http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2042856.stm

Want to raise your blood pressure? Read this article. There is a big pile of evidence now that the Sahel famines that ravaged Ethiopia and the Sudan in the 1970s and 1980s (the source of those images of famished children that became a stereotype of Africa) were largely caused by sulfur dioxide from factories and power plants in Europe and the U.S.

If anyone is interested, here are links to two scientific papers providing evidence:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/50/17891?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=simulation+sahel+drought&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006…/2006GL026067.shtml

If yields from rainfed agriculture do fall by 50% in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia and Latin America by 2030 or so, as the IPCC projections say is quite possible even with moderate emissions cuts, people are going to be talking about a very different kind of genocide in the coming decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Bubble

The South Sea Company
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For the Noel Coward play, see: South Sea Bubble (play).

Hogarthian image of the South Sea Bubble, by Edward Matthew Ward, Tate GalleryThe South Sea Company (1711 – c1850s) was an English company granted a monopoly to trade with South America under a treaty with Spain. Following the South Sea Company Act of 1720, it became better known for the “South Sea Bubble”, an economic bubble that occurred through overheated speculation in the company shares. The stock price collapsed after reaching a peak in September 1720.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Tulip mania
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Pamphlet from the Dutch tulipomania, printed in 1637The term tulip mania (alternatively tulipomania) is used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble. The term originally came from the period in the history of the Netherlands during which demand for tulip bulbs reached such a peak that enormous prices were charged for a single bulb. It took place in the first part of the 17th century, especially in 1636–37.

The event is remembered in part because of its extended discussion in the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by popular British journalist Charles Mackay in 1843, more than two centuries after the event. Mackay omitted mentioning that during 1636-37, the Netherlands suffered from an epidemic of bubonic plague, and severe setbacks in the Thirty Years War. [1]. Modern scholars (e.g. Peter Garber) consider the event much less extraordinary than did Mackay.

Marx does attribute about six functions or so to money,and the first chapter of Capital is “Commodities and Money”. I don’t know if the elementary attributes and functions of money impinge on the currency exchange.

On bubbles, what was the Tulip thingy in 1600 or whatever ?

Then there’s Victor Perlo. It is likely he discussed currency exchange in his last book. _Crises and Superprofits_. The idea that Marxist economists of today don’t discuss some major aspect of the world economy of 2008 like exchange values is , uh….

The definition of “price” is exchange-value in money terms.

Because what is going on now is one particular form of money has escaped the “market” constraints of all other moneys… that whole dollar hegemony problem.

Even more importantly, what is money? the original marxian description was still stuck on specie and paper-representation of specie… no account for the relations between currencies, et al.

It is important that one sum of money can be exchangeable for X+ one day, then X- the next. It is also important that money is simultaneously “legal tender” (political, requited to pay taxes with), an entitlement to labor and nature, and ecosemiotic.

The bubble phenomenon we are seeing now is a unique aspect of this period.

I’ll take a look at O’Conner.

Below is a little exchange I had elsewhere on the same thing we are talking about.

Charles
^^^

Who was it here who was denying that US capitalism is in a long-term
crisis of stagnation, disguised by “schachermacher accounting” of the
National Account Books and financial looting masquerading as
“profitability?”

S

^^^^
CB: May we discuss your long term crisis of stagnation point ?

As to real production, isn’t there, now, more production of
use-values consumed by the masses of the population, the working class
than there was at the beginning of the long term you refer to ? If the
long term is 35 years, weren’t there fewer use-values ( real products)
produced 35 years ago than now ?