"What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down. The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10 percent now own 85 percent of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90 percent been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.
You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite."
Sunday, February 07, 2010
What do you mean, "failure"?
Economist Michael Hudson:
Friday, February 05, 2010
All debt is now bad
Michael Turner, commenting on a Krugman piece at Economist's View has an interesting insight:
The narrative that attaches to political and economic events is more important to the politics than the nature of the events. I suppose one could venture that the political nature of an event is determined by the narrative, and not the inherent particulars of the event, itself.
Propaganda is effective, without being informative or educational. How many ads has an American heard for analgesic pain relievers, like aspirin and Tylenol and Advil, without ever learning the differences?
Americans have just had a near-Depression experience, after a financial-system 9/11. The housing bubble wasn't an equity-financed boom, but a debt-financed boom, and that was Wall Street's source of cash as well. And it's debt that Americans have harrowing personal experience with. All debt is now bad. Including government debt that might in actuality save their asses.
The narrative that attaches to political and economic events is more important to the politics than the nature of the events. I suppose one could venture that the political nature of an event is determined by the narrative, and not the inherent particulars of the event, itself.
Propaganda is effective, without being informative or educational. How many ads has an American heard for analgesic pain relievers, like aspirin and Tylenol and Advil, without ever learning the differences?
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Cool
Teens think blogging is about as cool as Rick Astley hits: "Blogging is falling out of favor among the young'uns these days as they move to quicker-moving social networking sites. At the same time, older adults are getting into blogging and teens still aren't hot on Twitter"
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
If you think Obama is an extremist . . .
"If you think Obama is an extremist, . . ."
Then, you've taken leave of consensus reality, and words cease to have accepted meanings, and everything you say is likely to seem crazy.
This last is the most troubling thing -- not that people disagree, but that they adopt conventional modes of expression that make it almost impossible to even discuss those disagreements.
You don't have to agree with or support Obama's agenda, but if you refuse to characterize that agenda in terms of common reference and meaning, than the discourse breaks down. Your concerns cannot be heard or respected, in the democratic process.
That's the essence of the Party of No: the insistence on a separate reality, a separate dictionary, and a bizarro-world narrative.
Bizarro-world narrative analysis might be good stagecraft at times, but it completely obstructs democratic dialogue, and erodes the power to reason together or to respect disagreement.
Then, you've taken leave of consensus reality, and words cease to have accepted meanings, and everything you say is likely to seem crazy.
This last is the most troubling thing -- not that people disagree, but that they adopt conventional modes of expression that make it almost impossible to even discuss those disagreements.
You don't have to agree with or support Obama's agenda, but if you refuse to characterize that agenda in terms of common reference and meaning, than the discourse breaks down. Your concerns cannot be heard or respected, in the democratic process.
That's the essence of the Party of No: the insistence on a separate reality, a separate dictionary, and a bizarro-world narrative.
Bizarro-world narrative analysis might be good stagecraft at times, but it completely obstructs democratic dialogue, and erodes the power to reason together or to respect disagreement.
Monday, February 01, 2010
A Winning Platform
The Party Of “Look, You Know, I Was, Uh, Yeah” - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com:
"right now the GOP literally has no ideas about how the nation should actually be governed.
And the scary thing is that lack of ideas seems to be a winning platform."
Saturday, January 30, 2010
America, an Example to the World
Academics fight rise of creationism at universities | World news | The Guardian:
"'There is an insidious and growing problem,' said Professor Jones, of University College London. 'It's a step back from rationality. They (the creationists) don't have a problem with science, they have a problem with argument. And irrationality is a very infectious disease as we see from the United States.' . . .
"Most of the next generation of medical and science students could well be creationists, according to a biology teacher at a leading London sixth-form college. 'The vast majority of my students now believe in creationism,' she said, 'and these are thinking young people who are able and articulate and not at the dim end at all. They have extensive booklets on creationism which they put in my pigeon-hole ... it's a bit like the southern states of America.'"
Friday, January 29, 2010
Life Cycles
A great financial crisis can be regarded as a technical problem in the management of a monetary system, but it can also be seen as marking a crisis of the established order.
The U.S., in the 1920s, was excited by the possibilities of the new economy of telephones, electricity, automobiles, movies, radio and television. But, the old economy of agriculture and steam was played out, and fully half the population was stuck on the farm and sinking rapidly into deeper and deeper poverty and despair. The financial crisis, brought on by a hysteria expressed in runaway speculation in fraudulent schemes, marked the beginning of 20 years of crisis, as the world came apart and a new architecture was developed, to rebuild it.
