Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post

roachboy · 10-01-2010, 08:48 AM

well, there's a side of me that sees the conservative bail-out in parallel terms. except that the idea of markets being rational is absurd. as is it's correlate in the assumption that business can be understood like plants. because this is capitalism in its contemporary variant and not some fiction drawn from mangled readings of ricardo and other chestnuts of english political economy from the days of the great fantasy novels fobbed off as political economy.

my problem with tarp in the end is the way it was done---in a reactive mode by people who are ideological opposed to doing things like designing and implementing tarp. so done by conservatives, who are the worst people to be confronted with crisis because in the main they react by saying fuck it, this is normal, it's not a crisis and doing nothing. except that in this case, the bush administration could not simply do nothing because this was a crisis that involved much of the global capitalist order because so many states and major social institutions have been allowed, under conservative watches and following on conservative "thinking," to play in the Great Casino of financial devices in general and HEY! so long as it worked out, conservative "thinking" was all like "AWESOME!" but then it didn't because of that whole real estate bubble as a matter of policy thing, that whole avoidance of the political consequences of the reorganization of the economy thing, that whole creation of new and improved debt bundling devices the exact content of which no-one knew but which were rated triple a ultra excellent by standard and poor and moodys, houses brought to you courtesy of the same institutions selling these accumulations of negative numbers, and that whole fed "let's not have a clearing house or actual market-place for these derivatives because that might bum out the traders" thing (think alan greenspan, 2002)...

and everyone appeared to benefit until that appearance wore itself out and a good appearance was good enough for the asshole free-marketeers who were at the helm....who turned out to be the same asshole free-marketeers who devised the stop-gap measures the effect of which was to accelerate concentration in the financial sector...

the "principled" objections to tarp are just so much gas, predicated on no understanding whatsoever of the world of global capital flows and all that entails. it's a bit of sepia-toned navel-gazing nostalgia for the bad old days of autonomous nation-states. it's quaint. it's the functional equivalent of an amish wagon.

but i digress.

there's no way to know yet what the outcomes beyond concentration in the financial sector that will follow from this last conservative bon-bon visited upon the rest of us. it's still a bit early in the game for such evaluations.

i would have preferred far more radical regulation of the financial sector than was imposed. i would have preferred an actual policy that did something beside encourage concentrations of wealth and power. but we didn't get anything like that.

10-01-2010, 08:48 AM	#4 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	well, there's a side of me that sees the conservative bail-out in parallel terms. except that the idea of markets being rational is absurd. as is it's correlate in the assumption that business can be understood like plants. because this is capitalism in its contemporary variant and not some fiction drawn from mangled readings of ricardo and other chestnuts of english political economy from the days of the great fantasy novels fobbed off as political economy. my problem with tarp in the end is the way it was done---in a reactive mode by people who are ideological opposed to doing things like designing and implementing tarp. so done by conservatives, who are the worst people to be confronted with crisis because in the main they react by saying fuck it, this is normal, it's not a crisis and doing nothing. except that in this case, the bush administration could not simply do nothing because this was a crisis that involved much of the global capitalist order because so many states and major social institutions have been allowed, under conservative watches and following on conservative "thinking," to play in the Great Casino of financial devices in general and HEY! so long as it worked out, conservative "thinking" was all like "AWESOME!" but then it didn't because of that whole real estate bubble as a matter of policy thing, that whole avoidance of the political consequences of the reorganization of the economy thing, that whole creation of new and improved debt bundling devices the exact content of which no-one knew but which were rated triple a ultra excellent by standard and poor and moodys, houses brought to you courtesy of the same institutions selling these accumulations of negative numbers, and that whole fed "let's not have a clearing house or actual market-place for these derivatives because that might bum out the traders" thing (think alan greenspan, 2002)... and everyone appeared to benefit until that appearance wore itself out and a good appearance was good enough for the asshole free-marketeers who were at the helm....who turned out to be the same asshole free-marketeers who devised the stop-gap measures the effect of which was to accelerate concentration in the financial sector... the "principled" objections to tarp are just so much gas, predicated on no understanding whatsoever of the world of global capital flows and all that entails. it's a bit of sepia-toned navel-gazing nostalgia for the bad old days of autonomous nation-states. it's quaint. it's the functional equivalent of an amish wagon. but i digress. there's no way to know yet what the outcomes beyond concentration in the financial sector that will follow from this last conservative bon-bon visited upon the rest of us. it's still a bit early in the game for such evaluations. i would have preferred far more radical regulation of the financial sector than was imposed. i would have preferred an actual policy that did something beside encourage concentrations of wealth and power. but we didn't get anything like that. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 10-01-2010 at 08:54 AM..