Our Oil Self-Sufficiency Equals Prosperity

The main purpose of the NAFTA and all phony free trade agreements is the destruction of all levels of self sufficiency and throw people to the mercy of the multinational corporate mafia.Wrote Ed Deak.

"Can you think of a greater indictment for a pretendedly unsurpassable system of econproduction and societal reproduction than the one which - at the height of its productive power - is producing a global food crisis, and the suffering of countless millions inseparable from it all over the world? That is the nature of the system which is expected to be saved now at all cost, including the currently "dished out" astronomical economic cost.

HOW can one make some tangible sense at all of the wasted trillions? Since we are talking about astronomical magnitudes, I addressed this question to a close friend who is Professor of Astrophysics at London Univesity. His answer was that I should point out that one trillion alone is roughly one hundred times the age of our universe. Now, on the scale of the same magnitude the regularly understated official figure of the American debt, on its own, amounts in our days to more than 10 trillion. That is, one thousand times the age of our universe.

But let me quote you a short passage from a Japanese publication. It reads like this:

"How much speculative money is moving around the world? According to a Mitsubishi UFJ Securities analysis, the size of the global `real economy', in which goods and services are produced and traded, is estimated at $48.1 trillion... On the other hand, the size of the global `financial economy', the total amount of stocks, securities and deposits, adds up to $151.8 trillion. The financial economy thus has swollen to more than three times the size of the real economy, growing especially rapidly during the past two decades. The gap is as large as $100 trillion. An analyst involved in this estimation said that about half the amount, $50 trillion is scarcely necessary for the real economy. Fifty trillion dollars are worth well over 5,000 trillion yen, too big a number for me to actually comprehend.""

It is indeed very difficult even to comprehend, not to mention to justify, as our capital-apologetic politicians and bankers do, the astronomical sums of parasitic speculation accumulated to the magnitude corresponding to 500,000 times the age of our universe. If you wish to have another measure about the magnitude involved, just imagine an unlucky accountant from Roman times, who is asked nothing more than simply to chalk up on his blackboard the figure of 5,000 trillion yen, in Roman numbers. He would be in total despair. He simply could not do it. And even if he had at his disposal Arab numbers, which he could not have had, even in that case he would need as many as 17 zeros after the number 5 in order to write down the cifre in question.