retreat in Philadelphia with his arm around House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.). In April, he turned up in the office of Caroline Pham, a Republican member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, less than a week after she assumed the post, along with Mark Wetjen, the former acting chair of the agency and now Bankman-Fried’s top Washington adviser. Hill staffers say they regularly spotted him around the Capitol, shuttling between meetings flanked by Wetjen and Eliora Katz, who joined FTX this summer from the staff of the Senate Banking Committee’s top Republican, Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.)

 

Bankman Fried (Priceless...,) Tried To Politically Gin Up Central Bank Support For Crypto-Shystery...,

NYTimes | FTX’s founder was called a modern-day J.P. Morgan. The analogy still works. Though one of them failed and the other died rich, both of their careers make the case for central banks.

Mr. Bankman-Fried tried to bail out a couple of smaller failed crypto firms, Voyager Digital and BlockFi Inc., drawing laudatory press that compared him to J.P. Morgan Sr.

The Morgan analogy was repeated this week even after FTX customers withdrew $6 billion in funds in the equivalent of a bank run, forcing FTX to freeze operations and stranding billions in remaining customers’ potentially lost assets.

For all of the obvious ways in which Mr. Bankman-Fried is no Pierpont Morgan, a model of discretion whose namesake firm continues to be solvent to this day, on one point they have something in common: Their careers demonstrate a need for central banks.

Morgan earned his reputation as a private rescuer in 1907, when a bank run struck the trusts (banklike associations) in New York City and then spread to traditional banks. Morgan assembled the city’s leading financiers to lend emergency funds and ease the panic.

His heroism slowed the bleeding — but some banks failed, many suspended withdrawals and scores resorted to dispensing homemade certificates in lieu of money. As each bank hoarded reserves to save itself, the stock market plunged 40 percent and the country suffered a severe recession.

Morgan’s inadequacy made plain that the United States, already an industrial powerhouse, could not depend on the benevolence of a single financier. Precisely for this reason, Nelson Aldrich, a powerful senator with close ties to Morgan, led a mission to Europe in 1908 to study the workings of the central banks in England, France and Germany.

Two years later, a group of bankers, including a senior partner of Morgan’s, the president of its rival National City Bank, and the central banking crusader Paul Warburg, gathered at Morgan’s exclusive club on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia. Meeting in secret, they plotted the outline of what Americans had resisted since Andrew Jackson’s day — a central bank. The Federal Reserve was born three years later, in 1913.

This week, The Wall Street Journal’s James Mackintosh opined, “The fundamental flaw of centralized finance is that it needs central banks to end chaotic bank runs …” This is like saying that the flaw with owning a home is that one may need the fire department.

Any monetary instrument is a form of credit, and credit will always involve risk. Mr. Bankman-Fried discovered that. His putative savior, a crypto exchange known as Binance, backed out 24 hours after it had tentatively agreed to a rescue. On Friday, FTX filed for bankruptcy. Yet had the rescue deal gone through, Binance would have been on the hook for, reportedly, up to $8 billion in claims against FTX. Who would have come to the rescue of Binance?

The point of a central reserve, which is what Paul Warburg and Nelson Aldrich had in mind in 1913, is that the pooled resources of the nation are immeasurably greater than those of any single mogul. They offer, in times of need, an ocean of liquidity to iron out the inevitable fluctuations in individual, regional, and industry-specific credit. Would anyone in their right mind wish to entrust the nation to crypto — and trade the imperfect Fed for the likes of FTX and Binance?

 

 

 

Ilhan Omar Responds To Anti-War Internet Disinformation

counterpunch  |   And even though they may lack the finely tuned mental framework to fit it all together, thanks to their news consumption habits, lots of people have begun to glimpse that Washington’s idiocy could get them blown up tout de suite and meanwhile is bleeding them dry and will very soon be bleeding them drier. Hence the public’s growing reluctance to keep handing Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, blank checks. The GOP even climbed onto the bandwagon and announced it won’t fund this misbegotten war if it regains congress. I, for one, will be astonished if Republicans have the backbone to keep that promise. Anyway, Biden plans to preempt this oath by forking over more billions to Kiev now. This will not, ahem, help the Dems, which is probably what Republicans count on. But then Biden gets to look like he’s a man of principle (the show must go on), while the rest of us go broke and calculate our distance from atomic ground zero. Americans struggle with utility bills, grocery and gas prices, medical and educational debt. They don’t need to fund defense contractors to the tune of billions of dollars so Ukrainians and Russians can kill each other halfway around the world. And they certainly don’t need a war that has humanity teetering on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

I am sorry, you all aren’t “anti war protesters”, you are dangerous propagandists who are literally making a mockery of the anti war movement.

