Fear breeds evil: Trump is only a symptom of much worse to come

"It is fear that brings misery, fear that brings death, fear that breeds evil."

Swami Vivekananda

Vivekananda, the Indian, patriot-saint, whose teachings inspired Mahatma Gandhi, spoke about fear breeding evil in the late 19th century. This was long before a massive wave of post-defeat inflation, which destroyed the savings of its middle class, caused a terrified Germany, home of Goethe, Hegel, Meister Ekhart and Einstein, to hand over its destiny and the lives of many millions of Europeans to an insane, failed water-colorist, ex-corporal, from Vienna... all with the blessing of Germany's "one-percent".

The lesson being, if the corrosive, poisoning effects of fear could cause that nightmare to happen in one the world's most educated and civilized nations, it could happen anywhere and that certainly includes today's United States of America.

Fear as Vivekananda said, "breeds evil". You could say that fear weakens the "political immune system" of a nation and that a "symptom" of an acute failure of that political immune system might be the sudden appearance of the bizarre, massively unqualified figure of Donald Trump as a serious candidate for the US presidency, with its capacity to turn the world into atomic ashes, something which in political terms could be compared to the spectacular Kaposi sarcomas which in the early 1980s announced the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

Or if you prefer even racier metaphors, The Donald could be a sort of wacky "John the Baptist" for the Anti-Christ...

Imagine, though, a different figure, someone with Mr. Trump’s callousness but without the thin skin, lack of self-control and fragile, oversize ego. Imagine, in other words, a demagogue who embodies the dynamics of America’s pervasive commercial atmosphere, but who is smart, cunning, self-aware and self-disciplined(...)We had better prepare for such a person. In business, Mr. Trump might be called a beta test, or a “proof of concept.” To that end, he has already succeeded. Lee Siegel - New York Times

Mark Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes:

The troubled psyche requires a scapegoat. For Hitler, it was the Jews, among others. Today scapegoats are sought everywhere for the widespread feeling that something is amiss: that jobs are being lost; that precariousness has replaced security; that incomes are stagnant or falling; that politicians have been bought; that the bankers behind the 2008 meltdown got off unscathed; that immigrants are free riders; that inequality is out of control; that tax systems are skewed; that terrorists are everywhere. Roger Cohen - New York Times 

What is the objective reality behind the fear that so many people feel today?

When (some economists and technologists) peer deeply into labor-market data, they see troubling signs, masked for now by a cyclical recovery. And when they look up from their spreadsheets, they see automation high and low—robots in the operating room and behind the fast-food counter. They imagine self-driving cars snaking through the streets and Amazon drones dotting the sky, replacing millions of drivers, warehouse stockers, and retail workers. They observe that the capabilities of machines—already formidable—continue to expand exponentially, while our own remain the same. And they wonder: Is any job truly safe?(...) The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54 years old) who are working has been trending down since 2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the share of prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s, and has increased as much throughout the recovery as it did during the Great Recession itself. All in all, about one in six prime-age men today are either unemployed or out of the workforce altogether.   The Atlantic

Andrew McAfee, associate director of the MIT Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management,(…) despite his obvious enthusiasm for the technologies, doesn’t see the recently vanished jobs coming back. The pressure on employment and the resulting inequality will only get worse, he suggests, as digital technologies—fueled with “enough computing power, data, and geeks”—continue their exponential advances over the next several decades. “I would like to be wrong,” he says, “but when all these science-fiction technologies are deployed, what will we need all the people for?” (emphasis mine) MIT Technology Review Magazine

"I love the poorly educated"

Donald Trump

When we say, "We the people"... Who exactly are "We"? Who are the winners and the losers going to be in our "brave new world"?

