ustwo: you miss the point.

the underlying claim is that there is nothing--at all--necessary or even functional about the way the american university system operates. it could be funded in an entirely different manner and would serve all the functions it claims for itself better--for example, university education could be free of charge if some of the money the americans squander on their grotesque military expenditures were redirected toward a more rational end--there could easily be stringent requirements by ability that streamed students into this or that tier of school---and if the system is about locating the most competent or promising students and streaming them toward a given profession, that function would be far BETTER served if the class position of a student's parents were minimized as a factor. i also think that educational funding should be taken away from ties to local property tax rates and distributed on a flat basis across ALL localities--for the same reason--if you want to encourage education--and NOT the reproduction of a debilitating class structure--it makes sense to create an educational system that neutralizes the effects of the parental class position in shaping access to opportunities.

this has nothing to do with making that system internally anything--i personally think that education should be more rigorous and more open than it in the main is--what this is about is eliminating arbitrary advantages that accrue to the children of the affluent simply because the parents are affluent.

it doesn't seem to me that you would WANT a real meritocracy, even at the level of the educational system. everything you argue for works against the idea that you take the notion of meritocracy seriously--you seem to think that the economic order is a reflection of that--a position which i see as surreal, unmoored from reality.

the flip of that is the simple observation that within the current. increasingly dysfunctional educational system in the states, debt is a problem and one of the results of debt is coercion and that this coercion is a political tool--it produces consent for an order that in many ways is at cross purposes with its own political claims, with its own rationale.

unless you really believe that the affluent are and should be more politically free than everybody else. which you seem to. i suspect that were you living in a system without even the pretense of a democratic system but which enabled you to feel all woozy with nationalist sentimentality at appropriate moments, you'd be fine with that.

I am only a lowly sole proprietor "trader in securities", and by night, a waiter.
The level of fiscal soundness and systemic abuses I detect, convince me that you will be "hard put" to keep your financial condition, "above water", based on what I KNOW is coming, even as I write this, to the US domestic economy.

As some of us have on the "1992 Redux" thread (namely, ace and myself...) let us agree to revisit this discussion, 12 months from today, to discuss whether you are as sanguine as you've appeared to be since making the decsion to expand your business.

You POV today is based largely on your anecdotal experience, as it will also be, one year from now.

I am not caught up in the distractions you are immersed in. I've had the experience of being a business owner with a $400 per hour "nut" to deal with....fixed costs per hour of operation, before expenses for purchases of materials and merchandise for resale, and my experience included meeting the payroll expenses of 17 employees, plus myself.

I did this for seven years, employees were paid immediately on completion of the work week, there was no "holdback", the week delay most businesses are allowed by law to delay wages paid to employees.

So much of that experience, no matter how good or able an owner/manager one actually was, seemed to owe it's success to luck and being in the right place at the right time. Selling, negotiating, employee relations, and management skills are of little consequence when an economic slowdown and credit tightening come to visit your market, always at the same time.

I had some success, "earned" profits, kept the doors open, satisfied customers, experienced almost zero employee turnover, paid off debt, invested in new equipment, and expanded into a new, complimentary line of business.

It was the loneliest time of my life, and the most all consuming. Only the "owner" can know what it's like to have that responsibility and opportunity, so Ustwo, I have some general insight into where you are now.

I don't wish you adversity or bad fortune. Anonymity allows me to speak frankly, though. My experience as a business owner made me appreciate Thoreau's observation that the farm seemed to "own" the farmer, more than the farmer owned the farm.

I can just about guarantee your that there is a once in every century "shit storm" headed at our economy. The consequences of it will profoundly alter your POV of economics and politics. Ask anyone in Japan who was an adult living there in January, 1990, through the present time.

Out of my depth? that's lovely. :orly:

You sir, are trying to tie your understanding of science to your understanding of the one true way that an economy and a society can be run.

I, sir, am trying to point out that using science - and specifically genetics and biology - to make a case for your political views is flawed at best and downright dangerous at worst. It's been tried many times, by many shades of political opinion, rarely to any good end.

...And Matt Ridley is an idiot because he and his political/economic theories and mismanagement caused the massive collapse of a major financial institution in one of the largest economies on the planet. Bravo that man. Spectacularly good job.

loquitir, and Ustwo, the thing that both of you do not yet seem to grasp, is the thing that homebuilders failed to grasp until it was too late.

Our economy is moving into a phase where, as homebuilders have found the hard way, there will be too small of a base of individuals who will likely be both willing and able to pay you for your services, to sustain your overhead and income requirements....

The time when it will happen is drawing close enough now that I can post about it without seeming like I am posting concepts most regard to be "on the fringe".

