What comes after nations is oceans. There is no system that knows where every ship is, not even with satellite oversight. We don’t know as much about ocean space as we do about “outer” space, some tell us. Thinking about it gives new meaning to the idea of monetary liquidity.
The useful thing about manufacturing everything in other countries on other continents is that they have to cross the ocean, which introduces all sorts of forces both in actuality and the bookkeeping of capital. Much that travels the ocean is in bulk in the holds of ships, but in modern times we’ve invented an ingenious way to convert masses of manufactured goods into numbers: shipping containers.
Better than boxcars, but keeping the shape and size, the stacks of shipping containers — cliffs and canyons overshadowed by giant cranes and lit by floodlights — are a bonanza for cinematographers filming menace and shootouts.
By being uniform in size and handling, distinguished and recorded only by number codes, even bar codes that can be read electronically, shipping containers can even go from ocean liners to railroads or trucks without ever being opened, totally secret. Even people can be shipped in them, though far from safely. There are gestures towards trying to detect radioactivity or bomb materials, maybe cadaver dogs.
The crime series writers have a field day with this, and even they have connected it to the practice of re-invoicing or substituting lower quality goods. Every point of moving from ship to railroad to truck, is an opportunity for deceit and swindle. Movies of European crime shows connect this to the government, but it’s too risky in the States — maybe. At least one of my French crime series was rumored to have been shut down by the government because it was too real.
American politicians, particularly Republican senators, are masters of diverting ideas as well as money. They provide many red herrings, sometimes without intending to, like the constant stream of moral rot, drugs and sex. The dark side of the Rule of Law is a lack of the morality that makes rules work and prevents self-serving profiteering, but also opens the door to blackmail and simple unclear thinking even in ordinary matters. In the end the goal exceeds mere accumulation of money and begins to be need of control, oppression of others who might be threats. NOW we’re on mafia territory. Putin’s main rival is in intensive care, evidently after being poisoned. He’s not the first.
The diversion of resource-generated funds is the bigger protectorate that has covered for local shake-downs like Trump’s concrete monopoly in a time of skyscrapers, which — by the way — is over now and people are beginning to wonder what will happen since now that we know how to commute online we know we don’t have to travel on a subway vulnerable to flooding in order to wait for an elevator to a high floor in a building that makes a good target.
In fact, there are a LOT of questions to ask: If money is only bookkeeping, why couldn’t the government simply rule that all interest on debts should be cancelled? Or cancel all debts? Or rule all the offshore money that is only credits rather than actual solid existing objects to not be money anymore.
Money is a human invention, not a “real” thing. It is controlled by social agreement which ideally asks it to abide by the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law is not a “real” thing. It is social agreement usually enforced by penalties and general contempt for those who don’t keep the rules. For dictators, neither influence exists since such matters are to them irrelevant. Their control includes mind control.
But Natural Law, like gravity, cannot be ignored away. We are approaching the limits of resources, esp. for the rare trace elements that make the like of cell phones possible to invent. When people hit the limits of resources, they begin to get ruthless and destroy whatever it is the way. This can lead to the re-examination of the Rule of Law, which hits the limits of public tolerance. But there is a little time before people figure out what’s happening.
Now we talk about the end of the oil economy rather openly. We have not really grasped the end of food.
This video is a discussion of the inequality of control of wealth that has resulted from the 400 year ago INVENTION of capital and capitalism. The World Bank and the International Money Fund are illegitimate in the opinion of Jason Hickel; they are enforcers of inequality.
“New Economic International Order” is an international UN - sponsored working document that dates back to 1974. It addresses the overwhelming flow of southern hemisphere resources to the developed northern countries and seeks to balance the scales. Much of it is unknown or undigested, to say nothing of being denied. Since Hickel recommends it, I’ll try to catch up.
It’s fascinating that “anthropology” is another discipline that was devised in the 19th century, grew to major importance in the 20th and then seemed to fade. Now it comes back again as a useful way to keep track of information and theory that threatens to escape us. We had thought all these unique “primitive” alternative cultures were mere tourist material, but now they turn out to be one of the major resources of the world.
Looked at in this way, it becomes fascinating to speculate on how much the railroad acted like a “shipping lane” to move the resources of the Blackfeet Reservation to the eastern industrialized states, at first the very materials that built the railroad: wood timbers, grazing, right-of-way, spectacular scenery, and so on.
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