The drieuxster's Happy Land

First off a h/t to a dear fiend, for Crackdown on herd-share farms over certification which is such a classical attack of the FeeMarketeers meets the LibertarianistaIsts and them meets that hope that some how the raw food is gonna save the problem.

The article says that this is not a matter of pasteurization, since 'raw milk' is legal in California. So we should in theory be allowed to skip over that part. I of course want to keep it as a flagged problem in the midst of all of this, since I remain very unconvinced that the cult of the raw is a gooder for the species in the long run. The first problem in that space is the problem of not getting real live natural diseases. This of course could be influenced by the fact that while I am worrying about a drug resistant strain of pneumonia in my lungs, I am ANNOYED that I am dealing with a drug resistant patient recovering not merely from the disease, but also from the drug regimen. So I have more than one dog in the fight about what is and what is not a sane working relationship with modern health, and the modern ways. I would so love to be all hippie, dippie, back to the land, but unfortunately that way leads to pain, agony and DEATH a whole lot sooner than I would prefer. So yes, technically that that of California is still as victimized by the left as the right about the war on science and the cult of the hip trip trendy.

It would of course be a wonderful day when we could clean all of this up, and have things simplified with a simple schism about those who support a national health programme under the national defense security stuff! Just one more State Security Operation designed to combatively tactically irradicatively respond to the global terrorism of the viro-sphere as to the memo-sphere as to the mundanely blowShitUppitan. But that is not going to be a simple those of Undefending White Christian America v. The Liberals any time soon.

Now do not get me wrong! I like the idea of co-ops, and herd-share would clearly be some trotskyite revisionist anti-industrialist regression against the True Stalinism if it were not for the fun and folly of the gamesPerKinShip of trying to do this for fun and profit! Or more accurately as a the on going problem of how can we turn the USofA into the People's Republic Of China where they are working their way between Imam's and Rabbai's to get some sort of Halal and Kosher in lieu of wasting the tax payers dollars on an Federal Health Inspection Programme! { ok, so I am worried here that the Red Hordes have not been willing to turn to some Radical Revivalist Protestant White Christian American Kult Kraze.... but could it be that the Chinese are in it for the long term, and not merely until the marketing spiel about the apocalypse arriving passes? Maybe if the Radical Right Wing Religous FruitUndtNutJobs were to make a commitment to the long term and not merely to the left behind series they too could be a cash cow in Red China's FeeMarket Society? }

I agree that the idea of an Animal-Co-Op is a good idea! If nothing else it is a great way for small farms to be able to stay in the game! It is a way for the Urban Centers to tie themselves to their agrarian green zones! But we might want to make sure that we do this in a lawful, and sustainable manner! It is not merely about supporting this seasons pet fetish! Once the news leaks out about the possible cash cow to be found in goat share cropping, as the new deregulated economy, how long will it be until the Enrons and Worldcoms are playing second fiddle to the shadow hedge funders in the majikal mystical world of co-opted-back-to-the-land....

Hum... So you want to have a plantation! Great Idea! can't afford it yet, well we may have a solution for you. We call it the share-croppers-plantation-land! The happy world where you need not own all of the players, merely enough of them to help bring in your cotton. So it is not really like you are a slave owner, it is that you are share cropping the slaves....

For those of you who want to say that such an idea is going way too far.... would this be a bad time to talk about the transition from the clinton era when you guys told me to trust you about the Glass-Steagal Act? And would it be a great time to talk about how only State Owned Enterprises (SOE) were allowed to have 'soft budgets', as opposed to the fail of the shadow banking industry.....

So before we start pretending that this is a problem of the massive retaliatory government..... maybe we should be working out what it is we as a democratic society would like to construct as the laws for our society! Who knows we could find ways to allow some folks State Owned Enterprise Grants to allow them to build up Herd-Co-Ops in a way that we find democratically supportable in a Federal Republic. You know, that idea of a land of laws and not of persons with bigger asset portfolios!

Essentially I agree with When The Magic Starts in that there is much that will need to be undone from the failure of the deregulation game that was based upon FeeMarketeeringFundamentalism.

I can only hope that some day americans will actually look at the game in play.

Then maybe ask themselves why was the Glass-Steagall Act already dead when Bush came to power? Why in fact were so many of the Financial Modernization Acts already in place when Dubya up and decided that he needed a BillionsForBillionaries programme to help Billionaires recover from the fiasco of the dot.bomb.era when Venture Capitalists privatized the profits and socialized the risk by pushing unprepared companies into the Stock Market with pre-mature-IPO's!

It is not like one needs some massive gnostic konspirakii theory! One merely has to take the time to read the relevant documentation. Oh heavens, one merely needs to do their own homework.

IF one can step away from the simplistic partisan politics, THEN one will start looking at the root cause problem of "triangulation"! With the collapse of the cold war the simplistic dialectic between those of us who were the forces of Freedome, and those who were merely minions of EVIL, also collapsed. No longer was there a compromise ground that we americans were all in it together as a holy crusade against the GodlessBatWingDemonsOfTheyThemThoseTypes. ( and yes, one really should enjoy the funny of both Fukuyama's The End of History and America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, since rarely does one get a chance to see such a mea-kulpa that no really cares about. )

Hey kids, what if the really ugly part of the current state of malaise is that we are stuck with more of the same failed Triangulation, but without the Demonic Hordes at the gates? We get to watch the same failure of the clinton years played out under the Obaminator. But we have moved from 'do not ask, do not tell' to almost like as if Gays can openly serve as defense contractors making the big business in the OffShoreLiberationCircuit. Ok, so the Obaminator has not actually said that Gays can openly serve as profit centers in the DOD's new marketing of war. But gosh, gays can now marry in some states, sorta, kinda.

