Well obviously it's time for another blog post. What is needed is an economics blog post from the magnificent fountain pen of Jack Jacob Silverman as nobody seems to know what is going on, or what to do about it, etc. Of course, all these answers to these problems are completely obvious, and I have noted them on here and there within this very blog (a.k.a.: the blog that no one reads).
Here then is another magnificent blog post to help you solve your problems. All of you. From a newspaper – "Some economists are pressing [the U. S. Executive, also rather poorly called] the White House to enact a second round of stimulus spending or find some other way to avert a prolonged job and wage slump. [As I read over this I am absolutely amazed at the poor sentence construction these people are involved with. Some economists --- pressing --- the White/Black House. As Obama says, "let's get real"] But the White House is in a tough spot. [So is the journalism profession, apparently] Officials [not some officials?] want to give the $787 billion stimulus [not to mention the various other programs that more than double this figure] package passed in February time to work----only 10% of the spending is out the door so far---- ...The unemployment rate is 9.5%...and many now expect it to stay high for a long time..."
Actually, we have never heard one constructive line of advice, not a word. The only idea any of 'em seem to ever have had is to use some kind of power they have to magically enter numbers into computers and create 800 billion and then another 800 billion, etc. --- as if the numbers even mean anything anymore. Obviously the industrial infrastructure can make most of the stuff we need to stay alive and perfectly healthy and comfortable. Our manufacturing infrastructure can make everything we need. That's easy. We just need to keep the "economy" working. What is an "economy"? What keeps us alive? Is it the infrastructure or agricultural know-how that keeps us alive? Not really, so what follows? Well, "the economy" seems to be a thing the bankers own. Well, hey --- maybe the bankers (Geithner's friends) do not deserve to own the economy. But that is not a thought we are allowed to have.
So, practically speaking and before I make a fat, oversuffed banker in a $600 suit angry or something, what do I suggest? I suggest we simply throw the big Geithner style bankers out of their jobs and Geithner and Summers with them (and get them therapists) and let some kind of “little” banks take up the slack. I mean banking: there's nothing to it. The money is fake. Another point: it is all the exact same money. How many freaking banks do you need to bundle mortgages and re-spindle securities and prioritize deprivations and derive securitizations and piddle about? The entire economy could probably operate on bets taken on checkers games at Washington Square Park. But they don't want you to know that.
But, seriously: psychiatrist professionals ought to be called in and all the American flake CEO's who are completely crazy ought to be put in accredited mental hospitals and someone else take over and America will be fine; we're a great country. I mean bank chiefs and corporate CEO's and the whole lot of them. They're entrenched. Let their banks fail, too. Then they leave their jobs, go under psychiatric care, and somebody else takes over and the whole game goes on another four years. That's how you do it. Capitalism is based on change, and will not be successful otherwise. The Pillsbury Dough Boy has to be changed once in awhile. He doesn't want to be. He complains. But he has to go. Why is it a Boy? Why isn't it a girl? We need change. The guys we've got as bankers: they're a culture; they're a cult. They have their own thing. And it's rancid. It isn't right. It's corrupt; it's a zero; it's rancid. The punk rock bands have been predicting this for a long time. Get rid of the bankers. Put them in subsidized housing. Confiscate their money. Give it to little old ladies. Spin the bottle; let the game go a new round. Stop being corrupt. Kiss me for God's sake!
p.s. OK. I just got it. I am talking about my bit above about the journalists now. The poor sentence construction there is considered allowable because they are considered to be dealing with truth. It does not matter that the sentence style is poor because we are serving truth here. Yeah. That must be it. Then let’s take that away. Away with the assumption that what persons say is true. Now it is fiction. Now, then, the poor sentence construction is no longer supportable. It is no longer supported because the "facts" it is connected to are no longer facts. No. Sorry. It is still supportable. The poor sentence construction however shows that these people are serious. It isn't their fault they are being boondoggled by business and government – and their own newspaper ownership, who I believe underpay them. They are sincere: hence poor sentence construction. OK. Now go back to your checkers game. Pay no attention to what the derivatives salesmen are doing.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
Producer and Consumer (as classes)
Capitalism: a unique cooperative relationship between producer and consumer.