I have never had the pleasure of responding to 🇷🇺 ridiculous internet disinformation in person before. Thank you for the opportunity ✌🏽 https://t.co/xzTLQCymgO

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 28, 2022

In an unexpected dribble of good news, on October 24 the Washington Post reported that some 30 members of the progressive caucus urged Biden to get diplomacy to end the war rolling. The next day, they sniveled and recanted. This was the first time any Dems had the guts not to cheerlead for more bloodshed and more war on Moscow. What caused this initial sea change, I don’t know. But it was good news. Better late than never, it seemed. It appeared to mean some on the so-called left in Washington had finally come to their senses and just might not behave as disgracefully as so many European socialists did once World War I started, when they abandoned their erstwhile pacifism. For a long time, honestly, it has looked like that was the inheritance Dem progressives wanted to claim, an inheritance not just of shame and mass murder, but, were the Ukraine war to morph into World War III, human extinction.

For less than a day the sun of reason and goodness shone down. Briefly, the people who consider themselves of the left decided this danger of humanity’s mass execution was worth speaking out about and that diplomacy for peace is the only sane route out of the fiasco. But then, the next day they chickened out of bucking their party’s bloodlust. Even their timid gesture was too much to ask. These people are not leftists. They are cowards. They are a disgrace to the left. If anyone in the progressive caucus ever speaks out for diplomacy again, I’ll be very impressed.

Speaking of being impressed, how about that Washington Post actually playing this story big, about progressives calling for diplomacy, instead of burying it? That was unexpected, to say the least. Because it’s long been sickeningly obvious that our mainstream media show one side of the story: the NATO, Washington, imperial, war-mongering side. And it’s been doing that, shamelessly, for a generation. (It did that earlier too, but with a bit of actual embarrassment, whenever it got called out.) Remember Iraq’s infamous weapons of mass destruction? The editors who hyped that lie for months on end went on to bigger and better things, and so did the politicians – Biden even became president! – while an entire country, Iraq, was bombed to smithereens, based largely on mendacious reporting and political chicanery and now, decades later, has simply swirled down the drain.

Finally When There's Nothing Left You Bust The Joint Out....,

BAR  |  One would think that Europeans would be outraged to see their already limited energy supply cut even further but they are strangely quiet. Sweden announced that it wouldn’t participate in a Joint Investigative Team because of fears that national security would be compromised. That’s a strange position to take considering that a terror attack took place near that country.

The countries involved are more than likely silent because they know that their super power ally, the United States, was involved in the sabotage. They murmur about Russia being the culprit but they also know that makes no logical sense whatsoever.

Europe is under the thumb of the United States, which is determined to turn allies into impoverished vassal states. France is suffering from fuel shortages created by sanctions against Russia and a general strike has been called. Italians are also protesting high fuel prices and are calling for an end to that country’s EU and NATO memberships. But these governments dare not complain.

The U.S. runs a protection racket not unlike that of its infamous organized criminal gangs. The state is reminiscent of characters in the movie Goodfellas, who promised partnerships with local businesses only to loot them and then set them on fire. The Biden administration is akin to a mafioso boss. European governments do nothing but grovel out of fear, which is just what the criminal gang wants.

The truth of U.S. “partnerships” with allies has been revealed as a gigantic fraud. In reality these countries are living under occupation and now there is no pretense that they will be treated any differently from other countries living under U.S. control. Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the UK all have U.S. troops stationed on their soil. Germany has gold reserves held by the Federal Reserves. They are not truly independent and the Nord Stream sabotage shows it.

Russia isn’t the only country the U.S. is trying to weaken. The hegemon has come out of the closet. It has no friends, only enemies and puppets and all end up being treated badly. Europe went along with the scam only to see the ruble rise in value and the euro decline. It turned out that Russia had a strong economy while the Europeans were very weak.

Thinking About Putin's Speech - THIS Right'Chere....,

Been thinking about Putin’s speech after having read it earlier. I swear that in one or two parts, he said something that gives context to this war. The outlines of the plan are long visible. 

