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cassiodorus commented on the blog post More Signs Obama Will Likely Approve Keystone XL
This gets added to the list of things America will wish hadn’t happened when it recovers from its eight years of Obama delusion, some time in 2017.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post More Signs Obama Will Likely Approve Keystone XL
I remember when Obama said “make me do it” in a speech, knowing full well we didn’t have the power to make him do anything.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post C. Wright Mills Explains the End of Liberalism
The game isn’t really over, it’s just that the public has agreed to lose.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post C. Wright Mills Explains the End of Liberalism
Economics (as an academic discipline) was from the get-go an attempt to exclude the wisdom of the “critique of political economy” (as championed by Karl Marx and others) from the late-19th-century modern university out of a fear that class conflict would enter the university itself. Kees van der Pijl has a developing argument about this: see e.g. page 5 of chapter 1 of this book:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ir/research/gpe/gpesurvey
So if economics today is merely a handmaiden discipline of an owning class seeking to maximize profits while the bottom 99% of the public is unable to improve its lot, this is because economics as a discipline was designed to do that exact task from the beginning.
Populist Keynesianism, the trend which allowed the 1950s and 1960s to be the “golden age of capitalism,” came about as a byproduct of the crisis of overproduction which caused the economic collapse of 1929-1932. Eventually, global elites saw the wisdom of creating a secure consumer class (as opposed to the highly-indebted consumer class of the 1920s) as a necessary accoutrement to profit — going into business is not meaningful if there is no public to buy one’s products.
This wisdom was jettisoned in favor of the financial games which were to characterize the neoliberal era after the economic crises of the 1970s. The reason that the casino economy of the 2000s hasn’t collapsed entirely is no doubt due to the residual strength of the consumer economy that was built during the golden age of capitalism. Eventually, we can predict, this residual strength will fail.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post More Indications Biden Is Thinking About Another Run
I’m guessing that 1) when in doubt, Joe Biden’s opponents can play the “plagiarism card”:
and 2) The Democratic Party main selling point will be “we’re better than the Republicans” from the get-go.
Neither of which will mean that the Obama administration’s record will mean anything in the 2016 election run-up.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post The Real Rogoff-Reinhart Problem Was Not the Mistakes, It Was the Lack of Basic Transparency
Like most transparent Administration in history y’know.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post MA Sen: It’s Markey v Gomez
And the Green Party candidate is… ?
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cassiodorus commented on the diary post Can Working People Be Saved From Obama’s Brilliant Plans? by joe shikspack.
But Obama is like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela!
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cassiodorus commented on the diary post Barack Obama: Wall Street’s Perfect Manchurian Candidate by probert06.
Thanks probert06 for putting out this video.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post Come Saturday Morning: Breakthroughs for Solar Power
Solar power will at best supplement fossil fuel power as long as we have a capitalist system calling the shots.
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cassiodorus commented on the diary post Seven State Keystone XL Resolutions, Where Are the Environmentalists? by Nick Surgey.
Do we really know that the “will of the people” is opposed to Keystone XL?
http://www.people-press.org/2013/04/02/keystone-xl-pipeline-draws-broad-support/
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post Is Obama Actively Trying to Keep Democrats From Taking Back the House?
Right — it’s time we started noticing that we have a democracy of nothing. Maybe it would help us figure out how to get some real power.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post Is Obama Actively Trying to Keep Democrats From Taking Back the House?
Obama is indeed a Democrat — a New Democrat. The “true Scotsmen” here at FDL need to get over their shock at having noticed that the party left them a long time ago, and start trying to figure out where they can be effective in doing something good.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post Is Obama Actively Trying to Keep Democrats From Taking Back the House?
history will say OBAMA made HOOVER look smart!
Hoover was very smart, and Obama is even smarter — the question is, smart at what?
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cassiodorus commented on the diary post Softer, Kinder, Simpson-Bowles, “The Lefty Humanitarians.” // Not! by TomThumb.
Yeah, it’s too bad marxism is “dead.” A few reading groups for Engels’ “Condition of the Working Class in England” wouldn’t be a bad thing now.
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cassiodorus commented on the blog post Is Obama Actively Trying to Keep Democrats From Taking Back the House?
Obama no doubt believes that it will be easier to pass a Trans-Pacific Partnership with Republicans running the House and Senate.
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cassiodorus commented on the diary post Softer, Kinder, Simpson-Bowles, “The Lefty Humanitarians.” // Not! by TomThumb.
We don’t provide a real safety net, especially in this country, because the capitalists want an impoverished reserve labor force.
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cassiodorus commented on the diary post Alternatives to Capitalism: an Open Thread by wendydavis.
I appeared to have come to the party late — excellent diary wendydavis. I’m still absorbing parts of it.
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cassiodorus commented on the diary post Are BRICS Agreements Signal of the Future Downfall of US Hegemony? by dakine01.
No, they’re not. Instead, they’re evidence of a continuing transition from a US-centered global economy to an economy in which smaller players seek refuge from the growing economic chaos.
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cassiodorus commented on the diary post Disaster Capitalism Is Creating Tremors in the Global Financial World by wendydavis.
Perhaps this is another way of explaining it: originally “primitive accumulation” was when western Europe stole the world to set up global capitalism. In this country this involved, largely, the taking of land from the native (“Indian”) inhabitants and the importation of “stolen” African slaves to work it. “Primitive accumulation” in this era, however, means [...]
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