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 22 Aug 2008 @ 11:50
As an adolescent youth in the 70s who was attracted to social theory and metaphysics, my eyes beheld the great potency of a paradigm that was then making waves within academic social science: Marxist theory. Among the things that particularly caught my attention, aside from Marxism’s explanatory potency, was the archetypal language embedded in it.
Marx constructed his philosophy (dialectical materialism) and science (sociology or ‘historical materialism’) at a time of intense conflict between materialism and idealism, in a context we now refer to as ‘Victorian’. Aware of that context, I simplified my explanation of Marx’s archetypal language as characteristic of the poetic-allegorical language of the Victorian academe. Scientific concepts were just being constructed then, so in the absence of a developed template of scientific-empirical concepts the thinkers resorted to allegorical language as a substitute.
In the works of the early Marx, archetypal language was particularly marked. Marx’s model of society actually used Masonic terms such as ‘superstructure’, ‘base’ or ‘substructure’ or ‘infrastructure’, and mimetically likened society to a house. It was pure and plain Masonic, this modeling and conceptual frame. Just exactly what made Marx decide to use Masonic symbolism, was it pure borrowing from the freemasons or was he in fact involved in secret Masonic lodges that prompted him to use the society’s accepted archetypes? More >
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 17 Aug 2008 @ 12:48
After 2000 years a cosmic drama gets to be re-enacted. Mystical masters such as Rudolf Steiner have clarified to us this knowledge of cycles before. This idea attracted thinkers Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee who used the same 2000-year period to characterize their theory of cycles of civilizations. When science and mysticism converge, theory becomes fact, fact is theory.
2000 years ago Rome’s Republic was in fragments, chaos was the order of things, and out of that chaos the Empire galvanized. Cosmic evil descended so low as to dominate the physical plane altogether. It was the chief reason why an Ascended Being, Jeshua ben Josheph, was sent forth by the White Lodge’s highest councils to counterbalance that chaos and check-mate the descent of Earth towards further chaos and evil.
The marked descent to evil by the figure known as Octavius at that very moment has been quite well documented. The nephew of Julius Ceasar, and close to him as he was to Ceasar’s confidantes and co-leaders, Octavius rose meteorically to monopolize all powers of state unto himself, bamboozle the allies of Rome through invasions and destructive onslaughts, and created ‘synergistic anarchies’ or ‘synarchy’ through ceaseless wars of aggression across the borders. That Empire was to last for 500 years, later on passing the flame to Byzantium. More >
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13 Aug 2008 @ 08:27
The final feature of the US ‘real economy’ worth featuring is transportation & communications. This is among the most productive sectors that produce real wealth, contrasted to the ‘casino economy’ of predatory finance that produces wealth from out of wealth itself, producing really nothing worth our value. Broad as it is, let me focus on the transport sector.
Time was when the railway industry took off, inducing growth as soon as the railways hit the West. The continental divide among the US states was bridged quickly, intra-trade exponentially increased. Soon enough, foreign trade also increased in leaps and bounds as maritime shipping grew and matured quickly, making US articles of trade be exported to all corners of the planet. More >
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13 Aug 2008 @ 08:21
As I’ve been stressing in previous articles, “it’s the economy” that count much as top agenda to be addressed by policy makers, bureaucrats and growth stakeholders in the USA. And this should be the primary concern of the political bigwigs when election comes by the end of the year.
A policy shift that will veer away America from the destructive flames of the ‘virtual economy’ founded on predatory finance, back to the ‘real economy’ based on tangible outputs in manufacturing, agriculture, infrastructures, S & T, and transportation & communications.
This time around, do make reflections on the S&T facet of America’s economy and society. For over two (2) centuries the USA was a hallmark of development, precisely due to the ingenuity manifested by its entrepreneurs who built the mighty industrial economy. The S&T facet of production has been a well established fact-of-life in America, and I should stress that facet here means ‘cutting-edge’. More >
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11 Aug 2008 @ 10:51
A bridge has fallen, the Mississipi river flooded Orleans like some pathetic third world city, airports are too cramped up as they are incapable of containing the surge in passenger & cargo levels, the East Coast experienced the emergency shut down due to grid overload (causing massive blackout), railway tracks are thinning out and overall capacity is on downward trend, and more.