If there is any grand tragedy that americans should be looking at, it is the total failure of their educational system and their commitment to any of their alleged political positions. Back in the dark days of the cold war, when the nation lived at less then 15 minutes to apocalypse there were serious efforts to understand the real economics! Who was really getting paid what and why! There were serious discussions about the limitations of the mercantilist systems and the problems of colonialism and post-colonialism.

But when the cold war ended, we were suppose to all majikally land in the happy place of the new e-biz world where all of the limitations of the old world no longer existed! We were also suppose to get a 'peace dividend'; but it may still arrive.

Unfortunately we should have learned the hard way that the dot.bomb was a bad thing. We should have learned from the collapse of the financial sector that the excess deregulation had been a fail! Unfortunately we live in the age of ElvisUnicornPoney's where the history is eaten by the langoliers before anyone can make any of those correlations.

As long as we can live in a fact free society where triangulation allows us to find some undisturbed middle between truthful and Underfactual, we really do not have to worry about the numbers.

Maybe the first step is for americans to opt in to a fact based way of life!

Let us start from the premise that fossil fuels are not like renewable products such as fruits, vegetables and other forms of feeMarketeerFundamentalists.

Let us also assert that the process of "market discovery" is a mechanism by which the markets effectively establish the actual prices of goods and services. We shall defer for the moment the problems of asymmetries in knowledge, and gamePerkinShip of unquantified externalities, for the moment, since, well, how ever could anyone but the market be able to know the true value of goods and services. I mean, it is not like there are banks holding onto any assets which at current market discovery rates, are, well, WAY OVER BOOK! Clearly the banks allocated funds to purchase such goods as the intermediation that makes market discovery possible. Anything less would make them the disney channel of economics, how ever can we doubt the FeeMarketeers.

yes, kids, you can sing along,

The world is a panoply of HORROR! wounderful Horrorfying HORROR!

You mean that was not the disney channel of economics theme song? Where tinkerbelle flew over the dungeon of doom and digital despair of those who did not learn the correct implementation of Fresh Water Economics?

So with all of that stipulated we can look at the current cost of gasoline, and the questions of when are things actually profit, and when are they merely looting, as means of hoping that no one was going to ask about the actual prices that an actual market discovery method would find.

Clearly the customer understands the influence of supply and demand on the current market prices. That as the supply in a given product decreases, either the demand must change, or the cost will go up. The price at the pump is fixed by this law of supply and demand, as well as by the underlying cost of all of the components that bring the gasoline to market!

There is the cost that the station must bear to bribe both the current labor market and their thugs in government. Then there are the costs that the distribution system must bear to bribe not only the current labor elements in the distribution chain, but also the various regulatory systems put in place by the wage labor types hiring government thugs. Then there is the cost at the refineries, which again includes the cost of bribing the labor elements, and the regulators, and the financial markets which are required to provide the capital and other financial assets to get not only the really large capital installations built and maintained, but also the ever expanding series of international thuggeries who all need to be bought and sold, of course at market prices.

Then there are the Extraction firms who have to bribe the labor force, both of the indigenous population, and the paramilitary forces who are required to manage the thuggery of the local governments, and the international exchange that regulates the global prices for buying and selling certified pre-owned governmental regulatory agencies, and their proprietors, who may or may not be the government that can be purchased at market rates, based upon the policy of Market Discovery.

So as not to overly complicated the model here, we shall presume that the Extraction companies are of course vertically integrated financialized firms that have effectively hedged themselves with regards to their Holey owned subsidiaries that find, and fix, the various repositories of fossilized fuels. { Of course they are Holey, since clearly they are doing God's Work! And at God's Compensation Package wages! }

But if we were truly to allow the invisible foote of the market to do the will of god, then what about the dinosaurs?

What About The Dinosaurs?

I mean, they contributed, and we clearly can not imagine that they did it for anything less than what the FeeMarket would demand!

Shouldn't the costs of creating and compressing the dinosaurs be factored in by the invisible foote of the market as a part of the non-externalized costs of creating gasoline for suburban assault vehicles and the Tiger-Soccer-NasCar-HeManManlyMaleBuckUp-Moms who drive them?

WHAT?

You mean that the market failed to factor in that the strata of rock where the dinosaurs were nice and neatly liquified by at least decades of pressure? You can not seriously tell me that the all knowing, all see, all calculating market fundamentals had a major systemic moment of "oopsie"?

Now seriously! Clearly the market understood that you do not make dinosaurs and turn them into a liquified carbon rich goo, with really mellow yellow benzene bonding rings that like to self deconstruct into a wide range of chemical by-products, and other easily financializable compounds, as if they were a french literary society sitting at the side walk cafe reveling in Foucault! { would this be the wrong time to point out that Foucault and fiends have NEVER invited the dinosaurs around for so much as a post-surrealist-post-marxianist assault on the post-suburban post-culture... or which ever pillar of what ever is post enough now. }

Oh hold it! what if the world were created in seven days, and the dinosaurs were merely put there to challenge the faith of those who were going to doubt the all knowing, all seeing, all pricing imaginary foote of the market!

Clearly if we factor that into the Cost of Doing Bizniz, well the marketing of the makretMythos to the bumpkins buying into that whole "suburban assault vehicles and the Tiger-Soccer-NasCar-HeManManlyMaleBuckUp-Moms who drive them" way of life. Not to mention the anthems about glorious military victories of their KulturKampf against the unbelievers, available from christian book sellers, and the table in the back. All of which, gosh, should also be a tax write off, because, well, government should never be interfering in the marketing of TotallyFreeRangeOrganicIdeologicalPurityModels which of course, only the FeeMarket can decide the price of! So of course there should also be more tax write offs for the pain and suffering that those who truly, truly, truly, truly believe that the market discovery mechanism has already priced in the cost of god creating more dinosaurs that god will liquify into goo in time to meet the appropriate futures contract! I mean, where is the faith in GOD!

