2013: Turning Point in the Long Western Decadence

http://watchingamerica.com/News/228734/2013-turning-point-inthe-long-western-decadence/

If militarization is not economically sustainable, we have to ask ourselves if there is any logic, some superior rationality, that explains this phenomenon.

2013: Turning Point in the Long Western Decadence
BolPress, Bolivia
By Jorge Beinstein
Translated By Tristan Foy
7 December 2013
Edited by Bora Mici

The "global crisis" — as it is still called — continues its course, becoming ever deeper over the years, wearing away at the institutions of the central powers, breaking the economic and cultural connections that have united these societies, plainly visible as decadence, like a process of general irreversible deterioration. It is also reaching the so-called "emerging countries," shattering the myth of capitalist rejuvenation from the outside, of the bourgeois improvement of Western neoliberalism, thanks to intervention by the state.

The years 2008 and 2013 constitute periods where the decline of capitalism sped up; in both cases, the origin of the disaster was the imperial center, which later spread to the network of the global system. We could establish an even more precise period and set the months — September 2008 and September to October 2013 — as the "moments" when universal history sharply accelerated, when the accumulation of deterioration produced a large jump of quantity into quality. From the point of view of the system's masters, it is possible to speak of "annus horribilis," namely, years of great disgraces, although from the side of the victims, the thousands of millions of human beings who go unnoticed on the bourgeois planet, we can speak of "annus mirabilis," periods where the system advances clearly toward its ruin, that is to say, with "wonderful" events that encourage hope in the possibility of achieving a better world.

On Sept. 15, 2008, in the United States, the financial giant Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, and the American International Group, considered the world leader of insurance and financial services, needed to be rescued by the Federal Reserve. The crisis caused by the collapse of the U.S. real estate bubble spread rapidly, bursting other real estate and stock exchange bubbles in Europe and Asia, and the governments of the large powers poured in several trillion dollars in the following years to stop the world economy’s international financial system's foundation from flooding. They were unable to understand its prior dynamics, much less the productive structures, but they were able to avoid the danger through postponement.

And so it has been from 2008 onward: The global financial mass, which was expanding at an exponential rate, stopped growing, and, in fact, experienced a gentle decrease. It is what we confirm when we compare the speculation of "financial derivatives" — the heart of global financial parasitism — with the gross world product. In mid-1998, these businesses amounted to around 2.4 times the global face value, coming to around 4.3 times toward the end of 2002, 8.5 times at the end of 2006, and 11.7 times by the middle of 2008, in complete speculative delusion, slowly dropping from then: to 10.5 at the end of 2009, 10.6 by mid-2011, falling to 8.9 at the end of 2012 and 8.6 by mid-2013.