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Rand Paul causing waves among the GOP
Rand Paul has the ability to force the Senate to raise sixty votes for every bill introduced that increases Washington’s spending for the next six years. He has, in other words, the power to create a massive ongoing political crisis for the bloated, wasteful perversity that passes for government in Washington D.C.
We think he will fold — we think he will pull an Obama and sell out the Tea Partiers who brought him to this quite spectacular position.
We would love it if he proved us wrong.
He has already signaled his willingness to cripple the earmark process in the Senate. And, now John “Maverick in Name Only” McCain is drawing a bead on Paul’s stated willingness to force massive cuts in the defense budget.
From the Huffington Post:
John McCain Attacks Rand Paul’s ‘Isolationism’ In Willingness To Cut Defense Spending
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed concern Monday that some new Republican legislators would be defined by their “protectionism and isolationism,” two views that the Vietnam War veteran feared would result in a butting of heads within the party on Afghanistan and defense spending.
“I think there are going to be some tensions within our party,” McCain said during a conference put on by Foreign Policy Initiative, a DC-based think tank. “I worry a lot about the rise of protectionism and isolationism in the Republican Party.”
A prime example, McCain continued, was Rand Paul, Kentucky’s next U.S. Senator.
“I admire his victory, but … already he has talked about withdrawals [and] cuts in defense,” McCain said.
Indeed, Paul appears to have taken after the more libertarian side of foreign policy issues, much like his father, Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R).
Never, in our memory, has someone so apparently clueless, seemed so likely to deliver on the precisely those things that have to be done to kill this economy for good, and bring the empire to its knees.
If he is even vaguely successful in challenging the status quo, we expect McCain will take the entire millionaires’ club hostage, automatic rifle in hand, in a frightening outburst of PTSD-driven, alcohol-charged, delusional rage.
We wish Rand Paul all the luck (and backbone) in the world.
Proposed law would name Wikileaks a national security threat
From AntiWar.com:
Senate to Mull Anti-WikiLeaks Law
Saying that it was vital to stop “WikiLeaks from hiding like a coward behind a computer mainframe,” Senator John Ensign (R – NV) announced today that he intends to push forward with legislation that aims to formally criminalize WikiLeaks as well as severely curtailing the ability to release classified documents.
Richard Trumka: How a tired old union hack misses the point completely
Once upon a time, the union boss was hated and feared on Wall Street, now he or she is just ridiculed or ignored – or propped up in front of the TV cameras to serve as a convenient scapegoat for why you’re paying for Wall Street failures.
Little does the Party of Wall Street suspect that, indeed, they are right – union hacks like Trumka are precisely the reason why you are footing the bill for GM mismanagement, and Goldman Sachs’ venality. The unions sold you out to cash in on the virtuous cycle of ever bigger defense budgets, rising employment fueled by wars and economic predation, and an ever growing slush fund of union dues.
Now the bills have come due, and Goldman Sachs wants to blame the UAW because Ford, GM and Chrysler can’t build a decent automobile at a competitive price – a price that requires that an American standard of living be readjusted to conform to Chinese wage levels.
Watch below as Richard Trumka whines like a bitch for a return to the good old days when American union bosses marched hand in hand with corporate predators in support of the Johnson-Nixon carpet bombing of Vietnamese villages.
Richard L. Trumka’s remarks at the Spotlight on Jobs Crisis forum.
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Interesting report from Fisk…
Robert Fisk is reporting a grand scheme to establish an alternative to the US dollar by 2018.
This comes on the heels of an earlier reported opinion that the US will be trying to reduce American standards of living by 50 percent over the next 14 years.
It begs the question whether these are initial negotiating positions between the various world economic powers on the transition to a post-American order. For the US to accept this state of affairs would require it to reduce its triple deficit – trade, public, and private.
Is the US prepared to peacefully give up its hegemony? To release its coveted access to global resources, which allow it to spend nearly the equal sum as the entire planet on defense? its aggressive military posture?