Granted, there is another possibility.

What if americans should be thinking about the problem of quantizing the externalized costs so that there were some way that an open and transparent fair market would be able to trade on the whole of the costs, and not merely a portion of the cost that the seller has been unable to fob off on god, or allibababingdingdingdingwingdingding, which ever is first.

Hum. What if we had a way to look at actual costs, the real costs of given goods and services, when we look at what we are really paying for -- without the cost of say reaping so called profits now, and deferring to another time, the need for someone else to raise the funds to find a SuperSiteFund to clean up all of that externalized costs. Why that way would be like, uh, using the market discovery mechanism to price goods and services in a way that did not allow some to merely engage in openly fraudulent conduct in the market place.

Hum....

What if Oil does not grow on trees. Or maybe, what if we found a way to make the oil products we need grow on trees... Why then we could deal with the actual costs and consequences of the economics, without the need to play fast and loose with the game of resource depletion, and all of the hand waving about how majikally god is going to honor the future's contract by pressing more Dino's for the Market Discovery Channel.

I picked up David Lebedoof's "The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in love and war" in the discount section at Printer's Inc, because I am an Orwell Fan. The premise is interesting, in that it gives folks an insight into two great writers who were born in 1903. As an Eton instructor noted, one spent his life trying not to be from there, while the other pretended to be from there.

There is an ultimately grand Irony that the author would publish his book in 2008 in the midst of the opening salvo's of the very laissez faire capitalism's Great Recession. One of several problematic points that start to leak out of his book. Clearly if we are to believe that laissez faire capitalism won WWII, and Orwell had been wrong about it, then, uh, how are we suppose to address the issues of the Great Recession? The author is amusing to note that we do not use the term 'capitalism' any more, never mind that he had, since it would offend the chinese. While at the same time acting as if he had never been in the country where the hot new trends in Person Branding, so that people focus on commoditize themselves as fashionably co-brandable products and services!

Ah yes. The problems still left open.

The world is starting to make some recovery from the Great Recession, and we might be able to live out Amity Shlaes' re-writes of 'the forgotten man'. But I much prefer the traditional Remember My Forgotten Man -- at youtube sung by Joan Blondell in the Busby Berkley Musical. So should we be reading Lebedoff in the 20's context of Vile Bodies or should we be viewing it in the frame of The Road to Wigan Pier"? Or are we suppose to make the leap of faith with waugh and support Mussolini's Liberation of Ethiopia?

Or were we not suppose to pick up the notice that Waugh was trying to influence the papacy to get them to annul his marriage to 'She-Evelyn' so that he could keep both his new found Roman Catholicism, while also continuing his social climbing up the old order's appropriately eligible daughters.? Which is to say, yes, the author is willing to note the problems of Hitler and Stalin as a simplified dialectic, but hopes no one noted his comments about Waugh and Mussolini, or the problems of 'taking the catholic position' a problem that the author never really works out. ( would this be a bad time to remind folks about when being a papist was UnAmerican? )

The author would have been well served to have taken the time to first read at least The Review of the Day: Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism, or gone ahead and ordered a copy of it, read it and then started working on the deep seated issues of being a writer who is not sure he feels at home with being an intellectual. It would have helped his effort to try to wedge Orwell into the same thought space as Waugh. Or at least helped him try to sort out what he might have been upset about in the differences between Authoritarians and Fascists. Unless that too was a root cause problem we were not suppose to notice.

I can and do appreciate that these STILL are tough times to work out how does one really want to deal with the actual facts of actual class warfare in the USofA, and else where. Should we address it in a fact based approach, where we deal with the actual numbers about inter-generational movement? Or should we appeal to the fact that it should be held as a matter of faith, and patriotism, and therefore it must be true. Since if we are not willing to address the questions of 'social mobility' as it really occurs, we are not really in a good place to talk about whether or not we should be trying to be the snotty social climbing bully like waugh? Or the Anti-Fascist/Anti-Stalinist/Anti-Bully like George Orwell. The short skids, for the last 30+ years we have watched a decay in the social mobility in america in real numbers. The spread between the wealthy and the rest of the working stiff, married as it is to the hollowing out of the Middle Class in America, has restored one part of the desire to return to brideshead revisited with the correct remains of the days; the hope that they are still hiring help.

But what would it mean in america if we were to have an american reconsideration of the same issues?

I can and do appreciate that with the new sorting algorithms the papist authoritarians have been able to toss in their lot with the Protestant and Secular Authoritarians, as both of those groups embrace the general notion that that plebeian masses will probably get theirs in the next life. But clearly GOD has elected those of us who were special enough.

One has to wonder why not address the reality of George Orwell, and not try to turn him into some sort of would have been waugh sort? Why not deal with the creation of a morality in the here and now? Why not look at folks like RIchard Rorty, and others, to look at grounding ethics in the very pragmatism that we all use. The very ground of the 'common sense' that Orwell actually, and the author alleges that he supports.

That would also mean the awkward separation of the intellectuals from the merely certified to have attended the correct set of schools. The author showed some awareness that the old school system was really never about the clever ones. But then promptly forgets that part of his book when trying to sort out some way to attack all of those liberals and intellectuals and their meritocracy! He never does resolve this problem of which parts of the Modern Era are the enemy that must be defeated. Nor how one would think about restoring the correct Moral Absolutes which will some how save the day.