Here is a graph to show the spread of intelligence (hint: most well paying jobs in the future will go to the light purple to red IQs on the right side of the graph)

Credit http://www.archure.net/

Lets clarify even further what "average" means:

The average IQ of the population as a whole is, by definition, 100. IQs range from 0 to above 200, and among children, to above 250. However, about 50% of the population have IQs between 89 and 111, and about 80% of the population have IQs ranging between 80 and 120, with 10% lying below 80, and 10% falling above 120.(emphasis mine) hiqnews.megafoundation.org

Here is a chart that shows what you can do with the following IQs:

Table 1 - Practical Significance of IQ - hiqnews.megafoundation.org

IQ Range	Frequency	Cumulative Frequency	Typical Educability	Employment Options
Below 30	1%	1% below 30	Illiterate	Unemployable. Institutionalized.
30 to 50	1%	1% below 50	1st-Grade to 3rd-Grade	Simple, non-critical household chores.
50 to 60	1%	1.5% below 60	3rd-Grade to 6th-grade	Very simple tasks, close supervision.
60 to 74	3.5%	5% below 74	6th-Grade to 8th-Grade	"Slow, simple, supervised."
74 to 89	20%	25% below 89	8th-Grade to 12th-Grade	Assembler, food service, nurse's aide
89 to 100	25%	50% below 100	8th-Grade to 1-2 years of College.	Clerk, teller, Walmart
100 to 111	50%	1 in 2 above 100	12th-Grade to College Degree	Police officer, machinist, sales
111 to 120	15%	1 in 4 above 111	College to Master's Level	Manager, teacher, accountant
120 to 125	5%	1 in 10 above 120	College to Non-Technical Ph. D.'s.	Manager, professor, accountant
125 to 132	3%	1 in 20 above 125	Any Ph. D. at 3rd-Tier Schools	Attorney, editor, executive.
132 to 137	1%	1 in 50 above 132	No limitations.	Eminent professor, editor
137 to 150	0.9%	1 in 100 above 137	No limitations.	Leading math, physics professor
150 to 160	0.1%	1 in 1,100 above 150	No limitations	Lincoln, Copernicus, Jefferson
160 to 174	0.01%	1 in 11,000 above 160	No limitations	Descartes, Einstein, Spinoza
174 to 200	0.0099%	1 in 1,000,000 above 174	No limitations	Shakespeare, Goethe, Newton

If these charts are correct it means that 90% of America's population is at the very best intellectually fitted for nothing more than then AI vulnerable jobs like "manager, teacher, accountant" and only 15% could even aspire to that. 75% are between 89 and 111.  All of those jobs from manager on down to caregivers and perhaps even sex workers are vulnerable to the rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

And don't imagine that China, often the villain of American job loss, is any different. The Chinese are leading the world in Robitics.  The loss of industrial jobs for "average" people is a world problem and the Chinese, like the Japanese, or Europeans for that matter, at least have the excuse that their population is rapidly aging.

However:

Largely as a result of higher fertility rates and immigration, America’s population, while ageing, is nonetheless likely to remain distinctly younger than other developed countries. Oxford Journals

It seems obvious that there is a critical mass of American citizens/voters who have every right to feel afraid and as Vivekananda said, "It is fear that brings misery, fear that brings death, fear that breeds evil.". This is the stagnant pool where demagogues like Donald Trump swim and flourish.

What  or who created good jobs for people with average intelligence in the first place?

Henry Ford

A good symbol of the economy that is disappearing would be Henry Ford and the philosophy behind that economy and American's legendary prosperity could probably be summed up by these two quotes of his:

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs 

Paying good wages is not charity at all - it is the best kind of business 

Those two ideas, making complex things cheaply and paying basically  low-skilled workers well, changed the world and created a stable, property owning, comfortable, middle class life style for millions of Americans with only a high school education or less, and gave the United States a political stability that was the envy of the entire world. That stability is disappearing/has disappeared as of today and fear... and the evil fear brings are the result. And soon even highly skilled workers and people with graduate degrees will probably be finding themselves facing the same realities as the poorly educated do today... if they aren't already.

Henry Ford's Detroit factory today

As we try to predict the future of the few winners and many losers of today's technological revolution, it might be useful to consider the fate of the losers (and they lost big) of  Ford's technological revolution.

This is what big city traffic looked like before Henry Ford made cheap automobiles ubiquitous.



