” Mutualists belong to a non-collectivist segment of anarchists.  Although we favor democratic control when collective action is required by the nature of production and other cooperative endeavors, we do not favor collectivism as an ideal in itself.  We are not opposed to money or exchange.  We believe in private property, so long as it is based on personal occupancy and use.  We favor a society in which all relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid.  The “market,” in the sense of exchanges of labor between producers, is a profoundly humanizing and liberating concept.  What we oppose is the conventional understanding of markets, as the idea has been coopted and corrupted by state capitalism.

     Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers, and production is carried out mainly by self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers’ cooperatives, worker-controlled large enterprises, and consumers’ cooperatives.  To the extent that wage labor still exists (which is likely, if we do not coercively suppress it), the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker’s natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product.

     Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom “petty bourgeois” is a swear word.  But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans.  Most people distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them.  They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system.  But they do not want an America remade in the image of orthodox, CNT-style syndicalism.”

 From Kevin Carson at  Mutualist.org

Comment:

I find a lot of Kevin’s work and thinking useful, but I should point out I’m not a mutualist myself. I don’t subscribe either to the Marxist labor theory of value, nor the Rothbardian subjective theory.  They’re both incomplete.  But my thoughts aren’t fully worked out yet in those areas…

“Geithner said he was “quite open” to China’s suggestion of moving toward a currency system linked to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), a basket of dollars, euros, sterling and yen, as a super-sovereign reserve currency.

That hit dollar sentiment as it could mean countries selling large portions of their dollar reserves, highlighting the use of gold as a hedge against the U.S. currency, analysts said.”

Comment

But then Geithner said dollar would be the reserve currency for a long time and gold sold off a bit…

Why doesn’t this fellow at least put on a pair of spangled tights in advance. Then we’ll be sure to keep in mind it’s a high-wire juggling act and not any kind of responsible Treasury.

Orange alert moves to red: these folks keep changing the name of the game but the moves are all the same: give us more power.

Latest from the DC Klepto-class (I’ve bolded the significant parts):

“As we have seen with AIG, distress at large, interconnected, non-depository financial institutions can pose systemic risks just as distress at banks can,” Geithner said. “The administration proposes legislation to give the U.S. government the same basic set of tools for addressing financial distress at non-banks as it has in the bank context”

Geithner made it clear he believes the treasury secretary should be granted unprecedented power, after consultation with Federal Reserve Board officials, to take control of a major financial institution and run it. The treasury chief is an official of the administration, unlike the FDIC, which is an independent regulatory agency.”

More here.

Translation: Treasury/Goldman Sachs/banking cartel is going to get its hands on non-bank financial institutions that are bleeding…..

“Matt Stiles, who writes at Stockhouse.com, who also happens to identify with the Austrian School of economics, argues why these hyperinflation fears are way overblown, and why we won’t see a Zimbabwe scenario here:

It is often said that we live with a “fiat currency” or with “paper money.” This is not entirely accurate. A very small portion of our total supply of money and credit is in the form of physical currency. It depends on how you count it, but regardless, it is under 10% of the total. This is what differentiates our monetary system with that of Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany circa 1920’s. Their economies were based on nearly 100% physical currency because nobody would accept the promises of government in order to issue credit.

The vast majority of our money supply is in the form of electronic credit. Electronic credit can be destroyed, while physical notes issued by a central bank cannot. This is why deflation is possible in a credit based monetary system, but not in a paper based monetary system.

…

All in all, the central banks are not nearly as powerful as they’d have you believe. The amount of the total money supply that is controlled by them is minimal. They won’t tell you that. They’d prefer you to think that just by them moving their lips they can affect the entire economy’s decision making processes. It simply ain’t so.

This begs the question: why is gold going up? Who knows. It has a mind of it’s own. But if it really only moved due to inflation concerns, it wouldn’t have declined 75% over two inflationary decades (80’s, 90’s) would it? If inflationary concerns were real, we would see TIP yields rising along with the gold price. They’re not. We’d also be seeing other typical inflation hedges rising – like property prices. That is obviously not the case. A better explanation is that gold is rising because of increased instability….”

More here

Comment:

Back later with more. But just one demurral. We won’t see Zimbabwean inflation because…well, because, Zimbabwe doesn’t influence the world in a million ways, through global institutions and laws and propaganda. The rest of this argument, I simply don’t understand. Electronic credit is still a claim on paper money.

