Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

The Turner Radio Network has obtained "stress test" results for the top 19 Banks in the USA. The stress tests were conducted to determine how well, if at all, the top 19 banks in the USA could withstand further or future economic hardship. When the tests were completed, regulators within the Treasury and inside the Federal Reserve began bickering with each other as to whether or not the test results should be made public. That bickering continues to this very day as evidenced by this media report

The Turner Radio Network has obtained "stress test" results for the top 19 Banks in the USA.

The stress tests were conducted to determine how well, if at all, the top 19 banks in the USA could withstand further or future economic hardship.

When the tests were completed, regulators within the Treasury and inside the Federal Reserve began bickering with each other as to whether or not the test results should be made public. That bickering continues to this very day as evidenced by this "main stream media" report.

The Turner Radio Network has obtained the stress test results. They are very bad. The most salient points from the stress tests appear below.

1) Of the top nineteen (19) banks in the nation, sixteen (16) are already technically insolvent.

2) Of the 16 banks that are already technically insolvent, not even one can withstand any disruption of cash flow at all or any further deterioration in non-paying loans.

3) If any two of the 16 insolvent banks go under, they will totally wipe out all remaining FDIC insurance funding..

4) Of the top 19 banks in the nation, the top five (5) largest banks are under capitalized so dangerously, there is serious doubt about their ability to continue as ongoing businesses..

5) Five large U.S. banks have credit exposure related to their derivatives trading that exceeds their capital, with four in particular - JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Bank America and Citibank - taking especially large risks..

6) Bank of America`s total credit exposure to derivatives was 179 percent of its risk-based capital; Citibank`s was 278 percent; JPMorgan Chase`s, 382 percent; and HSBC America`s, 550 percent. It gets even worse: Goldman Sachs began reporting as a commercial bank, revealing an alarming total credit exposure of 1,056 percent, or more than ten times its capital!.

7) Not only are there serious questions about whether or not JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs,Citibank, Wells Fargo, Sun Trust Bank, HSBC Bank USA, can continue in business, more than 1,800 regional and smaller institutions are at risk of failure despite government bailouts!

The debt crisis is much greater than the government has reported. The FDIC`s "Problem List" of troubled banks includes 252 institutions with assets of $159 billion. 1,816 banks and thrifts are at risk of failure, with total assets of $4.67 trillion, compared to 1,568 institutions, with $2.32 trillion in total assets in prior quarter..

Put bluntly, the entire US Banking System is in complete and total collapse.

Fiona: Oh dear, Justin, I read something about this in the last few days which included, among other things, that Turner is a self-promoting white supremicist who "engineered" the leak himself. Don't have time to search just now - can anyone help me here?

The usefulness of thought is that it should provide a light and a map. We are progressing and our recent incredible wealth is as a result of widespread use of plentiful energy. But we are also spiritually empty having gone to the well and returned full. So we reject some aspects of progress and move on. But the great philosopher of today is the TV. Those who control it, control the map and are the light, for 90% of the developed world. Who controls them? Capital is uncontrolled except by the "owner" who is actually, often the titular manager of the capital.

We have allowed corporate persons controlled by humans to control our destiny. This is unwise. With such funds through laundering havens, governments have been subverted. Blackmail is used to control those who should be independent and suicide visits those who refuse to shut up. The trails exist in bank records.

That system is now broken but who is to fill the apparent vacuum? Democracy is merely representational and reflects the capital system in that the managers/representatives are actually in charge. The strengths of a democracy are much weakened. A theocracy for the world?

There are two types of people: those who give their power to others, who claim it. Why not give machines a chance to decide? Or a hidden government which is accountable only to itself?

What do they mean when they promise us a New World Order? Will it leave us free to find deeper meaning in teams?

Hegel once said  "To be a philosopher one must first be a Spinozist". Bertrand Russell claims the Hegel's system would have never been had it not been for Kant. Will Durant claims "to be a philosopher, one must first have been a Kantian." The dialects of philosophy?

The dialectical process according to Hegel is a continuum where the later stages contain all the previous stages and to understand the whole one must understand all the steps of the dialectic. But what do we really understand, what do we really know?

