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i numbered the following to refer them to the quote/response segments above.
1. not in this climate. in another context, at another time, maybe i'd agree with you regarding bankruptcy.
2. on the history of this crisis. i've said this before, i'll say it one more time.
the actions of the bush administration have engendered a political crisis that is being expressed through economic crisis.
it could have happened another way, but this is how it's happened.
what is being taken down is much bigger than the reactionary politics of the bush people, however. it is the entire ideology for which they stand. while it is possible that this melt-down could have happened another way, it didn't...it happened this way. so while it is possible that there could in an alternative scenario be no particular connection between the political implosion of the bush administration and economic crisis, in this situation, which is the real world situation, there is one.
no amount of denial will change that.
i see this as a massive, wholesale implosion of neoliberalism, of cowboy capitalism, of the washington consensus, and of the lunatic "globalization" that neoliberalism has enabled. so this is obviously much bigger than the bush administration---neoliberalism runs back into the early 1970s. it's conditions of possibility include the various transnationalizations of transactions put into place by the nixon administration, whose importance in setting all this in motion is still underestimated. ideologically, neoliberalism took shape across the thatcher-reagan period. the political modus operandus domestically, the screen discourse, took shape during the reagan period....but i digress, moving from the ideology of contemporary capitalist incoherence--neoliberalism---which is intimately associated with american political and economic domination--and the earlier claim that the current economic crisis is a political crisis and a political crisis directly brought on my the staggering incompetence of the bush administration.
3. i agree with your assessment of the particular individuals who presented themselves to congress looking to get salvation, but not about the simplistic "analysis" that follows.
you want to eliminate complexity when you think about this, it seems.
i think that if you eliminate complexity, you eliminate thinking, so i don't see the point of heading down that route.
despite the fact that this is a messageboard, we can still maintain a certain minimal relation to what is happening in the world by refusing to boil it down to small-business level bromides.
4. this milton friedman horseshit is a significant element of the washington consensus that got us into this trainwreck. you cannot possibly expect me to take it seriously now. i have always argued that this position made no sense, even when it had some credibility. now it doesn't have that. time to retool your mind, ace. you can do it.
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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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