Bird that Sings

About a month ago, in the middle of May, our neighbor from the rental unit next door, got his PhD in Wildlife Biology from the prestigious local public university and left town to work for the Feds.

There was a job waiting him in the wilderness of the far north, but as he and his wife were loading up the van, he confided to my wife that the Feds had already let him know he wouldn’t be there long. As soon as he got to his isolated outpost, 500 miles from anywhere, they were going to turn him around and send him to Louisiana.

An earnest, circumspect, tightly wrapped young man not given to hyperbole, he had been having nightmares about the oil spill since it happened and was riven with the sense that it was more than chance sending him into the maelstrom.

It was “the worst environmental disaster in recorded history” he said, and he assured us–before the fact–that all the ostensible attempts of BP to stem the oil flow, from “top kill” on down, were longer than long shots: essentially PR stunts designed to allay the public horror.

The ecology of the Gulf Coast was doomed, he said, and when the loop current reversed in the middle of June, the oil would be making its way out of the Gulf: into the Gulf Stream and the world.

One month later, despite BP and the government’s attempts to calm the public, most of us understand in our hearts that we’ve reached a momentous point of no return in human and planetary history.

It’s not just the oil spill, it’s the melting polar ice caps, it’s the mysterious, scientifically inexplicable dead zones spreading through the oceans and the precipitously collapsing fish and invertebrate populations: seemingly discrete events all crescendoing together towards a terrifying dystopian climax.

For two centuries we’ve used and abused the resources of the natural world on an exponentially increasing scale, and now the natural world is dying.

Dramatic action is called for, yet as always the Obama Administration counsels political safety first.

The twenty billion-dollar BP Gulf restitution fund, proposed by the Administration and accepted–under duress–by BP is, on the face of it, a good step, but it won’t do f*** all to alter the planet’s trajectory towards ecological disaster.

BP is an enormously profitable company–with a thirteen billion-dollar profit last year and an over eighteen billion dollar profit the year before –and to leave it essentially intact to pursue business as usual is a catastrophic misreading of the political moment.

The US government needs to expropriate the American assets of BP: the Arco consumer retail divisions, the drilling and commercial operations, while holding the larger company liable for the establishment and funding of the Gulf restoration fund as well as all the other damages.

Once the US takes control–paying off all the stock and stakeholders of course–God knows we don’t want to spook the markets–the profits from the American holdings of BP, now to be renamed FP for Filthy Petroleum, or whatever, need to be used to directly fund clean energy.

We need to fund both existing clean energy start-ups, and new ones. We need to find ways to utilize and mass-produce solar energy, wind, electric, natural gas and human gas –<em>anything but Nuclear</em>–because accidents <em>will </em>happen. But barring nuclear, we have to do whatever it takes build a clean energy infrastructure now: not in ten to twenty years, but in five to seven.

We need to use this moment to build support for a direct tax on carbon and–in concert with the other nations of the world or if need be alone– to declare a date certain twenty-five years from today, in 2035, for an end to the Age of Oil.

And finally we need to airlift any of our Senators and Representatives who oppose these common sense initiatives for the survival of the planet–and not incidentally the reinvention of our economy–directly to the Gulf and let them see what the status quo looks like. And then leave ‘em there.

They can swim back to New Orleans.

Gordon Brown–(with apologies to the Stranglers)

“Gordon Brown, they called him a clown
Just a prat, heart could not be found
But now that’s he’s gone, it won’t be long
‘Til you raise a song to old Gordon Brown”

Well they’ve done it now. A right coalition of the Posh it is, Eton, Oxbridge and all that: Tory-Liberal, where the metro sexual elite meet.

What is most striking to American eyes though is how the clueless Brits desperately sought renewal with American style televised political debates aimed at approximating the vacuity of our own.

When they announced the debates you knew they were heading for trouble and sure enough; there was Nick Clegg, a wide-eyed Nick if ever there was, emerging as the fresh young thing of the moment.

