photo credit: striatic

Our submission to the Digital Dividend green paper for the sale of 4G Electro Magnetic Spectrum licenses.

Karl Fitzgerald

The electro magnetic spectrum is a scarce resource.

Over time it will increase in value, especially with the advent of new technology.

As such, the recent release of the iPhone 3GS has delivered windfall profits for the telco’s with the additional use of video/ web apps. 4G will dramatically speed up the search times and thus useability of the resource and technology.

In order for the public to gain a share of the naturally increasing value of the 4G resource:

A yearly EMS rent is to be paid by all EMS license holders at a fixed percentage, based on it’s ANNUAL value.

Property valuers and media consultants can quite easily determine the yearly value of a telecommunications license.

We propose a 10% annual licensee rental based on the yearly value.

This will keep a lid on speculative interests that may find motivation in flipping such a resource for exorbitant profits.

By doing so, the Rudd – Conroy government will help to keep a lid on the price of telecommunications, the very breath of the market system with it’s desire to deliver ‘perfect information’ to consumers.

photo credit: OiMax

Not only has the public re-organised spectrum space for the broadcaster’s new channels, but we’ve also gifted a rebate on their licensing fees! Some sort of Digital Dividend, Mr Conroy! A dividend for whom? Where will the missing $200 – $500m p.a come from?

The broadcasters should be paying more for the added access to the commons, not less. A yearly licensing fee commensurate with the value of the spectrum should be implemented.

With the upcoming 4G license to be auctioned, the spectrum issue is heating up. Crikey’s investigative team reveals there’s a lot more to the story:

Free TV Handout’s – We Don’t Know the Half of It
by Crikey’s Glenn Dyer and Bernard Keane

The competition regulator should step in and force Free TV Australia, the television broadcasting cartel lobbyist, to change its name. There’s now no such thing.

A Crikey analysis has shown that the promised licence fee rebates of 33% this year and 50% next year to the television networks will be much greater than previously thought. Rather than $250 million, the likely cost to taxpayers will be closer to half a billion dollars from the Rudd Government.

Which means the free-to-air networks will cost us more than $20 a head for every Australian over the next 17 months.

Based on likely growth in advertising revenue as the economy accelerates, big sporting events such as the Commonwealth Games and the advertising frenzy of a federal election, the rebate could conservatively yield about $240 million in 2010 and $300 million or more in 2011.

Looked at another way, the roughly $500 million involved is 25% of the combined budgets of the ABC over the current and 2011 financial years. Imagine the complaints from the television networks (and not to mention News Ltd, Fairfax and Foxtel) if the ABC got a budget increase of that scale.

But this is effectively what Nine, Seven and Ten will be receiving.

The Seven Network will share in about $187 million in the next 17 months, based on its December half year 38% share of television advertising revenues.

The big beneficiary is Kerry Stokes and his family with whom, as The Australian noted yesterday, Kevin Rudd spent the night at Stokes’s Broome mansion. Stokes owns 48% of the Seven Network Ltd, which in turn controls 50% of Seven Media Group, where the TV network in the five metropolitan markets and rural Queensland sits.

About 47% of Seven Media Group is controlled by US buyout group, KKR, with a tiny stake held by Seven executives. The identity of the executives is unknown and the KKR investors are secret, but most are believed to be offshore. They will all derive a benefit from the taxpayer in that the value of Seven Media Group will rise now that this extra money will roll in the door.

Seven Media group was written down to nil value by Seven network a year ago. That is now a very obvious fiction.

The millions coming from the Australian taxpayer to bolster the finances of the over-geared media group will ease any concerns bankers to the media group may have had about its finances, thereby relieving Seven Network and Stokes from having to tip in any money.

Nine will get about $156 million, based on its ad share of a touch under 32% in the December half year. That will flow to PBL Media, controlled by CVC Asia, on behalf of unknown offshore investors, and executives including David Gyngell and Ian Law.

As in the case of Seven Media Group, the licence fee rebate represents a direct transfer from taxpayers to the benefit of a small number of paid executives.

Nine also shares its rebates with WIN, controlled by billionaire tax exile Bruce Gordon and his family. Gordon has to spend six months of the year outside Australia because he doesn’t want to pay Australian tax personally.

Nine also controls the regional broadcaster NBN. These fees will help it finance the huge $250 million purchase price for NBN a few years ago.

Ten is a listed company, 11.9% owned by Gordon as well, although Gordon doesn’t have a board seat. He will get the benefit of any increased dividend Ten pays as a result of these fees. It slashed dividends last year when it looked as though it could founder. Ten shares its fees with its affiliate, Macquarie Media, which has also emerged from a near-death experience, this time by staying too long in the Macquarie Group orbit. Now it is free, but it has some struggling newspapers in the US that are a drain on finances.

