[lbo-talk] Is this as bad as the Great Depression?

[Dissenting Wren]

Whether or not it's a permanent readjustment depends partly on policy.  The 
current turn to austerity could certainly make it a permanent readjustment.  If 
so, then we can anticipate heightened class war from above in the wealthy 
countries, as the wealthiest strain to maintain their current position and wrest 
nearly all of the very limited gains from growth for themselves.  But a 
permanent readjustment of this sort would almost certainly not mean the 
cessation (or even immense reduction) of capitalist accumulation on a global 
scale.  Instead, capital accumulation would recenter itself on China and India, 
both of whose economies have continued to grow rapidly since 2008 (albeit 
somewhat less rapidly than before 2008).  Since the vast majority of inequality 
is inequality between countries rather than inequality within countries, this 
recentering could cause global inequality to shrink, even though the inequality 
that we, in the rich countries, experience would increase.  There is, though, a 
very large fly in the ointment - since India and China rely on coal-fired 
electricity generation for their growth, this recentering will substantially 
exacerbate global warming.  The recent Cancun summit implicitly found global 
warming of 4-5 degrees celsius acceptable.  Even using IPCC's wary calculations, 
warming at that level would cause the Himalayan glaciers to melt, wreaking 
almost unimaginable devastation in South Asia (twenty years of severe flooding 
followed by desertification) and very serious dislocation in China.

I'm just a font of good cheer today, aren't I?  Probably time for me to adhere 
to the three post a day limit and shut up.

----- Original Message ----
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Wed, December 29, 2010 12:52:29 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Is this as bad as the Great Depression?

What if it isn't a slump or crash or depression but merely (!) a permanent
readjustment in global capitalism. There will continue to be the usual dips
and recoveries, but nothing like the recovery of the 1950s with the
resulting "rising expectations" which fueled the Movement of Movements which
overturned the White Male Republic established in a1870, in addition to
bringing most of the world's population into the abstract  equality
("citizenship") rather than caste or estate or "identities" and made a
present reality of Marx's prophetic remark in the Grundrisse of the
"dot-like existence of the mere free worker" of bourgeois society. Zoning
laws (with the disastrous results described by Jacobs) and suburbanization
(with homes without porches and "neighborhoods" without bars & drug stores,
etcd, and nearby places of employment) created the physical environment
suitable to the invisible storage of these nomads. This ultimate
individualization of the populace makes the elimination of rising
expectations and the permanent reduction in standards of living (resulting
in a radical reduction of "free time") ends, perhaps more or less
permanently the material basis for collective action (either for radical
reform or for revolution. This isolation is, however, the proper basis for a
great intensification of the fear which accepts the various "Wars" (on
crime, on drugs, on cancer, on terrorism, on others to be invented),
creating a self-fueled process of ever greater isolation. The permanently
'depressed' economies of both core and 'periphery'* should both provide
support for the needed disciplinary wars and the soldiers to fight those
wars. Electoral politics will enter a new "Era of Good Feeling" (in which
politics becomes bitterly personal and grounded in slander, since there are
no longer issues around which partisan differences arise). This 'harmony' of
principle and extreme bitterness of partisan conflict is of course already
present: the attacks on Bush's intelligence, the myth of Obama's Islamic
relition, are exactly the sort of personal differences that fuel conflict
when there is substantial agreement on issues.

Profits may of course suffer but that hardly affects the continuation of
capitalist relations, which cannot dissolve themselves or be dissolved
within a legal context.

This is just a rude sketch off the top of my head, though I think it could
be  considerably expanded. And like all empirical predictions, it cannot be
confirmed nor  refuted. I would claim for it superiority to the Myth of
Progress, which has been the   cloak for so much horror over the last
century and a half, and continues to incapacitate thought aimed at change.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Marv Gandall
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 7:15 AM
To: LBO; Pen-L
Subject: [lbo-talk] Is this as bad as the Great Depression?

(Long article with many links)

Underneath the Happy Talk, Is This As Bad as the Great Depression?
Washington's Blog
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2010

The following experts have - at some point during the last 2 years - said
that the economic crisis could be worse than the Great Depression:

    . Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke

    . Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (and see this and this)

    . Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker

    . Economics scholar and former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic
Mishkin

    . The head of the Bank of England Mervyn King

    . Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz

    . Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman

    . Former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead

    . Economics professors Barry Eichengreen and and Kevin H. O'Rourke
(updated here)

    . Investment advisor, risk expert and "Black Swan" author Nassim
Nicholas Taleb

    . Well-known PhD economist Marc Faber

    . Morgan Stanley's UK equity strategist Graham Secker

    . Former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae Edward J. Pinto

    . Billionaire investor George Soros

    . Senior British minister Ed Balls

How could that possibly be, when the stock market has largely recovered?
(Let's forget for a moment that the stock market rallied after 1929, but
then crashed in a double dip).

To find out, we'll look at a couple comparisons to get an idea of what is
going on in the rest of the economy. And then we'll compare the government's
efforts in the 1930s to today.

[.]

Full: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/
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