Dialectics is a term that can be easily defined and understood within our neat and tidy minds, yet to use dialectics to make sense of our complex real world (as we know it, epistemologically speaking) is a fools errand; well, it is to me. I reckon Lao Tzu would agree.

It is interesting that we are attempting to use philosophy to understand economics. Just recently the blogger Caz posted a link to Our Epistemological Depression by Professor Jerry Muller who made an attempt to understand the collective stupidity of the Wall Street banksters and the US Government / regulators using theories of knowledge; a little too sophisticated for my liking.

Are we being a little too clever by attempting to make practical sense of our current political and financial reality by resorting to dialectics and epistemology?

In my neat and tidy mind I have come to conclude two things in relation to current events. One political and one financial yet both are intimately related, in a very unhealthy way.

1, The Political Problem - simply speaking our democracy is stuffed, especially democracy as we see it in the US. Democracy as practised today is more of an oligarchy, government by the few - the few being the political elite and their corporate puppet masters/financiers. I suppose  the US is more of a plutocracy and that plutocracy has trashed their constitution and engaged in many illegal activities, including stupid wars for the benefit of the few. Much has been written on this topic already and it is hard to disagree.

Maybe this explains why we are in the mess we are. To paraphrase Plato, "Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principal... oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth." For those paying attention it would appear Plato was/is somewhat on the money.

2, The Financial Problem - simply speaking money has become "the thing in itself". We have been subject to the perversions of financial capitalism inflicted on us by financial corporations (and their puppets - our governments)  that have become "too big to fail" - or so they tell us. You simply cannot create wealth by building a house of debt/credit. Wealth is created by producing stuff and providing real services we need, or don't need but want. Western democracies have allowed the economic rationalists (global corporations and their bidders) to run the show. Of course this has not been lost on communist/capitalist China that has done very nicely indeed by making stuff we need and stuff we think we need.

Money is the catalyst for production (productive capitalism as opposed to financial capitalism); production creates jobs and a healthy community; when money becomes the thing in itself the system implodes - as we are witnessing today. The taxpayer will take / is taking the fall - as was always going to be the case. At present the financial infrastructure in the US is being kept together by dodgy accounting and taxpayer "donations" to the greedy and incompetent few.

Understanding dialectics or epistemology will not be much use in solving our current problems. Understanding and returning to basic business and democratic fundamentals will. Somehow the powers that be have conveniently muddied the water to our detriment.

The Taoists understand dialectics in a wonderful Way. Ying and Yang, or thesis + antithesis = The Way, a process that is and always will be unknowable and indefinable by us mortal souls.

Only a revolution will save us now; we must get back to basics rather than back to university.

Jay, it is true that truth may reside in more than one location, but still the truth is a unity. It cannot, by definition, be untruth.

Eliot, because something is processive, it should not be inferred from this that it must have a purpose.

I suspect that while thinking of things as bipolar, with truth lying somewhere between the two ends of a string is sometimes useful, truth is closer to a  pantheon, a smorgasbord, or a wardrobe-full of clothes that one changes to fit the occasion.

One model that I’ve found very useful for expressing critical theory/ the journey to enlightenment is that of William Perry . As a kid I’d sometimes wonder what contained the universe. I’d get an unpleasant empty feeling in my heart, and decided I really didn’t want to think about it. Perry’s model suggests that the truly enlightened realise that the tank is empty but continue driving.

Has anyone consider that whether a person is conservative or liberal may very well be 50% genetic, 30% environmental (20% of it before the age of 5) 5% intellectual analysis and the other 15% random?

Fiona: Congratulations, Jay - no formatting problems whatsoever.

By definition, any dialectical system is teleological.

A teleological school of thought is one that holds all things to be designed for or directed toward a final result, that there is an inherent purpose or final cause for all that exists.

Not proximal, physical causes mind you - but some over-riding Destiny that is unfolding. Some cosmic final destination.

That's a metaphysical proposition, and not one that is accessible to empirical demonstration.

