Warring out of depression
The iresistible, if not totally accurate, comparisons of Obama’s administration with that of the lionized FDR ought to include the decisive masterstroke of the cunning patrician Franklin Roosevelt to leave behind the Great Depression once and for all: war. We always hear about the Works Progress Administration and other quasi-socialist measures taken by Roosevelt’s government, but the real exit strategy from that bout with general deflation was to build the US military-industrial complex, financing it through indebting other war-weakened allies.
Under their own circumstances, the New Dealers had the good fortune to enter the war by phases; first letting others take the brunt of the war — Europe as a battleground, and in particular the USSR, which would surrender around 27 million souls to the charnel house of WWII to debilitate the Wehrmacht — second, becoming the supplier of materiel, thereby indebting the rest of the Allied world while enriching the US prior to actual participation in combat, then finally, entry into the war against a bled-out Germany and Japan to ensure the US would be occupying key terrain in Europe and Asia as a preface to filling the vaccum left in the wake of the imperial collapse of UK and France.
Everybody loves Obama, because he sounds more reassuringly intelligent than George W. Bush even as Obama retains many of the very worst aspects of the Bush regime. Hey, he is the first Black Prez, he picked Carolina as this year’s basketball champs, and he could charm a badger.
But Obama is planning to use war as his deus ex machina, too. His war is to be the Pakistan-Afghan-Iran War, with Iraq stuck to his shoe. (He is not “withdrawing” from Iraq; and has stated that he hasn’t the least intention of doing so, unless one considers a force of 30,000 troops to be a non-occupation.)
Roosevelt used Keynesianism at home and war abroad to save capitalism. But Obama is not inheriting Roosevelt’s circumstances; his war will fail, and his “Keynesian” measures remain so contaminated with neoliberalism’s residues that it will leave the US domestic economy in a shambles that his dangerous (potentially nuclear) military adventures will only exacerbate.
Obama is applying an anachronism in his emulation of FDR, and compounding his foolishness by taking a page or two from the LBJ/Nixon playbooks for Vietnam, as we see in his nomination of the smooth-talking torture-chief and “unconventional” warfare commander, Stanley McChrystal, to head up the Afghanistan-Pakistan surge, coming soon to a theater near you. The Phoenix Program redux… writ larger still.
I shouldn’t blame Obama; and I don’t really. But he’s the name and address where the buck stops these gray days as the foundations of the Empire crack: pyramiding debt, weakening dollar hegemony, and the myth of American military invincibility unmasked. He gets to be at the helm during that ambiguous phase where he is subordinate to domestic political forces that are still in place but threatening to go under — Wall Street on the one hand, and an increasingly anxious Suburbia that delivers votes for the candidates and policies that Wall Street approves. He’s mortgaged the future of the great political bloc of Suburbia in order to rescue Wall Street — from his perspective, and the perspective of all Chief Executives of the US state, an inevitable decision.
It is that inevitability that defines Obama’s powerlessness… and the powerlessness of us all here in the wounded core nation.
The lethal cross-border attack on the Abi Talib mosque in Iran week before last, launched from Pakistan’s volatile Balochistan (on the Iranian side, called Sistan-Balochistan province), demonstrates the ethnic permability of political borders in the region, and why Iran will inevitably be drawn into the Obama’s Laos-Cambodia gambit. (There was another attack in Peshwar yesterday, on a hotel.)
Obama is gambling on Balochistan, even if the press completely ignores it. He needs his war (now called “Overseas Contingency Operations,” which should cause the Bush spin-meisters to blush with envy) as a means of bootstrapping the American economy; and the case for Balochistan is overdetermined by several factors. From Balochistan and the New World Order (2006):
Balochistan has only four percent of Pakistan’s population, though it occupies 44% of Pakistan’s land mass. Like its neighbor, Afghanistan, it is populated by religiously conservative ethnic Pashtuns living in extremely rugged and mountainous terrain. Like its neighbor, Iran, it possesses a geologic relic in abundance: fossil fuel, in this case the Sui natural gas field that produces 45% of Pakistan’s supply. It also contains a warm water port — Gwadar — only 70 kilometers from the Iranian border…
…there are suggestions that well-armed Balochi nationalists will soon be assisting in a fresh Taliban offensive against NATO occupation forces.
