Is serious left criticism of government’s share of GDP possible? (16)
Continued from here.
At this point we have to apologize for leaving the impression that the irresponsibility of Washington is somehow the cause of the current fiscal bomb set to go off beneath your feet in the not too distant future.
True, Washington sold you a bill of goods, but that transaction was carried on under the time honored market signboard, Caveat Emptor!
According to the Wiki,
Under the doctrine of caveat emptor, the buyer could not recover from the seller for defects on the property that rendered the property unfit for ordinary purposes. The only exception was if the seller actively concealed latent defects.
The authors of NSC-68 never concealed the fact you would be required to work longer than is necessary to feed, clothe, and, house your family in order to enforce the new order which emerged in the aftermath of World War II.
Washington has always emphasized a call for further sacrifice at every critical juncture in the rocky economic path you willingly adopted for the past sixty years.
You could have demanded a dismantling of the Cordon Militaire in the wake of the the Soviet Union’s collapse, some 20 years ago – a move which might have saved you some of the $9 trillion of public debt run up since then.
But you did not.
This eruption will be your fault, not Washington’s.
It is true, as has been noted both by the authors of NSC-68 and the authors of the NeoCon war planning document, REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, that you are incapable of being roused from your slumbers for anything short of a Pearl Harbor-September 11th scale event.
And, it is true that the fiscal bomb currently ticking down to zero will dwarf both those events, and make you long for the happy days of the Great Depression – when only 25 percent of working men and women were unemployed.
However, the present crisis – uncomfortable as it will be for us – is merely a modest expression of a much deeper set of economic forces – forces, which, even assuming the most fiscally responsible of regimes these past twenty years, firmly and irreversibly placed us on collision course with the historically unprecedented catastrophe toward which we now hurtle.
*****
You will recall that the military Keynesianism adopted by the Truman administration in 1950 relied on permanent economic expansion to fulfill two objectives: an open-ended Cordon Militaire around the Soviet Union, and, an improving standard of living for you, the American voters.
The thought process of authors of NSC-68 probably went something like this:
“If we keep producing more silly gadgets and worthless trinkets to inspire their consumer confidence, the idiots will never realize we are busy converting their lives into an unbroken string of empty meaningless moments of unnecessary, intellect-stultifying, toil.”
Can you say: “Iphone2!”
We don’t know how you feel about them, but every time we see one of those suckers, we get the overwhelming urge to rush out and take a second mortgage.
To pay off our home equity loan…
Which paid off our credit cards…
After we bought the previous version of the “Iphone!”
Ah, yes. The virtuous circle of consumer confidence: we work, so that we may borrow; we borrow, so that we may buy; we buy, so that we may work.
Speaking of silly gadgets and worthless trinkets, about now you are wondering how the government managed to fund the production of all those aircraft carriers and Minuteman II missiles systems – which latter runs about $7 million a pop.
As we noted earlier, despite the mystical pronouncements of the high priesthood of the Church of Full Employment, Washington cannot just print an endless stream of dollars to pay for really expensive items like Minuteman II holocaust machines.
To build the machines requires the real effort of real scientists, engineers, tool and die operators, and office managers.
First, these people have to be trained.
Second, the instruments of production, and raw materials have to be secured.
Finally, while they are building engines of death, they are not engaged in economically necessary activity like building homes, growing food, assembling cars, etc.
So, all this must be done on their behalf by people who have real jobs jobs aimed at producing life, maintaining life, supporting life, feeding, housing and clothing the living.
At least up until the moment the engines of death are actually unleashed in a searing cloud of flesh puddling apocalypse heralding the onset of nuclear winter.
(For what it is worth: however, idotic and superstitious it may be for explaining the beginning of life on Earth, Intelligent Design remains very much the leading scenario for how it ends.)
The means for growing the food, building the homes, and clothing the backs of our tirelessly working Dr. Strangeloves-in-waiting, if it is not to be taken from the current consumption of the rest of their fellow American voters, and, the current investment in means of production by American businesses, must be secured from the global labor pool beyond the borders of the United States.
