Read It Here First
About six months ago I mentioned Italian debt. Italy, like the U.S., is too big too fail and so, to avoid a Lehman Moment, it "managed a successful offering of debt securities" last night, bought by the European Central Bank. The problem is that the contagion is spread throughout Europe. France, even Germany (the wundereconomy) are leveraged like AIG was. Italy's bond yield is now way over 7%, the point at which Ireland and Greece had to start begging. According to Scott Simon at Economix,"..then all sovereign debt in Europe will need to be repriced downward." Sound familiar?
Which means Beaks favorite clown Berlosconi will have to be replaced and many are calling for a technocratic government of "experts" to step in and set things straight.But this begs the question; aren't we already really governed by experts? Aren't they called the G20? I think what these commentators are saying is we need some NEW experts, some who are more expert than the old experts.
It occurred to me this odd Occupy moment with everyone asking Who Are We and What Do We Want? is a problem of semiotics. We have learned in our post-modern world to live comfortably with all these floating and empty signifiers such as Democracy and Politics or The Left. I am ok with indeterminancy, but not with the lack of debate and discussion which has been the hallmark of the last 40 years. So now when a Moment or Event opens up, citizens have no consensus on what consensus means or what citizen means. They are all fill-in-the-blank questions and there is a great deal of talking past one another. The Right, being brain dead, doesn't have this problem,they just round up a posse for Liberty and ride out into the sunset.
The Left can begin by defining itself as anti-capitalist and working out from there.
posted by troutsky @ 5:27 AM
25 comments
25 Comments:
You could always organize a potlatch... ;)
...or some other post-structuralist sacrificial offering.
...but then again, you might have to publish a different form of economic textbook (not Das Kapital). ;)
*tick-tock*....
Kairos doesn't come around every day looking for a roadmap. ;)
In fact, he seldom comes round at all, any more.
Well, trout, if you try to converse concretely about OWS you get some vicious reactions from the right.
Beak and Pagan want you killed, each has said so. Farmer is off in lala land inventing a new personality. I don't know exactly what he's about.
Ask a question about the democratic control of wealth and you'll get 9-9-9'd.
Now, should we pull our money and put it in local credit unions? Would the money be invested wisely in local housing, businesses and growth instead of having some corporate entity skim the profit and ship it to an offshore account?
Well, yes, but that type of question is going to be lost. We can't even start.
Beak may be extreme but he isn't that different than his right wing brethren.
Is Beak really a Berlosconi maven?
trout master,
The European Union was ill conceived from the start. The goal was to create a competitor for the US. However, none of the member states individually ascribed to what is necessary for them to succeed as a union.
The Union was established with a bunch of egalitarian tripe that never works and now the member states that joined, seeing a backstop for their foolishness in membership, are reaping the results of all that statist garbage.
Moreover, they have stifled productivity with taxes and most of all regulations that have created a culture like parts of the US which are dependent upon government handouts generation after generation. The real contagion in Europe is a culture that Obama is desperately trying to import wholesale into America with his fatally flawed post colonialist and collectivist view of the world.
Duckster,
What is money? What is it's purpose? How is it created?
The answers to those questions will lead you to the answers you seek young grasshopper!
Farmer is off in lala land inventing a new personality. I don't know exactly what he's about.
:)
So much for the OWS crowd being able to understand it's own dialectic.
Q.E.D.
No CB, the nature of money doesn't give me much insight into why we try to carry on with a laissez-faire system that is going to see the 1% leave Dodge when they have everything and not even leave Beak with a job as a Walmart greeter.
1. An economic system should be sustainable
2. The distribution of welth must be proportional.
Laissez-faire fails both counts.
...should be
....must be.
lol! You quack me up, Grand Architect of the Universe.
Really whatever failings of the Italian economy were, it is linked to entrenched socialism. An apologist for Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro should not talk about economic performance.
