Eschatology
by Mike Kimel
There seems to be something inherent in human nature that leads to frequent predictions of the end of the world. Usually, those predictions turn out to be wrong and then require some form of backpedaling. As an example, folks who use(d) a statistical package called Shazam might remember the two quotes that appear at the start of the chapter on Probit and Logit estimation in the user’s manual:
“The deliverance of the saints must take place some time before 1914.”
Charles Taze Russel
American religious leader, 1910
“The deliverance of the saints must take place some time after 1914.”
Charles Taze Russel
American religious leader, 1923
Charles Taze Russel, incidentally, founded the Bible Student Movement, which would birth, among other things, the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
But more, er, secular predictions are not uncommon – there’s always someone predicting that a given policy is going to bring gloom and doom. Those predictions are also usually wrong, but here there’s an important caveat – sometimes the doo-doo really does hit the fan. The Great Depression happened, and more recently, so did the Great Recession. Even systems collapse – the past few decades alone have seen the end of the military dictatorships in South America, of the USSR, and of Apartheid in South Africa, which goes to show that the end comes to the bad as well as the good.
Which raises a point – how can you tell whether a big, quasi-end-of-the-world story has any credibility? I think it comes down to a few things. One is whether the source has been pretty good in its predictions in the past. On the economic front, clearly, anyone who talked about the Great Moderation, and the benefits that financial deregulation would bring is immediately suspect, and more so if they predicted, say, disaster in the 1990s. Another is whether the story makes any sense, and whether there’s any data to back it up.
Now, the point of this post is that I’m going to break a rule I’ve been following since I started blogging in in 2006. See, I have a long-run prediction, one I made in early 2001 – people who know me personally have heard it ad nauseum but I haven’t put it on paper because I really don’t like sounding as if I’m one of those crazy prophets of doom. However, a) I think my calls so far while blogging, though limited, have been pretty good, and b) what I’m seeing is conforming more and more to what I was expecting, so maybe its time to put things on paper in the hope in some small butterfly-flapping-its-wings way it helps change things. (I started toying with the idea of writing down this prediction when I wrote this post a few weeks ago, noting my correct calls about the start and the end of the Great Recession.)
My conclusion, back in 2001, was that when someone got around to writing
His successor followed in his footsteps – despite the backpedaling on “read my lips” tax burdens fell under Bush Sr. too, which is to say, the magical thinking continued. Under Clinton, things changed (as noted in my book, tax revenues began rising and spending began falling in Clinton’s first year in office, thus predating Newt’s influence by two years) and we had a break in the insanity. It wasn’t a complete break – this was the era of “black helicopters” and “UN military bases on US soil” and “Clinton shot some fellow drug dealers at the Mena airport while he was governor of Arkansas” but on the fiscal front, at least, the country was more or less united; paying down the debt was viewed as a positive. And it certainly is, because there are times when the government has to spend money (think World War 2, or a monster recession), and if the debt is high enough, its freedom of operation is very, very limited.
But just as Reagan’s change in direction wasn’t inevitably permanent, neither was Clinton’s. The country’s policies stood in balance – we could have gone either way, and we went the profligate route. And now, it will be that much harder to change direction again. Obama isn’t man to do it – as I’ve noted before, where it counts, this administration resembles nothing more than GW’s third term. (Back in 2001 I didn’t expect GW’s eventual successor to turn things around, largely for the reason that a) Republicans following the Reagan myth and GW’s more recent approach would have little incentive to break that mold, and b) any Democrat would realize that he’d be tarred and feathered as a big spender – see JFK, LBJ, Carter and Clinton for an example.) Granted, a few of the details – like Obama was going to shovel money at the folks who brought down the world’s financial system – were unknowable in 2001, but they aren’t exactly warm-fuzzies inducing. If anything, they make the story worse, and move the time line up.