This film was shot in London, but it could just as well have been made in New York or Chicago.

What is shown in 1890s London that is missing from today's city streets?

Horses.

The streets then, the world itself, was full of horses, millions and millions of horses. For thousands of years horses had accompanied humanity and done them great service. The word for horse in Spanish is "caballo" and the word for gentleman is "caballero". Our relationship was once that close:

Due to its natural companionship with man in both work and art, the Horse easily wins a special seat in history, ranking high marks of honor, reverence and symbolism. Serving man in war, mobility, productivity, agriculture, development of all kinds, the Horse is by far one of the largest contributor to the enhancement of civilization. Avia Venefica

Then...

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked. Elon Musk

In a very short time a much loved symbol of the "enhancement of civilization" almost disappeared simply for economic reasons.

What sort of "jobs" are the few horse left doing? What sort of insight could this give us to the future of the masses of today's humans who wont be relevant in tomorrow's new technological environment?

Well, a horse that is very fast or very beautiful, plays polo, does tricks or is very "good with children" still has a place in today's world of the wealthy and the chance of a comfortable, pleasant life. Other less desirable "careers" might be that of a "trail horse" in a summer camp... or participating actively in steak tartar.

But you say, "this horse metaphor is ridiculous, horses are animals and people are well, 'people' ... human beings, 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights' and so forth". But what this really boils down to, is that horses couldn't vote and unlike so many Americans today didn't possess fully automatic assault rifles with banana clips.  In short eliminating horses from American life because they were no longer needed or profitable had little or no danger or political cost.

So leaving aside the precedents of certain 20th century figures like Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, we can safely assume that Americans with average  to low IQs are not going to be physically eliminated. 

Where are we headed then?

If we want to be optimistic we can see ourselves looking at the problem as Michael Littman does:

We can turn machines into workers — they can be labor, and that actually deeply undercuts human value. My biggest concern at the moment is that we as a society find a way of valuing people not just for the work they do. We need to value each other first and foremost. Make it clear that the machines that we're talking about are machines to benefit everybody and not just the people that have them. Michael Littman, computer scientist at Brown University - Tech Insider

A skeptic might imagine one of the "great and the good", a "one-percent-er" reading that and thinking, "how much is all that going to cost?" and saying, "not by raising my taxes" and then contributing heavily to the campaign funding of any politician or media group dedicated to fighting Littman's point of view.

What will the future AI/robotic America probably look like then?

You won't need much of an imagination to envision where we are going. Think of a big country, thickly peopled, rich in natural resources with a first class scientific and cultural establishment and many mega-billionaires... and enormous masses of desperately poor people... Say, Brazil or India

In short, in the foreseeable future, or the United States of America is  going to turn into a nightmare of human misery something like the slums of Calcutta, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or today's Detroit and the South Side of Chicago, or the elected representatives of the millions of “unneeded human beings” are going to have to fund the  massive government expenditures that are going to have to be made in public education, social support, socialized medicine, day care centers and public “make work” projects of all kinds. This is what libertarian billionaire, Peter Thiel probably meant when he said that freedom and democracy are incompatible. He surely means that in a democracy his freedom to do what he and other billionaires want to do with their money would be severely curtailed.

In short, American big money will be as cool with this nightmare scenario as their Indian and Brazilian counterparts and like a boxer tying up his opponent in a clinch, will happily finance every nutcase and corrupt politician they can find to avoid this future sacrifice of their power, wealth and privilege. DS

Will this all end with a bang or a whimper?

