12-01-2020, 01:53 PM
(12-01-2020, 06:14 AM)Einzige Wrote:(12-01-2020, 06:08 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-01-2020, 05:56 AM)Einzige Wrote: Obama didn't want to be an LBJ-style social democrat and was never going to govern that way even if the Democrats kept both houses.
Obama wasn't LBJ. In the middle of the unravelling, no one was going to be able to get away with spending to benefit the worker. We had got out of the habit. Maybe the crisis will cure it, maybe not.
Still, common wisdom is to reject violence except as a last resort. There is a feeling among many people that we have not reached the last resort. Well, maybe the Boogaloo Bois. Maybe the Wolverine Watchmen. Maybe the Marxists. But most see us as nowhere near the last resort.
Lol, 2008 is the middle of the unraveling now? And that justifies the continued embrace of neoliberalism by the Democratic Party in 2020?
2008 is when people realized that they needed to turn off the fans and clean them, so to speak. That is when the Unraveling was proved unsustainable. Unraveling politics had bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina, the speculative boom in real estate depended upon people believing that real estate values could only rise and could never go down... and by then it was terribly overpriced, especially when bad loans underpinned the absurd prices for misplaced housing. Think of southern California's "Inland Empire" which should have remained agricultural instead of having schlock housing built upon it.
Other Crises have typically shown themselves as some speculative bubble bursts, as in 1857 and 1929. So it was in 2008. Speculative bubbles devout capital and divert it from job-creating plant and equipment to investments whose value depends upon a fantasy of always-rising prices. Any commodity, any consumer good, any real estate, and any joint-stock share can be overpriced. When people come to the realization that they have been had, there is no buyer, and people realize suddenly that their delusion of wealth is precisely that, and some new era of easy money from buying stuff and doing no real good for people becomes an obvious sham.
2008 is the mass realization that the Unraveling was over. The party mood (and I could make the case that the last Unraveling could be marked around 1980, when pop music quit pretending to have any high purpose and that young adults started using the word "party" as a verb) was shaky by 2005, and it was over in 2008. The idea among elites that nothing mattered except their power, indulgence, and enrichment and that anything that got in the way was a great affront to some cosmic reality (economic elites are often the worst swine) didn't go away.
Those elites were able to induce the first Crisis-era government with Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress to rescue the assets of the elites from ruin. Maybe we had learned from the last one that the economy could not start to recover until the financial system stabilized. America's economic elites still believed that no human suffering is in excess so long as it allows their maximal power, indulgence, and gain, and those elites pushed impatience with the recovery and organized the Tea Party and lavishly funded mirror-image Marxists to supplant Democrats.
I am satisfied that our economic elites are no better than those in Germany in the early 1930's, and that many of them would be satisfied for easy profits from wars for profit, monopolization of all business, privatization on the cheap to profiteers, establishment of captive markets in conquered countries, and perhaps even slave labor. Markets may be rational if competitive, but economic elites despise competition.
We are still sorting things out. That is Crisis.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.