They seem to be unrelated, but for economists and sociologists the trends all tell the same story. Pieced up together, they indicate crumbling infrastructures. Not because the structural engineers of America are sloppy, and definitely not that the heavy equipment sector couldn’t provide quality machines to reinforce the burgeoning infrastructure need of the juggernaut US economy. More >
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11 Aug 2008 @ 10:47
...But the overall alarming trend in America’s agriculture is the rapid shrinking of arable lands altogether. Lucky enough that America is blessed with millions of acres of arable land, but the liberalization of land use conversions affected this mighty economy strongly like in other countries. Prime agricultural lands are being transformed into commercial and residential lands, most specially those southern regions that practically fed the whole America for nigh centuries long.
Agriculture is following a general trend of economic decay. The historic practice of mono-cropping alone had already created havoc on the soil quality in many places across the US. Compounding the decay problem is the pressure by WTO members for the sector to bring down the trade barrier, thus possibly bringing in floods of cheap food imports from Europe and the south. More >
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9 Aug 2008 @ 23:18
The public (in America) is of the broad position that the NAFTA was responsible for the folding up of many factories and the transfer of jobs to Mexico/South. This NAFTA-bashing has some validity to it, but the semi-economic integration alone with Mexico and Canada isn’t a sufficient reason for the bigger problem of de-industrialization.
Once robust and colossal, the industrial sector of the USA contributed over 50% of the Gross Domestic Product or GDP, and employed half the labor as well. As early as the mid-50s, the futuristic sociologist Daniel Bell already warned that the trend wouldn’t hold long enough, as the ‘post-industrial society’ was already knocking its doors on the USA. Not only that, he also forecast that by the 21st century, the center of global economic growth would be the Asia-Pacific, while labor would shift to the services sector. More >
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9 Aug 2008 @ 23:16
...The USA’s GDP ended up at $12.5 Trillion last year, though some indicator massage could yield a higher figure of $13.5 Trillion (using Purchasing Power Parity or PPP). Measure this against the Gross World Product of GWP of $59 Trillion more or less, end of 2007. Estimate by experts is that the US contributes to 22% of the GWP, and ditto for the EU.
That figure of $12.5 Trillion, fellows, is simply the ‘nominal value’ of the US economy. Nominal and real are two different categories in economics. Granting that the ‘virtual economy’ based on financial speculation has been the one that raised values of commodities and services in the USA, the ‘nominal value’ is actually inflated, rendering the ‘real value’ at a much lower level. More >
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7 Aug 2008 @ 10:09
Just exactly at what level had the totality of US debts had reached is practically anybody’s guess. So complex is America’s financial system and the mess created by the ‘bubble economy’ over the last three (3) decades, that it takes an enormous amount of research efforts led by top economists and financial consultants to undertake.
One thing is clear though: whoever will be the USA’s next execs must never fail to measure, comprehend, and reverse the debt trends. The estimates today, using combined data from the Fed, the Bank for International Settlements or BiS, and independent researches would put the figure at $50 Trillion. More >
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7 Aug 2008 @ 10:07
So, fellows out there, whatever happened that the once mighty US economy—once contributing to 40% of Gross World Product (GWP)—is now drifting downwards, producing now just 22% of GWP? That the EU would itself catch up with the USA and equally produces 22% of GWP, though EU’s money is bloodily mightier than Uncle Sam’s once mythical Dollar?
...The ‘gambling economy’ based on speculation, conceit, lies, rather than based on the real value of consumable articles of trade, became the dominant modality in the USA. Debts and more debts piled up, since having no debt was moralized as bad behavior. Debs quadrupled in just a few decades, resulting to $50 Trillion worth of debts today. More >
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