Sovereign loans do not belong to “markets”: what belongs or is driven by the “markets” has no sovereignty whatsoever. Lending to a State should be marked as a crime, otherwise any economical “growth” is mandatory and already allocated to lenders. It should be a crime to allocate the life of your children to somebody’s current greed and “economical power”.

The only kind of sovereign loan that there can be is the State loan from its own people through a short bump in taxes with a corresponding future short lowering of taxes for the same population. A State loan from anybody else is a sovereignty loss, and, anyway, any such loan should be approved by referendum.

I hate seeing the EuroZone getting chewed up by a metastasis originating from the 20-th century.
I hate seeing everybody around me living their lives mainly to cover their parents’ debts, where’s the freedom in that?
Loans should not be part of a market because the effects of the corresponding debts are virtual, postponed; you don’t really know what you’re buying or selling, that hardly can be called a real market, rather a casino.

As long as a rumour or belief has a cost in money, that can’t be an objective market.
A market which is not objective cannot be free.
Whatever the size of your market, it’s meaningless to anybody else whom is not involved. It means that globalization is just a way to trick anybody into playing a certain wordgame: the debt-based capitalism; this is, ultimately, genocidal.

A majority lives mainly to pay a minority of lenders: this is no democracy.

Otherwise, the only tolerable way these debts can continue to exist would be to limit the personal wealth to a lifetime of average wages: the lenders would be so little and many that it would be impossible to have a sudden “run on the State”, any State would be able to feel a wave of mistrust and have the time to treat it/prevent its growth. This limit of personal wealth, beside bringing innumerable other ecological benefits, would eliminate the existence of big lenders which are, ultimately, a threat to sovereignty.

Why is sovereignty so important? The State is the agreement among people speaking the same language that they commonly follow some rules. If the State mainly warrants debts, it becomes a bank serving a tribe of lenders: the State becomes the instrument of power for a minority. If democracy is to be preserved such a State should go bankrupt and return to its public duty.

It is genuinely stupid to agree with a system that forces people in one country to “tighten the belt” because people in another country act on a rumour or belief (here “country” means a quantity of money): if there’s a huge lender of yours who wakes up one morning with a hangover and starts a rumour about your debt interest payment capabilities then it simply becomes a reality because of its (the lender’s) size and economical place. An economical opinion, in debt-based capitalism, is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you were close to the edge, now you’re way past the edge just because of somebody else’s hangover. At the core of debt-based capitalism there is no objective economical reality, the reality itself only serves as a source of inspiration for money games with deadly mass effects.

The Earth itself cannot survive a system like this.
To recount: debt-based capitalism can’t be democratic, shrinks any definition of freedom and becomes genocidal, so why, for the life of me, do we keep tolerating it?

It’s either the debt-based capitalism or us, the humans, we can’t survive together.

Bail out your children: default on your debts. It is the only way to reform this system bypassing a bloody and desperate global reset.

***

This is the sight
We had one day
On the High Mountain.
We saw a lamb with seven eyes
We saw a beast with seven horns
And a book sealed with seven seals.
Seven angels with seven trumpets
And seven bowls filled with anger.
Those are the pictures
Of what was
Of what is
Of what is to come.
We are the people
The rolling people
The why people
The waiting people
The wanting people
The tambourine people
The alternative people
The angel people

lyrics quoted from Altamont off 666 by Aphrodite’s Child.

Intrigued by Ubuntuism, commodification, and the software dialectic by Mike Chege, published on 1-st Dec 2008 in FirstMonday.

The author says:

free software is based on a philosophy of inclusion, cooperation, sharing, and openness, while the market is synonymous with self–interest, secretiveness, competition, and the exclusion of those who do not, or cannot, pay. The challenge of reconciling these two contradictory opposites is what constitutes the “software dialectic.”

So the question is, how does one reconcile these two contradictory opposites, commodification and Ubuntuism, so as to make free software economically viable while preserving the ideals of free software? This is the software dialectic.