In the real world americans no longer hold the moral high ground. By their own conviction rates in their own military courts of their own military personnel we might notice that the "Spiritual Fitness" has not been the value add to offer up the correct Moral Absolutes. ( We of course exclude the mercs and contractors, since it appears that we are not going to hold them to be actual members of the american armed forces under Military Law in a combat zone, but as, well, persons allowed to live beyond the law. You know. this time it is different! )

One of the tragedy of the InterNets is that one of the first look ups on the other book that the author wrote took me into FreeperVille where his champions made it so clear that the problem is all of them thar intellectuals and folks who do not understand that this time is different. Why gosh.

It seems to be an interesting head space, since these are not the 'intellectuals' who are arguing that we need to be abandoning prior standards. It is again the same followers of the very authoritarian trends in american culture. Why gosh, the ones who just happen to also support the corporate welfare support of the right sorts, you know, so that our kinds can get the right types of annulments....

I agree that there are many critical and important arguments that need to be raised about the rise of both Authoritarian and Proto-Fascist strains in the Paranoid Style of Politics. But The Paranoid Style In American Politics along with Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); were all written by Richard Hofstadter and should already have been covered by the reader, since the author opted to duck out on the heavy work.

On the somewhat credit side, the author offers the dialectic that Orwell's 1984 would have been the case if the Russians had won the cold war. ( We of course are all suppose to intellectually nod off about the question of China and the Capitalist Roaders... ) Whereas Huxley's Brave New World is about the horror of what happens if the americans win.

Oh dear.... that must have been some dangerously inconvenient truth for Lebedoff to stumble upon. Since it should have lead him to wonder how it was we went from the successful society that Won WWII to the sort of moral cesspool of our modern era. But to go there would mean being impolite and raising the sort of hard hearted economic analysis of the failure of 'deregulation' and the myths of the 'efficient market' theories that have been the very champions of making everything everywhere for sale.

These are the hard times that Orwell lived through that would take him from down and out in paris and london, down the road to wigan pier, then through the Homage to Catalonia, not to mention Second Thought On James Burnham since there might be more in the problems of worshipping power than merely the problem of idolatry might not get one into heaven any more.

So what if we as american opt out of the silly anti-intellectual games of pretending that the American Exceptionalism means we are all going to be above average, as soon as we all support the right type of pigs who are the ones who know how to really run things. Who knows it might make being an actual intellectual worth the time.

Other than the minor detail that the Author has not resolved the author's own self loathing issues about the dangers of intellectuals. Or that the Author was unable or unwilling to deal with the realpolitik of people who are willing to actually live their life by the ethical obligations that they held to, and that this might not require a magical imaginary friend, or supporting actual fascist dictatorships that engage in chem warfare against the wogs in far off lands to help grease the skids of getting an annulment to go social climbing...

Well let's just say that there are issues as the author tried to resolve his unresolved issues.

Hey kids would this be a bad time to talk about that decade of deficit funding the rich, with a pass up from the mere pleabian tax payers? You know those majikal 'recover from the tech bubble' "stimulouse" thingies, which had never really ever been about creating the requisite level of 'aggregate demand'?

Would this be an ever worser time to talk about the great failure of the 'fee market' to appropriately allocate assets in an ever increasing efficiency of the market? I mean, we could be polite, and limit the discussion to merely the time from when the Clinton Administration opted to revoke the Glass–Steagall_Act because the majikal powers were going to be majikal.

No please. Kick it old skool and tell me how all of that is still working....

No really. please.

I can appreciate that these are hard times, what with no real economic reform, and the economy facing a mere repeat, at greater costs to the tax payers of the vary same folly that fired the liquidity trap of 2007. So the compromise of waving the hand about freddie and fannie mae will of course help folks think as if there was a conversation about addressing stuff like a way to change things.

But it will help to stay on message.

IF one starts by explaining that the reason there is no private sector alternative to Freddie And Fannie, THEN it is important to not say that Freddie and Fannie executives were caught up in the same wave of problems that infected the private sector pools of betters on the state of the 30 year mortgages and the associated mechanism for financing homes.

I can understand that it is important to make it sound like there were no other secondary markets in collateralized mortgage instruments, since, well, if there were, then those would also have to have been governmental entities for them to have been the entities not squeezed out of the market by Freddie and Fannie... I can understand that it sounds well when one talks about the privatized freddie and fannie as being both GSE's and privatized entities, so that one can lambest them in their correct manifestation when discussing how there were no privatized entities, since, well if there had been, then those privatized entities would not have been at risk of collapsing on their own, gosh like AIG, from the failure to appropriate hedge their risks. But gosh kiddies, if we can find other players in the game, so easily, who failed so miserably, then why is it we were suppose to believe the myth that Freddie and Fannie had squeezed out the private sector, since, uh, the Freddie and Fannie could only deal in 'conforming loans' which meant something else was dealing with the problem of CDO cubing all of those non-conforming loans.

Ah yes, but that way would mean getting bogged down again the Zombie Economics of how it was that non-bank mortgage originating "firms" were some how Crushed under the jack booted heel of Repression, and thus forced by the CommunityReinvestmentAct, which did not extend to non-banking mortgage originating "firms", into making all of those bad loans which the invisible foot of the market would have correctly collateralized as risk based debt instruments since only the invisible foot of the market can appropriate collateralize risk and thus there should not be bank regulations that would impede the correct implementation of risk assessment and collateralization, as only the invisible foot, by means of banks and non-banking entities, can truly divine the Divine Will of the One True And ONLY invisible foot of the market. But that would of course mean understanding that there was a time when we could tell the difference between the things that are, and the things that are not.

So please, as we march forward into the new day in america. Uh what if we try not to self destruct the message in the same news release. Please folks we need to Stay Near Message about how only Trickle Up Economics can protect us from IranqIstanianFlyingSaucers and thus the government must get out of stuff, like Freddie and Fannie, but that they should still keep those home mortgage tax credits... Since every tax credit is sacred!

