Paul Krugman says that the world is headed toward a crisis and ugly ultra-nationalism

[TrotskistMarx]

ACCORDING TO NOBEL LAUREATE PAUL KRUGMAN THE WORLD IS HEADED TOWARD A AN ECONOMIC BREAKDOWN, AND TOWARD ULTRA-RIGHT WING NATIONALISM !!

The world is in the midst of a complete global economic “breakdown,” according to Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman, with the implications of political “radicalism” quickly brewing in Europe and the United States. “We are living through a time where we face an enormous economic challenge,” Krugman told Russia Today (RT). “We are facing — obviously — the worst challenge in 80 years and we are totally mucking up the response.” Traders of German Bunds and U.S. Treasuries agree and have sold PIIGS paper for other paper higher up on the food chain.

The Euro’s Demise Has Been Set in Motion: Are you protected? "Nationalism will emerge. Healthier countries will not see fit to spend their hard earned money to bail out their less responsible neighbors." As a result, rates on Bunds and Treasuries have reached record-low levels Wednesday of 1.59 and 1.23 percent, respectively—levels that Dan Norcini of Jim Sinclair’s JSMineset.com said signals a Lehman-times-10 event around the corner. With Spain’s 10-year note spread higher by 520 basis points more than the yield on 10-year Bunds, a near-record level as well as depositors decidedly motioning into a trotting bank run on Spanish banks, Europe is again on the slippery slope to doom.

Krugman blames policymakers for the impending crash, fearing a replay of Nazi Germany as a result of a radical drop in standards of living on both sides of the Atlantic due to Germany’s refusal to inflate the euro. “We’re doing a terrible job. We’re failing to deal with it,” Krugman added. “All of the people, the respectable people, the serious people, have made a total hash of this. That is a recipe for radicalism. It is a recipe for breakdown.” Forcing nations to swallow austerity contributed greatly to the rise of the Third Reich following severe reparations exacted upon Germany post-WWI—a mistake Krugman doesn’t forthrightly say in the RT interview, but may be inferred by his Jewishness, gleaned through numerous posts on his NYTimes Web blog and attributed to his notorious allegiance to a failed monetary system under intense fire from people of all nations affected by the crisis.

For the first time since the creation of the Fed, for example, the majority of Americans now understand that the Fed is not a public institution, but an independent one. “End the Fed” is almost as common a slogan today as “End the War in Vietnam” was during the presidency of Richard Nixon (1969-1975). In Europe, at the tip of the spear between the Brussels globalists (by the American proxy, the Fed) and the people of Europe is Germany, where the political heat of rising nationalism and scapegoating of Arab and Turk immigrants, in particular, has emerged and reported by international press. “No other religion in Europe makes so many demands. No immigrant group other than Muslims is so strongly connected with claims on the welfare state and crime,” best-selling author, former German politician and Bundesbank board member, Thilo Sarrazin, stated in German cultural quarterly Lettre Internationat of Sept. 2009. “No group emphasizes their differences so strongly in public, especially through women’s clothing. In no other religion is the transition to violence, dictatorship and terrorism so fluid.”

And, May 21, 2012, Israel Business published a Reuters article about Sarrazin’s newly released book, Europe Doesn’t Need the Euro, within which, he argued that Germany is being blackmailed by the EU to bailout the PIIGS to make further reparations for WWII. Germany’s globalists “are driven by that very German reflex, that we can only finally atone for the Holocaust and World War II when we have put all our interests and money into European hands,” he stated in his book. Germany’s initial bailout of Greece shows Germany’s “susceptibility to blackmail”, Sarrazin wrote, suggesting that crimes committed by the Nazi Party will be asked to be repeatedly atoned.

“This politics is turning Germany into a hostage of all those in the euro zone who may in the future, for whatever reason, need help,” he stated. Krugman believes the West may have reached a tipping point, not only in the sovereign debt crisis, but in the social order, as well. “There are a lot of ugly forces being unleashed in our societies on both sides of the Atlantic because our economic policy has been such a dismal failure, because we are refusing to listen to the lessons of history,” he told RT. “We may look back at this thirty years from now and say, ‘That is when it all fell apart.’ And by all, I don’t just mean the economy.”


