Si Ego Certiorem Faciam.Mihi Tu Delendus Eris. Amor vincit omnia.

Austerity

2012-12-02T05:56:00.000-08:00

Ultimately, the wealth of any nation is its population. It is wasteful to reduce families to poverty. The aim should be to make them more productive. The economy is an overall system, which requires a regulatory and tax structure to steer wealth-seeking in ways that add to national output, not merely to benefit the rich (or foreign investors) at the expense of the poor.

Pausmusik

2012-10-26T11:27:00.003-07:00

The missing archetype

2012-09-12T05:58:00.001-07:00

Tim Jackson

2012-08-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

This is a strange, rather perverse, story, just to put it in very simple terms. It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

Ingemar Nordströms

2012-08-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

Immortal

2012-08-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

2012-08-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

Fourth Circle

… I saw multitudes

to every side of me; their howls were loud

while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push.

They struck against each other; at that point,

each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,

cried out: Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?

Pulp Fiction

2012-08-02T16:49:00.000-07:00

There's a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon you." Now... I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, that meant your ass. You'd be dead right now. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. See, now I'm thinking: maybe it means you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here... he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. And I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd

Jules

Johnny B. Goode

2012-08-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
- Jimi Hendrix

Frihet

2012-07-23T03:03:00.000-07:00

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

Rightwing libertarianism recognises few legitimate constraints on the power to act, regardless of the impact on the lives of others … [Its] concept of freedom looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.

So why have we been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.

Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it’s the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.

Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.

As Berlin noted: “No man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. ‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’.” So, he argued, some people’s freedom must sometimes be curtailed “to secure the freedom of others”. In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.

Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude on other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. “If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.” It follows that the state should impose legal restraints on freedoms that interfere with other people’s freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity …

But rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak … as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. Theyassert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts – to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterise any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow …

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned “freedom” into an instrument of oppression.

George Monbiot

Olika sätt för dom som vill se i pannkakan

2012-07-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

Even Nouriel Roubini Says We Need to Jail or Hang Some Bankers

2012-07-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

Subliminal perception från DN

2012-07-07T09:09:00.000-07:00

Who the fuck you think your talking to?

2012-07-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Lay all your love on me

2012-06-30T18:55:00.000-07:00

Jean Baudrillard Welcomes You to the Hyperreal

Desert of the Real and Jean Baudrillard

2012-06-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

Sustainable development?

2012-06-25T04:38:00.000-07:00

George Soros

2012-06-16T04:04:00.000-07:00

I contend that the European Union itself is like a bubble. In the boom phase the EU was what the psychoanalyst David Tuckett calls a “fantastic object” – unreal but immensely attractive. The EU was the embodiment of an open society /…/
The process fed on its own success, very much like a financial bubble. That is how the Coal and Steel Community was gradually transformed into the European Union, step by step. /…/
The process culminated with the Maastricht Treaty and the introduction of the euro. It was followed by a period of stagnation which, after the crash of 2008, turned into a process of disintegration. /…/
The Maastricht Treaty was fundamentally flawed, demonstrating the fallibility of the authorities. Its main weakness was well known to its architects: it established a monetary union without a political union. /…/ In retrospect it is now clear that the main source of trouble is that the member states of the euro have surrendered to the European Central Bank their rights to create fiat money.

Ever since the Crash of 2008 there has been a widespread recognition, both among economists and the general public, that economic theory has failed. But there is no consensus on the causes and the extent of that failure.
I believe that the failure is more profound than generally recognized. It goes back to the foundations of economic theory. Economics tried to model itself on Newtonian physics. It sought to establish universally and timelessly valid laws governing reality. But economics is a social science /…/ taking an axiomatic approach similar to Euclid’s geometry. /…/
Up to a point the axiomatic approach worked. For instance, the theory of perfect competition postulated perfect knowledge. But the postulate worked only as long as it was applied to the exchange of physical goods. When it came to production, as distinct from exchange, or to the use of money and credit, the postulate became untenable because the participants’ decisions involved the future and the future cannot be known until it has actually occurred.

155mm Field Howitzer Samt lite River Dance

2012-05-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.

2012-05-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

Varför är Sverige i Afghanistan?

