prole

No, all I'm saying is that while capitalism is incredibly productive, it is also terrifyingly wasteful despite its claims to allocate resources in the most efficient manner. As you suggest, I think the State can have a role to play in terms of providing incentives or a "nudge" to channel resources towards social good in some cases. (Jay might be the only person not willing to admit hat Detroit might be better off had it adopted some government efficiency standards.) If one doesn't want the State to mandate what is produced by whom and leave the market to determine how resources are allocated and solve the massive problems that humanity now faces, then we need to develop new consciousnesses that incorporate an ethical dimension, analysis, and critique about how, why, and for whom things are produced. Doing so requires jettisoning horseshit fantasies like this, back to the Candyland from which it came.

This film is incredible.

Apparently, you haven't been shopping with Skymall lately. Now that the Sharper Image has bit it, Skymall now takes the Civilizational Decline and Selling Our Planet Down The River In The Name Of "Economic Freedom" Award. Here are some examples that even include some "labor saving" devices so you can spend more time at work (TruckNutz not included): Great stuff. Boy, who needs to waste our precious "finite" and "limited" resources on things like health care, green transport and energy technologies, education, wages people can live on, etc. when they're already being directed at such pressing problems as designing an art deco ass-wiping robot?

Given the amount of TV an average American 8 year old watches, it'd probably be pretty easy to mount an insanity defense.

Really, what was it like voting for John McCain?

Nice. Also, Pastor Ted was abused as a child. Who knew?

Vaginalina Jolie's pregnant again!

“We used to be a car company that sold financing on the side. Now we are a bank that makes cars.” --a finance manager at one of the Big Three automakers --from Harper's, October 2008

"Hey! No...Over here! Hey, yeah, look over here! The unions! Yeah, the unions did it all! Hey...hey wait! Look over here. Hey, where you going...hey. Hey?"

Strawmen aside (again), I think even moderates at this point can agree/have already agreed that in the current climate State intervention in some enterprises can be socially beneficial. Rather than putting millions of people on the streets of northeastern cities with no net just to prove a point, I think the State should gather some leading forward thinking technogeeks, progressive economists, workers, municipal and urban planners, environmentalists, and futurists to outline a plan for reorienting the productive capacity left behind by the Big 3 toward producing green and durable transportation and infrastructural technology for the next 50 years. The alternatives, by almost any measure social or political, are simply unacceptable (unless your economic advisor is Dr. Strangelove). By then, the ideas you're still trotting out around here, despite the apparent failure to make good on their promises thus far, may have come back into fashion.

As my original post makes clear, I am not certainly not in favor of subsidizing the status quo in Detroit. That it's a bloated, wasteful, and outmoded industry is not in doubt. Ironically, neither is the fact that industry management, shareholders, politicians, and "free-marketeers" fought tooth and nail against making the kind of cars that would have made the industry viable under the banner of "economic freedom" and "giving the people what they want". Millions of people are at risk in allowing the industry to fail outright. Creating a social safety net, extending unemployment benefits, job retraining (for what?), and a host of other crisis management options in the event these companies are liquidated sound great. I'm for them. You still end up with millions out of work, surviving with very little hope in a degraded postindustrial landscape. That is simply not socially acceptable. Do people think that they're going to teach the shareholders, corporate bosses, and union heads "a lesson"? Prove the cocktail napkin formulas correct, once and for all? If so, you're going to need those guns people keep talking about. People don't "just find another job", the closed businesses and factories don't disappear, they're fixed in the landscape. If Michigan doesn't suit your historical taste, take look at post-industrial history south central Los Angeles after industry left there. These fuckers should be nationalized (plenty of that going on in finance) for the time being, management and shareholders put to pasture, the factories retooled to make something useful as opposed to something immediately profitable, like bullet trains, or something, and pay people a living wage for doing it. It will certainly pay better dividends than the hundreds of billions being taken out the back doors of banks right now, for a fraction of the cost and a greater benefit to society as a whole.

It's not looking good... I was a bit skeptical of Klein's "shock doctrine" thesis in relation to this financial crisis, but this kind of shit epitomizes it.

Yeah, been to Detroit lately? I could recommend some photo sites. Not looking like the jobs already shipped out or eliminated were ever replaced to me, despite the "know how", productive capacity, and willingness to work unless you count crime, prostitution, and subsistence farming as job retraining. Thanks for pointing out one of the benefits of organized labor...As far as the last sentence goes, I haven't heard much criticism of a plan that expends criminal amounts of limited resources on an investment class that has taken the economy over a cliff. But goodness me, their distress and anxiety must be something fierce. Given that you're someone who defines "freedom" as the gluttonous consumption of an endless array of nearly identical products designed to become obsolete before they reach home without regard for the conditions under which they're made or disposed of, your bleatings on "finite" and "limited" resources border on obscenity. Your usual rhetorical prowess in service to a complete disconnection from social reality is on full display here. It is your trademark after all. That 3 million people are at risk in a geographically determinate area completely escapes you? In the present economy, is "another company" going to come set up shop in a region that was already economically depressed to begin with? Are these "free laborers" going to migrate to put their auto skills to work? Where? Are we talking about a new generation of Okies? Will they wait? Will the aliens land in the blasted wastes of Detroit when the UAW is finally busted through mass starvation? What's the plan? They got Faygo in New Zealand? [video:myspace]http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=20874168

Sure the great depression was bad, but at least there were factories, manufacturing, and family farms. What smoke and mirrors puts us in a better position now? Apparently, it was a cultivated aptitude for buying things we didn't need with money we didn't have. That was fun. What's next?