The debates made Clegg into a phenomenon, a cross between Barack Obama, Homer Simpson and the New Musical Express cover band of the week until after a meteoric two and half week rise he, not coincidentally, fell to earth like a burning piece of cosmic crap. Or so he would have if the Conservative Party had managed to come up with a majority on their own in the House of Commons. In the absence of that majority, Clegg’s Liberal Democrats were suddenly thrust into the breach of a hung Parliament.

Nick, who in a fairer world might have made an excellent British consular deputy in Trieste or Ljubljana, is now deputy Prime Minister.

Nick had a choice: to form a minority government and rule with Labour, or go whole hog and rule with the Tories. If he had chosen Labour, they would have bided their time and screwed him royally, but . . .he would have gotten a referendum on some form of Proportional representation–and a fair bit of Labour support for it–and ultimately gone down as the man who saved the Liberal-Democratic Party.

Instead Nick chose the Tories and now the odds are 50-50 on whether he actually lives long enough to regret it, or whether Cameron and he are carried out of Whitehall with their heads on pikes first, well before a new election can be called. Meanwhile all the issues dear to Nick, proportional representation, civil liberties, the environment, have been ransomed off to some future time, presumably after rising oceans subsume most of the Little Kingdom.

Yet as always in British politics, it didn’t have to be this way.

The roots of the British dilemma actually go back thirty-five years or so, to the early and mid Seventies.

It was in those long ago days, under the rule of Labour PM Harold Wilson that then Secretary of State for Industry, Tony Benn and his deputy, Eric Heffer first proposed a National Enterprise Board. It’s intent was to provide struggling British Industry with investment funding and give the government the ability to take failing firms into public ownership.

However Wilson, after agreeing to the plan in principle tabled it, moved Benn to the Energy Ministry and sacked Heffer. The Industrial plan as presented in Parliament was watered down beyond recognition, and then voted down.

The failure of Labour to reorganize British Industry when it had the chance heralded the end of manufacturing in the first manufacturing country on earth.

Today, even the famed British Auto Industry no longer exists.

The British economy is now over seventy percent service based, and much of that is dedicated to the Financial Services Industry, based in the “City of London.”

All through the end of Tory rule in the Eighties and into the New Labour, Blair years, when Finance looked to be endlessly expanding, this didn’t seem like a bad deal. Now, with Finance seemingly subject to an endless cycle of booms, bubbles and busts and maybe even, dare one whisper, the end of the Capitalist Road, the prospect doesn’t look as bright.

The Tory-Liberal alliance will not want to face that of course. They’re busy planning cuts to public and social services, in a fanciful attempt at alleviating the enormous British budget deficit, even as the gathering tsunami of Finance Apocalypse is sucking up the cold grey sea off the rocks at Lyme Regis.

Labour, now in opposition, seems equally clueless. Unfortunately, in post New Labour Britain, clueless is about as good as it gets, so until the coming Financial collapse sends Cameron and Clegg scurrying for their miserable lives, the best show in Britain will be the battle for leadership of the Labour Party.

Here, the cast of possible entrants alone makes the show worth the price of admission.

There is the redoubtable and fortuitously named Ed Balls, formerly a stalwart of New (capitalist) Labour, now a born again Socialist, or so he says. There is the left wing hope, Irish Jon Cruddas and finally, the two Milliband brothers: former Foreign Secretary and New Labour whiz kid, David Milliband and his younger brother, former Climate Change Secretary, Ed Milliband. David is an already announced candidate for the leadership post and Ed, a likely entry, setting up a Shakespearean “War of the Millibands.”

The Milliband boys are the sons of the late and revered British Marxist theoretician Adolphe “Ralph” Milliband, himself a working class Polish Jewish refugee who escaped from Belgium in 1940 just ahead of the Panzer Divisions.

They are said to have been a very close knit family which makes not only the War of the Millibands, but the politics of the two boys, even more interesting.

