to the very small number of californians who read this

why not vote nader? obviously obama is going to sweep california.

Our Supposed Capitalist-Socialist Hybrid Economy

From James K. Galbraith's Plan in this month's Harper's series of essays: How to Save Capitalism:

"The rot comes from predators posing as conservatives and mouthing the rhetoric of “free markets.” They are not actually interested in free markets. Their goal is to use the government to build monopolies, to control resources, to block regulation, to crush unions, to divert as much as possible from taxpayers into private pockets."


The idea that America is a mix of capitalism and socialism is now the new liberal parlance. The central flaws of capitalism, its reifying logic of unfettered and self interested competing parties that gracefully ignores a sub-history of blood/slavery/exploitation, are no longer relevant now that capitalism has subsumed socialism with things like welfare, public housing, income tax, and public education. (Never mind the labor wars that ensured every one of these things, and continue to be the basis for 'change' and corporate benevolence).

Of course, 'they,' Bush and his cronies, oligarchs consisting of developers-Bechtel and Haliburton- and oil companies, represent a perversion of our harmoniously mixed hybrid capitalism. While Galbraith's criticism of corporations manipulating government to gain contracts and power rings very true, the theoretically underpinnings of his critique are quite murky.

Should the government untangle itself from big business, and in what way in particular (in campaign reform/corporate lobbying or in dismantling welfare and regulation à la Clinton) , and if it does then is it the case that the underlying principles of the 'free market' will best serve our public interests? The irony of Galbraith's critique is that it ends with a plea for meeting our climate crisis via "direct public action and the cooperation of the private sector," or in other words, government contracts with (renewable) energy corporations (which was the basis of his critique of Bush & Company).

The central questions that haunt Galbraith's critique:
a) Are public interests best met through free markets?
b) Is profit in a capitalist system of exponential growth based on immutable principles of supply and demand or is it rather based on exploitation/ constantly being overcharged for services to fill the pockets of the top 1% who control 33% of the wealth and CEOs who make about 400 times that of the average worker?
c) If we accept a hybrid of government planning/money and the private sector how can this do anything but enabling monopolies and public spending that is well beyond the cost of the actual services?

PROMPTS

PLEASE GIVE ME PROMPTS !! I NEED ASSIGNMENTS. HARD TO GET STUFF DONE W/OUT CLASSES/COLLEGE.

DUE DATES FOR PROMPTS/ASSIGNMENTS ALSO ACCEPTED.

AN or A

an goes before every vowel sound. an honor, and also some single letter or acronyms with vowel sounds like an F or an MRI.

there isn't a consensus on historical (or history, or historian) because the h is pronounced softly, so it can be said either a historical or an historical.

source:Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch.

cold war 2.0

Does anyone remember when McCain said in the Jim Lehrer debate/parallel interview: "I looked into Putin's eyes I saw three letters, a 'K' a 'G' and a 'B.'"

at least McCain admitted in the 2nd debate: "obviously energy is going to be a big big factor, and Georgia and the Ukraine are both major gateways of energy into Europe, and that's one of the reasons why it's in our interest. But, the Russians, I think we can deal with them, but they got to understand that they're facing a very firm and determined USA that will defend our interest (and that of other countries in the world)." SUCH HONESTY.

I totally predicted the Cold War 2.0

giantgasbags to me
show details Aug 11 Reply
11:18 AM me: we are at war with russia via georgia
lol
actually it's sad
giantgasbags: omg yeah what is this
i am not paying attention
11:20 AM me: like ossetia is a region supposed to have autonomy and it has some georgians and russians there and both countries want the oil there
its only about 70,000 people in the area
and georgia tried to take it over
11:21 AM and then russia squashed the shit out of georgia, bombing everywhere
giantgasbags: wow russia rules
me: airports, and
military sites
and commercial areas
giantgasbags: when did they bomb georgia
11:22 AM me: and we funded georgia to do a little coup in assetia and make us some good oil deals
i guess
like 2 days ago
giantgasbags: WWWWHAT
the USA is behind this?
SWEEET
me: cold war 2.0

COLBERT REPORT 10/2 ON THE BAILOUT

So ah, by the way, ah what's this going to cost
oh ah 700 billion dollars...
where did the government get that figure?!
well, the treasury department said, it's not based on anything in particular they just, quote, wanted to choose a very big number.
the free market can save itself mister, it can do anything, it can self regulate- it can self correct....
true, but these are not normal circumstances; big companies are going under
good, it's called survival of the fittest, the companies are like lions fighting over the carcass of the economy, weak companies die, strong companies live, then the lionesses know who to mate with,
ah but that my friend is the problem, none of these companies are safe to mate with, it's like um business syphilis
so how did that happen
well it started with a few slutty lenders who jump into bed with some really sub prime mortgages
the next thing you knew you had a credit orgy..people were swapping derivatives, aig was all up in fannie mae, wachovia took on golden west then turned around and got it on with a.g. edwards, then city group had 'em all at once, it was steaming pile of hot slapping assets. no one, no one knew who was bundling who, but it felt good, and everybody was doing it, and in the end lets just say the market blew its liquidity.