I thought this article from the New Yorker raised some good questions.

Dart throwing chimp, incompetent, calculating con-man, clueless or conniving, victim of historical events far beyond anyone's ability to contain or platinum-plated opportunist serving his class's interests or loyal civil servant?

He's waiting for the Right to regroup and issue its set of talking points, tentatively titled "Payback". [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC5hPzonErs

Palin/Gingrich 2012!

As your earlier post alluding to "political expediency" suggests, you already know that this statement doesn't mean jack-shit, never did, never will. 1.3 MILLION PEOPLE out of work on the streets of Northeastern cities does. While you're perfectly willing to throw millions out on their asses for something you can draw on a cocktail napkin, no politician, much less any human being with a conscience, ever will.

We've been over "utopian politics" before. You know you'll have to find someone else to play those games with. Besides, I'm too busy watching the closest thing to the free-market utopia you're ever going to see collapse spectacularly under the weight of its own logic. We'll be lucky to avoid another world war. Thanks for nothing.

Good questions. The answer is: nobody fucking knows!

Hey: As a Lefty of the highest caliber, here's a quote from your man Engels that you might enjoy...... "Continual deviations of the prices of commodities from their values are the necessary condition in and through which the value of the commodities as such can come into existence. Only through the fluctuations of competition, and consequently of commodity prices, does the law of value of commodity production assert itself and the determination of the value of the commodity by the socially necessary labour time become a reality. To desire, in a society of producers who exchange their commodities, to establish the determination of value by labour time, by forbidding competition to establish this determination of value through pressure on prices in the only way it can be established, is therefore merely to prove that, at least in this sphere, one has adopted the usual utopian disdain of economic laws. Competition, by bringing into operation the law of value of commodity production in a society of producers who exchange their commodities, precisely thereby brings about the only organisation and arrangement of social production which is possible in the circumstances. Only through the undervaluation or overvaluation of products is it forcibly brought home to the individual commodity producers what society requires or does not require and in what amounts. But it is precisely this sole regulator that the utopia advocated by Rodbertus among others wishes to abolish. And if we then ask what guarantee we have that necessary quantity and not more of each product will be produced, that we shall not go hungry in regard to corn and meat while we are choked in beet sugar and drowned in potato spirit, that we shall not lack trousers to cover our nakedness while trouser buttons flood us by the million, Rodbertus triumphantly shows us his splendid calculation, according to which the correct certificate has been handed out for every superfluous pound of sugar, for every unsold barrel of spirit, for every unusable trouser button, a calculation which "works out"exactly, and according to which "all claims will be satisfied and the liquidation correctly brought about". If he had investigated by what means and how labour creates value and therefore also determines and measures it, he would have arrived at socially necessary labour, necessary for the individual product, both in relation to other products of the same kind and also in relation to society's total demand. He would thereby have been confronted with the question as to how the adjustment of the production of separate commodity producers to the total social demand takes place, and his whole utopia would thereby have been made impossible. This time he preferred in fact to "make an abstraction", namely of precisely that which mattered.» Tee-hee. What are you doing? Or more to the point, what is it you think that you are doing? 'Cause from here, you look like a clown.

If there was a strategic plan that wasn't based on neocon fantasy then I for one would love to hear it... Dude, they're talking about getting electricity on in a couple years. Give it some time.

I'm not saying "it's all Clinton's fault". The point here is that there has continuity in economic thought between administrations whether Republican or Democrat. That, for example, can be said in political terms of the Cold War paradigm that existed for 50 years under both parties. There were some significant differences in style between administrations and change over time but there was also a great deal of consensus as to the Soviet threat and US posture towards that threat. Something similar can be said of the continuity of neoliberal economic thought and policy extending from Reagan to Bush Sr. to Clinton to Bush Jr. Greenspan personified that continuity. Volker and Summers, if they hold to the beliefs and actions that got them where they are (and there's no indication that they won't), also represent that continuity. In his appointments of economic advisors, is Obama making a significant break with the failed polices of the past 30 years that have helped bring us to the current crisis? The election's over. I dutifully trumpeted for Obama and relentlessly attacked McCain as any left pragmatist should've. Now it's time to put the heat on and see if Obama's going to hold to his promises of "change". The appointments so far are bullshit.

There's a difference between the "economy as a whole" and the monetary policy that led to the growth of the the tech and housing bubbles and the current financial crisis. Neither I, nor the author of the article is attempting to define "the whole picture", you are. That's fine, but I don't necessarily think it's a fair criticism of the piece.