Vance Packard and the Ultra Rich

Presently I'm reading Vance Packard's The Status Seekers, which published in 1959 as a follow-up to his 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders. Status Seekers is out of print and I gather it had less impact than Persuaders(which was reissued recently), or at least is not remembered as having had as much impact. There's no question Seekers is dated in some respects, such as his numerous references to the prices of things circa 1959, and to a "diploma elite" who were seemingly guaranteed better outcomes in their lives by virtue of having attended college.

If anything, its datedness is instructive as to how much the underpinnings of the US economy and the zeitgeist are so different today. At any rate, datedness in some trivial particulars doesn't disqualify a text as therefore having little or no value. It's a little like objecting to a film from years ago because you don't like the hairstyle of the protagonist.

This is from Chapter 2, "An Upsetting Era:"

This brings us to the second big economic change affecting class: the graduated federal income tax. Some have described it as the great leveler. The federal-government income taxes began rising in the thirties to fight the Depression, and soared even more steeply in the forties to finance World War II. They still remain near wartime levels. As a result, it has become virtually impossible for a man to become a multi-millionaire by salary alone. He needs to have capital gains, only one quarter of which he loses in taxes, or to be an oilman and get a "depreciation allowance." Still, in 1958, I was able to find, without too much difficulty, several dozen Americans who have established fortunes of at least $10,000,000 in the twenty years since income taxes have become so high.[4]

Despite the laments about high taxes, the number of American families with a net worth of a half-million dollars has doubled since 1945. Most of the very rich manage, one way or another, to hold onto the bulk of their new incomes each year. Meanwhile, corporate lawyers have applied their ingenuity to find non-taxable benefits for key executives. These range from deferred payments in the form of high incomes for declining years and free medical checkups at mountain spas, to hidden hunting lodges, corporate yachts, payment of country-club dues (according to the survey, three quarters of all companies sampled did this), and lush expense accounts. One sales manager declined a $10,000 raise and took instead a $10,000 expense account which, it was specified, he didn't have to account for.

(Packard's footnote refers to "How to Make a Fortune-- New Style" from Ladies' Home Journal, January 1959. No author is cited. He also cites a lot of academic sociologists throughout the book, so he wasn't just citing popular articles, although the citations are a bit sparse for my taste.)

In the 1989 interview above with Harold Channer, Packard talks about Ultra-Rich: How Much is Too Much? which had just been published a couple of months earlier, and which turned out to be his last book. In Ultra Rich he suggests an absolute limit of 25 million dollars on inheritable fortunes, which he argues would motivate the wealthy to be more mindful of creating civic legacies and take an interest in making plans to disperse their fortunes down to that limit before they died.

For my part I think an absolute limit like that is unrealistic and promotes corruption, much as Prohibition promoted an underground alcohol economy in the 1920s. I think Huey Long also argued for an absolute limit on wealth back in the 1930s.

But I appreciate Packard's intent as well as his noting that Reagan's tax policies were promoting inequality, which, if memory serves, not so many people fretted about in 1989. To put it in perspective, remember that Bush Senior had been inaugurated president that January, the same month that Ultra-Rich was published. My impression at the time was that many people regarded the Reagan era as being an aberration, and felt we were likely to go back to the New Deal Lite policies of Nixon, Ford and Carter, especially after George Bush Sr. had memorably described Reagan's ideas as "voodoo economics" in 1980. And of course most of us didn't know to call him Senior then.

25 November 2011

above:Global Recession Looms as Euro Crisis Deepens

Nov 23rd: Costas Lapavitsas: Regulation is not enough, the public must take over the financial system.

Ian Welsh, "What's happening in Europe is what matters: rules of the financial rich"

from WikiNews:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan apologizes on behalf of the state for the 1937–38 Dersim Massacre.

The interim government of Egypt resigns amid violent protests in which at least 30 people have been killed and more than 1,500 wounded.


Two from Pink Scare, a new(to me) blog which reads like it is written by an academic, but accessibly so:

Nov 2nd: Is the Problem the 1% or the System?