1. Force Russia to take action to save the people of the Donbass
2. Have the entire west hit them with massive sanctions unprecedented in history
3. Seize all their off-shore wealth
4. Cause the Russian economy to implode
5. Have the locals topple Putin for Navalny or some other traitorous compradore
6. Move in and privatize & de-industrialize everything
7. Break up Russia into smaller countries
8. Exploited these and turn them against one another like Iraq. 

None of this is secret now but these were the broad outlines. But why? I had assumed that given a choice of Russia and China, that Russia would have seemed the easier target which when successful, would leave China ripe for the taking. After that, the rest of the world will have to fall in line for the west. 

But in his speech, Putin said this:‘And here it is important to recall that the West bailed itself out of its early 20th century challenges with World War I. Profits from World War II helped the United States finally overcome the Great Depression and become the largest economy in the world, and to impose on the planet the power of the dollar as a global reserve currency. And the 1980s crisis – things came to a head in the 1980s again – the West emerged from it unscathed largely by appropriating the inheritance and resources of the collapsed and defunct Soviet Union. That’s a fact.’

Putting it together, what if this is all of what this is all about?

Think of the 2008 crash which is supposed to have only cost $2 trillion (and the rest!). Think of the unholy amounts of Quantitative Easing that has been done since then to make the banks whole and profitable, to keep the FIRE sector safe. And then think of the massive amount of money that has been printed since the pandemic started. 

It is a veritable ocean of debt!

It cannot stay that way. In fact it is getting worse. It is not sustainable. 

So if Nuland and the Neocons could cause Russia to fall, wouldn’t all the untold wealth (~$77 Trillion) of that country not serve rather handsomely toward the goal of making some of this mountain of debt go away? Is all of WW-III about making western debt go away? A lot of already wealthy people would become even wealthier. This great pirate adventure would advance a lot of careers. 

No tin foil hat required tomake this hang together.

Greedy Immoral Treasonous Oligarchs Abusing American Workers

slate  |  If you were planning to spend Thursday stocking up on toilet paper in advance of a seemingly imminent freight-railroad strike or lockout, you woke up to welcome news. President Joe Biden has announced a tentative agreement to avert the disruption and the body blow it would have caused the economy and our supply chains. The deal isn’t final—workers will soon vote on it—but, nonetheless, it’s a relief following a week of headlines warning about the potential of $2 billion a day in economic loss, including disruptions to passenger trains, grain shipments, carmakers, and refiners.

What was missing from these headlines? The actual reason for the conflict between railroad workers and their employers. The potential strike or lockout was not because of any dispute over pay, but because of inhumane attendance policies that currently mean railroad engineers and conductors are either working or “on call” 90 percent of the time. When they’re on call, they can be summoned to work on two hours’ notice or less, and then may be away from home for days at a time. Workers report that they have no sick days, paid or unpaid. If they have to take time off unexpectedly, even because of illness, they lose points in a convoluted, points-based attendance system. That means workers are at risk of being disciplined or fired for getting sick, going to a doctor’s appointment or a family funeral, or for any other absence that can’t be planned far in advance.

As railroad worker Hugh Sawyer told the American Prospect, this meant that on his 65th birthday this year, he got home at 7:30 in the morning after working 12 hours the day before, slept for five hours, and then spent the day refreshing his computer to see if he was being called back to work. Another worker, describing the onerous requirements for scheduling off-time in advance, wrote on Facebook, “How do you schedule a funeral in October if it’s only February?” He also noted that he gets 30 days fully off for the entire year, no weekends. And the wife of an engineer told Vice, “They go to work sick, they miss funerals of loved ones, they miss final goodbyes to parents on hospice, they miss holidays, birthdays, all of it.”

As the unions put it in a statement on Sunday, “these policies are destroying the lives of our members.” The unions initially pushed for paid sick leave, but later sought only unpaid sick leave. Yes, really: They’ve had to fight in order not to be punished for taking unexpected, urgently needed unpaid sick leave. It appears that the tentative agreement between the parties would address these attendance and leave policies by creating “voluntary assigned days off,” granting one additional paid day off, allowing workers to attend medical appointments without penalty, and creating exemptions from attendance policies for hospitalizations and surgeries.

It should not be controversial to say it, but: People should have sick leave so they do not have to come to work when they get sick. They should be able to take leave to attend doctors’ appointments or deal with family emergencies without risking their jobs. Workers should also have regular time off, not be on call almost every day of their lives. This strike or lockout was threatened because of the railroad companies’ refusal, right up until the last minute, to accept these basic human needs, and their willingness to bring an already weary country to the brink of yet another economic disaster, all in the name of ever more profits.