Sunday's "news" changed all that. When was the last time you can recall the Fed announcing a between FOMC meeting interest rate cut, on a sunday?

When was the last time the Fed cut the key short term interest rate, 3.25 pts. in less than 6 months? The answer to both questions is "never"!

When was the last time the Fed permitted brokerages....not banks....brokerages, to borrow funds at the Fed "discount window"....the answer is, "not since the 1930s depression".

Capisce, amici?

Host, that's my risk, isn't it? If I end up falling flat on my face, then I will have no one to blame but myself for not having the foresight to see the oncoming train wreck. And I'll deal with it when/if that happens. But let me give you a hint: knowing more than one area of law helps cushion blows like that, and practicing in a firm that has expertise in helping clients through both good times and bad also helps.

But you're right, there is risk. Big risk. And I could possibly fail, quite badly, and the govt won't bail me out. That's why I'm also entitled to the upside.

Roachboy, the fact that I took debt on to go to law school is a datum, but it's not the fulcrum of my argument. The fact that I'm a free man and can't be required to give my work away on terms I don't agree to is the fulcrum. You may have heard of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits involuntary servitude.

loquitor--i tried to develop the underlying argument that i was making above--i linked it to a tendency to naturalize social inequalities, which you seem to do. i wouldn't argue that it's the center of things--i just used it as data to construct a position from.

Do you own stock or bonds or other securities, loquitur? Those in the bottom 50 percent own less than 8 percent of all US stocks and bonds, it may even be less than 5 percent.

When you say that the "gov't won't bail you out".....what do you think "went down", this past sunday, and with the "stick save" by the Fed, with another huge interest rate cut, yesterday, and a 400 pts. gain in the Dow?

What the Fed is doing is "bailing out" you and the very people who you regularly bill for your professional services, and it will have the consequences of making the few dollars the "bottom half" of the popuilation have to spend, buy much, much less, as we already see at "the pump".

Is your hubris or complacency so great that you haven't realized the Fed had been busy transferring the small amount of wealth from the least of us, to the "investor class"? What do you think this is about?

Is it capitalism, or is it more appropriately described as the rule of a corporatist oligarchy?

You know, fascism is rather ill defined.

Some definitions are very strict, mentioning Italy/Germany specifically. Some mention specific policies of these governments as part of the definition. Some are more general.

One of the more general ones is this....

A social and political ideology with the primary guiding principle that the state or nation is the highest priority, rather than personal or individual freedoms.

Now...who are the supposed fascists in this thread again?

i dont know anyone, anywhere who accepts that "definition" ustwo--except perhaps yourself, and even that for purely instrumental reasons.

Ustwo, do you or your family own any securities that were artificially supported in valuation by the Fed's "prop job", of the past three days, and going back to it's interest rate reduction, "dollar killing" program, begun last september?

Have you given any thought as to who the Fed is supporting and who it is taking wealth away from? I have.......could it be....the investor class is benefiting, at the expense of the vast numbers who live "hand to mouth", paycheck to the check cashing place and then over to "the pump"?

Who do you think $3.25 per gallon motor fuel impacts more, you or you office cleaning lady? Why do you think gas is $3.25? Could it be because the dollar is impacted by the 3.25 percent express Fed interest rate cutting?

Host, you object to pension funds being protected by the government? That's who the biggest shareholders are, and that's who is getting bailed out. Pipsqueaks like me are barely a hair on the pimple on the ass of the market. Even rich people don't account for that much. It's mainly institutions, the biggest of which are the pension funds.

Roachboy, the "tendency to naturalize social inequities" that you see me doing is simply a recognition that different people are good at different things and have different priorities. One of my friends is extremely good at making money, seeing opporutnities, and he's very good at it. He's a wealthy man. I'm not nearly as focussed on money - I need to be creative - so I'm in a line of work where yes, I make a decent living, but I'll never be rich. Other people may value leisure time, or have lower risk tolerance, or avoid stress, or seek fulfillment in other ways.

There are tradeoffs everywhere, and I have enough respect for people as individuals to recognize that they are allowed to make their own choices and choose their own muse. They take the risks they find congenial, they follow the paths they find useful, and they are entitled to those. This is part of the reason why I asked in that other thread why it is that people find economic inequality so bothersome. There are plenty of inequalities between people - in terms of talent, intellect, physical abilities, attractiveness, musical talent, etc etc etc. We don't object to those. I would argue, in fact, that economic inequality is just one more kind of human diversity.