To ask these questions is to answer them.
Swords into plowshares: How the Messiah is creating jobs for you by preparing for World War III
For those who still don’t get it: The brick and mortar of economic recovery and job creation is being fashioned out of the material of your life.
Isaiah 2:4: And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
From Contrarian Musings:
Raising GDP is not a hard thing to accomplish because GDP is really just a measure of spending. What really matters is the quality of the spending. If we are spending on productive investments that produce a long term return that is one thing, but if we are spending on consumer goods that produce nothing and depreciate over time, we are not creating wealth. If we are “investing” in housing, we are not creating wealth. If we increase government spending on defense (which rose 13% in the quarter), we are not creating wealth. If we increase government spending on welfare payments that are used for current consumption, we are not creating wealth. Wealth is created by saving and investment. Much has been made of the rise in the personal savings rate, but at this point government dissaving is offsetting all the good being done at the individual level.
Karl Denninger has this to say:
Real federal government consumption expenditures and gross investment increased 10.9 percent in the second quarter, in contrast to a decrease of 4.3 percent in the first. National defense increased 13.3 percent, in contrast to a decrease of 5.1 percent. Nondefense increased 6.0 percent, in contrast to a decrease of 2.5 percent. Real state and local government consumption expenditures and gross investment increased 2.4 percent, in contrast to a decrease of 1.5 percent.
So much for Obama destroying military spending eh? Uh, not so fast eh? 13% increase? Not bad. The Federal Government is attempting to pick up the pieces from the private sector, but without success. State and local governments are trying to pick up the pieces but all they’re doing is going bankrupt; do not expect to see this contribution repeated in the 3rd and 4th quarters, as they’re out of money!
The Daily Capitalist writes:
It is true that government spending grew at a 5.6% annual rate for the quarter, moderating the contraction in gross domestic product. But most of that increase came from the defense sector, not the nondefense sectors targeted by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Defense spending grew at a 13.3% annual rate, in part a rebound from a 4.3 first quarter contraction. Nondefense spending grew at a 6% annual rate, contributing 0.15 percentage points to overall growth. The economy can use all of the help it can get, but it’s too soon to declare that federal spending is effectively making its way into the system.
Yes, we wanted to tell our brother he is not a chicken, but we needed the eggs…
What you might not know, and most blogs and reports we found did not mention: This second quarter 2009 GDP spending party came on the heels of the Moron’s third quarter 2008 defense spending surge of 18 percent:
Economic Growth in the Defense Sector: While the U.S. economy slowed in the third calendar quarter, defense spending leaped, far outstripping other government agencies. It is tempting to draw the conclusion that defense spending is somehow not aligned with the rest of the economy. Here is why that conclusion is incorrect. According to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which tracks U.S. economic activity, defense spending rose 18.0 percent from the second calendar quarter to the third, on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis in constant dollars.1 The third quarter of 2007 saw a similar increase, when the annualized rise in defense spending exceeded that of federal spending, which in turn also outpaced overall U.S. economic growth.
We assume there will be another such green shoot uptick in defense spending for this quarter, which will technically send the economy into positive territory. As you can see from the chart, projections are that defense spending will continue to rise until the recession is over.
The consequences of our own decisions…
One of the nagging difficulties we have with trying to communicate our view of things is in conveying to others that actions and decisions have consequences.
Our society has avoided reducing hours of work, and is now suffering the latest in string of such consequences, which we will try to detail below. This is only a first attempt, so criticisms are welcome.
