Go Local, Go Sustainable, Now

Ron Paul stands for a lot of things that I think are nutty, like his untried libertarian utopian ideas. Under normal circumstances, I would never consider urging my American neighbours to vote for a libertarian.

These are not normal circumstances.

The US has reached a point of political-economic crisis – you cannot separate the two – and as a result the responses are limited and non-ideal. In a crisis you must take decisive action or events may overwhelm you – they may anyway, as a crisis is by definition somewhere between bordering on chaos and all-out anarchy.

At this point, the urgent need is to neutralize the power of corporations and the rich over the US government or nothing else will matter. Yes, climate change, peak oil, the current depression, and so on are all serious crises. The sad fact is that they all exist to the extent they do largely because of corruption in the United States government.

Until this corruption is rooted out, there is little chance of serious action on climate, on oil dependency, or of the US and world economy recovering. If you disagree with me, please show me what President Obama has done that will make a real difference with these crises.

You can trade an Obama for a Romney/Gingrich/whoever and things will get worse faster, but either way the crises we face will not be addressed.

Ron Paul has some scary ideas and libertarianism is untried utopian lunacy, but because of the extent of the corruption in the US government, he’s the only candidate who has a chance of stopping the American slide – and they’re going to drag a lot of us with them – into a police-state plutarchy.

I don’t say this lightly; electing Ron Paul is potentially a dangerous step but far less dangerous than hoping for change from Obama or any of the other Republican candidates. Ron Paul is anti-empire, anti-police-state, and pro-Constitution, which Americans desperately need to remember matters before it’s too late.

Many people are upset about the mess and disruption caused by the Occupy protesters. Some counter by saying that the preservation of freedom and democracy is often messy and disruptive, and this is true enough.

The more immediate point is that the OWS protesters are saying the same thing, albeit less coherently, as many prominent economists and most religious leaders: Greed is a vice, not a virtue. We cannot build a stable, secure, prosperous economy or society on a foundation of greed and corruption. The longer we ignore this fact, the longer the recession will drag on, all-the-while the banksters and their cronies collect fat bonuses.

While the OWS protesters may be driven out, the problem remains: Our economy and even our society’s morality at the upper levels is founded on the vice of greed. (I speak primarily of the US economy; other countries have not elevated greed to such a high level and are thus more stable.)

Greed is not good. Taking greed as a primary virtue, as the ideology of libertarianism (think Ayn Rand) and the elites of the United States have done, means bad things will happen, and unfortunately not just to the greedy. If greed is a virtue, then selflessness clearly can not be, as it is in direct conflict. To be greedy means to be selfish, and greed knows no bounds; there is no ‘enough’ for a greedy man.

The greedy don’t want to contribute to society, they want to line their own pockets. They don’t necessarily want to steal from you and me for themselves, but ultimately they must to feed their greed. Greed, like all vices, is addictive; there is no satiation point, no enough. Like any addict, when the easy fix runs out, they must take from whoever and wherever they can.

Picture the heroin addict: perhaps at first he can support his habit from his income, but soon the need for a fix destroys his ability to work and he must rely on theft to feed his addiction. Late-stage addicts will lie to and steal from anyone – friends, family, gullible good Samaritans.

There is not much difference in this way between a drug addict and a money addict. Bernie Madoff ripped off those close to him even though he already had billions. Greedy bankers will – just about did – destroy the economy for their fix, even though many were fantastically rich already.

So while you may mock the OWS protesters, remember this: An economy built on greed will collapse, probably viciously. And while many of the greedy will escape with their billions to safer places, you and I will be stuck here in the smoking ruins of a once vibrant economy. If the Occupy Wall Street does not accomplish its goal of rooting out greed, our future is bleak indeed.

Lots of folks slamming the Greeks for being self-entitled, lazy, and so on for rioting over ‘austerity’ plans for their country. True, their country owes a mountain of debt. But why are the citizens of Greece paying the price for this while the banks are being bailed out (again)? Don’t banks have a responsibility to ascertain the ability of a borrower to repay? And if those banks make bad investments…why are others paying for it?

The usual argument is fear of economic collapse if the banks are allowed to fail, but that seems backwards. Rewarding incompetent or foolish investors harms the market. And how much truth is there to the bank failure fearmongering, anyway?

Look at it this way:

Imagine all the banks that loaned money to Greece are allowed to suffer the consequences of their bad decisions and some even go bankrupt:

• The average Greek will still owe, and be expected to pay, his or her mortgage, credit card debts, car loans, etc.
• The average Greek small and large businesses will still owe, and be expected to pay, their various loans, accounts payable, etc.

Goldman Sachs, which orchestrated a financial sleight of hand that enabled Greece to hide its extravagant ways.

Also aiding Greece’s debt habit were some of Europe’s biggest banks. By 2004 it was widely known that Greece had cooked its books and that its financial condition was not nearly as sound as advertised. Still, major banks like France’s giant BNP Paribas and Germany’s Commerzbank bought billions worth of the ill-fated bonds.

In other words, Europe’s big banks and pension funds bought Greek debt, ignoring the risks, because it was profitable.

I make no claim to be an economic wizard…but then again, given how poorly most mainstream economists are doing, could I be much worse? That post was from 2009 and things have not improved. Seemingly obvious things are seemingly obscure to the average economics Ph.D. – in fact, one might say they are being wilfully blind.

There are three (3) blindingly obvious, common sense reasons why the U.S. would be very foolish to allow corporations to repatriate profits at a bargain basement tax rate. At least, they seem quite obvious to me, but if someone more knowledgeable than I would correct me, I’m all ears (and a fair bit of forehead these days, too).

[The idea is that U.S. corporations could bring home foreign profits and pay 8.5% - or less - versus the 35% they would normally pay.]

1. Last time, they just spent it on themselves. That is, the last time this was tried, corporations used the money to buy back their own shares and reward their CEOs with fat bonuses. There are lots of (extremely rich) people claiming “This time will be different, really,” but…fool me once and all that.
2. Corporations already have very large cash reserves and are not spending. And why would they, if there’s no demand for their product? Give them more, and why would they spend that?
3. It creates a perverse incentive to outsource jobs, because the tax rate on foreign profits would be so much lower than on U.S. profits. Allowing these corporations to ‘bring home’ the profits merely encourages them to send more jobs overseas.