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As the Empire declines, public discourse becomes more and more a theater of the absurd. At least, that is obvious to us who live outside the box. It's easy to forget that the vast majority of people in this country still take our politics seriously. Writing in this month's issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott tries to deal with the disconnect in That's Political Entertainment! First, Wolcott reminds us that there used to be news in the news, but now it's all showbiz.
In Morning Glory, last year’s most underrated movie comedy, go-getter breakfast-show producer Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams, divine), in a burst of exasperation, explains the facts of life to journalistic warhorse Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford, face furrowed with mental indigestion): “The world has been debating news versus entertainment for years, and guess what? You lost!” Which hasn’t stopped the losing side from singing the chain-gang blues.
Civic-minded souls in journalism, academe, and the mushroom farms of C-span panels can still be heard lamenting the infestation of news and politics by showbiz values, a war between informed debate and pole dancing that they (unlike Ford’s Pomeroy) recognize as a lost cause, hence their elegiac tone, the dead fly in their lemonade. The days when the words “Hollywood actor” framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics—candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike—is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.
In one corner, we have the Comedy Channel's Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Facing them across the ring are Fox News Network's Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Those clinging desperately to their faith in America's corrupt political system seem to have only these two options. Wolcott compares and contrasts Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on the Washington Mall with the Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" rally a few months later.
If you feel compelled to have a rally to restore sanity, it should immediately occur to you that sanity is now only a distant memory. It's far too late to do anything about it. Stewart went ahead and held the rally anyway. I guess we have to put him in the category Deluded.
Wolcott did come up with an insight (sort of) regarding those in the category Insane. Actually, a blogger named David Seaton came up with the quasi-insight, and Wolcott ran with it.
A blogger named David Seaton provided the keenest insight into the tactical superiority of Beck’s home-brewed surrealism. “To understand what Beck is doing, to understand him, you must suspend your capacity for rational thought and just let the emotions wash over you and try to take note of them as they assault your endocrine system,” Seaton wrote.
As America enters the downward slope of empire—its debt mounting, the disparity between wealthy and poor continuing to chasm, the environmental ravages becoming irreversible, high unemployment becoming the cruel norm—the Richie Riches have a vested interest in misdirecting people by blaming the powerless for the sins of the powerful.
Incoherence isn’t a bug in Beck’s software program, it’s the primary directive. Seaton: “That is what the Tea Party, Fox, etc is all about: keeping people from thinking straight. The idea is to play on people’s emotions: fear, hate, racism, xenophobia, just to keep them from doing the math. The Teabaggers, Beck, [Gingrich] and Fox [News] are often criticized for not making any sense This is not a failure of communication or an error on their part That is the object of the exercise: to make rational thought difficult or impossible due to emotional overload.” (Wolcott's italics).
To his credit, Wolcott sees that America is no longer a serious enterprise. And I agree that Glenn Beck is merely a tool of the rich. But seriously. Glenn Beck? Together with Rational Thought? I didn't realize this was an issue that intelligent people might hold an earnest discusson about.
The gap between those who grasp this and those clinging to the floating driftwood was dramatized in a Rolling Stone panel discussion in which renegade journalist Matt Taibbi flat out called the Tea Partiers “crazy,” much to the tea-pinkie dismay of David Gergen and pollster Peter Hart. You simply can’t write off such a large slice of the electorate as mental patients, Gergen demurred. (Gergen’s the Perry Como of demurral.) Sure you can, Taibbi replied. “I interview these people. They’re not basing their positions on the facts—they’re completely uninterested in the facts. They’re voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that’s enough for them.” This disinformation addiction puts the political satirists on the left at a disadvantage—how do you poke fun at nonsense that’s intended to be nonsensical, an ideological crack pipe blowing smoke into millions of brains? Swiftian satire clicks only for those already compos mentis.