The piece starts out:

My role here is the role of the person who starts the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

My name is Brad DeLong.

I am a Rubinite, a Greenspanist, a neoliberal, a neoclassical economist.

I stand here repentant.
( cf What Have We Unlearned from Our Great Recession? )

So while I await ronebofh to get his book report out about why his FreakShowWriterFromWallStreet is tehBOM, and I keep working my way through Griftopia by Matt Taibbi, and try not to worry that much about the collapse of it all. Why not peek into the abyss?

I twitted that Brad DeLong's piece was up, and it is probably one of those terrorFrying moments that many of us really should grab, look deeply into, and resolve which pious posture we are planning to pretend is our current crapTastical Cult Fave.

The nightmare for me is not the recent round of guiltMongering as americans try to cope with their hope that this time around they bet on the right anti-anti-war groupies, so that they can feel safe about the nightmare fear that niggers will get guns, or that liberal arts majors may finally tragically learn the tragic lessons from the defense of Sarajevo. Learning that it is not some romantic to "vote from the roof", but that being able to provide good counter sniper fire does mean getting potable water. And as we all know, those who have been around water born diseases, without drinkable water things are really underPositive.

Sorry peace time america. I was raised in the failed refuse you folks hoped was gonna stay 'out there'.

{ small helpful hint to the clueless, when you are pimping a theory of 'voting from the roof top' - it would be wise NOT to use a british military sniper. Does NOT fit in well with that whole 'do not tread on me' mystique. Unless you are trying to be honest about being the Tory Stay Behind Force... }

No, the scare the Shit Out Of Me Moment is finding out that Milton Friedman is also another one of the Radical Left Wing, clearly red socialist communist economists, like that Adam Smith Guy. I mean now that main stream classical Reaganites are the radical left wing, what is left?

I came home from the Cold War convinced that what we all really needed to do was kick it old skool! We would get a peace dividend since all of us from the classified world would be out in the open like a National Gay Pride Parade on Steroids as we all came out of the Closet to do what we did best! Find 'em, Fix 'em, Fuck 'em!

Unlike the Greatest Generation Ever, there was no ticker tape parade for having done what had to be done to destabilize the tyranny of the cult of personality that was stalinism as it ran through the degeneracy of Xeroxing the Image of the GreatLeader one time too many. { for our younger friends, there was a time when there was a Xerox, it provided technology one of which was a scan and print system. Which lead to freaks creating art by living with the minor defects as an image was copied and copied and copied. }

To be honest! Hand to GOD! I enjoyed the fun of XeroxArt, I never expected that any of the freaking stoners were going to use it as a methodology in Economics! But that seems to be the place we are in now. We get our news from the comedy channel. We find out that all of the classical free market theories about classical economics, and the scary neo-liberalism, has been pushed over the side like so many diseased horses from the troop transports taking the Light Brigade to Crimea. For our younger friends, that is a reference to the charge of the light brigade from back in the day when folks did things for reasons other than the commoditization and financialization of their action.

{ As an aside, I do have to keep my hope up that the younger generation will HAVE to get through some how. Since one friend was polite enough to reply with

zweieux they only had frosted bernanke bites. Is that ok?

I mean what can I say, but that maybe the kids will be all right! }

If there is any real tragedy that americans face from the horrors of the deregulation games, it is the complete preVersion of the notion of a fair and open market! We have taken even the classical commodities market and turned it into one more tragic piece of the Casino Capitalism! Things were bad enough when the victims of mere marianist cults of personality were willing to replace actual analysis with painfully simplistic sloganeering! But to find that the americans have so rejected any form of reason that they want a bland of capitalism that is no longer based in actual reality, but is little more than the 'hand in the air with the other cunts' sloganeering!

The tragedy here is not that we kicked at the fences and sought to offer a level of freedom never before seen. But that we get the HORROR STORY of learning that there were no more Prudent Men willing to BE the Prudent Men who were willing to do with the civilian economy what we had been willing to do FOR AMERICA.

I feel for Brad DeLong.

If one believed that in spite of the legal letters, being cut for the commodities traders by various regimes in power, there were clearly going to be old school tie types who understood that one MUST be the Prudent Man living out the whole content of the Prudent Man Theory then we would be left with even less than the mere Common Law! Gone will be all of that contract law, Equity, Tort, all of that technical stuff that allowed us to create large economic combines!

If there is any TRUE horror that our friends in teaTardia are not willing to address, or even think about, it is that we have stepped off the ledge and into the void of the post rational in the worst of all possible way! A world where there is no solid basis for any form of economics and real exchange system that will allow any of us to retreat into the pleasant land of Business As Usual! Since we have none of the legal values!

So the really scary part of the collapse is not that we will have to explain to history that we did not think that the world was flat! But that we will have to await another time when they are willing to live in a world where there is not only the Ptolemaic World View about how the planets revolve, but a similar system for how one conducts commerce.

And without a sound theory of Commerce, folks really had better come up with a real system for how they were planning to secure their drinkable water.

No Trust Me On This ONE! One of the first things you will need to find is drinkable water! Without it all of that going Galt Skank is not going to work!

When I first bought Death of the Liberal Class, I joked about the failure to include train schedules and an ROI on the conversion of Bio-Diesel. I wish I still had that level of snark and blithe optimism.