So there it is… we are going to spend ourselves, for no reason, into a position where we have no freedom of operation whatsoever. That leads to a million and one otherwise un-necessary cuts in the sort of spending that otherwise boost growth, and not a time of our own choosing either. And then the big need arrives – some event that requires the spending of money- and the resources aren’t there. Rome pulled back little by little, and so will we. The decay in Rome was gradual, and not noticeable, and for much of the decline, but the lives of the have-nots were much poorer than before, and even the haves lost their ability to control wider events.
I can’t disagree so I will harmonize.
This speech by Christopher Hedges on the Death of the Liberal Class contains a lot of relevant history and information. I think his insight that the economy was placed on a permanent war footing after WWII has some relevance. 45 minutes worth here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26658.htm
He explains that the collapse of liberal institutions in the church, in universities and in government enabled all this. And those institutions collapsed because they sold out to the same moneyed interests driving the other side. (“Thanks Slick Willie!”)
“If you want a vision of the future imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever” – George Orwell 1984.
Mike,
The national dialogue became skewed and has stayed that way since 1981. Possibly the shift from 24/7 news to 24 hour a day propaganda.
In addition to voodoo economics and printing press monetarism, Reagan instituted marketing versus delivery in the government, moved out smartly to prove that government can be quietly sabotaged so that corporatists’ plundering US resources and labor can go unimpeded by the evil of “big” government looking out for the “general welfare”, the Nanny State was nearly destroyed and the corporate state took over.
To “save” Social Security, a New Deal target since 1934, deficits became irrelevenat as long as SS surpluses could hide them and regressive payroll taxes can cover for declining progressive taxes.
Divide and conquer, with 24/7 propaganda and appeals to “tradtition, fundamental principles of the founding fathers” (Joe Stein who wrote Fiddler on the Roff” died past yesterday). The foundational message: “some men are very much less than equal, libruls are immoral, poor are cultural, fear the burqa…….”. The self evidence of all men being created equal has been subverted, and remains such in the 24/7 propaganda cycle going off as news.
Once the Declaration of Indepence was compromised the republic became doomed. I agree that date was Jan 20 1981, and I regret it.
It was as if Wendall Wilkie was elected and he took up Henry Luce’s empire.
Perpetual war is a tool to assure the corporatists steal the products of resources, knowledge and labor from assuring the establishment of the reality that “all men are created equal”.
If terrorists are not worth due process and if the US can kill enemy combatants with drones piloted from 8,000 miles away then libruls, poor, ethnically diverse humans in the US can be considered less than full humans.
Subversion of the most basic cultural foundation, non christians are bad, but forget about being a christian nation!
Oh the humanity!
In my rather nonknowledgable opinion, the change in politics under Reagan only acknowledged the changes in social structure in the USA from a manufacturing export based economy (with strong unions etc). to a service import dependent economy (with weak unions and a middle class obsessed by the fear of falling back in the proletariat).
Italy, where I live, was a sort of developing country up to WWII, and really industrialized only during the fifties and the sixties, apparently thanks to the lower cost of labour and the ability to sell to the richer american market or to other european countries which in turn exported to the USA.
This phenomenon went on up to the seventies, then USA economy slowed down a lot and the manufacturing sector had a big decline, for a while the government in USA and in europe tried to keep the economy afloat through keynesian policies (since european countries were and still are quite export-dependent), but keynesianism assumes that the shortfall in aggregate demand is cyclical and not structural, and in the late seventies were rejected apparently (while in pratice mantaining a growth in debt both public and private to keep the economy from collapsing, but hiding those policies under the carpet).
Now we simply reached the point were we can’t anymore hide the money printing (since ever increasing debt is a form of money printing), but it is still possible that someone engeneers a new form of money printing that is not so obvious, thus keeping the system afloat for some more tens of years.
…but…there was a Great Moderation… Anyone who noticed was simply noticing reality. Noticing reality doesn’t make one wrong. In fact, pretending it didn’t happen makes one wrong. The only problem in noticing the Great Moderation is in expecting it will persist forever. That’s the wrongness part.
So your prediction cactus is that the U.S. will slowly decline over the next 100-300 years and that’s Reagan’s fault?