Religion is a good example of a teleological system

However, the major empirical predictions made in the name of the most famous secular dialectical system, that of Karl Marx, a system actually based on Hegel, have by and large have not been anyway realised.

The idea that History has a Purpose is an anthropocentric nonsense, and it's about time dialecticians faced up to it.

Dialecticism is stupid.

My article ‘Hegel for Beginners’ has provoked comment, although I must say that the remarks are more directed at Hegel than what I had to say about criticism. I am not sure I would even want to take umbrage at all of these comments on the limitations of Hegel’s thought, but my point is that Hegel made a very important distinction between kinds of criticism that I feel is crucial in dealing with current social, economic and political events. The approach of judging some particular socio-economic theory on the basis of its practical shortcomings and then advocating a replacement is strictly limited in terms of social action and it is blind to the possibility of any real social understanding. In contrast, the critical task I suggest is to understand the historical circumstances which made this socio-economic theory a necessity. Hegel is quite right in this, whatever may be the limitations of his overall thought.

The first of my commentators, John Pratt, begins by quoting from a web article called What is the Hegelian Dialectic? by Niki Raapana and Nordica Friedrich (October 2005). Paul Walter suggests that this article is a bit reductionist. I would go much further. My objection to it is that it is not a scholarly text. Instead, I would direct any readers who want to understand Hegel to the Stanford Internet Encyclopaedia as an immediately accessible option satisfying scholarly demands. Those who seek a clear, readable introduction to Hegel’s early thought cannot go past Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (Routledge, London, 1967). Some of this text is available free on the Web.

What I fear to see in this interchange is yet another example, albeit unintentional, of a common response to any suggestion of engaging with Hegel, a powerful conviction that he should not be considered, that his thought is possibly even dangerous, coupled with the most flimsy of reasons for such a strong sentiment. I detect elements of this kind of response in the interchange between Pratt and Walter, it is obvious in the writings of Raapana, but most notably it dominates the work of one of the most proclaimed British philosophers of the twentieth century, Sir Karl Popper, whose conviction that Hegel – along with Plato, Marx and Freud – is an implacable enemy of the ‘open society’ is made on the poorest of evidence and argumentation. This kind of response to Hegel brings to mind the words of the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, whom I paraphrase: ‘the will to condemn always seizes the most readily available implement.’

Popper’s critique of Hegel collapses before it begins. It rests on a fallacy – the fallacy of the straw man. A key idea of hermeneutics, the science of understanding, is that the hermeneutic task is complete when I can express in my words your ideas to your satisfaction. Then we have established an understanding and may proceed on common ground. This is precisely what Hegel’s condemners characteristically fail to do. In the case of Popper, he quite explicitly creates a conceptual model which he then demolishes through criticism, but the conceptual model bears no resemblance to the actual Hegel, as represented in his writings. For details of how Popper constructed this straw Hegel, see: From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy by Walter Kaufmann, Beacon Press, Boston 1959, in particular Chapter 7: The Hegel Myth and Its Method, pages 88-119. This too is available free on the Web. Let me summarise the salient points of Kaufmann’s criticisms. ‘Popper has relied largely on Scribner’s Hegel Selections, a little anthology for students that contains not a single complete work’, and he seems ‘unaware of crucial passages, if not entire works’, not included in this book. But far worse from Kaufmann’s perspective, ‘Sentences are picked from various contexts, often even out of different books, enclosed by a single set of quotation marks, and separated only by three dots, which are generally taken to indicate no more than the omission of a few words. Plainly, this device can be used to impute to an author views he never held.’ I won’t go on. I’ve made my point.