Hedges presents the readers with an unpleasant ride starting with the collapse of the progressive movement as it was co-opted by the Creel Commission( cf Committee on Public Information ) and the marketing of the First World War as the war to end all wars, also sold as the war to make the world safe for democracy. ( I still feel that there should be a caveat here that says something about how the products may not be available in all areas, and how they may be void based upon local marketing conditions. You know, the sort of boilerplate to protect marketeers from being held legally liable for any underTruthineff of their spiel. )

While it is politically polite to talk about the Sedition Act of 1918 as independent of the Espionage Act, this so called act was really a set of amendments to the Espionage Act. Some will appeal to Brandenburg v. Ohio in the hope that it will protect us from any of the harm. One must embrace the Irony that Brandenburg was a KKK leader, in Rural Ohio, facing persecution under the syndicalism statutes first installed to protect us from the Red Menace of 1919. We continue to hear today that the perpetual state of war means that the Espionage Act can be used to protect us from WikiLeaking by non-American citizens. One has to respect the champions of democracy as they call not merely for the assassination of Americans, but also for treason trials of non-Americans residing outside of America. It would be one thing if this madness were a part of some nasty right-wing cabal, but we are talking about the openly outspoken heirs to Wilsonian Democracy and the creation of the Propaganda Product Branding of Americanism that we have all come to believe was always the way of things.

Death of the Liberal Class follows the thread of despair as the Liberal Class opts out of the hard choices by ‘triangulating’ their way around the very ideals they alleged were important. The Creel Commission is the thin edge of that wedge as we move to productizing patriotism so that the government can embark upon the simpler Public Relation campaign of defending Brand Americana as if that had always been the way it always was and always will be. As we have watched, the creation of the Permanent War has allowed “liberal” Americans to talk again in the language of the Espionage Act, since it allows them to sound like “serious people”. It would have been nice if Hedges had paused along the way to really address the issues of the Permanent War Economy as a part and parcel of the underlying betrayal. Instead, Hedges is better at writing about the religious side of commitment than he is about the awkward and unpleasant parts of creating a remake of the sausage we keep getting resold at the economic level.

His chapter on Dismantling the Liberal Class is a great framework of the cultural conflicts involved. He offers the reader a fabulous insight into the arts, theater, and the various ways in which Americans came together to reinvent their narrative as a success rather than as the sad disaster painted by the Hooverville Developer’s Association. He touches on some of the tragedy that was the failure to bring out The Cradle Will Rock as the full-on Musical that it was.

The Politics as Spectacle chapter ties in well with his previous book, Empire of Illusions. Hedges offers a rare insight into the New Left’s failure to build upon the lessons of the Great Depression. This was a problem driven as much by the New Left’s inability to make a real connection with the working class as by Labor’s co-optation into the new anti-Communist blame games that were the final phase of what others are now calling the Great Prosperity.

Hedges provides one of the best introductions to both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that I have yet read, and it should be used as a real discussion space to address the question, “What do we want Americans to be doing with our Egalitarianism?”. He also righteously points out that with the rise of a positive Black sense of self, the return of Suffragette ways, and the awakening at Stonewall to a need for Hope and Equality across the board, the utility of Liberal White HetMale Guilt was no longer going to work as the coin of the realm.

Along the way, Hedges covers the tragedies as the Arts stepped away from being engaged in the lives of the people as they had been with the Federal Theatre Project, and instead became merely playthings to show that only the right types of rich white folks understood the importance of “Art for Art’s Sake”. The liberal academic “Art” regime felt that this concept was something the plebeian masses would never be able to comprehend. This works well as a part of the Kultur Kampf that helps redefine why Government is the Problem.

The tragedy of the academic world becoming a useless playground for those who can afford to stay and play helps explain why it is no longer engaged in providing viable critical analysis of the economic, social, political and cultural problems. These are issues we must leave to the experts - at the right prices - since only they can talk to the correct types of experts about the correct types of correctness. What tragically started out as the Political Correctness memefest has become the full tilt boogie of product branding the one true and only response to the failure of liberalism: The Corporate State.

If there is any serious weakness, it is his failure to address the deeper linkages at the economic level. For Hedges, the Corporate State is here. It is no longer a debating point. There is really no longer any reasonable way around it. The independent press has fallen. The majikal thinking that had been the children’s crusades of the counterculture sixties have not been able to blossom any new flows in the new Web 2.0 world. As one of my friends said painfully:

“If you are not paying for it,
then you are the product.”

While Hedges is not yet fully speaking the language of Cultural Hegemony, he is aware that too much of what is being passed off as culture today is simply the market branding declaring that the rich are rich for clearly better reasons than the poor can understand. He understands that this conflict will not be resolved with romantic adolescent appeals to armed struggle and foco revolution. While that may work well in the light romantic cheeseball porn that Randianists confuse for political philosophy, it will not be the means that will ultimately return America to one person, one vote, and the Rule of Law.

The Fear that Americans should be addressing is how to prevent the degeneration of the Corporate State into the expected internal feeding frenzy that comes about when the upper 1% of the economy no longer has to worry about Americans because their private security systems will extract them from harm’s way. Meanwhile, their groupies are expecting that The Rapture will be their parachute to safety in the next life. This compromise allows the groupies to be the Martyr’s Brigade protecting the well-to-do who will be willing to comp any of the brigade’s families for a job well done. This is a pattern we have seen already in the collapse of the Liberal Class in the Middle East and the rest of the developing world.

Books Cited:

Hedges, Chriss. “Death of the Liberal Class”, New York: Nation Books, 2010 ISBN 978-1-56858-644-1

Hedges, Chriss. “Empire of Illusions: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”, New York: Nation Books, 2009 ISBN 9781568584379

The rational piece is in the pipeline to the editor, but maybe we should close out 2010 with a bit of the old school, pondering how are we gonna get out of all of this alive. Pink's Face Book Page which i picked up on because my friend CB decided that he liked it. For more details there is the wiki entryPink (singer) that will offer an insight into the media presentation of the personna.