And so Obama enters the Great Game. But it will yield neither pacific compliance from Southwest Asia nor the war-profit at home. Those ships sailed a long time ago.
As America needs most desperately to re-tool its entire environment from our current abject dependence on peripheral loot (including fossil hydrocarbons), the political establishment — dominated in the end by demagogues — will continue with the equivalent of enabling addicts with comforting lies and provision of the drugs of choice. That the drugs will run out — and this is sure — is the decisive reality that ensures Obama’s failure.
But failure — terrifying as it may be — is not nearly so awful as the unintended consequences latent in fueling war in this highly strategic and volatile situation.
While the world stands breathless before Obama after his speech in Cairo, one where a head of the US state (atypically) acknowledged the basic humanity of a billion Muslims, reviving hope of some new direction for the world, this war that could even make eventual allies of Iran and the US is already rippling through the fragile demographic and political condition of Pakistan, where nuclear weapons are readied in their bunkers, and anti-Muslim Hindutva nationalism threatens a hostile resurgence in nuclear-neighboring India. The world’s second largest nation-state, India, is awash in Hindutva reactionaries who identify their masculinity with “The Hindu Bomb.” (For a more in-depth look, albeit slightly dated, see “India Takes the Stage” — Part 2.)
While the Abi Talib attack and increasaingly frequent acts of political nihilism by violent Islamists have redirected Pakistani ire, for the moment, away from the US over its drone attacks, with their terrible civilian casualties, and against the Taliban-aligned forces; this will not last. The US will inevitably encounter the limits of unmanned aerial attacks — both in cold-blooded efficacy and in the thresholds of tolerance for a people who watch the civilian casualties mount from this technological war of moral cowardice.
War is the economic recovery package of last resort for superimperialism (now morphing into exterminism). It is already on the table.
Plenty of changes. Not a lot of hope.
Da Buffalo Amongst wolves:
I’ve excerpted this post at Archive.org, and my site, Razed By Wolves, in the morning commentary and news.
The commentary:
20090610-2 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: What Does The Archipelago Of Palau Have To Do With Guantanamo? That’s Where America, In It’s Fear, Is Going To Send A Group Of Guantanamo *Non-Combatants* Along With MILLIONS Of American Dollars.
$12 million per Uighur, about $200 million dollars total… Gives new meaning to the word “offshoring”
10 June 2009, 1:10 pmnate zuckerman:
FDR used Keynes but after a time not much helped and thus WWII gave employment and lots of jobs and that got us out of the Depression (I am not conservative and view war=spending), but you suggest both are at work at same time and No it is not the same and not nearly as big as WWII
Afghanistan and the Taliban: We had demanded that Afghanistan Taliban hand over Osama. They would not and refused to close down training camps. We attacked. Would you have said, just let it go?
You blame lots on Obama dn the leaders but in turn offer nothing positive to counter the recession and the threat from–yes–lots of fundamentalists in a number of countries.
11 June 2009, 1:05 pmStan:
The spending for the military now far outstrips anything in WWII, but it’s more complicated than that. Military spending and military contracts now serve to hold up massive sections of the domestic economy, increasing our general risk when that spending stops, for whatever reason.
The Taliban tried to hand over bin Laden in 2001 and the US refused (he was their pretext for an invasion plan already scheduled for Oct 01, prior to 9-11). The Taliban is not al Qaida, nor is bin Laden part of the Taliban.
There is no foreign threat when there are no foreign entanglements that provoke a threat. Name these threats specifically, instead of repeating unspecified stereotypes; and I can show in each case how just and moral changes in foreign policy could neutralize those threats… beginning by withdrawing US financial and political support for Zionism, pulling US troops out of the rest of the world, and abandoning the Dollar-Wall Streeet Regime by which the US extracts value from the rest of the world, and exports our trash and social disorder. The disease we suffer from is not terrorism; it’s our own nationalism.
And bailing our Wall Street by flushing good money after bad is not addressing the root casues of the recession (massive quantities of fictional value created by an unrestrained speculative pole within capital); it’s trying to save capitalists at the expense of the rest of us.
12 June 2009, 4:37 amSean:
And bailing our Wall Street by flushing good money after bad is not addressing the root casues of the recession (massive quantities of fictional value created by an unrestrained speculative pole within capital); it’s trying to save capitalists at the expense of the rest of us.