The interesting question is, why do people respond to Hegel in this way? I am not qualified to go into the individual motivations of particular critics and I don’t think the answer lies there anyway. I think the answer is to be found in the historical record. Here we find that Hegel’s ideas were dominant in European universities through the early decades of the nineteenth century, where they produced their critics, including the so-called ‘Left Hegelians’ or ‘young Hegelians’, as well as Marx and Engels, and Kierkegaard, the progenitor of existentialism. The dominant conservative interpretation focused on Hegel’s later works, which contain many of the features that antagonise Pratt, while neglecting his earlier works, particularly the Phenomenology of Spirit, which contain arguably the most advanced expression of liberal thought; Marcuse’s book concentrates on the young Hegel. Marxism and existentialism represent critical responses to Hegel, as in a different sense do the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but by the middle of the century a different attitude prevailed in the universities. Hegelianism was simply rejected and replaced, in Germany at first by neo-Kantianism, in Britain and increasingly the United States by philosophies based on the logical empiricism of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. There was a profound restructuring of the universities over this period and there was no place for Hegelianism in that process. In Germany, the goal of university education shifted from Humboldt’s notion of facilitating the self-actualisation and enculturation of the individual to the aim of producing technicians with the skills to operate in an increasingly technological world. There was no critical intellectual development from Hegel to Russell but rather a forgetting of the philosophical tradition, a kind of social amnesia. And, as with all amnesia, the constant problem is the return of the repressed.

I think it was Michel Foucault who remarked to the effect that every time we try to go beyond Hegel we find ourselves back before him. In his second set of comments on ‘Hegel for Beginners’, Pratt says, ‘I am trying to find an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic’, but isn’t this effectively the kind of approach Hegel criticised in distinguishing between abstract and determinate negation? Before we can abandon Hegel it behoves us to understand him.

I suppose I'm led back to the Prof. George Friedman Stratfor forecast Fiona Reynolds lent me, just at this juncture.

Here a framework was established by which certain proposals concerning mid century wars, technological advances and cultural changes were advanced.

But Friedman, an educated conservative, in no way expected his speculations to be taken as concrete, irreversible and immutable in the minutiae. They were musings as to what might "realistically" happen, in IR terms, given the accuracy of his framework based on the notion of the continuance rather than decline of the US as dominant, self interested and not entirely benevolent or self knowledgeable hegemon powered by the winds of economy, secular rationality, technology and a continued movement to cultural and social homogeneity.

A sort of "Playboy Lockheed Martin" type of thing, if that helps.

Friedman can't see changes to the dominant materialist capitalist neo-colonialist mode now operative for some time. He does not "rate" our current ecological crises, confident that techno fixes are within civilisation's grasp, and dismisses all religious fundamentalism as self -defeating, influential but not the determinant factor in the upcoming historical scenario.

The cataclysmic upheavals in the middle east he sees merely as another chapter, now becoming resolved within a wider historical process. This is to the extent that, confident of his scholarly framework, he is quite happy to acknowledge that the US has been quite happy to be as disruptive as possible in the middle east and all other locations across the globe, subordinate to the imperatives of US "Grand Policy".

No Huntingdonian cultural sentimentality tinged ideology here! The stuff is apparently realist and materialist, for hard-asses, but as unsafe as anything else when its underlying rationale and presumptions are not questioned.

For example, it remains possibly unconsciously or even expediently coloured by its writers own background as a Jewish conservative East-coast establishment academic. Is he happy to dismiss the long term upheavals of the Middle East as just a Jihadist scrub war manifestation of the cultural clash between secularism and modernism, and religious conservatism. That is, in the hope that the minimisation of its consideration enables his wider perspective even aspirations, to become self-fulfilling, for example.

Who does he hope, in his heart of hearts, triumphs between Palestine and Israel, for example? and he certainly does have a niche within American Establishment academia to guard - no telling how this factor could subconsciously impact on the framing of his model.

All this is a long way away from Hegel in the original context of the thread, but it does involve this human propensity to "know", including as a determinant in human affairs that colours human ability to predict and change according to theoretical, including arguably objective, frameworks.

OMG what have I done? I've woken an Hegelian from his slumber. Sorry to disturb your peace Trevor Maddock, but you may have noticed that the trajectory of what I've been writing is directed towards beginnings of critical theory rather than endings. In the meantime I've also been trying to club down the occasional neolib trog, or at least send them to the back of the cave so the light of rationality won't upset them with the play of shadows.