In each of the cases, the main networks, Seven, Nine and Ten, could claw back some of the rebates that end up at WIN, Seven affiliate Prime and Macquarie Media by way of higher affiliation fees. Those affiliation fees are a major source of easy money for the big networks.

The rebates will be given with no strings attached — not even a requirement that the money remain with the networks and not be returned to shareholders or sent overseas.

Likewise with the struggling PBL Media: the extra money will help keep the bankers and their $3 billion-plus debt happy. That also means the value of the equity the executives have will rise as the viability of PBL Media improves.

So it was no wonder Stokes, the younger, has hailed the rebate as an important outcome for the industry.
“Not only does it help bring the Australian industry closer toward international peers, it recognises the growing investment in Australian content and the increasing need for quality local content in a digital environment,” Stokes told a conference yesterday.

Stokes said free-to-air television was facing a time of “unprecedented change”, with competition from the internet and pay TV and the challenge of negotiating the switch over to digital television.

“In this context, we welcome the recent government announcement to protect Australian content on commercial television,” Stokes said.

That is a load of self-interested, conflicted rubbish, just as the comments to The Oz by Free TV Australia chairman, former Queensland Premier Wayne Goss, are rubbish.

According to Goss, “fees in Australia were much higher and completely out proportion to what they were in comparable countries”. Free TV Australia CEO Julie Flynn said in the News Ltd tabloids this morning the rebates will enable the networks to keep their local content commitments. Both comments are simply spurious

What others charge their broadcasters is simply immaterial to Australia. Our broadcasters do not compete with US, Canadian or UK broadcasters. If spectrum licence fees were higher in the US, UK or Canada, then Australian broadcasters would be charged more for programming by the likes of CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox and ITV to recover the higher fees.

You can argue that in fact our networks enjoy a programming subsidy because these foreign licence fees are lower than ours.

When you throw in that it is taxpayers who provide much of the war chests for the major parties’ electoral advertising campaigns, and it is taxpayers’ stimulus package money that has kept the economy and big-advertising retailers afloat over the past 12 months, it is clear that so-called free-to-air television networks are firmly fastened to the taxpayer teat.

With Treasury fronting Estimates all day today, the Opposition should be demanding to know whether Treasury was consulted, and if so exactly what the hit on taxpayers will be from this sleazy Rudd handout.

Alanna Hartzok

The global financial crisis has demonstrated a deep systemic failure of the prevailing economic paradigm. So far, efforts to remedy the situation have failed to address the root causes of the meltdown and are digging the American people deeper into the hole of public debt.

In an op-ed titled “Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism” earlier this year, Joseph Stiglitz wrote that the bailout of banks by taxpayers is a “partnership in which one partner robs the other.” Considering that in 2004 the top 1 percent of the population of the United States owned more than $2.5 trillion more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, and that even in 1996 about 350 billionaires held more wealth than nearly half of humanity, we have surely arrived at the end of the capitalist monopoly game.

Rent-Seeking and Economic Restructuring

Alternative economic analysts have traced the severe wealth gap problem to the ability of the so-called FIRE sector—finance, insurance, and real estate—to concentrate large amounts of money, resources, and power into ever fewer hands via a variety of rent-seeking behaviors. “Rent” connotes unearned income. Alternative analysis considers economic rent to be a socially generated surplus that is being privately captured.

As an economy generates wealth, the price of land and other natural resources increases. Because the gifts of nature cannot be produced by human effort and supply cannot be increased to meet demand, holders of land and natural resources are in a position to capture the surplus—economic rent—generated by labor and capital.

While economic rent is essentially a measure of the social surplus it is not regarded as such under neoliberal economics, which treats this value as a market commodity for private profiteering. This fundamental flaw in market economics has created a highly inequitable global economic system. Lack of knowledge as to how to correct this flaw, and retain the benefits, efficiencies, and individual freedoms of the market, was the impetus for the emergence of centrally managed and controlled state socialism. An economic restructuring based on a full understanding of the role of economic rent is needed for a new economic framework beyond both the old right and the old left.

Read more at Policy Innovations

photo credit: hans s

Michael Hudson

As published in today’s Business Age Opinion section

HIGHER land and house prices typically lead to an increased supply of housing. Yet at the peak of Australia’s perennial housing affordability crisis, the Housing Industry Association declared that there would be a 13 per cent fall in housing starts this calendar year, compounding last year’s 18 per cent fall.

In light of massive rezonings in Victoria and improved planning bureaucracy in many states, this can only be seen as a warning that property insiders expect there to be a price crash.