Friday, July 3, 2009
I'm Not Sure Where the Economics is in this one but it's in There Somewhere
Questions of basic moral decency matter. The survival of the many, many human lives -- rich and poor -- depends upon whether or not their rights are respected. Now we say “rights.” What we call "rights" should also be something “self-evident,” which is the way the famous U. S. Declaration puts it. If the rights are self-evident it doesn’t matter whether you call them “rights” or not. The fact is that they must be: they have got to be associated with a self-evident, intuitive immediacy. If they are not, the language itself confuses. My position is that the term "rights" is problematic (if it is a "right" then it does not seem to me that anyone could possibly lose it ---- ever), but for that matter our definition of "human being" is, perhaps, an unclear concept as well. So, we are talking in obviousnesses. For this reason, when talking about these matters everything has to be right there in its immediacy and self-evident.
Now wise, educated individuals know about this. You know. Not everyone can "see" human rights, but for those who can it is intuitive and obvious. You do not need to possess a concept, necessarily. There is an intuitive quality here. We can make a non-conceptual discernment of what these rights are, and, if I am to defend my human rights I do have to know what they are. I would even say that an oppressor has to know as well.
We need to have an order of things where we respect others; it’s very important. The world political order itself is a very fragile structure. Within this order of things, only a few wealthier capitalist nations have an actual history that has, many would agree, managed to integrate basic human decency into a modern type of political order. Primitive tribes we shall count as another story. Most of the world seems to have been colonized at some point, by a really small number of these modern states: Italy, France, Belgium, England, what not. We do not know why some states – the same ones that brutalized the inhabitants of their (own) colonies – have this history and others do not but at any rate they do; it is there. There exists the tradition of this kind of respect for basic rights, and it seems to me quite clear that this has been part of an extremely powerful thrust of Western civilization in history, which means in the world. Where Western nations like Russia or Germany tried to renounce the method, they fell.
And with no continued presence of these kinds of values, both of these societies, which is to say those that maintain political human rights and those that, as yet, do not - are threatened. The Western system really has to be defended and I would do it – but in a real sense, not the phony way Bush did.
Values, then, are intuitively understood. You are wise, and educated, and you have this capacity, as a person. It is no great feat. It is common - ordinary. We who are within the boundaries of the Western powers ought to have the education to respect human rights. We can - and do - understand a set of principles that say that other human beings should be able to congregate in public; they should possess their ethnicity - their own practices, habits and culture. They should be able to have their own political parties and all other social groupings - groupings of all sorts. What we say sometimes points to a concept of the freedom of speech. We should understand that human beings should be treated kindly, and respected, and given a place to live. They need to work, and if they have no work or nothing to do they should be able to find something. And I don't see you arguing. Are you? If you are not arguing it is because my having twisted your arm is not necessary - for you to know that these are the good, true, real, decent values for you to have.
Without these basic rights you are not going to get much of a world to live in.
Now we see human rights violated in Iran - and possibly in Honduras, depending on what the nature of what may be going on there is – I don't know - and, recently, a fundamental violation occurred. There was this anti-democratic action that Bush took that we just saw -- the man’s terrible lack of sense in invading a middle-Eastern country (Iraq), based on the pretext of American democratic superiority. With these two latest countries in the news, I mean Iran and Honduras now -- it might be that a whole new round of horrors is getting started. Where is Bush now? Does he still feel like he knows anything? He got his eight years but what was his gift? What did the Bushes bequeath? (I’m also adding Poppy in here a little.)