David Seaton's News Links

 

U.S. corporate profits and efficiency are getting absurd. On Friday we saw record quarterly profits of $1,450 billion, making up a record share of GDP at 10.1%. We're also at record corporate efficiency of $15,278.72 -- up 22.3% from last year (...). That last one says it all. Rampant job cuts and salary cuts, with new responsibilities for old workers, during the recession turned corporations into profit-making machines. Stimulative policies from the government and the Federal Reserve helped plenty. New technology also helps with efficiency. Unfortunately there are no signs that corporations are turning revenue into jobs. Business Insider

The problem with US manufacturing is not that it has been shrinking – despite the “offshoring” of textile and electronics manufacturing to China, US manufacturing output rose by 3.9 per cent a year between 1997 and 2007. However productivity grew 6.8 per cent annually in the same period, so millions of jobs were lost. If manufacturing carries along the same path, McKinsey estimates that it could shed another 2.3m jobs by 2020, while the economy needs to create 21m more jobs to return to full employment. The mini-recovery in manufacturing jobs – 164,000 were added in the six months to April – recently stalled. John Gapper - Financial Times

Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible and thrive in a globalized economy. The alternative is – like in the 1930s - unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability. Nouriel Roubini - Project Syndicate

Since Steve Jobs announced his resignation a few days ago, there have been endless (well deserved) paeans to his genius and how sorely he will be missed. However, it seems to me that what the world needs more than anything else right now is not another Steve Jobs, but another Henry Ford.

This is because the jobs that Jobs has provided are mostly for people with post-graduate degrees and what is needed now is what Henry Ford provided: steady, well paying, jobs for people with even less than a high school education. Ford created an entire industry based on the idea that the men that worked in his factories should earn enough wages to buy the cars they themselves made. That concept was the keystone to America's disappearing middle class prosperity.

The present technological revolution means that workers in today's more advanced and "competitive" industries often need some two years of specialized training to be of any use at all, thus advances in productivity are creating an impoverished subclass of "working poor"... if they can find work.

Most commentators think that this problem can be solved by improving education to make those entering the work force more "competitive". Certainly education is always valuable even for (or especially for) its own sake. But those who have sweated through four or many more years of university to acquire marketable skills, should not feel smug.

Those with post-graduate degrees in math and engineering should be looking warily over their shoulders at the advances in artificial intelligence (AI). They might ponder on the programs that today allow computers to defeat the world's most skillful chess players. If we take as a working hypothesis that artificial intelligence is now at about the same stage as personal computers were at the beginning of the 1980s (remember the Commodore 64?)and project the trajectory of AI similarly into the coming three decades they could easily picture their futures as Walmart greeters... if Walmart can find enough paying customers to stay in business... or, more probably, armed with their PHD in math, finding employment as security guards or gardeners at a gated community for (fill in blank)...

Thus the system seems to be moving inexorably toward eliminating human input except as credit-fed consumers. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this cannot be sustained for very long without a political explosion of some kind... now that credit is crippled, perhaps for good.

Tragically this explosion probably wont happen in the USA, where it is needed most.

Most of today's middle class Americans, in contrast to the rioting, overcrowded, ghetto residents of a few decades back, live isolated in places that Gertrude Stein described as "when you get there, there is no there, there".

In the USA there is really no equivalent to Cairo's Tahrir square or Madrid's Puerta del Sol: a recognized demonstration-drome, which can make governments and societies themselves stop in their tracks. There is no Bastille* to be taken in the United States, just angry, isolated people stewing alone in darkened living rooms, easy prey for the ilk of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party crazies. It probably will be they who inherit the wind. DS

*did you notice how French millionaires, who do remember the sans culottes, and the Paris Commune are lining up to pay higher taxes.

Humanity: up a tree, with no fireman in sight

Raghuram Rajan

“The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.” [Marx - Capital, Volume III, Chapter 30]

“It is the end of cheap goods,” says Bruce Rockowitz. He is the chief executive of Li & Fung, a company that sources more clothes and common household products from Asia than perhaps any other.(...) China helped to keep global inflation in check. But that era is now over, (...) Nothing can replace the Chinese miracle. “There is no next,” says Mr Rockowitz. Prices will now start to rise by 5% or more each year, with no end in sight. And that may be optimistic. So far this year, Mr Rockowitz says, Li & Fung’s sourcing operation has seen price increases of 15% on average. Other sourcers of Asian toys, clothes and basic household products tell similarly ominous tales. Economist