The public face of the housing industry is quite different. So, what do property investors expect that the rest of the population does not?

Government spokesmen reflect assurances by bankers and their major category of customers – the real estate industry – that Australia’s economy is defying gravity. In reality, that is as impossible in economic life as it is in physical nature.

Property prices are defined by how much a bank will lend. Donald Trump claims that a man is worth what he can borrow. This usually depends on what a borrower can afford to pay, after meeting basic break-even needs (the cost of living, plus taxes). In the corporate sector, it means after-tax cash flow. So property prices are set by the banks, subject to the tax system.

The motto of real estate investors is that rent is for paying interest – and whatever the tax collector relinquishes is available to be capitalised into a bank loan as a flow of interest payments. The guiding idea is that affordability determines property prices. One example of how the tax system affects property prices is in its failure to distinguish land from capital improvements. Speculative withholding of prime locations from the market in an undeveloped or unsold state creates artificial scarcity. This raises prices.

Property speculators are able to afford this hoarding to the degree that the land’s potential site rent remains untaxed. Taxing the land would bring underutilised land and other property on to the market. It also would reduce the available free-lunch rent that is currently capitalised into bank loans to raise prices.

The myth is that higher property taxes increase the cost of housing and office space over time. The reality is that higher taxes would leave less site-rent to be pledged to banks – thereby reducing the financial cost of property ownership – while also enabling the government to shift the tax burden back off labour on to property, as used to be the case in Australia before the mid-1970s.

This explains why the financial lobby supports the real estate lobby in shaping public perceptions of the property market – along with government financial policy towards the finance, insurance and real estate sector.

Australia’s fiscal-financial system has become increasingly dysfunctional in giving tax preference to land-price ”capital” gains and hence property speculation rather than tangible capital formation. Instead of raising living standards by producing more, what passes as post-industrial ”wealth creation” takes the form of inflating asset prices on credit. The result is a bubble economy. And inasmuch as asset-price gains are fuelled by debt leveraging, wealth creation is more accurately viewed as debt creation.

The problem is that debts remain in place even as prices drop.

And they are dropping in response to the economy’s shrinking ability to pay, as more and more income is earmarked to pay debts run up in the past. This debt service is not available for spending on goods and services. The result is debt deflation. Lower spending on goods and services shrinks the domestic market (and also shrinks imports), leading to lower business profits and also lower business rentals. Lower rental income results in lower property prices – and at a point, property falls into negative equity: the mortgage debt exceeds the current market price that home owners or commercial investors can recover.

This is the end stage of debt-leveraged bubbles. In this respect it behoves Australians to look ahead. It seems that Australian property investors are also doing this. How else to explain the cutback in new building?

Michael Hudson is distinguished research professor at the University of Missouri.

photo credit: bjornmeansbear

With climate change forging into our conscience day by day, how are Gen X,Y & Z to feel when they realise they have been ripped off like no other generation before? The increase in the First Home Owners Grant saw nearly 13,000 youngsters manipulated into buying at the top end of the property cycle in January alone.

Tell your friends – whatever you do, DON’T BUY NOW! This is an 18 year property cycle and will pop soon.

The financial illiteracy of the general populace is further enhancing the wealth gap. Will economic know-how be seen as crucial once the dust settles on the ugly months we have coming our way? The wisened property speculators have left the market spectacularly, cashing out just as their advisers directed. What a pity youngsters have Paris Hilton to advise them….

The lobbying forces for an extension of the FHOG are in full effect (it is due to expire June 30). It is widely understood amongst policy wonks that this is being used as a pump priming stimulus package to buffer the construction industry, rather than to provide affordable housing.

However, the reality of day to day life sees many youngsters miss the nuances in the debate. Mainstream media does little to bring balance to this looming tragedy. With the property lobby the major benefactors to political companies/ parties, it seems likely that the dominance of lobbyocracy will again prevail in this world of poll driven, spineless politicians. Ruddy pawns.

And to think that Brumby-otis has hit again with Minister Madden ripping planning controls for major developments from the closest thing we have to grass roots politics – local councils. This will see large tracts of public land sold to VicUrban or major political donors who have played the game of land hoarding until their planning desires are finally approved.

The casualisation of the younger workforce exposes a massive risk. Banks are like sitting ducks for our sub-prime like FHOG recipients. Will they get bailed out when the effects of the job layoffs start to cascade into foreclosures? Michael West reports:

Outside the first-home buyers, interest rate cuts have done little to spur growth. Since August, the number of loans to existing owner-occupiers has risen only 1.2 per cent, compared with the 65.4 per cent surge in first-home buyer loans.

