Search LBO-Talk Archives

2641 [lbo-talk] Austerity In The Face Of Weakness -- rank: 1000

On Sep 7, 2010, at 10:03 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote: > Michael writes: > > "This contrived Tea Party thing -- pure > theater. Staffed by a handful of useful idiots. " > > Yes, there's a magnificent bit, near the end of Silone's 'Fontamara' that describes similar theater in southern Italy, just before WWII. Yeah, but the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant stuff isn't theater. It's widely held and hideous. Doug

Document Size:	5177
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Sep 7 19:56:53 PDT 2010

2642 [lbo-talk] Austerity In The Face Of Weakness -- rank: 1000

On Sep 7, 2010, at 1:18 PM, Patrick Bond wrote: > Doug has shown that he has limited forward vision and in his cynical way, he also likes throwing cold water on Marxian crisis theory. For someone we all love to learn from on so many topics (and I remain one of his biggest fans), and for someone editing a Left Business Observer, these are unfortunate flaws. Not to sound too presumptious, but they can be remedied, with the right attitude. (I thought the wake-up call of September 2008 would have ...

Document Size:	6043
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Sep 7 18:06:57 PDT 2010

2643 [lbo-talk] end of civilization (cont.) -- rank: 1000

<http://gizmodo.com/5632095/justin-bieber-has-dedicated-servers-at-twitter> Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter resources at any moment. According to a Twitter employee talking to designer Dustin Curtis Bieber has "racks of servers dedicated to him. I'm sure this will excite his haters (hello 4chan!) even more.

Document Size:	4932
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Sep 7 14:55:57 PDT 2010

2644 [lbo-talk] Bill Gates as "Tea Party" supporter? where? -- rank: 1000

On Sep 6, 2010, at 10:36 AM, Fernando Cassia wrote: > So, anyone got any direct, verifiable reference about Gates putting > money into the Tea Party?. That seems very very unlikely. Gates is rather liberal for a plutocrat. Doug

Document Size:	5038
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Sep 6 07:43:03 PDT 2010

2645 [lbo-talk] Newsweek Poll: 57 percent say government spending on jobs should be top priority -- rank: 1000

On Sep 4, 2010, at 11:24 AM, Shane Mage wrote: > And yet the number of unemployed workers today is bigger than the number that Obama claimed would be unemployed *without* his ARRA. You're an economist of some sort, right, Shane? What's so hard about the concept that unemployment is lower than it would have been without ARR? Obama's predictions have nothing to do with it. Doug

Document Size:	5453
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Sep 4 08:35:01 PDT 2010

2646 [lbo-talk] Newsweek Poll: 57 percent say government spending on jobs should be top priority -- rank: 1000

On Sep 4, 2010, at 9:34 AM, Shane Mage wrote: > Actually they're likely to vote (with their feet) in large numbers against those who promised government spending to create jobs in the present and then refused to enact any program that would do so because they became terrified by a scarecrow, future deficits. They were wussy about it, but there's no doubt that ARRA spent a lot of money and preserved millions of jobs that would have otherwise disappeared. Latest CBO estimates: http://www.cbo.g ...

Document Size:	5672
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Sep 4 07:32:19 PDT 2010

2647 [lbo-talk] question for those who remember the 70s -- rank: 1000

On Sep 4, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Marv Gandall wrote: > I may have missed it, but in catching up with this thread, I didn't see any reference to the explosive spread of affordable post-secondary education in the 60s and 70s, which to my mind provided the material underpinnings of the so-called youth revolt of that period I recall some right-winger at the time as saying that the massification of higher ed gave people an experience of leisure that was really inappropriate to their class position. Dou ...