1. The first consequence of a too many hours of work was the Great Depression;
2. The second, which was made unavoidable by the first, was the debasing of money from gold;
3. The third was the growth of government, in the form of the New Deal, to cope with the massive unemployment produced by the Great Depression, and which was made possible by the debasement of money;
4. There followed the massive preparations for World War II, and the outbreak of the conflict, which was made possible by massive pool of labor made available by the unemployment created by the Great Depression;
5. The above was followed by the implementation of National Security Memorandum 68, and the creation of the Cordon Militaire to contain the Soviet Union and establish the American Empire, made possible by the great pool of untapped superfluous labor which caused the Great Depression;
6. Which was followed by monetary instability, as the United States began pulling in global resources in the context of fixed exchanged rates;
7. Which finally forced the United States to abandon the dollar’s peg to gold, and a decade of monetary instabilty;
8. Which triggered the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt, and produced an unbroken string of trade deficits to this day;
9. Which forced permanent fiscal deficits, and the beginning of the consumer debt crisis;
10. Which, to control high interests rates, led to the manipulation of markets for various commodities – most importantly gold – by the American government;
11. Which led Washington to deregulate the derivatives market, even as those markets had nearly killed the global economy, and produced the Asian Meltdown, the Russian Financial Crisis, and the Argentina Crisis;
12. Which led to the monstrous overhang of CDS and other financial instruments of mass destruction;
13. Which led to last year’s Wall Street Meltdown, and the emergence of the greatest economic crisis since;
14. The Great Depression, which is not really a depression, but merely Mister Market’s way of saying you are working too hard…
The new and old “normal”
History, Marx believed is a continuous process – that is, a cumulative unfolding of events which do not merely change the faces of the actors, but alters the relations they enter into even as they may imagine they are performing the same old play.
Speculators in the stock market, however, very often imagine it ruled by regularities – cycles, patterns, waves – in which the same events play themselves out again and again across an equities landscape which never fundamentally changes.
They have a rule for this: “Only fools believe it is different this time.”
Of course, it may be a matter of your time horizon: we leave home each day and return to find everything pretty much as we remembered it; but we return to our childhood home and find everything just seems so much smaller than we recalled – if it is there at all.
The median price of a single family home in 1950 was around $3000.
By 2005, a single family home fetched about $264,000.
Blogger Cassandra asks us to consider which of these two prices is the normal one; and, what, if anything, we take for granted in the economy today can be considered normal, as well:
In Japan, “normal” meant that in 2004 residential real estate prices were roughly 30% of late 1980s or early 1990s prices. In Germany , though nominal prices might be similar in many places to those prevailing two decades ago, the real price destruction would be probably be similar to Japan’s. But what is “normal” for economic growth? Or what is “normal” for aggregate US consumption? Or the amount of debt a typical household can sustain? What is the “normal” leverage for a bank, or the normal return on equity o a listed company? What is a normal share of GDP for corporate profits in an economy experiencing deep recession? What is “normal” for sustainable government budget deficits? What is the normal income multiple of a banker or CEO to a policeman, a professional baseball player to a school-teacher or a doctor to a nurse? What is the normal amount of due diligence a bank should do before extending a loan and what is normal for the amount Honeywell Industries will earn per-share in the coming years?
During the time from 1950 to 2008 Washington’s role in the economy has increased several magnitudes, and with this intervention, debt has increased phenomenally, as has the financial sector and prices generally.
Seen one way, price levels for all goods has increased to the astounding heights we currently take for normal.
But, since Marx reminds us history is a continuous process, we cannot afford to ignore the growth of the other factors in the equation – government intervention, public and private debt, and the bloated financial sector.
The latter – financials – is mostly dead; public and private debt continue to hover over us like some massive Sword of Damocles; and, government, whose growth accounts for much of the debt, and much of the growth of the financial sector, is teetering on the icy edge of disaster.
Now, what is normal? With all the changes to the economy between 1950 and 2005 is is clearly unknowable what the “real” price of a single family home is now, much less to assume that it fall somewhere on a curve between the beginning of the housing bubble and when it burst in 2005 or so.
But, let’s add another complication:
Oops! Another complication: Change in labor productivity 1950 -2004
According to Erik Rauch, “the number of weekly hours needed to produce the 1950 worker’s output declined by almost one hour per year until the mid-1970’s, and has been declining by about half an hour per year since then.”
Rauch estimates, “An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950.”
