9/18 Open Thread: What's Broken & Who Broke it??

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borked

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Damn, what a topic. That could be anything, the climate, the economy, our economic system, our political system, that cheap meat thermometer I ordered online or the expensive gadget that I studies and pondered and sweated over before choosing, which, nonetheless, quickly went terminal. Digression/Explanation first - I get a ton of stuff sent to me, by magazines, by news media, by NGOs, even by people I know, and now by pocket. This is good because I do two OTs per week which is 104 per annum and I need topics. (I skate by on Monday by throwing some history against the wall interspersed with snide references and remarks and associated music, but that only carries one so far. (I could emulate the justly famous JS by swapping out the history and instead inserting today's news, but I'm too frequently afoot and afield to stay current, and I really lack his truly encyclopedic now ledge of things musical, damn.)) So I got myself a pocket. I can stash things there that will be used on these essays, or things that might be, or shit that I can't get to right now, or things that I need to read at least one more time, but its temporary, short-term, not like maybe evernote, dropbox, keep, or drive. It came, when I got it with some newbie freebies, including e-mails of the most frequently pocketed stuff, which has a surprisingly high (for a cynic) ratio of what I consider to be content to what I consider to be fluff. So, when hard up for a topic, I check my pocket and see what's there.

So, I'm a puzzle type of guy, ya know; "what structure having but one edge and one surface can, nonetheless, exist on only 3 or more dimensions?" "How is a Raven like a Writing Desk?" So, here I bring forth two articles -- Why Nothing Works Anymore (The Atlantic, February 23, 2017, by Ian Bogost; https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-nothing-works-anymore ) and Boeing's travails show what's wrong with modern capitalism, Matt Stoller, the Guardian, (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/11/boeing-capitalism-... ). These, I assure you, are related, but how? Mr. Bogost discusses an assortment of modern, updated, everyday devices that, upon reflection, are disasters. Self flushing toilets that flush prematurely and seemingly at random, disconcerting if nothing else, and prone to waste a lot of water. Pseudo-automatic paper towel dispensers, that proffer insufficient quantities of product, requiring the patron to go for seconds and thirds and eventually more than needed, wasting paper. Need we discuss "auto-correct" or those telephone menus suggesting that you press one for this, two for that, and on and on and on. These things all, to some extent, blow up, and inure us to the expectation that such things do and should be expected to blow up. He explains that this is because these things are not intended to serve the users, but to serve other purposes, all in the form of reducing the need for human labor and/or intervention.

The author introduced the term precarity, which was new to me, and, thankfully, defined it.

“Precarity” has become a popular way to refer to economic and labor conditions that force people—and particularly low-income service workers—into uncertainty. Temporary labor and flexwork offer examples. That includes hourly service work in which schedules are adjusted ad-hoc and just-in-time, so that workers don’t know when or how often they might be working. For low-wage food service and retail workers, for instance, that uncertainty makes budgeting and time-management difficult. Arranging for transit and childcare is difficult, and even more costly, for people who don’t know when—or if—they’ll be working.

And this, really, is what these products are about. They save labor costs by eliminating given quantities of labor hours, but also by creating a situation where people will wind up working for less and less as they scramble and scuffle for ever fewer jobs. Much more, including the self feeding of the world of borked things by the rush to fix or supplant them by introducing yet more technology based on the false goal of electro-mechanical self-sufficiency. I cannot do it justice (legally) and highly recommend that you read it for yourselves, it isn't that long and presents a lot of ideas. All that's missing is some Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

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And that, my friends, is an invisible segue into the next article. The subhead Deregulation means a company once run by engineers is now in the thrall of financiers and its stock remains high even as its planes fall from the sky in conjunction with the opening paragraph damn near says it all, so, on to said topic paragraph:

The plight of Boeing shows the perils of modern capitalism. The corporation is a wounded giant. Much of its productive capacity has been mothballed following two crashes in six months of the 737 Max, the firm’s flagship product: the result of safety problems Boeing hid from regulators.