Yes indeed. I would hope that more Americans come to see this truth, accept it, and act upon it with personal conviction and the passion of one who has been wronged.
Thank you Stan!
12 June 2009, 9:29 amEntera:
I’m always stunned to hear people still parroting that old lie that War Is Good For The Economy. Even without actually confronting the facts, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do some simple math and figure out what an inflationary waste the military endeavor is. What made THE America we all hearken to was 1) the New Deal, and 2) the GI Bill of Rights, which allowed a huge portion of the population that had heretofore been able to do so, to Go to College, Buy A Home, etc., and create a vibrant MIDDLE CLASS (now disappearing) in America. Spending huge sums of OUR money to kill and destroy doesn’t make even elemental sense.
12 June 2009, 10:30 amBill Jones:
nate zuckerman is poorly informed (or has been drinking the corporate media cool-aid, which amounts to the same thing). The Taliban government was willing to discuss extraditing Bin Laden etc (after all, who want’s CIA tools in their country?) They wanted some evidence that 911 was caused by Bin laden etc and that there would be some semblance of a fair trial, rather than assume that Bushco wouldn’t just cage people indefinitely and torture them.
12 June 2009, 2:12 pmJim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi:
Dead on as usual Stan. No one is born a “terrorist”. Terrorism (calculated or highly probable violence against non-combatants) of the oppressed, is qualitatively different than terrorism of the oppressor. But terrorism comes from impotence and a need for instant, and visual results (output) with relatively little input. In the case of terrorism by the oppressed, especially where so called “collateral damage” is the result (highly probable but not precalculated like Jews in Warsaw taking out some Nazis at a restaurant knowing some non-Nazis and innocents will also be killed) I would argue that in the last analysis, the moral culpability rests with the oppressor not with the opporessed. Like a woman in the part attacked by a rapist and she has a weapon and shoots it but one bullet misses and kills a child across the park, the moral culpability still rests with the rapist.
Bottom line? Where there is oppression, there will be resistance; it is a law of history. No weapon systems or doctrine or force strructures, conventional or asymmetric will get rid of terrorism without get rid of the fundamental fuel of the recruiting and actions of terrorism and terrorists: oppression, real or imagined. As for the number one source of state sponsored terrorism in the world today? It is [the] US.
Good to see you still writing Stan.
12 June 2009, 5:23 pmDeAnander:
I’ve been slogging through J R Saul’s rather thick book *Voltaire’s Bastards — the Dictatorship of Reason in the West*. It’s an unsatisfactory read in the sense that the analysis doesn’t go nearly as far as I would like; but it does contain two rather brilliant chapters on the armaments industry and the mythology of “armaments and militarism are good for the economy”. Ch 6 and 7 for anyone who cares to dip in — “The Flowering of Armaments” and “The Question of Killing”. Saul touches on many familiar themes; he tries to trace the roots of machine-consciousness (the mechanistic worldview and the obsessive focus on structure rather than content that so stupefies our contemporary industrial society) to the Encyclopedistes. [The text is littered with unexamined assumptions about "the West," about militarism as a necessity, and so on; gender analysis is basically nowhere other than in a token admission early on that (paraphrase) "there's some kind of patriarchal bias in Western culture and that's a shame, but let's get on with the story." Meanwhile the author habitually uses "castrated" as a synonym for "having all the goodness leached out of it" without the least sense, apparently, of patriarchal bias in his own prose
But that's not unusual.]
His analysis however of the malfunctioning of huge bureaucracies, the alienation of the public and the miscarriage of socialist ideals (as well as the persistent selfishness and obstructionism of private wealth) are interesting; and his accounting of the international arms trade and its insane “logic” is lucid and very much to the point. Among other things he points out the intolerable moral dissonance for citizens, as our media demonise colourful and shady “arms dealers” whose ill-gotten gains are peanuts, mere chump change, compared to the massive amounts our own governments invest (and often embezzle, launder, etc) in the international arms trade. The diversion of so much wealth and productive capacity to an entirely unproductive activity (almost literally “shoot self in foot”) is, for him, a key to the unravelling of modern industrialism and finance.
