[lbo-talk] bailouts/crisis- a selfish pespective

Wojtek Sokolowski swsokolowski at yahoo.com
Fri Oct 3 06:43:00 PDT 2008


----- Original Message ---- From: Dmytri Kleiner <dk at telekommunisten.net> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Friday, October 3, 2008 5:12:57 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] bailouts/crisis- a selfish pespective

Everything written bellow is merely Begging The Question. You assume that Washington is interested in helping you rather than simply maximizing profits, that the things you describe will happen for sure if the "bailout" doesn't happen, and that they wont if it does. I reject all these. Please support your premises.

[WS:]  I think that a vision of government (or ruling class) as a singular body moved by a single motive (profit or else) is rather simplistic and inaccurate, albeit well entrenched in the popular discourse.  A more realistic view is that of a "garbage can" - a collection of interest groups pursuing diverse interests and objectives, sometimes conflicting, sometimes not, and having different levels of power.  Moreover, these group often form strategic alliances with outside-government groups to gain more power vis a vis opposition, and these outside groups bring a new layer of motives and interests to the game.   There is a ton of literature in sociology and political science showing that.  A good point to start (from a progressive point of view) is Charles Tilly, _From mobilization to a revolution._

So it is a challenging intellectual task to understand how these different forces and interests play out under different conditions, and what outcome is likely under a particular set of circumstances.  What was likely yesterday may not be likley tomorrow.  However, people often abandon that intellectual task, mainly because it is so challenging, for a simplistic demonization of their real and perceived enemies. 

So to answer your question, different groups in Wasgington have different stakes in the eonomy and consequently, the outcomes of the current crisis.  Democrats can probaly stand to gain from keeping the crisis on people's minds until November 4, while Repugs would probabl want to put to it to a rest asap, but not at any cost.  The "elected representatives" rpresent diverse interests - some of them those of the Wall Street, or pensioners, which tend to coincide, others (especially in the South) those who benefit from the fedral largesse spent in their states (prisons, military, pork barrel etc.) and wuld hate seeing that largesse going north to New York bankers.  There is likely a myriad of conflicting interests in this bailout - which must be empirically ascertained and analyzed to understand positons of different parties and the course of action they may take.  Assuming that they will all act one way - they way of predcited by a demonization

narrative of one kind or another - does not strike me as particularly helpful.  Wojtek

--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------



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