For what it is worth, I take Mike’s point to be that deficits do matter and that we have passed a tipping point with our national debt. I am very gloomy about our long term structural unekmployment problem which is largely a problem because of the way unchecked capitalism distributes resources. I think that our debt/deficit problems are very manageable in economic terms although I concede that the partisan politic – which the Tea Partier types only make worse–make it difficult to reach common sense compromises. Obviously, several people are right that it is the lorporatists with constant war who have every incentive to prevent a solution, but I think that their real coups were in the tax cuts which eliminated any income taxes for large parts of the working class, the switch first to an all volunteer military and then the outsourcing of most military functions to private mercenaries which sealed the deal. Not only do most people not care how income taxes are spent–because they do not pay them–most people do not care about wars of choice because neither they, nor their children are being drafted to fight them and they do not pay for them. Why do you think that Dumbya kept both Iraq and Afgahnistan off budget? Does the guy who is making $40K a year and ends up paying a few hundred dollars in federal income taxes after deductions and exemptions care if Dumbya’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are extended? Do you think he would if he was told that his tax bill would triple if those tax cuts are extended? Given the politics, I have come to favor a VAT. It is highly regressive, but it is the only way to get Americans involved in the governance of the country and with some skin in the game. I would also go back to the draft and eliminate most private contractors from the military. I daresay we would be much less likely to continue endless war just for the sake of corporate profits.
cactus,
Clinton’s revenue going up during his first year was due to Bush Sr’s raising taxes (as you noted) and the huge upswing caused by the start of the US entering the information age and the Cold War dividend. You have never shown any data that would let anyone believe that a second Bush Sr term would have been (economically) any different from Clinton’s first term. And without Clinton there probably would have been no Newt. In any case a lot of good events came our way at exactly the same time. Clinton won the lottery.
Greenspan, with full support (explicitly or implicitly) from both parties, blew the huge tech bubble in the ’90s we all remember fondly. Especially a lot of the younger 20 something’s – now in their late 30’s/early 40s, who saw that change to the information age as the new frontier. The big new thing that really grabbed them and now they are some of the leaders in the blogosphere and in politics. A lot of them still believe the Kool-Aid they drank in the ’90s about how the technological nirvana was going to continue forever, with them riding the wave to fortune and fame. Then in the space of a year, practically a blink of the eye, we had three huge shocks to the system: the messy, divisive election of Bush Jr, the technological bubble burst, and 9/11. Any one event would have been lived through with dreams intact, the three combined burst a lot of bubbles. Lots of dreams were dashed, money and jobs lost, and it became quite evident we were no longer at the end of history.
Clinton’s greatest fortune was that the tech bubble didn’t burst until he left office. But there is no denying the bubble was there and it was going to blow on the next admin, Bush Jr or Gore, no matter who won. The mild recession of the early ’00s ended fairly quickly, but that ending was caused by the inflation of another bubble – this time in real-estate. That bubble is still deflating, with 10-30% still to go in places, and has brought down the banks, put the USG in the position of eating trillions of debt and placing us in the Great Recession. Obama hasn’t done much to help the situation and has arguably made things worse. After next week I expect the next two years to be pretty much an economic and governmental ‘muddle through’ period as neither side will be able to pass any major changes to the current system. No repeal of Obamacare, but no cap-and-trade either. One of the big questions out there is if the economy starts to come back on its own sans government intervention. I think it will once business knows that major game-changing laws from the Fed are not coming, and thus a lot of uncertainty is gone (YMMV).