In the early Seventies–about the same time that Tony Benn and Eric Heffer were getting the run around–Ralph Milliband came to the reluctant conclusion that the British Labour Party, despite it’s professed Socialism, could not be trusted to stand up for the interests of the Working Class–let alone Socialism, because it was too tied to the political self interest of its Parliamentary members.

An obvious conclusion, but a truism nevertheless. Because of it, Milliband ultimately became a signatory of “Charter 88,” a movement for Parliamentary reform, proportional representation and the creation of a written Constitution that was initiated by Agit-Pop star Billy Bragg among others. Twenty two years later, it is the principals embedded in Charter 88 that Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats were championing and which, seen from this distance, seem worth championing.

Since the Little Kingdom keeps borrowing all the worst stuff from us, it seems reasonable to propose that they at least consider some of the best. This would mean abolishing the bloody House of Lords and replacing it with a 100 person Senate elected by–I dunno, proportional representation, to go with a written Constitution.

They should do this, but probably won’t and frankly in their current straits, it doesn’t matter much anyway. The progressive possibilities of the Labour leadership battle, and for what happens to a Labour Party cut adrift after almost twenty years of now discredited New Labour ideology is the thin strand of hope to which UK citizens might cling.

It’s not much, but then as Ralph Milliband taught us and Barack Obama keeps proving everyday, in electoral politics, Hope is just a four letter word.

I was thinking about Rahm Emanuel last Saturday morning and how he’s spreading the word that he’s not responsible for the policy debacles of the Obama Administration (because the White House hasn’t been listening to his tough minded advice).

Then on Sunday morning, I started thinking about Rahm again when I read that the Dead Zones in the Ocean, especially the Pacific and especially the Pacific Northwest, are spreading rapidly, alarming scientists who don’t know why. And then, when I read that Rahm apparently referred to Liberals pushing Obama from the Left—especially on health care— as “fucking retards,” I thought that we needed to find Rahm an appropriate diminutive as well. Let me suggest here, “The Little Putz.”

 

            You can see the reason of course, behind the Little Putz’s off handed dismissal of Move-on/Daily Kos/MSNBC types. For anyone to have believed that Barack Obama was something more than a symbolic change candidate, implies for me at least, a level of credulity one generally attributes to pre-schoolers.

            The Little Putz was never taken in; he understood Obama. He also understood—or thought he understood—what it took to pass a tough-minded package of reforms through a dysfunctional Congress.

The big problem with the Little Putz is that he’s fighting the last war.

For the past generation Democrats could argue that in the words of Reggae poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson, “all we’re doing is defending.”

            Starting with the election of Ronald Reagan and running all through the Clinton and Bush years, the Republican free market fundamentalist argument has been in ascendance. Democrats have had to defend every inch of the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society; of what used to be called the American Way. While economically, culturally, socially, and environmentally the period has been one long unmitigated disaster—which the Democrats have largely acceded and bought in to—politically they’ve held their own surprisingly well. As a Democratic attack dog par excellence, the Little Putz was well suited for duty in this period.

            Now, with the collapse of the market fundamentalist model, everything has changed and Obama was supposed to represent that change. That he doesn’t is actually a larger tale in which the Little Putz plays a . . . smaller role.

 

In retrospect, even if people had understood that Obama’s was an impossible candidacy it wouldn’t have mattered. Who would have been elected in his place?

            No, we deserved Obama, just like we deserve the “magical and revolutionary” Apple I-pad and now we’ve got them.

However the principal flaw in Obamaism is its structural inability to incorporate the politics of class. This is not because President Obama and his advisors are stupid, it’s because the Obama campaign was not, and could not be about Class and still win an election.

A black candidate who campaigned on the basis of uniting the white and non-white working class against a failing system that rests, Atlas like, on its’ stooped shoulders, would seem a frightening, angry candidate to almost everyone else.

Nonetheless, the inability of Obama to talk about class in an authentic way means the Administration is ceding the terms of the conversation to others and in that spirit, I am put in mind of a long ago conversation with my late grandparents in their apartment in Northeast Philadelphia.

