Mary Landrieu has the entire Blue Dog side of the Democratic party up in arms and supporting Republic-cons on the Keystone Pipleline. They think that will help her win reelection. Unfortunately, it's not likely to do her any good. When voters are forced to choose between a genuine con and a less genuine one -- they'll go with the real thing. So:
Bye!! Bye! Mary Landrieu.
I almost hope I'm wrong. But....
Right now our two party system is almost descriptive of the two main umbrella parties. Both are open tents where anyone can join the party who elects too. The Democrats claim to stand for a broad franchise, democracy and an open tent approach to governing. The Republicans are more whiggish than they ever have been since the whig party broke up in the 1850's. They still support the "supremacy of congress" over [this] President but they no longer support a program of "modernization and protectionism", that's the job of the Democrats. But they still are the party of the business classes dominated by business tycoons, which has been the feature of the Republicans since 1877.
Now we Dems, we are the party of our business classes too, in uneasy alliance with labor -- and the rest of us.
When you hear Cons talking they praise "Schumpeter's creative destruction" and think that anything the "Government" does to ameliorate or stop that "creative" destruction retards change and has negative side effects. That is what they are teaching, I suppose in Business classes nowadays I suppose. In this view unemployment, businesses shutting down and moving to the South and then to China is just "competition" working itself out. The storms and dislocations are "natural" and for the followers of modern Schumpeterism the government should coin "sound money" and stay out of the way of Business. No wonder Businessmen love the theory!
"The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism." (p. 83) [econlib]
So they take a negative and turn it into a positive in classic newspeak.
I was listening to Sunday's "Melissa Harris Perry" broadcast on NBC, and she's there saddled with 3 "economists" who thought this was the greatest thing in the world. The same cons who will tell you that "evolutionary theory is not true and the world was created 6000 years ago" will opine rapturously about Schumpeter's warmed over Spencerianism. I think they count on their audience not actually reading both Bible and the works they quote. Hence the word "con" instead of conservative.
Our two party system is dominated by a sick and slick warmed over 19th century ideology that used to be balanced by equally sick and slick left wing ideas but has now been rebranded with focus group developed "messages" that aim to support the interest of a pyramid scheme of business that runs a narrow class of billionaires over a slightly less narrow class of millionaires over a vast soup of businessmen and wannabe millionaires who see their own starvation or failure as "competition" and the hunger and privation of workers as "creative destruction." It's a mob ideology, a sports team ideology. An ideology where ancient Romans throwing their enemies to the lions would be right at home. How we see things influences how we behave and if somehow there is no shame in "outsourcing" until your relatives starve enough to accept Vietnamese wages, then we live in a shameless world.
The opposite of virtue is vice. That means the opposite of virtuousness is viciousness. Our system is vicious. The only thing moderating it is the charity of bad conscience supported by tax deductions and government programs. The viciousness comes from classical ideas like those of Spencer and Schumpeter. And those who defend them have indoctrinated themselves into a vicious ideology that has no virtue, no merit. They treat capitalism as an idol. A kind of Mars in Drag who claims to be Athena, but is idealized warfare and buccaneering as vicious as any other kind of piracy. All in the name of getting soap and clothing to market. If "Schumpeter's Creative destruction" is capitalism, we need a revolution.
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields.htm
Christopher Hartly Holte 11/10/2014
Jeff Carlson wrote:
"It Becomes Official:
"In 1922, the Veterans of Foreign Wars made the poppy the official memorial flower to represent United States veterans"
Red Poppies Today:
"Red poppies are still worn on Veterans Day, and money is still collected to assist veterans returning from war and to aid their families. So, on the next Veteran’s Day, don’t forget to wear your red poppy in honor of all those who have served."
Note -- on every Sunday's talk to Republican Shows, every single one say we NEED WAR and killing and do it NOW. They sure want to Profit from Killing because WAR is never the correct thing."
On May 2, 1915, John McCrae’s close friend and former student Alexis Helmer was killed by a German shell.