Colebatch goes on to say:

In a dramatic reversal of the trend towards increasing ownership of homes by negatively geared investors, the financial crisis has seen first-home buyers lift their share of lending from 17 per cent to 29 per cent in just six months.

At the same time, the share of lending for home purchase going to investors has shrunk from 40 per cent to 30 per cent, as the banks become more wary of lending, and investors more wary of borrowing.

The Bureau of Statistics reports that lending to would-be housing investors so far this year is down roughly a third from a year earlier, plunging from $12 billion to about $8 billion.

The net result is that while lending to first-home buyers has risen 84 per cent since the Government lifted the first home buyers grant, the total amount lent for housing has risen far more modestly, by 11 per cent.

Warn your friends – don’t buy now! Wait a year. You’ve heard that before we know but this is an 18 year cycle, a generational cycle that goes back 400 years. Read Boom Bust 2010 or listen to a recent interview with the author Fred Harrison. Time for some laughing yoga to get through this…..

photo credit: sludgegulper

In Socialist Alternative, issue 13, February-March 2009, which was circulated widely in Orientation Week at the University of Queensland, the first page proclaims that “Capitalism Caused this Disaster”.

The correct slogan should be that “Land Parasitism caused this disaster”. At least two thirds of the cost of urban houses and buildings is the cost of the land, which is why 80% of the wealth of this country is owned by, at most, 15% of its inhabitants.

Capital is a major factor in increasing the wealth of the nation, but land ownership is the major factor in halting progress, creating poverty and unemployment. The building of roads, factories, houses, etc. depends on access to land and all are dragged back by the cost of land. Thus, land monopolisation is the real reason for the unsustainable loans and mortgages forced upon businesses and home owners and the soaring cost of rented accommodation which is driving so many Australians into homelessness.

Instead of penalising production by evil and crazy taxes such as income tax, payroll tax and GST, we should abolish these taxes and instead take for the community what really belongs to them, namely, the community-created value of land.

It is estimated by the States’ Valuers General that this source of revenue would return many billions of dollars – more than enough to meet the nation’s needs. At the same time, it would encourage production which in turn would substantially reduce unemployment and homelessness.

Karl Marx, perhaps influenced by the American Economist and Philosopher Henry George, came to acknowledge the distinct and vital role played by land in his later publications; unfortunately, Communism was founded on his earlier version of Das Kapital in which land and capitalism were joined together as a single entity. No wonder it collapsed under the corruption which this misunderstanding inevitably created.

Cecil and Helen Stowasser, March 1st, 2009.

Warm up by watching the above, then read the latest from Michael Hudson, who is writing up a storm on the inside motivations to banksters bailouts world-wide.

Michael Hudson

as published on Global Research

Banking shares began to plunge Friday morning after Senator Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the banking committee, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that he was concerned the government might end up nationalizing some lenders “at least for a short time.” Several other prominent policy makers – including Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – have echoed that view recently. (Eric Dash, “Growing Worry on Rescue Takes a Toll on Banks,” The New York Times, February 20, 2009)

How is it that Mr. Greenspan, free-market lobbyist for Wall Street, recently announced that he favored nationalization of America’s banks – and indeed, mainly the biggest and most powerful? Has he “gone left”? Or are we dealing with the most recent exercise in Orwellian doublethink?

The answer is that the rhetoric of “free markets,” “nationalization” and even “socialism” (as in “socializing the losses”) has been turned into the language of deception to help the financial sector mobilize government power to support its own special privileges. Having undermined the economy at large, Wall Street’s public relations think tanks are now dismantling the language itself.

The popular media should not let them get away with it.

Economic idealism from the left to the right wing of the political spectrum advocates a free market. But what does this mean? Is it what the classical economists advocated – a market free from monopoly power, business fraud, political insider dealing and special privileges for vested interests – a market protected by the rise in public regulation from the Sherman Anti-Trust law of 1890 to the Glass-Steagall Act and other New Deal legislation? Or is it a market free for predators to exploit victims without public regulation or economic policemen – the kind of free-for-all market that the Federal Reserve and Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) have created over the past decade or so? It seems incredible that people should accept today’s neoliberal idea of “market freedom” in the sense of neutering government watchdogs, Alan Greenspan-style, letting Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide, Hank Greenberg at AIG, Bernie Madoff, Citibank, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers operate freely enough to plunge the economy into crisis and then use Treasury bailout money to pay the highest salaries and bonuses in U.S. history.

Terms that are the antithesis of “free market” also are being turned into the opposite of what they historically have meant. Take today’s discussions about nationalizing the banks. For over a century nationalization has meant public takeover of monopolies or other sectors to operate them in the public interest rather than leaving them so special interests. But when neoliberals use the word “nationalization” they mean a bailout, a government giveaway to the financial interests.