But notice stocks are up…and we can see the reason why here:  existing home sales for Feb rebounded at the fastest pace in 6 years, according to Reuters. That’s mostly (45%) in the foreclosure market as we’ve been telling you guys. There are cheap deals out there – and not just in Detroit.

Meanwhile, the Treasury  came out with a detailed explanation of their bail-out which has people reassured. It’s the details of Geithner’s public-private partnership which has been overdue by 2 months and is cheering up the market.

Update:

Gold ended down, pressured by the rising stock market and the dollar. It  rebounded against the pound, euro, and yen, but ended down.

Update:  My conclusion is that this piece by Stiles is just more stock-boosting to mask the (long-term) bullish scenario for gold.

Short to midterm we are probably due for a correction in gold.

Check out some funnies at Conde Nast Portfolio,

“The rule of law requires that like people be treated alike and that people know what the law is so that they can plan their lives in accord with the law. In this case, a law is being passed to impose taxes on a particular, politically unpopular group. That is a tyrannical abuse of Congress’s powers. And in addition, it is retroactive legislation, changing the law upon which AIG and its employees had relied. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 62, “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws . . . undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”Selective taxation is tyranny. Ex post facto legislation violates the spirit of the liberal order, even if a particular piece of legislation can be “structured” to pass constitutional muster.”

David Boaz at the Cato Institute web-page

On the other hand, Lawrence Tribe, at The Atlantic, who is on President Obama’s legal team, thinks the taxation can be structured  so as to avoid constitutional objections (challenges as a violation of due process and a bill of attainder).

Comment:

Are they serious?

The rule of law requires that like people be treated alike and that people know what the law is so that they can plan their lives in accordance.

This same Congress has just dumped the follies, fraud, and recklessness of the entire financial industry on the laps of the population, regardless of whether they had anything to do with it, hustling the whole thing through with propaganda and distortion at every turn, has destroyed the economy, continues down the same path of redistributing the wealth of the public (present and future) to the very people most responsible for destroying it, with nary a thought for the constitution and now, lo and behold, niceties of law are an insuperable objection.

Fine.  Under law, interpreted constitutionally, one could as well say the entire financial industry turned fraudulent in the past few decades and was acting criminally, so no contracts from the period are valid to begin with, let alone bonuses.

Rather than taxes, call it a penalty or fine.

“It is easy to fall for the aesthetic gyrations of the stock market. Their stylized cycles make them look natural. They “revert to mean,” as Francis Galton would have it. They oscillate within fairly clear boundaries. Their ups and downs seem almost automatic (at least in retrospect). Their regularities are so neat many are tempted to forget David Hume and extrapolate the past into the future.

And here lies the problem. The long-term cycles of the stock market, no matter how stylized and regular they seem, are not self-generating. They don’t just happen on their own. Each cycle has a reason, and that reason is deeply social and historically unique.

Note that, during the twentieth century, every oscillation from a bear to a bull market was accompanied by a systemic societal transformation:

• The crisis of 1905–1920 marked the closing of the American Frontier, the shift from robber-baron capitalism to large-scale business enterprise and the beginning of synchronized finance.
• The crisis of 1928–1948 signaled the end of “unregulated” capitalism and the emergence of large governments and the welfare-warfare state.
• The crisis of 1968–1981 marked the closing of the Keynesian era, the resumption of worldwide capital flow and the onset of neoliberal globalization.

Furthermore, none of these transformations were “in the cards.” Most observers in the 1900s didn’t expect managerial capitalism to take hold; few in the 1920s anticipated the welfare-warfare state; and not too many in the 1960s predicted neoliberal regulation. All three transformations involved a complex set of conflicts, their trajectories were all fuzzy, and their outcomes were all but impossible to anticipate.

In other words, underneath the seemingly repetitive long-term patterns of the market lies an open-ended and inherently unpredictable reordering of the entire political economy. Although past bear markets have always given way to long bull runs, these transitions were never automatic. Each and every one of them reflected a profound transformation of the underlying social structure. And in our view, this correspondence still holds. In order for the current crisis to end and a new upswing to begin, something very big has to happen: the social structure must change.

The precise nature of this transformation—assuming it occurs—is likely to remain opaque until the process is well under way. But one thing seems clear enough. A new upswing means the rekindling of accumulation, and if we are to understand what this upswing might entail, we need to go back to the beginning and start from the entity that matters most: capital.

For more on that issue, stay tuned for the next installment in our series….”

Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan  in Dollars and Sense.