Archive for category Continuing Crisis
No silver bullet…we already know what we need to know.
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Continuing Crisis, Philosophy on February 13th, 2010
Everybody’s looking for new ideas. We’re hoping for the next “big idea” that will save us all from calamity. We face so many problems, there just has to be something new we need to learn in order to solve them. Right? Is that what we’re missing…novelty?
Astra Taylor, documentary filmmaker whose work includes Zizek! and Examined Life, makes the following observation:
Over time I’ve come to believe that our quest for “new ideas” may not be that different from our quest for new cars, new clothes or new entertainment and distraction; just another manifestation of the short-sighted, immediate gratification attitude that created our current dilemma in the first place. It’s a capitalist approach to matters of the mind: That concept is so last season! Out with the old, in with the new! If we’ve encountered a concept before, it’s summarily dismissed as yesterday’s news, as though ideas have a use-by date.
The thing is, many good insights are never put to use, let alone used up. Over the course of history, countless excellent ideas and theories have simply never gotten any traction. Would it be so bad to actually try to put some of the old Enlightenment principles of liberté, égalité et fraternité into practice? Or what about the Marxist maxim of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? Or Kropotkin’s meditations on the possibilities of mutual aid?
This is reminiscent of Chesterton’s remark that it wasn’t, for instance, that Christianity had been tried and found wanting; it’s that it has never really been tried. In his Orthodoxy he generalizes:
Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas;but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas. If I am merely to float or fade or evolve, it may be towards something anarchic; but if I am to riot, it must be for something respectable. This is the whole weakness of certain schools of progress and moral evolution. They suggest that there has been a slow movement towards morality, with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant. There is only one great disadvantage in this theory. It talks of a slow movement towards justice; but it does not permit a swift movement. A man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things to be intrinsically intolerable.
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I only say that whatever is justice ought, under given conditions, to be prompt justice.
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Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish the king’s orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish the king to be promptly executed. The guillotine has many sins, but to do it justice there is nothing evolutionary about it. The favourite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in the axe. The Evolutionist says, "Where do you draw the line?" the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it HERE: exactly between your head and body." There must at any given moment be an abstract right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something eternal if there is to be anything sudden. Therefore for all intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping things as they are, for founding a system for ever, as in China, or for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution, it is equally necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision. This is our first requirement.
The point is that we already know what we need to know. We just have to have the will do follow our conscience and the courage that will take.
[Read the rest of Astra Taylor’s essay here: http://bit.ly/9vyz34. Read more of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy here: http://bit.ly/bQzeGO]
Single-Payer Health Care Plan Dies
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis, Health on December 17th, 2009
What you have to look forward to: “The Private Insurance Company Stimulus Package.”
Here’s to your health (you’re going to need it…).
100 Dead in Explosion…How About a Nice T-Bone?
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis on December 4th, 2009
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Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis on November 20th, 2009
Lester Brown on what to do…
Paul Craig Roberts: U.S. is a failed state
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis, Economy, Res Publica, War on November 5th, 2009
The bill of particulars:
U.S. budget is dependent on foreign finance.
U.S. too weak for diplomatic efforts; can now only use force of arms.
U.S. costs out of control to the benefit of the rich only (example—no money for universal health care, but we spend $400 a gallon for gas used by troops in Afghanistan.
U.S. political leadership rife with corruption (example—many on the take from private insurance companies)
etc., etc., etc.
This is a problem because:
In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the USA. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.
Goldman Sachs secretly bet on housing crash–Report
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis, Economy on November 5th, 2009
McClatchy’s inquiry found that Goldman Sachs:
- Bought and converted into high-yield bonds tens of thousands of mortgages from subprime lenders that became the subjects of FBI investigations into whether they’d misled borrowers or exaggerated applicants’ incomes to justify making hefty loans.
- Used offshore tax havens to shuffle its mortgage-backed securities to institutions worldwide, including European and Asian banks, often in secret deals run through the Cayman Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean that companies use to bypass U.S. disclosure requirements.
- Has dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.
- Was buoyed last fall by key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.
More evil here.
David Schweickart on Economic Democracy
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis, Economy on November 5th, 2009
A stable, sustainable, full-employment economy is possible. Its institutions are imaginable. It would be democratic and efficient. It would embrace market competition. There would be a place in it for entrepreneurial capitalists and for a small business sector like the one we already have. In fact, it wouldn’t look too different from what our economy looks like today—and yet it would be very different.
Don’t miss this essay for a plausible analysis of our current crisis and a way to recover. Note: It is not in the plans of any of our “leaders.” Too bad.
To what end is Economic Democracy aimed?
We shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently than the way the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs…. What work there still remains to be done will be as widely shared as possible-three-hour shifts, or a fifteen-hour week…. There will also be great changes in our morals…. I see us free to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the extraction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow…. We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things.
–John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"
Unemployment, Foreclosure, Homelessness
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis, Economy on November 5th, 2009
The unemployment numbers due out are projected to top 10%. A report on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning notes that if you factor in the underemployed (those working part time but who wish to work full time) and those that have just given up looking for work, the real number nationally is closer to 16 percent. In some parts of the country, it’s more like 20% percent.
Couple this high unemployment rate with the disaster in the housing market, and you have a prescription for increased homelessness. The National Coalition for the Homeless produced a report [.pdf] a few months ago detailing the situation, and the New York Times published a long piece on the plight of one of those affected.
Not all are convinced that foreclosures are the main reason for homelessness—even in cases where that is exactly what is being claimed. Daniel Indiviglio remains skeptical. See his recent piece for the Atlantic’s Business Channel. Note especially what he has to say about the impact of foreclosure on renters and the role of personal responsibility. Even the Time’s piece shows that its subject did make some poor financial choices.
Also, we need to continue the discussion of whether home ownership ought to be the goal of everyone. Why not rent? Here’s an article [.pdf] about renting in a nation of owners. Timothy Noah mulled it over in Slate ten years ago (here and here), but the questions remain.
It is tough for a worker to demand equity at a job if that worker is bound to a mortgage and cannot afford to lose that job.
Of course, we’re back to the question of how to find a job these days in the first place.
Chomsky on Palestine
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis, Res Publica, War on November 5th, 2009
Chomsky’s Amnesty International Lecture
Posted by eweislogel in Continuing Crisis, Res Publica, War on November 2nd, 2009
Here is an Open Letter to Amnesty International protesting Chomsky’s appearance based on Chomsky’s role “in revisionism in the story of the concentration camps in northwestern Bosnia in 1992.”