nothing is real to the us press until it hurts the six figure income demographic.
capitalism is built on a model of predation: dog eat dog. there's allegedly a line in the sand somewhere, where people above a certain income level don't prey on each other, where you're supposed to be "safe" 'cos you are respectable and conformant. but in practise that line moves around, and as resources get tighter and enclosure gets more totalising, that line is moving upward and leaving chunks of the middle class behind, to face the very upsetting realisation that they are not "Us" after all but only Them -- clueless punters and prey to be fleeced by the biggest shills and thieves at the top.
some of this is addressed in Fear of Falling: the inner life of the middle class...
middleclass people in the high-inequality nations desperately need to believe that they are inherently, innately different from "losers" -- the poor, the homeless, the landless, the indigenous, the struggling immigrant, the undocumented. they need not to think "there but for the grace of God go I," because that acknowledgement -- that another person's risk and vulnerability is mirrored in our own, that we might well be in her shoes someday or she might well have been us were it not for dumb luck (the atheist's version of grace) -- is the Great Heresy of our time, heresy against the cult of the individual and the vulgar darwinism of fools.
when the predation line rises and leaves the respectable bourgeois exposed along with the "losers" on the same littered foreshore, to the same marauding gulls, it's an existentially devastating experience... and one which would result in an epiphany of class consciousness, were they not brainwashed from birth against any such event.
we see in our time a crisis of belief as well as resources: how long will people hold onto an adamant ideology when reality contradicts it daily in more and more painful and immediate ways? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
But now there is some phase change going on in modern capitalism. The scale of credit developments is giving rise to new qualitative relations. The new phase is not going to look pretty - one surely looking thing is growing imbalance of economic (and eventually social) power. It is like everyone is playing the "Monopoly" game, and now we are in the phase that people are starting to drop out. One difference is that unilateral win does not make sense, so people in play will start make arrangements (rather cooperative) to "settle" the game. Other difference is the risk that "loosers" won't leave quietly.
The new phase of capitalism does not mean "the end of the world" - some will adopt very nicely even without trying, so to speak. But there might be a great hangover even for "winners" - they will probably get less than they ever thought.
The worst of mortgage crisis is still to come - I will check the sky in April :-]
It is like everyone is playing the "Monopoly" game, and now we are in the phase that people are starting to drop out.
I have been thinking along these lines in the past couple of days. And I don't like the look of it.
What happens when control of corporations is concentrated in relatively few hands? When the controllers are permitted to pass control to their heirs? When the corporations in question have revenue streams comparable with the GDP of sovereign countries?
We don't know. Yet. But methinks it won't be pretty. Equality under the law is gonna go, at the very least.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
What happens when stuff runs out, and cities flood?
Petere Hamilton has written about a possible future for the UK where a Mao-ist government collectivises everything and everyone after the flooding - which I think is more likely than a corporate dystopia, because corporations can only survive when energy is readily available and travel and transport are simple and relatively cheap.
Without easy international trade, corporations are meaningless. They're also a lot more brittle than they appear.
When the corporations in question have revenue streams comparable with the GDP of sovereign countries
Jake, they already do, and have done for a very long time, right back to the Dutch East India Company , which was quite durable, and the South Sea Company and Mississippi Company, which were spectacular bubbles, and blew the English and French economies respectively out of the water.
My case is that big transnational "Joint Stock Limited Liability Companies" aka Corporations are obsolete complex and hierarchical dinosaurs, which will either collapse and die, or more likely, the cannier ones (eg IBM) will evolve into something else more networked and collaborative.
It's in this field of collaborative legal protocols and "enterprise models" or "legal and financial structures" that I've been working on Open Capital this past few years, since I realised that the UK government had inadvertently - and for entirely the wrong reasons - made Victorian-vintage "closed" corporations obsolete.
They did this in 2000/2001 by creating what I call an "Open" Corporation, in the shape of the UK Limited Liability Partnership ("LLP"), (which is not a partnership, despite the name)and the US LLC is a close enough cousin to use in the US for the same purpose.
I believe that those enterprises (by which I mean both "private" businesses, and "public" institutions) which do not use the risk and revenue sharing structures I observe emerging - eg "Capital Partnerships" and "Guarantee Societies"- will be at a disadvantage to those that do.
Classic "emergence"
The driver of all this is direct "peer to peer" connection. The models I am describing enable "dis-intermediated" and indeed cross-border consensual legal protocols I characterise as "legal XML".
We are quite close to the position where new tools based upon such "Semantic Web" protocols begin to spread "virally". "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
What happens when control of corporations is concentrated in relatively few hands? When the controllers are permitted to pass control to their heirs?
I have been mulling what the optimal level of wage/income equality/inequality is. Any ideas? Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
"The middle class" should be a reasonable if controversial answer.
I mean, you need both fairness, social mobility and rewards for entrepeneurs and people who want to study and work hard.
Without losing sight of the veil of whatever Rawls called it.