The article is, nonetheless, worth a read and even a close read. The author, Matt Stoller, quotes journalist Jerry Useem regarding the fact that “Boeing has always been less a business than an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” and then chronicles its decline into a soulless profits driven body that really has trouble designing and building aircraft, let alone delivering them on time. In doing so, he uses Boeing as a metaphor for so many other corporations, such as GE, now largely reduced to distributing Chinese light bulbs and money lending, and the US economy as a whole. Key problems are highlighted, such as consolidations and monopolies (thanks, Bill), and the sloth and corruption that result. Politics and politicization, also a product of monopolies, especially for Boeing, a major defense contractor, parasitically gorging itself at the public trough. The concern for profits regardless of products and production. The elimination of skilled production oriented employees (and their replacement by mba toting gofers and toadies).Deregulation (thanks again, Bill), and, of course vulture capitalists private equity firms, pirates and looters all who asset strip their prey in order to pay obscene bonuses to insiders and indulge in stock buy backs to enhance their power and distributive shares and who are quite ready to bequeath the rest of us the eventual useless, empty, abandoned and bankrupt husk a la Radio Shack, K-Mart, and oh so many others.

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And there, in the modern financialized corporation, in the finance and financier driven economy that no longer does or even can deliver products that work and work properly, we find the answer to the question that Yeats so presciently posed in his second verse:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Help me out here, did not somebody once warn or assert that the internal contradictions inherent in capitalism, the ugly soulless drive to reward capital and it alone with all excess value created by extraction and production, would someday bring it crashing down? Did that really happen and did we ignore it, or am I imagining things?

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Hola campesinos! Quelle hombre dice da kine esos?

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Title Image is borked, a public domain image modified by enhydra lutris and is hereby declared public domain if not already by law

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It's an open thread, Jim, so have at it. The floor is yours
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Lookout's picture

Did that really happen and did we ignore it, or am I imagining things?

Capitalism ate itself and turned to crap. Not to mention the eminent collapse of the US dollar.

Last week you wrote about sleep, and this weekend I caught a piece about vitamin D and deep sleep. I wish there was a transcript cause it's a bit over an hour...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74F22bjBmqE
Here's the Dr website https://drgominak.com/

Anyway what fascinated me is she suggests sexual identity is created during our deep (REM) sleep. When people can't get into deep sleep they don't identify with their gender, and even if they go trans, they still have not solved their sleep issue. She also suggested autism and other issues may be sleep related.

A week late, but really interesting.

Have a good one!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

enhydra lutris's picture

@Lookout
is alleged to require loads of vitamin D? Out here there are ample sun days, though sometimes you need to find wind shelter to get your shirt off. Assuming adequate diet, it isn't a real strain. As I aged and "grew up", especially with the move north, the ratio of shirt on to shirt off days decreased, but, all in all, I figure that I've still been short-sleeved more waking hours than not, though, sadly, far too many hours indoors. However, how much sun time does one really need anyway, something to look into I guess.

Have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris
And a jacket in restaurants in summer because the A/C is too cold.
Unless you go the other way like my wife (and many women) and complain that it's too hot with the thermostat at 68

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

edg's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness

She's 63 and long past menopause, but she still gets hot flashes followed by chills. We're constantly bumping the thermostat up and down or turning fans on and off. Some of it's from the meds she takes for RA while some is just age and hormonal changes. Me & the dogs don't mind the hot flashes, as we like it cool, but dealing with the chills is not as pleasant.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness
wearing long sleeves on a day like today.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris
And be thankful you can enjoy your restaurant meal instead of shivering and gobbling your food so you can get outside faster.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

magiamma's picture

et al

I was on a panel for the opening day of the Climate Strike week along with others from our SC Climate Coalition which hopefully will move forward together. The first question was what is the cause of Climate Change. Duh, I think to myself. Capitalism. Orchestrated consumption of the Earth's resources. So. There.

Here is a Dropbox link to the photos from the Headline Forest that was installed yesterday and will be happening again Thursday Evening. Over 50 people holding headlines. A whole block was filled with people and their headlines.