Which implies, all things being equal, the actual “real” median price of a home built in 1950 (the price measured in the actual expenditure of human working time) may have declined to as little as $825.00.
That’s EIGHT HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS, not $264,000.
For pretty much the price of your congressman’s shabby, not ready for Wall Street, ill-fitting, rumpled, J C Penny’s quality business suit, you could have a three bedroom, two bath, McMansion on a cul-de-sac in Culver City.
So, even if we assume government statistic on productivity are correct – and there is evidence they are not – clearly home prices have significantly further to fall.
Deflation: a good idea whose time has come.
For Sale: one slightly used pump (as is)
The financial system set up after World War II to assist Washington in its strategy of siphoning economic resources to maintain and expand its vast military empire has collapsed.
Nowhere is this more clear than the complete breakdown of monetary policy, already touch and go in the last downturn, in the present financial crisis: the Federal Reserve Bank, the institution responsible for managing the mechanism of credit markets to assure continuing financing for Washington’s growing debt, has exhausted its traditional tools.
According to Brad Setser, the Fed has been forced to step into the role formerly played by private market players:
Over the last few months, the Fed has more or less taken over a slew of functions previously performed by the private financial system.
Banks with spare cash (more deposits than loans) used to lend to banks that were short of cash (more loans than deposits). Now they lend to the Fed, and the Fed lends to the banks that are short on cash. That way no bank risks taking losses lending to a bad bank ….
Money market funds used to lend both to the financial sector and to firms with short-term financing needs. Now they (to simplify a bit) just buy Treasuries. The Treasury met this demand by increasing its issuance, and (to simplify a bit) putting the cash it raised on deposit with the Fed. That in turn allowed the Fed to lend to institutions in the US and abroad that previously relied on money market funds for financing.
Foreign central banks used to buy rather significant sums of Agency bonds, and in the process finance (indirectly) the extension of credit to American households. Now foreign central banks just want Treasuries. The Fed now plans to purchase rather significant quantities of Agencies, in effect making up for the fall off in demand from other central banks.
To paraphrase a thug from an earlier time: L’Économie c’est Moi.
But, closer to home that might be rewritten thusly, Markets “R” Us!
According to the Economist, the Federal Reserve’s effort is aimed to provide, “investors with the confidence that a committed buyer is in the market.”
Which is to say, the Fed is intent on using your tax dollars to support asset prices long enough until, they desperately hope, capital markets begin to function again on their own.
Deflation, the WMD of the poor and dispossessed, is here, and Washington has stepped down into the filthy gutter of Wall Street ponzi schemes to prevent the global and domestic Joe Plumbers from ever seeing the fruits of their victory – a victory they have achieved simply by being what they are: poor, dispossessed, and utterly dependent on social production and consumption.
It is, above all, absolutely critical to Washington to prevent the general fall in prices of goods and assets, a ensure their continuing upward spiral.
This much is understood by many, since deflation is a dagger aimed at the heart of accumulated wealth.
Forty-eight percent of investment assets are held by the top one percent of Americans; with the top ten percent holding 85 percent of such assets – as the charts show below.
Table 2: Wealth distribution by type of asset, 2001
| Investment Assets | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 1% | Next 9% | Bottom 90% | |
| Business equity | 57.3% | 32.3% | 10.4% |
| Financial securities | 58.0% | 30.6% | 11.3% |
| Trusts | 46.3% | 40.4% | 13.3% |
| Stocks and mutual funds | 44.1% | 40.4% | 15.5% |
| Non-home real estate | 34.9% | 43.6% | 21.5% |
| TOTAL | 47.8% | 37.7% | 14.5% |
| Housing, Liquid Assets, Pension Assets, and Debt | |||
| Top 1% | Next 9% | Bottom 90% | |
| Deposits | 21.7% | 35.5% | 42.8% |
| Pension accounts | 13.3% | 47.0% | 39.6% |
| Life insurance | 12.5% | 33.5% | 54.0% |
| Principal residence | 8.9% | 28.0% | 63.0% |
| Debt | 5.8% | 20.1% | 74.1% |
| TOTAL | 11.9% | 34.0% | 54.1% |
| From Wolff (2004). | |||
At first blush, this looks like a classic case of “comforting the comfortable.”The Federal Reserve is clearly stepping in to prevent the wealth of a handful of individuals from being dissipated through deflation, and it is doing it using the money of those who have least.