Again: I have enough respect for each individual's own sovereignty to recognize that each person is more than just the size of his/her wallet. It's not a question of someone with means being more deserving or more moral, because they're not, they're simply better at certain kinds of activities - but I think the flipside is that they are not more immoral either. And their activities do tend to benefit a lot of other people as well.

As for fascism, I find it curious that my view on economics is called right-wing, and according to the OP, tending to fascist, when my basic credo is that people should be free to follow their own paths and make their own lives as they choose -- but you and host seem to feel that my liberty and my very brain have to be put at the service and direction of others who supposedly know better than I how I should be spending my time and my money, and that the force of government should be behind that compulsion -- and that, supposedly, is enlightened and liberal.

I just don't get it. I'm a classical liberal. I don't feel a need to force other people to do things my way. But I don't want them telling me to do things their way, either.

interesting...one reason i jumped out from the education debt thing really is that i don't conflate the diversity of capabilities or talent or interests amongst populations in general with the *particular* way in which economic and cultural opportunities are distributed in the american/capitalist context. rather, i tend to see the latter as cutting across the former and imposing constraints/limitations arbitrarily--so that, say, within a particular class fraction (o why not---in bourdieu speak, the one i am of, the "dominanted fraction of the dominant class" which is the space that most folk with my educational background end up in, particularly if they also happen to consort with artist-types) you might find a particular range of capabilities and talents which have been able to achieve some degree of operational fluency (yikes) but you'd have to be kinda restricted in your view to imagine that this class fraction includes all possible folk who have or who started out having similar abilities or talents, but who--for arbitrary reasons, that is for reasons of economic position in the main--have not been able to access the background, the opportunities, the time to work with what they are able to do well and push it into new areas (new for them, new objectively, it hardly matters)--and who might not for any number of other reasons felt authorized to embark on this sort of path to begin with.

my main difference then with your position is in the relation each of us sees between a diversity of possibilities or capabilities in a population which you might think about like aristotle did, that is with economic factors excluded--so that a "good society" can be seen as one in which this diversity is able to find expression and flourish--and the capitalist mode of production, with its divisions into classes--compounded by the american-specific way of repeating this class division spatially--which is compounded by the ways in which education is funded by locality--which makes of educational opportunities the exact mirror of the class order.

i can imagine a set-up in which that correlation of educational opportunities and economic class would be reduced or eliminated, and that is what i was trying to explain above--and i got to it by taking off from your mention of debt acquired to get through law school---which (btw) i am not critical of in itself--hell, i wouldn't be playing here as i do had i not also had access to debt--but it's the idea that you have to acquire it in order to get something as basic as education that i dont agree with, that i dont understand.

so..hope this is clear.

the other riff about coercion was interesting when i started it, but i've kinda lost interest in it now, just because it seemed to lead to something more engaging. so reset. there: i pushed it.

I actually disagree that the capitalist system necessarily divides people into classes, unless you buy into the socialist/derivatively Marxian view that economic resources are destiny. There are plenty of rich boors, there are refined and cultured poor people, there are elite thinkers who make middling wages, and on and on and on. Using income to classify these people makes zero sense - it doesn't describe them and doesn't do them justice. "Class" in the economic sense often is but need not be determinative of outlook or life posture.

For instance, I consider myself to have much more in common with professors and creative types than with many of my clients. It's a matter of what sorts of things we find interesting. They drink beer and I don't - just a small datum, but it means something.

loquitur, your take on the Fed's actions since last september somehow having populist overtones is entirely opposite the information I'm sharing with you below.

I think Roosevelt described what it actually is, as reported by Time in May, 1938.

I think the vast majority of Americans would be much better off with a Fed practicing a fiscal policy that actually promoted a strong dollar, as they and Paulson claim, but that they don't fucking do....

I think the rapid short term interest rate cutting in 2001 was the single biggest catalyst for the housing valuation bubble, and now they've cut rates even faster than 2001 to 2003. I think the two espisodes of drastic rate cuts
are the biggest factor in the 68 percent decline in the dollar vs. the euro, since 2002.

I think Fed policy is intended to do what is in the best interests of the wealthiest, and what is has done to the purchasing power of the dollars is devastating economically to at least half the country's households.

I think that leaving the interest rate where it was last september, at 5.5 percent, and not allowing the four largest banks to lend up to thirty percent of their assets, (instead of the former ten percent limit) to their brokerage subsidiaries, and not nationalizing Bear Stearns last weekend, and not destroying Fannie and Freddie by forcing them to buy up hundreds of billions of dollars of MBS, would serve most of the country better than what the Fed is doing.