Here is a link to all the photos from the action:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/taa7zzccisfdepl/AABmaZo9hadvV7vyhioezXJZa?dl=...

Maybe y'all could do this in your city too. Thanks for the ot and have a good one...

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Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook

enhydra lutris's picture

@magiamma
good action. I wonder if that could be done flash mob style, with participants just suddenyu popping up here and there. Signs and seats would be a problem, though, I guess.

Thanks for what you do and have a great one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

magiamma's picture

@enhydra lutris
doing Flash mobs. ::)

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Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook

smiley7's picture

Thanks for the Hunter piece, yesterday. Busy packing, traveling today. Your essay brought Sandburg to mind.

CHICAGO

HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

~ Carl Sandburg

Have a good one.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@smiley7
piece was sort of a given, can't say "my pleasure", but happy to do it given the circumstances.

Have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

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enhydra lutris's picture

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@QMS
you have a good one two three and fore
what are we fighting for?
don't ask me i don't give a damn
next stop was viet nam
how did that work out?

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Wally's picture

Help me out here, did not somebody once warn or assert that the internal contradictions inherent in capitalism, the ugly soulless drive to reward capital and it alone with all excess value created by extraction and production, would someday bring it crashing down? Did that really happen and did we ignore it, or am I imagining things?

Was it . . . Karl Biden?

Edit/playing around with reducing size of photos

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enhydra lutris's picture

@Wally
the picture was truly something else. Yeah, that must've been the guy, thanks for jogging my memory. Karl Biden, leading us into the future stronger together. Hah!

Have a great one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

eating itself. It does seem to be broken. I just read an article about WeWork. It doesn't. It doesn't work. Another broken thing. However, its CEO is making out like a bandit.

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/09/jpmorgan-chase-has-billions-in-cr...

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@randtntx
FDR style managed capitalism did pretty well until "business was unshackled" i.e. unbridled greed was let loose.

The Cold war is what destroyed that system. Wars in Korea and Vietnam, because "Communism" and selling the American worker to Japan to prevent Communism there.
Selling to China was just unregulated capitalist greed.

It's the fairy tale of the goose that laid the golden eggs all over again.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness FDR put us on life support. Then the big guys decided we don't get life support because they wanted it all. Now the whole thing is shot through with corruption. It's just one big diseased mess.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@randtntx

one of two things:

1)FDR was a capitalist, and far from a saint, but he was smart enough to know that the system couldn't survive without limiting what powerful people could do, because otherwise those powerful people would themselves end up destroying their own institutions and the nation itself. (Not a difficult idea, and one fundamental to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, to say nothing of civilization itself.) The fact that the powerful people were business owners and financiers, the darlings of capitalism, did not change that fact. He was smart enough to know it, got some help from an erudite expert and a bunch of highly competent staffers, and voila! you have a New Deal and the so-called golden age of capitalism.

2)FDR was a capitalist, and far from a saint, but he was smart enough to know that the system couldn't survive without limiting what powerful people could do, because otherwise there would be an old-fashioned revolution, either of the populist working-class type or the semi- or pseudo-populist middle-class type that started the nation in the first place. Therefore, although many of his fellow capitalist aristocrats resented it heartily, he imposed limits on them. Some of them were dumb enough to hate him for it, when he was actually saving their asses. This continues till today. FDR got some help from an erudite expert and a bunch of highly competent staffers, and voila! you have a New Deal and a so-called golden age of capitalism which some particularly bad apples in the capitalist aristocracy heartily resented and plotted to destroy at their earliest convenience. Once the Civil Rights movement and the environmental movement of the sixties happened, as well as the anti-colonialist-war movement, and it became clear that the government would listen to a mobilized populace part of the time, rather than automatically obeying the ruling class, business owners and financiers freaked the hell out, decided the sky was falling, and went along with the bad apples who had wanted to tear the whole thing down since FDR and his administrations first conceived it. They spent ten years, more or less, planning the takedown of--well, of the entire system of rules, regulations, laws, customs, and morality that undergirded the New Deal republic America had become and the Great Society republic it was in the process of becoming. After ten years or so, they began to execute their plan, and continued to do so for roughly another fifteen years, after which there was little chance anyone would be able to challenge their rule ever again. Once entrenched, they used their power to loot the economy, embroil America in continual war for (their) profit, destroy that old silly notion of human rights, rewrite the legal system to be both fascist and subservient to them, and condition the American people to accept all this as normal.