Source: http://etfdailynews.com/2012/06/01/nobel-laureate-says-globe-headed-for-financial-breakdown-and-radicalism-ewg-fxe-vgk-euo-vwo/#



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[KingoftheSwing]

In case of Belgium he's absolutely right. Ultra-right nationalism gets almost 50percent of the vote in the flemish part. Luckily in the french part the social-democrats get 40 percent of the vote. Not exactly a reason for joy but good luck trying to form a government :lol: (last election they broke the world record and kinda doubled it, took them 535 days)

[Agathor]

Ah well, I'm probably safe in England. We will never abandon our major parties, even though we know they exist to kick us around. We are a nation of abused wives, and apparently that has its virtues.

[Geiseric]

People are definately begining to fracture from the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. but no real alternative is available aside from the Tea Party. Occupy seems to be popular among the wider working class, however we have a long road ahead.

[TrotskistMarx]

The thing is that humans have a defense mechanism, and in a situation with elevated prices of gasoline, food in the supermarkets like chicken at rising from 1 dollar per lb. (current price) to 10 dollars per lb. milk, rising from 4 dollars to 25 dollars per gallon. And every thing becoming super-expensive, along with wages not rising at all. People can get desperate and support any populist messiah promising people salvation. And that clientelist, populist messiah can come from the the Tea Party. Because of the fact that US electoral politics is too expensive, The Tea Party is wealthier than leftist parties, and the leftist parties of USA are too divided, the members of each leftist groups of USA are too into their own school of leftist ideology. Some progressive movements are not even aiming for a socialist system at all. But toward identity politics based on isolated issues like immigration reforms, etc. And because of all those problems of the left together. Any organized ultra-right wing Adolf Hitler messiah option can rise a lot easier to power than the left of USA


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People are definately begining to fracture from the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. but no real alternative is available aside from the Tea Party. Occupy seems to be popular among the wider working class, however we have a long road ahead.

[Mr. Natural]

The problem is that capitalism has reached the end of its line and that no radical alternatives exist at present. Capitalism is a systemic process that requires the creation of ever greater profit--a profit it can no longer produce.

Capitalism is collapsing, and it is taking natural and human ecological relations with it. Capitalism's globalization means that it has enveloped all forms of life on Earth, and this will prove to be humanity's endgame, whether it be actual extinction or a return to an impossibly immiserated New Stone Age.

Unless, of course, a presently conservative, sterile, passive left gets some life and re-revolutionizes Marxism/anarchism. To accomplish this, however, the left would have to engage the new sciences of organization that it has been so resolutely resisting. Marx and Engels eagerly engaged scientific developments as they appeared, in marked contrast to modern "Marxists."

I live in a "Tea Party town" and am appalled on a daily basis as I observe the activity and spirit of the far right and the complete lack of any action or potential for action on the left.

Do any other comrades see how conservative the left has become? The Marxist classics are all at least a century old! Where are the necessary revolutionary updates as capitalism and knowledge have developed? Where are the necessary revolutions in the revolution?

It is hard to maintain Trotsky's "optimism of the will" in the face of the left's current pervasive intellectual conservatism. I don't have a choice, for to surrender to capitalism would be death, but the absence of any revolutionary, intellectual vigor on the left makes my life a daily endurance contest.

Erich Fromm plaintively noted that we are born without our will and die against it. This is the human existential condition, but between the beginning and the end of our individual lives we have our one-time opportunities to realize our human natures and spirits--together. To give up these lives and our human future to our capitalist Frankenstein moster without any effective opposition is beyond monstrous, but that's where we are.

My red-green, time-to-get-radical-again best.