That evening, in the absence of a Chaplain, John McCrae recited from memory a few passages from the Church of England’s
“Order of the Burial of the Dead”."For security reasons Helmer’s burial in Essex Farm Cemetery was performed in complete darkness."
"The next day, May 3, 1915, Sergeant-Major Cyril Allinson was delivering mail. McCrae was sitting at the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the YserCanal, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, Belgium."
As John McCrae was writing his In Flanders Fields poem, Allinson silently watched and later recalled,
“His face was very tired but calm as he wrote. He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."
Within moments, John McCrae had completed the “In Flanders Fields” poem and when he was done, without a word, McCrae took his mail and handed the poem to Allinson.
"Allinson was deeply moved:
“The (Flanders Fields) poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene."
Jeff 2014
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Christopher H. Holte 10/31/2014
Christopher H. Holte 10/31/2014
In my previous essay I introduced his book and talked some about what he was saying. As I noted a lot of what he says is on the money, though not completely for the reasons he says. Where he is right is when he as he says "zeros in on the skunk in the woodpile" (page xv) of AIG. It's a theme in his book. Time and time again the Federal Reserve, it's shill economists and the corrupt Security Exchange Commission (SEC) used the excuse of "protecting" the economy to bail out fat cats and protect their cronies on Wall Street -- at the expense of the economy and main street. But the common reality is that our modern Wall Street ran a multilayer and ongoing con on the American people. He traces it back to Roosevelt, which is not surprising considering he despises Keynes, despises Democrats and despises Roosevelt. But I'd trace it all the way back to Alexander Hamilton and the founding generation, and specifically what happened when Alexander Hamilton was removed from the scene and lesser lights took over his project. If I can I'll talk about some of the same subject but call it "Hamilton's Revenge" and discuss the subject from a very different POV. His shibboleth of "Good Money" is actually part of the problem. And the alternatives he seems to feel would save the economy are so unrealistic and crazy that they are the reason that the cons felt they had to run cons and fool people instead of come up with an economic approach that was fair to everyone.
In his opening paragraphs he despises Paulson's "150 billion one-time tax rebate", Noting:
"President Reagan's great accomplishment had been the burial of the Keynesian predicate: the notion that Washington could create economic growth and wealth by borrowing money and passing it out to consumers so they would buy more shoes and soda pop."
Which of course is a misrepresentation of what Keynes actually said. (Though he fleshes out that even Reagan hadn't buried that notion at all later in the book). He then proceeds to blame Obama's 800 billion stimulus for the red ink that in later chapters he will note had already been spilled by George Walker Bush. But I can forgive him for this. He's talking about his "road to Damascus" moment in realizing that the whole country was being swindled and conned by his colleagues on Wall Street -- which after all is where he worked as a private equity investor.
Then he lays out his "revisionist history of our era" blaming the whole thing, of course, on FDR and making a Neo-Liberal/Austrian case for the why's and wherefores of the mess:
"At the heart of the Great Deformation is a rogue central bank that has abandoned every vestige of sound money. In so doing it has enabled politicians to enjoy 'deficits without tears' by monetizing massive amounts of the public debt.
But I don't see this bait and switch reality as a switch that rewards politicians or common folks. It rewards Wall Street executives and a few mega-rich folks at the expense of a short term pile of debt that will eventually crash. Yes AIG was running a corrupt derivatives operation, but the "politicians" bailed out the monied class not the ordinary people. Yes, we did away with sound money, but we did away with "sound money" because it created centuries of deflation and depression for ordinary people and really didn't do that much for the rich except putting an artificial and weak check on banks, bankers and their ability to print money for free and lend it at interest. If "Sound money" had been such a great concept it wouldn't have been permanently abandoned. And if "Eisenhower in the White House" and "William McChesney Martin at the Fed" brought back "sound money and Fiscal Rectitude" it was by investing in good capital investments by creating our interstate highway system and not breaking much. Yes, defaulting on the "Bretton Woods gold standard" ... "was the starting point for the present era of floating money" and "massive debt creation" but Stockman, sociopath that he is, is blithely uncaring about the consequences of the alternatives. He describes a world of policy where Low wages and long hours are what the rest of us 99% should expect and only his class of wealthy investors and silver spoon legacy babies matter in deciding economic affairs. What he inadvertently is describing in his book is an investor/political class that shamelessly looks out for the top tiers of the investor/political class -- and doesn't give a snit about who gets hurt by their fights as long as they are paid in Gold. I would even agree that the collapse of fixed exchanges and the fake Gold standard of the Bretton Woods system was not an optimal situation. But his notion that a fixed rate alternative and the Gold Standard was a viable alternative is unrealistic.