We are dealing with an abuse of language of the kind that George Orwell described in 1984, a degradation of the vocabulary to mean the opposite of what it formerly meant in order to rewrite intellectual and political history along lines that serve the currently dominant vested interests: “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” Doublethink with regard to “nationalizing” or “socializing” the banks and other sectors is a travesty of political and economic discussion from the 17th through mid-20th centuries. Society’s basic grammar of thought, the vocabulary to discuss political and economic topics, is being turned inside-out in an effort to ward off discussion of the policy solutions posed by the classical economists and political philosophers that made Western civilization “Western.”

Today’s clash of civilization is not really with the Orient; it is with our own past, with the Enlightenment itself and its evolution into classical political economy and Progressive Era social reforms aimed at freeing society from the surviving trammels of European feudalism. What we are seeing is propaganda designed to deceive, to distract attention from economic reality so as to promote the property and financial interests from whose predatory grasp classical economists set out to free the world. What is being attempted is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the intellectual and moral edifice of what took Western civilization eight centuries to develop, from the 12th century Schoolmen discussing Just Price through 19th and 20th century classical economic value theory.

Any idea of “socialism from above,” in the sense of “socializing the risk,” is old-fashioned oligarchy – kleptocratic statism from above. Real nationalization occurs when governments act in the public interest to take over private property. The 19th-century program to nationalize the land (it was the first plank of the Communist Manifesto) did not mean anything remotely like the government taking over estates, paying off their mortgages at public expense and then giving it back to the former landlords free and clear of encumbrances and taxes. It meant taking the land and its rental income into the public domain, and leasing it out at a user fee ranging from actual operating cost to a subsidized rate or even freely as in the case of streets and roads.

Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation’s credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt as has occurred under today’s commercial bank lending policies.

How Neoliberals falsify the West’s political history

The fact that today’s neoliberals claim to be the intellectual descendants of Adam Smith make it necessary to restore a more accurate historical perspective. Their concept of “free markets” is the antithesis of Smith’s. It is the opposite of that of the classical political economists down through John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and the Progressive Era reforms that sought to create markets free of extractive rentier claims by special interests whose institutional power can be traced back to medieval Europe and its age of military conquest.

Economic writers from the 16th through 20th centuries recognized that free markets required government oversight to prevent monopoly pricing and other charges levied by special privilege. By contrast, today’s neoliberal ideologues are public relations advocates for vested interests to depict a “free market” is one free of government regulation, “free” of anti-trust protection, and even of protection against fraud, as evidenced by the SEC’s refusal to move against Madoff, Enron, Citibank et al.). The neoliberal ideal of free markets is thus basically that of a bank robber or embezzler, wishing for a world without police so as to be sufficiently free to siphon off other peoples’ money without constraint.

The Chicago Boys in Chile realized that markets free for predatory finance and insider privatization could only be imposed at gunpoint. These free-marketers closed down every economics department in Chile, every social science department outside of the Catholic University where the Chicago Boys held sway. Operation Condor arrested, exiled or murdered tens of thousands of academics, intellectuals, labor leaders and artists. Only by totalitarian control over the academic curriculum and public media backed by an active secret police and army could “free markets” neoliberal style be imposed. The resulting privatization at gunpoint became an exercise in what Marx called “primitive accumulation” – seizure of the public domain by political elites backed by force. It is a free market William-the-Conqueror or Yeltsin-kleptocrat style, with property parceled out to the companions of the political or military leader.

All this was just the opposite of the kind of free markets that Adam Smith had in mind when he warned that businessmen rarely get together but to plot ways to fix markets to their advantage. This is not a problem that troubled Mr. Greenspan or Mr. Bush. There really is no kinship between their neoliberal ideals and those of the Enlightenment political philosophers. For them to promote an idea of free markets as ones “free” for political insiders to pry away the public domain for themselves is to lower an intellectual Iron Curtain on the history of economic thought.

The classical economists and American Progressives envisioned markets free of economic rent and interest – free of rentier overhead charges and monopoly price gouging, free of land-rent, interest paid to bankers and wealthy financial institutions, and free of taxes to support an oligarchy. Governments were to base their tax systems on collecting the “free lunch” of economic rent, headed by that of favorable locations supplied by nature and given market value by public investment in transportation and other infrastructure, not by the efforts of landlords themselves.