This, of course, is so amazingly obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with the basic principles of economics, it hardly bears mentioning.
Which is why it is routinely overlooked by the brightest minds in the field of economic policy – which minds prefer to keep the evil spirits of economic catastrophe at bay with primitive chants, cabalistic incantations understood only by initiates, catatonic mouthing of talking points, and, a very liberal swinging of sulfurous incenses.
To wit, this threeway exchange between Fareed Zakaria, Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence Summers:
ZAKARIA: Oil and food prices are sky-high, world markets are down, and the American economy seems to be slinking into a long slump. Just how scared should we be?
Well, I’ve gathered three of the top economists in the world to talk about all of this.
[…]
The first question to you, how scared should we be? In other words, are we in the phase of a crisis where the pain has been felt, and there’s going to be a long, slow working out of this pain? Or are there more unpleasant surprises to come?You know, what innings are we in?
JEFFREY SACHS, DIRECTOR, THE EARTH INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, ECONOMIC ADVISER TO GOVERNMENTS: I don’t know if Paul and Larry agree exactly, but one thing that could be added to this is the question of whether there’s a way to counteract the downturn itself, not whether one should pump up the economy, and so forth. But is a recession at this point unavoidable? This is going from, you know, gloom to gloomier.
But I would say yes, and that the attempt early on in the next presidency to have a big stimulus and keep pushing, and do everything we can to avoid the downturn, would actually prove to be fruitless at this point, because there are so many imbalances that have been built into the U.S. economy in the last decade, and especially in the last few years, and now added to the — now added on by the global markets — that consumers really are going to have to adjust.
They’ve not been saving for years. The housing market is not going to be the way the economy is going to recover. There’s going to have to be a lot of structural change in the U.S. economy. There’s going to have to be export-led growth to an important extent, because we’ve been borrowing on an amount that we will not continue in the future…
ZAKARIA: So, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), a recession will actually have an effect of cleansing the system. It will take out some of these unsustainable imbalances.
SACHS: No, what I’m saying is that, the idea that there really are enough gears right now to just keep that headline measure of the total size of the economy growing at some positive, close-to-normal rate, is just not the case. We don’t have tools like that, that can do that.
And there are so many problems that need adjustment right now, and such a legacy of imbalance, that I think that heroics to stop a downturn wouldn’t work.
LAWRENCE SUMMERS, FORMER U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY, FORMER PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Jeff, we’ve been friends for 35 years, and I’ve never heard you say such a fatalistic thing.
I don’t disagree with you about the difficulty, the challenge. And I think, no matter how brilliantly policy is carried on, the next three or four years are not likely to be three or four particularly favorable years in American economic history.
But I think it’s a serious mistake to suggest that we should somehow accept our recession like a man, and that if we just do that, we’ll cleanse the imbalances…
Notice how Summers challenges Sachs’s manhood in this exchange – daring the sissy-boy, this wannabe economic chicken-hawk warrior, to display his soft pudgy manicured hands to the viewers.
“You betta man up, bitch!” Summers appears to be saying. “Shit is gonna hit the fan, and we will need every able bodied dick to to be out there swinging.”
Of course, you will also notice Summers never challenges the premise of Sachs’s statement: without a massive reduction in the living standards of American voters, the current eruption of interlocking crises can not be fixed.
To be continued.
Is serious left criticism of government’s share of GDP possible? (A full accounting)
Continued from here.
By now it should be clear to you that the real question is not can the left criticize government’s share of GDP?
Rather, the question can be posed more briefly:
What LEFT?
Indeed, what we have so far witnessed here – beginning with the Democratic Party’s Truman administration, and continuing without interruption through Democratic and Republican administrations down to our own beloved Moron, and likely to be continued unchanged by either that neanderthal of the right, John McCain, or, that darling of Europe and the cell phone set, Barack Obama – is nothing less than the coagulation of all the most essential features of a fascistic regime unmatched even by the standard of Hitlerian depravity.
