>The liberal elite criticism has been to equate
>criticism of the banking industry and specific bankers
>anti-semitism and conspiracism; to equate criticism of
>monetary policy with quackery; and to equate protectionism
>and/or economic nationalism with xenophobia and nativism.
The associations show up so often you have to wonder why.
The other week I heard Steve Bronner give a talk about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion <http://home.earthlink.net/~centurion88/jewish_question/protocols_of_z ion/>. I was struck by how easy it would be to substitute "financiers" and "globalizers" for "Jews," yielding a text rather consonant with stuff circulating on the left today. Is this because "Jews" is a debased and hateful shorthand for "financiers" and "globalizers," or is there something debased and hateful about the style of critique itself? In both critiques, tradition and the local are threatened by cold-blooded, destabilizing, cosmopolitan, and conspiratorial forces.
>Another axe is that of the anti-populist marxist.
>Criticism of banks or even monopoly in general is held to
>be incorrect doctrine.
I'm very wary of any critique of "banks" that isn't part of a critique of capitalism, since it focuses on only the M-M' part of the M-C-M' formula, forgetting that the whole point of commodity production under capitalism is the prodcution of profits in monetary form. Keynes realized this, though he shied away from drawing the appropriate political conclusions.
And what about "monopoly"? Is the implied good opposed to this bad "competition"? Isn't competition a socially corrosive force? Doesn't it force wages downward and further the cause of the war of each against all?
Doug