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host---this is an interesting phase, ain't it?
the politics of distraction are everywhere.
i'm not sure if this is a topic for this or another thread, but since i am still working out how to fit the pieces together, and as a response to your post yesterday, i'll put it here for now.
a friend of mine made the argument the other day that the present financial crisis can be connected back to 3 main structural shifts--the deregulation of banking under reagan which resulted in the blurring of the line that traditionally separated investment banking from mortgage debt; the creation of an array of new financial instruments that function to move this debt around as an object of exchange; and neoliberalism as an enabling ideology--so that for example these instruments (which i am vague about because i do not yet really understand them--but i'm working on it) operate in quite opaque ways with consequences that are nor foreseeable and so constitute a huge increase in overall risk--which would not have been understood as a good idea for banks to take on were it not for neoliberalism, which enabled ideologues to argue that risk was not a big deal because markets are rational...that sort of thing.
while i'm still thinking about this, where it seems to lead to is that this crisis is an expression of structural problems engendered and enabled by the neoliberal regime itself and so is maybe a crisis of a much larger and more basic order than it is being presented--in other words, the subprime thing may be just an immediate trigger.
at one level, this is obvious--i-banks trafficking in mortgage debt means that the debt is now held transnationally, so the meaning of "local" economies is now obsolete--the political crises engendered by the bush people are playing out across a massive leaking away of american political power as it has pertained to economic activity, with the result that the american economy is rapidly becoming just an economic area amongst others caught up in the transnational flows of capital--the fluctuations of which are outside the control of any given nation-state--so by extension we are tipping into a crisis of the nation-state itself (maybe) or a surfacing of the underlying weakness of the outmoded notion/institutional reality of the nation-state.
this is a riff, but the pieces seem to fit.
there are holes in it, which are mostly a function of my still thinking through things and not knowing enough about--for example--the nature and role of these financial instruments--the put is an instance....
if this is anything like accurate, it is really unclear how the issue of the economy as it is now playing out can be coherently addressed in the context of a political campaign--it is not even clear how any of the candidates would address these questions once elected. because if this is a problem that affects the neoliberal regime itself and all the candidates are trafficking in versions of neoliberalism, how exactly are they to address a problem at that level?
to address it would seem to be sawing off the branch upon which they all sit.
there are specific conservative media networks--patterns of ownership and relay--they sit within broader patterns of ownership and ideological orientation--but it seems that there is a general ideological consent, a general delimitation of what the terms are that shape "legitimate" debate about economic questions, social questions, political questions--and that, if the above is at all correct, what may be unfolding is a problem for this entire ideological shell--and if that's true, the defunctionalization of the entire american ideological order may be among the largest chickens that is coming home to roost.
may you not live in interesting times....
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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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