[Geiseric]

I don't think anything not superficial has changed since those "100 year old marxist classics." overall, imperialism is still very real and the same it was, dialectically, a hundred years ago. We're confronted by a failure of the socialist movement, not any fictional "leftist movement," to win over the masses by a long history of opportunism on every leadership (the exception being the early russian revolution) of the proletariat. We need to organize a workers party that is led by actual radical workers and not union bureaucrats or opportunist "leftists," who simply vie for a spot in the bourgeois system. we need to fight for whatever the working class is fighting for, according to where it is in terms of consciousness. at this point our concerns are with things directly effecting the average worker, namely union and wage issues. as soon as the working class has its organizations and lifestyle secured, it will have the confidence to fight for political demands.

[Die Neue Zeit]

at this point our concerns are with things directly effecting the average worker, namely union and wage issues. as soon as the working class has its organizations and lifestyle secured, it will have the confidence to fight for political demands.

That's so linear an argument. Political demands aren't fought for out of confidence, but out of necessity. Non-unionized workers already see some form of public politics as the only solution to their wage problems.

[Dexalin]

Žižek alludes to a similar situation in his book from last year, Living in the End Times, and I tend to agree with him that we are reaching a critical point where politics could go the way of fascism if capitalism continues on a path of failure as it has. I think the left owes it to itself and the proletariat to band together and oppose these fascist fuckers from taking control. I don't think you'll hear one person on the far-left who doesn't agree with that sentiment, even if they belong to one of the fractured parties. So the issue isn't what should be done but how should it be done, right? Could there really be that much bad blood between the leftist parties across the board that they can't be reached out to and brought back into the fold?

[Geiseric]

That's so linear an argument. Political demands aren't fought for out of confidence, but out of necessity. Non-unionized workers already see some form of public politics as the only solution to their wage problems.

Non unionised workers are the least political of the working class, and in the context of strike breakers and scabs are more likely to be fascist than socialist, which proves my point. Before workers will present political demands, such as ending a war, or land reform, it only makes sense they they have the confidence that they have some chance of accomplishing it. A worker won't strike unless he has a hope that his wage will be increased, and the same worker won't sit in, occupy, or expropiate his factory unless he has experiance and confidence from winning demands that himself and his fellow workers have already struggled for. After all, workers struggles for wages, working hours, and their basic existance were fought before the struggle for "Land, Bread, Peace," was fought.

[Geiseric]

Žižek alludes to a similar situation in his book from last year, Living in the End Times, and I tend to agree with him that we are reaching a critical point where politics could go the way of fascism if capitalism continues on a path of failure as it has. I think the left owes it to itself and the proletariat to band together and oppose these fascist fuckers from taking control. I don't think you'll hear one person on the far-left who doesn't agree with that sentiment, even if they belong to one of the fractured parties. So the issue isn't what should be done but how should it be done, right? Could there really be that much bad blood between the leftist parties across the board that they can't be reached out to and brought back into the fold?

Do you mean Anarchists and Socialists uniting or Stalinists and Trotskyists uniting, or Trotskyist sect 1 and Trotskyist sect 2 uniting? "The left," is a fictional term, you need to be more specific. However in the context that I think you mean, as in Anarchists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Social Democrats (still techincally "Left," compared to bourgeois conservative parties), that kind of front is impossible unless fascism is coming around, which we're not at yet.

[Klaatu]

If Capitalism itself is in fact collapsing, it is the Capitalists themselves that are causing it.

As a lowly, innocent worker, I personally had nothing to do with this. :tt2:

[Kenco Smooth]

capitalism has reached the end of its line

No, it really hasn't.

[Dexalin]

that kind of front is impossible unless fascism is coming around, which we're not at yet.

Is it really so simple? Even when fascism was gaining support in Germany the SPD and KPD failed to work together at key moments and both parties experienced splintering during this time as well.

[Mr. Natural]

9mm asked for some clarification of my last post (Thanks, 9mm). I will guess this has to do with my emphasis on capitalism as a system that creates particular systemic effects, and with my insistence that there are new sciences of the organization of life (thus revolutionary processes and healthy communities) that show a currently paralyzed left how to organize.

Capitalism is a system that keeps itself going by manufacturing a constantly accelerating profit that is taken from the systems of life. Capitalism produces for profit; life produces for community. Capitalism and life are mortally opposed. Capitalism functions as a cancer of all living systems.