Hyperbole, you protest. The manic mutterings of a deranged and unbalanced mind.
Guilty as charged.
For, although we have laid out for you the carrying costs of empire, in 2008 dollars, and hinted at the mortal outrage of its human costs – in lost opportunity for human self-development, and the astonishing loss of life in the present catastrophic occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – we have, so far, concealed from you the running total of brutality of the present course you have supported these sixty years.
To put this in an increment you might understand, the Wiki has this to say about scale of human loss on September 11, 2001:
There were 2,974 fatalities, excluding the 19 hijackers: 246 on the four planes (from which there were no survivors), 2,603 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon. An additional 24 people remain listed as missing. All of the fatalities in the attacks were civilians except for 55 military personnel killed at the Pentagon. More than 90 countries lost citizens in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
NIST estimated that approximately 17,400 civilians were in the World Trade Center complex at the time of the attacks, while turnstile counts from the Port Authority suggest that 14,154 people were typically in the Twin Towers by 8:45 a.m. The vast majority of people below the impact zone safely evacuated the buildings, along with 18 individuals who were in the impact zone in the south tower. 1,366 people died who were at or above the floors of impact in the North Tower. According to the Commission Report, hundreds were killed instantly by the impact, while the rest were trapped and died after the tower collapsed. As many as 600 people were killed instantly or were trapped at or above the floors of impact in the South Tower.
Fatalities (excluding hijackers) New York City World Trade Center 2,603 died and another 24 remain listed as missing American 11 88 United 175 59 Arlington Pentagon 125 American 77 59 Shanksville United 93 40 Total 2,974 died and another 24 remain listed as missing. At least 200 people jumped to their deaths from the burning towers (as depicted in the photograph “The Falling Man“), landing on the streets and rooftops of adjacent buildings hundreds of feet below. Some of the occupants of each tower above its point of impact made their way upward toward the roof in hope of helicopter rescue, but the roof access doors were locked. No plan existed for helicopter rescues, and on September 11, the thick smoke and intense heat would have prevented helicopters from conducting rescues.
A total of 411 emergency workers who responded to the scene died as they attempted to implement rescue and fire suppression efforts. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) lost 341 firefighters and 2 FDNY paramedics. The New York City Police Department lost 23 officers. The Port Authority Police Department lost 37 officers. Private EMS units lost 8 additional EMTs and paramedics.
Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., an investment bank on the 101st–105th floors of One World Trade Center, lost 658 employees, considerably more than any other employer. Marsh Inc., located immediately below Cantor Fitzgerald on floors 93–101 (the location of Flight 11’s impact), lost 295 employees, and 175 employees of Aon Corporation were killed. After New York, New Jersey was the hardest hit state, with the city of Hoboken sustaining the most fatalities.
Weeks after the attack, the estimated death toll was over 6,000. The city was only able to identify remains for approximately 1,600 of the victims at the World Trade Center. The medical examiner’s office also collected “about 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to the list of the dead.” Bone fragments were still being found in 2006 as workers were preparing to demolish the damaged Deutsche Bank Building.
Let us call the above figures, taken from the pages of the Wiki, a single unit of loss.
We can give this unit of death and destruction the name, “September 11th” – being a unit of death and destruction equal to the total loss of human beings in Washington, Pennsylvania and New York on the bright blue morning of September 11, 2001.
2974 persons dead, 24 additional persons missing, untold thousands injured directly and indirectly as a result of this insanity.
According to a recent study, the human cost of your Full Spectrum Dominance has so far amounted to 10,000 September 11th events in incidents ranging from the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, under a program called Operation Ajax, to the 7.8 million slaughtered during the Vietnam War, to more than 1 million deaths in Iraq since the United States invasion in the first Gulf War in 1991.
The authors go on to say:
And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.
This uniquely American Holocaust has been estimated to total 20-30 million mostly civilian deaths, and as many as 200-300 million wounded, on every continent, and in every region of the planet!