He doesn’t (yet — I’ve not finished the book) connect any dots with resource drawdown, scarcity, biotic systems collapse, etc. I’m waiting to see whether he will ever get to a critique of “growth” and the usurious financial model (debt-based economy) which demands infinite growth. Anyway, the stuff on “defence” spending and the lunacy of arms proliferation is well addressed, lots of accessible and well-presented facts and figures. I put off reading this book for a long time because — and this is somewhat amusing — the odious Camille Paglia had reviewed it favourably, and by the age-old human tradition of Taint, this gave me a distaste for it. However, it’s turned out to be better than expected; I think there may even be some theological digressions later in the volume which might interest Stan.
13 June 2009, 11:02 amDeAnander:
PS I forgot to say, the Saul book does touch on themes familiar to Stan — for example the dysfunction of “staff college” warfare, the failure to exercise commonsense and OODA on the ground, the ways in which heavy hierarchical structure tries to eliminate the flexibility, creativity, and mobility essential to success in any activity including a fight. His critique of technology-obsessed, “total war” strategy applies perfectly to industrialism as a whole, especially where it meets biotic reality (factory farming, chemical pest “control”, industrial phood), but that’s not his interest so he doesn’t note or even (apparently) perceive the parallel.
13 June 2009, 11:05 amHenry:
Re: Re: What made THE America we all hearken to…
Well, in a way. But what made that possible–the America this gentleman hearkens to–is third-world predatory, infinite growth transnational corporate capitalism and the Dollar-Wall Street regime cleaning up after the shambles of WWII. With 5% of the population, the US uses some 30% of the resources, with Europe coming along behind, and Asia racing towards the same mirage. The world has become “modern.” Like a parody of Adam and Eve, the modernist mentality feels naked and ashamed without the clothing of technological “progress,” and industrial “development.” Everyone rushing like lemmings towards the abyss. The First Horseman may be approaching.
13 June 2009, 5:27 pmHenry:
Stan’s link above to his article, “India Takes the Stage” — Part 2, seems to be broken. This one still works:
http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/080406_india_stage2.shtml
13 June 2009, 5:47 pmStan:
Hi to Jim, and I hope you’re feeling better these days. I suspect you and De are not far apart up there in Pacifica NW.
I want to say it was DeLanda I read recently who showed that big biz has always predicated their organizational models on military ones. They see accumulation as a form of warfare. On the question of whether on not war is good for the economy or not, there are a lot of assumptions about circumstance that are not addressed in this kind of generalization.
In the case of FDR, the calculation was not that war = improved economy. It was that war production would stimulate industry at home for export abroad (Lend-Lease preceded US participation in combat), and that the burdens of the liquidation of excess capital could be shunted onto allies, even as the US prepared to establish itself in other imperial state’s peripheries. In particular, the US had designs on the Sterling Zone and the soon-to-be-ex British Empire. They let the Soviets absorb the brunt of Hitler’s armed forces (after the US and UK had been trying behind the scenes to get Germany to attack the USSR first), and Roosevelt let Europe absorb the economic shock of war on its own land.
The strategy wasn’t war-for-economy; it was far more contingent than that. This is the case with Obama, too. The US is looking for a handhold in a very turbulent period of change to re-establish its capacity to do what core nations do with peripheral ones… as Martinez-Alier and Hornborg said, import order and export disorder. In McNeill’s book, An Environmental History of the 20th Century World, he shows how past successful adaptations in one place are carried over into a different place, whereupon they become maladpatations that destabilize systems. Cities encroach on peasants in valleys, eg, push peasants further into hills, then old (fertile valley) farming practices (on hillsides) result in deforestation and accelerated soil erosion.
Obama et al in the US ruling class are experiencing this maladaptation, which is also in large part what Harvey called the contradiciton between the geographic logic of the state and the logics of transnational finance. Boyd, of OODA fame, would have called this perceptual mismatching.
The economy is not explicable through economics, because economics (of left as much as right in many cases) is an enterprise of ideological abstraction. In some cases, economics — where it attempts some semblance of honesty — has descriptive and even predictive value. But its separation from the physical world (through abstraction) is always and necessarily deceptive. In the real world, energy flows; and it does so in specific forms and locations, and under a complex set of historical circumstances, wherein the interplay between ecology, personhood, and culture are constantly emerging anew, even through patterns and activities that seem repititious, until we arrive at tipping points where major (and disorienting) phase-transtitions occur.
