The Bell Tolls For Us - II | The Agonist - The Diigo Meta page

• 26 Aug 08
  

  Todd Suomela

  Thus, the poor must now pay. And pay you will. Not just today, not just tomorrow, but for the rest of your life. This is the one thing that neo-classical synthesis economics prescribes, if money cannot bail the problem out, then the problem is that the po

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  • Thus, the poor must now pay. And pay you will. Not just today, not just tomorrow, but for the rest of your life. This is the one thing that neo-classical synthesis economics prescribes, if money cannot bail the problem out, then the problem is that the poor have too much money, and must be shorn of the ability to spend, until they can spend within the frame work of equilibrium growth. Neo-classical economics solves mesoïnflationary pressures, then, by forcing the people out of the world of prosperity.
  • Barack Obama is destined to be a catastrophe for America, for the Democratic Party, for the Progressive movement which backed him. He is going to destroy his would-be friends, reward his enemies, spend money he does not have, make promises he will not keep, and plunge into ruin an American Economy that he and his advisors do not understand, because they are a generation out of date. The same ideas that put an end to Jimmy Carter, are the ones that he would enact now. Barack Obama is running for a repetition of Jimmy Carter's first term in office, as much as John McCain is running for George W. Bush's third term.
  • This failure of a liberal ideology to step forward means that the neo-conservative ideology which dug this hole is going to go through one more cycle of a weak Democrat cleaning up the mess left by a reactionary Republican, paving the way for the next Reactionary. As Carter cleaned up Nixon-Ford, and was defeated by Reagan for his troubles, as Clinton cleaned up Reagan-Bush, and was impeached for his troubles, Barack Obama is volunteering to clean up George W. Bush, and be followed by someone like Bobby Jindahl, or what ever good hair Republican is manufactured in the next 4 or 8 years to replace him. Only at the end of that next round of making the wealthy tax exempt will there be a true day of reckoning. This is because the peaking of light oil will have well and truly set in, the offshoring of production to China will be irrevocable, the baby boom retiring en masse will create fiscal havoc in the Medicare system. At that point, with resources exhausted, America will be forced to sell the rest of the crown jewels of its economy, disgorging companies which it can now decline to sell.
  • That one problem is that we do not know how to create an economy without oil. The problem then, is not any of these symptoms, because if it were not one, it would be others, but the lack of a substitute for petro-think, other than massive austerity provided by a low density economy. And that, if one measures the numbers, merely substitutes fresh water for oil in the world. Show me which 4 billion people you want to hurry along to a premature grave, and I will sign up for this program. But you have to pick them, I do dirty work, but not that dirty. Or let me be colder, the coming global conflict when oil bandwidth falls dramatically, will pick them. And it will fall on every continent, on every age, on every class. That is, unless we act soon. So far, we are not.
  • Obama's problem is that he, like other Democrats of his generation, wants to get rid of the liberals from the Democratic Party, and leave behind only the parts of the party that are addicted to government spending, without having the parts of the party that create the wedge that that government spending is predicated on. It is urbanism, and intellectualism, and cosmopolitanism the very forces that Barack Obama has repeatedly pissed upon in his actions from lecturing the Daily Kos audience on why they had to bend over for Alito, to exiling Wes Clark and John Edwards from the Democratic National Convention. In short, like Nixon, like Reagan, like George W. Bush, Obama wants liberalism without liberals. Which is to say, he wants liberalism without the engine which drives liberalism.
  • The failure is one of postulate: the neo-conservative big government libertarian theory was that free markets are emergent. They are not, instead, what is emergent is rental plutocracy. Capitalism is not the natural state of an economy, instead, small elites controlling rental resources is the natural state. Food, violence, land, energy are the historical rents, with money being used as a lever for all of them.

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