But the large wild cards in the deck are the huge amount of personal debt owed by the average US citizen, states that are deep in the red budget wise or for all practical purposes bankrupt (California), and the enormous Federal deficit that shows no signs of even leveling off under a Democratic President. And yes McCain probably would not have been any better. We are really not in the Great Recession, but in the Great Unwinding as we work are way through all that debt. That’s going to take time – and we haven’t even started at the Federal level. Plus lots of pain, low growth, high unemployment until we get a handle on the fiscal crises. […]
Good piece
I now see Clintons years as simply kinder gentler neoliberalism. He bought into the Reagan mythology as well. Yes he raised upper tax bracket rates but, on the back of the beginning of the consumer credit bubble and the dot com boom, on the whole most of the upper income people payed about the same end percentage (if not less) than they had always paid out of a much bigger piece of pie. The shift of income away from the middle class mostly continued but we had plenty of “credit” spending power so we felt wealthier.
The “paying down of the national debt”, “budget surplus” bullshit was the beginning of the end. It was the precursor to 2007/2008. Once we commited to that, consumers were forced to run up personal credit to maintain their lifestyles. Sure, many will argue that the consumers did it willingly and no one is promised any type of lifestyle, but the great moderation was in affect and credit could never be a problem because it was self regulating out of peoples knowledge of their income. Besides as long as all your assets (401k and home) continued increasing in value there was always enough”savings”to pay off your debt. So, the whole thing is predicated on having a consistent income source and continually rising asset values. How on earth could policies which drive salaries down be a problem?
So it really wasnt hard to predict this ( for people in the field paying attention ) only hard getting people to listen to your message which is always the problem. Which is why preachers engage in the most affective apocalyptic talk, they’ve got an audience for an hour at least one day a week ( Weds evenings as well in the Baptist tradition) People want to be scared or at least they are scared and they want to know what to be scared of (that whole “uncertainty” thing that is popular with those of conservative bent today).
Now the question is how do we go forward? kharris is right, there was a Great Moderation and it happened on the back of consumer credit and rising asset prices. We now need it (growth) to happen on the back of consumer income and slower rising asset prices. Asset prices need to go up because people can pay for them not just because they are willing to BET on them rising.
Reagan was a face man. He just stood up there and recited the Randian and Chicago School’s line which sounded good to him–and look at the great role he got out of it! Government delenda est. So, seems likely to me that the money guys and billionaires’ club were sick of shared prosperity, liked Friedman’s ideas, and just went ahead and took everything over.
In those days, they were quite discreet. Consider that Pete Peterson’s only public appearance was as the Sec. of Commerce from 1972-73 during the Nixon administration. Later of course he proceeded to feather his nest and is now on up there with the current administration leading the charge on deficits and overly generous entitlements. Very public guy now that the whole blogosphere knows his name.
Same with the Koch’s, the CoC’s foreign and other contributors, Murdoch and anybody who can put some nice green fertilizer on a patch of astroturf to good effect. These guys make Gates and Jobs look benign. After all, all they want to do is sell us a new app. Peterson et al. want our economic souls.
So, Cactus, here’s a link which brings your book and your findings to mind. Saw it yesterday during my wanderings on the web. http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8AGMUZ?OpenDocument My question is along the lines of yours but reduced to individual terms. If US wages this low do not merit the consideration of our own investor class as a basis for new industrial development, how low do wages have to go before someone thinks this country is a worth while investment? NancyO
Mike is looking at the wrong game board. The game isn’t empire, it’s MONEY.
Those who control the wealth and key industry corporate players determine how the pieces are played, and that effort most certainly isn’t limited to national boundaries.
Those who think the game is empire are well behind the power curve in their thinking.
The game is MONEY.
Cactus. Buff makes some good counter arguements here and if you get a chance adress them please. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I don’t think your expectations and my expectations of an extended period of Japanese style stagnation are all that different or stem from much different sources.
NancyO
We will look like a good investment when entrepreneurs can convince themselves there will be markets with monetary demand to sell goods into at a profit.
While an individual business can make more money by cutting the wages of its work force, it is a fallacy of composition to suppose that if the entire economy reduces the wages of its work force the entire economy will make more money, which seems kind of obvious when put that way, but the monetarists have been insisting that poorer employees are the path to riches for forty years now. With wages down and employment and thus income down who will buy things?