Old habits + new situations = inappropriate and unpredictable outcomes.
The question of whether war is good or bad for the economy, then, is both polemical and rootless. The context matters, a lot. As De points out, war is not the only activity that is “unproductive” in capitalism. In fact, — as Hornborg shows (influenced by Martinez-Alier) — profit and negentropy run counter to each other, they exist in an inverse ratio. Profit (growth, by extension) is always destructive (“wasting” energy); and war is but one instantiation of that destruction. War-of-choice, as the Obama-apologists call Iraq, is exactly what Obama is gearing up for in Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran (the geographic surroundings for Waziristan and Balochistan,, which shares a long border with Iran) as part of a general attempt to re-establish stable US footprints in the world upon which to attempt another upwave of accumulation.
After the Cold War, the disposition of US imperial forces was obsolete; and the redisposition is what the US has been struggling with ever since. Bush attempted to do it in Iraq, after his coterie of zany academics conivinced him there would be some kind of cascade effect of Westernization that would magically ripple through the region. Oops.
But the US is still faced with its parasitic dependency on the rest of the world, and the dilemma that faces polticians (in attending to the geographic logic of the state) is how to keep the domestic natives from becoming too restless (preserving their imperially-derived comforts) without exacerbating the restlessness of the rest of the world at our depredations of the semi-peripheries and peripheries.
What Obama inherited was a nation whose power rested on the twin pillars of dollar hegemony and military capacity… and the former is in very deep trouble. The British faced the same dilemmas — in a sense — as their empire began to unravel. They chose the soft landing of backing out of foreign entanglements except as an adjunct of the new imperial master. The US is not in that position.
Do not be surprised if, in a couple of years, the US and Iran are cooperating militarily in Balochistan, and further destabilizing Pakistan.
14 June 2009, 6:30 amSean:
The economy is not explicable through economics, because economics (of left as much as right in many cases) is an enterprise of ideological abstraction.
Yes indeed. Whatever the field of economics could be, I don’t much care. As near as I can tell, its presently use by the full left-right spectrum of economists is focused on justifying capitalism, with the only divergences being how much “freedom” the “market” should have. It is nothing but a game of abstraction in service of distraction.
If anyone knows of any other kind of economist working today, who has the ear of any government in the so-called “first world,” well then I wish someone would identify that economist for me.
14 June 2009, 8:35 pmStan:
Economics is chrematistics disguised as science. Mathematics is the language of science, and economists believe their own tale that because they speak the language, they are natives. Actual science — when its not acting as the servant of capital — asks way too many questions, and way too exactly, for economics to bear the intensity of the light.
15 June 2009, 8:56 amMichael Anderson:
As far as Obama acknowledging the humanity of a billion-plus people:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/05/obama-cairo-america
I wonder how long the rest of the world is going to let him (us) get away with it.
15 June 2009, 9:25 amSean:
Khaleed Diab seems reluctant to openly criticize Obama. He throws too many applauses toward Obama, especially when comparing Obama to Bush. Diab seems unable to realize that Obama doesn’t write his own speeches, nor did Bush. Whatever difference exists between Obama and Bush, it is merely cosmetic. Obama’s pattern has been to mirror Bush/Cheney, while covering the copying with words that pretend toward a significant difference in approach. Diab seems to miss this point, and instead weighs in against a generic delusion. But Obama’s problem is not one of a generic delusion held by all Americans. It is simpler, much simpler. Obama’s problem is that he is a liar. And thus the problem devolves, because Obama’s cultish followers and supporters do not see the lies, are unwilling to note the lies, and are mighty eager to attack anyone who offers proof that Obama is a liar.
If Diab wanted to honestly assess the situation of America’s Fed Govt policies on the domestic and global stages, he’d have to do better than his soft-pedaled non-criticism of Obama. Why? Because one of the obstacles to having a shift away from the delusion of American Exceptionalism is to see that Obama is a happy shill for that perspective, and to accept that Obama is a liar, and to begin imagining that we can do differently — and must do differently, if we want things to improve.
+++++++++++++
My apologies for a very confusing drafting error in my 14 June comment. The word “presently” should not have the terminal “-ly” and it is confusing as written.