Nov 16th: Chicago's Democrat Machine Votes Unanimously For Austerity

This is a declaration of war by the 1% against the 99% right here in Chicago. The bill cuts over $400 million out of city services: It shuts down 6 of 12 Chicago Dept of Public Health clinics, it cuts $63 million from Family and Support services (which has already eliminated 63 full-time jobs this year alone), slashes full-time public library staff by 32% (on top of the 10% cuts last year) laying off more than 300 librarians, reduces hours for libraries, makes cuts to firefighter pay and closes fire-stations, etc. Meanwhile Rahm is pushing hard for big tax breaks (e.g. $23 million for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) for the wealthy as well as public transit fare hikes.

Charles E. Lindblom, "Muddling Through" [PDF link; I'd never heard of Lindblom before reading Pink Scare. He looks like an interesting thinker.]

Healthcare Now, "Sponsor a Single-Payer Activist"


Blue Nile: 'High-end market is the healthiest'

Blue Nile CEO Mark Vadon discusses Black Friday sales for the online jeweler, and says the 'healthiest part of the market is the very high-end.'

MSN Money: "Over 55 and desperate for work"(via Fiscal Times)

Florida assistant principal calls police on kissing 12-year-olds

Chicago Tribune,"Competitive Shopping" Cited in Wal-Mart Pepper Spray Attack

Talking Points Memo, Gov. Brownback's Complaint About Student Tweet Lands Kansas Teenager In Principal’s Office

Days of Rage, Evenings of Indifference

above: uploaded 17 Sep 2011, below: 20 September 2011



below CNN:Erin Burnett: Wall St. protesters vague on details 4 October 2011



Slate, "Even the Protesters at Occupy Wall Street Are Confused About What They’re Protesting"
(This article was also titled: Vacant: The Occupy Wall Street protests and the creation of the post-Obama left. By David Weigel Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, at 3:24 PM ET)

Douglas Rushkoff, CNN: "Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it"
updated 1:09 PM EST, Wed October 5, 2011

Peter Hart, Fair.org, "Erin Burnett Hears the Critics--But Still Misses the Point"
10/05/2011


Dennis Perrin writes:

I admire these kids. They're off their asses. Agitating. Arguing. Providing a living example. There's passion and feeling in their dissent. They're willing to be punished. It's easy to mock them, but how many of you would take their place? Primarily when the cops attack?
[...]
Our owners fear any rustling from below. They'll throw whatever they have at those unsatisfied with our paradise. There are signs that the Wall Street protests will expand nationally. If so, get ready for serious shit slinging.

Yet I have doubts. The class war from above demoralizes as much as it incites. Countless people have surrendered. Faded from view. To demonstrate or occupy corporate turf doesn't seem like a wise option. You'll get beaten and arrested. For what? Making mortgage payments is tough enough.

I've been checking Pollingreport.com for signs of any thing related to Occupy Wall Street. They have links dedicated to Nancy Pelosi, Chris Christie, "Is the Supreme Court too liberal?", "Kids of illegal immigrants", even "Is Social Security constitutional?" But Occupy Wall Street? Thus far, zilch.

There are, admittedly, some items that may be peripherally related: "Can you trust Washington?" and "Distribution of money and wealth" but these are summaries of older and unrelated polls. You'd think the establishment media was blithely unaware of 'OWS',(Ha!) but one assumes they've been hoping the kids would just go away. I'm not even sure how accurate it is to characterize them as all or mostly kids but either way they didn't just go away, at least they haven't yet. One assumes the powers that be have a certain patience threshold with respect to how long OWS may go on, but it hasn't been reached yet. They recognize it's in their interest to seem indifferent at this point.

Finally, CNN released a poll today about OWS, saying that roughly half the population has heard of the protests going on. If a poll conducted after this has been going on for over two weeks shows 49% of respondents still haven't even heard of "Occupy Wall Street", how many do you suppose were even aware of the various one-day demonstrations in D.C. over the years, whether related to the Iraq war or other things ? 20%? 15%?

(I mean the noncommercial ones of course, mounted by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and their ilk, as opposed to those media spectacle faux demonstrations sponsored by Fox News or Comedy Central.)

