US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

again, it's the Dem leadership's fault for allowing this conflation of the raising of the debt ceiling and the deficit in the first place.

As long as people can watch Dancing With The Stars and drink a beer on their own private property, I don't really think anything is ever going to change for America.

rmde

I take it the guilty fruit of conjugal intimacy is when you're kid gets caught selling drugs or something, right?

goole otm itt but its way more fun to think of ourselves as standing on the precipice of the total collapse of liberal democracy--gonna buy myself a gun and a generator this weekend i think

there are respectable reasons to support Obama's stated position re the Bush tax cuts, i suppose. all i'm saying, though, is that if we really DID care about deficit reduction then repeal of all of the tax cuts would've been on the table.

yeah it would definitely mean impeachment articles from the House, plus Supreme Court challenge, etc

xp

I continue to drift more and more into Morbs' mindset and it upsets me.

also, i don't think that things are so bad that liberal democracy is in grave peril or anything. we have more answers now about how to solve a serious economic downturn than we did during the 1930s (when folks really WERE fumbling in the dark). we just don't have the political will to actually DO the things to get the economy back to something like full employment.

goole it's "late" in the sense of the cycles of capital accumulation, i.e.

Wage repression produces a deficit of effective demand that is covered by increasing indebtedness that ultimately leads into a financial crisis which is resolved by state interventions which translates into a fiscal crisis of the state that can best be resolved, according to conventional economic wisdom, by further reductions in the social wage.

http://davidharvey.org/2010/08/the-enigma-of-capital-and-the-crisis-this-time/

that's one tangle of a sentence

so many xposts that this is probably irrelevant now but

you seem to be arguing that our politics/economics are going to shit because we're hitting some kind of malthusian limit or something. i don't think that's true.

yeah, i can see why people would be skeptical of that, particularly after the predictions of The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth were followed by three decades of relatively consistent growth (although it must be noted that the primary model in Limits to Growth didn't predict a huge economic collapse for the mid-1970s, but rather a huge economic collapse for...about now). people in the 60s and 70s predicted eminent global food shortages due to resource constraints, but those fears were allayed by the Green Revolution (although again it must be noted that the Green Revolution was powered almost entirely by dumping fertilizers onto everything to a degree that destroyed the resilience and sustainable productivity of a ton of cropland, and also that currently over a billion people are malnourished.)

i suppose i'm partial to the resource/energy constraints argument because peak oil writers have been saying for a long time (more than a decade now) that since oil is the foundation of the global economy, peak oil would come paired with large economic problems, including a big recession. and then, just as oil production peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s, and oil prices were hitting their peak in the 2008, along came the recession. for the ultimate tldr; see Richard Heinberg's thoughts on this: Temporary Recession or the End of Growth?

the question is whether you agree with this:

compound growth for ever is not possible: capital accumulation can no longer be the central force impelling social evolution

at the moment, this appears to be true. but it seems unthinkable that an alternative force could be found. so maybe it won't be.

we're not abt to thunderdome in this bitch

but a lot of people a lot smarter than me seem to think we're lookin down the barrel of a gun son of gun son a bitch that's scarier than we've ever seen.

we just don't have the political will to actually DO the things to get the economy back to something like full employment.

I think a lot of this stems from the Bachmann mindset. There are a lot of ppl whose attachment to Xtianity impels them to view economics from a moralistic viewpoint, either from a Calvinistic pov or from an intellectually dishonest pov which tries to factually 'prove' the superiority of good clean Xtian living. Their emphasis is always on family instead of larger collectives since that suits their prejudice and they're always scared that majority tyranny will impose man-made over divine morality even if that means driving over the cliff that's right before their very eyes.

1. finance capital, after decades of being let off its leash, had a huge failure, and economies capsized overnight

Don't worry, they found a way to blame it on black people.

Well, remember this: Matt Taibbi vs Byron York.

Wage repression produces a deficit of effective demand that is covered by increasing indebtedness that ultimately leads into a financial crisis which is resolved by state interventions which translates into a fiscal crisis of the state that can best be resolved, according to conventional economic wisdom, by further reductions in the social wage.

this is exactly what i said!

step 0. in my little schema up there would be "no real wage growth and a credit boom going hand in hand for a decade or so"

"the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy

Also note that the word conjugal implies "within marriage" = they only care about the babies of socially upright husbands and wives, properly conceived in the dark, in the missionary position, and keeping in mind that Jesus is always the third partner. Or something.

