naked capitalism

attempter says:

My authority for the contention that calls for more R&D are just a delay tactic and a lucrative example of the Peter Principle is Joe Romm, certainly no collapse theorist. (Indeed, I’ve been wondering if he still insists on Deployment, Deployment, toujours Deployment! since Obama came in; I haven’t followed him lately, but I can picture the corporatist CAP having changed its line on a lot of things.)

But my main objections to your way of looking at things are:

1. This is a terminal kleptocracy, but you still think it can be induced to engage in large-scale trickle-down corporatist projects rather than corporatist projects which are simply manifestations of class war.

Is there any level of evidence that would convince you that trickle-down is a fraud which doesn’t work?

Your logic that socializing the cost for an $80K electric car will trickle down to a $20K car has already failed hundreds, thousands of times.

If that logic were true, why aren’t existing cars just a few hundred dollars? Why aren’t cars as such an undifferentiated commodity by now? How is it possible to still make any profit on cars? None of that would be possible in the world according to the capitalist textbooks.

BTW, how do you figure $20K is going to qualify as a People’s Car anyway? In a permanent depression? That’s a sick joke.

But that leads to:

2. You still assume infinite growth, not because your study of energy has provided evidence that this is possible, but because you take it on faith. Then from there you construct a notion of energy technology which allegedly supports this faith.

But that faith, just like faith in trickle-down, is false. There hasn’t been real growth in decades. All “growth” has been nothing but financialization’s accounting frauds. Exponential debt itself has collapsed, and the debt economy is being partially propped up by no reality based force, only the government Bailout, which in turn is only possible for as long as the rest of the world consents to the “reserve currency” fiction.

And now Peak Oil will set in, to deliver the death blow.

3. This is a terminal kleptocracy, so even if the things you talk about were done, that wouldn’t stop the tar sands and any other hideous project as long as it’s corporatizable. It’ll be done to feed the monster of consumption, or simply as pure corporate welfare. That’ll continue for as long as criminal regimes like the US and Canadian governments exist.

It’s another proven falsehood, that a green project cancels out a fossil fuel project. Fossil fuel projects are done or not done according to their own inner political and economic (il)logic.

4. Trickle-down is a Big Lie. We know that the benefits of energy corporatism will go only to the rich and powerful, while the tax money stolen from us for the research is simply lost to us, even as we descend into the terminal great depression.

Since this is a terminal kleptocracy waging class war through each and every policy, it follows that any benefit to the rich and the corporations, even if it’s not directly a weapon against us, is still indirectly such a weapon.

Anything that benefits them is by definition a detriment to us. So the best possible thing which could come out of any government policy is something deployable by the people right now. (There’s also the little matter of the jobs such deployment could create; there too, to say “wait” is the same as saying “let’s not do it at all”.)

So that’s why I say the people need to reject all corporatism going forward. It won’t trickle down, it’ll go only to our enemies, it’ll only be more wealth stolen from us, it won’t prevent environmental destruction*, and it won’t bring back growth; and “growth” has been proven to have been a malevolent goal in the first place, so why would anyone want to restore it?

*If you want to stop something like the tar sands, the only thing which can possibly work is direct action against the tar sands. But here too, liberals want to do nothing but mail everything through a corporate “process” and hope a drop of quasi-good might trickle down at the end of that process. What could be more convoluted and predestined to fail? It’s never worked, not once.

attempter says:

I’m sorry to have put words in your mouth. I guess that’s a habit I fall into sometimes. But I think my depiction of the trends of the ideas you expressed is correct.

It’s false to say we can’t distinguish between normal corruption and full kleptocracy. Here’s one major example. During the first Great Depression, it was politically possible and considered desirable by a critical mass among the power elite to enact the New Deal. In our incipient Depression, not only is even any modest step in that direction impossible and rejected, but all existing remnants of the safety net and employment protections are under ferocious assault. There is near-unanimity on this program. Indeed, the crash and permanent mass unemployment were intentionally and systematically caused by these system elites.

So there’s just one clear example of the difference between normal corruption and terminal kleptocracy. There are many, many others.

Time and time again we have had the costs of new technologies drop to a lower level due to economies of scale. What we see in the current price of automobiles is the fetishized production of delusion within the American public that they need an automobile that confers notions of independence and that always has a new string of gadgets.

But that’s another version of believing in some ideal capitalism, with the claim being that this brand and embellishment differentiation of what should long since have become an undifferentiated commodity is a fall from the true capitalist faith.

But capitalism has been in the full deployment stage by now for long enough and universally enough that whatever it has always been, that’s what it really is. This fetishization is an integral part of capitalism, not an abuse of it.

You’re exactly right that the automobile should by now long since have been an undifferentiated commodity where it’s impossible to extract more than the absolute minimum profit necessary for those capitalists to stay in business at all. But this fetishization of brands and embellishments is just one of many ways that the strongest capitalists, seeing their profit rate necessarily falling (since that’s what automatically happens as a sector matures, if textbook competition continues), transformed themselves into rent-seeking oligopolies. That was the only way they could continue to take high extractions, now in the form of rents rather than textbook “profits”. The same is true of all sectors by now.

That requirement for every sector to transform itself into an oligopoly, in turn, required the government to become far more aggressive in asserting the corporate prerogative. And that was the main driver of government’s devolution from normal corruption to terminal kleptocracy.

So getting back to what started all this, it’s in that context that I said green energy – the corporatist manifestation – is a scam. Nothing engulfed in this corporate/government nexus is likely to benefit the people. If that were likely, they wouldn’t do it. All their actions prove this.