Wolcott is framing the argument in Left/Right terms, as though these categories have some relevance to anything at all. They do not. If you think the important debate in the United States is between the Comedy Channel and the Tea Party, you're living in a state of terminal confusion. We can also throw Wolcott in the category Deluded along with Stewart. Wolcott argues that—
The old punditocracy, grounded in facts, credentials, and rational debate, has been overpowered by a new breed of political entertainer, who deals in raw emotion. Sure, there’s some brainy blue-state satire out there, from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Kelsey Grammer, et al. aren’t trying to change the way people think, the author argues—they don’t want their audiences to think at all.
That's all true at a superficial level, but the central insight which eludes Wolcott is this: the debasement of our political discourse, it's evolution into pure entertainment, the preying upon people's emotions, is a predictable outcome of America's decline. These are not independent phenomena. Here's what Walcott said—
Long before Jon Stewart (the Deluded) or Glenn Beck (the Insane) showed up, the "Richie Riches" had a vested interest in stealing the people's money and misdirecting blame for the theft. And it wasn't just those on the so-called Right who did that. To give you just one example, Bill Clinton pushed hard for globalization and free trade. The inevitable result? The decline in American manufacturing, the flight of those jobs, and so on. The Empire was already sliding downhill when Clinton endorsed those policies in the mid-1990s. Clinton was just moving things along. The fix has been in for a long time, folks. As America enters the downward slope of Empire... Enters?
Share of total income going to the top decile (10%) with my annotations, from Emmanuel Saez's Striking It Richer
You basically have two choices. You can live inside the box, as Wolcott does, and arrive at the startling conclusion that Glenn Beck spews emotion-laden nonsense in order to serve his corporate masters. And then you can watch the Comedy Channel instead. Or you can transcend this unhelpful, misleading Left/Right distinction, and then decide what you're going to do with your life.
Economist Dave Rosenberg has published another missive, patiently explaining to anyone who will listen how the Powers That Be are Creating The Illusion of Prosperity (zerohedge). Among mainstream economists, Rosenberg stands out. Most of would call him a pessimist, but there are no Bears or Bulls where Reality is concerned. Why is he so forthright? Honestly, I think it's because he's Canadian. He is not burdened with the strenuous effort required to maintain the myth of American exceptionalism.
Nobody should be reading this and jumping to the conclusion that my fundamental views have changed over the contours of this post-bubble-bust economic recovery. The economy remains on government-assisted life support, and the government has been very successful in creating the illusion of economic prosperity. It is doing this to buy time and help preserve social stability as the adjustment towards housing deflation, consumer deleveraging, and chronic unemployment takes its toll on the growth rate in organic final demand.
The question really is still one of sustainability. If the Fed and our public officials were as comforted as the financial markets now seem to be over the sustainability of the recovery, then after a full year into it the central bank would not have embarked on another monetary experiment and the government would not have dipped into Social Security as a means to put more change in people’s pockets for spending purposes. Money, as an aside, that isn’t really ours.
Rosenberg lists all the reasons why the sustainability of the best "recovery" money can buy is in doubt, including the usual suspects—declining house prices, the need for "draconian" spending cuts in state and local governments, a global food crisis, rising energy costs, and the mess in the Eurozone. You may not have noticed that global food crisis because it's rarely reported on in the United States. I'll be posting on that soon.
Rosenberg is most incisive talking about our Central Bank, which has manufactured so much of our current prosperity—
Back to Bernanke. In a speech he just gave to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation forum on small business:
“Our policies have contributed to a stronger stock market just as they did in March 2009 when we did the first iteration of this program … a stronger economy helps small businesses more than larger businesses. Interest rates are higher but that’s mostly because the news is better. It has responded to a stronger economy and better expectations.”
So the Fed Chairman seems non-plussed that Treasury yields have shot up and that the mortgage rates and car loan rates have done likewise, even though he said this back in early November in his op-ed piece in the Washington Post, regarding the need for lower long-term yields:
“For example, lower mortgage rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance. Lower corporate bond rates will encourage investment.”
But the Fed Chairman is at least getting what he wants in the equity market. Recall what he said back then — “higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.”