The U.S. today has played out the economic and political architecture of the New Deal and WWII. Those structures, concepts, opportunities, imperatives, habits -- they are all dead and broken and played out, exhausted.
It isn't just our political system, but the whole basis of our economic and national life.
The country is like an old man, the powers and ideals of youth faded away, consumed, at the end, by the final triumph of bad habits and weaknesses of character. The smoking that was a daring rebellion at 20 is cancer at 60; the generosity and confidence of the prosperous 30-something is poverty and anxiety at 70.
Building out new suburbs, buying a second car and a television, going to the new shopping mall, bearing any burden in a fight against godless communism -- these hopeful, idealistic and highly productive ideas have become caricatures and monstrosities: McMansions, SUVs, the Global War on Terrorism, 500 channels and nothing to watch. Kennedy's taxcut and Johnson's Great Society, that triggered the prosperity of the 1960s, reducing poverty, and encouraging the country to cast off the conventionalism imposed with WWII discipline, have become Bush's taxcuts for the rich, creeping authoritarianism in law and custom, and a dumb acceptance of the inexorable rise of poverty.
The indecision and irresponsibility of our politics is just a symptom of a political economy at the end of its natural life -- an analogue to the senility and incapacity of a diseased old age.
Even if the political system, in its near-terminal corruption and paralysis, continues to refuse to answer, reality presses on, and necessity increases its demands.
The sense that the country is progressing toward becoming a banana republic of authoritarian politics, with a vicious corporate elite oppressing and exploiting a passive population is palpable. And, the evidence of the institutional decay to bring about this result is plentiful, as one after another institution of the New Deal has been destroyed or corrupted, and every ideal of liberal internationalism has been made into a bad joke, in a farcical parody called, "American Empire". (America Triumphant is spending record defense budgets to tramp around the absolute poorest places on earth, blowing holes in the sand and knocking one rock off another, while using the Constitution as toilet paper in a camp for some pathetic group of alleged scary terrorists, many of whom aren't scary or terrorists!)
"Change we can believe in" -- We still desperately want the change, but no one believes we are going to get it.
Everything -- every fundamental thing about how this country and the world is organized, economically and politically, has to change to adapt to the new reality of peak oil and global warming and globalized communication.
The most frustrating thing to me, about the way Krugman abstracts, say, the case for fiscal stimulus spending on a vast scale, is that he never connects it to any reality, but the mere fact of unemployment. No other context, which might point us toward what to spend money on. It is true that the Keynesian "technical insight" is that it doesn't really matter what you spend the money on. But, it matters to the political moment.
It isn't coincidental, that we have this financial crisis, and massive unemployment in the old economy of building suburbs and cars to drive to them, at this moment. We don't just need "JOBS" -- though surely we do need them -- we need a completely different system for powering the economy. By 2050, power generation and transportation in the U.S. has to produce no net greenhouse gas emissions. That's very ambitious. It requires rebuilding everything. We need a new rail net, for example. We will have to abandon suburban sprawl for something else -- some combo of denser cities and locally dense ex-urban places.
If the U.S. is not to become a banana republic, then we have to find a new basis for middle class incomes, a new medium for a sensible political discourse, other than 24/7 corporate-advertising-supported cable news.
Everything has to change.
My personal hypothesis is that the sense of that, the necessity of that is well-known out here, among ordinary people. Not just people, who blog. Tea Partiers are responding, in their way, to the felt sense of massive change coming.
It is the elite -- comfortable and self-interested and vested in how things have "always been" -- which doesn't want change, and is resisting it with all of its power -- and the elite has all of the power, after all.
The middle class has lost is HomeATM, but the corporate and banking and political elite is still drawing down on its credit lines. The banks can up their credit card fees. The high-flyers of Wall Street can resume selling their CDSs or exploiting the Bernanke Carry Trade. The political class thanks the Supreme Court for opening the floodgates of corporate money. Apple orders some new iPads from China for gadget-hungry America, and H-P is a horrible place to work, but, hey, it's a job.
The elite, upon whom we depend for our daily dose of propaganda and to run our corporations and our politics -- that elite, vested in how things have long been, and which has been increasing its skim off the top by small increments, year after year, really doesn't want anything to change. And, they're in charge.
The only good news is the impending bad news: the bad news is that the system doesn't work, and the good news, sort of, is that the system doesn't work, and so, won't survive.
The U.S., in the 1920s, was excited by the possibilities of the new economy of telephones, electricity, automobiles, movies, radio and television. But, the old economy of agriculture and steam was played out, and fully half the population was stuck on the farm and sinking rapidly into deeper and deeper poverty and despair. The financial crisis, brought on by a hysteria expressed in runaway speculation in fraudulent schemes, marked the beginning of 20 years of crisis, as the world came apart and a new architecture was developed, to rebuild it.
