Are We Entering A New Age Of Feudalism?
Everything old is new again. Current makes note of the growing belief that, in the era of postindustrial perma-recession, our sociopolitical structures increasingly resemble those that were found in feudalist societies — a concept called neofeudalism:
Among the issues claimed to be associated with the idea of neofeudalism in contemporary society are class stratification, globalization, mass immigration/illegal immigration, open borders policies, multinational corporations, and “neo-corporatism.”
How Ayn Rand Tanked The Economy
Ayn Rand was a godawful writer, and in ironic fashion her philosophy failed disastrously in her personal life. Yet decades after her death, her work’s destructive influence has never been stronger. The Awl rips apart the “Objectivist” doctrine championed by Rand and one of her most adoring disciples, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan:
That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both.
The two first met in the ’50s. Back then, a gang of acolytes, calling themselves the Collective, used to gather at Rand’s apartment on East 36th Street every Saturday night so they could tell each other how smart they all were. Along came Greenspan one evening, shy…
How The Banksters Got Away With The Biggest Rip-Off Ever
Hats off to Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”
“Financial crooks,” he argues, “brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”
True enough, but that’s only part of the story. The Daily Kos called his investigation a “depressing read” perhaps because it suggests that the Obama Administration is not doing what it should to reign in financial crime. Many of the lawyers he calls on to act come from big corporate law firms and buy into their worldview.
Kos should be more depressed by the failure of the progressive community to focus on these issues, and not pressing the government to do the right thing.
There is much more to this story. It’s also more about institutions than individuals, more about a captured system…
Mike Maloney Illuminates the Bankers
From GoldSilver.com. Great presentation, definitely worth watching:
Mike Maloney was recently invited to speak at the 8th International Banking Forum in Sochi, Russia. The theme was…
The Sherriff Elizabeth Warren Rap Video
Mark Memmott for NPR:
Please allow us to mix a seriously serious subject — consumer protection — with a bit of fun.
As NPR’s Scott Horsley will report on All Things Considered today, President Obama is getting a lot of advice these days about whom he should name to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Actually, most of the advice is about whether he should or shouldn’t choose Elizabeth Warren, chair of the congressional panel that oversees the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
…The fun part of the story, though, is the “Elizabeth Warren rap video,” also known as Got A New Sheriff…
Hard Times
Aren’t job losses and foreclosures as important as a “Ground Zero Mosque” (that isn’t a mosque, hasn’t been built or even at ground zero)?
We know we live in hard times that are on the verge of getting harder with 500,000 new claims for unemployment last week, a recent record.
The stock market may be over for now as fear and panic drives small investors out. Big corporations hoard stashes of cash rather then hire workers. The D-Word (depression) is back in play.
Foreclosures are up, and the Administration’s programs to stop them are down, well below their stated goals, only helping 1/6th of those promised assistance.
And here’s a statistic for you: 300,000. That’s the number of foreclosure filings every month for the past 17 months. This year, 1.9 million homes will be lost, down from 2 million last year. Is that progress? In July alone, 92, 858 homes were repossessed.
At the same time, the…
Countdown To Collapse: The Recovery Is Not Recovering
Financial journalist Charles Gasparino, whose career trajectory took him from Newsweek to CNBC to Fox News, was on with Bill O’ Reilly doing what the host of the factless Factor likes to do the most: promote Fox News. In the course of their self-promotional banter, Gasparino let slip an unverifiable story about a meeting of top CEOs speculating about whether President Obama really is a secret socialist.
Stories like this, invented or not, freak a White House ever eager to reassure the business world of their loyalties. That is no doubt why Robert Gibbs, the President’s Press Secretary, took a whack at the “professional left,” a statement he later said had been “inartful” but did not withdraw.
Writing on OpEd News, Kevin Gosztola was not surprised:
“While circumstantial, the best evidence for why Gibbs would feel like uttering the aforementioned remarks is the shift of money from Wall Street to Republicans ahead of…
On The Third Anniversary Of The Crash Of The Economy
We live in the United States of Amnesia and selective memory. As we debate the breaking news, we easily forget the sequence of events that broke the bank and left us broke.
Three years ago, when the idea of an Obama presidency was still a fantasy in polite company, a non-seismic financial earthquake began to rumble in ways we then could barely anticipate. Buildings didn’t fall as they did in Haiti’s nightmare, only a financial system. And, there are still piles of rubble everywhere here, too.
It was August 2007, and I was blogging about the coming economic collapse even as it appeared that our economy had nowhere to go but up.
What began with a few “incidents”–the collapse of New Century Financial, the demise of Bear Stearns–turned into a nonstop month-long drama of economic convulsion as fear turned into panic with calls for intervention. Slowly, like an apple being peeled, the truth…
Unemployment Is Worse Than We Know, The Recovery Challenge Harder Than We Think
As we move into the dog days of summer, and a coming Congressional recess, the Obama Administration has shifted its focus back on to the economy and wants to convince one and all that an economic recovery is just around the corner.
In recent speeches, the President warns that the Republicans, if they take over, will support policies that will usher in a new recession, as if the current recession is over. “They are the same policies, “ he said, ”that led us into this recession. They will take us backward at a time when we need to keep America moving forward.”
He wants to push “distractions” like the Shirley Sherrod affair and the BP spill out of media view so we can all get back to the economy.
Wake me up when reality intrudes into a “debate” that is flawed on all sides.
