January 27, 2008




IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY



DANGER AND OPPORTUNITY



Troubled economies can produce opportunities, but also present dangers. Adolf Hitler was able to galvanize Germany because the Weimar Republic was suffering hyperinflation. Money was almost worthless. The awful policies of the Bush administration have made our own dollar decline against other currencies like the Euro. We're seeing huge spikes in costs for energy, food, and health care. Many of our good jobs have been sent offshore in the name of globalization and free trade. Like the time of the Great Depression, we have an opportunity to restructure the United States economy. We can get single payer health care, we can rebuild our infrastructure, we can do something meaningful with our education system, and we can make sure working people earn decent wages and benefits. Or we can allow the vultures to privatize everything and reduce most of us to a state of peonage. This column by Naomi Klein is at www.latimes.com:



More than a decade ago, economist Dani Rodrik, then at Columbia University, studied the circumstances in which governments adopted free-trade policies. His findings were striking: "No significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis." The 1990s proved him right in dramatic fashion. In Russia, an economic meltdown set the stage for fire-sale privatizations. Next, the Asian crisis in 1997-98 cracked open the "Asian tigers" to a frenzy of foreign takeovers, a process the New York Times dubbed "the world's biggest going-out-of-business sale."



To be sure, desperate countries will generally do what it takes to get a bailout. An atmosphere of panic also frees the hands of politicians to quickly push through radical changes that would otherwise be too unpopular, such as privatization of essential services, weakening of worker protections and free-trade deals. In a crisis, debate and democratic process can be handily dismissed as unaffordable luxuries.



Do the free-market policies packaged as emergency cures actually fix the crises at hand? For the ideologues involved, that has mattered little. What matters is that, as a political tactic, disaster capitalism works. It was the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, writing in the preface to the 1982 reissue of his manifesto, "Capitalism and Freedom," who articulated the strategy most succinctly. "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."



DEBAUCHING ADAM SMITH


Adam Smith is the Enlightenment economist whose ideas created a framework for modern day capitalism. Right-wingers like to invoke Adam Smith, ideas about the free market, and the "invisible hand" of the market to suggest that business should be unfettered. But Adam Smith did not believe in the godliness of businessmen. This article by Scott Horton is at www.harpers.org:


One of the idiocies I see trotted out every day in the financial industry’s press is the suggestion that Adam Smith and other great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment–who furnished the basic framework for our current understanding of industrial and post-industrial economics–had limitless faith in entrepreneurs. It is true that they had confidence in the entrepreneurial spirit as a creative engine. But their Calvinist inclinations were anything but unstinting in praise of entrepreneurs as individuals or as a class. Smith notes that the individual businessman will always seek the expansion of his own wealth and power at the cost of others and of society as a whole. So Smith would have fully anticipated, and deplored, the consequences of seven years of Bush’s government of by and for the plutocrats. Socialistic experimentation is not the answer for this. But a sound concept of social fairness in the allocation of the burdens of society certainly is. Government should not unduly burden the entrepreneurial class. But neither should it become a vehicle for transfer of wealth to those who already have the most, while leaving a heavy debt to be borne by those who follow in their wake.