Tag: Economics

My Hillary Problem

This is a tough post for me, as I have tried very hard to not criticize the candidacy of Sen. Hillary Clinton for President.  But considering the current economic crisis in America, particularly in the liquidity markets, I cannot stay silent.  Irrespective of the merits or lack thereof of Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy, I have to say that I feel that Sen. Clinton is the wrong choice for President of the United States.

You see, it’s the economy.

In Pennsylvania yesterday, Sen. Clinton said:

We need a president who is ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy.

Pelosi Speaks Out On Tibet; Class Conflict A Cause of Protest

Speaking in Dharamsala, seat of Tibet’s government-in-exile, Ms Pelosi said: “We call upon the international community to have an independent outside investigation on accusations made by the Chinese government that His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] was the instigator of violence in Tibet.”

She added: “The situation in Tibet is a challenge to the conscience of the world.

“If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China and the Chinese in Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak out on human rights.”

link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asi…

Congressional Poverty Scorecard – Anti-Poverty Legislation Blocked

On Monday, the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law released its 2007 Congressional Poverty Scorecard. The President of the Center, John Bouman, noted that in states with the highest poverty rates, their congressional delegations tended to score the worst.

“Poverty is everywhere in America, but it is interesting that in states with the highest concentrations of poverty, the Congressional delegations seem least interested in supporting initiatives that fight poverty,” said John Bouman, president of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, which released the study. “This appears deeper than simply opposing spending. A member could have opposed any of the measures we analyzed that called for new spending and still could have voted to support half of the poverty-fighting measures on our list.”

Former presidential candidate John Edwards was also on the center’s conference call with reporters.

“We can get the national leadership and we can get the congressional leadership we need,” Edwards said. “But first voters need to be educated as to who is doing the work and who is not.”

“The Invisible Hand” of “The Market”

What is the invisible hand of the market?  Proponents make it sound like it will save us all.  All you have to do is believe.  Have faith.  Deregulate.  It’ll take care of things.  Just you see.  “Trust me.”

Let’s break this down.

Mexican Farmers Protest NAFTA

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The Megamarch Yesterday In Mexico City

Chanting “Sin maiz, No hay pais” (Without Corn, the country doesn’t exist), Mexican farmers by the tens of thousands demonstrated in Mexico City against NAFTA.

Join me across the Rio Grande.

Memories, Class Anxiety, and Shuffling Toward Oblivion

I think my own notions of class might be a bit too quaint. I think about my grandparents. Granddad with a grade eight education, worked at a steel mill when things like that actually existed in North America. Grandma worked part time on the weekends at a dry cleaners operating one of those giant presses. They owned a small home. They took modest vacations camping all across Canada and the United States. They believed in “saving for a rainy day”. My grandpa, like most men in his neighborhood could build and fix things. My uncle Floyd was a printing press operator who made a bit of extra money on the side fixing cars in his neighborhood. My mother went to nursing school at age seventeen because girls became teachers, nurses, or secretaries. Although she later went to university as an adult, it never occurred to my grandparents to send her even though she had straight As. There was a rather well off side of the family and the women from that part became teachers. It was considered respectable to do that.

Then I think of my own early childhood. We were probably considered middle class because my mother was in a union and while they did go on strike, she was never laid off. My grandparetns had to consider layoffs in their houshold budget. My parents separated and my mother got a job as a nursing instructor. She made exactly enough money to qualify for a mortgage and borrowed the down payment off my grandparents. Despite the fact that my mother was an is skillful at handling money, it generally ran low at the end of the month and we ate vegetarian. Most of the men on my street worked in factories, I lived in a GM town and working there was a commonly expressed aspiration. When I was eighteen one of my childhood friends got on with GM and we thought she had won the lottery. She did to.

The men on my street generally worked in factories although there was a teacher, a few firemen, and a cop. If you raised to much hell, Art, the cop might talk to your parents. His boys, one of whom was my age, were expected to be nice to the young kids and even the girls and include them in games. They might have resented it but they reluctantly included me street hockey, helped me learn how to skate at the local arena, and beat the shit out of a boy from another neighborhood when my nose got bloodied. When I took power skating, a big guy from out of the neighborhood who knew Art’s boys, took up for me when the guys in my class accidental knocked me over about a hundred times. He skated over and asked what the problem was. Naturally, I said there was none. He was sixteen, I was ten, I had no freaking clue who he was. The next week he was there at the rink, teen aged boys hung out there even when they weren’t playing hockey. He showed me how to tie my skates a different way to compensate for my weak ankles and introduced himself. Nobody knocked me on my ass at power skating although they still told me I couldn’t skate worth shit.

It wasn’t all nostalgic tribalistic bonding. Until other couples got divorced on our street, my mom and I were outsiders. The women considered her a threat, the men thought she was uppity. I routinely got into fights at school because I “did not have a dad” and spent an inordinate amount of time at the principals office. I was small, I lost most of the fights. My clothes weren’t stylish and my mother could not volunteer as a parent chaperon on school field trips. There was a limited amount of social tolerance for anybody who was perceived to be different. If you were different you were expected not to draw attention to yourself and inhale a certain amount of harassment or exclusion at recess. Teachers did not intervene unless blood was spilled. My school went from K to 8, it was big by the standards of those days:700 kids by the time I left. Older kids used drugs there on the weekends and dropped the occasional needle. A chapter of a well known motorcycle gang had a house within walking distance of my street. Everybody knew where it was. Nobody got very nosy. My mother’s best friend was from India. When she and her husband came to visit, people in my neighborhood stood in the driveway and stared.