If those individuals who profit from the across the board wage suppression were to actually spend as much as they profited the demand for luxury goods would float the whole economy, but they don’t do that. They want to “invest” without understanding that there must be demand for investments to produce returns. So we end up with a giant bubble of globalized capital rolling around the world first hitting oil in 08 then rolling into gold and other commodities last year, now saturating Brazil because their bonds actually pay interest, or rare earth mining operations.
This is a hoard and will not find productive use until it is spent or invested in a way that creates jobs with enough income for people to buy things and establish demand for entrepreneurs to respond to. Gates and Buffett begin to understand this by getting the billionaire boys club to put 50% of their money to use, but even this effort will get sucked into endowments that will not find productive investments until enough jobs pay enough to create it.
Better would for these John Galts to either man up and build the new infrastructure we all know the nation needs of shut up and move permanently to their gilded ranches and quit polluting our politics with Supreme Court sanctioned bribery.
Correct it is all a game, and the way the game is played is to keep the players in the dark.
Empire, perpetual war, military industrial complex, recession, money (fiat, species, whatever) are all forms of play options fakes.
Bread and circuses!
well, a lot of personal world views on this thread and i have no reason to believe mine is any better than yours, but just for the sake of inclusion:
i am not sure debt matters. at the worst we all default and the rich people who lent us the money have to write it off without any change in either their life style or their investment plans whatsoever.
there is no need for “eternal growth in the economy.” we are quite rich enough as it is. we have a distribution problem. and a failure of imagination. our wealth could be put to better uses than buying plastic toys and driving them back and forth to work,
i don’t think its a good idea to take pot shots at the “religious.” the Jehovah’s Witnesses, despite their quaint ideas about putting a date on the second coming, are quite sweet people, and they stood up to Hitler, which is more than a lot of more sophisticated people did. Meanwhile by confusing your dislike for the religious “leaders” with dislike for what the unsophisticated need to believe, you simply deliver their votes and political energy to your political enemy. They are being suckered into believing you are their enemy, and you are being suckered into believing they are your enemy. Only if you keep poking your finger in their eye.
I’m waiting for the first shareholder lawsuit to come out of Citizens United Vs. FEC…
Once it turns out after the fact that a corporation might have won a favorable regulatory ruling if they only contributed to the right candidate, and that ruling would have protected shareholder interests it’s just a matter of time before a CEO is deposed…
“Can you explain how your failure to attempt to influence the election satisfied your fiduciary duty to shareholders Mr. CEO?” It’s coming just wait.
“But if the western liberal democracies do retreat back to the core, well, God help the rest of the world.”
Read Kipling lately?
1941 Japan was thinking the East did not need being the ‘white man’s burden’ anymore.
I do not think the current Chinese pathfinders worry much about the ‘white man’s burden’ being lifted.
The western empire [Latium/Rome] fell apart when the [western] legions could no longer keep the various groups Goths, Vandals, and Germans from overrunning the Italian penninsula, a while after the legions were not sending plunder back. Don’t know anything about exchange rates as long as the tribute and plunder were flowing. The eastern emperors spoke latin until after Justinian I from thence greek until Constantinople became Istanbul, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque.
ilsm will not change
ilsm,
The other game boards feed the big game board controlled by the few. MONEY is the control board and the other boards are played as tools for the master game. I met a couple of the global heavies (the Names) in London long ago. Their statements read off like a list of known events, all of which unfolded within two decades.
Those who can’t visualize how the big game board works concentrate their attention on the feeder game boards. But that is not where the action is. The MONEY board, now slightly modified, has driven the events of this planet since before our births.
Most of what unfolds in the U.S. and elsewhere are sideshows to the MONEY game. It’s a convenient way to keep people busy, but not much more than that.
There is only one real game in play, the MONEY game, and you can count the number of Name players.
Mr. John–Excellent comment. I have been having trouble understanding why the Money Guys continue to torment us. They have been quite successful in extracting 30% (or more) of every home owner’s equity in his house, keeping wages at minimal levels while demanding longer hours of work, and now finding high rates of unemployment very comfortable while the rest of us sweat out what sure looks and quacks like a depression.