15 June 2009, 11:33 amm.c.:
Jared Bernstein for example as a heterodox economist, who is the VP’s Chief Economic Advisor, and is known for being openly critical of NAFTA and pro-organized labor doesn’t even have an economics degree. Wiki says he studied Music & later got a Masters in Social Work and a PhD at Columbia in Philosophy and Social Welfare. I admit he’s not much of a counterweight to Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Paul Volcker, Austan Goolsbee, etc….
15 June 2009, 3:43 pmld:
Speaking of the DWSR, some very sad news to report: Peter Gowan has died of cancer.
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2009w23/msg00253.htm
16 June 2009, 12:35 amStan:
I hate to hear it. My he rest in peace. His thesis on DWSR, and the financial history of globalization that went with it was, and remains, invaluable. This fine mind will be missed.
16 June 2009, 4:32 amSean:
m.c., thanks for that note on Jared Bernstein. I’ll look into him. My reflexive response is cynical but I think well-founded: anyone working for POTUS 44 is not likely to be a heterodox, not truthfully. The idea of heterodoxy in the Obama Admin is, ironically, heterodoxy itself. Obama is all about continuity with a different front, a more “articulate” front. And if Bernstein really is an iconoclastic purveyor of “economics,” having a single iconoclast would be for show, not for the real lubricant of what drives the Obama Machine. But I do appreciate having his name offered for my consideration. Thanks very much.
16 June 2009, 10:35 amld:
Here’s a more thorough and more insightful obituary/biography for Peter Gowan:
http://www.marxsite.com/Peter_Gowan.html
16 June 2009, 11:17 pmStan:
FULL
Link to the whole series
21 June 2009, 4:56 amStan:
Good piece from Wade at NLR:
FULL
And another one from Michael Hudson today:
FULL
22 June 2009, 7:18 amStan:
FULL
28 June 2009, 9:00 amJim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi:
Hi Stan,
Thanks for the note and I’m sorry I have not been in touch. I had a close brush with our old friend Mr. Death not long ago followed/coupled by the usual stuff with the Neanderthals at work. I’ll be going to a conference on Indigenous Cultures and Cultural Renewal/Preservation in Kunming China near where my father flew 94 missions in B-25s with the 490th Bomb Squadron (Burma Bridge Busters) of the 14th Air Force successor to the Flying Tigers. After that I will be giving some lectures on Economics at Tsinghua University and maybe Beijing University in Beijing and to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Here is what I’ll be doing in Kunming and I’ll write something about it when I get back. I hope you are doing well and I am glad to see you are still keeping on keeping on and sharing your considerable knowledge and insights.
keep the faith,
Jim/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi
Notice of Topics and Program of the Academic Sessions/Panels, IUAES 2009
Dear Chairperson,
Indigenous Epistemology and Science: Some Parallels and Contrasts With Neoclassical Theory, Complexity Theory and Dialectical-Historical Materialism James M. Craven omahkohkiaayo@hotmail.com Clark College, WA July 28 am
Canada-China Symposium
IUAES2009
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·???????????·
Preliminary Program
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July 28-29, 2009
Yunnan University, Kunming China
2009?7?28-29?
????·????
Managing Ethno-Cultural Diversity:
Comparisons of Approaches to Multicultural Diversity
Canada-China Symposium
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·???????????·
Presenters:
l James M. Craven?Clark College, USA?: The Survival and Sustainability of the Blackfoot Nation and Culture in Canada and USA ??????????????“?????????????????”
28 June 2009, 2:22 pmStan:
Jim, I hope you are well, and that you stay that way.
Here is another from Michael Hudson, our old A-List buddy:
FULL
30 June 2009, 4:47 pmJim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi:
Hi Stan,
I am writing from Beijing as I am at Tsinghua University and will be giving lectures on critiques of Neoclassical Economics. I was at the 16th Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological (grave robbing) “Sciences” where I gave papers on The Survival and Sustainability of the Blackfoot Nation” and “Indigenous Epistemology and Science: Some Parallels and Contrasts With Neoclassical Theory, Complexity Theory and Dialectical-Historical Materialism.”