2012-05-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

FN och världssamfundet står inför stora och omfattande utmaningar i Afghanistan. Sverige vill bidra till en långsiktig lösning av Afghanistans problem och deltar därför i de internationella ansträngningarna i landet. Det svenska engagemanget ska stärka Afghanistans förmåga att upprätthålla stabilitet och säkerhet, demokrati och mänskliga rättigheter och erbjuda afghanerna förutsättningar för att förbättra sina levnadsvillkor och en hållbar ekonomisk och social utveckling.

Och Talibanerna, vad säger dom?

"These are the enemies of Islam who originated from Pakistan. They are the Pakistani police, soldiers and their supporters who recently lined up six kids in Swat and shot them execution style. These Pakistanis are now our captive and we will avenge the death of the children by doing the same to them."

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

2012-05-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

Austerity measures IRL

2012-05-10T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Sun

Kreativ spärrforcering

2012-05-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

Avreglering

2012-04-21T06:22:00.000-07:00

The way economies are organized and function is significantly the product of social choices, not the product of nature. Over the past thirty years we (society) have embraced a set of economic ideas that shaped economic arrangements – including the pattern of income distribution, the power of corporations and finance relative to labor, and the way in which the economy generates demand.

This shaping of economic arrangements was obviously driven by political forces acting on behalf of corporate and financial elite interests, but economic ideas also played a critical role. First, the ideas of mainstream economists provided justification for the re-shaping of the economy in ways that elite interests wanted. Second, mainstream economists put forward additional ideas that were picked up and incorporated into the policy project of corporate and financial elites. Third, the monopoly capture of economic discourse by mainstream economics served to exclude other competing economic ideas from making it on to the policy table, into classrooms, and into the public debate.

The implication of this view is the crisis is at a deep level the product of a flawed economic policy paradigm derived from a set of flawed economic ideas. Escaping the crisis means replacing that policy paradigm and the ideas from which it derives. That is a massive challenge involving both a political contest and an intellectual contest. We need to win both. One without the other will be useless. It is no good winning the political contest if you simply replace Tweedledum (hardcore neoliberals) with Tweedledee (softcore neoliberals). Likewise, it is no good winning the intellectual contest if you do not win the political contest to implement different economic policy ideas.

My argument is that around 1980 the U.S. adopted a fundamentally flawed economic paradigm. From 1945 through to the mid-1970s the U.S. economy was characterized by a “virtuous circle” Keynesian growth model built on full employment and wage growth tied to productivity growth. The political triumph of Ronald Reagan enshrined a new economic paradigm that abandoned full employment and severed the link between wages and productivity growth.

The new paradigm was fundamentally flawed. One flaw was that it relied on debt and asset price inflation to fuel growth instead of wages. A second flaw was the model of globalization which created an economic gash in the form of leakage of spending on imports (the trade deficit), leakage of investment spending offshore, and leakage of manufacturing jobs offshore. These twin flaws created a growing demand gap.

That is where finance enters the picture as its role was to fill the demand gap. Financial deregulation, regulatory forbearance, financial innovation, financial mania, and plain vanilla financial fraud kept the economy going by making ever more credit available, However, as the economy cannibalized itself by undercutting income distribution and accumulating debt, it needed ever larger speculative bubbles to grow. The house price bubble was simply the last and biggest bubble and was effectively the only way around the stagnation that would otherwise have developed in 2001.

There are many mainstream (orthodox) economists who have progressive values but they miss the big picture because their theory cannot accommodate it. Moreover, they can’t abandory for a host of psychological and sociological reasons. At the psychological level it would involve a devastating admission that they have been wrong; that they’ve been teaching their students a lot of nonsense for thirty years. n their theoAt the sociological level it would mean giving up the trappings of power and pay that go with their current intellectual monopoly because the paymasters of the system would quickly replace them with others.

That said, many mainstream economists are starting to admit income distribution has played a role in fermenting the crisis (you have to be willfully blind not too see it). Consequently, they are busy trying to incorporate income distribution into their narrative. However, they do so in a way that leaves their core theory about markets and market efficiency unchanged. Unfortunately, journalists and the general public cannot see this and are taken in by this tactic. One of the contributions of the book is it unmasks these obfuscations by showing how these stories don’t stack up and are inconsistent with the evidence.

Finally, this discussion shows why it is very important the general public be capable of distinguishing between “values” and “analysis”. If not, people risk being fooled by the rhetoric of progressive values that provides cover for policies that are actually conservative.

Thomas Palley