It reminds me of the conceit of looking for "untainted" jurors for high-profile murder trials. I've always wondered about that, why it's supposed to be preferable to have incurious lunkheads as stewards of the juroring, or whatever you call it.



Poll: Half the country has heard about the Occupy Wall Street protests

An ORC International Caravan Poll released Monday[pdf link] indicates that 51% of Americans say they've heard about the Occupy Wall Street movement, with 49% saying they haven't heard about the demonstrations, which started in New York City 24 days ago and have spread to cities across the country.

According to the survey, 27% say they agree with the movement's overall position on the financial system and social change, with 19% saying disagree with Occupy Wall Street on those issues. Fifty-four percent of those questioned have no firm opinion about Occupy Wall Street.

The pdf link CNN provides barely scratches the surface. Maybe there were many other questions. I'm curious how people's views correlate to age, whether or not they usually vote, to level of education, and obviously viz-a-viz employment status and income. The perennial drum-beating about how persons with bachelor's degrees making so much more over the course of a lifetime than high school grads has struck me as a bit fishy for some time, and I wonder about how those numbers are derived.


A detour, of sorts: Discussing Slavoj Žižek means you get to use diacritical marks, which is always fun. I've read people like John Caruso and BDR saying he's an overblown fraud, but have tried to reserve judgment because I haven't read any of his books, just an occasional essay in The Guardian or Counterpunch. But he comes across as a clueless, egocentric jerk in this linked 2 part Youtube video [via] of his visit to OWS from this Sunday. Why do the kids co-operate with his insistence that they repeat everything he says, like extras in The Life of Brian? So Fox News can make fun of them?


Cain: Not rich? No job? Blame yourself (CNN Political Ticker)


Herman Cain: "Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself."

( And he's supposed to be one of the less wacky candidates.) I hope somebody asks him about the phenomenon of CEOs occasionally getting performance bonuses for trimming their workforces, in light of the above.

He's right though, that ultimately the Occupy Wall Streeters represent a critique of capitalism, but I suspect that now that the establishment media has their angle of "the liberal tea party", this critique will be increasingly difficult to discern for people watching on television. At any rate, it probably behooves us to mistrust our own reactions sometimes, when we are convinced

"the American People are so...[insert quality x]"

because the media often works to make us give up on each other.

9 October 2011

via Crooks and Liars, from yesterday. I think programming this is part of the reason I watch much less TV nowadays.


from a couple of weeks ago, via Dennis Perrin: Marisol Bello, USA TODAY, Poverty affects 46 million Americans



Paul Craig Roberts: Is the war on terror a hoax?
(via KFO's Buck v. Bell, where he has some additional comments. BvB was apparently named for this case from many years ago.)

Guardian UK, "Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media"

Dan Hancox,"The Real Reason Why Police Cage Peaceful Protestors" October 3, 2011

Duncan, "In my back yard"

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said in a recent interview that a lot of talk about "sustainability" is misconceived, because the lifestyles people want to sustain simply aren't sustainable. And some well-meaning people just don't get it: one person commented on Facebook, "When I have enough to feed myself for the month and not Overdraft...Overdraft ..I will undoubtedly suffer help I those less fortunate." It's a nice sentiment, but it misses the point. Personal, private charity can't fix the systemic structural problems the world faces.

...

The Ides of September: Dickensian blogging for Yahoos

update below

Look, even the OKC neurosurgeon and his wife are selling their Oklacastle at a loss, so that means everybody's hurting. OK?

No, Yahoo doesn't actually say that. I'm kidding, OK? I'm such a kidder. And to be fair, maybe I've been excessively critical of Yahoo on occasion(also here). I imagine they're not substantially better or worse than average as far as corporate new media go. For all I know the people updating their front page actually put these kinds of items in stark opposition deliberately, to obliquely comment.


A Medieval-Style Castle in Oklahoma
By Rob Bear, Curbed September 13, 2011

"...they've put their Oklahoma City travel alternative up for sale at a loss, despite having filled the place with glamorous European light fixtures and furnishings. The castle was first listed for $4M in early 2011 and took a quick $500K price cut in May.
[...]
At 9,600 square foot, "[i]t's a big home and everything suits it," the owner says. "The chandeliers and the big door handles. Everything is more perfect than I could pick out in a million years." Yet the six-bedroom manse, a hodge-podge of faux finishes and architectural styles, might be one of the most muddled designs we've come across.

