This week has seen the following three momentous, and I use that word sincerely, events in the world of finance capital and capitalism in general.

1) AIG were bailed out – again to the tune of $30bn.
2) The UK government cut the interest rates to 0.5%, their lowest since records began.
3) The UK government has decided to “print money”, the last time that was seen was in Japan 10 years ago and before that in Germany between the “great wars”.

Let us start at the top:

The crisis-stricken insurance company AIG has crashed $61.7bn (£43bn) into the red with the biggest corporate loss in US history after being crippled by policies protecting troubled banks against default on loans and derivatives.

In a renewed effort to prevent AIG from collapsing, the US government yesterday provided it with access to $30bn of emergency aid. This takes the amount of taxpayers’ funds advanced to AIG to more than $150bn.
Guardian Online

Did you read those figures? AIG is a central structure in capitalism and in essence it supports all of the other entities that float around it, as it provides payment insurance. If AIG were allowed to fail, by the ruling class / governments, we’d all be in food queues tomorrow and the govs who like to control us would have chaos on their hands. It’s not scare mongering to say that there would be carnage. So they save it. With tax payers money to the tune of $150,000,000,000.

Nice little game if you can be in on it. Tax payer’s money is given to the ruling class to bail out the wee “game” they’ve been playing and we’ve been supporting, for all these years. A game that has been shown to be lack by both its own terms, profit generation, and any kind of moralistic measure right thinking humans would care to measure it by.

We will suffer the most. We the people who do not own the means of production or have any way to feed ourselves other than sell our labour to “the market”; a market that has so obviously failed, even in it’s own terms – profit generation.

Maybe we can be thankful that the gov and ruling class are trying to save this system, that brings us cyclical down turns and wars, as at least we’ll be okay.

The media / economists have been saying, openly, that we are in new territory here and there is no telling if anything they do can “fix capitalism”. People who do theoretical analysis, as opposed to just “appearance” analysis of capitalism, will tell you that there are inner contradictions in the system that will have to manifest themselves as a collapse of the system.

Whether we are seeing this process in front of our eyes or not just now we can surely come up with a better system of commodity production. I mean, is this the only way we can envisage food, cars, beer, wine, shoes, clothes and all other commodities flowing into and around our lives?

The central issues within capitalism remain the same, now, as the did last year and the year before that;

A. Antagonistic competition exists between monolithic ( and now tax payer supported ) entities that are there for only one reason.
B. Profit is the only reason that any commodity gets produced. The profit motive is put beyond any kind of human factor, always.

Take a simple consequence of B – mad cow disease.

Commercial feeds for most farm animals contained meat and bone meal. Cows, which are natural herbivores, were being fed parts of other dead cows. Their feed also included the ground and cooked left-overs of the slaughtering process gleaned from other animals. The carcasses of sick and injured animals such as pigs and chickens were being used as a protein supplement.
Times-On-Line

Now, you or I, looking logically at things, would never ever decide to feed meat to a herbivore, would we? It’s insanity. However, in the world of profit generation, it is sanity if the profit that can be turned is more than if the process was not carried out. So it gets done. Not one human ounce of thought in there. Your kids could tell me that it sounds like a bad idea. This is not rocket science.

Are you seeing how this system, at any level you care to analyse it, is not actually set up for you? You are not even an after thought. Profit is central, and it brings you the chaos you see around you, and the pain you are about to experience as profit is no longer able to be generated.

Let us now lump points 2 and 3, way above, together; we have the lowest interest rates since records began and the gov has decided to print money.

These two facts are so earth shatteringly important to your life but you may not realise it right now. You see, this system works on lead times. Right now, looking around, aside from the house prices crashing and some people being made unemployed, the world looks kind of normal and stable.

The Bank of England yesterday announced unprecedented steps to prevent the deepest slump since the 1930s when it unveiled plans to inject up to £75bn into the economy over the next three months.

…

after its monetary policy committee cut the bank rate for the sixth time since the global financial system came close to collapse last October. The rate is now 0.5% – a level not seen before in the Bank’s 315-year history.
Guardian Online

What you have to bear in mind here is that these steps, currently, are aiming to restore order to the system that brought us here in the first place. We’re in free fall just now, without a parachute. We’re just trying to get ourselves back up 1000 feet, but the ground is till looming.

The last time money was printed was in Japan and they did it to try and end a 10 year recession in profits. Note, it was not done to get food in peoples mouths or to get homes built, but it was done to end the recession in profits.

It is not akin to the situation in Germany in 1923 or currently in Zimbabwe as the money that is being printed is being given to, guess, wait for it, the ruling class banks and financial institutions. Maybe the gov feels that the tax payer has paid enough to these institutions so they’ll use some ink instead?

Either way economists are hailing this as a break through and a bold move and one that is needed; however, that is all just guess work, as the system has never, ever, been in this situation before. The closest thing we have to it is 1930’s and then we needed a global war to get out of it. War, again, a construct of the ruling class elite.

Let’s play devils advocate here for a bit; even if all of these “measures” actually work and save “the system”, from itself; is this a system that you really want?

Do you want to have to face the fear of job loss on a cyclical basis? Do you want pollution on your planet that is killing your kids? Do you want to see humans blown up on battle fields for the sake of profit? ( Think Gaza re-generation – build, bomb, build; taxes flow from folks to large businesses as per).

[ I am not suggesting Gaza should not be re-built here, I’m suggesting we demand that the elites stop getting us to blow things up in the first place ]

In summary this system stands on the edge of a location that it’s never found itself in before. Given that the system has no though for human need, and only profit, I would argue, strongly, that right now we, as humans, have never had a better time to utilise all of our previous creations towards building a future that is human focused.

For a detailed break down of the current system see www.realityinfo.org.

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