The astounding concentration of wealth demonstrated here should cause one to question democracy itself: how is it possible a government, “of the people, by the people,” could stand by and allow the most amazing impoverishment of that people, and the lopsided distribution of the product of that people into so few hands – and to follow this tragedy by working furiously to maintain this lopsided distribution?
The cynical answer is, of course, it wasn’t that hard at all. They just waited until you were off to the mall shopping off the effects of September 11, 2001 – as instructed by the Moron.
The serious answer, however, is the concentration of wealth was the outcome of the deliberate Washington policy of inflating the economy and siphoning off an increment of this inflated economic activity to fund its empire.
Specifically, Washington secretly planned an open-ended inflation of economic activity, because economic growth,
…would permit, and might itself be aided by, a build-up of the economic and military strength of the United States and the free world; furthermore, if a dynamic expansion of the economy were achieved, the necessary build-up [of US military forces] could be accomplished without a decrease in the national standard of living because the required resources could be obtained by siphoning off a part of the annual increment in the gross national product.
It was a secret deal between Washington and Wall Street – not a secret deal in the conspiratorial sense, since all the players overlapped, and had to overlap, given Washington’s nationalization of industry to fight World War II – but a secret deal in the sense the American people were locked out of the discussion, never provided any meaningful alternate economic policy choices, and because the real reason for the economic policy decisions made in the decades after were never provided in a way alternatives could be examined.
So, when inflation began to bite in the 1950s, when 100 years of trade surpluses turned into trade deficits in the 1970s, when industry began abandoning the Midwest for the South, and for China and the low wage periphery, when trade deficits turned in budget deficits, and those budget deficits turned in personal savings deficits, and as the national, corporate and personal debt ballooned to the kinds of cataclysmic number we witness today, no one in mainstream politics stepped forward to say:
“Well, it would not be this way, if Washington would simply stop surreptitiously stealing national income to fund its empire. That really is the entire cause of our economic problems.”
Because, you see, if you want to sipon off the wealth of a nation to fund your empire, you need a pump, and Wall Street was that pump – in the entirety of human history, no social organization has ever been as efficient as finance capitalism in siphoning off wealth.
But now deflation has broken the pump – the ongoing collapse of real estate, the collapse of credit and equity markets – all the result of a mass of impoverished and dispossessed billion slaves who cannot feed themselves with what they earn producing the whole world of wealth that is now crashing aound us.
And, the last target of deflation – Washington – finds itself desperate to get the pump running again.
In Paul Krugman’s opnion, “Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.”
To which, the residents of Kibera reply, “What do you mean ‘We’ white man.”
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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:
A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.
However, there is an upside to this earthy diet:
Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.
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:
On March 14, 2008, JPMorgan Chase, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, provided a 28-day emergency loan to Bear Stearns in order to prevent the potential market crash that would result from Bear Stearns becoming insolvent. Two days later, Bear Stearns signed a merger agreement with JP Morgan Chase in a stock swap worth $2 a share. In addition, the Federal Reserve agreed to issue a non-recourse loan to JP Morgan Chase, thereby assuming the risk of Bear Stearns’s less liquid assets. This sale price represented a staggering loss as its stock had once traded at $172 a share as late as January 2007, and $93 a share as late as February 2008.
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.
The paper said the Defense Department would respond to China’s expanding military power through “shaping and hedging.”
“This approach tailors investment of substantial, but not infinite, resources, in ways that favor key enduring US strategic advantages,” it said.
“At the same time we will continue to improve and refine our capabilities to respond to China if necessary,” it said.
The paper said Russia was leveraging its oil wealth, asserting claims in the Arctic, and continues “to bully its neighbors, all of which are cause for concern.”