Document Size:	5172
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Sep 4 07:30:49 PDT 2010

2648 [lbo-talk] Newsweek Poll: 57 percent say government spending on jobs should be top priority -- rank: 1000

On Sep 4, 2010, at 5:00 AM, CGreen7223 at aol.com wrote: > 57 percent say federal government spending to create jobs should be top > priority, while 37 percent say deficit reduction should be top priority. And > yet the top priority of the politicians is to slash medicare and social > security. And they're likely to vote in large numbers for people who'll do the opposite. Go figure. Doug

Document Size:	5582
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Sep 4 05:47:04 PDT 2010

2649 [lbo-talk] Michael Heinrich on Capitalism and the State -- rank: 1000

On Sep 3, 2010, at 6:24 PM, Angelus Novus wrote: > There's a depressing tendency among leftists to project their own wishes into really vague and broad terms like "democracy" and just assume the rest of the population has the very same notions as to what words like that mean. Ain't dat da troot, as we used to say in New York. Among the many idiocies afflicting the Pacifica network right now is an empty faith in an empty "democracy" of the listeners, who have absolutely no ...

Document Size:	5259
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Sep 3 18:17:14 PDT 2010

2650 [lbo-talk] the media (cont.) -- rank: 1000

[from Popbitch] >> Judgement day << What matters to the press 2000: William Hague is leader of the Conservative party and happily lobbies for benefactor Michael Ashcroft to get a peerage, despite knowing he would be a non-dom, not paying full UK tax, then denies these facts for 10 years. 2010: Hague shares a twin hotel room with a junior aide. Question: which of these got the press and Conservative MPs in a lather about Hague's "lack of judgement"?

Document Size:	5112
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Sep 3 14:37:36 PDT 2010

2651 [lbo-talk] Michael Heinrich on Capitalism and the State -- rank: 1000

On Sep 3, 2010, at 5:08 PM, Angelus Novus wrote: > "Consequentially, the demand is raised to push back the power of corporations, which is to be realized inter alia through the nationalization of private banks (11) and structurally decisive large enterprises (9). However, during the financial crisis, the state-owned Landesbanken did not cut a better figure than the private banks." > > It's like American leftists are so used to the deeply rooted fake anti-statism of the U.S. r ...

Document Size:	5799
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Sep 3 14:28:10 PDT 2010

2652 [lbo-talk] Michael Heinrich on Capitalism and the State -- rank: 1000

On Sep 3, 2010, at 2:49 PM, Eric Beck wrote: >> also increases the relative bargaining power of labor against capital. > > True, but at a cost, no? Wasn't that power gained at least in part > through domestic slavery, Jim Crow, and the exporting of higher levels > of exploitation? Those things came under intense attack during the Keynesian era. I don't see how they sustained the arrangement in any essentail way. > As you've said in the past, the only barrier > capitalism ...

Document Size:	6499
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Sep 3 12:14:02 PDT 2010

2653 [lbo-talk] Michael Heinrich on Capitalism and the State -- rank: 1000

On Sep 3, 2010, at 2:15 PM, SA wrote: > "Centralization on our terms" doesn't cut it, not even close. I can't even begin to speculate what it might mean. Well there's rural electrification plus Soviet power but I don't think that's what Eric has in mind. Doug

Document Size:	4989
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Sep 3 11:24:33 PDT 2010

2654 [lbo-talk] Austerity In The Face Of Weakness -- rank: 1000

On Sep 3, 2010, at 12:44 PM, James Heartfield wrote: > a theory of permanent crisis. That's not Marx, it is Sisimondi Marx, from the Grundrisse: Those economists who, like Ricardo, conceived production as directly identical with the self-realization of capital - and hence were heedless of the barriers to consumption or of the existing barriers of circulation itself, to the extent that it must represent counter-values at all points, having in view only the development of the forces of producti ...

Document Size:	5632
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Sep 3 10:28:58 PDT 2010

2655 [lbo-talk] Tea Party Numbers (and Chomsky's citation of polls) -- rank: 1000

On Sep 3, 2010, at 12:52 PM, James Heartfield wrote: > Doug to Eric: 'It's why capital hates Keynesian arrangements' > > No, I don't think so. The capitalists of the 1960s favoured such Keynesian arrangement Ours tolerated them, because they thought they had no choice. By the 1970s, they'd reached the breaking point, and launched a war. Doug

Document Size:	5170
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Sep 3 10:23:49 PDT 2010