10,000 September 11th events.
And this was in peacetime.
To be continued
Is serious left criticism of government’s share of GDP possible? (15)
Continued from here.
You will remember that following World War II, most of the industrial centers of the world outside the United States were in ruins.
Well, we want you to hold that idea.
It will be on the quiz.
For now, let us consider this:
Bush Leaving Next President Record Federal Budget Deficit
The government’s budget deficit will surge past a half-trillion dollars next year, according to gloomy new estimates, a record flood of red ink that promises to force the winner of the presidential race to dramatically alter his economic agenda.
The deficit will hit $482 billion in the 2009 budget year that will be inherited by Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain, the White House estimated Monday. That figure is sure to rise after adding the tens of billions of dollars in additional Iraq war funding it doesn’t include, and the total could be higher yet if the economy fails to recover as the administration predicts.
The result: the biggest deficit ever in terms of dollars, though several were higher in the 1980s and early 1990s as a percentage of the overall economy.
As you will notice, this post from the Huffington Post is a complete and utter bald lie by trained professionals.
Typical of American media, which have become reduced to parroting the headline provided by Washington agencies through sheer force of habit, HuffPo presented what they thought was a shocking enough piece of information, while concealing from you the actual depth and desperation of this economic moment in the history of the nation.
The $482 billion deficit the Moron (and Congress – let us not forget their role in this disaster) is leaving to his successor is underestimated by a good $80 billion dollars just for continuing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Then, we have to consider that both McCain and Obama would likely continue the Moron’s charitable contribution to George Soros, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates – in the form of tax cuts aimed to fill the nearly empty coffers of wealthiest American families – HuffPo estimates this to be another $200 billion.
$482 billion + $80 billion + $200 billion = an adjusted $762 billion deficit.
Three quarters of a trillion dollars, and we have not yet had breakfast.
But, wait! There is more.
Typical of Washington, which makes laws we must follow while they do not, government accounting for spending does not conform to accepted standards – if your accountant were to treat your income and expenditures the way Washington does the nation’s, he would go to jail.
And, you would be his cell mate.
One thing for which the government does not account is all that Social Security money you have been paying in – allegedly to support your retired parents and grandparents.
Well, there is no Social Security Trust Fund – Social Security is paid for real time – the excess monies you pay in, sold to you as a means to “fix” Social Security, actually goes to kill Iraqis, cruise carrier groups around the Indian Ocean, and – of course – pay for those tax cuts to Soros, Buffet and Gates.
Charity does begin at home, does it not?
Your home.
So, by lying to you that your money was going to Social Security to help Grandma buy groceries, Washington was able to beat you out of another couple of hundred billion dollars.
In 2003, according to the New York Times, that excess FICA tax you paid to Washington allowed the Moron to hide $160 billion dollars of the deficit.
$762 billion + $160 billion = a whopping $992 billion dollar deficit.
I bet you thought we were finished.
Which only proves you are a silly, gullible, and naive ass.
Just the kind of idiot who could be sold a 60 year bill for containing a threat that doesn’t even exist, and hasn’t existed for nearly twenty years.
The excess monies you have been paying into Social Security, and, which has ended up supporting the troops in long, leisurely, cruises around the Mediterranean, will come due as the baby boomers retire.
A business with such a liability would have to tell Soros, Buffet, and Gates – and their other shareholders – that it was carrying this financial iceberg on its books.
Not so for America Inc.: so you have no way of knowing – unless you turned off American Idol and did some research with Google – that this bill is accruing, and adding to the real deficit each year.
The New York Times estimated in 2003 this bill was another $370 billion on your tab.
$922 billion + $370 billion = $1.3 trillion.
And, growing as we write this.
Oops.
I think you should have read the fine print when the Moron and his filthy NeoCon crew – and all the other Morons before him – seduced you with the idea of Full Spectrum Dominance.
Did we mention that the New York Times, in the same article, estimated the total liability to you for the unfunded Social Security Trust Fund at $10.5 trillion?