Why don’t they just do what the Elves did at the end of the Lord of the Rings and withdraw to the Western Isles? Heard it’s real nice over there and the land values are incredibly low. It would be truly terrible if they have figured out a way to get even more of our resources converted into money to stash in their coffers. The thing about money though, MG, is you can’t eat it, sleep under it, wear it or even enjoy it without other people to make things with it. It is useless in itself. Could these people really be so bereft of intellectual curiousity that all they can think of to do with their lives is play with their ill-gotten gains? Note–I apologize for my rhetoric, but What are they thinking? NancyO
“Cold War dividend”, effectively the military industrial complex (MIC) grew in “price” more rapidly than the costs of inputs, thus MIC price levels rose more slowly than the economy’s general price levels while its cost pushed inflation, due to socialized, protected, revolving door, polical charmed life style of the players caused the force structure to decline quantitatively as well as qualitatively. I was there.
However, reducing the MIC take of the economy to less than 2% would be stimulating.
“Clinton won the lottery.” With Robert Rubin!! Was as good for the Street as Obama. Maybe almost as good a Bush II.
“Clinton’s greatest fortune was that the tech bubble didn’t burst until he left office.” Whuudddanode that all that fiber was really not needed? And the rest, and what about helicopter Ben in 2000? And so forth. Tech was a bubble but we made it the old fashioned way IPO’s………….
ilsm will not change
The game is MONEY.
The words of a natural born rice merchant. It’s all just a game.
Right up to the point where somebody draws a sword. That’s when it stops being a game and the rice merchants leave the field for the warrior class to manage. They always do.
Ilsm–The rapid industrialisation of the US during the 19th and early 20th centuries permitted the incredibly ambitious and ruthless capitalists of the period to rip off every damn thing that wasn’t nailed down and a lot that was. But, if there’s anything we can count on, it’s our citizens’ perpetual ignorance of history.
So, Americans don’t know and don’t care about exactly how Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt got to be so godawful rich. But the Billionaire Boys’ Club knows and man, are they going to town taking tried and true methods the next step.
As you accurately describe their socialized military establishment, they’ve got people being perfectly willing to hang around waiting for the next Existential Menace to fight using the best and newest useless billion dollar equipment. The concentration of wealth in the 19th century was accomplished by truly brutal methods–nothing, not even genocide, was off limits. Now, let’s exterminate evey last terrorist (they just happen to be Islamic, never mind the religious aspect of this endless war) And, people don’t even recognize what’s going on.
When MG says it’s all about money, he’s right. But, they don’t have to be so sloppy about it. Is it necessary to wipe out the Constitution on the way to the Bank? Interesting times have befallen us. NancyO
Nancy,
Thanks for the response. The answer to your query to me is the reason that MG is right about where the actions is. Once you have a certain amount of money, money is no longer money: it becomes power. The ability to draw enough of it out of the economy gives you the ability to draw more and more demand into your own control which naturally gets you more money, more demand and control until you get quite comfortable telling everyone else what to do, including politicians and our erstwhile judiciary now reduced to the status of well paid employees.
You cant eat it or sleep under it but unfortunately since you live in an industrial society you must get money in order to eat and sleep. The money guys can lend irresponsibly into a bubble causing it to inflate, then extract their profits and watch it pop secure in the knowledge that their decisions with their money will only hurt poor people who since they are obviously not as deserving (they are poor after all) is the best possible out come. What they’re thinking is that they’re pretty special and that the rest of us who chose to do what we do because we like it or thought it might make the world a better place or other such naive fantasies are a bunch of rubes for not worrying about money first like they do.
The match isn’t over, but every round in the last forty years has gone to the money guys and MG is right that what we call politics is a side show: anyone who thinks “liberal” or “conservative” are functional political terms at this point is blind to the real divide: immortal corporations (who’s managerial heads ignore their share holder bodies) vs mortal people.
