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what's simultaneously not surprising and a bit alarming in paulsen's statement this morning is the "bad apples in an otherwise healthy batch of produce" way of framing what's been happening. if this thinking frames the program that's being fashioned--the magical debt-sponge institution----
which i think we should all benefit from, don't you?---let's declare a universal debt holiday--pull the plug on the entire machinery for a minute, push reset. ok everyone is liquid now. let's start over. without that, you might start thinking that marx was right about the particular unfreedom within capitalism for everyone except the holders of capital, that the state is little more than an expression and instrument of defense of class interests, on and on....
but that can't be true as we're in a post-class society and the problem is only those bad people who mention class, who seek to divide and/or express their resentment-----
then the Magic Debt Sponge will not be framed in a comprehensive enough manner to do much of anything beyond it's immediate functions.
what this has to do with is, in the end, how you understand the mortgage business, whether you connect it to the usage of debt as a mechanism for buying social solidarity that's been pushed to its limits by neoliberalism, or whether you see it as separate.
this is one of those questions that i think an index of the political divisions within the american monocrop ideology,
at the moment, my theory of what's coming is way too cynical.
suffice it to say that the next election looms ever larger, and that i think if mc-cain/palin are elected, the united states will find itself shifted from empire to a nebulous space closer to that of the "3rd world" than its position of empire. gone are the days when the americans will be able to export the irrationalities of their socio-economic order and use the imf/world bank system to force southern hemisphere countries to accept them. the empire is crumbling, but that doesn't mean there's only one possibility as to outcome.
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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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