It also pointed to Russia’s resumption of long-range bomber flights, withdrawal from arms control and force reduction treaties, threatened to target countries that host US missile defense bases, and signaled increased reliance on nuclear weapons as a foundation of its security.
“All of these actions suggest a Russia exploring renewed influence, and seeking a greater international role,” it said.
But the paper said the strategic environment the United States faces for the forseeable future “will be defined by a global struggle against a violent extremist ideology that seeks to overturn the international state system.”
Which implies Washington has figured out how to repeal the laws of
- physics, or,
- economics.
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):
long before the war, the United States had run an almost unbroken string of trade surpluses—that is, an excess of exports over imports—and the war damaged or destroyed much of the most significant international competition for U.S. industry.
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:
After 1970, however, the almost unbroken string of trade surpluses turned into one of trade deficits, and in the 1980s and 1990s, those deficits grew quite large.
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
Re: The People 
Don’t open the window, tear down the walls…
When Tom Walker first raised the topic of Overton’s Window, it did not seem to us to hold much value beyond the obvious conclusion that a democratic society, when it is at equilibrium, allowed for only the most modest changes at the margins.
We thought: Hey Tom, tell us something we don’t know.
After years of living with two wars, after the catastrophe that was the 2008 financial crisis, and after witnessing the fiery critique of American foreign policy that resulted in nearly 3000 deaths on September 11, 2001, and the watery critique of its domestic policy with Katrina, if society could pass through this and emerge with political relations pretty much undisturbed, we thought even marginal change itself seems like an overly optimistic goal.
Our opinion was simple: Society would change when it was impossible for its members to muddle along from one catastrophe to another. In the case of shorter working time, that means when you will reduce hours of work when, no matter whether you have a job or not, you still face starvation.
When hunger and want stalk you, no matter how many hours you sell yourself into slavery, the idea of selling yourself into slavery will die on its own
Okay – a little over the top, we admit. Not wrong, we believe, insofar as it goes, but it certainly doesn’t offer much hope that things will change short of really desperate times. (And, frankly, you can’t be trusted to do the right thing in relatively good times, how likely is it you will instinctively do the right thing in really desperate times?)
So we got to thinking, and trying to imagine something other than the worst case scenario. (Really difficult, mind you, this imagining something other than the worst case scenario. The last time we got our hopes up for real change was when the Soviet Bloc disintegrated, and a tiny handful of people began talking of a peace dividend. But, then HW’s sweetheart got bitch-slapped by Saddam Hussein, and suddenly it was the Munich in the Summer of 1938 all over again. Our children will never know how close this proud nation came to speaking Arabic with Iraqi accents! Just thinking about it gives us chills!)
Short of really desperate times how might the reduction of working time be realized?
After years of subpar performance, the leadership of the SU finally admitted they had among themselves no new ideas how to reverse the decline in the living standards of the country. Much like the US today, massive amounts of work time were being squandered on a useless buildup of military might, environmental degradation, social alienation, and war. A new leader, Gorbachev, ascended to power and found the support among the sclerotic elite to make one last push to break the spiral of decay – in a campaign they called Glasnost (openness and freedom) and Perestroika (economic restructuring). The idea was to take a hidebound, autocratic, ideologically rigid statist political system and open it up to new ideas that would, in some undefined fashion, make it possible for the Soviet Union to overcome the catastrophic course on which it clearly traveled.
It was, in other words, an announcement of the impending systemic collapse of the society by the Soviet bureaucracy in the only way a bureaucracy can admit its complete and utter failure: They put up a suggestion box.
Much like Overton’s Window the question of the moment in the Soviet Union was how to expand the range of possible change to which the system would be subject.