“In the quest for growth, many countries have neglected to build a reliable system of social security that will help citizens buffer the market's volatility.(...) Democratic capitalism’s greatest problem is not that it will destroy itself economically, as Marx would have it — but that it may lose its political support.” Raghuram Rajan

David Seaton's News Links

Marx's predictions of the system collapsing under the "enmiseration" of workers seem to have been foiled over and over again by the system's growing ability to produce and market ever cheaper and more abundant consumer goods and then, when incomes began to stagnate, to make available ever cheaper and more abundant credit with which to buy those goods: a form of consumption which used to be aptly known in England as "buying on the never-never". The role of the worker was replaced by the role of the consumer and the connection between the two roles became ever more tenuous.

Thus did the system square the circle: people could "own" their own home and consume just as if they were prosperous, despite stagnant or falling wages and to tide people over the rough spots, in most developed countries, there was a generous welfare state in place.  This formula for dynamic economies combined with social peace appears to be have run out of road. And in this financial crisis the "never" of never-never seems to have arrived.

In the video above, Chicago University professor and former (clairvoyant) chief economist of the IMF, Raguram Rajan lays great emphasis in improving education in order to prepare workers for a labor market demanding ever more sophisticated skills, as those without said skills, seem irredeemably doomed to Marx's "enmiseration". 

As much as I admire professor Rajan, and I admire him very much, I am skeptical about the possibility of training the mass of humanity, the grandchildren of homo habilis, in the skillful, rather obsessive, management of the abstract symbols and concepts which make up so much of the new technologies... This is a sort of skepticism I have been incubating for a long time. I remember even writing a poem when I was in my teens, with the lines:

On a rectangular plot of manicured grass,
Sits the man of tomorrow,
On yesterday's ass

My intuition tells me that we are quite a young species -- only about 200,000 years old -- and only living in permanent village-town-cities, that is to say, "civilized", for some 10,000 years. We belong to a species, which, by a quirk of evolution, is intelligent enough to have gotten itself into a situation which we are not intelligent enough to get out of... something like a kitten climbing a tree... Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a "fire department" to get us down from our "tree".

Let me give a simple, graphic, example of what I am trying to say. Look at today's epidemic of obesity, which I think is a perfect indicator of our dilemma. For almost all of our 200,000 years of existence as a species, right up till the very recent development of our advanced agricultural and distribution techniques, being able to gain weight quickly, when food was abundant, and lose it slowly, when food was scarce, was a vital plus for surviving frequent crop failures, droughts and other natural disasters. Suddenly, within a few generations, thanks to our logistics and food processing systems, a large percentage of the population finds itself waddling toward an early grave.  I think this will serve as metaphor for many observable phenomena today, you are welcome to make your own list.

Certainly most of humanity through most of its history and prehistory, survived and did useful work without having to manage abstract symbols and concepts and it seems to me as cruel as laughing at fat people  to make those abilities essential for living with any security and dignity today.

The challenge today is to allow the most average of people to have a decent life, with good health, as much education as they are able to absorb and a chance to work gainfully in occupations within their capacities and enjoy a dignified retirement. The person able to "re-invent" work, and make this possible would be the "Einstein" of today's world.  DS

The asymmetrical revolution - part II

Just suck it up

David Seaton's News Links

There is an idea prevalent among many commentators that the "markets" are something immutable, some God-given law of nature, like the law of gravity. This is part of the "end of history", pensée unique, business. In fact the markets are just human social constructions like any other... that is to say they are political. What human beings have arranged, human beings can rearrange.

Admittedly the human animal can continue to flourish in conditions where any other self-respecting mammal would stop breeding and go extinct, but even so, if you oppress them enough, they turn and bite. That is what is about to happen shortly, certainly in countries with long traditions of taking things to the streets.

The welfare state is not socialism, but rather something created to stem the rise of socialism. The whole skimmed milk, social democracy business was concocted in the first place by the middle class (Bismark created the pension system, Roosevelt created Social Security, remember) to protect itself from violent revolutionary movements.