It should not be government policy to make it easier now to borrow. No one should take a mortgage loan until the average selling price of the average home is at a level where the average income earner can qualify for a mortgage loan by putting 20 percent "seasoned funds"....funds documented to be in an account in the applicants name for at least six months before approval of mortgage loan application, and where MTI monthly payments do not exceed 36 percent of the borrower's monthly income.

Until that is the state of things, all purchasers of homes, going forward, will likely experience home valuation depreciation. There was no sharing of profits during the price bubble phase of the 2001 to 2006, why should the losses in the collapse phase of the bubble, be put on all of us?

Why should the Fed keep weakening the dollar to perform a "prop job" for the wealthiest? Could it be that the status quo is as Roosevelt described?:
<h3>loquitur, the only thing that has changed in the last 70 years is that no US president is independent enough from the wealth and power of the wealthiest to say what Roosevelt said publicly on April 30, 1938. By that measure, we are today even closer to the fascism in the US that Roosevelt described and warned the public about.....</h3>
The Fed has assigned "NORC" to produce the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, (It probably won't release any data on wealth distribution BEFORE the November election....):

http://www.norc.org/projects/Survey+...r+Finances.htm

Host, read the stuff you're quoting. It says something slightly but importantly different from what you're saying.

And none of this has anything to do with fascism.

loquitur, you posted this:
I have a high degree of confidence that I countered your assertion effectively with this "stuff":






<h3>Concentration of wealth and corporate control then:</h3>
<h3>Concentration of wealth and corporate control more recently:</h3>
<h3>Concentration of wealth and corporate control in our own era:</h3>
....Even your denial that my response "had anything to do with fascism". If my response was so weak, you would have taken the quote from FDR apart....
you didn't even respond to it.

You said securities ownership is diversified, I've shown persuasively that it was not.....70 years ago, nor is it now.....

So please give me a more detailed response. Was FDR wrong about what fascism is? Am I wrong maintaining that the top one percent wealthiest are still the "controlling private power" that FDR was describing? If they own two thirds of the stock and 93 percent of the bonds, as of 2004, isn't the Fed protecting their interests as it rapidly lowers interest rates and fails to promote a strong dollar?

Concentration of power is oligarchy, not fascism. Nationalistic, heavy governmental control of economic power (with or without nominal private property) and subordination of individual rights to the collective (usually the state) under a "wise" leader, usually with militaristic or expansionist tendencies, is fascism.

I didn't say stock ownership is diversified; I said it's dominated by institutions, the largest of which is pension funds. Nothing you posted is contrary to that, Host. The fact is that most of the population either directly or indirectly has a stake in healthy financial markets -- their insurance company is heavily invested, their 401(k) is too, so is their pension fund, so is their bank.

As for FDR, throwing around the word "fascism" apparently was fashionable back then. Bear in mind that the critics of the New Deal insisted it was fascistic because it involved massive governemnt control of the economy and huge infringements of property rights. So of course FDR needed his own counter-response. Rhetoric is cheap. It is now, always has been.

As I said up above with the quote from Orwell, fascism doesn't mean "things I don't like." It's a set of variously implemented principles, and the free market sure ain't one of them.

I am trying to to write and send this from the Opera mobile browser I dnloaded onto my wife's cell. Consider that in 1935 the mccormack dickstein committee report on the coup Gen Butler described in his testimony had indeed been funded and planned by the men also named in my last post. Butler the committee and the press all called it a fascist coup. All the descriptions of stock ownership i posted contradicts what you believe.

loquitur, the shame of it is, if you were not absolutley adament that you already "know what you know", you could use your above average access to research tools (such as <a href="http://law.lexisnexis.com/">lexis-nexis</a>) to "flesh out" and confirm for yourself, the information I am sharing on this forum.

<h3>1933, loquitur, just 20 Morgan partners, serving on 167 boards of major corporations</h3>....Morgan, an investment bank, a year later, implicated in a fascist coup planned against the US government, a plan that seems to have actually been financed and seriously researched and entertained:

Fast forward to just a week ago, loquitur:

The quote in the first box is from this WSJ article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1205...googlenews_wsj
Fed Races to Rescue Bear Stearns
In Bid to Steady Financial System
Storied Firm Sees
Stock Plunge 47%;
J.P. Morgan Steps In
By KATE KELLY, GREG IP and ROBIN SIDEL
March 16, 2008 9:50 a.m.

Whether you believe it or not, the concentration of ownership and control of 2/3 of all US traded stock shares and 93 percent of the bonds are, after seventy years, still owned by the wealthiest one to five percent.

The Fed demonstrated that it's priority is the major banks and brokerages, and the wealthiest folk who own them, and not the taxpayer.

