Bush to Blago to Madoff: a triple play from hell

We can't tax or spend our way out of this mess. The bad debt must be defaulted, and this will mean bankruptcies among both people and companies (including banks) - lots of them. This is inevitable. Market-Ticker

“I have abandoned free-market principles to save the free- market system” George W. Bush

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the U.S. and China are becoming two countries, one system. How so? Easy, in the wake of our massive bank bailout, one can now look at China and America and say: “Well, China has a big-state-owned banking sector, next to a private one, and America now has a big state-owned banking sector next to a private one. China has big state-owned industries, alongside private ones, and once Washington bails out Detroit, America will have a big state-owned industry next to private ones.” Thomas Friedman

David Seaton's News Links
Masters of the craft often insist that it is essential to write every day if you are going to build any writing muscles, there seem to be neural paths that need to be blazed between brain and hand in order to write and the only way to blaze and nurture them is by steadily putting words onto a white space. My brief experience tells me that this is true.

I came to writing late: analyzing world affairs meant having to write on a daily basis and having to write turned into loving to write and that helps me to write every day: a beneficent circle.

The problem in facing the white space is usually where to begin, but world news has always provided me with a wide variety of themes: every morning there was some new event to start the flow of words and ideas moving.

The last few weeks have been heavy going though.

Bush to Blago to Madoff is not the kind of triple play to have the fans on their feet, hoarse from cheering. A steady diet of writing about nothing but criminal stupidity and decadence on a massive scale is finally as appetizing as chugging a barium shake.

However the quotes from Bush and Friedman that top this post give me a glimmer of hope that certain veins of mineable mineral may lie hidden gleaming within our depression-bound dung heap.

It seems sure now that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the ideological struggle against its real-existing socialism, rather than leading to the kingdom of heaven of market capitalism has, in fact, led to some sort of surprising synthesis, which we might tentatively call "don't-look-now-socialism".

The bottom line is that the political system of the United States will not tolerate those classic economic forces, the very rock upon which they have built their church; it will not permit the forces that Reagan called "the magic of markets", to wreak their "creative destruction" on the lives and futures of America's children, aged pensioners, middle class home owners, students, farmers, autoworkers and the assorted consumers of junk food and Chinese Gewgaws.

The system won't tolerate the market cleaning up its own mess because the system is afraid that the aforementioned victims might just turn around and burn the mother down.

Off the top of my head I would say that the consumer society, whose cornucopia of abundance buried real-existing socialism, succeeded in becoming the absolute motor of the US economy by drumming into people's consciousness that they are unique and special individuals whose wants and desires must be discovered, cultivated and satisfied.

Try telling a spoiled child that he or she has just been drafted into the world's "reserve army of labor", then stand back and watch them trash the nursery.

For the American economy to look them in the eye and tell them they are just so much dirt is not a message that a consumer with a "unique life style" can easily digest.

So here we are in the closing days of 2008, watching Adam Smith, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper and Milton Friedman lie moldering on the ash heap of history, while Karl Marx daintily brushes the ashes off his old suit and goes over his notes. DS

Global Warming... "conservatives" up against the wall

David Seaton's News Links

Scientists are overwhelmingly in agreement: global warming is happening and the results are already catastrophic. By the time today's small children are adults, the nightmare will be consummated... The end of the world? No, global warming is not the end of the world, just as tetraplegia is not the end of life. Global warming only means the end of life as we know it.... or perhaps as we would want to know it. Politically the question is, can our free-market economy, which is based on consumption, respond to the challenge? Can a fox guard chickens? As there seems to be a direct link between our consumption habits and climate change, it would appear not. Clearly, "conservatives" (ironic term) don't want to admit global warming or talk about it because they are looking at a collapse of their system that would dwarf the Soviet Union's. As the disaster progresses there seem two broad alternatives for humanity: selfishness or solidarity. First case: a tiny minority, armed to the teeth, maintains something like the old life style surrounded by a hostile, suffering majority... think Israeli settler enclaves on the occupied West Bank... on a planetary scale... or. Second case: a highly controlled, planned economy on a global scale where scarce resources are husbanded and shared equitably. The second alternative by any other name is "Socialism". The question would be, totalitarian, terror-based socialism or participatory, democratic socialism? Totalitarian, terror-based socialism, as we saw in the Soviet Union's, "Real, Existing Socialism", would mean a a tiny minority (party apparatchiks), armed to the teeth, that maintain something like the old life style surrounded by a hostile, suffering majority... while talking solidarity. It would seem that the only humanly tolerable alternative to a parched and flooded, homo homini lupus, dystopia, would be democratic, participatory socialism... Which hasn't been invented or tried yet. So anybody who would like to do some serious, useful thinking, should get busy preparing it, designing it and agitating for it. Meanwhile read Anatol Lieven's, wonderful, "writing on the wall" piece below. DS

Anatol Lieven: The end of the West as we know it? - IHT

Abstract: For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming.(...) As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change "is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen." The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations. If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.(...) If the conservative estimates of the Stern report are correct, then already by 2050 the effects of climate change may be such as to wreck the societies of Pakistan and Bangladesh; and if these states collapse, how can India and other countries possibly insulate themselves? At that point, not only will today's obsessive concern with terrorism appear insignificant, but all the democratizing efforts of Western states, and of private individuals and bodies like George Soros and his Open Society Institute, will be rendered completely meaningless. So, of course, will every effort directed today toward the reduction of poverty and disease.(...) If this comes to pass, what will our descendants make of a political and media culture that devotes little attention to this threat when compared with sports, consumer goods, leisure and a threat from terrorism that is puny by comparison? Will they remember us as great paragons of human progress and freedom? They are more likely to spit on our graves.
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