Gold pool collapses
The final straw that broke the back of the gold pool was the Tet offensive by the Vietnamese resistance fighters in January 1968. The markets feared that the U.S. would greatly increase the number of U.S. troops and would finance this with newly printed dollars. In March 1968, what amounted to a bank run developed against the gold pool. Capitalists moved to purchase gold at $35 before what was seen as the inevitable rise in the dollar price of gold occurred. In some ways, this was a little like what happened in 1933 between the time Roosevelt was elected and when he took office. The expectation of a rise in the dollar price of gold led to a run.
Within weeks, the gold pool was forced to suspend the sale of gold and was wound up much like a failed bank. An important part of the central banking system supporting the value of the U.S. dollar had failed.
With the gold pool gone, a so-called two-tier gold price was established. The U.S. Treasury still promised to redeem its dollars at the rate of one ounce of gold for $35 presented to it by governments and central banks, but it gave up the attempt to hold the price of gold on the open market at $35.
At the time, this was presented by the media and economists as the final steps towards the “demonetization of gold.” Most professional economists believed that gold was money because governments and central banks held it in reserve and treated it as money. The professional economists who held this belief included not only the followers of John Maynard Keynes but also the anti-Keynesian Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, the darling of the political right. As the governments moved to “demonetize” gold, these economists assured us the dollar price of gold would drop, since gold has relatively few uses besides its role as money.
But our economists—Keynesian and Friedman and his supporters alike—got it, as they often do, exactly backwards. Governments and central banks hold gold reserves because gold is money and not the other way around. Despite the predictions of the economists that the price of gold would fall as it became “demonetized,” with some fluctuations, the details of which we do not have room to go into here, the dollar price of gold soared on the open market.
When it rose above $40 in 1971, the French government under Charles De Gaulle began to present dollars for payment at the U.S. Treasury’s “gold window.” In August 1971, the then U.S. president, Richard Nixon, announced that the U.S. was defaulting—of course, they used different words—on its promise to redeem dollars for gold on the demand of the foreign central banks and governments.
As the dollar price of gold soared during the 1970s, the price of oil and other primary commodities rose as well. Increasingly, these price increases worked their way into prices you pay at the store—retail prices. These high dollar prices were caused not by too many dollars chasing to few commodities, still less did they reflect high wages—real wages were declining as money wages rose less than the cost of living.
Instead, the high prices reflected the growing depreciation of the paper dollar against real money—gold. As each dollar represented less gold—hard cash—on the open market, prices in terms of dollars rose, even as the prices of commodities in terms of gold actually dropped sharply.
Since the purchasing power of the mass of the people declined as dollar prices rose, economic growth stagnated. Indeed, there were not one but three recessions during the stagflation. (11) And two of these were very severe. One, called at the time the “Great Recession,” occurred in 1973-75. The other recession, sometimes called the “Volcker shock,” unfolded between 1979 and 1982.
By the end of 1982, even the official unemployment statistics in the U.S. had reached Depression-like double digits. Though some banks failed, there were no bank runs. But inflation did erode the value of bank accounts. Is it any better to lose 50 percent of the purchasing power of a bank account because prices have doubled as opposed to getting say 80 percent with some delay after the bank is liquidated?
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/the-federal-reserve-system-its-history-and-function-part-2/
I'm sure a lot of you are already aware of this but this was so interesting. Vietnamese war of national liberation destroyed the monetization of gold and therefore the postwar Bretton Woods system. Insane. Also witness Keynes and Friedman get owned.
Constantignoble posted:it's probably pretty elementary to folks in here but i like the interpretation of cain and abel as reflecting social conflict amid transition from nomadic pastoralism to fixed agrarian settlements. one gets so locked into the proletariat/peasant distinction as to associate farming with rural life but i guess it stands to reason that at that point it would be the more urban factor. plus cain is associated with city building and all. one of the half-dozen or so interpretations of "cain" points to "metalsmith," iirc
incidentally basically all the iron people used at that point in history would have come from meteorites. weird metal from heaven, harder than anything, thought to have apotropaic properties. probably most of the iron people encountered in the wild was all red with rust, too, which might have led to the original association with blood (?)
