Doug Henwood wrote:
>> Because the subprime mortgages, current account deficit, public debt,
>> relatively stagnant GDP etc etc are symptoms of a deeper problem.
>>
>
> What, the crisis of capitalism?
Aye, Doug, the overaccumulation crisis.
> Has the deeper problem always been there -
> for all 700 of O'Connor's years?
>
>
No Doug, it gets really bad at certain times in the accumulation cycle.
> You didn't answer my objection the other day that the use of "fix"
> implies something of a dirty trick and one that isn't going to last.
>
'Dirty'? I guess so. Moving problems around is sometimes a trick - witness the way Treas.Secretaries from John Connolly to Larry Summers described events as diverse as the Bretton Woods Agreement default to the Asian crisis - and usually the fix doesn't last. The last 'fix' that worked was a massive devaluation of economic deadwood that was sufficiently far-reaching to restructure capitalism in all sorts of ways: the Great Depression and World War II. What's happened since is a set of partial devaluations and bubble-building displacements that moved vast amounts of capital this way and that without solving the underlying problem of overaccumulation.
> But geography has been part of capitalism since forever too - regions
> rise and fall, sectors rise and fall, the whole thing is a dizzying
> and brutal show.
>
>
You describe uneven development well, but don't factor in its *amplification* during periods of overaccumulation crisis and financial bubbling (the subject of a thick PhD which I believe lies dust-adorned in your bookshelf: Uneven Zimbabwe).
> Ok, so the crisis is now almost 40 years old? That's a lot shorter
> than 700 years, but really, Patrick, that's an awfully long crisis.
>
>
Aye, the lads running the show learned lots from the last big one, especially how to ramp up state spending (in spite of Reagan/Thatcher) and offer financial bailouts (unlike 1929) and screw other countries (they have an IMF/WB/WTO now) so as to keep the game in play.
> you seem to think that capital won't be successful
> at coming up with another model. The U.S. could, under the Dems, go
> into some bastard Progressive Era.
>
>
Yes, that's an option, one that could even be extended globally (as any 'solution' must), and indeed David Harvey writes of a global New Deal as an option for the ruling class in his book New Imperialism. I think that's myopic, because of the balance of class power at the global scale and the neolib-neocon fusion in all the multilateral institutions. There's just no indication that the ruling crew can coordinate any kind of reform of *anything* at the global scale anymore. Am I wrong? (I hope so.)
>> Savvy means an earlier bailout? Isn't that always the strategy of the
>> ruling lads: move the devalorisation elsewhere?
>>
> Yeah sure why not? Works for them, doesn't it?
>
>
Up to a point. Then people fight back.
> And what about, say the, systemic distribution of the costs of the
> S&L bailout? The masses paid, but a total collapse would have cost
> them more.
>
>
Well you'd agree it would have been fair if Neil Bush and Jim Wright and those guys had paid a *little* bit, not so? Jesse Jackson put it well (I worked on this with him in 1988-89): "We didn't go to the party. We didn't make the mess. So why are we the ones doing the cleaning up?" The metaphor works more and more.
>> In which case Doug's
>> mistake in downplaying the economic problems until they bit him in the
>> ass
>>
> I've said the housing bubble was waiting to burst since 2005.
>
>
And downplaying contagion and the broader structural problems ever since? Like above?
>> is a function of not recognising the potentials for the internal
>> crisis (overaccumulation and financial speculation) to grow to such
>> large proportions from early on, and not recognising the scope of
>> capital's collateral damage and in some cases (e.g. Iraq) the
>> resistance.
>>
>
> I don't get what Iraq has to do with subprime. I never really got how
> David Harvey knows that the Bush admin was trying to compensate in
> politics for a decline in U.S. economic power; there's no evidence
> that the Bush admin ever thought that the U.S. was in decline.
>
>
>
It has to do with resistance, as I indicated. For Harvey, the Iraq attack was partly about competitive position in relation to Chinese access to oil. Surely you'll recognise neocon paranoia about China?