A Review of a Review of a Book

There's an interesting review by Samuel Moyn in the Nation of a book, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, which criticizes the author, Gary J. Bass, for bracketing the imperialistic underpinnings of humanitarian sensationalism: "Victorian humanitarianism often exported to foreign lands the savagery it purported to be banishing from them." Moyn also notes that the first recorded case of sadism "was a man who found the humanitarian depiction of tortured slaves sexually exciting." I am not very knowledgeable in British Imperial history, and have not read this book, though I found the contemporary implications of Samuel Moyn's criticisms of Bass's book very interesting.

Basically the book is an attempt at charting a legacy of liberal humanitarianism to defend the notion of just wars, e.g. Kosovo (the excessive Nato bombing campaign that helped displace the very people it was supposedly liberating, claimed hundreds of innocent lives as "markets, hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains, and a TV station" were among the targets [quoted from Klein], and set the stage for a capitalist investment frenzy in dismantling state run infrastructure, pipelines and mines, most famously Trepca).

I am still reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which brilliantly outlines the current trend in military/imperialist policy of unloading billions of dollars of bombs (shock and awe) followed by a rebuilding/reconstruction frenzy/contracting Bechtel and Halliburton. It also draws an analogy between torture treatments for the mentally ill (sensory overload, deprivation, temporal disorientation, breaking down and then rebuilding the patient) and the wonderful torture methodology in Guantanamo, formerly Abu Ghraib, and secret prisons throughout Europe, and also at the macro level of military policy/treatment programs for 'rogue states.' On that note, I am skeptical over whether Obama offers a substantial alternative toward our current middle eastern crusade (I was and am still not for the Afghanistan or Iraq War, and am not for a proposed war+sanctions in Pakistan, and am very critical of Israeli policy- though, on a side note, it was encouraging to hear Olmert's comments, upon resigning over bribery allegations, that Israel must withdrawl from the West Bank and from East Jerusalem).

SEE:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081013/moyn

and for the full article, and other Nation articles, click on the bellow site and enter h11/print.

http://www.smith.edu/libraries/research/article.html

OMG SO EXCITED FOR THE DEBATE!!!

Palin interviewed by Couric, excerpted from Zakaria's article in Newsweek:
COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out [awkward/thus begins the haphazard recycling of any and all thoughts pertaining in some way to the economy]. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed [???] to help shore up our economy, helping the—it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. [?]And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing [incomplete]. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity [fragment]. All those things [?] under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that [awkward].

Leisure, the Work Day, and the Etymology of Lunch

I was reading a book by F.Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, and noticed that he always uses the word Luncheon instead of Lunch. I then began looking up the term, and found that lunch is actually a contraction of luncheon and also that dinner used to be the term for a noontime meal. I came across a short essay What Time is Dinner, by Sherrie McMillan, which attempts to provide a historical background for the shifting meanings of dinner and lunch. That dinner used to refer to what we now call lunch led me to suspect the existence of something like a siesta in medieval times, and the idea that some of our leisure time was lost with the emergence of manufactories. Wouldn't a large meal at noon require a sizable break from work?

Luncheon was a snack between dinner (then held at noon) and supper mostly for farm workers during long Summer days. Dinner was actually held at noon and supper just before sunset, probably out of convenience given the complications of not having electrical lighting and having to do everything at night by candlelight. McMillan suggests that technological advances inaugurated a culture of night life and leisure that increasingly included more and more of the masses: "Due to new developments in culture and technology," and the growths of "the middle class...mercantilism, trades, and manufacturing," candles became much more available and it was no longer a luxury to feast at night. In her analysis of the etymology of lunch and dinner I began to suspect that the loss of a substantial noontime meal could actually prove the opposite of her thesis.

Was it, as McMillan claims that "the middle and lower classes in Britain were quick to adopt this new meal when they could," and that "many people in the middle and lower class began to eat dinner in the evening as the nobles and gentry did”? Or, rather could one read into the shift in mealtimes as a gutting of leisure time in the context of the manufacturing revolution?

With the advent of the manufacturing revolution workers no longer owned their own time. Time was subject to strict scrutiny, so as to enable maximum productivity. Due to the enormous increases in efficiency that manufactories provided it seemed as if this technological shift could pave the way for shorter workdays and expanded leisure time. This was precisely what was prophesized by the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who articulated a technological utopianism that was embraced by capitalists and communists alike. The reality is of course that with all our technological advances and increases in efficiency, the average workweek is continually increasing, as our economy proceeds in a fitful state of exponential expansion. Thus every time workers dine in the evening they can mourn the bygone days when dinner time provided a leisurely break from work.