The United States, unlike many countries, does not have a national law guaranteeing sick leave; if we did, the railroads’ attendance systems would be clearly illegal. The kind of point-based attendance systems that railroads employ can still be considered unlawful retaliation if workers lose points for taking leave that is legally protected, such as for absences guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, or state or local sick-leave laws. Apart from questions of legality, it is grossly irresponsible to punish people for unexpected illnesses ever, and especially during a pandemic.

 

Arabella Advisors: Why The American Progressive Left Wing Is Neither

tabletmag  | Behind the closed doors of an unassuming philanthropic consultancy in Washington, D.C., is one of the most powerful lobbying forces in the United States. The Atlantic has called it “the massive progressive dark-money group you’ve never heard of” and “the indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money.” The Washington Post believes its potent lobbying arm is reason enough for Congress to enact forced donor disclosure laws, while Politico labelled it a “dark-money behemoth.” “The system of political financing, which often obscures the identities of donors, is known as dark money,” wrote The New York Times, “and Arabella’s network is a leading vehicle for it on the left.”

Meet Arabella Advisors, the brainchild of ex-Clinton administration staffer Eric Kessler and the favorite tool of anonymous, billionaire donors on the progressive left. Since 2006, the Arabella hub has overseen a growing network of nonprofits—call them the “spokes”—that collected $2.4 billion in the 2019-20 election cycle, nearly twice as much as the Republican and Democratic national committees combined.

These nonprofits in turn manage and supervise a vast array of “pop-up” groups—mainly political attack-dog websites, ad campaigns, and “spontaneous” demonstrations staffed by Arabella’s network of activist professionals who pose as members of independent activist organizations. These groups—such as Fix Our Senate, the Hub Project, and Floridians for a Fair Shake—typically emerge very suddenly in order to savage the political opposition on the policy or outrage of that particular day or week, then vanish just as quickly. The pop-ups do not file IRS disclosures or report their budgets, boards, or staff. In most cases, their connection to Arabella goes unreported. Many of them have offered sympathetic ordinary voters the opportunity to donate to whatever the “grassroots” cause happens to be, when in fact the money feeds back into Arabella’s enormous dark-money network.

The relatively novel and innovative model of political activism perfected by Arabella, which was founded 2005, went more or less unnoticed until 2018, when I was reporting on the activist groups that attempted to prevent the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Among the sea of picket signs outside the court in July 2018 was the name of an unfamiliar group: Demand Justice. A search of the IRS nonprofit archives showed the name itself wasn’t listed. What did turn up in an online search was a downtown address on Connecticut Avenue shared by dozens of other organizations, including the Arabella “spoke” that appeared to be running Demand Justice, Sixteen Thirty Fund.

It isn’t uncommon for political groups to share expensive D.C. office space, especially when they’re affiliated, like the Center for American Progress (CAP) and its lobbying arm, CAP Action. But Arabella’s arrangement is unique: A for-profit consultancy (Arabella Advisors) is the central hub; four (perhaps five) tax-exempt nonprofits (New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, Windward Fund, and possibly North Fund, all founded and led by Arabella leadership) are the spokes; and countless ephemeral pop-ups branching out from the nonprofits.

In early 2019, the Capital Research Center (where I work) released a report on the network. Since then, my colleagues and I have collected large amounts of data on Arabella’s origins, lobbying, pop-up campaigns, board connections, and donors, which helped lay the groundwork for later reporting on Arabella in mainstream outlets like The Atlantic and New York Times—which have since acknowledged that the political “left” has outraised and outspent the political “right” using dark money in recent years by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.

And yet today, the vast majority of American voters remain unaware of Arabella’s existence, even as it promises to play an increasingly central role in American politics, and as the culture wars and fight for control of federal institutions reaches a fever pitch in the fall of 2022.

The Warm Salty Golden Shower Of Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness...,

BAR  |  Senator Joe Biden played a role in creating these terrible conditions. In 2005 he and 17 other democrats joined republicans in voting for the Bankruptcy Act, which made it all but impossible to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. The Delaware senator was beholden to the consumer credit industry, like all of that state’s elected officials. They were the drivers in ensuring that filing for bankruptcy for any reason would become very difficult and they were always among Biden’s biggest campaign contributors.

Of course Biden knows what people need and want. During his campaign he said , “I propose to forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for debt-holders earning up to $125,000.” At other times he included Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in this debt forgiveness plan.