Yahoo Finance/AP: Mortgage default warnings surged in August
Report: Mortgage default warnings spiked in August, signaling potential new foreclosure wave
(also here, and here)

update:

Rob Payne of Halcyon Days adds some useful information, in the comments:

I assume it’s part of the bailout, the subsidizing of banks who are holding onto foreclosures. It’s a really bad situation, the banks won’t loan because often the foreclosures have serious problems, damage, termites, sometimes the people who lost their home damage the property but the bottom line is they are often in terrible condition. And the question is, if the bank loans on a decrepit home, who fixes it? Who pays for it? You can bet the banks don’t want to.

I’ve read that the banks are holding onto properties to keep the number of homes for sale down so that it doesn’t further drive prices down. If they dump them on the market prices would no doubt plummet again depending on the geographical area. Rich neighborhoods are by and large not affected nearly as much as working class neighborhoods. For the wealthy prices have only dropped slightly and in some cases not at all. That’s the advantage of the wealthy and upper middle classes...

-the rest is in the third comment.

CNN re Rebecca Zahau

"Dr Drew" doesn't sound very convinced of his own assertion when he says the police have convincing evidence, etc. [CNN link is here]

Darcus Howe interview on the BBC

update: I think this video is better than the old one.
update no. 2: Lenin's Tomb, "The BBC vs Darcus Howe"

I'd never heard of Darcus Howe, before, and I note the linked wikipedia article seems to have been edited pretty extensively in the past 24 hours.


Somewhat coincidentally, I was reading Jack Crow's essay "Humiliation" last night when I came across a link via the comments from Justin:


"Why the Rich Fear Violence in the Streets"

Which inevitably made me think of events in Tottenham. (Justin is right, some of the comments at the WSJ link are genuinely malevolent towards poor people.) We may not know exactly what happened in Tottenham, but I'm struck by some things:

(1)Believing that precipitating conditions(like Cameron's austerity measures) are irrelevant while simultaneously condemning the rioters as morally reprehensible, less civilized, etc, and less worthy of empathy, is a little like believing in "free will for me but not for thee" while also being indignant at the putative sub-human Other for not possessing as much free will as you do, even as you may be part of the reason he has less freedom. (Or not possessing as much as you believe you do.) The belief in the sub-human other is rarely directly expressed of course, but it seems as if it comes to the fore pretty quickly.

(2) Automatically dismissing the possibility of agents provocateurs as having had a hand in the events, as opposed to being agnostic about the question without hard evidence pro or con, amounts to an ideological tenet. (I talked a little bit about the world of marketing co-opting the signifiers of radicalism and protest politics the other day; apparently www.agentprovocateur.com is an online lingerie seller.)

(3) Riots like this are opportunities for the elite to strengthen the loyalties of the middle class. Maybe this is thunderingly obvious, but relates to why I mention no. 2, above.

See also Will Shetterly, "Why rich people hate looters"

Rich people need hugs too

Arthur Laffer on Fox, via Media Matters

Fox Hosts Art Laffer To Claim "You Gotta Cut Government Spending" To Get Out Of Recession.From the August 5 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom.

I imagine there actually are people who don't realize how absurd Laffer's "two person economy" model is and need it explained to them. Laffer is a dangerously irresponsible man.


Alex Pareene, Salon.com The baffling paranoia of rich guys against Obama:

The president who preserved a system rigged for the haves now faces their (confused) wrath.

Ken Langone* doesn't strike me as being the least bit confused, and I don't doubt that he knew that BHO meant to accommodate the right wing agenda of his ostensible opponents. But hey, Pareene has a paid writing gig and I don't, so what do I know. This article from earlier this week originally had a video from late July(i.e. last week), which CNBC has subsequently yanked. I think this is it, below:



*Actually I agree with Langone that BHO shouldn't call the super rich "fatcats." It sounds kind of silly, and suggests that the president thinks poor people are just resentful and stupid, as opposed to thinking they are really hurting and being concerned with fairness. This is awfully unseemly of him, almost a "tell." He really should call them his employers.

