I’ll hazard a guess that many
I'll hazard a guess that many in Occupy will be adopting nationalise the banks slogans, based upon arguments presented by the likes of Ellen Brown here. http://www.alternet.org/economy/its-interest-stupid-why-bankers-rule-world?paging=offWe should be ready to counter that interest is from the surplus value extracted from workers. A nationalised bank will be just as much a robber as a private one and it is irrelevant how the spoils are divided.Ellen Brown cites the examples of Australia, Canada and Argentina of a reduced interest burden but glaringly omits any evidence of its benefit to workers in those countries. She refers to Iceland. This quote explains all "I think that people have learned that money is not made in banks. It is made by real people working hard at real jobs. Actually, deep down we knew that all along. We just have to learn it again." Asbjorn Jonsson, an Icelandic fisherman.As Marx identified “So long as things go well, competition effects an operating fraternity of the capitalist class…so that each shares in the common loot in proportion to the size of his respective investment. But as soon as it is no longer a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses, everyone tries to reduce his own share to a minimum and to shove it off upon another. The class, as such, must inevitably lose. How much the individual capitalist must bear of the loss, ie, to what extent he must share in it at all, is decided by strength and cunning, and competition then becomes a fight among hostile brothers. The antagonism between each individual capitalist’s interests and those of the capitalist class as a whole, then comes to the surface…” Marx also pointed out that “the moneyed interest enriches itself at the cost of the industrial interest in the course of a crisis” Bankers are enriching themselves at the expense of industrial capitalist and workers, in other words. So whats new?Ellen Brown seeks a solution in the likes of the State Bank of North Dakota. That the bank owned by state authorities weathered the recession was perhaps more a reflection that the state’s economy which is primarily based on agriculture and oil, both involved in current boom times. Nor was the state particularly exposed to the sub-prime disaster “North Dakota really didn’t participate in subprime to a significant degree. I mean, that was–you know, it was sort of a flyover state. All of the aggressive subprime lenders apparently didn’t think there were enough folks in farms that they could get to lever up to take on these dodgy loans.”http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6239 Yves Smith. author of the book ECONned and creator of the website NakedCapitalism.com She wants to fix capitalism but revolutionaries want to abolish it. Some in Occupy will be impressed by her seemingly easy fix – we should rebut it vigourously.