Yes.
$10,500,000,000,000
We would imagine they just rounded it down to the nearest half trillion dollars.
That was in 2003.
It is now 2008.
Do you know where your wallet is?
Boy, we sure do hope you invested wisely.
Because we did not include the price you will have to pay for all those young kids you sent off to murder 1.2 million Iraqis and Afghanis for absolutely no apparent reason.
For small things like shattered brains, limbs, psyches, and families – not too mention the odd suicide here and there.
You know, for the kids.
Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz have estimated this price tag at the mere pittance of a further $3 trillion.
We wonder when the collection agencies will begin harassing you at dinner.
Sucker.
Oh yeah, we almost forgot: Barack would like you to okay adding another 90,000 troops to shore up our creaky Full Spectrum Dominance.
Should we just add that to your tab?
To be continued
Is serious left criticism of government’s share of GDP possible? (17)
Continued from here.
Dirt cookie, anyone?
Anyone?
No takers, huh?
Well, it is an acquired taste.
Which is to say: while you acquire the means to build holocaust machines, the poor of Haiti sprout a taste for dirt, water, salt and vegetable shortening patiently baked to a crumbly goodness, almost, but not quite, reminiscent of something edible.
A blog we came across had this to say about the flavor:
However, there is an upside to this earthy diet:
Which latter health effect, no doubt, will provide a modicum of relief to us all, when the American system of medical care collapses under the weight of our Full Spectrum Dominance.
Gated communities are very expensive, and, if you did not notice, you are getting closer to the day where you can’t afford to live here any longer.
Somewhat like that mortgage meltdown stuff which seems to be affecting everyone but you – for the moment.
Remember that other victim of the mortgage meltdown, Bear Stearns?
The Wiki does:
One day a major investment bank is worth $172 a share, two months later, it is worth $2 a share.
The average price of an American home in October 2005 was $264,000. Were the housing market to collapse like Bear Stearns, within months that average home price would drop to $3000.
Which, oddly enough, is about equal to the unadjusted median price of a home in 1950 – the year the Truman administration embarked on its spanking new economic policy of Full Employment.
(We are joking here, of course, about the, “oddly enough,” part. Actually, there is nothing odd about it: it was exactly the value we expected, when we went looking for it while writing this chapter.)
Federal Reserve bailouts might work for insignificant minor league players like global investment banks, but, if you imagine they can step in and bail out us home owners…well, we do sincerely hope you have a Plan B.
Even if the Federal Reserve had the capacity to bail us out, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as we write this, is just now announcing Washington’s intention to permanently “resource” sufficient means to fight Iraq- and Afghanistan-level conflicts, while maintaining its on-going capacity to pursue a Full Spectrum Dominance strategy.
Which implies Washington has figured out how to repeal the laws of
Or, most likely, Washington has firmly decided to sacrifice us all.
As Jeffrey Sachs so emphatically pointed out, to maintain the present level of insanity going under the name, Full Employment, requires a trade surplus, or, failing that, a cataclysmic reduction of the American standard of living.
Just after World War II, when Uncle Sam’s Club opened for business, the policy of Full Employment was possible because the United States enjoyed just such a trade surplus.
In the words of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):
People in Europe needed everything, and, for a relatively steep price, we could provide it.
The least important component of that price was interest on the loans we provided to them to buy goods from us.
The most important component – the gift that keeps on giving, so far – was the adoption by Europe of the dollar as the international currency for trade.
And, that was a good deal for us, since, according to the CBO:
Which, for you, means, the value of everything for which you have worked your entire life – everything for which you have struggled, everything for which you rose from your bed each and every morning of your adult life, everything you had ever hoped to pass on to your children, or enjoy in your retirement – today hinges on the willingness and ability of foreigners to hold US dollars to settle their international trade obligations.
Precisely the same foreign individuals who are the target of our military policy of Full Spectrum Dominance.
(How do you say, “Fucked!“, in Arabic?)
To be continued