Both of them had been working class radicals when they were young but over the years their politics had evolved into a cranky, slightly paranoid, cold war liberalism. It was in this latter incarnation that I experienced them.

On this particular occasion I found them both insisting—surprisingly—that if I wanted to understand the Russian Revolution, I had to read Maxim Gorky’s “Mother.”

They became quite adamant about it, which made it difficult to understand my grandfather, whose accent was more or less impenetrable in the best of circumstances. But now they were on either side of me, shouting and gesturing in my face, “Read “Mother!” they insisted, “it’s the Truth!”

 And so I did.

I have to admit, given the build-up, at first “Mother—the book” was disappointing. “Mother” appeared to be a standard agit-prop recounting of the horrible lives of Russian workers and peasants in the run-up to the failed Revolution of 1905. The “Mother,” an illiterate, habitually battered widow of a drunken worker at first listens in with trepidation to the political meetings her worker-activist son conducts at their modest cottage.

But then she has her epiphany. The Mother is not sure about all the political jargon the young people use, but now she tells them fervently that yes, they have to tell the people “the truth.”           

What the Mother means by this is the big truth of the powerlessness of the people in the face of the grinding poverty that rules their lives, and the political-social autocracy that enforces its rule.

I think this is also “the truth” my grandparents were talking about and the Mother’s epiphany inevitably led me to my own.

The revolt against the inchoate sense of one’s own powerlessness is the true source of populism, whether of the right or the left. However this populist impulse to “the big truth” can lead to 9/11 conspiracy theories just as easily as it can lead to the insistence of the Tea Parties that the government has been taken over by Banker loving Socialists.

In this political environment, attacking the Republicans for their obstructionism is almost useless and an attack dog like Rahm Emanuel is as well. People do not want politics as usual; they want the truth.

The big failure of Obamaism is not the failure of The Little Putz to enact a modest package of reforms through Congress, nor the let down for liberals who wanted something more. It is the bigger, and almost inevitable— given the fairy tale nature of their campaign—failure of the Obamaites to construct an honest political narrative—the truth— that speaks to the powerlessness of people over a world gone horribly wrong.

 

 

In good times, Free Enterprise works well for some people. In bad times it doesn’t work well for anyone. Believers in the mystic efficacy of the market call this the business cycle. Everyday people, who only awake from our political stupor in times of serious emergency, call this alarming.

Nevertheless, this is what we find.

The Obama administration thinks that raining down money on the financial markets, along with a measure—or two— of New Deal Keynesian style pump priming of the economy will ease liquidity and eventually restore demand to more or less previous levels.

Voodoo economists say, Dream on.

Owing to the insane levels of consumer debt that we, the people had to carry in order “to grow” the now collapsed Ponzi Finance economy, it’s highly unlikely that we will able to re-inflate Demand to 1990’s or early 21st century levels. If consumption at 2006 levels is what’s necessary to re-inflate demand enough to “end the recession,” it’s not going to happen; not next year, not anytime soon.

In 1933, when FDR came in, the Financial Crisis of 1929-30 had already long before morphed into a Great Depression and it was clear to anyone, including the five or six Capitalists with their heads on straight (and that’s being excessively generous), that only massive government intervention in the economy could save Capitalism.

The Obama Administration, on the other hand, is coming in near the beginning of a deep slump: near enough, that many are still not convinced of the slump’s severity, and the administration is still concerned with “not spooking the markets.”

However the biggest—and still somewhat hidden— problem that Obama faces is that it’s not clear there is another way forward for Capitalism this time.

The Ponzi finance economy of the Reagan-Clinton-Bush era didn’t just happen. It’s roots go back to the initial decline of American manufacturing in the late 60’s.

By the end of the Seventies, we were flooded with a slew of Marxist jeremiads that saw the crisis of those years as presaging the collapse of the system. What many of these analyses missed, however, was the possibility of further innovation in Capitalism: What they missed was the coming Tech and computer revolution.

