Noam Chomsky: ... The New York Times happened to have an article by its economic correspondent in its magazine section [in August] about Obama's economic programs. He talked about Reagan as the model of passionate commitment to free markets and reduction of the role of the state, and so on.

Where are these people? Reagan was the most protectionist president in post war American history. In fact, more protectionist than all others combined. He virtually doubled protective barriers. He brought in the Pentagon to develop the "factory of the future" to teach backward American management how to catch up on the Japanese lead in production. SEMATECH ["Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology"] was formed.

If it was not for Reagan's protectionism and calling in of state power, we would not have a steel industry, or an automobile industry, or a semi-conductor industry or whatever they protected. They reindustrialized America by protectionism and state intervention.

All of this is washed away by propaganda as though it never happened. It is very interesting to look at a place like MIT which was right in the center of these developments. My department -- you are teaching a course in the Military Industrial Complex -- my department is an example of it.

...
The electronics lab, along with the closely connected Lincoln Labs, was just developing the basis of the modern high tech economy. In those days, the computer was the size of this set of offices and vacuum tubes were blowing all over the place [with] computer printouts, paper running everywhere.

By the time they finally got computers down to the size of a marketable mainframe, some of the directors of the project pulled out and formed DEC [Digital Equipment Corporation], the first main frame producer.

IBM was in there at government expense learning how to move from punch cards to electronic computers. By the early l960s IBM was capable of producing its own computers, but no one could buy them. They were too expensive. So they were bought by the National Security Agency.

Bell Labs did develop transistors. That is about the only example you can think of a significant part of the high tech system which came out of private enterprise. But that is a joke too!

Bell Labs were able to run a great laboratory because they had a monopoly, so they could use monopoly pricing powers to set up a great laboratory. They worked on technology. Their transistor producer was Western Electric, who could not sell them on the market; they were too expensive. So the government bought about 100 percent of advanced transistors.

Finally, of course, all of this gets to the point where you can market them privately. It was not until the l980s after 30 years of development essentially in the state sector that these things became marketable commodities and Bill Gates could get rich.

http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N51/chomsky.html

Responsibility and long term planning have never been a part of that, because they cramp their ability to pile up the cash and party.

The problem with a Green Strategy is that opportunities for making a big stinking pile of cash are more limited than they would be in other areas - which is not to say that they're not available, but no one is going to get as much of an adrenaline rush from building a windfarm as from building a planet-spanning derivatives empire which could implode at any moment.

Green energy is measured, intelligent, sensible and mature, which makes it utterly the wrong choice if you're one of the Econo's consumers of financial crack.

So, most people now know - painfully, was the whole "set the markets free" ideology, but some pretty smart people managed to convince a great many not entirely stupid others that this was correct almost to the brink of disaster.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice. Blog - Nice Experience

this is their nightmare, having to watch people smash the manacles that kept them enslaved to the 'big boys', keeping them fat, while little people suffer.

If'Madness is the absence of work'(Foucault), then Sanity is the presence of play..