My mother went to graduate school secretly because you got a 500 dollar bonus at the community college. She was worried she would be seen as too ambitious by her boss and get assigned extra work so she did not tell anybody. She just wanted the money.

The United States was considered rather exotic. They were hip.

LCE: The Hydrogen Economy vs The Sustainable Poutpourri

This a Lazy Comment Essay, where I copy a comment from elsewhere as a short essay.

This comment is in response to a comment thread in my own diary on the Big Orange (posted here first), The Next Economic Revolution: Economic Growth and the Steady State.

paul2port says:

Regarding energy

Wood, followed by coal, followed by oil followed by….

Energy specialists seem to think the next sustainable energy economy will be — hydrogen.

There needs to be a lot of innovation and breaking down of the old established system to replace oil.

It can’t come too soon, as far as I am concerned. …

And then after a round where I demur and raise some issues and he answers and I demur again, says:

We’re not arguing here

The elegant solution might involve that tricky, tiny atom, hydrogen. Let’s put aside the political aspects your quite correctly identify, just for a moment. It might work someday.

In the meantime I’m all in favor of some inelegant kludge. If solar photovoltaics come down in price there will be a point where you won’t care if they’re only 20-30% efficient. There’s so much solar energy hitting the earth that they’ll simply be everywhere.

My Lazy Comment Essay, after the Fold.

LCE: Market vs. Government, vs. Government and Market Institutions

The is a Lazy Comment Essay, where I copy a comment from elsewhere as a short essay.

This comment is in response to a comment thread in the diary on the European Tribune – LQD : Towards an Institutionalist Political Economy – a Manifesto.

ChrisCook says:

Re: LQD : Metaphysics

I believe that the problem is Metaphysical. The assumptions that underpin conventional Economics bear no relation to reality as we know it.

They are distorted in a way designed to suit the beneficiaries of the value flows that result from the surreal financial structures that comprise our current Economy.

linca replies:

Re: LQD : Metaphysics

I think one of their point is that not only money is important, and that economics, as a social science, needs to look beyond money, as it is not the only means of social exchange – that is basically the basic axiom of current economics, that are way to much based on econometrics.

The vote, the christmas gift, the exchange of drink rounds, are also important means of economical interaction, but are denied by the modern economics influenced thinking.

My Lazy Comment Essay, after the Fold.

Critical Theory for the 21st Century: Alf Hornborg’s The Power of the Machine

This is a review of Alf Hornborg’s The Power of the Machine, a book by a professional anthropologist offering a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary critique of our global society.

The review is in four parts: the first part is an introduction to critical theory, the second part will detail Hornborg’s main concern, which is that we are trapped in a “fetish” of economic “machines,” and that this is why we keep offering “technological” and “capitalist” solutions to problems like abrupt climate change.  The third part is a short critique of his central concept, “machine fetishism,” and the conclusion will summarize the book chapter by chapter.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Theoretical Political Questions

The following questions are theoretical questions.  They resemble real-life situations, but are not presumed to be correct in their analysis of actual events.  The purpose of this is to view our reactions to situations in isolation, free of the fuller picture that incorporates all truths.   By doing so, we can break complex reactions down to their components, to better understand the complicated layers of analysis we all use, and to recognize how fallacies in one component of our reaction can cause fallacies to be accepted by the whole of our reaction.

Also by doing so, we can free ourselves to answer the actual question, rather than ask a different question which allows us to give the answers we would prefer.  In the interest of that, and of getting actual answers to the question, I ask that readers consider the information in the questions to the exclusion of real-life matters which are not considered.  If you believe that the questions excluding unasked issues are meaningless, then of course, so would any potential answer to them be.  If those are your feelings, then do yourself a favor and spend your time considering other things you feel are less stupid.

A Narrow History of Dollar Hegemony: Hudson’s Super Imperialism

(Crossposted at DailyKos.com)

Book review: Hudson, Michael.  Super Imperialism.

Second edition.  London: Pluto, 2003.

I thought that a discussion of Hudson’s book book would be pertinent in terms of recent discussions of indebtedness and in terms of Hudson’s role in the run-up to next year’s elections.  Michael Hudson’s site says he is “President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), A Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972 and 2003) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).

In 2007, Dr. Hudson has been appointed Chief Economic Policy Adviser for the Kucinich for President campaign and is writing a new tax policy for the United States.

Buh Bye Middle Class

The shirking and shrinking middle class is not a new item for anxiety. Part of the reason the illegal immigration debate has suddenly sprung forward in the last few years is because it is being framed in terms of how it directly affects the middle class, it is being sold as an explanation as to why the middle class is suffering. Illegals are taking middle class jobs. It is a great way for Republicans and Dems to transform themselves into populists and divert questions of the other ways in which the middle class has been subverted.

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