"You know, this used to be a helluva good country"

Excerpt from Easy Rider[video link]

Yes, Easy Rider is dated. And the idea that long hair represents rebellion seems quaint, because most or all of the signifiers of rebellion and discontent from the 1960s have been co-opted for marketing purposes, to sell perfume or cars or mutual funds, etc.

Ian Welsh, "What the Debt Limit Crisis Should Have Taught You", July 31


Arthur Silber, "Tell Me Again: Who's the Stupid/Weak/Incompetent One?" August 1st


Zachary Karabell, Time: "The U.S. is not drowning in debt", July 15th

Irony deficiency: Yahoo vs. class consciousness

Two screenshots from Yahoo from earlier today.

Darkness and light

From Joshua Holland’s "Fallout of Hate Is Spreading Across America from "Ground Zero" which appeared in AlterNet on August 21st:

In May, a man walked into the Jacksonville Islamic Center in Northeast Florida during evening prayers and detonated a pipebomb. Fortunately, there were no injuries. (If the man had been Muslim and the House of worship a Christian church, the incident would have garnered wall-to-wall coverage, but while the story got plenty of local press it was ignored by CBS News, Fox, CNN and MSNBC.)

It was the most serious of a series of incidents in which mosques far from the supposedly hallowed earth of Ground Zero have been targeted. A mosque in Miami, Florida, was sprayed with gunfire last year. Mosques have been vandalized or set aflame in Brownstown, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; Arlington, Texas (where the mosque was first vandalized and then later targeted by arsonists); Taylor, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Eugene, Oregon; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Tempe, Arizona; and in both Northern and Southern California. A mosque in a suburb of Chicago has been vandalized four times in recent years.

In May, an Arab man was brutally beaten in broad daylight in New York by four young men. According to the victim’s nephew, "They used the bad word. 'The mother bleeping Muslim, go back to your country.' They started beating him and after that he don't know what happened.” A Muslim woman in Chicago was assaulted by another woman who took offense at her headscarf. A Muslim teacher in Florida was sent a white powdery substance in the mail. In San Diego, a man in his 50s became so incensed by the sight of an American of Afghan descent praying that he assaulted him after screaming, “You idiot, you mother f**ker, go back to where you came from."

The perpetrators of these hate crimes are clearly unhinged, but they’re not operating in a vacuum. They’re being whipped into a frenzy by cynical fearmongers on the Right. Writing for Tablet magazine, Daniel Luban astutely calls the dark spread of Islamophobia, “the new Anti-Semitism.”

Since then I know of the cabbie who had his throat cut in NYC and vandalism of a mosque being constructed in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The latter stood out in my mind because my mother briefly attended Middle Tennessee State College, as it was known then, in the early 1950s. She was born and raised in Iraq, and she remembered her time in Tennessee fondly.

My perspective may be different when it comes to would-be Koran-burner Terry Jones, maybe because I “look like them,” in the eyes of the Terry Joneses of the world. It’s not a question of breadth of vision, or wisdom, or empathy. Your life is different when you know you look like “them” in the eyes of people around you, some concerned about that more than others.

When the towers were attacked in September of 2001, I felt in those moments watching on TV and the second tower was hit that the republicans had received a gift, and our social landscape would immediately change, and there would be no going back. Now, years later and nearly two years through Obama’s term in office it’s pretty clear it was a gift to both parties.

Even today I find it unlikely that we will eventually be rounded up like the Japanese-Americans were during WWII, but I am concerned that things will get worse. Rob suggests the establishment media is working for the government; I'm more inclined to think that the government and the media work for a common group of owners.

Earlier today Jonathan Schwarz wrote:

the sad reality of life on Earth is that horrible things happen all the time. What was unusual about the terrorist attacks wasn't that they happened, but that they happened to us. We have two giant oceans on either side of us; two weak, friendly neighbors; and the most powerful military in the world. As awful as that one day was, what was true before is still true afterward: No one has less reason to be scared than Americans. Wondering whether we're safer is a little unseemly, like Yao Ming wondering whether he's ever going to get taller.