Our fearless leader—the Bernank—has succeeded in boosting stock prices, thus making us all wealthier But haven't we been down this road before? Another phony Bear market rally? Rosenberg again—
So back to the markets. We are in a very powerful bear market rally. In fact, in less than two years the S&P 500 has managed to accomplish what it did over a five-year span from 2002 to the 2007 peak. That was a bear market rally too.
You see, a primary or secular bull market requires a positive exogenous shock to the economy. One that is self-sustaining. One that adds to the productive capital stock. Not only did we have the baby boom stimulating demand growth in that 1949-66 secular bull run, but we also had Eisenhower roll out the nation’s highway network, which exerted a powerful multi-year impact on transportation costs and productivity...
There has been no positive exogenous shock boosting productive capital stock. But who cares? A New Era of Prosperity has just begun!
Having seen this kind of thing before, Rosenberg has decided to make it official—the Federal Reserve now has three mandates, not two.
So now the Fed has added a third mandate to its charter:
1. Full employment
2. Low and stable inflation
3. Higher equity valuationThe real question we should be asking is why Ben didn’t add this third policy objective back in 2007 and save us from a whole lot of pain over the next 18 months?
And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending.
Regarding prosperity, if you can't achieve the real thing, you might as well fake it. Appearances count for everything in a declining Empire. Rising equity values make those manning the trading desks on Wall Street very happy. The wealthy vested in the stock market are also very happy. The lucky few inhabiting the Money World are very pleased with this bubbly rally in the S&P 500.
Unfortunately for the unlucky many living on Main Street, those Mom & Pop retail investors who have only their retirement money to gamble with, the Bernank's "virtuous circle" includes only those who can afford to ante up, and the real price—the risk premium associated with catching the wave in a phony stock market rally—is very high. Perhaps we should call it a virtuous circle jerk instead.
It is painful for me to write about ignorance in America because it is rampant and disturbing. I was at my local watering hole one night talking to a professor at Carnegie Mellon University when, after several libations, I suddenly heard myself exclaiming when did everybody get stupid? By stupid, I did not mean mentally slow or impaired. Rather, I meant ignorant or untrained to think. As with so many other things, I believe you can lay this at the doorstep of a culture dominated by corporations, aka. the "consumer" society.
I am not going to cite the usual statistics today—the U.S. ranks 27th among developed nations in the share of students getting engineering and science degrees—as I did in American Competitiveness? It's Not A Pretty Picture. Instead, let's look at what's happening on college campuses.
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have written a book called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning On College Campuses. Here's an excerpt from the summary—
In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year ... but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?
For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year.
According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. [The number is 36% after four years.] As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.
From a personal standpoint, people have no hope of reading and understanding what I say on DOTE without the ability to engage in critical thinking and complex reasoning. In fact, I have noticed on many occasions that people have simply not understood what I have said in a post.
Incomprehension may be due to poor communication on my part, but I seriously doubt that's the problem most of the time. Either these people have not been able to understand what I wrote, or they have read into it whatever they want to, i.e. what they are already inclined to believe as opposed to what I actually said. Sometimes I am confronted with the wrongness of things I did not say. So the problem of ignorance, or a lack of reading skills, or an inability to follow a complex argument, is compounded by psychological confusion. Fortunately, these problems are relatively rare on DOTE, but take a look at the comment sections on really popular blogs like The Big Picture or Global Economic Analysis.
Looking at education generally, the situation is grim, as we might expect in a dying Empire. Here's a quote from USA Today—
Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives ... Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.
"These are really kind of shocking, disturbing numbers," says New York University professor Richard Arum, lead author of the book, published by the University of Chicago Press.
He noted that students in the study, on average, earned a 3.2 grade-point average. "Students are able to navigate through the system quite well with little effort," Arum said.
It is natural for young people to focus on their social lives, but it defeats the purpose of a college education if their instructors don't give a damn whether the students learn anything or not. And here we must come to grips with the fact that colleges and full-fledged universities are run just like private corporations. Corporations try to make money for their shareholders. Academics try to accrue grants that benefit themselves and the university. The "business models" are different but the goal is the same: make or attract money. Education of the young is no longer the primary goal of so-called educational institutions.