The reason we even had the recent subprime mortgage crisis in the first place was because a political decision had been made to make home owning possible for the savings-less working poor through easy credit -- by giving away money -- because the real incomes of everyone but the rich had either stagnated or had been in decline for decades.

Home ownership is considered socially stabilizing, the entry point to the prudent middle class. Politically it was thought positive to get  poor people (NINJAs) into houses they thought they owned, even if they really didn't and could never have afforded, if the lenders had been using traditional credit evaluation procedures.

Thus a fiction of prosperity was created through politics. The increasing inequality and impoverishment of the lower middle class and working class, brought on by decades of Friedman-Reagan-Thatcher-ism was papered over by easy credit and now the money is being shut off. Changing metaphors, root canal work begins after the anesthetic wears off.

So making endless cash available was a political decision to defuse social tension, but now it has been decided that politics must bow to the markets... we are expected to believe that the markets will decide the fate of nations, will decimate health care, education, pensions... and everybody is just going to resign themselves to that and say "Amen". People who believe this should take their eyes off the Bloomberg screen for a moment and read some history.

We have finally come to a major debt crisis because it has never been politically possible in democracy to ask people to resign themselves to poverty. It still isn't. They tend to rebel, especially when they see that those who are telling them to "live within their means" are drawing huge salaries and bonuses. Any ruler should know that if there is nothing left in the larder to throw to the "wolves", they will break inside and feed at will.

What is being cooked now is a huge social conflict... like 1968, but this time without the background of full employment; less festive, more "bread and butter", more widespread and more violent.

Hopefully democracy itself will survive this. DS

The joys of bankruptcy, or is this January 1914?

Angry populism lurks just beneath the surface of two-party politics in America. Just listen to Sarah Palin or her counterparts on American talk radio and yell television. Over the long term, the political stakes in reforming Wall Street are as high as the economic. Robert Reich - Financial Times

“The fact that Wall Street is enjoying record profits and bonuses in the wake of receiving trillions of dollars in government assistance — while so many families are struggling to stay afloat — has only heightened the sense of confusion.” Phil Angelides - Chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and the people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French...and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you, if you will get us free from the French.' True story. And so the devil said, 'Okay, it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out -- the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other...They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy I'm optimistic something good may come..."
Pat Robertson (enormously successful American, ultra-right, religious wacko)

David Seaton's News Links

One of my favorite commentators on world affairs is Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times: he is always insightful and fresh and often provocative in his rather sly, kindly, way.

Rachman has recently written a column that has caused quite a stir, entitled: "Bankruptcy could be good for America", where he says:

In Winnie-the-Pooh, there is a significant moment when the bear is asked whether he wants honey or condensed milk with his bread. He replies “both”. You can get away with this sort of thing if you are a much loved character in children’s literature. But it is more problematic when great nations start behaving in a childish fashion. When Americans are asked what they want – lower taxes, more lavish social spending or the world’s best-funded military machine – their collective answer tends to be “all of the above”.

He lists a series of financial crises which led to reform in a number of countries that has brought them increased prosperity and winds up:

(T)he Brics (Brazil, Russia, India and China) all needed a fiscal crisis to set them on the road to economic reform and national resurgence. America may one day be lucky enough to experience its very own national fiscal crisis. Let us hope it is not wasted.

It is hard to imagine such a fundamental part of the scheme of things as the USA going bankrupt, the effects could mean the end of financial life as we know it on our planet.  But having said that, a lot of bad things have happened over time that nobody in their right mind wanted to happen... but they did.

World War One, for example.

It came at the end of nearly a century of barely interrupted peace, years of progress in every field of human endeavor without equal in the history of our species

The extent of the destruction of our civilization, human, cultural, geopolitical and even psychological by World War One was "unimaginable" in the years running up to it. It was no less than the end of the idea of "progress": the inevitable march of humanity to a better state. And the way it started and developed in the summer of 1914, while supposedly powerful, intelligent men, who understood perfectly what was happening, looked on in helpless, impotent, horror, might be a foretelling of what we are living through today. The moral of the story is that just because a scenario is too horrible to contemplate is no reason that it couldn't occur.