Of those few Western countries that do have a history of respecting human rights, the U. S. in particular seems to be confused and without an idea what to do. This idiotic intervention that occurred recently – of G. W. Bush – the idiotic intervention in the affairs of Iraq – has only made things worse. All we have is the record of what actually happened -- an idiotic, mismanaged, illegal intervention. The authors are the half dozen fools that leave the nation -- as opposed to the few, the individuals -- with no clue as to where to go, what to do or what we really stand for as a nation. Of course democracy is always a good excuse for things, but, if democracy is just an idea, it is no better than any other idea.
Human rights is an idea too. But human life is not an idea. Human life is no abstraction, and it takes a lot more than abstraction to protect it.
Should we have countries and individuals trampling all over the rights of others it does not look like life is going to get much protection. That does not occur by merely a show of words. And it also does not occur merely by a show of force.
Now wise, educated individuals know about this. You know. Not everyone can "see" human rights, but for those who can it is intuitive and obvious. You do not need to possess a concept, necessarily. There is an intuitive quality here. We can make a non-conceptual discernment of what these rights are, and, if I am to defend my human rights I do have to know what they are. I would even say that an oppressor has to know as well.
We need to have an order of things where we respect others; it’s very important. The world political order itself is a very fragile structure. Within this order of things, only a few wealthier capitalist nations have an actual history that has, many would agree, managed to integrate basic human decency into a modern type of political order. Primitive tribes we shall count as another story. Most of the world seems to have been colonized at some point, by a really small number of these modern states: Italy, France, Belgium, England, what not. We do not know why some states – the same ones that brutalized the inhabitants of their (own) colonies – have this history and others do not but at any rate they do; it is there. There exists the tradition of this kind of respect for basic rights, and it seems to me quite clear that this has been part of an extremely powerful thrust of Western civilization in history, which means in the world. Where Western nations like Russia or Germany tried to renounce the method, they fell.
And with no continued presence of these kinds of values, both of these societies, which is to say those that maintain political human rights and those that, as yet, do not - are threatened. The Western system really has to be defended and I would do it – but in a real sense, not the phony way Bush did.
Values, then, are intuitively understood. You are wise, and educated, and you have this capacity, as a person. It is no great feat. It is common - ordinary. We who are within the boundaries of the Western powers ought to have the education to respect human rights. We can - and do - understand a set of principles that say that other human beings should be able to congregate in public; they should possess their ethnicity - their own practices, habits and culture. They should be able to have their own political parties and all other social groupings - groupings of all sorts. What we say sometimes points to a concept of the freedom of speech. We should understand that human beings should be treated kindly, and respected, and given a place to live. They need to work, and if they have no work or nothing to do they should be able to find something. And I don't see you arguing. Are you? If you are not arguing it is because my having twisted your arm is not necessary - for you to know that these are the good, true, real, decent values for you to have.
Without these basic rights you are not going to get much of a world to live in.
Now we see human rights violated in Iran - and possibly in Honduras, depending on what the nature of what may be going on there is – I don't know - and, recently, a fundamental violation occurred. There was this anti-democratic action that Bush took that we just saw -- the man’s terrible lack of sense in invading a middle-Eastern country (Iraq), based on the pretext of American democratic superiority. With these two latest countries in the news, I mean Iran and Honduras now -- it might be that a whole new round of horrors is getting started. Where is Bush now? Does he still feel like he knows anything? He got his eight years but what was his gift? What did the Bushes bequeath? (I’m also adding Poppy in here a little.)
Of those few Western countries that do have a history of respecting human rights, the U. S. in particular seems to be confused and without an idea what to do. This idiotic intervention that occurred recently – of G. W. Bush – the idiotic intervention in the affairs of Iraq – has only made things worse. All we have is the record of what actually happened -- an idiotic, mismanaged, illegal intervention. The authors are the half dozen fools that leave the nation -- as opposed to the few, the individuals -- with no clue as to where to go, what to do or what we really stand for as a nation. Of course democracy is always a good excuse for things, but, if democracy is just an idea, it is no better than any other idea.
Human rights is an idea too. But human life is not an idea. Human life is no abstraction, and it takes a lot more than abstraction to protect it.