Capitalist true believers, of course, like to trumpet Tech as the example of what the Market can do if left to it’s own devices. This assertion is frankly even dumber than crude Marxist assumptions about the inevitability of Capitalism’s collapse. The deep wellspring of state support for the research that underlay the Tech revolution: particularly the development of the Internet by government computer scientists belies the boosterism of the true believers.

The big problem with Capitalist Tech innovation, at least in the Reagan/Clinton/ Bush era of Ponzi Finance Capitalism, was the mixed, muddled, and corrupted way it went about fulfilling its larger, non-financial, promise.

The vast preponderance of email on the Internet is Spam, and the majority of sites on the Web are dedicated to Porn. And let’s not even talk about Twitter. What drove the so-called Capitalist innovations of Tech were stock market valuations and these typically turned out to have nothing to do with even potential profitability. The entire system was predicated on the assumption that the Market knew, when in fact the Market is an ass, and proud of it.

With the collapse of the Tech bubble at the turn of the century, Wall street next turned to “financial innovation” as the new salvation of Capitalism and, as we see now, that didn’t work very well.

It’s still quite possible to believe that a next wave of Capitalist innovation could be led by Biotech, Green energy and what have you. However in the absence of a market that can fairly value these emerging technologies, what we are left with is the same, incredibly profligate, inequitable, wasteful and broken, Finance Capitalist model. And it’s not clear that the world can survive too much of more of that.

We need a new global economic system, and with the demise of Command Economy Socialism, ironically only two short decades before the collapse of its bete noire, Capitalism,  only Voodoo Economics can supply it.

The genius of the American System has always been the controlled competition of checks and balances and that’s what the Voodoo Economic Recovery plan builds on. We’re talking about Real Competition here, not the fake Japanese monster movie competition between highly leveraged and cannibalistic oligarchies that characterized late Capitalism.

The only entity with enough Capital to compete with the too-big to-fail mega Corporations of the 21st Century is the State itself.

For an idea of how this would work, we need look no farther than the Auto Industry.
This Industry is collapsing before our eyes, and if nothing is done about it, the Midwest and Upper Midwest are going into a depression that will not lift in our lifetimes.

We sense now that Obama and his “Temple whore economists,” Summers and Geitner, are really gonna blow it here big time, but using the Public-Private Competition model instead, here’s what would happen.

The government would first of all bailout both Ford and GM, by assuming the health care and legacy costs of the two companies. In exchange, we, the people will receive an equity—and voting— stake in the two companies as well as significant public and union representation on their boards.

Chrysler, the least viable of the Big 3, would be bought from Cerberus Capital Management and run by a Public Corporation—call it US/Chrysler. Over the course of several years it would be converted to a dedicated green car company, whose chief line; the “Green T” would be a stripped down, low, cost hybrid or electric car, affordable for every American family and financed by the new US/Chrysler Bank.

In the Voodoo Economic Recovery Plan, this model of the auto industry would be followed throughout the economy. When most of the big Banks are taken into the receivership, as they surely will be by early 2010, one of the Banks will not be resold to private investors, but will be kept by the people and managed by a Public Entity. Like a private bank, the “Public Bank” will also be responsible to its shareholders: the people of the United States. Profitability would be a goal, but wise public investment in green community building, low cost student loans, affordable mortgages and non-usurious commercial credit would be it’s raison d’etre.

The Pharmaceutical Industry has created an empire by utilizing public, government and university research to make obscene profits for itself, and then paying an army of lobbyists to cover the tracks. This is an industry crying out for Public Competition.

Public Power and utility companies would be systematically established in every area of the country to compete with the existing private companies. The goal of public power would the replacement of fossil fuels with renewables as well as fair and reasonable service to its customers.

On it would go throughout the economy: Could Microsoft dominate the software and computer industry if a public tech company, capitalized at the same levels as Microsoft, was pushing open source and Linux software as a competing platform? Could Google continue as a Big Brother like power unto itself if challenged by a well-capitalized, less self-interested, search engine? Maybe yes, maybe no, but a Public Tech company would create thousands of tech jobs and a tech industry more focused on value and function, and less on planned obsolescence and weird nerd fetishisms, either way.