I think that’s largely true. The scope of the 9-11 attacks was also unusual, but the two-edged nature of ever-advancing technology suggests that more large scale 9-11 like attacks may be more likely in the future, especially as the global overclass strives to lock in their huge financial advantage over everybody else and make class increasingly less fluid in the years to come.

In the meantime, the hostility towards Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans not only looks like it will get worse, it looks like the product of a country that knows its in decline and is lashing out at convenient scapegoats. (Of course when my mother attended college it was communists.)

Even in September of 2001 the wars we waged(and continue to wage) since were by no means inevitable. In our screwed-up political climate it would have been easier for a sitting republican president to show restraint than a democrat. A few targeted strikes here, a few there, and we would have matched "their" body count and claimed one burnt corpse to be Bin Laden's and called it a day. Meanwhile the CIA could easily refute(or even refudiate!) any subsequent tapes or videos as fakes. (I got an auto-email from my congressman today which said that 2,977 Americans died in the 9-11 attacks, and that (thus far) 5,661 US soldiers have died in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have to believe the scenario I sketched out would have cost fewer lives, on both sides.)

It's actually pretty amazing to me, how America's elites apparently don't want to solve our long term problems and seem to want them to get worse. Seems there's money to be made investing in the decline of America, but only for a lucky few. Some years ago I saw an article in The American Prospect, I forget who the author was, entitled, "Where are the rational greedy bastards?" As far as I can tell the American overclass is increasingly divorced from the rest of us, so breaking US society down for tax cuts appears rational to them. Which must be why they're happy to gin up social strife, as we're less likely to notice what they're up to.

At any one time it seems that there is a certain portion of the population, maybe 15 to 20 per cent, that are what popular parlance today calls "haters." People who reason based on fear and authoritarian impulses, that have an undue respect for authority schizophrenically mixed with a simultaneous resentment of it. Maybe in bad times, like nowadays, it climbs to 25 or 30 percent. By assigning numbers to it I recognize I'm being a bit glib, but my point is I'd like to believe that even nowadays they're a noisy minority, even though like Joshua Holland I'm concerned at how they've become emboldened of late. (And that's why I do care about the president or secretary Gates urging restraint, even if it's grossly hypocritical on several levels. Because when two-bit Koran burners show restraint this may influence others, who look to them for imagined permission to do other things.)






It's a strange country we live in, where much of the society cares about being insulated in would-be innocence from the world beyond our borders while our government meddles bloodily all over that same world. When I read about New York cabbie Ahmed Sharif's would-be killer Michael Enright and looked at the photo of him looking all innocent and alarmed in court I thought about that dichotomy, and wondered if it's a sort of mental illness shared by millions.(I note, however, that Enright had the presence of mind to select an non-white lawyer to appear with him.) I'd like to believe in the other America, the one described in Wayne Drash's story of two young Muslim Americans who traveled cross country for Ramadan and said they encountered mostly warm, decent people. But as far as I can see, they both exist.



New York Daily News, "Muslim cab driver slashed by boozed-up bigot just back from filming Marines in Afghanistan: cops"
(original title: Muslim cab driver slashed by upstate New York man because of his religion: police)

Wayne Drash, CNN: 2 Muslims travel 13,000 miles across America, find an embracing nation

Productivity vs. Progress

part 2 is directly below-

the G20 and the Real News fund raiser

from their website today:

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Haitian abduction story, Pt 2

from CNN:

"I warned her, I said as soon as you get there without the proper documents, you are going to get into trouble, because they are going to accuse you, because you have the intent to pass the border without the proper papers and they are going to accuse you with kids trafficking," Carlos Castillo said he told the group's leader, Laura Silsby, during a meeting Friday.

Four hours later, Silsby and nine other Americans were turned back from the border. They were arrested and taken to a jail in Port-au-Prince.

"This woman knew what she was trying to do was not legal," Castillo said.