The argument between Progressive Era reformers, socialists, anarchists and individualists thus turned on the political strategy of how best to free markets from debt and rent. Where they differed was on the best political means to achieve it, above all the role of the state. There was broad agreement that the state was controlled by vested interests inherited from feudal Europe’s military conquests and the world that was colonized by European military force. The political question at the turn of the 20th century was whether peaceful democratic reform could overcome the political and even military resistance wielded by the Old Regime using violence to retain its “rights.” The ensuing political revolutions were grounded in the Enlightenment, in the legal philosophy of men such as John Locke, political economists such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Marx. Power was to be used to free markets from the predatory property and financial systems inherited from feudalism. Markets were to be free of privilege and free lunches, so that people would obtain income and wealth only by their own labor and enterprise. This was the essence of the labor theory of value and its complement, the concept of economic rent as the excess of market price over socially necessary cost-value.

Although we now know that markets and prices, rent and interest, contractual formalities and nearly all the elements of economic enterprise originated in the “mixed economies” of Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC and continued throughout the mixed public/private economies of classical antiquity, the discussion was so politically polarized that the idea of a mixed economy with checks and balances received scant attention a century ago.

Individualists believed that all that shrinking central governments would shrink the control mechanism by which the vested interests extracted wealth without work or enterprise of their own. Socialists saw that a strong government was needed to protect society from the attempts of property and finance to use their gains to monopolize economic and political power. Both ends of the political spectrum aimed at the same objective – to bring prices down to actual costs of production. The common aim was to maximize economic efficiency so as to pass on the fruits of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions to the population at large. This required blocking the rentier class of interlopers from grabbing the public domain and controlling the allocation of resources. Socialists did not believe this could be done without taking the state’s political and legal power into their own hands. Marxists believed that a revolution was necessary to reclaim property rent for the public domain, and to enable governments to create their own credit rather than borrow at interest from commercial bankers and wealthy bondholders. The aim was not to create a bureaucracy but to free society from the surviving absentee ownership power of the vested property and financial interests.

All this history of economic thought has been as thoroughly expunged from today’s academic curriculum as it has from popular discussion. Few people remember the great debate at the turn of the 20th century: Would the world progress fairly quickly from Progressive Era reforms to outright socialism – public ownership of basic economic infrastructure, natural monopolies (including the banking system) and the land itself (and to Marxists, of industrial capital as well)? Or, could the liberal reformers of the day – individualists, land taxers, classical economists in the tradition of Mill, and American institutionalists such as Simon Patten – retain capitalism’s basic structure and private property ownership? If they could do so, they recognized that it would have to be in the context of regulating markets and introducing progressive taxation of wealth and income. This was the alternative to outright “state” ownership. Today’s extreme “free market” idea is a dumbed-down caricature of this position.

All sides viewed the government as society’s “brain,” its forward planning organ. Given the complexity of modern technology, humanity would shape its own evolution. Instead of evolution occurring by “primitive accumulation,” it could be planned deliberately. Individualists countered that no human planner was sufficiently imaginative to manage the complexity of markets, but endorsed the need to strip away all forms of unearned income – economic rent and the rise in land prices that Mill called the “unearned increment.” This involved government regulation to shape markets. A “free market” was an active political creation and required regulatory vigilance.

As public relations advocates for the vested interests and special rentier privilege, today’s “neoliberal” advocates of “free” markets seek to maximize economic rent – the free lunch of price in excess of cost-value, not to free markets from rentier charges. So misleading a pedigree only could be achieved by outright suppression of knowledge of what Locke, Smith and Mill really wrote. Attempts to regulate “free markets” and limit monopoly pricing and privilege are conflated with “socialism,” even with Soviet-style bureaucracy. The aim is to deter the analysis of what a “free market” really is: a market free of unnecessary costs: monopoly rents, property rents and financial charges for credit that governments can create freely.

Political reform to bring market prices in line with socially necessary cost-value was the great economic issue of the 19th century. The labor theory of intrinsic cost-value found its counterpart in the theory of economic rent: land rent, monopoly price gouging, interest and other returns to special privilege that increased market prices purely by institutional property claims. The discussion goes all the way back to the medieval Churchmen defining Just Price. The doctrine originally was applied to the proper fees that bankers could charge, and later was extended to land rent, then to the monopolies that governments created and sold off to creditors in an attempt to extricate themselves from debt.

Reformists and more radical socialists alike sought to free capitalism of its egregious inequities, above all its legacy from Europe’s Dark Age of military conquest when invading warlords seized lands and imposed an absentee landlord class to receive the rental income, which was used to finance wars of further land acquisition. As matters turned out, hopes that industrial capitalism could reform itself along progressive lines to purge itself of its legacy from feudalism have come crashing down. World War I hit the global economy like a comet, pushing it into a new trajectory and catalyzing its evolution into an unanticipated form of finance capitalism.