It's only the last part that has caused them any trouble, and they're doing far better on that front since 2016.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

TheOtherMaven's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

and could be both/and.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@TheOtherMaven

That started to occur to me on re-reading what I wrote.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
Did not exist until college deferments were ended. As long as it was proles being shot, it was all okay. The movement would be better named the i-dont-want-MY-ass-shot off movement.

There is no mass outcry today because there is no draft. It's someone else's ass being shot off.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

enhydra lutris's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness
leadership and the participants in the anti-war movement were, in fact, students. I was among them. Some were also aged out of consideration for the draft but were nonetheless heavily involved, including a ton of Quakers and, at least in Berkeley/Oakland/San Francisco, a lot of Lutherans. Both those slaughtered and those merely wounded at Kent State were students at an anti-war protest, fwiw.

Parallel to the anti-war movement and protests there was a substantial stop the draft movement with concomitant protests devoted to the idea that nobody should go to these wars under duress, if at all. The 1967 "Stop The Draft Week" in Oakland was largely a project of UC Berkeley students, which did a major part of the organizing and planning and provided a lot of the bodies. It completely tied up Oakland's downtown on more than one day and drew a lot of attention to the cause nationally, especially when the cops rioted and brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@enhydra lutris

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal FDR was a smart guy. He also had a smart wife and some really great people on his team. Among them Francis Perkins. But as Marx points out, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. What FDR really did was overcome the immediate economic crisis without solving any systemic problems except to mitigate them and as we now know, only temporarily. He also prevented riots and bloodshed in the streets with the end result that riots in the streets today are out of the question.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@randtntx

Though his changes were certainly too far-reaching for his fellow aristocrats, who hated him on that account (and they really did; that part wasn't all folderol/campaign speeches.)

The problem with the New Deal is that it is a deal: by definition something that only works if everybody keeps their word. What happens when the rich want to welch on the deal?

the-reagan-show.jpg

BTW, is "welch" on the deal really a slur against the Welsh?

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

TheOtherMaven's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

"welsh" (or "welch") on a deal
"gyp" somebody
"coon's age" (doesn't mean raccoons)
"jew" someone down (that one's mostly obsolete, fortunately)
get one's "Irish" up (get mad and/or start a fight)
and most infamously "Indian giver" (clearly projection from dishonest white-eyes)

And those are only the ones I can think of offhand.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

@TheOtherMaven

Very poorly understood. Giving, in other cultures, meant an offering to further relations. When a gift was given back, it was the highest praise for the gift. The receiver valued the the gift, so it was given back to the sender as a thank-you. Respecting the nature of the gift.

What was pounded into the kindergarten brain?
Indian giver -- meaning a weak end exchange.

Makes the whole genocide procedure valid.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@QMS

Makes the whole genocide procedure valid.

Nothing could do that.

There's not much that could even fake doing that, apart from religion. Or, possibly, nationalism, though that one would have been difficult to sell even to the colonists.

"Well, these people here are a threat to Britain! Yeah, the ones with the bows and arrows and spears, who have no boats big or strong enough to get across the ocean..."

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@TheOtherMaven @TheOtherMaven

on a grape juice company.

Just sayin'

Wink >

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@TheOtherMaven

for talking about somebody gyping somebody else out of something.

I had no idea that it had anything to do with the Romany. But got multiple rants from somebody who held their honor dear.

Even after I'd apologized and said "Gee, I didn't know, guess I won't use that again."

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
So it might be a better analogy to say that it only works if nobody is palming cards.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Wow. I never knew that.

