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Dream Big, Obama
David Sirota in Salon:
All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.
Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don’t reach for “a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business,” as Paul Krugman said we once had — they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.
Via @HicSaltus.
Stamping Loudspeaker Bells
Philadelphia, 1925. Stamping loudspeaker bells at the Atwater Kent radio factory. Found here.
Too Poor to Make the News
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, looks at the plight of the “already poor” in the New York Times:
The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.
Maybe “the economy,” as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won’t pay enough to live on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what the Economic Policy Institute calls a “dramatic collapse” in the last six months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.
Bing’s Commercial Blames Google for Financial Crisis
In review:
- People watched too many stupid videos on youtube.
- This allowed the forces of evil to destroy our economy.
- When we tried to stop them using our google cannons, we got LOST IN LINKS and it got worse and everything turned into suck.
- If you use Bing, you can completely ignore this reality and enter a new one, one where people sit in front of giant white boards and wear knee braces and children are kinda cute and Hey Look, a muscle car!
Also, there’s the obvious Hitler analogy.
Death Drive in a Cadillac
While I was browsing old car manuals searching for Studebakers, I came across a series of Cadillac brochures which advance the Cadillac lifestyle. As far as I can tell, the Cadillac line moved from sophisticated continental gentlemen to predatory equastrian-based molestation to murderous anti-human technical landscapes.
1959:
1971:
1987:
Cutting Spending
Adam Kotsko:
You know what would really help, if you want to cut spending? Most things that actually help the majority of people — social programs, preventive health care, even free college tuition — are not very expensive. Most human beings’ needs are actually quite modest, even if you’re thinking in terms of “full human flourishing” — which of course is a ridiculous thing for the government to care about, but stay with me. The really expensive things are huge tax cuts for the wealthy ($300bn), bailouts for reckless speculators who threaten to undermine capitalism as a whole ($700bn), and unnecessary wars ($700bn).
Bailout Burnout
I haven’t read through all of these yet, but Talking Points Memo has a great list of various economist’s reactions, including Paul Krugman’s, Robert Reich’s, and Nouriel Roubini’s, to the failure of the bailout plan to pass through Congress and where that leaves us. Definitely worth checking out.
“Fleecing Shareholders”
In the comments section recently a discussion erupted extending from fascism, to liberalism, to communism, and finally to the Wall Street bail-out. Yesterday Mark featured part of the discussion on the economics of fascism. Today I want to bring up this notion of “fleecing shareholders” as a form of benefiting the majority. As Ezra Klein notes in the above link
…[T]he majority of the country doesn’t own any stock. Indeed, the bottom 90 percent of us only own 20 percent of the market. The top 10 percent, by contrast, control 80 percent, with the top one percent of Americans controlling an astounding 36.9%.
You can see a graph over at The American Prospect, and the data comes from the Economic Policy Institute. So, again, the question with the bail-out is one chiefly concerning the question of who benefits, but seeing as the bail-out is in limbo at the moment there is not much else to add.
Bailout Talking Points
The blogosphere reacts!
- David Brooks thinks we should take this opportunity to completely overhaul the financial system by hoping for the appearance of a financial oligarchy of “bipartisan” Economic Wise Men who will fix everything. Glenn Greenwald reminds him that this was basically the guiding idea before the entire financial market collapsed!
- Kos asks why some of the planned $700 bn. bailout will go to banks that aren’t even failing. TPM has more thoughts on this.
- Doubt is cast on whether or not we’re really in a “crisis.”
- Jonathon Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution sums up what I will likely find to be the most fucked up part this entire scheme:
Whatever happens with the Wall Street bailout, I hope the recipients will take $30 million and endow a Hank Paulson Chair in Free Enterprise at AEI. Then the person in that position can spend the next forty years writing op-eds and going on TV telling us how if we just deregulate Wall Street it will make us all rich! rich! rich!
I think it’s clear that the Fed/Treasury is in the wrong: for one, the problem is not simply “liquidity,” it’s rather that the financial institutions, which had little oversight, were using bad loans as collateral. Some have used that argument to assert that the people who took out subprime mortgages are fundamentally at fault, but this perverted logic ignores the fact that the entire solipsistic speculation started with Wall…
The Pantheon of Capital
Premediation:
So where does the agency of the market to prompt the federal government to hand over nearly $1 trillion to bail out Wall Street come from? This agency, I would argue, in some sense comes from, participates in, the agency of premediation. The tone of this mediation is urgency. We are to be on the alert, to be concerned, and ultimately to be scared. The agents that we should fear are called “the market” or “Wall Street” or “the Dow.” “The market will not be happy if too many limitations are put on this bailout.” “Wall Street is worried that unless the Fed acts, more turbulence lies ahead.” “The Dow is demonstrating its concern about the terms of the bailout.” Not unlike the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods, these powerful creatures need to be feared and respected and pacified. The mediasphere is filled with the priests and votaries of these gods, warning the public of the danger that could come if they are angered or their will is flaunted.
…But the gods of Wall Street are in turmoil and they are still at the present moment more powerful than the collective voices of Main Street. Only when the premediation of Main Street’s agency begins to compete with the premediation of Wall Street’s agency will it be possible to imagine an economic future in which the US government acts to bail out the overwhelming majority of the American public who are threatened by this financial crisis, not the minority of those whose investments and livelihoods depend upon the financial markets.
‘All of a Sudden’
Senator Bernie Sanders:
For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford — that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.
Watch the video interview here. (Via Daring Fireball.)
Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
William Greider in The Nation:
Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses—many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?
If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public—all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics—exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.
(Via A Tiny Revolution.)