It was unanticipated largely because most reformers spent so much effort advocating progressive policies that they neglected what Thorstein Veblen called the vested interests. Their Counter-Enlightenment is creating a world that would have been deemed a dystopia a century ago – something so pessimistic that no futurist dared depict a world run by venal and corrupt bankers, protecting as their prime customers the monopolies, real estate speculators and hedge funds whose economic rent, financial gambling and asset-price inflation is turned into a flow of interest in today’s rentier economy. Instead of industrial capitalism increasing capital formation we are seeing finance capitalism strip capital, and instead of the promised world of leisure we are being drawn into one of debt peonage.

The financial travesty of democracy

The financial sector has redefined democracy by claiming claims that the Federal Reserve must be “independent” from democratically elected representatives, in order to act as the bank lobbyist in Washington. This makes the financial sector exempt from the democratic political process, despite the fact that today’s economic planning is now centralized in the banking system. The result is a regime of insider dealings and oligarchy – rule by the wealthy few.

The economic fallacy at work is that bank credit is a veritable factor of production, an almost Physiocratic source of fertility without which growth could not occur. The reality is that the monopoly right to create interest-bearing bank credit is a free transfer from society to a privileged elite. The moral is that when we see a “factor of production” that has no actual labor-cost of production, it is simply an institutional privilege.

So this brings us to the most recent debate about “nationalizing” or “socializing” the banks. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) so far has been used for the following uses that I think can be truly deemed anti-social, not “socialist” in any form.

By the end of last year, $20 billion was used to pay bonuses and salaries to financial mismanagers, despite the plunge of their banks into negative equity. And to protect their interests, these banks continued to pay lobbying fees to persuade legislators to give them yet more special privileges.

While Citibank and other major institutions threatened to bring the financial system crashing down by being “too big to fail,” over $100 billion of TARP funds was used to make them even bigger. Already teetering banks bought affiliates that had grown by making irresponsible and outright fraudulent loans. Bank of America bought Angelo Mozilo’s Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch, while JP Morgan Chase bought Bear Stearns and other big banks bought WaMu and Wachovia.

Today’s policy is to “rescue” these giant bank conglomerates by enabling them to “earn” their way out of debt – by selling yet more debt to an already over-indebted U.S. economy. The hope is to re-inflate real estate and other asset prices. But do we really want to let banks “pay back taxpayers” by engaging in yet more predatory financial practices vis-à-vis the economy at large? It threatens to maximize the margin of market price over direct costs of production, by building in higher financial charges. This is just the opposite policy from trying to bring prices for housing and infrastructure in line with technologically necessary costs. It certainly is not a policy to make the U.S. economy more globally competitive.

The Treasury’s plan to “socialize” the banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions is simply to step in and take bad loans off their books, shifting the loss onto the public sector. This is the antithesis of true nationalization or “socialization” of the financial system. The banks and insurance companies quickly got over their initial knee-jerk fear that a government bailout would occur on terms that would wipe out their bad management, along with the stockholders and bondholders who backed this bad management. The Treasury has assured these mismanagers that “socialism” for them is a free gift. The primacy of finance over the rest of the economy will be affirmed, leaving management in place and giving stockholders a chance to recover by earning more from the economy at large, with yet more tax favoritism. (This means yet heavier taxes shifted onto consumers, raising their living costs accordingly.)

The bulk of wealth under capitalism – as under feudalism –always has come primarily from the public domain, headed by the land and formerly public utilities, capped most recently by the Treasury’s debt-creating power. In effect, the Treasury creates a new asset ($11 trillion of new Treasury bonds and guarantees, e.g. the $5.2 trillion to Fannie and Freddie). Interest on these bonds is to be paid by new levies on labor, not on property. This is what is supposed to re-inflate housing, stock and bond prices – the money freed from property and corporate taxes will be available to be capitalized into yet new loans.

So the revenue hitherto paid as business taxes will still be paid – in the form of interest – while the former taxes will still be collected, but from labor. The fiscal-financial burden thus will be doubled. This is not a program to make the economy more competitive or raise living standards for most people. It is a program to polarize the U.S. economy even further between finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) at the top and labor at the bottom.

Neoliberal denunciations of public regulation and taxation as “socialism” is really an attack on classical political economy – the “original” liberalism whose ideal was to free society from the parasitic legacy of feudalism. A truly socialized Treasury policy would be for banks to lend for productive purposes that contribute to real economic growth, not merely to increase overhead and inflate asset prices by enough to extract interest charges. Fiscal policy would aim to minimize rather than maximizing the price of home ownership and doing business, by basing the tax system on collecting the rent that is now being paid out as interest. Shifting the tax burden off wages and profits onto rent and interest was the core of classical political economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the Progressive Era and Social Democratic reform movements in the United States and Europe prior to World War I. But this doctrine and its reform program has been buried by the rhetorical smokescreen organized by financial lobbyists seeking to muddy the ideological waters sufficiently to mute popular opposition to today’s power grab by finance capital and monopoly capital. Their alternative to true nationalization and socialization of finance is debt peonage, oligarchy and neo-feudalism. They have called this program “free markets.”