It is easy to point out the discrepancy between what he promised and what he now proposes, but the problem is bigger than the laundry list of Biden campaign lies. There is great confusion among Black people about student loan debt relief, what it will really accomplish, and what is actually needed.

Biden promised well heeled democratic fundraisers that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Forgiving student loans or any of the other forms of debt peonage is the last thing that the U.S. oligarchy wants to see. The increasingly predatory capitalist system demands that Biden does little more than give lip service instead of meeting the people’s needs. That is why the oddly named Inflation Reduction Act will negotiate Medicare drug prices but not until 2026 and then only for ten drugs. Even if Biden cared he wouldn’t be allowed to do anything more for senior citizens, student loan debtors or anyone else.

Of course the Black political class can be counted on to aid in the subterfuges that are used to keep the people quiet. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley falsely proclaimed , “President Joe Biden just canceled student debt.” Her assigned role at this juncture is to get Black voters to the polls in November and she can’t do that without lying about Biden. Getting voter buy-in for neo-liberal policies is Pressley’s problem. No one else has to go along with the inevitable falsehoods that come with the territory of holding elective office.

She and others may call themselves “progressives” but in the end they are no better than Senator Biden when he worsened the student debt crisis. They are all little more than errand boys and girls for the kleptocrats and all of them are compromised.

Finance Won The Darwinian Struggle On The Corporatist Evolutionary Threshing Floor

theatlantic |  Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.

EU Fitna Foist The American Style "Asset Forfeiture" Game On Russians

usnews  |  The European Commission proposed on Wednesday to make breaking European Union sanctions against Russia a crime, a move that would allow EU governments to confiscate assets of companies and individuals that evade EU restrictions against Moscow.

Breaking EU sanctions on Russia is now a criminal offence in 12 EU countries. It is either an administrative or a criminal offence in 13 and two treat it only as an administrative offence, Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders said. Penalties for sanction breaking across the EU vary accordingly.

The Commission proposal aims to unify that approach to make sanctions evasion a serious crime in all members of the 27-nation bloc, he told a news conference.

"Today's proposals aim to ensure that the assets of individuals and entities that violate the restrictive measures can be effectively confiscated in the future," the Commission said in a statement.

The EU has so far frozen 10 billion euros in physical assets and more than 20 billion euros in bank accounts of Russian oligarchs helping the Kremlin's war effort in Ukraine.

But before these assets could be confiscated and sold off, the oligarchs would first have to be convicted of either trying to evade sanctions or of other crimes and the assets seized would have to be linked to that crime only.

The new EU law, which has to be unanimously approved by all EU governments and get a majority in the European Parliament, would also penalise those who help break sanctions, like lawyers or bankers working with those who circumvent restrictions.

The Commission also proposed to make it generally easier to confiscate assets of criminals in the EU, making it possible to impose an immediate freezing order to prevent the assets from being moved, before a proper court order confirms it.

The Commission estimates annual revenues of criminal gangs in the EU at 139 billion euros, only 2% of which become frozen by the authorities. Only half of the frozen assets are later confiscated.

 

 

Asset Forfeiture As Collective Punishment

americansforprosperity  |  What happens when the federal government blatantly violates a court order and takes the property of citizens who are not under criminal suspicion?

Why should innocent property owners have to prove their innocence in order to get their property back from the government?

These are a few of the questions that have come into play when law enforcement agencies seized private property through the most recent horror story involving civil asset forfeiture.

In this ongoing case in California, federal agents exceeded their authority, took property from citizens not even under criminal suspicion, and are refusing to give it back unless they can successfully navigate the government’s demands.

The stories of these people are unfortunately not the first example of the government violating our rights in this manner, but they are certainly not any less shocking.

The raid on U.S. Private Vaults

On March 22, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Agency acted under a warrant to shut down a Beverly Hills, California business called U.S. Private Vaults.

USPV provided bank-style safety deposit boxes to customers who wanted anonymity. Through biometric identifiers, or a nondescript key, boxholders could store valuables without ever having to identify themselves by name.

Prosecutors say it was a criminal business however, and a grand jury indicted the company on charges of conspiracies to launder money, distribute controlled substances, and structure transactions.

The warrant authorizing the raid allowed investigators to seize a list of items, including deposit box keys, money counters, biometric scanners, security cameras, and computers.

