Geopolitical Knowledge Gaps

Here Danny Haiphong talks to India and Global Left perpetrating macroeconomic myths. This is not good. However, I am being picky. Mostly I like listening to Danny’s takes on geopolitics. But like a few other geopolitical webcasts who shall not be named${}^\dagger$ he gets monetary economics completely backwards sometimes.

${}^\dagger$But check out the excellent The Burning Archives .

Is it too “extremist MMT” 🤣 to write “completely backwards” there"? Probs. But I’m going for complete alienation here! It’s a Ministry of Silly Walks Strategy. The one person with “millieeeeeons” of dollars and a twisted mind who agrees with me might give me an annual pittance stipend to continue writing for their personal weekend pleasure.

Aren’t the Myths Stealthy?

Is there a case for the noble “White Lie” here?${}^\ddagger$

I think not. I think quite the opposite. An informed electorate is one which never needs to fight fascism in the street in the first place. Remember the Weimar lesson. Fascism feeds off many things, but one big tasty junk food meal for them is public ignorance of macroeconomics. Thatcher’s “tax payer funded” myth helps them. It is the antithesis of a leftist noble white Lie. I do not know any leftist noble white lies.

${}^\ddagger$Holy smoke, can you taste the irony?

Using the “tax payer dollars are funding this” myth is just right-wing, period. It does not mean you are right-wing. It just means you are unwittingly enabling their neo-reactionary monarchist 𖨚𖦙𖥣𖢧.

Today it is the petrodollar myth, one of the puny little boys of leftist myth-making. I guess you could say it does not detract too much from the main points Danny and the host were making, but I would argue it does!

Why?

Because having a good moral geopolitics and macroeconomic justice frame is a good thing, but it is tragic if you cannot explain to people why US/Western hegemony and political dominance is based largely on quicksand. It can all disappear under (without harming any US citizens, except in relative terms the top One Percent) very rapidly. We are talking maybe even months. But it would require everyone to understand the monetary systems of central governments.

While it helps keep me busy in vain trying to educate people on MMT from a spiritual point of view, I still do not like the tragedy of it all when the Left shoot themselves in the head (more on this in a sec.) even if the bullets are nerf balls.

The Good Ol’ Hegemonic Petrodollar

The politics of oil is very frickin’ bad and nasty, and so important. But maybe all the more reason why I do not appreciate myths being peddled. Even when hearts are in the right place. They distract from the real core rot in geopolitics, which is stuff like unnecessary crap, pointless energy consumption for the sake of “growth” for no particular reason. (The reason given is “falling rate of profit” otherwise, which is ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ.)

We survive today because of oil. We cannot do without it near-term, without oil the working class would tomorrow be living in darkness and starvation. We can stop burning the stuff if the engineers got cracking on building nuclear and geothermal power utilities. But this cannot remove our modern dependence on oil. We need oil for chemical feedstocks. Weaning off oil is not simple thing. The politics of oil will thus still be with us probably long after climate catastrophe is averted, if it can still be averted. I say “probably” because there is a good case to be made that oil politics is so closely associated with climate crisis that to solve the latter would mean eliminating the nasty stuff about the former. (I do not mean to incite defeatism here!)

When the host mentioned the “petrodollar” I had my say in the comments. It is perhaps a minor issue but you can judge for yourself the weight of false psychology. I personally think understanding why the petrodollar is a myth is an important part of any nation’s knowledge bank for avoiding dependency on the USA.

I wrote to India and Global Left:

@12:00 there is no such thing as a petrodollar. Not that it is the worst myth of normie macroeconomics, but it isn’t a good one either. What do you even mean by the term for a start? We in New Zealand import over half our oil, we mark-up the exporter’s bank account by having ours marked-down in NZD. They convert to their currency. Same for anyone. The Saudis desire USD because they do not understand their own currency and desire extremely low taxes. With bare minimum taxation they cannot use the riyal for domestic full employment without incurring inflation risk. So they use the foreigners currency to get imports etc. without politically intolerable inflation of riyal denominated prices. But it is just a convoluted way to ensure decent real terms of trade but with all the overhead false psychology-of-money, which is not good, and miss-fires people’s geopolitical neurons.

I continued:
It distracts attention of activists from what US hegemony really derives from. In fact it contributes to aiding US hegemony. If you buy in to the common rhetoric the US dollar is a “global reserve currency” and is what enables the USA to be hegemonic economically, you simply do not understand reality. The USA needs people to be completely ignorant on the monetary system. If people understood what the US dollar is, they’d not have a bar of it, and the IMF/WB would be completely defanged — without anyone in the US Congress lifting a finger to help us.

(I skip many nuances of realpolitik, but that’s all a youtube comment can offer, you need to research this stuff yourself properly and not regurgitate normie economics myths.)

I’d just say sprinkling around the phrase “petrodollars” like it means anything (other than “false psychology”) is incredibly stupid and shows a lot of ignorance and laziness which is tragic.

I added for sarcastic emphasis,

If you can weld steel and erect timber and pour concrete out of USD scorepoints in a FED TSy account, then yes, you can build beach property with USD earned from selling oil. No workers or machines in sight, right? Magical thinking.