Actually you'd think by those standards they'd stop harassing single women about their own fertility...something doesn't make sense there....

Wish I could find a screencap of that scene from The Handmaid's Tale which illustrates perfectly what they mean by "conjugal intimacy."

state and local governments have cut about a half million jobs over the last two years from a NY Times blog

I guess this makes Norquist and other conservatives happy(although they would prefer to see those cuts at the federal level as well)

nothing makes them happy

not in public

well, being in power, for its own sake? notice how nobody gives a shit about 'deficits' until the economy is bad and/or a democrat is in the white house.

the strange variable in all this, which i don't really know what to make of, is that the unemployment crisis is really only at crisis levels within Dem demographics. what will this mean? i don't know. right now, though, it means republicans can talk about while comfortably opposing anything that will improve it.

xp

I can't believe TPM ran this story. Until we know if they're lobbyists, what's the point?

to foment rage

stories like that are only good in pairs:

http://consumerist.com/2011/07/chase-gets-man-thrown-in-jail-for-fraudulent-check-except-the-check-is-legit.html

"class warfare" etc

I've eaten in Bistro Bis twice btw. It's not that great (or so expensive).

C'mon, Michael: you don't view economics from a moralistic perspective? You think that people who "don't work hard" "deserve" financial security anyway? I don't think it's a specially "Christian" view to think that that's wrong.

jeeeeeeeeesus christ @ goole's story

Reading that story made me shake with anger.

punch a banker, you'll feel better

I read that story that goole posted earlier today and I just . . . that kind of stuff probably happens to poor people in this country a jillion times day, but the media manages to get people outraged that CEOs might pay an extra 4% on their income taxes. It's amazing.

it's funny, on both sides of my family I have super-mega-rich investment banker uncle-in-laws. both are perfectly nice, conscientious guys and yet... neither of them seems particularly happy (one seems distinctly UNhappy afaict) and I find it hard to reconcile my personal loathing for their profession with their chosen livelihoods.

xp

I never had it as bad as that dude, but I remember starting off as a young, undereducated married person with a shit job literally digging through my couch and my laundry looking for enough change to buy a single gallon of gas to put in my car so I could go to work, and being unable to come up with enough.

I feel like my whole life I have watched them accrue bad karma and reap the psychological/emotional damage of such. otoh they are still filthy rich.

xp

Rich people buying expensive stuff! Run for the hills!

That guy screwed by Chase seems like such an almost cartoonishly cliched capital V victim - all it's missing is a dead pet - that it makes me wonder if there's more to the story. Like, a bank clerk can't just have a non-violent, non-confrontational guy arrested, can he? Even if it was a fake check, let alone a real one. There's got to be more to the story, especially since such a page-view bait story is coming out a year after the fact. Not that I wouldn't put it past Chase to fuck this guy every which way they can.

otm

Like, a bank clerk can't just have a non-violent, non-confrontational guy arrested, can he? Even if it was a fake check, let alone a real one.

Can't speak for his jurisdiction, but in Ohio, they certainly can. Attempting to cash a bad check of that amount if a fourth degree felony.

He was black, it was $8k, come on, totally reasonable, call the cops

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/07/chase_bank_is_very_sorry_for_h.php

Another article about it with a link to the lawyer's letter

btw guys congrats on pulling the "the shifty black guy must have done SOMETHING to deserve this" card, it's good to see bias alive and thriving on the left

well i hope you know i was being sarcastic!

Yes of course! That was specifically for Josh and Alfred.

that TPM ryan thing is hilarious

Well, I always look for more than one source when a piece of non-fiction asks for my sympathy.

xpost Fuck that. I just said there must be more to the story. Maybe the clerk has a record of being an asshole? Maybe the cop had a bone to pick? Maybe this happens all the time at this branch? Who knows? It's just an oddly incomplete story for such a tale of massive economic tragedy.

alfred's prudence is the right way to operate but i find that story totally easy to believe just because it's chase

who are (post-wamu-takeover) my bank