Life generates a sustainable, ecological "profit" with which it creates and maintains the living systems that create and maintain the life process. Life is a bootstrap of living systems maintaining themselves and the life process, and life/nature accomplish this through the process of photosynthesis that takes the sun's energy and converts it to forms of energy we can all use, and through the process of natural selection that generates countless offspring that serve as energy sources (they are eaten), life partners (many creatures live in a mouse burrow, predators/prey), and co-evolutionaries.

So life generates a sustainable surplus with which it maintains its communities, and this is the economic process anarchism/communism intend to establish. Capitalism, though, keeps itself going by manufacturing a "malignant profit" that is taken from life's communities. Capitalism attacks human and natural ecology, and it has reached the end of its process. The cancer of capitalism is about to kill its hosts. That's us, among other beings.

As Leon Brotsky correctly noted, the basic rules of capitalism haven't changed; however, globalization represents more than a superficial development. It means capitalism has enveloped life on Earth and can no longer expand externally. It means internal exploitation will relentlessly increase as The System desperately searches for means to keep itself going. It means increasing ecological devastation and social conflict, and in the absence of anything resembling an effective left, this can only result in a string of disasters and ....

So we/humanity must learn to organize against The System, and the new sciences of the organization of life and society offer us the necessary mental tools. These sciences to which I refer all work with organizational relations and processes. The first of these new sciences--evolution--was eagerly engaged and employed by Marx and Engels. Evolution showed them that nature had an organization and history analogous to humanity and society. Evolution confirmed them in their belief that human beings are natural beings who must learn to live according to their nature.

A cascade of new sciences of organizational relations followed evolution. There was the astounding revolution in physics that, down deep, showed that matter is but energized, organized relations. This new physics emphasized the organizational relations of the cosmos that underly the organizational relations of life on Earth.

The "new sciences" of cosmology, systems theory, cybernetics, and chaos theory followed the new physics, and all of these "new sciences" were then addressed by systems-complexity science, which is powerfully and popularly presented in Fritjof Capra's Web of Life (1996).

In all of these sciences, the root importance of pattern, process, and organization is emphasized. Life has an organization that brings matter (people are matter) to life. Life has a communist organization that we anarchists/communists had damn well better learn and employ before it is too late.

Marx, Engels, and the materialist dialectic understand life and society as organic, systemic processes. See Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003) for confirmation of this. Why have modern leftists strayed from this essential radical realization?

Nothing I've written so far is actionable, though. That life is organized as communist doesn't tell us how to organize as communists. Capra's triangle does!! The theoretical physicist, Fritjof Capra, has created a conceptual triangle that models life's universal pattern of organization--the pattern by which matter self-organized into living systems on Earth some 4 billion years ago.

I have been working with and researching Capra's triangle for a dozen years and I know it works. I know that the average person can learn to employ this mental tool to survey their situation and create living, communist systems in the middle of the cancer of capitalism. However, learning to "see" life's organization will require a paradigm shift in a human perception/consciousness that readily sees the things of life but is blind to their organization. The triangle is the mental tool that can enable humanity to cross this consciousness barrier.

I'll end this lengthy post with a paean to the unseen glories of organizational relations delivered by Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics. "We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-running water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."

Life and communism have a pattern of organization and Capra's triangle models this organization. This revolutionary development is almost beyond belief, and so far, no one believes it.

My red-green best.

[aty]

If Capitalism itself is in fact collapsing, it is the Capitalists themselves that are causing it.

As a lowly, innocent worker, I personally had nothing to do with this. :tt2:
No it is not. It is capitalism as a system that is collapsing because of its inner contradictions. It is not the capitalists fault, the capitalists are just a product of the economic system that is called capitalism. They are also bound by capitals own movement and laws.

[Geiseric]

Is it really so simple? Even when fascism was gaining support in Germany the SPD and KPD failed to work together at key moments and both parties experienced splintering during this time as well.

