7 Comments

1. DeAnander:

   It was a hot debate, but something else was going on at the same time that got less attention: There was the emergence of what could be called the healthcare economy. As Michael Mandel wrote in Businessweek last September, “Without [the health sector], the nation’s labor market would be in a deep coma.” Between 2001 and 2006, 1.7 million new jobs were added in the healthcare sector. Meanwhile, the rest of the private sector added exactly zero new jobs (net) during that period.

   (The conventional wisdom is that the economy needs to add about 150,000 jobs per month to keep up with the growth of the working-age population.)

   If current trends continue, 30 percent to 40 percent of all new jobs created in the United States over the next 25 years will be in the healthcare business. Mandel argued that this trend is partly responsible for the United States’ low overall unemployment rate. “Take away healthcare hiring in the U.S.,” he wrote, “and quicker than you can say cardiac bypass, the U.S. unemployment rate would be 1 to 2 percentage points higher.”

   Propping up a Sick Economy on the Backs of Sick People [my title]

   one of many ways in which “bads” are converted to economic “goods” in rentier capitalism.

   See also Good For the Economy, a response to a J Winterson essay:

   It might have been Paul Hawken who suggested that the “economic hero” of our time is a thrice-divorced man with a heavy alcohol habit and terminal cancer His sorry life history has “contributed” more to what economists call national success than that of a healthy, nonaddicted, non-litigious individual leading a quiet and contented life. He has certainly “contributed” more, in economists’ eyes, than his ex-wives ever did by maintaining home and family, doing more than their share of unpaid domestic labour, minding and comforting kids, etc.

   a biggish chunk of the economy now consists of making people sickly with bad food, sedentary office- and TV-bound lifestyles, industrial toxicity, and the high stress levels of deep inequality — then medicating (not curing, but “managing” their pathologies) with expensive privatised so-called “health” care.

   economists will be pleased to know, no doubt, that the prosthetic industry is undergoing an investment and research boom, thanks to the large nunber of survivable gross trauma injuries among US troops. to an economist, It’s All Good.

   30 July 2007, 9:04 pm

2. bob_d:

   I’m posting these papers on my blog. Stan is already known here

   31 July 2007, 10:59 pm

3. Brighid:

   Definite food for thought. Stan, you make the same point about the September 11th attacks that I have been trying to make to people since then, they were sending us a message, not trying to wipe us out. Too bad we can’t hear them over the din of the propaganda machines.

   1 August 2007, 7:46 pm

4. John Brown:

   Hey Stan,

   Not to long ago I had a brief back-and-forth with an old comrade on the subject of 911 and, more specifically, your essay & radio interview called “The so-called evidence is a farce”. It was what introduced both of us to your work… something neither of us will forget.

   In that talk, you point out some of the immediate contradictions - what was NORAD doing? how did the pilot maneuver the plane into the Pentagon? - with the official narrative, now codified into the voluminous 911 Commission Report ‘conspiracy theory’.

   Evidence that has emerged since those early days - the presence of Thermate at the towers, the military ‘training exercises’, the ubiquitous presence of US intelligence operatives around the so-called hijackers, their training at US military installations, etc. - all seems to render even more implausible the government line.

   Yet it appears from this essay that you now accept that these ‘terrorists’ pulled off this sophisticated operation under the nose of US intelligence.

   Some of your more recent lectures that I managed to acquire (and play to my captive students!) helped me to clarify the meaning of Empire: the role of ‘dollar hegemony,’ and the role of the US Embassy in destabilization efforts, and the ‘humanitarian’ work of NGOs and USAID.

   It seems far more plausible to me that 911 was a cover for the US government itself to advance an imperial agenda - which you correctly describe as in crisis due to its inability to extend itself further.

   The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq both strike me as sort of last-ditch efforts to preserve the very Empire you describe - one fueled on dollar hegemony and military force.

   Obtaining the popular ’support’ needed to undertake these campaigns required a ‘New Pearl Harbor’.

   Perhaps Bin Laden and his (US trained) cohorts saw the opportunity to use an Bauldrilliard-esque spectacle like 911 to draw the US into multiple unwinnable wars. But if so, alCIAda’s subsequent actions (the killing of Daniel Pearl & Nick Berg and the actions of ‘Zarqawi’) have only divorced and alienated them from the very people to who’s name they claim to act.

   To me, the group seems more invented than real - an actualization, through propaganda, of Western Civilization’s darkest fears - brilliantly and carefully deployed in order to demonize dissent and drum up enough fear to justify the implementation of a meticulous Hobbesian plan to divide and conquer the world and sieze as much material wealth as possible before the coming cataclysm you so aptly describe.

