Tag: Economics

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour was recently interviewed by the conservative Washington Times and stated his opinion on a variety of current events.  Barbour’s name has been floated as a potential 2012 Republican Presidential nominee and he appeals strongly to the party’s conservative base.  The most interesting portion of the interview focuses on federal government spending versus state government spending.  Barbour’s reply also reveals how quickly we have forgotten the problems of our past.  Those who advance a states’ rights agenda and hold up the Tenth Amendment as justification often forget the massive problems this country faced when we focused more on individual states at the expense of Washington, DC.  While placing more control in a centralized system of government has created some problems, they are nothing compared to way it was when the reverse was true.  

So it’s the day of the big speech, Mr. President, and we got trouble with a capital “T” right here in Health Care City.

What are you gonna do? Do we follow the traditional Democratic Party legislative process of passing…something…at any cost, assuming the entire time that the Left and the Netroots will “go along with the program”, or is there a risk that the calculus doesn’t work as well today as it did in 1994 and 1996?

Well, lucky for you, I’m a fake consultant, and I know a few things about your “target market”, so before you answer that question…we need to talk.

Every thinking person agrees that the health care (actually, sick care) system in the United States is not performing as well as it should.  I say “every thinking person”, because special interest money can turn off one’s thinking cap very quickly.  This is what is happening now.

People, by our genetic makeup and millennia of experience, are averse to change.  We like thinks to be predictable, especially when it is fundamental to our survival.  We like our homes, familiar abodes of safety, just as well today as we liked our caves, or our hunting and gathering grounds, or any number of things that gave us a sense of security thousands of years ago.  Change, and the uncertainty associated with it, is scary for most of us.

Mission accomplished! Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon….the bubble economy has been reflated and it’s oh so glorious to be an American. Matt Taibbi’s Bubble Number Five – The Bailout Bubble as expressed in his brilliant The Great Bubble American Machine is now well on the way to reaching critical mass. Oh come all ye suckers, joyful and triumphant the casino is open again….time to drive up those depleted 401k’s, fine whatever credit cards haven’t been maxed out and spend….spend….spend….

Forty years ago this week an event occurred that changed the history of mankind forever.

An event so monumental that the memory lingers on, even though the venue where the event took place has been, shall we say, “repurposed“.

But we’re not here to talk about the time that Minnesota Twins Manager Billy Martin appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Instead, let’s talk space.

NASA is forever trying to interest the world in space exploration…and forever struggling to come up with the money to get things done.

Well, I’m not a scientist, nor an engineer, and I don’t assemble rocket vehicles…but I am a fake consultant, and if NASA took my advice, I’d bet my fake paycheck that money would be a lot less of a problem.

Just a few thoughts this miserable Monday on the lemming farm as Goldman’s record earnings are about to be announced and the Republican pigs are shovelling bloody read meat to their dumber than a bucket of shit racist base over the Sotomayor hearings. There is a very good article by Paul Krugman in the damned librul New York Times today on the state of the economic fallout from the decades long class war. In Krugman’s piece, Boiling the Frog he is once again on the mark about Obama’s failings in propping up the looter capitalist system at the expense of the regular Americans.

The hits just keep coming for the Empire of Avarice, the Great Satan that is Goldman Sachs. As Matt Taibbi’s brilliant expose The Great American Bubble Machine continues to spread across the internet there is chaotic shuffling around the feeding troughs by Wall Street’s big piggies. It is now conventional wisdom on both the street itself and the whorehouse in D.C. that there must be a savage campaign to use the pocket media to take down Taibbi with extreme prejudice. The good ole bread and butter “conspiracy theorist” tag is to be the weapon of choice. According to this story by the Independent’s Stephen Foley, the Great Satan’s oily mouthpiece chimes in with these old warhorses (Propaganda 101) –

In keeping with the hyperbole of the row, Goldman’s wonderfully arch spokesman Lucas van Praag described the piece as “an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories,” adding: “Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F Kennedy’s assassination] and faking the first lunar landing.”

“Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough.”



– Jan Willem Van De Wetering

The battle has now been joined by the Great Satan (aka Goldman Sachs) as the brilliant Matt Taibbi piece has fortunatly gone viral thanks to bloggers. When the pigs on Wall Street, their legal armies and on call public relations propagandists turn into pirannhas as they are with this piece the fuckers are on the run. The seige on CNBC’s drooling house baboon Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer that was kicked off by comedian Jon Stewart was beaten back with a disinformation laden blitzkrieg and the money changers regained control of the temple. It’s all been the hogwash of the GREEN SHOOTS ever since. And despite the dismal news contained in yesterday’s jobs report the long weekend couldn’t come at a more fortuitous time as the four flushing,gold plated cocksuckers will regroup once again and launch a saturation bombing campaign of more goddammed lies.

This is a meditation on power and political hope, on the idea that the struggle for power seems to favor those who focus their lives upon the attainment of power (rather than, say, the enjoyment of life), and of what hope to place (and in what) in a world in which this is true.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

This is a book review of an ambitious text, Richard Peet’s 2007 book Geography of Power, which gets at the issue of social power by defining it as a physical thing and by locating it in time and space.  As will be shown in this book review, this is really a thing worth doing, and so the critique of this book will be aimed at sharpening Peet’s discussion of “power” while helping him resist just being another David Harvey.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)