The five largest brokerages all probably would have been crushed by their incestuous counterparty relationships, last friday, all insolvent, and immediate chaper 7 cases, by law, with rapid liquidation, by auction, of their assets, then the proceeds of those auctions would rapidly be dispersed to their creditors.

Instead, the Fed and Hank Paulson decided that JP Morgan would live and Bear Stearns would die.

The Fed opened the discount window to the brokerages, which are leveraged as high as 40X assets, while the banks, by law, are leveraged at 7X max. The Fed did not put the brokerages under the supervision of banking regulators, or require that they deleverage, as a condition of their discount window borrowing privileges.

Bear Stearns notified authorities on thrusday evening, March 13, that it had become insolvent, yet the SEC and NYSE allowed Bear shares to trade all day on firday the 14th.

How many rules were bent, laws violated, in the scenario I described in the preceding paragraph.

My reading brings me to the conclusion that the brokerages will use their low interest rate access to borrow money to lend at rock bottom rates as "bait" to raid clients from the brokergae divisions of the major commercial bamks.

loquitur , it is no work to dismiss all of this information, as you did with the FDR reference to fascism. The players have not changed, and the "game" has not changed in 70 years.

The difference then, though, compared to now, was FDR then vs. these two now, who should be attacking the Fed and the criminals who run Wall Street:

The Fed is now openly colluding with the criminals it was supposed to regulate, and the two presidential candidates most likley to win the presidency, instead of announcing that Wall Street crime and greed has put the currency and the entire economy on the brink, and that the people are going to go to war against Wall Street, are instead, "DARLINGS of Wall Street".

Post from the wife's cell more often...

Yes Eugenics was popular among many people in the early 1900's including many who are considered heros by their nations today, lest someone assume it is only the Nazi's and their ilk who supported such policies.

But their mistakes do not mean science has no place in understanding human behavior or what sort of political systems mesh well with what we have been evolved to do.

I would hope that the tens and perhaps 100 million killed by their own governments in the name of communism would show that regardless of what the theory behind it is, in practice it does not work well with human nature and results in the most horrific and oppressive form of government to ever blight the human race.

Perhaps Matt Ridley was not the best choice for running his fathers bank, I really haven't looked into that aspect of his life, but you on the one hand tell me to read Richard Dawkins as some authority that can teach me the folly of my ways (something you will not find in his works) and then when I mention an author who tackled this problem directly you give an ad hominem attack on the author. This author in fact contributed a chapter to one of Dawkins more recent books.

Funny how that all worked out.

Host, I do more than enough research, thank you. And I have my feet on the ground and I deal in the real world. I don't have to obsess about the things I'd like to be true but aren't.

Bottom line: if you think the economy, including asset distribution, is the same today as it was in the 1930s, you go right ahead.

ya know, loquitur, one of us is posting in an arrogant manner in these exchanges, and one in an ignorant manner. Which is which? Hint....only one party is doing all of the work to make this into the form of a continuing "discussion":

Is the distribution of debt currently, less equitable than it was in the 30s?


How about in the distribution of the profits and the losses?

loquitur, CONSIDER THAT THERE WAS NO TALK OF "CAPPING", or EVEN TAXING EXCESSIVE PROFITS DURING THE GROWTH PHASE OF THE MOST RECENT SPECULATIVE BUBBLE IN REAL ESTATE AND IN THE ISSUANCE OF THE PAPER THAT FINANCED IT:



Footnote [12], above is referenced in the highlighted area in the excerpts of the following article. Can anyone argue that the highlighted area in the 2nd NY Times article excerpt above, does not mesh well with:
<h3>What would have happened if the Fed and Treasury had not nationalized Bear Stearns, beginning on March 14, and instead stood by and watched insolvent Bear pull down it's closest counterparties,</h3> JP Morgan Chase, Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, and possibly Citi Group and maybe another "big four" bank?

Would the ensuing losses and liquidation auctions have been the natural reaction to the excesses that fueled the Real Estate and CDO markets? What did we get, instead, because of the Fed "prop job"?

What are the negative consequences of a period of unavailability of mortgage lending, or of the "hit" to the portfolios of the wealthy clients of the firms named above? They made obscene amounts of money as the bubble inflated, even as their income tax and inheritance tax obligations were being slashed by the conservative politicians that they financed into office.

Does it do anyone any good to be able to borrow easily now, to finance a home property purchase that will decline appreciably in value over the next several years? Will we experience 18 years of SLOW unwinding and decline, as Japan has, directly as a consequence of government interference, bailouts, and official protection of insolvent banks, disguised as "going concerns"? Isn't borrowing too much, and overleveraging, the two abuses that caused the current instability?