   As such, I think the realization of 911 for what it is - an inside job - is importnant not for its own sake, but rather for better understanding the strategy that now finds the ruling class in even greater crisis than before 911.

   STAN: On the 9-11 issue, I raised many questions then without concluding anything except that the official story lacked credibility. I’ve written elesehwere about why I believe it was not an inside job; and I realize that this is controversial. The reasons is that the inside-job, especially for those who have no experience of demolitions or the governments propensity to leak like a chickenwire canoe (making vast conspiracies nearly impossible to complete and conceal). I have enough on record, as do others who have background checked the inside-job hypothesis that I won’t bore anyone with it here through drumbeat repetition. But the series on Homeland Security will explore the phenomenon of political Islam (a mass movement) and its bin Laden-ish faction within (a cell-like, conspiratorial, highly hierarchical network of formations). For this, I rely heavily upon — and strongly recommend — Mahmood Mamdani’s work. I will also explain why I don’t think the ruling class employs “strategies” per se in the deeper cycles of social organization, and how they themselves are trapped within self-reproducing structures. Thnaks for the note, and for your engagement with my ranting… past and present.

   3 August 2007, 11:36 pm

5. peggy:

   Americans are the ones who are seized by irrational hatred. But I guess others must have made this point many times.

   5 August 2007, 7:44 am

6. Gary:

   Not to belabor the 9-11 issue too much more, but the ‘vast conspiracies are impossible for the government to conceal’ argument has been debunked by simply pointing to the vast conspiracies it has been able to conceal. Ruppert shows that relatively few people would needed to have had full knowledge of the plot. The evidence is so voluminous that you don’t even need the forensic evidence of supposed detonation debunked by the Popular Mechanics piece. Crossing The Rubicon makes a powerful case for USG complicity at least; do you take issue with Ruppert’s conclusions or premises?

   STAN: Yes. And have taken issue with him face-to-face.

   5 August 2007, 7:46 pm

7. John Brown:

   Hey Stan,

   After a bit of much-needed time away from the computer I’m slowly making my way through your series of essays. It’s spectacular stuff, and I wonder if you’d mind if I posted them up on my blog with an introduction & summary.

   I’ll refrain from much more discussion on 911. The PM apologetics have been thoroughly debunked by those with a much greater knowledge of and interest in the events. I’m confident that enough evidence will present itself for you to conclude that Uncle Sam was the primary doer and, more importantly, that He needed it done to stabilize the system you’ve done such a great job describing in this series of essays.

   I’m quite interested in seeing you develop further your comment that you “don’t think the ruling class employs ’strategies’ per se in the deeper cycles of social organization, and how they themselves are trapped within self-reproducing structures“.

   I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive. Obviously the rulers are trapped within material reality just as everyone else. But that hardly mitigates against the development of strategic plans to content and benefit from that already existing reality among certain groups of people sharing common economic or political interests and/or worldviews. Obviously their plans are embedded in the real world rather than standing somehow outside of it.

   Perhaps I’ve misunderstood what you’ve written.

   Plan Colombia was conceived with an understanding of the social and political dynamics at play in South America, between the Narco-Terrorists and the Colombian government, among the drug-pushers here on Uncle Sam’s Plantation and the producers in the region, etc.

   Neither the ruling class nor their political stooges can account for everything at all times, of course. They can’t step outside of the deeper cycles of social organization. The Poet Laureate of ruling class, Donald Rumsfeld, has perhaps said it best: “As we know there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things
   we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

   That said, they can react and respond to social, political and economic phenomena with plots, plans and schemes of their own.

   The creation by China, Russia, and others of the SCO is a similarly conceived ruling-class political & economic combination created precisely due to the already existing political, military, and economic reality in Central Asia.

   They’re not stepping outside of anything in creating this bureaucracy. Just the opposite. And just members of the ruling class strategize and develop plans, those at war with them must also do so. The creation of the Soviets in Russia during the 1905 revolution was a political maneuver based on a United Front strategy conceived of by revolutionaries to address the real-world situation they faced.

   Reading Part III of your essay, I learned how the GATT was used as a poison-pill as the post WWII economic system was hashed out. This is very interesting, but it also seems to contradict your statement.

   I’m interested to see how you tie together the collapse of the UnionJack and the rise of political Islam together as you move forward - especially how you do so in terms of value, Empire, and Capitalism.

   11 August 2007, 11:04 pm

Leave a comment