I think this is a fake challenge, why should be free software economically viable? Free software is an intellectual activity, equivalent with watching an interesting movie and discussing it. Some talk poetry to their neighbors, some others talk poetry to the machine; some talk a language that humans understand, some talk a language (also designed by humans) that the machine (used by humans) understands.

Why ask for economic sustainability of free software? It’s like asking for economic sustainability of education or of toilets. Since when did “economy” became a law of nature? This “economical request” is an exaggeration coming from parasites: people who don’t dig the potatoes they’re eating but have the insolence to request money for their talking. That implies that some of us are made for “creativity” and some of us are made for potato digging, it is a master/slave attitude, especially when that “creativity” is solving only the economical problems of the “creative” ones. The burden of proof stays with those who pretend money for speech, not for those who see speech as a cheap gesture (the common evidence).

Today’s economy is not a wrapper around the physics of society. If it were, the economists would have been able to prevent the crises, or prevent the societies from feeling them, but they are not able. So the economists should take the backstage and learn how to make a science out of their activity. The market is a construction of words (the words of those with large enough capital), not a physical entity, and certainly not a mystical power.

Now, even using this mercantile vocabulary, how do the following prices make their companies economically sustainable? Adobe CS4 $1800, Windows Vista $320 , Office 2007 Pro $500.

Here’s how: there are two main categories of payers for these licenses,
1. clueless (or corrupt) suits in your government
2. you yourself, by paying the price of ad design even when you’re buying a toothpaste; that is you, the ignorant of what’s happening to you until it’s too late: you don’t understand anything about the machine that sits on your desk, the same way you forgot that milk comes from cows; most probably a Mac user.

Today, your government is sponsoring Adobe and Microsoft through the licensing mechanism (by “generously” installing on the public offices’ desks Microsoft+Adobe, rather than Ubuntu), but it should, instead, sponsor the GNU, Debian and FreeBSD projects. These projects form the infrastructure of practical democracy, they embody the free speech in its most accurate form. Your government/public administration should use them starting yesterday, these projects are offering fully-functional alternative solutions to the onerous pieces of bloatware mentioned above. You can test this statement easily, get Ubuntu on a live CD and play with it without making any modifications to your machine and see how’s it going, and, while at it, write a letter in OpenOffice to your public administration representative, asking him/her to end immediately the funding of Adobe and Microsoft. Then we can talk again about economic sustainability.

So, because what defines humanity prevails over if you prefer pork or more pork, the question of Mr. Chege should be reframed: how can we correct the market so that the free software ideals get preserved? Better yet, how should we redefine the market so that humans can survive it too?

The intellectuals (the authentic ones, not those who talk for money) should have noticed already that a public administration, by giving preference to proprietary software when free software is available to accomplish its public interest tasks, is, in fact, serving the self-interest of a smaller group of individuals (the “shareholders”): this practice is eroding the democracy and begs the question on the legitimacy of such a system/government, in other words, it supports corruption or incompetence or both. This applies to UN and EU too. How long do we have to pay incompetent people to “manage” these institutions’ software infrastructures?

Is your government economically sustainable?

Is your local economist economically viable?

Some questions only reveal the conceptual framework they belong to, the vocabulary they’ve been conceived with, the built-in limits of the answers-field.

I’ll quote a part of my comment below

Anyway, using free software is not just economically sustainable, but obviously more sustainable than any other alternative, while making it is not obviously sustainable. Exactly like (good) education, or wikipedia. They should be supported through taxes if we expect coherent results with a positive impact on society.

Why is the free software obviously sustainable? Because if you’re a programmer then you can maintain/modify it yourself, and, if you’re not a programmer, then:
1. you’re paying only for support, if you can’t figure it out from other people’s experience written on the web (with proprietary software you pay also for using it);
2. people who are getting the support can learn something from that, this knowledge becomes common knowledge in the long run (with proprietary software, the knowledge gets lost completely along with the initial investment)

So the bottom line is: asking for the sustainability of free software is identical to asking for the sustainability of your own language.