If education is no longer the main mission of colleges and universities, what is? The answer is entertainment. And that choice has been forced upon them. Consider this quote from Stephen Dubner's The True Cause of College-Tuition Inflation—
... it’s probably also important to consider how much money colleges have been putting into student amenities as well. When I visited my undergrad alma mater a few years ago, the chancellor pointed out that three buildings had gone up in the past decade or so that were each larger than any existing building on campus. There was a library, a convocation center (a multipurpose arena), and a huge student gym.
The gym, he said, was a top priority because parents and prospective students increasingly think of themselves as customers, shopping for the most amenities for the best price, and the colleges that didn’t come to grips with this would soon see their customers going elsewhere.
Prospective students are not would-be learners. No, they are customers, potential "consumers" of the college experience. Lest you think this story is anecdotal, consider this report from CNNMoney called Is college still worth the price?
After recalling his days as a low-paid community organizer, Obama urged the graduates to consider careers in public service. "I ask you to seek these opportunities when you leave here," Obama declared. "The future of this country - your future - depends on it." His message was received with enthusiastic applause.
Calls to "give back" always seem to resonate at elite schools like Wesleyan, a picture postcard of academic abundance on its 360-acre wooded campus, complete with state-of-the-art film center, 7,500-square-foot fitness facility, skating rink, 11-building arts complex and a new $47 million student center offering everything from Mongolian grill entrées to organically grown coffee...
If colleges were spending most of their money on initiatives that improve the quality of education for students, you might regard price hikes running at two to four times the rate of inflation as a necessary evil. But spending on palatial dorms, state-of-the-art fitness centers and a panoply of gourmet dining options? Maybe not.
Yet that's precisely what many schools are doing to attract students - engaging in a luxury arms race, fueled by the wealth of such elite institutions as Harvard and Yale.
Sure, they're also putting funds into cutting class sizes and hiring top professors. But they're spending even more on building Hogwarts-style dorms with mahogany casement windows of leaded glass (Princeton's newest $136 million student residence); installing 35-foot climbing walls and hot tubs big enough for 15 people (Boston University); providing multiple eateries with varied cuisines and massive fitness and recreation centers (too many schools to name).
"There's a lot of competition from other colleges," says Steven Knapp, president of George Washington University. "In today's consumer culture, parents and students expect a certain level of comfort - and they compare the amenities."
The goal of all this collegiate bling is to entice more people to apply...
[My note: Sorry, I felt compelled to whip out the red font. I will cover the exorbitant cost of going to college in another post.]
Affluent prospective students are shopping around, looking for the best college experience money can buy. Think about it. College-age people today were born in the late 1980s or the early 1990s. They were socialized as "consumers" of everything—smart phones, burgers, fancy t-shirts and college degrees. Once at college, they will spend 51% of their time socializing and recreating. The colleges need to provide those "amenities" (fitness centers, gourmet dining) which attract young people who have been bombarded with advertising for 18 years.
These same young people, especially if they come from well-off families, think nothing of giving out their personal information to Facebook or any other place which wants to sell that information to people who want to sell them stuff. In fact, they want to be targeted by advertisers. That makes consumption all that much easier.
So-called "consumers" (as opposed to people, or citizens) are regressed. They live in a child-like, even infantile, psychological state. They will never become full-fledged adults. Corporations encourage this—take a good, hard look at the morons characters, actors or otherwise, who populate TV commercials and the "content" itself.
Advertisers can't sell pointless junk to educated, sophisticated people who know how to discriminate. They want sheeple who are easily led on. Colleges are catering to "consumers," not learners. Consumption is easy. Learning is hard. Eating at the Mongolian Grill is easy. Learning calculus is hard. Watching TV is easy. Reading is hard. Nobody reads anymore, and if they do, they read the insipid crap put out by a "consumer-aware" publishing industry which must value money over quality if they want to sell any books.
We are living amidst an epidemic of ignorance. We are left to conclude that over one-third of graduates learn diddly-squat while they are in college. Richard Arum calls that "shocking and disturbing," but it's just fine with the elites who own this country. Do you remember what George Carlin said?