Isn't the cost of the government attempting to prop this mess up, too great a price for taxpayers to bear in exchange for their continued ability to borrow to buy or refinance still gorssly overpriced assets?

Isn't what happened with Bear Stearns, really about the influence of a bunch of rich pigs and their revolving door realtionships, Ruben was Treasury Sect'y and is now Citi's CEO, and Paulson was Goldman's CEO and is now Treasury Sect'y. Aren't the financial health of their wealthy friends, their actual top priority? What the fuck are they doing using OUR taxes and future debt obligations, to shore up these other corrupt Wall Street pigs?

Host, it has nothing to do with being arrogant. I just find most of your "research" irrelevant. You have an axe to grind and you do "research" to support arguments you already have in your head. Most of it has zero to do with what the actual economy looks like. I read newspapers and practice law wtih real live business people and have a pretty good idea of what is going on, and it looks nothing like what you're posting.

I don't come here to "win" arguments because there is nothing to win. This is a hobby. When it starts becoming work I'll stop posting because I have plenty of real work to do. So I'm not going to go through the Statistical Abstract of the US to "prove" what I'm saying, nor am I going to start larding my posts with long quotes from historical sources to "prove" a point that the posts don't prove. If you really think the country is run by a conspiracy of robber barons and it makes you feel better to think that, there's nothing I can say that will dissuade you because you're seriously invested in that thesis. I see from personal experience that it's not true, but you're perfectly free to believe otherwise.

loquitur, I posted the opinions above on March 3, 2007. What were you and your "real live business people" paying attention to, and predicting, 55 weeks ago?

What have all the "real live business people" on Wall Street and at C'wide's HQ in Simi, CA, been thinking and doing to get themselves in such dire straits as to whether they remain solvent? The answer is....they didn't handle "things", did they? They botched things up to the point that they have become "wards of the state"?

You've done no job of credibly discussing the points I have made....it's now degraded to what amounts to a personal attack.....the arrogance evident in your last response speaks volumes.

You are an attorney with no passion for argument. Why did you even bother to make your last post?

They (the people at Bear) made bad decisions, and a lot of them - including some people I know - are materially poorer because of it. By materially poorer, I mean that they have lost the vast bulk of their personal assets - just went poof. There were lots of people (myself included) who saw the real estate price run-up as a bubble and figured it was just a matter of time before it burst. I didn't know which sector would blow first, but it was clear something would.

I had this conversation with other lawyers and consultants numerous times in the past couple of years. I'm old enough now to have been through three shakeouts, and each one was driven by pretty much the same thing - people thinking short-term, and trading current fees for future risk. In the late 80s and early 90s it was junk bonds (and to a lesser degree, real estate); in the early 00s it was tech stocks; and now it's subprime mortgages and pooled pass-through securities.

My point is that this stuff is cyclical, and there is always a shakeout. As I said, the people I know at Bear are taking a huge hit because of this. Other people are too. The question is whether there is anything to be done about it, and I remain to be convinced that this sort of phenomenon is either repealable, or if repealable, only through heavyhandedness that will stifle economic growth (and thus should be left alone).

I made my last post because you appear to be trying to "shape the battlefield" by establishing rules for argument here that favor your method of argumentation. That's why you keep saying i haven't answered you "credibly" or am "arrogant." I have said a number of times that I respect the passion you bring to this and the amount of work that you're willing to do, but -- it is massively unfair of you to expect everyone else to either do the same or be branded "not credible." I simply don't accept that I have to do things your way in order to be credible - I have neither the hours nor the inclination to spend my time hunting around the net for articles and blog posts to throw up there. As I said, this is a hobby. If it stops being interesting and begins to be work; if it stops being an amusement and becomes a source of stress, I'm simply going to stop. And I don't accept that you have either the right or the power to prescribe for me or anyone else what is "credible" or legitimate. Different people have different approaches to things, and different ways of seeing things, and your way isn't the only credible way. If you think that's a personal attack on you, well, I don't know what to say.

Thank you, loquitur your post is sincere, too rare a thing generally around this forum. I have been trying to keep my posts OT (I mean...ON topic !)and this thread is about fascism. I thought I was making a fair attempt and I guess time will tell.

Actually this too is a genetic relatedness question.

Males in the colony will be from the outside, they are less related to the sisters than anyone else in the hive. Ant colonies are a good example for the weakness of asexual reproduction, because if any place should have it, its an insect colony.

So far there is only one 'animal' with long term asexual success, and its a bit of a mystery as to why they have it when almost every other asexual species eventually dies out.