The economic bubbles are the proof that economic coercions do exist (exerted upon some economic agents by the ones who have the economic advantage at the time), the coercions are temporarily accepted by the coerced through credit/debt, which postpones/softens the consequences of the transaction. Those who were lucky enough to escape a bust (there is no rational way of escaping a bust, it is a random pick, unless some agents become so powerful that they could time/initiate the bust in their favor, which is a low probability event) think that the free market has worked for them and enforce their stupid belief that this is a universal feature onto the others because they happen to have the economic upper hand after the bust. And these are the genuine free market believers. The rest of the free market believers are just slaves on the property of the genuine ones, ultimately the instruments of the coercion itself that they’re hiding away from the free market concept. That, assuming they’re not all stupid…

Overall, the free market world picture is this: most people, the fetish of the lottery and the few (random) people who run the lottery.

The bubble bursts are proof that the supply=demand expression is also a fake: there’s a very low probability that a critical mass of (demanding) people suddenly change synchronously their minds into not willing to buy houses or gas or whatever, that’s why if supply=demand had any truth value in it relative to the reality we live in, bubble bursts should not happen, but they do, so the bubble bursts are only sudden significant changes in the flavor/direction of coercion. Today’s money can simulate demand or supply with equal rights, so at any time one set of rich economical agents can fake a part of the demand or the supply using money. supply=demand means nothing as long as money (through their capacity to partly impersonate either term of this equation), or any other coercion tool, exist.

The free market concept is also meaningless in a world of commercial ads: it’s one thing to find out once in a month who’s polishing shoes in the ‘hood for the time being, and it’s a different thing to get hit several times a day by the news that you have to buy bottled water. The latter is not only psychological torture of scale, it is economical coercion of one (set of) agent(s) by another, it’s creating and growing the demand at the ultimate expense of the buyer, through credit.

The free market concept is as meaningless as the concept of particle trajectory in quantum mechanics, it is not a concept valid in ideal conditions; the free market concept is, rather, a fake concept when applied to living beings.

This fake concept is also tragic in its applications, in the sense of a classical Greek tragedy: we know it is a fake, but we proceed nevertheless, because that’s the only toolkit available. Because no negative feedback is really built in a “free market” economy, stability or continuity have no chance to ever settle in such a model. I’ve seen no humans naturally willing to jump for the entirety of their lives from job to job, from land to land, just to feed themselves and their children, or to keep their moral integrity. They only do that after they are coerced into an economic exchange in which they didn’t believe, or they find themselves immersed in an economic system which uses them as simple, coerced, input (expression: human resources).

The coercion is sustained (intentionally or not) through the following sequence of acts: have children (to the point that we are so many, and resources so scarce, that you either have to suicide, to become a slave, to continuously avoid becoming a slave, or to get picked up by the waves as a temporary economic master; all in all we are coerced into competing against each other, that is, to behave as primitive raptors although our brains allow us to do better as a species), buy a house on credit, buy something else significant on credit; one ends up conditioning its entire life in advance: ultimately one cannot afford to live even a simple, authentic life, because the coercion is working its way with the help of the rest of the coerced/slaves. One cannot afford any morality in these conditions. That’s why credit has to be strongly limited, and with zero interest.

There is no symmetry here between supply and demand. They do not exist simultaneously, first one has to have the demand, then figure out a way to supply for it. And when the supply has been provided, what about the people who no longer have to work on the supply side? If the social unemployment guarantee is not there, these people will have to invent new ways of rising/reorienting the demand again (to be able to “earn a living” supplying, that’s a civil war in disguise). That’s why “earn a living” is a stupid concept also, which keeps coming back because the society still doesn’t protect its citizens from unemployment by definition.

I find it interesting that there are, at any time, people who insist on pushing this free market model onto others: those people are morally criminals in my view, especially those of them who claim to have professional reasons (as economists) to coerce this model onto the rest, their free market theories are genocidal for any group of people.