That it failed is not the point of this brief recollection; rather, the point is this item taken from the Wiki:
Arriving in Berlin on June 12, 1987, President and Mrs. Reagan were taken to the Reichstag, where they viewed the wall from a balcony. Reagan then made his speech at the Brandenburg Gate at 2 PM, in front of two panes of bulletproof glass protecting him from potential snipers in East Berlin. About 45,000 people were in attendance; among the spectators were West German president Richard von Weizsäcker, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and West Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen. That afternoon, Reagan said,
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Later on in his speech, President Reagan said, “As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner, ‘This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.’ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.”
The words President Reagan saw on the Berlin Wall, were not written by a young Berliner. The words were actually spray painted on the Berlin Wall by an American. On October 10, 1986, William Ozkaptan spray painted the words “The wall will fall. Beliefs become reality. W.Oz 10/10/86”.
Another highlight of the speech was Reagan’s call to end the arms race with his reference to the Soviets’ SS-20 nuclear weapons, and possibility of “not merely of limiting the growth of arms, but of eliminating, for the first time, an entire class of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.”
A little background to understand this excerpt
When National Security Council Report 68 was written in 1949-1950, the authors anticipated that the Soviet Union would, on occasion, make peace proposals to limit the possibility of conflict between the two empires. In their view, such proposals were little more than ploys designed to undercut Western resolve to contain the SU and its bloc of allies.
However, whether these were ploys or legitimate attempts by the Soviet Union to deescalate the conflict is besides the point, since the reality the authors of NSC-68 faced was the possibility that such “ploys” might appeal to public opinion in Western Europe and the United States – and they wanted nothing to compromise Western willingness to contain the SU for what promised to be a very long time.
Gorbachev’s Glastnost and Perestroika was viewed in the same light by the authors of NSC-68 – who had, since, abandoned the Democratic Party in disgust, and rallied to Reagan during the Carter Presidency. A Soviet leadership committed to change on its own terms threatened an already grumbling coalition of Western governments and malcontents, and presented the threat that Washington Empire might disintegrate as well. To answer this threat, Reagan took to the podium on that day in Berlin to issue the ultimate challenge to the Soviets: Tear down this wall!
The Soviets called his bluff, and the American Dollar Empire went looking for a new evil to justify its bloated existence.
The rest of the story is a collection broken bodies, burnt beyond recognition, in buildings, wedding parties, and beds.
What lesson is there in this?
Gorbachev set out to widen the window of possible change in the Soviet Union. Reacting to this event, and intent on maintaining its coalition, the United States responded to this charm offensive by demanding that the Soviet Union do more than widen a window in the wall: The wall itself must be brought down.
The Soviet Union had to abolish itself.
Having abolished itself, it imediately called into question its opposite – the American Empire – the leaders of which have been working mightily to justify its continued existence based on the proposition that 48 percent of global war spending must be devoted to the extermination of one guy in a cave on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Don’t widen the Overton Window, tear down the Wall.
As Barkely Rosser at Econospeak has pointed out, all of the most pressing problems today, which have produced fairly broad, if mostly unconnected, movements for change are rooted in the need to reduce hours of work. (Rosser made this point only to disparage the work of Tom Walker, but it is true.)
To give a few examples:
We could go on and list any of a number of social ills that have produced movements of individuals devoted to their eradication that are, at their core, only symptoms of a society which simply suffers from overly long hours of work.
(In fact, it was our intuition at the time, that the Soviet Union faced precisely this problem – albeit in a more pronounced form. Economists called it investment hunger, or some such stupid label. However, the paradox presented by this investment hunger was that adding ever more labor resources to enterprises only raised cost without significantly raising output)
We think it is time to take Ronald Reagan’s advice and tear down the walls that separate work time reduction from each of these movements, and, which separate and compartmentalize these movement each from the other – often on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Advocates of work time reduction must do the painful, difficult work of amassing evidence to support the proposition that each of these ills are no more than symptoms of overwork.
Much has been done so far to make the connection between global warming issues and long hours of work. Still more work like this is needed on a host of issues, even – dare we say it – wading into emotionally charged issues like immigration, and speaking to the leaders and members of a movement not known for political correctness.
We would like to know your thoughts on this.