eScholarship: What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America The Origins of the Present Crisis
i have been considering starting another thread around this but figure the likelihood of folk reading a 70 page narrative economic history of the neo-liberalism which runs from the reagan period through the early phases of the current implosion are pretty slim. but the paper that's linked here, "what's good for goldman sachs is good for america" is really quite impressive and utterly, completely devastates the various conservative myths not only about the present conjuncture of imploding housing prices, credit disappearances and no jobs but also about the links between these phenomena and neo-liberal monetarist policy. which btw doesn't become the actual guiding ideology of the imperial formation that was until the clinton period. shows you what we sometimes say about the united states being a single party state with two right wings.
i see no particular reason to take seriously conservative hand-waving about economic history and the realities that play into it, and still less their hand-waving about what should be done to address it.
the article departs from a basic argument: capitalism since the 1970s has been plagued with extremely weak fundamental characteristics as a function of a crisis of overproduction/overcapacity. but the history simply builds out from there and returns to it. the data's here. there story is interesting. and you've maybe seen popular accounts that parallel this.
there's no mystery as to why there are no jobs accompanying this "recovery"...there never was any mystery about it.
but read the article if you like.
seems to me it might be a good idea to restart a conversation around a shared information set.
we'll see what, if anything, happens.