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it seems to me that the enabling condition behind most of this is neoliberalism, the assumption that markets magically regulate themselves and that the state introduces irrationality, that growth is a steady state, that people suddenly become rational actors when money's involved and that in the aggregate the actions of rational actors armed with cash money and credit extensions (think hair weave) function to serve the greater good. this is the ideology that surfaced across the thatcher-reagan period and which has formed the logical center of globalizing capitalism.
it has been the rationale behind deregulation in all its various forms, from taking the breaks off the banking and traffic in debt derivatives to the imf/world bank various experiments in "structural adjustment" to the doctrine of "free trade" that has been used to justify it.
if you assume that people are not stupid, particularly not people who find themselves in positions of power (which is to some extent arbitrary, as assumptions go) but they do things that make no sense, what that generally indicates is that the framework they use to make sense of the world and to think through actions/agency in the world are fucked up. that's why neoliberalism is important to think about in this context. without it, i don't think the elements that we can list as being involved with the present massive trainwreck would be in place, and if they were, they'd not have the same impact.
from there, you can fit together any number of trajectories that explain one or another aspect of the present trainwreck. in the most local sense, folk seem to find in the decision to let lehmann brothers tank a turning point, more than the decision to bail out a.i.g.--but the moment that framed the a.i.g. action seems to me the first to indicate that this was actually a crisis of the global financial order and not only the american.
you also have to factor in the political weakness of the bush administration in all this. but that's another story.
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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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