Ahh… Waiting for the Endgame:
Can our masters guide our fall?
Or will their toppling tower
Destroy us all?
Check out:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/39080441/The-True-Secret-of-the-Pyramids
for how the ancient Egyptians destroyed their middle class, and reduced them all to indigence and slavery. Nowadays, the masters are much more sophisticated: Instead of piling rocks, we have fighting over rocks, and other creative and inventive ways of destroying resources and siphoning the people’s money into the grubby hands of the wealthy class. The US government controls 24% GDP, The increasing disparity of wealth can only be a matter of policy. Just by the way, the top 1% also controls 24% GDP.
Unsurprisingly, nothing effective is being done to reverse this. Our government, bought and paid for.
MG,
Generally, agree.
I am reminded of Jefferson’s warning about banks and standing armies. Can all men be equal in context of money? Was the balance of inalienable rights some balance to “all men are created equal”?
Also, I had a conversation with a sociologist friend who asserts it is not so much having huge amounts of money as who controls the debt.
Money is the store of value, but does no good sitting around in a vault (as the trillions today are) or if the underwriter, faith and credit, is out of business.
As Warren Mosler has tirelessly pointed out, government’s with fiat currencies can never go broke.
http://moslereconomics.com/2009/12/10/7-deadly-innocent-frauds/
Maybe bailing out tarp babies and continuing Gitmo isn’t such a good idea, but we won’t go broke. What we need is a full payroll tax holiday and a job guarantee.
http://moslerforsenate.com/?page_id=22
I’m with Coberly. Debt’s not the main issue, if it matters at all. The issue is who shares in the prosperity that our knowledge, technology, and social insitutions provide. Economic growth is needed, but the kind of growth we need is what we’ll get if we direct our knowledge and technology to improve our social institutions and the quality of our lives, with most of the increases going to those who experience the fewest benefits now.
Helping the rich gets richer just inflates bubbles that impoverish the rest. Engaging the vast majority in meaningful work that makes lives better for themselves and their neighbors is sustainable. You do that and secondary measures like controlling the level of debt and providing economic growth will take care of themselves.
Right on MG
ilsm
What money are you storing your value in?
empires decline due to environmental degredation – like soil erosion and lack of agricultural productivity and lack of resouces to support the population – not debt – money isn’t real, it is just a way of keeping track of who owes what to who and in a macro sense every dollar of debt is a dollar saved by someone else – the US produces enough food and can produce enough energy and goods to sustain its populaiton – the issue is that banks and rich guys are hoarding all these stupid little tokens, which causes everyone else to hoard those same tokens causing everyone to reduce consumption – the answer is obvious to me take the tokens from the hoarders and give them to people who will put them back in circulation – but it has nothing to do with the overall ability of the US to sustain its population
It probably wouldn’t hurt to drop the retirement age for a few years at least (if not permanently). The sunk cost to educate millions of 20somethings who cannot now find work needed to repay their student loans are about to become the next ugly bubble.
cursed,
I don’t have much value, I have a few values and they are inestimable.
That said I have far more money than sense to think which money to store my values in.
To quote Coberly–“there is no need for “eternal growth in the economy.” we are quite rich enough as it is. we have a distribution problem. and a failure of imagination. our wealth could be put to better uses than buying plastic toys and driving them back and forth to work.”
So, here are these fantastically (or phantasmagorically, pick your preferred image) rich guys who are endlessly powerful. Check. And, we know that they like to play war and toy games, as Ilsm has explained. Check. Mr. John notes their success in sucking the rest of us dry certainly since the 80’s if not before. And, Coberly points to their obvious intellectual and moral sluggishness.
Still I keep asking, Why can’t they think of something better, more interesting–maybe even more profitable–to do? Is it that hard? Man, I can think of gazillions of things to do starting with basics like streets and highways, levee redesign, wetland preservation, whole lot of re-engineering farming, developing new livestock production methods, and many more. A country with maybe 330 million people and not a damn thing they can think of to do with it except collect interest on folks’ mortgages? Really? Then, money must make you stupid and from all appearances it has done just that in the BBC. NancyO
The permanent war footing after WW2 was just the military industrial complex (war profiteers) refusing to dismantle their money machine.