The only alternatives I can imagine to the free market crap, which have a built-in negative/stabilizing feedback are:
a. continuous government tempering/monitoring of economic forces or
b. the real market, or genuinely fair market: a market in which economic exchange is defined as valid only when the efforts of the buyer and the seller are equal; as an objective measure, the economical effort spent by somebody to produce some thing can be estimated and verified as a percentage of its wealth at the time of the exchange; its wealth should be measured with a unique, universal measure; these new “money” cannot themselves be exchanged, bought or sold, the only role of them is to set up a unique standard for evaluating wealth; they have yet to be defined universally; something like meter, kilogram, second, I would call it re (from resource), or eco. This kind of market has nothing to do with profit, but with real demand, real supply, real productivity and efficiency, ultimately with real quality of life; belief or psychological terrorism can play no role in establishing the economical effort to be exchanged (the price). Any market model which neglects this equality of efforts on both sides of the exchange relies on an ill-defined concept of exchange, which is, in fact, a giving or a taking, if not a coercion.

Now, after the raise, the university professor has 1500 euro/month and his assistant gets 600 euro/month. The new difference between their wages is now 900 compared to 600 before the uniform increase, that is, the difference of income between them increased with 50%. In other words, either the assistant is more stupid after the increase, or the professor more intelligent. My life experience says that the assistant is stupider indeed, because he accepts to continue working under these conditions.

The same goes for the retired. This is how my mother’s getting now 120 euro/month pension but those retired on special pensions are getting 1200 euro/month (lately, the government increased their pension by a uniform 20%). Here a break with tradition is made necessary: after you finish up your active worker years, you should go at the nearest garbage disposal hole and just dissolve yourself, so these politicians won’t feel the burden of killing you slowly; what if your biological strain delays your death over and over again? you’ll end up getting per month what a leech pays for supper.

The public administration should make the increases so that the differences would be conserved in absolute terms. It’s not that difficult today when any man and his dog has a computer.

Clean and short and stands to logic. In a normal world this would be called just common-sense, but in this world, he’s my hero.

If this amendment is not voted, it should be clear to anybody, anywhere, what unmoderated/uncapped capitalism means: roaring thievery.

It doesn’t matter if these toxic assets will payback sometime; the matter of fact is they’re no good now. If they were any promise, surely a smart capitalist would buy them; but none did, or none is smart, either way it’s time for the populace to swallow. They (the toxic assets) should be passed forcefully as the profit opportunities they are in the hands of those hardcore 3% capitalists above. If they manage to earn more from them, cheers to them. If not, at least they lived by their own language.

I don’t believe these senators that all of them are angry about this bill: probably none of them have an income less 100kUSD/year so they won’t really feel the pinch; and most of them are responsible for this crisis too.

The Sanders amendment wasn’t even seriously put on the table: the generic choir answer was noooooo; I learned this way that the senators who were against Sander’s amendment represent the interests of those 3% richest guys here, in US. Each senator said his/her heart is broken for those who voted him/her, but they have to vote the bill. OK, but they could vote the amendment too, which would have nullified the effects of the bill over the 97% of the population. They didn’t, so they don’t deserve to be elected anymore, because they seem to represent amounts of money rather than people; and then their place should be in some bank, not in the senate of a country.

Here’s a quote from Sanders:

I believe, and it seems to me pretty commonsensical, that if an institution is too big to fail, then it is too big to exist.

On the same subject, here’s a pointer to World Capitalism in Crisis – Part Two : Bankruptcy of bourgeois economics by Alan Woods. He advocates the planned economy as the only real way to avoid crises and, between them, the life stress the people feel under the pressure of their exploiters’ greed.
I am not sure about the planned economy, maybe mathematics, physics, algorithms and the Net can make it work, but I’m pretty sure that this bubble and burst mechanism, which is the core of the capitalist system, can be stopped in its tracks by constitutionally limiting the financial leverage to maximum 2, if not barely equal to 1: how can you lend money/wealth/anything you don't have without producing a bubble-burst pair event? This is outrageous even to my cat.

We can decrease the leverage slowly until we reach the value of 2 or 1; of course this would be a pressure on all financial institutions to clean themselves up, to strip them of their lies, but in the end the society will look much more natural than it is right now: when you don’t really know if in front of you speaks an adult or just a mortgage payer under pressure.

Here’s another quote, to lighten your mood, from 101 ways to get rich without doing anything socially useful by William Blum,

Capitalism is the theory that the worst people, acting from their worst motives, will somehow produce the most good.

.

Now, that “agreement” is, in my view, an agreement between someone who accepts slavery and someone who pretends to be the master, a fundamental sham: the one who grew the apples should have calculated the percentage of his wealth spent on producing them, then he should require, in exchange for his apples, the same percentage of the economist’s wealth; this is the correct agreement on exchange, I would call it “the percentage economy”. I’m pretty sure that the apple seller had a mortgage, and the mortgage payment is done in percentages. The loans are in percentages. Let then every exchange be run in percentages: when somebody goes to a store to buy milk, the milk container should have a percentage stamped on it (namely the percentage of the total wealth of the producer spent for producing it), then the buyer has to come with a card that declares his total wealth and pays the same percentage at the cashier.

I wish I could see the face of a globalization advocate after this economy model is implemented.

This exchange model might be an even better solution to “all the evils” than the one I previously proposed, that the total wealth of a person should be, at any moment, limited to a lifetime, say 120 years, of average wages.

The problem is that many of those who do real work, for example, the apple growers, are tricked into thinking that an apple costs just 0.5USD for everybody. We are not equal, right? We are individuals of different worths, right? Hold your thought.
Ok, then, somebody who can afford to buy, say, the government of a random country, should pay proportionally, according to one’s status in the society, according to his wealth rank, that one only deserves the appropriate respect, right?
If the total wealth of the apple grower is 100,000 USD, and he is glad to recover now his expenses for producing an apple with 0.5 USD, then the apple’s price would be 0.0005% out of the seller’s total wealth and out of the buyer’s total wealth.
If your total wealth is 10,000 USD, you should pay 5 cents for the apple, but if you’re such a genius to have a total wealth of 1 million USD, then you should pay proportionally, the same 0.0005% of your wealth, that is 5USD for an apple.

A commercial exchange is only fair if the exchange partners spent the same effort to bring the exchangeable goods on the table, and whatever that effort is, the ultimate fair calculation is in direct relationship to the total wealth of each of them at the moment of closing the transaction. Any other variation seems to be the equivalent of aggression or, at best, thievery.

Or, maybe we should call this the relative economy model, or, better, the humanist economy.

The fake in the current economy resides, I believe, in the concept of “utility”: if you believe this object would be very useful to you, you would pay more. But you are bombarded all the time with well-meaning advertisements ending up in hypnotizing you that this object has an utility for you. So you end up paying proportional to how deep you were brainwashed, which has no link with the producer’s expenses to create that object. You pay the sociologists and the media puppets behind it and their masters. There is an incentive for the producer to lie about the value, and for the buyer to lie about his willing to buy, we end up as liars, beside the exchange.

To eliminate the possibility of this manipulation, an economy has to establish an objective unit for exchange, and that is, obviously, not money, but the effort to produce and the effort to buy. These efforts, in a correct exchange, by definition, should be equal.

• 1 Kg potatoes,
• 0.5 Kg loaf of bread,
• 1 transistor,
• a shoe,
• a pair of dead soldiers,
• a truckload of unintentionally killed civilians in wartime,
• a happy family of civilians in peacetime,
• the number of months of educating a human,
• the number of months you can feed a cat,
• the number of sunsets you can enjoy without having to change your job,
• the number of hours you can fake a living,
• the number of minutes you can avoid commercial ads,

whatever it corresponds to, you (or sociologists) name it.

Well, if in your country 10% of the people own 90% of the property, then if you’re among the 90% of owners of the rest of 10%, you should be rather happy when your country’s growth is 0% or negative. Not because those rich guys lose at it, but because they might get concerned and try fixing it, and, in the process, you might get a break to smoke a joint and imagine happiness, similar to the 70′s, what else would you care to do with so much time on your hands, being used to being used?