P!nk - Raise Your Glass is youTube offering up the pinkVevo video presentation of the music video. Where Pink poses in the so called Rosie The Riveter posture of theWoman who inspired iconic US WWII poster dies kicking it hard about being wrong in all the right ways.

Well the Why So Serious? question she raises is clearly worth the answer.

What if the whole 'party hearty' mythos is the ENEMY! Don't get me wrong, I am not making a call for some sort of pious puritanism! But I am going to challenge the marketing of the The Theory of the Leisure Class by the marginally literate to those who have not been challenged to learn well enough to see deep enough.

Holy Crap! To test So What I get a blip of Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues pimping me some Sony Product.

Wow, how far we have really come, since clearly

You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows
( subterranean-homesick-blues lyrics )

Now don't get me wrong here, it is not like I have anything against actual working musicians. But one has to wonder how Woody Gutherie would see it all.

There is an old tale about how someone asked Woody how to become a professional musician, and he answered along the lines that one puts their hat out, and start playing. If you get paid, then you are professional musician.

But those were attitudes from the Great Depression, when there was no place else put up.

Yes, I recall the crisis when Dylan went electric with like a rolling stone! It was clearly the sign of the apocalypse. But maybe we should have all been looking around. Maybe someone was creating a failure myth! Maybe we did not want to make a deal....

There was a luxury back in those days that most do not understand, and most fear to even pause and ponder. But some are still talking about Land of the Free And Unequal and how the decision to embark upon the class warfare, as foxNews likes to report it, where the poor need to pay more to the rich, so that there is less distributed around to those who will use it to buy the goods and services that will make for a sustainable economy. Ah yes, but should we be getting our pretty little heads all mussed up with those big ugly techical graphs and data, and math and stuff.

When we can be raising a glass, and pretending. Yeah - learning a skill, and getting all army strong! One has to respect the Ultimate Irony of Pink Pimping It all Gangster Style for the skills about how to make a quick barrel change on the squad assault weapon! How to do the trig to do time on target, first round each time! So that fine folks like Karl Rove and Friends don't have to get their kinky pinky behinds into the weeds where it can be complicated, difficult, and you would have to remember which side is down when taping in the three sides of a sucking chest wound's best friend.

Yeah, raise your glass! Dirty Little Freaks! Because the idea of becoming the threat to those who are pretending that there is a clear and compelling reason why God has elected them to be the ruling elite, is, well, just stuff that is clearly beyond your pay grade!

Remember, as long as you have your rock moves, what does any of it really mean. Why should you care! It's not like you have to make a real living in the real world, because, well, yeah, of course, you are a rock star!

And all of the kids in the front row are the qool kids, and their daddies can pay their bills for them! Yeah, let's all be the rock stars, with the rock moves... Please don't leave me says things about america's dysfunctionality that we clearly should be screaming from the roof top! What if it were time to get sober and maybe serious.

What if we were looking at our kids getting on the firing line, being that 'army strong' so that the nice folks back home can be all patriotic about how someone else's kid has been sucked into the void! sucked into the nightmare that at best they got a chance to view at the movie theatre, where the safe and scary are all that they need to know that they need to be at least as patriotic as Dubya, playing dress up and drag, and landing on the Carrier for the press release foto's cause he can. Rather than the schmucks who walked up the brow the old fashion way, and will queue for the liberty launches when their liberty call comes.

Yeah.

Raise a Glass!

Remind me about how it is so much that we want to be the right type of wrong! Because there were no other options open to the players trying to make the best deal they could when everyone around them had sold the whole game out for a chance to be the next rock and roll video!

Yeah Pink, raise the glass!

Better to drink ourselves into the abyss than to sober up.

Maybe Next Year! Maybe we will not be the year of living dangerously! Maybe it will not be the unbearable lightness of being! And if we are lucky, we will not need to defect to the west.

The story begins the night before christmas, when all through the house the good children were huddling snug in their beds. Meanwhile, the older children were huddling around the port and coffee and fruitcake, with fear and the looming threat that Saint Nick would soon be there.

He searched the wreckage of his memories, looking for the right red ryder rifle recall that said, when he had been briefed in, that Santa Claus did not really exist. There were memories of NORAD, memories of the DEW line, there were memories of squadron rolls, wing tip to wing tip, down the runway. On Strike leader! On Tanker, on Flak Fogger and vixen...

But no matter where he looked, all the memories said the same thing: Santa Claus was CIA. I mean, the red suit, the giving away gifts to kids all over the world to co-opt them into Support the State Policy of the so called free world... Hell, USAID was crawling with that sort of player. Many of them were actually on the payroll, and others, well, it was probably better not to tell the hippies who was really signing the paychecks.

"Three days of the Reindeer", she whispered into his ear. It caused the required and expected laugh, as everyone pitched in, "The elves! They were all dead! There was blood everywhere...."

'Twas a nice comedic change of pace, a reference back to the happier times of Three Days of the Condor, when the nation was transitioning from one phase of its Vietnam Syndrome to that New Day In The Post Vietnam Syndrome. Yes, those kinder, gentler, more halcyon days when there was an obvious Evil Empire just over the seas in Evil Empire Land. Over there they were building Light Weight Aircraft Carriers, so there was still the need to maintain some sort of Union Labor which would build the ever bigger Galaxtic Class Advanced Aircraft Carriers that would some day be released from the tyranny of leftist liberal whineyneff. Ah yes, some day we would be allowed to unleash death from above as stand-off weapons would rain down on the enemies, destroying lighting, heating, food systems, clean water, and the basic infrastructure that differentiated an organic free range subsistance hunter-gatherer group from the more advanced industrialized romantics who were ever so infatuated with the happy world that Death From Above would bring to people!