i don't remember where i was going with this. also, there's probably one or more actual books i could find to meander over these topics in a more systematic way than just occasionally picking up a detail here and there and then hoping they all come together into something interesting or meaningful
i wrote a commentry on how the fall from eden is about the trasition from fruit to bread (i.e. to agriculture) and how it was unpleasant for those involved: "18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;" and how this is linked to a deep historical gens split; as the lord to the serpent: "15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." - because they ate of the "tree of knowledge" which is a sex reference
but its too blasphemous to post
TG posted:i started reading the quran, because i know very little about islam and its a pretty major religion. i got a decent way into it and realized that reading the sacred text of a religion without much in the way of cultural, historical, or dogmatic context is not a very good idea. i liked the part about usury being really bad but not the part where paying back one's debts is a moral issue
the first 50 or so pages of reza aslan's book about muhammad provides some context but after that the apologia becomes intolerable so i gave up on that book, ymmv
but if you want specific information about what specific passages are referring to, just pick up a tafsir book. even tho quran pretends to be full of nothing but nuggets of wisdom for any place and time, all it has is just reactions to mundane incidents. the abrogation of child adoption by the quran for example happened just because muhammad wanted to marry the wife of his son in law lol. there are other surahs that were "revealed" after incidents such as wives of muhammad being jealous of another wife of his, too many people visiting his house etc
Edited by sovnarkoman ()
toyotathon posted:i was thinkin about why the world settled on gold as money, for so long, apologies if this is basic. gold and platinum are the two known elemental metals which won't oxidize (w/o a passivating layer yada yada). slaves die, cattle die, wheat rots, iron rusts, silver tarnishes (undergoes a chemical reaction) copper turns blue, alloys can be split into constituents, gold stays gold -- it is not deflationary.
there's a few parts of the grundrisse that will interest you (e.g.)
I feel like he wrote on this elsewhere, too, but it escapes me
edit: I guess the first few chapters of Capital have a short blurb re: "although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver," etc, but not quite so detailed
Edited by Constantignoble ()
tears posted:but its too blasphemous to post
could anything be that blasphemous
Constantignoble posted:tears posted:but its too blasphemous to post
could anything be that blasphemous
they'd burn me as a witch
toyotathon posted:i was thinkin about why the world settled on gold as money, for so long, apologies if this is basic. gold and platinum are the two known elemental metals which won't oxidize (w/o a passivating layer yada yada). slaves die, cattle die, wheat rots, iron rusts, silver tarnishes (undergoes a chemical reaction) copper turns blue, alloys can be split into constituents, gold stays gold -- it is not deflationary.
that's pretty much it. it also helps that gold is not actually useful for anything, easy to recognize, easy to check if it's real (hard to fake a hand-deformable metal). and it naturally occurred in pure form, so it would have been pretty obviously something special. and just rare enough outside the americas to be weird and special. obviously the native americans didn't give a shit since they were drowning in it though.
probably also helped that since you could argue it was sun-coloured the palace classes of various ancient civs could make up something about how it was definitely theirs by divine right, along with anything else shiny.
i think the human cultural relationship to metals in antiquity is hard for us to really understand though. it must have been a very obvious jump to just assume it was some kind of divine gift; according to records metals would just be laying around on the ground in some areas, or incredibly rich big pure veins in exposed cliff faces, etc. like stories of the pre-european americas, you just dip a basket into the sea and it gets filled with fish, the forests were teeming with animals, ...
tears posted:but its too blasphemous to post
blessed be
And (of course) it's getting worse...
karphead posted:blessed be
Edited by red_dread ()
red_dread posted:reading volume 6 of the marx engels collected works (~1845-48). the only things that stick out so far, apart from poverty of philosophy, are engels' writings where he's just raving about how fucking stupid germans are. it must've been pretty neat to read a german in 1846 making the case for a napoleonic terror in germany to uproot the dipshit peasantry and the petit-bourgeoisie.
tfw you realize engels was the first trot
sovnarkoman posted:tfw you realize engels was the first trot
Permaban
Just finished this which is about how America is screwing over the childless by "over accommodating" those who decide to have children. Quite libertarian but raises some interesting questions about how having x, y and z for working parents/mothers but still paying them only $10 an hour, isn't what the parents/mothers wish if it meant instead of free childcare they would get a decent payrise etc.
