so what it looks like is that the administration has no idea what to do really but thinks it important to get congressional approval for it.
they waited so long to do anything beyond react that they are now in a position of making reaction into a virtue, so telling congress: we don't know but give us the umlimited power to figure it out...is a marketing thing. yes Everybody, what we're proposing here is Big.
given its appalling performance, i would not give the bush administration unlimited authority to clean dogshit off my lawn.
the Magickal Debt Absorption Machine they are proposing is a curious thing because it is to magically absorb debt the amount of which no-one seems to actually know.
the assumption seems to be the Bad Apple theory writ very very large.
if, as this analysis and most others clam,
Rough Week, But America's Era Goes On - washingtonpost.com
the origin of this is collapsing house values in the united states, then what do you think should or even can be done to address this?
if the problem is that the mortgage crisis has happened because unregulated lending practices has exposed the banking system to the social consequences of the reconfiguration of production under neoliberalism, to the wobbliness of the distribution of decent=paying jobs, to the untenability over even the medium term of the american model of doing things as it has unfolded since reagan, what should be done?
do you really think that the Magickal Debt Absorption Machine is adequate? it seems to me that it addresses symptoms and not causes, and symptoms that affect the institutions whose lunatic actions in the context of deregulation are amongst the two main causes for this mess in the first place (the other being--i think---the implications of allowing corporate organization to mirror the nature of capital flows, to become deterritorialized, so that profits are unhinged from any social relation which might obtain in any particular region where actual people live---and the rationale for it is cheap-ish consumer goods and easy debt availability)---it looks to me like a bubble, but a much bigger and different one that what we've been talking about, which follows the way this crisis has been framed in limiting it to the collapse of the derivatives market.
personally, i think that the proposed mechanisms should unfold in multiple stages and that should be built in--at least at the level of outline--into what congress is being asked about. maybe the Magickal Debt Absorption Machine can be legitimated as a stop-gap, the meaning of which is more psychological (the Appearance of Doing Something) than material...
i think it not unreasonable to convene an international-level commission---perhaps working out of the G8 perhaps out of the united nations---certainly not under the auspices of either the imf (where is the imf on this?) and world bank, which are the simple arms of neoliberalism at this point, a neoliberalism which is THE problem---the commission should probably formally bury neoliberalism, maybe have a little party for it, and outline steps that can be taken to basically transform the ways in which transnational capital flows are regulated, perhaps with an idea of encouraging something like economic planning in some sectors, not least of which is a plan to encourage a different, more coherent distribution of decent jobs for people. that way you could re-hinge credit to something.
but this seems partial, early sunday morning over an initial cup of coffee type stuff.
what do you think should be undertaken at this point?
from where you sit, how would you think the problems we are watching unfold on tv as this mini-series i like to call "the financial catastrophe show"--should be approached.
how far would intervention have to go to stabilize things?
what direction should we be heading in?
personally, i think not only is neo-liberalism done but the era of the nation-state is probably cooked as well, so we are basically confronting a situation that will result in some new forms of transnational regulation, which will require some new forms of transnational enforcement.
so whaddya think?
have a cup of joe and be bravely speculative about this.
it's not like what we think matters in the bigger scheme of things, so we should be free with it.