Not to be a jerk, but how do you know that? I just re-read the speech, and it's not clear to me which kind of "deal" he's talking about.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
My understanding has long been that the phrase "new deal" had been in currency for quite a while, originating in card games, where it is common for someone at the table to announce "new deal!" at the end of a hand, or -- more significantly -- in the event of a botched deal.

In this source, the meaning of Mark Twain's "original" (?) usage is not unambiguous, though he is talking in terms of a business arrangement, so maybe he was thinking about a business deal. On the other hand, the contemporary (of FDR) cartoonist clearly thought of the expression in terms of a hand of cards, and Merriam Webster says, "from the supposed resemblance to the situation of freshness and equality of opportunity afforded by a fresh deal in a card game".

Meanwhile, Dictionary.com claims that the term originally became a political catchphrase during Andrew Jackson's presidency, something I was unable to corroborate; another source that I found and then lost asserted that its earliest printed use was in the early 1830s (which fits the Jackson story); but neither of those sources provided any kind of citation or any information about the sense in which the word "deal" was used.

FDR almost certainly got it, directly or indirectly, from a 1932 book titled, A New Deal, by a guy named Stuart Chase; Chase originally used the phrase in an article he wrote for The New Republic. I haven't located that original article, in which he perhaps elucidated on the metaphor; surprisingly, in the book he uses the phrase only once, about halfway through; he does refer to "the terms of that deal", which again sounds more like a business deal. I'm quoting at length just so everybody can be suitably bummed out by how little has changed.

The present signs suggest that the bankers of the world are bent on suicide. At every stage they have been unwilling to adopt a sufficiently drastic remedy. And by now matters have been allowed to drift so far that it has become extraordinarily difficult to find any way out. ... It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances and to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Lifelong practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men. It is so much their stock-in-trade that their position should not be questioned, that they do not even question it themselves until it is too late. Like the honest citizens they are, they feel a proper indignation at the perils of the wicked world in which they live — when the perils mature; but they do not foresee them. A bankers' conspiracy! The idea is absurd. I only wish there were one. So if they are saved, it will be, I expect, in their own despite.
In Summary
We have chronicled some of the outstanding facts of the world depression; examined the course of the business cycle, and enumerated what appear to be its major causes. The primary cause is neglect of the mechanism; the failure to control it from the top; failure to ask what an economic system is for. The business cycle has been a parasite on the industrial revolution, and will continue so to be until this ques- tion is answered. In addition to the downswing of the "normal major cycle" (there is fine irony in the term), the year 1930 in the United States found itself encumbered with the secular trend, and the minor cycle; with a multitude of imbalances fostered by the War; with the quite mad phenomenon of the Big Bull Market; with the legacy of high pressure salesmanship; with the prob- able fact that technical progress, in the form of new investment, had come to a plateau; all of which put a growing volume of ice into the banking system. The trough of the major cycle, even in the com- paratively stable Nineteenth Century, was bad enough. Witness 1893. When to it is added this extraordinary and abnormal bill of particulars, the situation becomes grave in eed. Nor is it aided at all by the course of the secular trend, which the pro- fessors tell us must be downward for another twenty years. I am not convinced by their historical analogies, but they may be right. If they are, recovery this year or next will shortly be followed by another and graver decline. An orderly recession of prices as the result of economies in mass production is nothing to be alarmed about, indeed, quite the reverse, but this is not what the professors have in mind when they speak of the secular trend. Gloom and despair; the end of the world? Not at all; at least not necessarily. But I suspect it is the end of the economic system as we have known it — and suffered with it — in the past. The contraption has outlived its usefulness, and a new deal is in order. The terms of that deal are only beginning to emerge, but its prospect — to those of us not buried in the Nineteenth Century — is stimulating and exciting.

I'm beginning to think that different people simply interpreted the phrase differently, depending on their familiarity (or not) with the card-playing phrase. FDR himself might have meant either thing, without us knowing which. I think I'd have to do a LOT more research to find details of what others were saying at the time, & whether FDR ever discussed The New Deal in a context where his meaning was clear.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@UntimelyRippd

It's so great to read thinking that is done well. By which I don't necessarily mean I agree with all of that gentleman's conclusions--just that he thinks deeply and logically. A real treat in these times. I should confine my reading to things written before 1979.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

enhydra lutris's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

Once entrenched, they used their power to loot the economy, embroil America in continual war for (their) profit, destroy that old silly notion of human rights, rewrite the legal system to be both fascist and subservient to them, and condition the American people to accept all this as normal.