Frankly, I don't think America's bankruptcy would be a good thing, especially because it would most probably lead to outright fascism in the USA. Americans are armed to the teeth and given to substance abuse and I don't think they are just going to meekly sit back and accept pauperization, especially now that the financial system has proved to be such a scam.

I don't think any of this will be led by Sarah Palin, I don't think she has the chops. Palin for me is a sort of "Joan the Baptist", not fit to the tie the sandal of the one she foretells: she is a sign, a portent of an effective way of addressing "ordinary people"... and not a good one.

I believe that Rupert Murdoch, like the German financiers that originally backed Hitler, will finally find himself in the position of having created someone he cannot control. I've got my eyes peeled, but I haven't seen America's version of Mussolini yet. But as function creates the organ, if the jobs don't come back, you can be sure this figure will appear. He or she already exists, but who exactly it is that at this very moment is slouching toward Jerusalem on the Potomac remains to be seen. There will be little to stand in this person's way unless the jobs come back. The jobs have to come back or there will be blood.

Of course at the heart of all this dysfunction is the paralysis of our political system which hasn't been this corrupt since the days of Jay Gould, a time when the world was a much simpler place. That colossal web of corruption is the "Catch-22" that makes any significant change in our society and its way of doing things of tenuous credibility

The movement that spawned Ronald Reagan has ruined America. The "conservative revolution" has been a political form of AIDS which has destroyed all the system's antibodies and left it prostrate and at the mercy of all the countless parasites, vultures and wiseguys that America has always produced, consumed avidly and even exported.

We have seen where the deregulation and laissez-faire of Reagan and Thatcher have finally taken us, those are yesterday's recipes and they are clearly failing the majority of the people in our developed countries and destroying the middle class which has been the secret of our post WWII social peace. It is time for the the market fundamentalists, the Milton Friedman-Taliban, to FOAD and let others step up to the plate.

Someone like me, who has become increasingly skeptical of the American political system, is tempted to see Barack Obama and Sarah Palin as two sides of the same coin; as the system's "good cop and bad cop"; Obamaites and Teabaggers, being mirror movements both acting as the system's "lighting rods", one on the left and the other in the right of what Gore Vidal calls "the party of property", leading the lightning bolts of people's righteous anger off harmlessly into the ground... leaving the interests of those who have caused the damage basically unaffected... Or are you seriously expecting Sarah Palin and Fox to rein in Wall Street? (You can see that Obama has no intention of really doing so by the people he has set to watch the store).

Taking into account the laughable bunch of odds and sods that passes for a "left" in the USA, the most probable movement will be to the wacko right. If the USA had any credible social democrats, even of the housebroken Olaf Palme or Willy Brandt variety, there might be some chance of putting the country on a proper footing. As it is, I think there is a good chance of some real trouble. Certainly, protectionism and trade wars are on the cards.

A tiny ray of hope:

Last Saturday I saw Michael Moore's latest film, "Capitalism, a love story". Aside from his stunts, like putting crime scene tape around Wall Street -- cheap clowning which I'm getting a little tired of -- much of the film was brilliant. Especially the montage section about the rise of Reagan and its consequences.

What really impressed me for its political daring was the "Liberation Theology" line that Moore was taking. He affirms without any caveats in the film that capitalism isn't "Christian": that the values of capitalism are totally contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ. In other words, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Moore even had a couple of priests and bishop, say this clearly in the film.

The talk itself wasn't that surprising to me, I grew up around a lot of Catholic progressives. A cousin of mine from Saint Louis was Michael Harrington's closest friend since they were babies and his mother and Harrington's mother were inseparable friends since they were little girls. Thus I am totally aware that not all Irish Catholics are like Pat Buchanan. So I'm sure this is not something that just popped into Michael Moore's head: these are his roots.

Now, Michael Moore is nothing if not an opportunist and he is very shrewd and a masterful agitation-propagandist from head to foot, and as an icon of the left, I think he feels that the moment is ripe for Liberation Theology.