The IMF notes about Bretton Woods:
"During the 1930s states had experienced a series of connected problems: shortage of gold, exchange rate instabilities, the movement of "hot" money in and out of their realms, and the lack of a mechanism to adjust balance of payments problems. The IMF was designed to deal with these difficulties by putting in place an international monetary system that contained a stable exchange rates regime with some scope for revaluation ("pegged but adjustable"), provided for the convertibility of currency, provided a mechanism for overcoming short-term liquidity crises and an organizational actor for managing the system (J. Williamson, The Failure of World Monetary Reform, New York, 1977, pp. 2-28). The World Bank was designed to help the economic and industrial reconstruction of Europe and to help developing countries achieve industrialization. The purpose of the ITO was to propel states down the path of free trade, to stop them from defecting to protectionism as a way of responding to balance of payments problems (e.g. by imposing import quotas as an alternative to devaluing their currency). The ITO never emerged, because of US concerns. Instead, a weaker agreement known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade took its place. In this grand plan for international institutions in the postwar era tax, as an object of regulation, was absent. Keynes' letters and reports around the time of Bretton Woods do not discuss the coordination of tax policy between states. Tax policy, the implication seems to be, would be retained by the nation-state."
Bretton Woods in other words was Keynes creation. He apparently believed in "Good money" too. Stockman talks about his subjects in isolation as if our trade deficits had nothing to do with the breakdown of Bretton Woods and as if we could have stayed on the Gold standard without some coordination of tax policy between nations and without dislocations at home. Stockman does talk about those things but he doesn't seem to make the connection to why Nixon wasn't "perfidious" because he ended the gold standard (he was for other reasons) and couldn't maintain a gold standard or why FDR had to do what he did with our Gold Supply. [More later] The IMF article quoted goes on:
"It is an exaggeration to say that the whole Bretton Woods system broke down. What did break down was the rules of cooperation for the convertibility of the dollar into gold and the exchange rates regime. After the war, the US dollar became the international reserve currency. The US also went from being in surplus to running trade deficits. States at first wanted US dollars to meet their trade obligations. They were also happy to let the US run deficits since this provided liquidity in the international monetary system. This situation led, however, to a crisis first anticipated by the economist Triffin in 1960 (R. Triffin, Gold and the Dollar Crisis, New Haven CT, 1960). The problem was that if the US attempted to correct its balance of payments deficit it would cause a liquidity crisis. If it allowed its deficit to continue, other states would lose confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency and seek to convert their dollars into gold. US deficits continued to increase, partly because the US had to pay for its war in Vietnam. Confidence in the dollar started to slide. States began to seek, as the gold standard allowed them to, the conversion of their dollars into gold. The US reacted by announcing in August 1971 that it was going to abandon the convertibility of the dollar."[https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/42675.html]
Now Stockman does explain the string of bad policies that led to Nixon being forced to abandon Bretton Woods. And Nixon comes out smelling like Nixon always comes out smelling (machiavellian & ruthless). But Stockman's narrative doesn't hold up to even a cursory examination. Yes, the trainwreck that is our current deficit and the 2008 collapse was a long time coming. No it had nothing to do with the Gold Standard. Yes, it had everything to do with the class of vulture privateers that Stockman exemplifies, and the politicians they pay off and bribe. Pirates always want to be paid in Gold.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QAdjH7ypL.jpg
Christopher H. Holte, written 10/28/2014 while visiting the 311 Fukushima group at facebook.