A CNN reporter attempted to get reaction to Castillo's comment from the jailed Americans, but they would not discuss the matter, responding to questions by singing "Amazing Grace" and praying.

the real news and 'false market value'

"James Crotty: The creation of speculative bubbles creates false values which leads to huge bonuses"

Does the US Spend Too Much on Foreign Aid? - Peter Singer

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

"what a continuously proven wrong dickhead"

Fora TV has an excerpt of a talk Thomas Friedman gave at a bookstore recently, above.
In the comments, whoo689 wrote:

"Is Friedman a conservative or libertarian? My friend says he's libertarian, but I dunno. The only "libertarian" aspect of him seems to be his stance on free trade."

I responded that I doubted that he had a coherent political philosophy, and that mainly

"he's just a guy with a high-powered rolodex of connections who puts his finger to the wind periodically to figure out what kind of book to write next, something that will please the PBS tote bag crowd. I like to think of him as the Robin Leach of globalization."

But perhaps "poop121" said it best(above). Far more succinct too.

More from Jim Rogers

More from Jim Rogers, this time sans bowtie:
"Britain & America have no clothes", part 1 of 3.

And, Part 2 and part 3.

I don't entirely agree with Rogers' views. For example, I think the massive US debt going forward means we do need to raise taxes on the wealthy to prevent stimulus-oriented public spending from causing inflation, and to prevent panicking foreign banks contemplating a possible collapse of the dollar.

In part two Rogers says, of the creditor-debtor relationship between China and the US, that

"it's the first time in history that an undeveloped nation financed a developed nation."

I don't know about that-- it seems to me that Europe and the US forced undeveloped nations to finance their growth, through the economic plunder of colonialism. But having said all that, there's still a lot of value to what he offers, and I think his misgivings about the bank bailouts are apt.

(Of course, as with any would-be economic sage-slash-teevee-talking head, it's useful to keep in mind how they might benefit or be hurt by different policies the government may take. This of course applies to Rogers, as well as Warren Buffet and Alan Greenspan, etc. It's very much to Rogers credit that he readily talks about his investment in Asia in this regard.)


cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Jim Rogers, "helping your friends"

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

FIRE sale

courtesy Avedon Carol, there's this simple slide show with stick figures(see controls on the lower left corner) explaining recent events. :^)

Although Avedon recognizes the bill that didn't pass on Monday was a bad one, she nevertheless buys into the notion that

"the Republicans tripped over their own fake-out this time by trying to simultaneously support and condemn the bailout bill. Weird."[one]

Sorry, I don't buy that it was just a "fake-out"; why shouldn't the GOP rank-and-file rebel when their hidebound leadership instruct them to cut their own throats?

"...apparently the vote on the deal failed, according to Atrios, because the crybabies are back - that is, the Republicans were miffed because Pelosi hurt their feelings, and therefore they decided not to bother to "help" the country during this totally-urgent-we're-all-gonna-die emergency."[two]

Barney Frank has been trying to sell this line since Monday afternoon, which (should be) just as transparent as the GOP leadership blaming the GOP defections from the bill on Pelosi's speech beforehand. The party leadership on both sides are probably relieved that no bill passed, insofar as whatever they mean to eventually foist on us will undoubtedly be pretty noxious and they're lining up their stories so they can blame the other side for the less salutary aspects-- which I'm guessing will be pretty much every aspect of the bill that finally passes, if one passes before the election.

That doesn't change the fact that the reason Barney Frank and Atrios and others are labeling this as a "hissy fit" is to prevent people from looking more closely at the collusion of the democrats in helping to bring us to the present state of affairs, or even looking at specific reasons that the opposition may have for opposing the present bill. Whether or not a better bill actually emerges is another matter, and I'll admit I suspect it's unlikely. Nevertheless, in the short term, putting the brakes on Monday afternoon was the best result possible.

Large numbers of people freaked out when the Dow lost 778 points on Monday, partly because the people on TV told them to fear the reaper if a deal didn't get done. OK, so it didn't. But the pesky dow gained back 485 points the next day, without a bill having been passed, and some people even reported seeing the sun shine.

Even if it proves to be transitory, reality intruded, casting in sharp relief the lies of all the sumbitches who want you to suspend your skepticism, and fear what you are told to fear when they want to ram through a poison-soaked piece of legislation to "help" you. I'm reminded of

this video.

Finally, here's a guy who thinks no deal is better than anything Washington is likely to concoct: