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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-TickerMasters 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 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
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.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/
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Excellent post, David.
My only quibble?
I think he does.
December 17, 2008 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Please don't quote the idiot-in-chief.
Tom Friedman is oblivious to how obvious he is. He falls in love with words that sound cool, like Flat Earth, missing how stupid they sound from a slightly different angle. "One system." Fatuous phrase love.
Milton Friedman is dead, but not enough. Marx is interesting but incomplete.
Adam Smith is doing fine.
December 17, 2008 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I quote Thomas Friedman because he is a thermometer, a rectal thermometer, if you will, but a thermometer.
December 18, 2008 2:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
a rectal thermometer, if you will, but a thermometer.
Giving the phrase "damning with faint praise" a whole new dimension...
December 18, 2008 3:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry to pester, but you surely do not lack subjects. Economics has yielded a few, and that vein is very rich, see the current Cafe front page. Islam, of course, and the tensions between India and Pakistan led to Arundhati Roy's excellent piece on the specifics of local politics and the absence of easy lines between good and evil.
Why not enlighten us with more about the multicultural sources of modern Spain? Something not talked about much is the gitano population. But the music and ethos of Spain is hugely dependent on the Moorish presence. How is it still active? Bin Laden mentioned Andalus in one of his first videos. And modern Spain got its ass kicked by Al Qaeda newbies, eclipsing ETA and causing a major foreign policy alteration.
Let the US crap alone, it's well covered. Tell us about your world.
December 17, 2008 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
You know Tom Spain is one of the most interesting subjects and so little is written about it here.
My god there were Greek colonists there 3000 years ago and Caesar's first job was as its governor. El Cid is so fascinating as a legend and how he really worked with moors and the factionalism and the military alliances he and others forged.
This is off subject, but yes the Moors still survive in Spain.
December 17, 2008 8:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
The reality of Spain is so far removed from the clichés about Spain that even to begin a discussion you would have to live here about six months. Otherwise I would have to write a textbook of context just to explain anything... not much fun. The American thing is more fun, because, at least for the moment, the USA is the universal context.
Having said that, I could tell you that Spain's economy is in as big trouble as the USA's, but Spanish people are more stoic, "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die", type of folks than Americans. One of the most fun things about writing on America and Americans is the solemn bellybutton gazing of the Americans as it all falls around there ears; it gives a certain wacky, Vonneguty, surrealism to it all.
December 18, 2008 1:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
So start talking. You don't have any competition on the subject, while you have lots on the American view.
December 18, 2008 8:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
If I want to blog about Spain on a general basis, I'll do it in Spanish for a Spanish audience... I already publish in the Spanish language.
December 18, 2008 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like I have said before, Friedman isn't half as smart as he thinks he is and he is never going to get a Nobel Prize. I would throw my shoe at him.
And David, if I am catching your drift, I read all those guys who are in the pile and they were just in the ministry of propaganda. On the lecture circuit alone in front of millionaire robber barons they made a lot of money spewing out this bullshit.
And millions like Joe the Plumber thought they could steel their millions and spit on the rabble from whence they came.
December 17, 2008 8:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Baloney. The elites in America are not afraid of "children, aged pensioners, middle class home owners, students, farmers, autoworkers and the assorted consumers of junk food and Chinese Gewgaws."
The only way the system would tolerate the market cleaning itself up is if there's money to be made doing so.
December 18, 2008 3:58 PM | Reply | Permalink