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pan--i understand the sense of bewilderment and frustration, but i see the problem in entirely different terms than you do. but rather than rehearse what i put up earlier to this thread and what i've been arguing from the point this explicit fiasco got rolling, i'll ask you a simple question:
what do you propose as an alternative? what do you think should be happening?
to some extent. what you say is predicated on what you think is going on--because what you think should be done has to be hedged round with assumptions, otherwise is arbitrary---little more than ï don't like it--but who the hell does like this, pan?
how do e start to talk about this mess? seriously...you're right about what's been neglected under the rule of neoliberalism, which worked in part on the assumption that somehow a radical redistribution of wealth toward the holders of capital and elimination of transfers of wealth through taxes was equivalent to rational choices in a market context and because they were rational and because markets are so wonderfully self-regulating and because everyone benefits--it'd follow that somehow these areas were supposed to just magically take care of themselves. infrastructure? why when i look around, it's just there, like trees--so nature must take care of it--so choke off taxation to the federal government and the states and localities and transfer money to the holders of capital and, if this market nonsense meant anything, voila--awesom infrastructure.
except it didn't happen.
30 plus years of this lunacy and the problem is barack obama? that he laughed at a strange time in a tv interview? what are you talking about?
think about it--maximizing shareholder profits quarter to quarter is nuts as a strategy--even some of the main corporate ideologues who popularized this nonsense have now started running away from it, captains of industry like rats from a ship, you know how it goes. 30 plus years of focus entirely on the movements of capital enabled a wholesale transfer of manufacturing away from the old factory model and away from the idea that actual people depend on jobs to live==because so long as the focus was entirely on capital, it didn't matter--you and i and everyone else didn't matter--the movement of capital mattered--and people bought into it.
anyone who was awake and looking could make a long list of such insanities---you could too.
the point is that the problems revealed by this latest fiasco that neoliberal well-running deregulated markets full of rational actors who make rational choices based on elightened self-interest so that what benefits some benefits everybody are STRUCTURAL problems, and dealing with them is NOT a small task and it makes NO sense to complain about taxation in this kind of context because the only reason the money's being thrown around as it is is in order to play for time.
to my mind, if you want to complain about something, complain about the lack of a plan. complain about the fact that geithner's new "plan"" is the bush administration's "plan"that the same fucking people are still in treasury, that the same ideology is still bought into by folk in a position to actually do something to move into an alternate model of capitalism--because that's what we're up against---there is no going back to the way things were before--there is no normal in that sense any more--that game is over.
but if any of this is accurate--and i think it is within the confines of what messageboard compression allows--then what do you propose should be done?
seems to me you get mightily worked up about comparatively little things like that interview footage because the bigger picture scares the hell out of you--and it should--it scares the hell out of everyone who looks at it.
so what do you propose?
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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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