TRUST YOUr GUTS
by William Greider. The Nation.com. 28 March 2009.
[url]http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/greider?rel=hp_currently]http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/greider?rel=hp_currently] [url]http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/greider?rel=hp_currently (http://[url=http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/greider?rel=hp_currently)[/url]
A reassuring new story line is emanating from our leaders. I heard Representative Barney Frank, chair of the House Banking Committee, explain it. Then I read the same line in a Washington Post news story. That tells me people in high places are selling it. Dynamic capitalism, they explain, invents ways to create greater wealth, but sometimes it goes a little too far. Then government has to step in to correct things. This need typically occurs every generation or so, all in a day's work. The Obama administration is proposing "sweeping" new regulatory laws so that capitalism can continue its good works.
The story makes disturbing current events sound practically normal. But what are the storytellers leaving out? They aren't saying that this financial catastrophe was not merely an inevitable development of history but a man-made disaster. Greedheads on Wall Street did their part, but so did Washington. The reason we need new rules is that a generation of Democrats and Republicans systematically repealed or gutted the old ones--the regulatory controls enacted eighty years ago to remedy the last breakdown of capitalism (better known as the Great Depression).
The reason we need new rules is that a generation of Democrats and Republicans systematically repealed or gutted the old ones--the regulatory controls enacted eighty years ago to remedy the last breakdown of capitalism (better known as the Great Depression).
True, and even then, a lot of those rules made an outright crash almost impossible, but that slow roll and burn, it does not seem able to do much against that. Couldn't really, wasn't designed that way.
Everyone became enamored of the price, but forgot how to calculate the worth, and those are often two very different things. At the same time, and for the same base reasons I would think, far too many people who should have known better got all addicted to the process, and spaced out the reason that the process was there in the first place.
I talk with a lot of MBA types, who are under the illusion/delusion that they are operating some vast wheeling-dealing empire, when in fact, all we do is put on rock shows so we can sell beer and t-shirts. If we could skip the entire very-expensive-and-a-real-pain-in-the-butt show thing, and just get right to selling beer and t-shirts I bet would would, or we should. But, we need the show to get people in there to buy beer and t-shirts, and since its only the show that is bringing those people into buy beer and t-shirts you can't neglect the show itself.
All costs, though equal on a balance sheet, but in real life they are not. In a similar manner, all profits are not equal either, and those profits made by in effect and in reality making our manufacturing base weaker, or fleecing the financial system, were short term gains, and very long term losses, and should not have been allowed.
And that's part of the problem with the gay rights, abortion, gun control debates is that they were put up for pop culture politics while these guys ran loose at the trough, and no one much paid any attention. While these guys looted the Public Treasury everyone was all worried as hell that some gay boys in San Francisco might have a wedding. I mean really, what the hell was the point of that? Were farm boys and rednecks from all the middle parts of this country going to go out and get hitched to their drinking buddies all of a sudden? I doubt it.
You know how much we've spend on this 'bailout' now? Well enough to have simply paid off every single god damned mortgage in the United States. Every fricking penny of every fricking mortgage, paid. Which would have solved a bunch of this, but no... And where has this super huge pile of money gone? Best as I can tell the answer is, "Who knows?" Not exactly a confidence boost, more like a confidence game.
I prolly should have responded publically to your post when you made it, instead of privately.
Your analysis is insightful and pretty much spot-on. We engorge ourselves on the silly and self-evident and fight battles that are rather meaningless in the light of where power lies and who has their hands on those levers.
Better educated in terms of the world? I really don't think so. We are consistently fed consumer-culture pablum by the so-called MSM and don't realize that the view of the wolrd we have is part and parcel of "Friends" and "Will and Grace" or "CSI." (Excuse me if the tv references are dated. It's been seven years since I saw any TV programs other than the UEFA Champion's League finals and the Sper Bowl that starred Chicago and Indianapolis.)
But the bread and circuses are the primary "food" of our culture. And the bread isn't even subsidized for the consumer the way it was from J. Caesar to Romulus Augustulus.
Nichole
Oh heck, and most of what we are fed is dead wrong. Anyone who is very involved in a career or profession knows that feeling of watching some movie or TV show based on that that they are getting it all wrong. Take CSI, do CSI types really go out in the field and interview suspects? No, detectives do that, (as anyone who watches Law and Order knows) the real CSI types are lab rats who never leave the lab or crime scene, at least NCIS has that right, Abby is never doing the interviews.
But not seeing the forest for the trees is not exactly a new deal, which is why the idea itself is such a common saying.