Yep, very true. Sad, ain't it.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@enhydra lutris

good to "see" you, e.l.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

edg's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness

What I repeatedly heard from business people in the 1970s was that the Chinese market was valuable because you could make profit on volume. That proved correct, except that the volume and profits ended up being generated for China by American consumers avidly seeking cheap stuff at the cost of millions of American jobs. As usual, the 1% get their vig and happily bray, "See? Capitalism works!"

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enhydra lutris's picture

@randtntx
article.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

enhydra lutris's picture

@randtntx @randtntx
What did the fanancier say to the starving panhandler?

Give me your cup or I'll stab you.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris As in Lapham's, "Bertolt Brecht Explains The Racket".

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earthling1's picture

Not words the capitalist aristocracy understand.
Thought experiment:
Imagine a planet where homo sapien never existed.
A planet where the great apes were the highest form of primate.
Now consider the cause of climate change.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

Azazello's picture

Stoller makes a point I've been thinking about for awhile now.

These are not the natural, inevitable results of capitalism. Boeing and GE were once great companies, working in capitalist open markets.

It is not Capitalism itself that is the problem but rather deregulated, financialized, neoliberal capitalism.
Also:

Far from being an anomaly, Boeing is the norm in the corporate world across the west. In 2016, the Economist noted that profits across the corporate sector were high and persistent, a function of a lack of competition across swaths of the economy. If corporations don’t have to compete, they can raise prices to buyers, lower what they pay to suppliers and workers, and reduce quality.

cf.

“But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.”
- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Ch. XI

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

enhydra lutris's picture

@Azazello
of content in the Stoller article, and yep, deregulation (thanks Bill) and financialization play a very big role in the destruction of both these companies and the economy as a whole, not to mention the lives of both workers and consumers.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Azazello

I don't think it's been conclusively proven that capitalism will always, inevitably, turn into what we've got now, which is what Marxists have always said late-stage capitalism would look like. But I can't dismiss the Marxist argument either; it looks more likely now than ever that they've been right all along. So I can see both sides. I genuinely don't have a horse in that race.

That said, it's absolutely true that this...crap we now reside within, that goes by the name of capitalism, is breaking every rule and principle that the older form of capitalism lived by. The only question is: was this degeneration bound to happen?

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Azazello's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
It was not inevitable. Neoliberalism was a political project and it is quite possible to imagine a world where that project had not been successful.

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Azazello

and neoconservatism for that matter--being two halves of a very deliberate project to transform America. It's not like we don't have the original proposal of that project written down and accessible to us. (Thank you, Lewis Powell.) And yes, I agree that that project could have failed (probably sometime between 1978 and 1992 would have been the most likely occasion for it.)

But I think what the Marxists are saying is that, if it weren't that neoliberal/neoconservative project then, it would be some such project sometime, because the New Deal depended on mutual trust, and all it would take is enough men (and women, but it was mostly men back then) in positions of power willing to act like total and complete assholes to break it.

If there's an actual Marxist on the board, I hope they will speak up and describe their views better than I can. Anyway, like I said, I'm on the fence.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Anja Geitz's picture

Yeats. You selected one of my favorite stanzas in a poem that does what all great poems do; Using a combination of just the right words to conjure up images that elicit powerfully visceral emotions. So much good stuff here, EL, I'm going to have to bookmark it and read it on my break (Of which I'm likely to comment aloud in the break room and annoy my fellow crew members with "that political stuff"). Crazy busy today, thanks for a wonderful OT!

PS. Topics for OT's, that could be an essay in and of itself, eh? We should start a club, heh, heh.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

enhydra lutris's picture

@Anja Geitz
that the poem in question is all that good for the digestion.

Have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --