 by Flemming Funch
"Capitalism" is often presented as synonymous with "Free Market", which I think is totally bogus. I don't have any doubt that a truly free market is inherently fair and productive and intelligent. I just think that the core of capitalism is about something totally different: The centralized, monopolistic, private ownership and rental-for-profit of all the capital that everybody else has to use, and the hierarchy that flows from that. Simply a clever way of confiscating and socializing the majority of the wealth on the planet, without hardly anybody noticing. Would anybody like to disabuse me of that idea? Anybody has a definition of "Capitalism" that explains what it does with capital, rather than just extolling the virtues of freedom and individual liberty, of which I need no convincing. capitalism.org appears to say nothing about capital. Ludwig von Mises: Human Action: A Treatise on Economics is weighing down my bookshelf, and I haven't gotten around to reading it. Is it about free market economics or about capitalism?
Excellent article by Catherine Austin Fitts: Narcodollars for Beginners. First of all, her "Solari Index" of the health and safety of a neighborhood is wonderful and simple. And then she gives one of the most lucid explanations of the economics of drug trade, and how absolutely obvious it is that it pervades the whole U.S. economy and is kept in place from the highest levels of authority.
Rupert Murdoch's media network is planning a television game show that over a two year period will pick the best person to be president of the United States. Hey, I think that's quite a good idea. I doubt that they would pick an illiterate oil millionaire who cheats in elections.
In 1901 divers off of Antikythera, Greece uncovered a clock-like mechanism from an old shipwreck. It apparently would acurately keep track of the positions of the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the time, the moon phases and other good stuff. It resembles a well-made 18th-century clock, and used technology previously believed to have been developed the first time in the 17th century. The problem is that it is more than 2000 years old, and was calibrated for a time period around 80B.C.
I really like the word "Holonomics". It sort of conjures up for me an integrated whole systems discipline that illuminates economics, society, reality, thinking, acting, feeling, etc. It is a very under-used term. Jose Arguelles spread it around a bit and said some promising things about it, but nobody filled in the details. Ha, I just found a little essay I wrote about it in 1994, on a nice site in Malaysia that I didn't know.
"In this Jump Time of whole-system transition we can no longer afford to live as half-light versions of ourselves. The complexity of our time requires a greater and wiser use of our capacities; a rich playing of the instrument we have been given. The world can thrive only if we can grow. The possible society which includes the emerging global business world can become a reality only if people learn to be the possible humans we are meant to be." -- Jean Houston
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