It is interesting that the philosophical positivists of the Neoclassical persuasion kept insisting that the sole test of their a-priori hypothetico-deductivist models (logic and adequacy of assumptions) lay in preciction and accuracy of same; and now they have been totally repudiated with global crises their bogus paradigm said could never happen, and with high priests like Greenspan repudiating their own polemics and paradigm, they now retreat to new assumptions and claims to consider all the stuff (history, context, etc) they explicitly rejected as irrelevant and even a messy distraction.
take care and glad to see you are keeping on keeping on.
wei ren min fu wu (Serve the People)
Jim/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi
2 August 2009, 8:19 amRobert Reed (cabdriver):
Too bad we have a similar take on this, Stan. I wish I could disagree with you, and mount a plausible argument against your contentions.
But it looks as if the power elites of the Anglo-American West are still stuck in that century-old paradigm from the cresting wave of the British Empire and the dawn of the Age of Oil. Overwhelmingly in thrall to the geopolitics of Ruskin, Rhodes, and Haushofer. A century out of date, on a planet with something like four times the human population it had in 1909, having run through the majority of the earth’s petroleum resources in the process.
Meanwhile, the natural systems of the planet are suffering from wholesale depletion. Largely still taken for granted, shunted to the bottom of the list of priorities requiring action. Given lip service, and then ignored. The monetary systems and networks of earthly power remain the focus of political priorities. Notwithstanding all of their petty internecine squabbles and maneueverings, the contemporary world of political leaders, industrial and financial elites share a common bubble of privilege, convinced of their own agendas. What the Tao Te Ching refers to as “private ends.” Wedded to the perpetuation of their own goals of personal success, translating from that perspective into an unreal view of the world, and of the human future- right up to the point where the wave comes crashing down.
And despite that looming future, the rest of us have to find ways to shift for ourselves- both as individuals and as communities that adhere to pro-human, pro-ecological values. Something more worthwhile than sociopathic survivalism- that false path co commonly held up by the output of the Entertainment Media Complex as glamorous, desirable, even optimal, under conditions of societal upheaval.
8 August 2009, 1:04 pmTeresa:
“And despite that looming future, the rest of us have to find ways to shift for ourselves- both as individuals and as communities that adhere to pro-human, pro-ecological values. Something more worthwhile than sociopathic survivalism- that false path co commonly held up by the output of the Entertainment Media Complex as glamorous, desirable, even optimal, under conditions of societal upheaval.”
Robert, this prior statement of yours, is so important, if I’ve understood you correctly. The idea of individual hunkering down with loads of unperishables with 40 AK47′s and 100,000 rounds of ammo in the mountains of Idaho, and to hell with your neighbor, has got to be a real objective of the TPTB (the powers that be). imo, there are things worse than death: this is one of them.
One the quotes that Stan has put at the top of this site seems apropos: “The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.”
9 August 2009, 10:09 amAndrea Dworkin
Michael Anderson:
Indeed….the people “hunkering down with loads of unperishables with 40 AK47’s and 100,000 rounds of ammo in the mountains of Idaho, and to hell with your neighbor” will sooner or later get tired of their unperishables and “Fort Apache” life, hoist the Jolly Roger & go a-buccaneering—and maybe come back and live peacefully, too. We are all in this together, and we need to realize this, pull in our horns, and exercise restraint. That doesn’t seem to be what Amerika, to use Andrea Dworkin’s spelling, is about right now, though….but I have hope. Hope is not just for the examples.
10 August 2009, 10:20 amMark:
Link
White House fears liberal war pressure
White House officials are increasingly worried liberal, anti-war Democrats will demand a premature end to the Afghanistan war before President Barack Obama can show signs of progress in the eight-year conflict, according to senior administration sources.
These fears, which the officials have discussed on the condition of anonymity over the past few weeks, are rising fast after U.S. casualties hit record levels in July and August.
The aides also expressed concern that Afghan election returns, still being tallied, will result in a narrow reelection for President Hamid Karzai that could result in qualms about his legitimacy — “Tehran II,” as one official put it, in reference to the disputed Iranian election.
The result: some think Afghanistan — not health care — will be the issue that defines the early years of the Obama administration.
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To try to salve critics, the administration has been developing a series of numerical indicators, scheduled to be sent to Capitol Hill by Sept. 24, that are designed to sharpen U.S. goals by measuring everything from civilian deployments to the proportion of the Afghan population that is secured.
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Ah metrics, he should be able to win this war on paper in no time.
2 September 2009, 8:20 am