But there's a reason ... education sucks. It's the same reason it will never, ever, ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you've got. Because the owners of this country don't want that...
I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking, they don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that, that doesn't help them. It's against their interests. They don't want people smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago...
In my time, before the full evolution of the "consumer" society, do you know what we would have called the college experience today? Babysitting.
Bonus Video from Tech Ticker.
A marketing revolution is sweeping the nation. Digital Out Of Home Media (DOOH) is coming to a hair salon near you!
New York, NY — The relationship between advertisers and consumers has flipped. Consumers are now in control—they decide when, where, and how they will view content. They're multitasking different media and skipping ads. Advertisers looking to reach affluent consumers have had an increasingly difficult task.
That's one of the many reasons digital out-of-home media is increasingly being sought out by advertisers looking to reach consumers. One of the prime digital out-of-home venues advertisers are now turning to is the salon marketplace. As a medium, place-based digital signage networks command attention—and can't be switched off.
Hair and nail salons offer an ideal environment for advertising and product placement. Salon-based networks provide advertisers with reach, frequency, and attention. According to the Salon Industry Association, 50% of women go to a hair salon every 6 to 8 weeks, and 72.5% visit nail salons every 2 weeks. The average salon client spends between 30 and 60 minutes receiving salon services.
Yes, no matter where you go—the hair salon, the elevator the gas station, the supermarket—They Will Find You, as my local newspaper the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports in Digital Out Of Home: An On-Screen Revolution. You can run, but you can not hide—
It's all around us. Digital Out-of-Home video, or DOOH, is everything from CNN news reports in the elevator, to building-sized advertising in Miami, to snippets of Fox's "House" at the local gas pump.
On a milder scale, it's that tiny video box in the supermarket soup aisle, the silent loop of loan application info on the screen behind your teller at PNC Bank.
"People are accepting that there is advertising everywhere now, and it is our job to make it interesting," said David Leider, CEO of Birmingham, Mich.-based Gas Station TV (motto: "It's always Primetime at the Pump.")
It's not just advertising. Gas Station TV boasts more than 27 million at-the-pump viewers each month. Its chief competitor, Los Angeles-based Outcast, which teamed with rival PumpTop in 2009, reports more than 23 million on-the-go consumers.
How does the DOOH miracle work?
Increasingly, the DOOH model is looking a lot like that of Gas Station TV, whose programming is a quick mix of news, weather, sports, classic TV show clips and, of course, commercials. Mr. Leider said Gas Station TV tinkered with the format and found that 60-second bursts of content were actually too long for anyone spending those five to eight minutes at the pump.
"We honed our experience," he said. "We found that shorter bursts, maybe 15 to 30 seconds of content, worked best."
Advertising makes up roughly 30 to 35 percent of these bursts, he said, adding that the captive audience is ready-made for DOOH: "You're bored, you've got nothing to do for that five minutes you're there."
There are five Sunoco stations in the Pittsburgh market with Gas Station TV programming, and more on the way.
Those 15 to 30 second bursts worked best with "consumers" in the species Homo sapiens. These were human trials. Surely the outcome would be different if you were trying to sell goods & services to "consumers" belonging to other species, like bushy-tailed gray squirrels, bellowing howler monkeys or domesticated sheep.
And now watch this astonishing video. I think it will take your breath away. It certainly set my brain on fire. All that's left to do is ask yourself this all-important question:
Are you in the Active Consumer Mindset?
Why not surround consumers on multiple networks with optimum frequency and exposure throughout their day?
Today's title is a quote from Simon Johnson, founder of The Baseline Scenario, former chief economist of the IMF and now professor of economics at MIT. I quit reading Simon's website about a year ago. Here's why—
What I object to is this: who exactly is Simon Johnson trying to persuade to do something about these problems [in the banking sector]? Is it the Congress? Only they can pass a law changing the current regime. Here's Illinois Senator Dick Durbin talking about the banks' influence in Congress—
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has been battling the banks the last few weeks in an effort to get 60 votes lined up for bankruptcy reform. He's losing.