So far as I'm concerned these days the political project is as follows:

1. The maintenance of an intact ecology sufficient to allow the flourishing of all beings;

2. The maintenance of social life sufficiently democratic and reciprocally respectful to allow those who seek their own freedom to pursue that objective.

After that whatever others choose to do is entirely up to them. In other words after we have secured material conditions adequate to sustain human social life and curtailed human excesses enough to guarantee the life of other species then the matter of freedom is very much one of individual choice except in so far as the choice made does not curtail or limit the life options of others. To greater or lesser degree. The issue of exactly what are the conditions to sustain human social life is what has been at stake in these discussions of course. But more on that at some other point.

I agree with you that the history of the political economy of capital is considerably more complex than the format here allows but that is one of the limitations under which these discussions labour.

I daresay there will be more on this topic and I look forward to that but for now I'm off to a cabin on a mountaintop in the middle of what is categorised as "wilderness" for some respite. It is a romantic construction of nature to say that it is wilderness, for which understanding I have partly to thank Adorno, but wilderness is an aesthetic formation of nature that I enjoy a lot.

Cheers. Later.

I am trying to find an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic. This is as close as I can get.

We are all participants in the dialectic until we introduce absolutes such as ideas of right and wrong, or true and false for example

It seems to me that one man's right is another man's wrong. How do we meet somewhere in the middle? How do we find truth? It is only by discussion and an exchange of ideas that another man could show me that what I think is right today may in fact be wrong?

I think we need to accept that there are nearly always shades of grey and in fact sometimes what I think is right is wrong.

Whether we like it or not we are trapped in the Hegelian dialectic.

Followed your link, John, and found it a bit reductionist.

I'd have moved directly to the Feuerbach/Marxian corollary to Hegel, which advances Hegel beyond the point to which the idea of discourse can be employed to obfuscate and hold up.

Specifically, if the underlying ethics are crook, this a factor that must not remain immanent but form part of a conscious understanding of the correct dimensions of the discussion. Along with the realisation that in this form it remains, solely, a discussion (as with emission trading, no action!!)

Basically, capital, by its nature, applied in reality as a determinant based on oppression and theft, refuses compromise. Consider (nothing more than) emissions trading versus even a mild carbon tax, let alone sequestration of global resources to deal with the environmental disaster; and on a parallel movement involving a different manifestation, well-being of the global poor relating to the refusal even of Tobin taxes, for example, as part of the remedy.

We can have the goose a big bit dead or a little bit dead, but capital dictates its death as non- negotiable. We may find out later there were no golden eggs stuffed up the dead goose (plausible deniability), rather as we find, at the end of neoliberalism an environment bordering on ecological collapse and no hope of much advancement when ideology is so skewed with red herrings like the one on the link, as to split consensus even on preconditions for progress.

Israel "negotiating" over Palestine is another good analogy.

"We can talk, as long as you understand there is to be no fundamental change".

One seldom succeeds in negotiations from a position of weakness and ignorance, so I think that the future may be a bit rockier than some hope.

The Hegelian dialectic is the ridiculous idea that constant conflict and continual merging of opposite ideologies, as established by extreme right or left belief systems, will lead spiritual mankind into final perfection. (Americans understood man's spiritual quests to be outside the realm of government control). Hegel's brilliance rests in his ability to confuse and obfuscate the true motives of the planners, and millions of people world-wide have been trying to make sense of why it doesn't work for over 150 years. But like the AA definition of insanity, the world keeps trying it over and over expecting different results. ...

When Frederick Engels and Karl Marx based their communist theory on Hegel's theory of spiritual advancement via constant resolution of differences, they based the theory of communism on an unproven theory.

While Darwin's theory of evolution is still being debated, there's absolutely no proof that societies are continually evolving. When Engels and Marx later based their communist theory on Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of anthropology in 1877, they again based the theory of communism on an unprovable theory.

I think Hegel's idea  of societies continually evolving is close to the truth; otherwise we would all be living in caves.

We progress by trial and error. Those that develop the best social systems become dominant.  We have taken capitalism to its extreme. Now we need to evolve an alternative system by the merging of ideologies.

We must constantly evolve - it is a natural law.

By the way, what is the alternative?