But I digress, I think this thread is about calling people like us, you know small government, less regulation, economic freedom loving, fascists.

Ustwo, if there was to be "name" calling, directed toward you, it would be done more appropriately at the <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rubber+stamp">rubber stamp</a> thread, but as of yet, no one has authored a thread on that subject:

....and not a fucking peep out of you...

...and again, in the aftermath of what is described above, not a fucking peep out of you...

Maybe the most blatant example; a declaration by "your president", on the same day that the Wall Street bailout "Op" was going down:
Your president, the leader you have consistantly "rubber stamped" in every way, was lamenting that he would love to help bailout homeowners, but...

No terms in the weekend bailout of the criminals who caused the destablization of the "model" US economic system were too sweet, too excessive, too contrary to what Bush had said made it impossible to "bail out" homeowners:
Total hypocrisy and blatant preference toward transference of taxpayer obligated new debt to perform the bailout of the economic and politcally connected elite, which as Bush said on March 14, would do exactly what Bush said should not be done for homeowners, because:
....and not a fucking peep out of you, ever....in opposition to any of it, that I can recall, posted anywhere on this forum.

As soon as people start mentioning genetics and relating any and all of biology to politics, I believe such people should be forced to assume the voice of General Ripper:

The essence of our systems lies within the purity of our .

The whole of that beautiful line of genetic/social/political logic should be copied verbatim to the humour section.

Yes, it has a second "U".

Actually, fascism might be in the eye of the beholder. This is an interesting blog post from Shannon Love, who is one of the bloggers at the classical liberal/libertarianish site Chicago Boyz. The title is "The Left’s Deal with the Devil." His thesis probably needs to be fleshed out to be more and might be the kernel of a good doctoral dissertation were it not for the fact that it uses the "f" word. Using the "f" word makes it a bit incendiary, but that word is in the air a bit these days, so I guess he might just be responding to that. The lesson I take away from this is that it's possible to find fascistic implications in lots of things, and that the people howling loudest about fascism often have some kinds fascistic baggage in their own backyards that they don't even see because they are so intent on bludgeoning the other side.

Anyway, here is an excerpt to give you an idea:

identity politics is a huge problem.
whether you can really connect it to fascism in isolation is not obvious, however. using a factoid-level approach to mussolini is a not terribly new way to try to make this rickety equation operate--it amounts to a recapitulation of his political trajectory and a little tautology built into the sentence (identity in marx, identity in the--one-dimensional--fascim he made--the assumption, which is asserted in the sentence, not argued---is the consistency in the notion of identity across positions.)

the account of identity politics that you have here really doesn't say anything about what they are--where they come from, what they were supposed to do--but "left" identity politics--which is mostly an academic affair--was consistently pitched as an oppositional politics, emphasizing the particular AS OVER AGAINST more homogenizing patterns of solidarity building. the writer skips over or never understood that part.

so at bottom, i don't see a coherent understanding of fascism in that piece.
i see an interesting kernel of an argument about the problematic role of bourgeois conceptions of identity in mass politics--but there's so much one-dimensional stuff around it that i would think it'd require another writer to make it work.

A very quick look over what this particular person has written about on the site you mention (Chicago Boyz? Chicago school? Ultra-monetarists? LIBERAL?) reveals this little nugget of wisdom:

(link)

I would contend that far from being a candidate for the kernel of a document which should substantially add to the weight of human knowledge (doctorate), either or both of these should be treated as exactly what they are... unsubstantiated, ill thought out rants of a slightly fevered ego.

His assertions about England (unitary ethnic? he thinks all white folks are the same eh? Go to one of the other states represented in Westminster and start calling them ethnically united with the English and see how quickly your blood flows...) in particular are so insanely incorrect that it should make people question anything this chap says without a reference.

Unfortunately though, it seems like there is a pattern here. Very long chains of non sequiturs and flat out inaccuracies passed off as hardened fact which directly relate the starting point to the final conclusion in some inane, tenuous way.

Sorry. loquitur, this meme, in the first sentence of the piece that your linked to:
.... is nothing more than a contemporary conservative, disinformation "Op". If you believe it to be true, why not revise Mussolini's wiki bio, including it, citing it, and then defending it. It is a extremist description....who would have an incentive to create and distribute such a strong declaration, backed by the tenuous support of the fact that Mussolini was a socialist before, WWI, and expelled from that party. He grew up poor, one of 14 children.

Did you check for supporting sources for this?
Here is some "balance":

Host, read the flippin' post. It says Mussolini moved from socialism and developed fascism. I didn't think that was a particularly controversial historical point. The controversial point these days is how much socialism was imported into Fascist thought, and how significant the imported elements were.