Visit Michael Hudson’s site

photo credit: sparr0

Inventors or Speculators

An interview with James Murray (Centre for Policy Development) skates thru the GFC, highlighting the trillions in goodwill on the books. Also covered is a touch on Obama radiance and how local rents are jacked up pre-uni year to extort the market. What’s the solution – join our podcasters!

Show Notes

Workers must restrain from wage claims – said Rudd on Monday, levelling concern at employers, the capitalists.
What about the most important determinant to human endeavour – the landlord sector?
A 3% cut in interest rates since GFC
How has the fed thru to help investor Landlords?
Example: $350K loan to buy an investment property (using ING Loan calculator)

• standard principal + interest loan

$687 p/m saving in interest payments (6.19 – 9.19%)

• interest only (more popular for investor class)

$880 p/m savings

But yet continual reports that rents are being jacked up! A colleague had her cosy (3 BRM) Brunswick apartment increased by $300 to $2000 p/m last week. And who is getting the bailout?

Is this happening as we approach the university year and student demand peaks? What are we to do about it?

If we were to increase the holding charge on land
- the 175 vacant properties found in carlton would soon hit the market, forcing down rents.

Obama’s Sober Sermon on the Steps

For me, the most compelling moment of the speech came when he quoted the Bible. While we remain a young nation, he said, “the time has come to set aside childish things.”

Our “badly weakened economy” as a consequence of not just “greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

“prefer leisure over work” and “seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.”

Time to grow up.

honoring “the doers, the makers of things.” As opposed to those who make thing up — like, say, credit default swaps.

“This Land Is Your Land” Like Woody Wrote It

At the conclusion of today’s concert for president-elect Barack Obama 89-year-old Pete Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen for a sing-along with perhaps half a million people of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which I dare say practically everyone in the country knows from childhood.

Full Lyrics

This Land Is Your Land
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

Chorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

I’ve roamed and rambled and I’ve followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said – no tress passin’
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Chorus

In the squares of the city – In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office – I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.

Chorus (2x)

Who is a HRD?

The term ‘Human Rights Defender’ generally refers to “people who, individually or with others, act to promote or protect human rights”. The most obvious example of HRDs are non-governmental organizations (NGO), or
individual activists who campaign for the realization of human rights on a daily basis.

HRDs do not, however, need to work in the field of human rights consistently.

Music

Saltwater Queen – The Battle for Land and Sea
Woodie Guthrie – This Land is Your Land

Following our recent visit to Vanuatu, a colleague put this together, reflecting the heartfelt concern ni-Van’s have for their rapidly dwindling land ownership. Just 29 years since independence, only 11% of land in Villa is locally owned.

As Morris Kaloran states: “No matter what factory they use, they cant make any more dirt.”

We will be announcing a number of initiatives to assist this movement during the course of this year

photo credit: James Willamor

Michael Hudson explores the analogous nature of Ponzi schemes and the property bubble. How is wealth created in the modern era? Through hard word, through who you know or what you ‘flip’?

December 23, 2008

Last week the Good Lord evidently realized that not enough people had been reading Hyman Minsky’s explanation of how financial cycles end in Ponzi schemes – the stage in which banks keep the boom going by lending their customers the money to pay interest and thus avoid default. So He sent Bernie Madoff to dominate the news for a week and give the mass media an opportunity to familiarize newspaper readers and TV watchers with just how Ponzi Schemes work. What Mr. Madoff did was, in a nutshell, what the economy as a whole has been doing under the moniker “wealth creation.”

If the media were able to wait until as late in the financial collapse as last week to provide helpful diagrams about how Ponzi schemes need to keep on growing exponentially, it is simply because bad foreign financial news is not deemed newsworthy in North America. But Europe has been having its own run-throughs, headed by Spain – which by no coincidence is now experiencing the biggest real estate bust outside of the post-Soviet economies.

The best case study occurred two years ago. On May 9, 2006, Spanish police raided 21 homes and offices of Afinsa Fienes Tangibles SA, the world’s largest postage-stamp dealer, and rival firm, Forum Filatélico. They charged eleven men with running a $6.4 billion pyramid scheme that took in some 343,000 investors – 1 percent of Spain’s entire population, making the fraud one of the largest in Spanish history.[1]

Read more