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there was a time when i would have actually typed a long response to this kind of thread. i have learned since.
is the american economic system superior to what? in the endless circle-jerk of conservative ideology, the superlative is not relational. the most excellent ne plus ultra....and in that tiny and shrinking little world, the question is a tautology. and that is why it is of no interest to engage the dwindling population of that tiny tiny intellectual world.
there are a number of structural features of american captialism which are HUGE problems:
1. the entire war economy model that was a significant element of the american economy under fordism and which became the center of it under the uncoherence that was the reagan period--ideological expression: neoliberalism.
2. the inability to face the fact that the fordist period is over and that another possibility exists within "globalization" than america-uber-alles: neoliberalism in its domestic variant resulted in a jingoist denial of reality for a very long time--no planning, no foresight, no action, no nothing.
3. firms are not rational economic actors. hell, even hayek and von mises knew this--everyone knows this except apparently neoliberals.
well, look at the banking crises and now you know.
look at the evanporation of the american manufacturing sector and maybe you'll being thinking "firms may act rationally in the pursuit of profits, but they kinda fuck over everyone else in the process"..but hey, the SERVICE SECTOR takes care of the excess human beings produced by this particular transformation--and in typical reagan-period slight of hand, that percentage not taken care of by macdonalds or retail or by adventures in iraq, you dont count.
4. the appalling neglect of public education. already a weapon of class warfare because its funding is tied to local property taxes, so never great to begin with, public education has been subjected to 30 years of politically motivated attack from the jingo right because of the fact that teachers are unionized on the one hand--and because for conservatives, it is ok that the futures of the childen of the affluent are structurally different from the futures of the lives of the less affluent. this is obscene.
5. the barbaric health care system.
6. what the american system has made itself into outside the united states.
7. the fact that 1 in 10 african-american males is in prison. this is self-evidently an index of class warfare conservative-style: act like it doesn't exist, do nothing to change anything about it, neglect infrastructre, choke off opportunity, criminalize informal economies, blame the victims of this reactionary mode of class warfare, round em up, put em in camps. go usa.
thing is that we could make this a different kind of system.
but neoliberalism has to go--contemporary jingoist conservatism has to finish its collapse. the period they defend is over. the politics of retro-denial in significant measure explain why we're in this fiasco. the politics of the right are responsible for this: this is the world the right has made.
given how conservatives like to talk about "personal responsibility" you'd think they'd suck it up and acknowledge---well, this didnt work out so well and we're all in this together so maybe try something else....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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