Should we have countries and individuals trampling all over the rights of others it does not look like life is going to get much protection. That does not occur by merely a show of words. And it also does not occur merely by a show of force.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
My New Apartment and My New Life
I have just moved into a new place. It is a studio apartment basically. I am experiencing a more high-class type of existence since I am right next to the university and not only that but right across from the research library. That is where I do my work sometimes. What I do is economics. It is my own version of economics. I am a private scholar. And I have some observations --rather a question, about my new neighborhood and about the world.
In the world we live in, what makes a person a good person? Our world of course can be something like our culture or our society. It can be our society. Other languages, like French or German, are better at dealing with the signifier of "society" than English. I would assume there are some peculiarly American or Anglo-American reasons for the denuding of the concept and the refusal to assign a valid set of words. Whatever that reason is, it is still fully obvious that humans have got to live in some kind of an environment and to get at this with the best term, we may choose and revert to: "society."
So, what makes a person a good person in the world, or in our world? It really seems to me that the best answer one can give to this question is this: simply if one has money, he is a good person. Of course that is a bit simplistic. I know it. But we are trying to get at the truth of capitalism: with the abolition of class, not much else identifies the individual as respectable ---- it is the matter of whether there is money in your pocket.
And that is my basic observation. What implications flow from this supposition? What we are saying is that this is about all that identifies one as a good person, in society, or better put: higher society. We are really asking about "good" society and "high" society. Because it works differently in the ghetto. There personal relations come into it.
Before this week, I was living in a bit of a borderline ghetto. Something like that. Now I would say that I would seem to be around a lot of high class persons. What makes them the good people? It's kind o' hard to figure out. I just hope I am one.
I intend to work really hard, in my new surroundings, and I'll do it by trying to do better at being an economics theorist, which I am doing in some sense for (by) myself. So, maybe: being a good person is strictly internal, subjective. This idea makes sense.
In the world we live in, what makes a person a good person? Our world of course can be something like our culture or our society. It can be our society. Other languages, like French or German, are better at dealing with the signifier of "society" than English. I would assume there are some peculiarly American or Anglo-American reasons for the denuding of the concept and the refusal to assign a valid set of words. Whatever that reason is, it is still fully obvious that humans have got to live in some kind of an environment and to get at this with the best term, we may choose and revert to: "society."
So, what makes a person a good person in the world, or in our world? It really seems to me that the best answer one can give to this question is this: simply if one has money, he is a good person. Of course that is a bit simplistic. I know it. But we are trying to get at the truth of capitalism: with the abolition of class, not much else identifies the individual as respectable ---- it is the matter of whether there is money in your pocket.
And that is my basic observation. What implications flow from this supposition? What we are saying is that this is about all that identifies one as a good person, in society, or better put: higher society. We are really asking about "good" society and "high" society. Because it works differently in the ghetto. There personal relations come into it.
Before this week, I was living in a bit of a borderline ghetto. Something like that. Now I would say that I would seem to be around a lot of high class persons. What makes them the good people? It's kind o' hard to figure out. I just hope I am one.
I intend to work really hard, in my new surroundings, and I'll do it by trying to do better at being an economics theorist, which I am doing in some sense for (by) myself. So, maybe: being a good person is strictly internal, subjective. This idea makes sense.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
I have a newspaper in my hands...
I have a newspaper put out by our community in Madison ("community" meaning the whole freaking liberal town) and it's got an article with quotes from James Galbraith and William Stigli, two economists who are willing to tell the truth with a minimum of jargon.
Some matters involved in economics do not hardly even require any kind of technical talk or anything subtle or hard to get that we cannot figure out for ourselves. Of course you do need at least a third-grade education. Is that too much to ask?
For example what is the antonym of the terms one hears of or reads in the newspapers' accounts of our world, such as "toxic" or, James Galbraith says, "poison?" The proper antonyms are "exhuberance" , "hyperactive" and "bubble." "Hyperactive" and "exhuberant" (this is actually Greenspan's famous term) mean that you really, really want to get close to something and "poison" means you really, really want to avoid it.