A hugely complex issue, permeating everything we discuss here. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
isn't social mobility one of those growth myths though? if everyone is upwardly mobile, then who picks the fruit, who sweeps the streets, who washes the floors?
the technotopian answer to that is "robots of course", whicm merely means substituting energy slaves for human slaves. and energy is now an increasingly scarce resource, alont with enojgh other resources that we know "social mobility" cannot continue to mean "aspiring to live like ozzie and harriet" let alone paris hilton.
why should rewards only go to inventors and entrepreneurs and similar [mho] growth fantasists? why should not rewards go to good stewards of land, producers of good food and high quality durable goods? or even to people who keep the streets clean or fix bike tyres or cook a magnificent blintz?
for people who like to study, isn't studying a reward in itself? do they also need to be bribed with positional goodies galore? surely the reward of studiousness is to be let loose in a library: the maintenance of a library being a net-positive benefit to everyone instead of a privatised position good to reward only the elite few deemed worthy.
and so on. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
how long will people hold onto an adamant ideology when reality contradicts it daily in more and more painful and immediate ways?
how long is a rubber band?
the metaphor of torture, one we are being asked daily to contemplate, leaps out of this...
it's like the media is a voyeur at a torture session, and we are invited to draw lots on how long can folks endure sweepstakes, complicitly staring along too...
how long can gazans get hammered before they roll over and get that they are subhumans and don't deserve anything?
how long can we see our fellow humans acting out without something snapping inside ourselves?
how long can cognitive dissonance be the status quo?
i think the root bitterness is found in the childbirth question...
we discipline ourselves not to have kids, or have few, and we resent the fact that the third world is out-reproducing us. now, they caddy on our golf courses, pretty soon they'll want to build shanty towns on them!
we 'get ahead' and want our way to go on forever....inside the gated communities, don't care how many guards and armies it takes to defend us.
we expect and feel entitled to a colonial viewpoint, where coolies do the dirty stuff and serve us mint juleps on the terrace.
we are afraid, because we know we've been living on the backs of the poor, but we are terrified we've lost the skills to work hard, while taking that cushy job in uncle's insurance firm.
oh i know it's not conscious... but it eats away at the happiness they thought they could buy, it literally kills the natural joy of life, and their lives become a gilded sitcom, rotting from within.
pitiful...
as pitiful as the plight of the poor, in a different way.
and what about the middle class? (which i disparaged so much as a teenager, finding the values totally materialistic and moneygrubbing, the precursor to the positional consumerism we see as operant capitalist model today.)
what i failed to see was the benefits of education accorded to the emerging middle class...
the poor started work too early to get academic passe-partouts, and the rich never sweated it too hard in class, they knew that job in the family tea plantation, or dickie's recommendation for some cushy foreign office job was a given.
the middle class saw the sting of poverty too closely for comfort and whipped itself to ascend the greasy pole, by hook or by crook, while their baby boomer kids were studying history and civics, building an idealism that was too fuzzy to be concrete, but too tonic to be ignored.
so the middle class had (has) the incentive to push themselves, and the education to enable a global viewpoint.
take away the awful part of being a bourgeois, the part poets and beats railed against, the part that was too constipated or entrenched to 'get' the 60's, the part that made the sterile conformism of the ozzie and harriet era such a rebellious kick to try and upend, and what do you have?
our last best hope...the grown up children might not wear paisley or stargaze-with-bongos any more, but they have been exposed to the embryonic western 'enlightenment', they spent their halcyon days with whitman and emerson in their backpacks, and as long as they could, they dreamt big.
the poor have so few voices, the digital revolution is still a generation away, (if we're lucky,) it is rare to see great leaders coming up from their ranks, the whitefella media machine doesn't find them sexy enough to promote unless they are blingy rappers or sports heeerose.
the rich are silent, all the way to the bank, they buy pols to to the tiresome job of lying to a spun public why 2+2 =3, and why though we're in a 'boom', (gotta believe!!!), the crumbs are getting sparser, and the only thing that's tricking down is due to incontinence...
woo woo, it's the world cup...maybe britney with no panties....
largesse... the luxury of having enough time away from the plough for one's children to get that precious 'eddication'...
then what?
oh yeah, that's right....blog!
participate in intelligent discussions, realtime, worldwide...
use whatever privilege we were born into to dis- and remantle the operating system, with a lot of help from mother nature to help prove points that should have been compulsory viewing 40 years ago, but were already so hairy to contemplate, it drove millions off screaming into the night, and what almost became a playful upending and recoding of the rules we live by, instead became what we see today, an oncoming pitched battle between the haves' private armies, and their cousins behind the barrios.
but worldwide...
many times education strips us of conscience, as the sheer repetition of cultural superiority narratives condition us to conveniently overlook what society doesn't feel good seeing in the mirror.
to recover one's personal stake in group sanity entails looking hard at these myths, and so many here are helping me unwind them...
sorry for the long ramble... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
thankyou too for all the 4's, your subtle encouragement has emboldened my already over-insistent urges to mouth off to strangers!
it's a pretty combustible combo of brains colliding here, the result falls between damn gripping and pleasantly relaxing... as you know, i'm almost as addicted as some of you to showing up for my window-onto-the-real-world.
happy neuron firing! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
The economy = the top 1%
and all is clear. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
"the economy" = "the top 1 percent" or "the aristocracy"
"reform" = "droit de seigneur"
"free market" = melee
and so on. they'd be far more fun to read and more accurate too! The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