Well the working class didn't favor the KPD because it basically cheerlead the SPD's reformism throughout the 1920s. It wasn't seen as the possible revolutionary leadership for the German working class. However slow the KPD was growing, Fascism was growing at a much faster rate, so extraordinary plans would of had to of been made to secure the working class's well being. This is the opposite of the reformism and the unconditional support for the SPD, a workers party with bourgeois interests from the leadership, spawned by the birth of fascism in 1923 which was entirely unwarranted at that point when NSDAP struggled to get a few hundred thousand votes.

If we want to really think about things in perspective, the SPD was paralleled to the Russian Provisional Government and the Nazis were the White Army. After Kolchak's bands were starting the counter revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks were freed from prison by the SRs and Mensheviks, the former opportunists who applauded at the Exiles of the Bolsheviks from Russia and the imprisonment of basically the entire party leadership, to hold a united front against the enemy of the working class and the lower peasantry, the White Army. In 1930 when the SPD, the leaders of the German Proletariat who were losing support like Kerensky's government in the July Days through october, asked the KPD for a working class united front against the greater enemy who threatened mortally both parties and all working class organizations for that matter, the KPD refused and took up a stance of "Social Fascism," which meant that somehow the Weimar Republic was worse than a state run by Fascists, the natural enemy of the working class. The ideal united front envisioned by Trotsky would of led to a mass movement against Fascism, thus a mass movement against Capitalism in its highest and final incarnation. A movement against Fascism undertaken by the working class in Germany would of been class conflict in its rawest form, with the working class in conflict with all layers of bourgeois society.

[A Revolutionary Tool]

TrotkistMarxist, what the hell kind of source is this? It refers to someone's "Jewishness" for Christs sake and about ending the Fed. I don't have to tell you what kind of theories started to gain ground the last time capitalism collapsed when it came to banks and Jews right?

[Klaatu]

No it is not. It is capitalism as a system that is collapsing because of its inner contradictions. It is not the capitalists fault, the capitalists are just a product of the economic system that is called capitalism. They are also bound by capitals own movement and laws.

I think I will have to disagree that it is not capitalists' fault; it is their own unbounded greed and willingness to step on faces on their way to the top of the dungheap, that gets them into trouble every time. They'll shoot each other over money (like the gangsters that they are)

Yes, there are inherent flaws and contradictions, etc within the capitalist system, but they would rather screw each other blind (not to mention screw the public blind) in order to enrich themselves in opulence and power, rather than try to fix all of the problems that exist. For example, the recent near-failure of the U.S. banking system has gone without any sort of real reform; the fucking gangsters are still at it (Jamie Dimon, for example) Instead of even modest regulation of their activities, banks/Wall street fiercely resists stabilizing oversight... they would rather go on with their schemes to continue to suck the wealth out of the lumpenproletariat until we bleed to death on their sacrificial altar of high finance.

And that, my friend, is only but a small part of the massive corruption which infects the capitalist system.

[Geiseric]

I think I will have to disagree that it is not capitalists' fault; it is their own unbounded greed and willingness to step on faces on their way to the top of the dungheap, that gets them into trouble every time. They'll shoot each other over money (like the gangsters that they are)

Yes, there are inherent flaws and contradictions, etc within the capitalist system, but they would rather screw each other blind (not to mention screw the public blind) in order to enrich themselves in opulence and power, rather than try to fix all of the problems that exist. For example, the recent near-failure of the U.S. banking system has gone without any sort of real reform; the fucking gangsters are still at it (Jamie Dimon, for example) Instead of even modest regulation of their activities, banks/Wall street fiercely resists stabilizing oversight... they would rather go on with their schemes to continue to suck the wealth out of the lumpenproletariat until we bleed to death on their sacrificial altar of high finance.

And that, my friend, is only but a small part of the massive corruption which infects the capitalist system.

Don't they suck the blood out of the normal, not lumpen proletariat when they unemploy the working class in the stead for slave labor elsewhere? I mean the only way that working people can live is by selling their labor, and that is an impossibility for i'd say 20% of the american population, including the lumpenproletariat. I have a question though, are scabs and strike breakers lumpen?