There’s no public indication however, that law enforcement had specific information about criminal suspects with boxes there or had identified boxes that held ill-gotten gains from specific crimes. And the warrant specifically prohibited law enforcement from seizing the contents of the more than 800 privately held safe deposit boxes at the business:

This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of safety deposit boxes … in accordance with their written policies, agents shall inspect the contents of the boxes in an effort to identify their owners in order to notify them so that they can claim their property.

That restriction was ignored. Prosecutors seized the contents of the boxes, intentionally casting a wide net that took in all customers, innocent or otherwise. The FBI now says it intends to hold onto $85 million in cash, and an unspecified haul of gold, silver, and precious metals.

On June 22, U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner found that the FBI “provides no factual basis for the seizure of Plaintiffs’ property,” and issued a temporary injunction against the seizures.

The U.S. Treasury Office Of Asset Forfeiture

treasury.gov  |  ​The Treasury Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture (TEOAF) administers the Treasury Forfeiture Fund (TFF). The TFF is the receipt account for deposit of non-tax forfeitures made pursuant to laws enforced or administered by Treasury and Department of Homeland Security agencies.

About

Established in 1992, the Treasury Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture (TEOAF) was established to affirmatively influence the consistent and strategic use of asset forfeiture to disrupt and dismantle criminal enterprises.  Asset forfeiture is a vital legal tool that serves a number of compelling law enforcement purposes and is designed to deprive criminals of the proceeds of their crimes, to break the financial backbone of organized criminal syndicates and drug cartels, and to recover property that may be used to compensate victims and deter crime.

TEOAF administers the Treasury Forfeiture Fund (TFF), which is the receipt account for the deposit of non-tax forfeitures made pursuant to laws enforced or administered by Treasury and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) law enforcement agencies:

• Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigations Division (IRS-CI), U.S. Department of the Treasury;
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Department of Homeland Security;
• U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Department of Homeland Security;
• U.S. Secret Service (USSS), Department of Homeland Security;
• U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security.

Other statutory member agencies include the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), and the Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).

 

The TFF is a special fund, i.e. a federal fund collection earmarked by law for a specific purpose. The enabling legislation for TFF (Title 31 U.S.C. § 9705) defines those purposes for which Treasury forfeiture revenue may be used.  The funds can be allocated and used without the enactment of an annual appropriation by the Congress. 

 

TEOAF’s priorities in administering the Treasury forfeiture program are to:

• Administer and manage the Treasury Forfeiture Fund (TFF) program in a fiscally responsible manner that seeks to minimize administrative costs and maximize the benefits for law enforcement and the compensation of eligible victims. 

• Ensure program policies protect due process rights of individuals.

• Focus resources on strategic cases and investigations that result in actions against high profile criminals and criminal enterprises to affect the greatest financial damage to criminal organizations.
• Foster a strong working relationship between federal and state or local law enforcement agencies.

 

 Additional information about the TFF is included in the following Treasury orders and Directives:

• Treasury Directive 15-04
• Treasury Order 102-14

 

Uselessly Eating Muggles Are Using Up All Of Our Personal Fossil Fuels...,

 surplusenergyeconomics  | TIMING THE MOMENT OF FRACTURE

When and how can we know that a change of direction is fundamental and lasting, rather than a temporary departure from established trends?

That, in essence, is the call we need to make now. Far from being “transitory”, current conditions – including rising inflation, surging energy prices and the over-stressing of supply-chains – are indicators of a structural change.

Ultimately, what we’re witnessing is a forced restoration of equilibrium between a faltering real economy of goods and services and a drastically over-extended financial economy of money and credit.

This is where confidence in continuity crumbles, where the delusions of ‘growth in perpetuity’ succumb to the hard reality of resource constraint, and where ‘shocks that are no surprises’ shake the financial system.

If you want just two indicators to watch, one of these is the volumetric (rather than the financial) direction of the economy, and the other is the behaviour of the prices of essentials within the broader inflationary situation.        

The economics of stress

In the science of materials, it’s observable that fractures happen quickly, even if the stresses that cause them have accumulated over a protracted period. We can spend hours, days, weeks or even years gradually increasing the tension applied to an iron bar, but the ensuing snap in that bar will happen almost instantaneously.

Economics isn’t a science, but there’s a direct analogy here. Anyone who understands the economy as an energy system will be well aware of a relentless, long-standing build-up of stresses.

They’ll be equally aware that this cannot continue indefinitely.

Two things matter now.

First, when will these cumulative pressures bring about the moment of fracture?

Second, what should we expect to see when this snapping-point is reached?

The answers to the second question are pretty clear.