The U.S. today has played out the economic and political architecture of the New Deal and WWII. Those structures, concepts, opportunities, imperatives, habits -- they are all dead and broken and played out, exhausted.
It isn't just our political system, but the whole basis of our economic and national life.
The country is like an old man, the powers and ideals of youth faded away, consumed, at the end, by the final triumph of bad habits and weaknesses of character. The smoking that was a daring rebellion at 20 is cancer at 60; the generosity and confidence of the prosperous 30-something is poverty and anxiety at 70.
Building out new suburbs, buying a second car and a television, going to the new shopping mall, bearing any burden in a fight against godless communism -- these hopeful, idealistic and highly productive ideas have become caricatures and monstrosities: McMansions, SUVs, the Global War on Terrorism, 500 channels and nothing to watch. Kennedy's taxcut and Johnson's Great Society, that triggered the prosperity of the 1960s, reducing poverty, and encouraging the country to cast off the conventionalism imposed with WWII discipline, have become Bush's taxcuts for the rich, creeping authoritarianism in law and custom, and a dumb acceptance of the inexorable rise of poverty.
The indecision and irresponsibility of our politics is just a symptom of a political economy at the end of its natural life -- an analogue to the senility and incapacity of a diseased old age.
Even if the political system, in its near-terminal corruption and paralysis, continues to refuse to answer, reality presses on, and necessity increases its demands.
The sense that the country is progressing toward becoming a banana republic of authoritarian politics, with a vicious corporate elite oppressing and exploiting a passive population is palpable. And, the evidence of the institutional decay to bring about this result is plentiful, as one after another institution of the New Deal has been destroyed or corrupted, and every ideal of liberal internationalism has been made into a bad joke, in a farcical parody called, "American Empire". (America Triumphant is spending record defense budgets to tramp around the absolute poorest places on earth, blowing holes in the sand and knocking one rock off another, while using the Constitution as toilet paper in a camp for some pathetic group of alleged scary terrorists, many of whom aren't scary or terrorists!)
"Change we can believe in" -- We still desperately want the change, but no one believes we are going to get it.
Everything -- every fundamental thing about how this country and the world is organized, economically and politically, has to change to adapt to the new reality of peak oil and global warming and globalized communication.
The most frustrating thing to me, about the way Krugman abstracts, say, the case for fiscal stimulus spending on a vast scale, is that he never connects it to any reality, but the mere fact of unemployment. No other context, which might point us toward what to spend money on. It is true that the Keynesian "technical insight" is that it doesn't really matter what you spend the money on. But, it matters to the political moment.
It isn't coincidental, that we have this financial crisis, and massive unemployment in the old economy of building suburbs and cars to drive to them, at this moment. We don't just need "JOBS" -- though surely we do need them -- we need a completely different system for powering the economy. By 2050, power generation and transportation in the U.S. has to produce no net greenhouse gas emissions. That's very ambitious. It requires rebuilding everything. We need a new rail net, for example. We will have to abandon suburban sprawl for something else -- some combo of denser cities and locally dense ex-urban places.
If the U.S. is not to become a banana republic, then we have to find a new basis for middle class incomes, a new medium for a sensible political discourse, other than 24/7 corporate-advertising-supported cable news.
Everything has to change.
My personal hypothesis is that the sense of that, the necessity of that is well-known out here, among ordinary people. Not just people, who blog. Tea Partiers are responding, in their way, to the felt sense of massive change coming.
It is the elite -- comfortable and self-interested and vested in how things have "always been" -- which doesn't want change, and is resisting it with all of its power -- and the elite has all of the power, after all.
The middle class has lost is HomeATM, but the corporate and banking and political elite is still drawing down on its credit lines. The banks can up their credit card fees. The high-flyers of Wall Street can resume selling their CDSs or exploiting the Bernanke Carry Trade. The political class thanks the Supreme Court for opening the floodgates of corporate money. Apple orders some new iPads from China for gadget-hungry America, and H-P is a horrible place to work, but, hey, it's a job.
The elite, upon whom we depend for our daily dose of propaganda and to run our corporations and our politics -- that elite, vested in how things have long been, and which has been increasing its skim off the top by small increments, year after year, really doesn't want anything to change. And, they're in charge.
The only good news is the impending bad news: the bad news is that the system doesn't work, and the good news, sort of, is that the system doesn't work, and so, won't survive.
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