[aty]

I think I will have to disagree that it is not capitalists' fault; it is their own unbounded greed and willingness to step on faces on their way to the top of the dungheap, that gets them into trouble every time. They'll shoot each other over money (like the gangsters that they are)

Yes, there are inherent flaws and contradictions, etc within the capitalist system, but they would rather screw each other blind (not to mention screw the public blind) in order to enrich themselves in opulence and power, rather than try to fix all of the problems that exist. For example, the recent near-failure of the U.S. banking system has gone without any sort of real reform; the fucking gangsters are still at it (Jamie Dimon, for example) Instead of even modest regulation of their activities, banks/Wall street fiercely resists stabilizing oversight... they would rather go on with their schemes to continue to suck the wealth out of the lumpenproletariat until we bleed to death on their sacrificial altar of high finance.

And that, my friend, is only but a small part of the massive corruption which infects the capitalist system.

The capitalists functions just as capitalism makes them function. If they dont make more and more profit they will loose all their capital in the competition amongst the other capitalists. Capitalism produces "greed", not the capitalists themselves.
They must always find the best ways to produce goods at the lowest costs possible in the competition for the greatest profits, or succumb. That is how capital functions.

Your explanation has nothing to do with marxism, what your explanation produces is reformism. Then we could just make the workers unions a little stronger and introduce fordism amongst the capitalists, and then we could manage capital forever, peace between classes!
This keynesian dream cant last, it is impossible as we have seen the last 40 years. Capital cant be regulated in the long run, it is a revolutionary force.

[Klaatu]

I have a question though, are scabs and strike breakers lumpen?

That's a very good question, and hard to answer. Unions are a very important thing in our fight for equality. IMHO, I think scabs are pretty much uninformed and clueless "Fox-News-Watchers." If they had a better understanding of how things really are (that is, how they too are getting screwed) they might think twice about stealing someone else's job.

[Pretty Flaco]

That's a very good question, and hard to answer. Unions are a very important thing in our fight for equality. IMHO, I think scabs are pretty much uninformed and clueless "Fox-News-Watchers." If they had a better understanding of how things really are (that is, how they too are getting screwed) they might think twice about stealing someone else's job.

i was more under the impression that most of them were just desperate for jobs. was i wrong?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Is it really so simple? Even when fascism was gaining support in Germany the SPD and KPD failed to work together at key moments and both parties experienced splintering during this time as well.

SPD thugs were going at it against the KPD militias as part of a mainstream, politically correct "Democratic Front."

[Dexalin]

SPD thugs were going at it against the KPD militias as part of a mainstream, politically correct "Democratic Front."

And what will make this time around so special? I think it's likely we could see the same attitude from democratic socialists in parties like the SPUSA whose party platform now have retreated to reformist talking points, not to mention liberals in the Democratic Party claiming to fight for working class issues. I think it's important to consider these scenarios and find ways for a vanguard party to work through them in order to gain more support.

[Die Neue Zeit]

And what will make this time around so special? I think it's likely we could see the same attitude from democratic socialists in parties like the SPUSA whose party platform now have retreated to reformist talking points, not to mention liberals in the Democratic Party claiming to fight for working class issues. I think it's important to consider these scenarios and find ways for a vanguard party to work through them in order to gain more support.

Could you please confirm if the Platform changed? I've read it over and I don't think it has, apart from formatting.

[Dexalin]

Could you please confirm if the Platform changed? I've read it over and I don't think it has, apart from formatting.

My bad, I didn't mean to say that SPUSA's platform has changed, but my point still otherwise stands.

[Blackburn]

Sadly it looks like Australia is just abut there. With the unpopular Labor government due to be voted out next year, we will have the most far right government I've experienced in my life time.

In the State of Queensland, the far right was elected to 75% of the seats. There is no upper house, so no checks and balances. so first thing, they are already talking about dredging the Great Barrier reef to help mining ships.

You know, one of the 7 natural wonders of the world? Gets in the way when they need to please Billionaire Miners.

We had the sad honour of having the richest woman in the world now. Mining heiress. A hideous woman with a far right agenda.