Considering how fucked its all getting might be of interest to those pondering over their own internal debate over reproducing. But the tone of the book is so fucking grating and condescending
In the papers you are about to read, and which do not escape the law I have pronounced – assuming that they have some claim to be treated, for the time being at least, as discourses with a theoretical meaning – we have simply tried to apply to Marx’s reading the ‘symptomatic’ reading with which Marx managed to read the illegible in Smith, by measuring the problematic initially visible in his writings against the invisible problematic contained in the paradox of an answer which does not correspond to any question posed. You will also find that the infinite distance which separates Marx from Smith and in consequence our relation to Marx from Marx’s relation to Smith, is the following radical difference: whereas in his text Smith produces an answer which not only does not answer any of the immediately preceding questions, but does not even answer any other question he ever posed anywhere in his work; with Marx, on the contrary, when he does happen to formulate an answer without a question, with a little patience and perspicacity we can find the question itself elsewhere, twenty or one hundred pages further on, with respect to some other object, enveloped in some other matter, or, on occasion, in Engels’s immediate comments on Marx, for Engels has flashes of profound inspiration.
Footnote to the above:
If I may invoke my personal experience, I should like to give two precise examples of this presence elsewhere in Marx or in Engels of the question absent from its answer. At the cost of a decidedly laborious investigation, the text of which (For Marx, pp. 89ff) bears the mark of these difficulties, I succeeded in identifying a pertinent absence in the idea of the ‘inversion’ of the Hegelian dialectic by Marx: the absence of its concept, and therefore of its question. I managed to reconstruct this question laboriously, by showing that the ‘version’ Marx mentions had as its effective content a revolution in the problematic. But later, reading Engels’s Preface to Volume Two of Capital, I was stupefied to find that the question I had had such trouble in formulating was there in black and white! Engels expressly identifies the ‘inversion’, the ‘setting right side up again’ of the chemistry and political economy which had been standing on their heads, with a change in their ‘theory’ and therefore in their problematic. Or again: in one of my first essays, I had suggested that Marx’s theoretical revolution lay not in his change of the answers, but in his change of the questions, and that therefore Marx’s revolution in the theory of history consisted of a ‘change of elements’ by which he moved from the terrain of ideology to the terrain of science (For Marx, p. 47). But recently, reading the chapter of Capital on wages, I was stupefied to see that Marx used the very expression ‘change of terrain’ to express this change of theoretical problematic. Here again, the question (or its concept) which I had laboriously reconstituted out of its absence in one precise point of Marx’s, Marx himself gave in black and white somewhere else in his work.
Althusser's way of saying, hey u should read Marx, this guy was a fucking genius
Ezekiel 38–39 & more
the apocalypse of paul (gnostic)
the apocalypse of paul (regular)
the apocalypse of st john
Hosea 4
newtons "Rules for interpreting the words & language in Scripture"
something newton wrote on the back of an envelope posted:So then the time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calendar of the primitive year. And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner. This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fancifull men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, & by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail. Christ comes as a thief in the night, & it is not for us to know the times & seasons wch God hath put into his own breast.
A woman describes how she taught herself to read again after ECT, at age 50:
I could process language only with difficulty. I knew the words, how they sounded, but I had no comprehension.
I did not literally start at "scratch", as a preschooler, because I had some memory, some understanding of letters and sounds---words---but I had no comprehension.
I used TV for newscasts, the same item in the newspaper, and tried to match these together to make sense. Only one item, one line. Try to write it in a sentence. Over and over, again and again.
After about six months (this was daily for hours), I tried Reader's Digest. It took me a very long time to conquer this--no pictures, new concepts, no voice telling me the news item. Extremely frustrating, hard, hard, hard. Then magazine articles. I did it! I went on to "For Whom the Bell Tolls" because I vaguely remembered I had read it in college and had seen the movie. But it had many difficult words and my vocabulary was not yet at the college level, so I probably spent two years on it. It was 1975 when I felt I had reached the college level in reading.(I started in 1970.) (Faeder, 1986)
Caesura109 posted:anyone know where the post about NATO facilitating the drug trade is
All u need is in the drugs thread, listed in the good threads index