On Monday night in an interview with a radio host back home, he came to a stark conclusion: the banks own the Senate.
"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place," he said on WJJG 1530 AM's "Mornings with Ray Hanania."
My accusation against Simon Johnson? Inexcusable naiveté. My verdict? Guilty as charged.
My view then, and my view now, is that if you want to solve our Too-Big-To-Fail banks problem, you must first solve our the political corruption problem. But the latter is clearly unsolvable. The political system is irrevocably, completely broken, and has been for many years now. And it's getting worse. Wall Street's size and influence is greater than ever before. Johnson sums up our precarious situation in The Bill Daley Problem—
Today’s most dangerous government sponsored enterprises are the largest six bank holding companies: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. They are undoubtedly too big to fail – if they were on the brink of failure, they would be rescued by the government, in the sense that their creditors would be protected 100 percent. The market knows this and, as a result, these large institutions can borrow more cheaply than their smaller competitors. This lets them stay big and – amazingly – get bigger.
In the latest available data (Q3 of 2010), the big 6 had assets worth 64 percent of GDP. This is up from before the crisis – assets in the big six at the end of 2006 were only about 55 percent of GDP. And this is up massively from 1995, when these same banks (some of which had different names back then) were only 17 percent of GDP.
With Obama's hiring of J.P Morgan Chase executive Bill Daley as his chief of staff, Johnson now believes the bankers have won completely. My view is that the Big Banks had won completely when Barack Obama appointed Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and a host of Wall Street bankers to key positions even before he had assumed office.
Of course, my singling out of Simon Johnson is arbitrary and even a bit cruel. There are thousands and thousands of people on the right side of the issues who are equally clueless. Nevertheless, his guilt serves as a proxy for the guilt of all the rest. None of these well-meaning but hopelessly confused souls can get outside the box.
In the video below, Johnson argues that we need to prepare for another banking crisis sometime between three and seven years from now. If we lived in normal times, I would agree with him. His argument is based on what economists call the credit cycle—
A cycle involving the access to credit by borrowers. Credit cycles first go through periods in which funds are easy to borrow; these periods are characterized by lower interest rates, lowered lending requirements and an increase in the amount of available credit. These periods are followed by a contraction in the availability of funds. During the contraction period, interest rates climb and lending rules become more strict, meaning that less people can borrow.The contraction period continues until risks are reduced for the lending institutions, at which point the cycle starts again.
Economists argue about the relationship between the credit cycle and the business cycle. I'm not particularly worried anymore about another blow-up of the financial system. Even if the over-leveraged banks are still taking unconscionable risks, they will likely not be the source of our next crisis. I believe the next crisis will revolve around our soaring public debt, not once again insolvent banks. Of course, if the six biggest banks really are "government-sponsored enterprises" as Johnson said—that's what Too Big To Fail means—there's no real difference between a public debt crisis and a financial crisis!
Perhaps we should refer to the next meltdown as a Money World crisis. And see The Money World — Part II.
Note: Treasury includes Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, etc.
I will have to return to this subject some other time, but I believe that portraying what happened to our economy and what will happen next in terms of the "business cycle" or the "credit cycle" is just another form of denial, a comforting fiction—or discomforting, as the case may be —that mainstream economists (such as Simon Johnson) like to tell themselves.
Here's the video from Tech Ticker's story Bill Daley’s Appointment Proves "The Bankers Have Won Completely," Simon Johnson Says.
This weekend marks DOTE's first anniversary, which I will officially celebrate tomorrow. It's been my pleasure to present the best music and film videos I can find on the intertubes each Saturday afternoon.
Although we can't do much about the evil misdeeds of the Empire, we can certainly fantasize about what we might do if we had the chance to set things right. The first two videos are from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. These illustrate first the problem of dealing with the Empire, and then the solution. It's merely a coincidence that the astronaut is named Dave
And then some classic music from Bob Dylan which needs no introduction from me. Today I selected Most of the Time and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. This latter is from the D.A. Pennebaker film Don't Look Back (1967).