The key of the last 30 has been messaging. Until someone other than conservatives develops and disseminates another set of messages to counter them, we will continue to see victories going to the right. Drew Westin’s “Political Brain” is a fairly good description of the process needed to counter the right. But it’s more difficult now that the right also largely controls the means of communication.
The key of the last 30 has been messaging. Until someone other than conservatives develops and disseminates another set of messages to counter them, we will continue to see victories going to the right. Drew Westin’s “Political Brain” is a fairly good description of the process needed to counter the right. But it’s more difficult now that the right also largely controls the means of communication.
The key of the last 30 has been messaging. Until someone other than conservatives develops and disseminates another set of messages to counter them, we will continue to see victories going to the right. Drew Westin’s “Political Brain” is a fairly good description of the process needed to counter the right. But it’s more difficult now that the right also largely controls the means of communication.
Alice
i should let this go, but what in hell wll a payroll tax holiday do for us?
I think those boots were Rand Pauls’ supporters’…
Actually we have seen the effect of popular backlash on the citizens united ruling. If you are in a brand name consumer business be careful or someone will organize a boycott of your product if you make a contribution. If you deal in business to business its not as much of a problem however, or if you sell generic products under retailer labels. So for example P&G won’t do much of it because it could hurt their branded sales, while Koch being in the business to business area can contribute without fear of backlash.
NO,
“more interesting–maybe even more profitable–to do?”
Read 1984; to keep it going they have to divide the masses and pose outside threats, a mix of Orwell and Mencken.
“we have always been at war with”….. Islam: 1088CE, to date (Vienna last invested in 1640). Orwell
“foreign threats, anyone opposed to militarism is unpatriotoc”… Mencken.
Goal is to rule by terror/propaganda a populace which acts contrary to its own interests.
They destroyed the “all men are created equal” part… and keep the people divided and down.
Object: Concentrate and control the “wealth of nations”.
ilsm
permit me to note in re “rule by propaganda” that not a single “newssource” in this country will fail to print the lie that “the deficit” is caused by social security” and that if we are to save ourselves from massive debt we must cut “entitlements.”
whatever this means for social security and the future condition of the aging… and it’s bad… it tells us that we are completely ruled by propaganda. free press be damned. the nature of propaganda appears to be that if you repeat a lie long enough from enough “sources” everybody will believe it, including those who ought to know better.
Propagandists,
Here are the “indisputable principles of the founders”.
The “created equal” phrase applies only to the real men owners, the top 1%.
The “pursuit of happiness” is idiom, means exploit labor and deny the fruits of resources, technology and work from the laboring classes.
A corrollary “indisputable principle of the founders”: Taxes are evil, cutting taxes create opportunities for the ownership class to lend money to the government from which they reap only gain.
Since taxes are bad the only way to cash special treasuries is to sell new ones.
Another “indisputable principle of the founders”: Reagan was a great economist.
He was the Boubon county coordinator for Rand Paul according to NYT
“It is very difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it” -Upton Sinclair
So yesterday, IBM authorizes $10b share buyback (6% of outstanding). They couldn’t think of another damn thing to do with the money.
In the 19th century you could start a new industry or if you were out of ideas, build libraries across the country.
Today it’s all bits in a computer–low development cost and zero manufacturing and distribution cost. What’s a poor robber baron to do? Buy gold and bury it in the sand in Aruba? Open up a charter school?
Bad government policy (a trillion here, a trillion there) creates black markets. Not, generally, a good thing, but at least people aren’t sitting at home waiting for Jerry Springer to come on.
If I sold my plastic car and went home to work on my Philosopher/King, my wife would kill me.
LOL. Poor little IBM…too dumb to be more productive or inventive. (pat, pat)
Someone must be watching that Springer crap. Or did the network forget to pull it?