There were many weaknesses of the late Capitalist system, but the most obvious was the structural one. Capital needs to grow, which in turn, means enterprises have to grow larger and larger, until too-big-to fail, the epithet for our times, is the most obvious term that applies to them. But it’s not only that they’re too big to fail, giant enterprises simply do not work particularly well. This goes for Public Enterprises too. Voodoo Economists do not believe that publicly owned companies would intrinsically operate any more efficiently than private or publicly traded Companies. If we have to hazard a guess, we’d say that they will operate spectacularly better at first based on the go-getter idealism and unflagging energy of the first generation of workers and management . . .
. . . And then fall off in efficiency through succeeding generations, until eventually they more or less resemble the Post Office.

C’est la vie. The Voodoo Economic Recovery program does not pretend to be a panacea for the troubles of the world, it’s just a way of leveling the playing field, and pointing needed social investment in the right direction. Parenthetically it should also crack open the door for small and mid level manufacturing to take advantage of the rebirth of Capitalist competition, which became almost an afterthought in the last generation.

Voodoo economics, of course, has gotten a bad rap over the years; especially from Bush I who accused Ronald Reagan of it, but as we say at the Institute, consider the source. And for that matter, don’t criticize what you can’t understand.

Here at the Institute, we’ve been reluctant to criticize this administration over their first hundred days simply because they’ve inherited such a mess. But now, as we’ve watched the Obama Administration take baby steps in a hundred different policy directions, it’s become obvious that addressing the mess directly is not their MO. The Obamaites are going to try and, Clinton-like, politically finesse the mess, and wait for openings to take their shots.

The problem is those openings may never come.

This “Recession” may, or may not, lift a bit over the next year, but it’s not going to “end.” We’re in the beginning of a structural change in the World Economy.

Voodoo Economists expect this realization to kick by the first quarter of 2010, if not before. Of course by then, it may be too late to save Obama’s Presidency—or at least the “change” part of it. Someone will have to take the fall, and we suspect it will be Obama’s Machiavellian Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who’s so busy triangulating, it’s not clear who he’s triangulating with.

In the Jewish religion the current season between Passover and the ancient beginning-of-Summer Festival, Shavuot, or “Festival of Weeks,” is called “the counting of the Omer.” The Omer lasts seven Shabbats, seven weeks, 49 days.

In the way of Prophecy, we suggest here, that like the Omer, Rahm Emanuel’s days (as Chief-of-Staff), are numbered.

I was thinking about going down to DC for the inaugural last month, but decided it was too cold to sell my “I was there for the Fall of Capitalism but all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

So I stayed home which was probably a good thing, as I don’t think it was the right crowd for my product. Even now, my impression is that people don’t really get it: that despite the great gifts of Obama, the first political-economic initiatives of his Administration suffer from a “systemic cognitive deficit.”

Then too, as a friend of mine says, “Barack didn’t put in for this.”

Obama’s 2008 campaign was like a good pop movie, but it wasn’t a populist campaign, nor a campaign that challenged the underlying assumptions of the system: it was a Public Relations campaign with Obama as “the brand” representing Hope& Change.

It was a great campaign for the end of Reagan era, but God willing, Barack was not only the best of the “branded” candidates, but the last.

Not only is the Reagan era, the Conservative era over, but so is the era of Finance Capitalism, though we are not yet ready to absorb that, nor are we ready for what comes next.
So let’s just call these, “The Years of Agonizing Reappraisal.”

Specifically, the big problem that Obama and the rest of us face is that the answers to the twin dilemmas of excess debt and falling demand plaguing the world economy are diametrically opposed.

The stimulus aims to “jump start” the economy by recreating the missing “Demand” that our missing jobs, vanished savings and mounting personal bankruptcies have led to.

But of course the way we created all that Demand in the first place was by over consuming; by running up lunatic levels of personal debt—often perforce—that mirrored what Wall Street and Big Business were doing on an enormous scale with leveraged debt in the Macro Financial economy.