I hope he is right.

Americans are very religious people, by and large and if there is one thing that unites most working class and rural whites, African-Americans and Hispanics, it is their love for Jesus, who, as Moore points out, was never a friend of the wealthy and the powerful... As embarrassing as many of my readers may find that simple statement of fact.

There has to be found or be created, an overlap between American progressives and the Evangelicals. That is why I often say that what the American left needs today is a new William Jennings Bryant.

In a sense the question is: are American progressives going to identify defending American workers, their homes and their jobs as their primary task or are they going to identify themselves as defenders of the values of an illustrated upper-middle class? Both positions have their value, but it might be more intelligent at this moment to defend the first and reserve the second for better times.

The one thing that  I am sure of is that if the jobs don't come back to the USA real quick there is going to be hell to pay. Globalization is going to fall apart on that one. The jobs have to come back or everything will fall apart. DS

Globalization's Broken promises - William Pfaff - International Herald Tribune

David Seaton's News Links
The greatest achievement of the post WWII western world was the creation of a massive, satisfied, new, working middle class. This gave a previously unheard of stability to these societies. Globalization is directly attacking the prosperity and aspirations of that middle class. Logically this will lead to a return of "class struggle", something that was supposed to be as out of date as the buggy whip... but if cars ever disappeared, back would come the horses and buggies and of course, out would come the buggy whips. Nouriel Roubini predicts a major recession for the first quarter of 2007, there is a Democratic Congress... Things might begin to move. Globalization was born in the USA and if it ever dies it will die there first. DS
Abstract: The U.S. midterm election was noteworthy for what analysts called voter "populism," which is to say, its element of economic protest. It is increasingly clear to voters in the United States - and in Europe - that the promise concerning globalization made to the public by economists, business leaders and politicians has not been kept. Workers in the rich countries were promised that they would ultimately benefit from globalization. Under the new corporate norms of the globalization era, wealth and rewards were to "naturally" trickle down to everyone in a company. Instead, workers find that their countries grow richer, as do corporations and executives, but ordinary working people grow poorer. The promise was that workers whose jobs were outsourced abroad might undergo transitional difficulties but eventually would have better and more sophisticated jobs. This was unconvincing. In the past year, it has become generally acknowledged in practice and in the economic literature that workers in North America and Western Europe have paid the price for the gains made by corporations through outsourcing production. Recognition of this affected the U.S. election and is a major factor in recent popular hostility to EU expansion and further extension of the EU's single market (as in services, to take the current controversy).(...) what we are talking about is taking skilled employment from people in advanced countries, accustomed to high wages, and awarding it to people in poor societies where high-labor competition exists at much lower wages for the same skilled work (wages that in the economic circumstances of these countries may nonetheless be adequate or even generous). The low-wage worker and his society benefit in most cases, but have also entered into what is a one-way movement, and a permanent one. The logic of the process dictates that the outsourced work steadily seeks even lower-wage societies. There are few if any manufacturing or professional skills in the advanced countries that cannot eventually be supplied elsewhere at much lower cost. It also has not until now been fully appreciated that the corporation itself and its management are eventually subject to this logic. Why should the Indian or Indonesian manufacturer of products sold in more sophisticated markets by American, European or Japanese corporate clients not eliminate that costly overhead, and himself take over the functions of corporate headquarters now in Chicago, London or Frankfurt? The formerly anonymous Chinese manufacturers of IBM products bought IBM, seeing IBM's existing American managers as a profit drain on their company. If you think in this way, globalization still has a long way to go. It may not prove a pretty process.(...) current international and national assumptions and ideologies concerning the economy are recent, arbitrary, open to challenge, and undoubtedly as transient as those of all their predecessors since Adam Smith (a humanist). Monetarism will not pass away with Milton Friedman, who died Thursday. But it will become a footnote to economic history. The ideas of John Meynard Keynes, which are attracting attention again, will have the more lasting influence. Why? Because of Keynes's fundamental humanism. READ IT ALL