from "Executive Intelligence Review," April 28, 2000 ON THE CRASH OF THE NASDAQ: "Information Society" -- A Doomed Empire of Evil by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. The myth of the "information society" is nothing other than a mass delusion, like the infamous tulip-mania and John Law-style financial bubbles of the past. The notion that "information technology" IS somehow "high technology" is the most pathetic of the expressions of exactly such a culturally and economically suicidal mass-delusion ... Sum up that point this way: Imagine the results of the Wall Street, junk-bond hostile takeover of a formerly productive, high-quality manufacturing firm, now renamed Blivets, Inc., whose new management had the firm's production of physical product reduced savagely, to become, instead, a RESELLER OF SLAVE-LABOR PRODUCTS IMPORTED FROM ABROAD -- sending former manufacturing operatives out to make a living taking in one another's laundry, or in related forms of make-work employment in financial and personal "services." Now, within the cannibalized firm's new administration, it has increased greatly the size of the accounting, bookkeeping, sales, and related ["bean-counting"] functions of administration, and therefore increased greatly the sheer quantity of the number of administrative calculations made each day, by use of modern computers as accounting machines. This would then be called an "information economy." The use of such accounting machines, for such purposes, in such ways, might lead to [importation of slave-labor products] being called (using one's hand, in an act of discretion, to cover the sadistic smirk on one's lips) a new "high-tech industry" -- by means of which the old agricultural and industrial economy has been turned into a superseded relic of the past. If you think Blivets, Inc. typifies the success of a new kind of economy, see a competent psychiatrist immediately, if you can still afford one (after the ongoing turns in the financial markets); but, make certain, that the putative psychiatrist's personal financial management, does not show him to be one of those lunatics, who has joined in taking over the asylum -- a lunatic spreading the very tulip-bubble style in mental illness, from whose effects you need, most urgently, to be liberated. The crucial measurement to be made in any economy is centered around the following proposition: 1) What percentile of the total labor-force, is engaged in either a) applying new physical principles to increase mankind's per-capita power over nature, or b) generating new physical principles and technologies employed "at the point of production"? 2) What is the rate of net increase of physical output per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth's surface-area, as expressed at the point of physical production of basic economic infrastructure, agriculture, and manufacturing? Those factors, viewed within the context of employment of the entire labor-force, and [the participation of] the entire population, are the true rule-of-thumb measure of physical-economic performance ... Do not confuse ["market"] prices with physical reality; rather, assess the MEANING of prices by subjecting them to such standards of physical reality. Such is the point of view of SANE men and women -- the point of view from which the lunacy of the "Information Economy" is to be assessed rightly by HONEST accountants ... ________________________________________________________ BIS Warns of US Stock Market / Dollar Collapse 'On June 5, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank of world central banks, warned in its annual report that the US financial bubble is "unsustainable" and that "a soft landing is by no means assured." 'In Europe, all of the leading press, from the Financial Times of London, to Germany's Handelsblatt, to France's Le Monde, prominently covered the report. "Warning of Global Hard Landing," "Dangerous Dynamic on Financial Markets," and "The World Economy Is Threatened With Shock," were the headlines of articles in these newspapers. 'But in the major US media, the report has been totally blocked out ...' _________________________________________________________ In a popular computer-user rag like "Computer Currents," I was recently startled to read the following statement made in a column written by a high-tech consultant: "KILL THE INTERNET." That was written seriously, not tonue in cheek. Move over, "Kill your TV" -- the Internet has become the cultural successor to television and has already, within the space of only two years, betrayed all hopes of its potential value as a medium for education and (mere cliche now) "information." At worst, the Internet has become the world's MOST saturated medium for "marketing" -- advertising ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, but especially "products" and "services" which require the CHEAPEST advertising because they're VALUELESS. The 'Net has become the ultimate "flea market," seventh heaven for "junk mail." Information? You won't find any there. Gresham's Law applies to the extreme: bad currency has driven out good, to the point where any "information" which is obtainable via the Internet is almost certainly inaccurate, biased, or invented. At best, "e-commerce" has only speeded up the normal rate of exchange of dollars-and-cents-type "information" in the FINANCIAL transactions of our progressively SICK economy, already scraping bottom. Profit-taking has become logarithmically faster -- but so have the ultimately ruinous effects of what it represents: only a few people making exorbitant sums of money from a non-productive "service" economy rapidly descending into pure slave labor, dehumanizing to any society. The bubble of our increasingly "virtual" global-market economy was inescapably destined to burst, eventually. But now, with financial exchanges fast approaching "instanteous," however, such a bubble's traditionally short lifespan has been shortened even more. Its collapse could come literally "any minute now." And realizing that fact --that "survival of the fittest" is now also a frantic game of "beat the clock"-- the most predatory near the top of the "e-commerce" pecking order have begun to act like heroin addicts facing the LAST CHANCE to get their next fix, or gamblers down to their last dollar, all the odds against them, as the casino is closing. Forget conscience, forget ethics, forget even laws against CRIMINAL activity -- indeed, forget SANE behavior -- because what's at stake here is the LAST dollar EVER to be made (and hopefully invested "securely," despite now overwhelming risks) before the game is finally OVER and the dollars of future players become WORTHLESS ... Over a century ago, Hegel described the Western economic system as "Faustian." Faust's behavior just before the stroke of midnight, when the Devil arrives to claim his soul for all eternity, is not something you would want your OWN life to depend on ...