In the economy of the 90’s and the aught’s, there was an explicit trade-off for your willingness to go deeply into debt. You were now empowered to buy more than you could ever reasonably afford to buy—say for example a house whose price had been artificially pumped up, in turn, by the speculative logic of the debt system.

You were rewarded by the system for being an irresponsible Super-consumer who would never ever be able to get out debt again for the rest of your (miserable) life.

The neo-cons even came up with a suitably Orwellian name for this system: they called it “The Ownership Society.”

In all, it was an evil system riding for a fall and now, like Humpty Dumpty it has.
Now we can’t recreate that missing Demand, we can’t “jump start” the economy, no matter how big the financial stimulus; we can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again even if we wanted to.

We are in a cycle of falling demand because no one can give us credit anymore to keep up our over consumption. We are in a cycle of falling demand because the System itself has failed.

Of late though, I’ve been wondering why the mainstream economists either don’t see or don’t want talk about this, and find myself thinking back to a long ago conversation with a friend who later became an oft quoted institutional economist in the 90’s.

I ran into him at the crossroads of campus late one afternoon as he was coming out of a Hegel seminar, taught by a well known dissident Communist political philosopher. The seminar was invitation only—my friend was a nominally Marxist Phd candidate—and I was curious to know what the hell was going on in there. He told me only that it was pretty heavy going, and when I replied that at least it would help him in his future academic career he just shook his head sadly.
No, he said, it wasn’t going to help at all.

“Larry,” he explained, speaking carefully—as one would speak to a small child—“what people in the Economics department call Macro-economics is not what people like you or me call Macro-economics. In the Department they’re not interested in philosophy, they don’t see the connections and they’re not particularly interested in making them. It’s mechanical, it’s about equations and modeling out how the elements of the real economy work together, and they’re pretty good at it. But that’s all they’re interested in.”

In the classic book 1972 book “Reinventing Anthropology,” Dell Hymes points out a similar dynamic in his own discipline. “How much of what goes in departments is for the sake of mankind’s self-knowledge (let alone liberation) and how much for the sake of perpetuating, extending and propagating departments? . . . ”
“ . . . By virtue of its subject matter, the study of man, Anthropology, is unavoidably a political and ethical discipline, not merely an empirical specialty. It is founded in a personal commitment that has inescapably a reflective philosophical dimension.”

Substitute the word “Anthropology” with the name of any of the other Social Sciences: Sociology, History, Political Science, even Economics and you get the idea.

Right now, Larry Summers and Tim Geitner clearly have the upper hand in Obama Administration councils, by virtue of being economics professionals. The problem with Summers and Geitner however, judging by the solutions so far proposed, particularly their half assed bank bailout scheme, is they’re wearing ideological blinders.

To Summers, Geitner and Fed Chairman Bernanke, there is no alternative to the “free market” and apparently even short term nationalization of the banks is off the table. Instead, we have the Fed and Treasury socializing the losses of Companies that are too big to fail like Citigroup, AIG, and soon Bank of America, to avoid “spooking investors.”

Of course this bit of economic legerdemain fools no one, let alone investors. Except for the terrified political professionals in the White House, it seems pretty obvious to everyone else that Treasury is not only risking the dollars of taxpayers, but the whirlwind of their coming political wrath.

Looked at empirically, it’s possible to see exactly where the world economy is headed: toward what economists call stagnation, in this case, medium or long-term stagnation. Obama clearly has a lot on his platter, and it would be a shame if his initiatives on Health Care Reform, the Environment, Labor and potentially even the Middle East were all overwhelmed by his administration’s failure to deal honestly and effectively with this ongoing crisis.

President Obama now has a choice that will define his Presidency: go along with Summers, Geitner and Bernanke, or begin to develop new lines of thinking about the economy; particularly, about the efficacy and sanctity of the so-called free market.

In the meantime I’m going down the basement to set up the silk screen for a new T-shirt I’m printing up to sell along with the first. It’ll read, “The truth is a commodity too.”