Archive for January, 2011
Friday, January 28th, 2011
Trends in Unsustainability
I realize that “financial services” explains some of the number and that the baseline is last year’s anemia, but, nevertheless, this quote from today’s New York Times is worth noting:
“Things are better, but they’re not anywhere near where they need to be to make major inroads into unemployment,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics.
The item that is “not anywhere near enough” to trigger meaningful job creation by the Obama-worshipped, cash-hoarding “private sector?” Last quarter’s 3.2 percent rate of overall economic growth.
So, this is where we’ve allowed ourselves to be taken: A rate of economic growth of the bloated, hyper-distorted, massively wasteful U.S. economy that is wildly, insanely unsustainable in the ecological terms of the 21st century is now nowhere near fast enough to make capitalism do the first, tiniest bit of trickling down.
Such are the wages of letting the overclass buy up everything and impose its supply-side priorities* everywhere. Such is the decrepitude of this outdated, severely dangerous social order.
*“All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
The Ultimate Form of Waste
Waste, these days, is alleged to be a creature of public, not private, enterprise.
The suppressed fact, of course, is that this is a huge case of excessive protestation. Corporate capitalism, with its scattered McMansions and its 95 percent idle 4,000-pound grocery fetching machines and its omnipresent packaging-for-marketing efforts, is 2/3 waste.
And the waste isn’t confined to the use of materials and space, either. In a nation of billowing, softening, clogging bodies, with vast fields of work needed in reconstructing towns and rehabilitating ecosystems, how sick is this?:
If you count the “Part time employed for non-economic reasons”, you get 126.8 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, working part time or “Not in the labor force”. That represents 53% of working age Americans.
Hat-tip: Doug Pressman
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
More Howlers from Hewson
Speaking of smarmy and dishonest shills for capitalism, our favorite musically tapped-out tax-dodging huckster megalomaniac is back at it. From among the latest batch:
The United States is “a nation that finds joy in the impossible.”
The Kennedys, the missile-gapping stiffers of MLK, the architects of escalation and covert regime change (when their boy Diem started displaying signs of softness) in Vietnam, “had no patience for the status quo.”
The Peace Corps “changed the world” and did something — something unnamed, of course — to reduce poverty and injustice.
Going to Catholic Mass every day? Not a pathetic, anachronistic, pointless, holier-than-thou gesture, but “an act of rebellion against brutal modernity.”
Love that soft-hearted, tender, indulgent, not brutal stuff the Mass-meisters did before we went and got all modern…
Well, anyhow, you do have to hand it to somebody with the capacity to lie to himself and others at this level and still keep his legs moving.
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
How to Help Plastic!
The greenwashers over at RecycleBank, a new marketing front that “rewards” its victims users by sending them more junk in exchange for swallowing corporate green shopping dogma and making tiny gestures with their old junk, are devoting a whole webpage to the topic of “how we can help plastic make a better impact.”
This tortured, whorish double-talk is of a piece with the rest of RecycleBank’s attempted assault on the public mind.
“There’s no denying that the invention and eventual widespread use of plastic was a major advance for society,” says RecycleBank, complete with a supporting weblink to “The Benefits of Plastic” on –wait for it — plasticsindustry.com!
After listing some beneficial uses of plastic, RecycleBank delivers the core proposition:
This, of course, is absolute malarkey. The chief problem with plastics is not their durability, but their grossly excessive use as packaging by corporate capitalists. Nobody denies that plastic has a place in the world. What people are rightly concerned with is why there is so god-damned much of the stuff being heedlessly made and sold.
But that concern is exactly what greewash marketing like RecycleBank exists to massage into tame, misconceived channels. What we need and ought to be demanding is access to the macro-economic decisions that determine when and where plastic gets used. What we get instead from RecycleBank and its paymasters is two things:
1. the fiction that recycling could ever compensate for the consequences of those macro-level choices, over which the public remains utterly powerless; and
2. the transfer of all responsibility onto “consumers,” among whom Recycle Bank positively encourages “green guilt.”
Oh, and the sponsor of the RecycleBank plastics “awareness” mindfuck?
Naked Juice, the “healthy” plastic-bottling subsidiary of PepsiCo.
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011
Black Reagan’s Third Year
He Warned Us...
While scamming the electorate in 2008, Zerobama did admit he was into Reagan. Careful to suggest he was also into FDR, he did admit it.
Certainly, no doubt remains which was the substance and which the window dressing.
Fresh off appointing a high-ranking career bank executive his new Chief of Staff, our Entrepreneur-in-Chief has long since buried all talk of FDR under the accumulating mountain of his Reaganite assaults on the public/give-aways to the rich.
The latest, delivered with yet another insistence that “Small firms drive growth and create most new jobs in this country,” that, in other words, government will continue to do nothing to create jobs directly? A truly moribund mega-howler, delivered, appropriately enough, on the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal.
The actual essay, chock full of familiar, obsequious Reaganite fictions surrrounding the core thesis that “vibrant entrepreneurialism is the key to our continued global leadership and the success of our people,” is just too awful to reprint here. Read it on you own, if you must. But don’t bother. It’s vintage Reagan: Hoary, moldy, petulant, wishful falsity.
Suffice it instead to say, this summary from The New York Times is just about right:
President Obama, intensifying his courtship of the business community, announced Tuesday that he is issuing an executive order that aims to free companies of unnecessary regulatory burdens and promote economic growth.
In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Obama said he is ordering a government-wide review of the rules that govern business, in an effort to remove “outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.’’ He said his administration is committed to seeking the ‘’proper balance’’ between freedom of commerce and regulations necessary to protect the public against threats to health and safety.
They always talk about “balance,” of course, when they are opening the henhouse door even wider for the foxes. We have scared and defenseless poultry and hungry, impatience canines wanting to expand their dining habits. The foxes aren’t asking to take the door off completely. “Balance,” see?
In actual history, of course, before giving them away to capitalists, government sponsors or invents most of the core technologies (assembly line, airplanes, computers, various types of electronics), and government regulation has always been not just a primary form of protection for the public, but also often a core benefit to business interests. Never in human history has de-regulation revived a depressed capitalist economy. Indeed, it can’t, because depressions are demand-side, not supply-side, problems. Further indulging business owners when there is already too much capital at the top does nothing (less than nothing, really) to put money in the pockets of those truly in need, the ones who would spend it if they had it on basic, economy-boosting products.
All that, of course, is not going to stop an utterly unchecked and decrepit and self-deluded ruling class of rentiers and their lapdog politicians from making the same old claim. Power concedes nothing without a demand. Hell, it doesn’t even admit it has a problem.
It would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious.
Monday, January 17th, 2011
Quote for MLK Day
Given his religious commitments, MLK probably would not have said this in this way, had he somehow lived to be 82 in this nation of right-wing shooters. Still, I think the following quote sums up the situation, the day, and the ever-widening (and demoralizing) gulf between verbally celebrating MLK and the utterly heedless actions of our overclass and their political lapdogs, including the nation’s first black President. It also overlaps with MLK’s still under-appreciated denunciation of the Vietnam War and its long-standing imperial instigator. From the great James Keye:
Reality is that the earth is a summary of innumerable coincidences creating conditions of stability upon which life formed and now rides. The variations of life have had sufficient opportunity to produce an adaptation manifesting the most minutely possible principles of a new system of order riding on (or in if you like) a single species. The magnificence of this occurrence is beyond beyond. The functioning of this adaptation is problematic given the nature of its origin, and now it is a toss up as to whether the carrier species will discover how to manage such a powerful adaptation before its more dangerous expressions destabilize the conditions that allow it to exist.