Actually Duncy you need to read the full comments again. The comments were an illustration of the unreasonable expectation of commies who demand Israel make peace with genocidal Arabs who are quite open about their aims.
I want you and the other communists placed in mental health facilities or prisons depending on your actions. Prison can be avoided
in return for denaturalization and deportation to North Korea on a voluntary basis.
Continued advocacy of a genocidal philosophy and theft in light of the historical record makes you a mental health reject.
Farmer: How come every time I turn around there is some economic theory talking about "cosmic energy" which I can't see,feel,taste,or hear? or even sense?
Your eudaimon is not my eudaimon.
Ducky: pulling out your money is a good demonstration of what might be but pulling your debt, no one paying their bills is better. Best of all is no one providing their labor.
CB: There was that little issue of World Wars, violent affairs that overdid the whole creative destruction motif. Culture is always a contest that is never settled but poison gas...should be avoided at all costs.
As for this new emphasis on the inscrutable nature of money, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
CB, why do you assume we aren't going through a period similar to the one that produced the populist movement at the turn of the last century? People had finally had it with renters class and a strong opposition rose.
Unfortunately the boat capsized, as capitalism is wont to do and FDR was there to save capitalism.
Now the boat is about to overturn again and we don't seem to have anyone around in the political class willing to try to save capitalism.
Trout and I are pinning our hopes on Mr. 9-9-9 but for other reasons.
How come every time I turn around there is some economic theory talking about "cosmic energy" which I can't see,feel,taste,or hear? or even sense?
How can you explain Manque other than as some sort of cosmic force? How about the sense of obligation you feel when given a gift? Love?
Your eudaimon is not my eudaimon
Hey... who ever said that ALL the Erinyes (Furies) have to transform into Eumenides? Can't some of them remain outside their Sacred Grove at Colonus and just haunt murderers who escape Athenian justice (Aeschylus, "Oresteia")... a daimon to cleanup what the so-called "eudaimon's" miss?
Symbolic castration anyone? I hear that "economically" you can get "more for less" that way. ;)
Economics has become an unknown-known. It's all a form f'n magic, in which only two people at are time are allowed to view the wizard behind the curtain, only they focus upon their future pleasures, instead of their present fears.
I thought you were Malthusian, Farmer. He, along with Marx and Ricardo and most classical economists knew that resources are finite.
Technology managed to speed the extraction and massive debt allowed impractical levels of consumption but it may be hitting a wall.
On another note, don't look for #Occupy to wind down easily. The Keystone pipeline win is going to be a big boost along with the Delaware River basin fracking hearings coming up.
Then, as trout says, folks just stop paying the renter class. That should shake things up. Shades of Henry George.
Duncy
OWS is the Obama Campaign and the damage it cause him suits me just fine. People are learning about the role of Acorn, Soros and Van Jones in these freakstocks and are getting fed up. They will take it out on Obama and the groups supporting this Freakstock.
Gifting within cultures is fine but when the white guy gives you a blanket or some beads, beware.
Just saying cosmic giving is not a system of measurement. Which you eventually need and which must be agreed upon.
Consumption has "hit a wall"? Can "human desire" hit a wall? It can only "sublimate" and "transfer". I think that the declining birth-rate in Europe has demonstrated the weakness inherent in a "strictly Maltheusian" conception of population growth. And given half a chance to substitute future material "wealth" for immediate children and women of child-bearing age will "joyfully" abort their offspring...their natural desires self-sublimated and spiritually transferred to a desire for greater crass materialism.
Just saying cosmic giving is not a system of measurement. Which you eventually need and which must be agreed upon.
What wrong with a hybrid economy? Patents expire and private intellectual properties become public technological "gifts" to the world. We but stand upon the shoulders of giants.
And given the choice between wealth and power, which should mankind choose? That which has "measurement" or that which does not?
Oh wait. Watts, Ohms, Volts. I can measure power. But now how do I measure the power of a sovereign?
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