I know that’s a bit juvenile, but I honestly think sometimes such obvious things need to be stated, even though the comedic irony score is low. I am sure I need people to hit me over the head sometimes too when I stray from my topics of expertise. ((Look: The Barbie movie (2023) was not anti-capitalist. Radiohead are mathematically provably the greatest artists of all time. I am pretty sure I am right about the Barbie movie. But I did not see it, so… not my expertise. I have no aesthetic expertise in music composition at all, but I can still mathematically prove the statement about Radiohead.🤣))

Why the “falling rate of profit” is ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ

I thought that remark above might trigger some lefties, so I think I should defend myself. If you focus on profits denominated in the State unit of account then you are being misdirected. Call it a CIA Op, even though the CIA do not do a thing for this one. It is an autoleft-psy Op.

What rapacious capitalism does, and is doing, is causing breakneck production of a lot of crap, but also rapaciously nice things like smartphones, villas and golf courses, and also slightly cool but terrifying things no one ever needs like trips into low Earth orbits, and whatnot. And it matters not whether one damn iota of any of this generates monetary profits or not. It is generating ecological debt, period. Real debt, and the currency has nothing to do with it. And while the working class do not get their fair share, we should not want a share in the fruits of rapaciousness. A nice eco house next-ish to a golf course is good enough, I do not need to own the golf course, no one should.

Total ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗𝔰 (a Gaelic technical word) will use any unit of account for this, they just do not care. You have to appreciate how workers get soooo badly exploited it is worse than you can ever imagine. “Not even funny” does not even capture it.

People lack a capacity to comprehend the difference between one million and one billion, mainly I think because adding three zeroes seems psychologically like a small step. “I can get there too one day with my bank account!” No you can not!

This is why I gagged recently when Kim Stanley Robinson almost seemed to give Bill Gates the “autism out” excuse. Like being a nerd excuses the incapacity to realize one is exploiting workers for one’s own gain? (I’d be slightly more ok with the “Freud excuse” — his daddy was a total ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗, or 90% ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗, and instilled total ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗 values in young Bill. Only 90% because the Gates neurons seem to have been trained on data to realize taxes can be a good thing and not in order to fund government but because rich ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗𝔰 are too damn ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗-ridden.)

More Tragedy from Yanis

Again, I believe I am being thoroughly nit-picky. But I still think a case can be made that this sort of false information, even though seemingly innocuous and “innocent” does the Left harm, needlessly. It’s not like (imagining I am in a position of power and influence 🤣) that I am demanding a purity test. I just don’t want to hear any stupid 𖨚𖦙𖥣𖢧 from people I respect and admire.

You know, because you need to remotely prepare your heroes so when you meet them they do not disappoint. I mam working on this for Neil Turok.

Hereabouts Yanis does a good take-down of cryptocurrency and libertarian general nonsense. But right at the end he slips in,

“Money can never by anything other than State money.”

Doh! 🤦🏽 What are you doing Yanis?

If you want the Extremist MMT Handbook concept of “money” (which is the One true concept), it is:

Definition: Money is everywhere and always an I.O.U of the issuer.

By this definition Yanis was fibbing.

However, for those experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance, Yanis is not wrong in practical terms for geopolitics. At the geopolitical level we are talking the only currencies of any importance are State currencies. The rest of what Yanis said was true, but I would have said it in much stronger terms — because I can — Yanis cannot, since he is dim. I can say,

Crypto is not even currency!

What is crypto. It can be many things to many people, but essentially crypto is a certificate for solving a completely useless hard math puzzle.

All the rest — ponzi scheme; means for rich ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗𝔰 to siphon money off suckers; means for a few lucky ꕗꗇꕷꖡꗇ𐝥ꕒꕷ to delusionally think they can get rich quick and actually luckily do; a black marketeers dream token; a drug dealers way to avoid needing a Caymans Island bank account number; a way of accelerating climate change;… are all also true to some or varying degrees on a case-by-case basis. Where is any of the liberation in any of this?

Also, damn it! It really frickin’ annoys me when lefties laud “The Blockchain” — as Varoufakis does. I cannot say politely how stupid that is. The Blockchain is not an awesome algorithm nor fantastic pinnacle of 20th century ledger software engineering, it would not rank among the top 1000 most useful algorithms. It is anti-human.

Anything good you can do with Blockchain ledgers you can do far better, with better outcomes, with more decent incentives, by trusting people and in turn being honest. It is not rocket science or deep mathematics. (Although trustworthiness and honesty cannot even be mathematicized, so are deeper than deep mathematics, but the point is, it comes to human beings naturally without great effort when we are not living in precarity.)

Apologies

I have lost the energy to expand on the thesis that getting small little things wrong about monetary systems is actually a frickin’ huge deal, and is leftism shooting itself in the brain. It is not (yet) leftists shooting ourselves in the heart. I understand that, and that might be a good place to finish today.

Things in Left spaces could get to the heartless place though, and I worry a lot about this. Once you give up on realism and start imagining magical revolution in your head, and imagining your utopia is the only good one, and imagining money does not matter, you can get to heartless places. Part of the spiritual condition is valuing wisdom over raw knowledge. The knowledge is however still needed, it is wise to acquire knowledge. It is then in a real sense heartless to try to foment revolution without wisdom about what you and your army are going to do about records of social obligations.

(Think I am making too much of this? Extremist MMT Handbook dude!🤣 Get it on your Amazon Kindle State Surveillance device today for only $9.99 petrodollars.)

You understand Ōhanga Pai now?

Money is a spiritual concept. But no one realizes (bar a few amazing anthropologists and weirdo dirtbags like myself). Such ignorance is one needless source of great suffering.