But please, deal with my post instead of latching onto a peripheral point.

I think there's a misunderstanding here... Not every kind of collective effort is essentially socialist or socialist derivative in nature...

The structure of the army is highly organised, controlled with the will of the individual suppressed for the will of the authority or collective goal, objective or aim enforced through 'military discipline', conditioning reflexes, propaganda, etc.

Are armed forces expressions of socialist ideology?

I seem to remember history making extensive reference to that well-known branch of liberals and socialists, The Roman Legions.

Is it possible that, with extensive exposure to how an entire society can be mobilised for war through an armed forces model as happened in 1914-18, with many positive results in planned economic expansion, social cohesion, etc, etc, Fascists might have seen no reason to end the mobilisation?

There is no denying that socialist thinking and the 'collectivism' of the military have cross-pollinated, but to my mind at least they are nowhere near the same.

The first sentence is not a "peripheral point"....it twists a commonplace, at the time, 1914 and earlier socialist party membership and employment as a jounralist at a socialist publication, into:
...and, as I have hinted at, it is another "right centric" attempt to rewrite the actual history:


loquitur, when I heard Jonah Goldberg being interviewed about his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0385511841/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1">new book</a> on Salem Comm. radio recently, I chuckled to myself as I drove along, listening to Goldberg's points, wondering if anyone really subscribed to his upside down take of where fascism resides on the political spectrum.

I am not laughing now, because, if you believe there is some merit to Goldberg's pov, I have to accept that the REAL RIGHT, buys his lines in the latest "Mighty Wurlitzer" rendition..."fascism comes from the left", hook, line, and sinker. That is sobering, because the idea that we have any common ground becomes shakier with each new discovery of how divided our perceptions are.

If you want to read some biographies of Mussolini, go right ahead. But you'll find that he spent most of his youth as a Marxist/socialist, then decided in 1915 that Italy should get involved in WW1 - thereby switching his prior position, which got him tossed out of the socialist ranks. That switch to nationalistic ardor was the kernel for the Fascist doctrine he later developed and protected.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the thesis of the post that I put up.

tisonlyi, your post just illustrates my point that it's possible to see fascism everywhere, if only you want to. It also means that people should be very, very, very careful about tossing the "f" word around, because almost every popular modern movement has certain elements traceable to the same roots as the fascists.

loquitor:

in terms of being careful about the usage of the term "fascism" i agree with you---earlier in this thread, i outlined a pretty comprehensive definition of the term and i don't use it unless the criteria are fulfilled.

what has happened in the thread more generally is a series of definitions, most of which are so vague as to be useless, which demonstrate the other point--which is perfectly obvious if you know the history of usage of the term "fascist"--which is that it is also a bit of invective that gets drained of any specificity and so functions basically to say "i dont like x."

what's annoying is that the actual definitions of the term that have been put up here have been fucking ignored.

i don't think anyone did it intentionally, but it is beyond irritating to find the thread at this impasse when i, for one, had actually devoted (wasted as it turns out) the time to try to put together an operational definition of the ideology.

so i see the thread as a self-fulfilling little exercise which demonstrates the persistence of the second meaning, as a bit of invective.

but that it CAN be used and IS being used in a way that drains it of content does not mean that there is no ideological signified that CAN be referenced by way of the term "fascism"--the is obviously a considerable body of scholarly work on the ideology--i know alot of that stuff--and when i use the term, i do it with that in mind. and there are close parallels between contemporary american populist conservatism and strains of ideological fascism in the france of the 1930s--poujadisme in france of the 1950s---- italian fascism in its more corporatist form--->one *can* restrict a conversation to a technical understanding of the term and demonstrate the parallels point by point.
an elegant, simply demonstration that points to ugly and disturbing conclusions it is, too.


it is also possible to dissolve this demonstration by piling up enough bullshit around the category so that the technical meanings ascribed the term by people who have actually done the work to figure out its specific ideological parameters get buried.

that is what is happening here.

it's hard not to wonder why that would be the case.

'just'

I think you can trace the roots of anything to anything else at some point... after all there is nothing new under the sun.

It follows then, that if you want to be cautious and prescriptive about the use of 'fascism', you have to be careful about 'socialism', 'communism', 'capitalism', etc.

Debasing the terms to the level of insults seems to me somewhat dangerous. Removing all serious meaning from the terminology and allowing some dangerous ideas to sneak from under the rock of the, now, epithet. As dangerous as seeking to prove that there is ONE TRUE PATH.

After all, if there was ONE TRUE PATH, what price wouldn't you pay to achieve it?

I think you know that though. it's late here. ;)