They were printing free money and they were raking in free money an' that was the fake, toxic bubble that burst! It's really, really simple - once you understand it. It is most interesting, really, that the economists don't. And that's all I am going to say right here!
How much does it take before we realize these economists (some of these economists I should say) are bullshitting us? A failed bank ought to be nationalized. That is not hard to get, even if they won't "get it." Or is someone going to buy it? But why would you buy something that only represents money (and is a failure at that)? Give me a break. The economists have their (ahem!)
head completely up their asses. I guess that when you're in the dark crack hole of self-deception (as least Mr. Bush required the actual material drug substances) you just cannot see the money on the wall.
Message for the economists: You are in the dark. Take your head out of your ass and start thinking for a change.
All the words are lies. The language is fake. Why would anyone buy a business that is "toxic"?
It's an assault on language basically, not just on your pocket book. This is, in fact, a matter that I have probed to some degree.
Some matters involved in economics do not hardly even require any kind of technical talk or anything subtle or hard to get that we cannot figure out for ourselves. Of course you do need at least a third-grade education. Is that too much to ask?
For example what is the antonym of the terms one hears of or reads in the newspapers' accounts of our world, such as "toxic" or, James Galbraith says, "poison?" The proper antonyms are "exhuberance" , "hyperactive" and "bubble." "Hyperactive" and "exhuberant" (this is actually Greenspan's famous term) mean that you really, really want to get close to something and "poison" means you really, really want to avoid it.
They were printing free money and they were raking in free money an' that was the fake, toxic bubble that burst! It's really, really simple - once you understand it. It is most interesting, really, that the economists don't. And that's all I am going to say right here!
How much does it take before we realize these economists (some of these economists I should say) are bullshitting us? A failed bank ought to be nationalized. That is not hard to get, even if they won't "get it." Or is someone going to buy it? But why would you buy something that only represents money (and is a failure at that)? Give me a break. The economists have their (ahem!)
head completely up their asses. I guess that when you're in the dark crack hole of self-deception (as least Mr. Bush required the actual material drug substances) you just cannot see the money on the wall.
Message for the economists: You are in the dark. Take your head out of your ass and start thinking for a change.
All the words are lies. The language is fake. Why would anyone buy a business that is "toxic"?
It's an assault on language basically, not just on your pocket book. This is, in fact, a matter that I have probed to some degree.
They Create Myths
Obviously, the one who "isn't making sense" is me, since I just doubled my own post. The one for April 29 doubles another one. So what.
Well, here' today's post:
They create myths. Myths are good. At least they are real structures.
Intellectual structures. These are intellectual structures. There are, it seems, material as well as intellectual structures. Thirdly there is just blank ignorance.
For ex. the intellectual idea is that there's this free market or this economic thing out there. And so forth...until we have built a little Hansel & Gretel fairy tale. The "free person" goes out and "gets a job."
But there is one thing that's not a myth and that is that this world is built on sickness and corruption.
One never, eve, ever gets a job in a free market. The free market may exist to an extent, but it doesn't sell persons jobs. That's crazy.
On the other hand, I suppose all societies need their myths.
(p.s. this seems like it would be good with the post from February 23)
Well, here' today's post:
They create myths. Myths are good. At least they are real structures.
Intellectual structures. These are intellectual structures. There are, it seems, material as well as intellectual structures. Thirdly there is just blank ignorance.
For ex. the intellectual idea is that there's this free market or this economic thing out there. And so forth...until we have built a little Hansel & Gretel fairy tale. The "free person" goes out and "gets a job."
But there is one thing that's not a myth and that is that this world is built on sickness and corruption.
One never, eve, ever gets a job in a free market. The free market may exist to an extent, but it doesn't sell persons jobs. That's crazy.
On the other hand, I suppose all societies need their myths.
(p.s. this seems like it would be good with the post from February 23)
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