Tag: stimulus

  There has been a lot of talk about a double-dip recession recently by people like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, how to define it, and what it means. What is missing from these discussions is the most obvious question of all: why won’t the economy recover?

  Capitalism is supposed to be self-correcting – or so we’ve been told – and a recession like the one we’ve had is supposed to be that reset button. So why aren’t businesses hiring?

  I’m going to try to answer that question in the simplest way possible.

 There are two primary reasons why the economy isn’t recovering, one reason is cyclical, the other is secular.

  The most heated debate in Washington these days involves deficits and unemployment. There are lots of heated rhetoric, finger-pointing, and hyperbole.

  What there isn’t is a surplus of actual facts.

 For instance, this headline reads “U.S. should cut deficit to spur recovery, IMF says”. It implies that cutting the deficit would automatically increase economic growth.

  That sounds good to me. The problem is that the IMF never actually says that. In fact, the article spends most of its time warning about a drop in economic growth.

 The headline was misleading, as is just about everything said in this debate.

[R]eality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.

The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common.

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

The sorcerer’s description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.

When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.

In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world. Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world.

The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.

After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.

The Teachings of Don Juan

by Carlos Castaneda

Just two days after announcing the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama held a jobs summit:

With unemployment levels above 10 percent, Obama said “We cannot hang back and hope for the best.”

But, mindful of growing anxiety about federal deficits, Obama also tempered his upbeat talk with an acknowledgment that government resources could only go so far and that it is primarily up to the private sector to create large numbers of new jobs.

He said while he’s “open to every demonstrably good idea … we also though have to face the fact that our resources are limited.”

Beyond the question of why a Democratic president is giving lip service to deficit hawks at a moment that screams for more Keynesian stimulus, the real question is this: why is it that we have to endure nearly a year of grueling political games just to get a weak, watered down health care bill that we have been told, all along, has to be deficit-neutral, yet no one bats an eye at throwing tens of billions more each year into wars?

A couple weeks ago, CBS News reported:

My things seem chill here.   Everybody seems to be in a groovy frame of mind, maybe it’s the holidays, maybe we’re all just high on cold medicines (I know I am, I’ve got a nasty one), maybe it’s just longer nights and the shorter days ….

But too bad.  I’m gonna hit you over the head with an article that will PISS YOU THE HELL OFF.

Thomas Ferguson is a political scientist and author who studies and writes on politics and economics, often within an historical perspective. He is a Political Science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a contributing editor of The Nation, and is also the author of several books, the most recent of which is Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political System.

Back in April 2009 Ferguson was interviewed by Real News CEO Paul Jay, and at the time called the Obama/Geithner/Summers economic/stimulus plans a “recipe for disaster”.

Today, Ferguson again talks with Jay, and with the hindsight of the past 7 months now says that the stimulus program was far too small, a much larger one is still needed, and predicts that the Democrats must start a new jobs program to bring the economic growth to the bulk of the population or face losing badly in the 2010 mid-terms.

We strive to be, if anything, a participatory space around here, and I’ve had a question come to my inbox that is very much deserving of our attention.

To make a long story short, our questioner wants to know why, on the one hand, despite the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, also known as the “stimulus”), unemployment in the construction industry continues to increase, and, on the other hand, why there is such a giant disparity, on a state-by-state basis, in the cost of saving a job?

They’re great questions, and, having done a bit of research, I think I have some cogent answers.

Real News – March 28, 2009

Obama held hostage by PPPIP

Pepe Escobar: If Geithner’s plan does not work, the President sinks

President Obama’s destiny – more than his foreign policy decisions – will be sealed by how he deals with the US financial crisis, argues Pepe Escobar.

The verdict of top economists on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s new PPPIP (Public Private Partnership Investment Program) has not been auspicious.

Some speak of taxpayer rip-off while Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman foresees a “lost decade of zombie banks”.

The President has been trying to appease Wall Street while at the same time appeasing America’s anger directed at anything bank bailout-related.

On a global level the Chinese have made it known their patience with America’s addiction to debt has limits.

The upcoming G-20 meeting in London is bound to discuss more radical steps, while back in the US some already dream of a new saviour, post-Geithner.

Geithner’s Treasury $500 Billion to $1 Trillion Plan to Purchase Legacy Assets PPPIP Whitepaper is here (.PDF)