Ah yes, we speak of those who would be freed from the fear that modern medicine would help treat their open running wounds and diseases, make safe their food sources, or provide a means to detect the various pathogens that would - without medicine - kill off the happy free range organic kayjun style subsistence hunter-gatherer groups. Ah, how nostalgic all of that now seems, back when there was always going to be some sort of 'out there' where everyone would make their Logan's Run, as if it were just one more part of the annual marathon races.

"I'm not a field agent, I just make toys!"

Peals of giggly wiggly laughter ring until the matron of the house whines about keeping it down lest the little one awakes. It makes good comedy. Really it does, on par with Lee Major's in The Night The Reindeer Died, from the classic Scrooged. Ah yes, the fun filled days when we all had hope that the cold war would roll on forever and ever, and those damn liberals would not let the Berlin Wall fall down and become the backdrop for a Grand Pink Floyd Spectacle.

What sort of corporate state would give up on a perfectly great cold war? Was it just to sell more media imaging sets? Just a side wandering thot ...

Meanwhile, while trying to figure a way to squeeze Santa Claus into the final scene where the protagonist shows up at the NYT with a copy of his story, the limo pulls up. Do we re-write Cliff Robertson's character? Or do we put Santa in the Limo as the real puppet master?

"You do know that Dickens ('A Christmas Carol') was a communist? We really should try to weave that in here."

But like all good mashups, there is a limit as to how much neuvo one can novelly mix in before the luddites get confused by the Semiotext(e) and whether we are still at war with french, because they are french, or because they have a theory about symbols and markings and image management.

"But you have to understand, the whole game has changed."

A reasonable enough point, given that to some, this 'game change' is the idea of having a ground station in some nice suburban shopping mall hell where civilian contractors track targets, who then hand over the joystick to an official card-carrying member of the Military Welfare Statists to pull the trigger. Yeah, major changer there, unlike all of the rest of the stand-off delivery systems before it. But one really has to wonder why we haven't yet commoditized it? Think of it ... Some hot new online gaming MMO where kids get to pay good money to kill enemies like in those cool retro sci-fi movie remakes of films like Gamer, but without all of the downside of anti-state elements engaged in anti-state terrorism!

Why not write it up as a project, get some DARPA funding, and take a stab at letting the paying customers enjoy the happy moments of being able to purge unbelievers, anti-state terrorists, and collateral damage units from the feeMarket?

Besides, since that great remake of Papillon that cleaned up all of the depressing french parts, we have been focusing totally on how Butterfly farming had become such a critical part of the off shore rehumanization facilities. Granted, no one had actually met anyone who had been to a rehumanization station, but clearly they had to be a great improvement on the original efforts in GitMo Land before that was turned into a part of the greater Havana Luxury resort system.

Long gone were the failed regressionists that believed that the Great Leader did not naturally have the right to liquidate anyone who had become a menace, or was unpopular, or basically should have opted for a more natural organic free range type of life. Those were the sort of people who were just not going to be rehumanized and learn to fit in!

These were the new and improved modern times! Not the sort of lame failure of the failed old days! America had made the Glorious Military Victories of the CFMA of 2000, and no matter what anyone said about the various liquidity traps that came after it, it was what the market really wanted! Everyone knew that a feeMarket wasn't fee! That we all just had to deal with the real world! We all had to understand that God had selected some to be allowed to convert into Bank Holding Companies! It was god's will! It was the proof itself that there were those who were the elect of God and, well, those who were not.

Why, all of the best Television Shows showed that it was a law of science that those who are converted into Bank Holding Companies (BHC) could not be regulated, since the very science of the survival of the fittest mandated that those who were BHC lived a totally different life than the mere mundanes! They had to be the post-human group that God alone had designed from the very beginning to be the new ones! The ones that everyone turned to.

Well yes, there were all those stick-in-the-mud 20th-century throwbacks who thot some WarThing was how that great depression had ended. But as we all know, it was never government's role to create level playing fields. Besides, the creation of the lighter, simpler, better hunter-killers meant that there was no need to waste money on all of those archaic forms of 'warfare' that really were all about creating a bunch of reactionary tools. I mean, does anyone actually remember any of the great tank battles of Bagram or Baghdad or any of those B-States? Of course not! The new generations of Death From Above not only made things more cost effective, they had streamlined the whole process of interstate negotiation.

All of that Marxist dribble from History of the Intellectual Debate on progressive tax with pinkos like Adam Smith, well, it was just so many fairey tales. As if anyone truly believed that people should be treated as equals before the law! Instead, god revealed the divine holey revelation of the natural law for those who were Bank Holding Companies, so there really was no need to worry about mundanes. If they were lucky, the mundanes would be able to find their way back to the organic free range. Why should the states have to keep passing Special Public Security Acts (SPSA) to cover this dangerous thot criminal or that dangerous thot criminal? I mean really, we have come a long way from warehousing folks like Binayak Sen for violating the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act back when SPSA had names and numbers associated with them.

What we need is a FeeMarket solution that will fix all of this! What if we get to market and productize "The hunt for organic free range mundanes". Yeah, that would be a great MMO! We get the up-front cash flow from the game. We have the solid back-end from converting the mundanes into Patriotic Bio-Fuels.

It should work.

Wrap it with a brisk upbeat jingle or two, and it'll be in the shopping malls for CombatShoppingDayz!

Yeah, "Three Days of the Reindeer", what a wild and crazy idea! To think that folks once considered there could be any sort of disagreement internally in the national safety services directorate!

Who knows what next year will bring ... with any luck we might all be Bank Holding Companies.

With the happy tunes of Es Y Golonac dancing through their heads, they all called it a pleasant eventide.