The “signs” of recovery, so breathlessly trumpeted by the politicians…
Lying And Spying: The Economy Is Sinking, Confidence Is Down Along With The Market – Is A Depression Coming?
The FBI arrests 1200 Americans for mortgage fraud in the largest crackdown of its kind in history. There is no media focus on the companies that securitized and insured their toxic loans. This white-collar crime sweep is, at best, a one-day story with most of the reports carried by local outlets.
Clearly the FBI did not get the media punch it had hoped for. The issue of financial industry fraud did not even register on the media’s Richter scale.
Two weeks later, the FBI tried again, this time with an ill-timed, years in the making bust of 11 alleged Russian spies accused, so it seems, of impersonating Americans with no sign that they carried out successful espionage missions.
The story grew legs, in several senses, after it was discovered that one of the “spies” posted sexy pictures of herself on Facebook and other sites.
Ooo la-la: Predictably, she has now become the story; No…
Left And Right Agree: Buy Gold!
When the New York Times runs a front page story suggesting that now is the time to buy gold and they quote Peter Schiff saying that paper money may become useless, is it time to buy, or a classic signal that the hype exceeds reality? Personally I think buying land, livestock and seeds might be a better bet…
It is the resurgent passion of the doomsday crowd, a bet that everything will go wrong. No matter what has you worried, they say, the answer is gold.
Inflation, deflation, government borrowing or the plunging euro — you name it — the specter of these concerns has set off a dash to gold, driving the precious metal to new highs and illustrating how fears of economic turmoil have moved from the fringe to the mainstream.
And gold bugs, often dismissed as crackpots who hoard gold bars in the basement, are finally having their day.
“I just think…
Sen. Byron Dorgan, Who Predicted Financial Collapse Ten Years Ago, Retiring
How easily we forget this whole mess started under a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, with the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in 199. Here’s Huffington Post from a few months ago that sums up why a guy like this retiring is a big deal. Dan Froomkin writes:
He got it right last time.
Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, was one of eight senators who stood up to oppose the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act in 1999. That repeal, which was signed into law by President Clinton exactly 10 years ago today, broke down the barriers between commercial banking and investment banking, and led to the growth of behemoth financial firms that were able to take enormous risks with impunity, because they were “too big to fail.”
“I think we will in 10 years’ time look back and say we should not have done this,” Dorgan said back then. The video of his speech has become something of a cult favorite for wonks — ten years, a $700 billion bailout and a major financial crisis later.
The World’s Tallest Building: A Symbol of Global Excess in Dubai
Juan Cole writes on Informed Comment:
The world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifah or Khalifah Tower, was unveiled in Dubai on Monday:
Dubai is a finance hub, the bubble of which has burst, so the building’s opening now seems a critique of past excesses more than the triumph originally dreamed of. Now that Dubai is having to be bailed out by its oil-rich sister emirate, Abu Dhabi, the tower had to be named for its ruler Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, rather than retaining its original name, Burj Dubai. Many critics have seen it as a monument to hubris likely to remain mostly empty, as the 21st century Tower of Babel.
As you can see, Dubai nevertheless went all out to celebrate the opening.
The Burj Khalifah is a symbol of everything wrong with our present moment. Rooted in a finance and real estate bubble, planned as big for the sake of bigness, opulent, now saved from disaster by Abu Dhabi’s unsustainable oil revenues, it casts its shadow on a nation of guest workers, many impoverished and exploited. If global warming proceeds at the pace some climate scientists fear, and the seas rise substantially, it may, ironically enough, be all that is visible of the low-lying United Arab Emirates a century from now.
On CNBC, Strategist Says Dollar Will be ‘Utterly Destroyed’; We Are Moving Toward ‘New World Order’
Wow, this was on CNBC:
The dollar will get “utterly destroyed” and become “virtually worthless”, said Damon Vickers, chief investment officer of Nine Points Capital Partners.
“We don’t have resources. Neither does a lot of Asia to be quite frank,” Vickers said on CNBC’s Asia Squawk Box. “Countries that have resources — the Brazils, the Canadas, Australia — their currencies are doing well.” Vickers noted that their stock markets have done the best year-to-date.
“They have stuff. They’ve got resources. They export real things. The United States exports ‘promises’ and ‘pretty paper’,” he added.
Due to the huge wage disparities between the United States and emerging markets like China, Vickers said that may resolve itself in some type of a global currency crisis.
“If the global currency crisis unfolds, then inevitably you get an alignment of a global world government. A new global currency and a new world order, so we may be moving towards that,” he said.
Vickers added that this is the time where investors should be making money when the trend is developing. “Oil looks higher, gold looks higher, currencies look weaker.”
2008 Financial Collapse: An Inside Job
By Robert Singer
Maybe it’s the smoke from Mt. Vesuvius that keeps Arianna Huffington and the financial community from seeing that the economic collapse has nothing to do with the Fed “missing” the warning signs leading up to the October meltdown.
“Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.” John F. Kennedy
The Fed didn’t miss anything; the October meltdown was an inside job.
Capitalism never made sense
Professor Ebeling, the Ludwig von Mises professor of Economics at Hillsdale College, understood something was wrong when he wrote: “the perverse development and evolution of historical capitalism, the institutions necessary for a truly free-market economy have been either undermined or prevented from emerging.”
But when he claimed, “it is the principles and the meaning of a free-market economy that must be rediscovered” in order to overcome the burden of historical capitalism and save liberty, he should have written that principles must be rediscovered in order to prevent…
