Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Dunno. Seems pretty underwhelming and stale, compared with the issues at play. I tend to agree with Doug Henwood that small business is massively over-rated as an answer to anything. And I believe small business assets are still more unevenly owned than are big business shares. So, the closing seems quite tired and off-point, IMHO, as does the fantasy of projecting himself as a Senator asking honest questions...

I think he's not so entranced with small business as an answer to current problems. Although he might have some affinity for the Georgist hijinks Owen laid out. It read to me like he was championing them against consequences that are, for the most part, undeserved.

I'm not a big fan of small town bankers either. So I'll concede your point about the closing without a quibble. But I do have a different take on the admonitions to a hypothetical senator. I think he's in lecturing mode, addressing an elite group that is none too bright and none too capable -- if someone carefully explains how to cross the street, they'll stop feeling a need to push their constituents in front of cars.

To clarify a bit, I think his abiding concern is a lawyerly and liberal one. He's a meliorist, with but a touch of red, and truly the best of the old school liberals.

I honestly think calling Nader a "liberal" is a little too harsh on the guy. He's just too disrespectful of all the institutions that liberals worship. A Red he ain't -- but as a wonderful sui-generis monkeywrencher, he's pretty damn good.

I'm quite likely making too much of the word "liberal" and being awkward in its assignment. Yet I can recall a time when all the smart, young, self-identifying liberals I knew wanted to be just like Ralph Nader. Diligence hadn't steamed their own irreverence away and most of them felt no need to play that self-conscious, right wing-appeasing, denunciation game that defines the breed these days.

Exactly, Al. I don't think he changed -- I think they did.

Or come to think of it, he did change -- but in a good way. The Unsafe At Any Speed Nader morphed into the Democrats' Abomination of Desolation -- surely, surely! that's a step up from liberalism?

Yes, yes it is, at least a step up. The Democrats' reaction to him bears all the signs of the shame-ridden chiseler caught in the act.

I totally agree with Ralph Nader.

"As one solid small town banker in Indiana put it recently: “If these big companies are too big to fail, then they’re too big.”

But at the bottom of Ralph's article seems to be the idea that if only the American government were made up of genuine lefties and not sellouts like Obama, it would be able to restrain the big banks.

This is just Arthur Schlesinger in lefty drag.

Ralph needs to take the next step. The American state is too big to fail and, thus, too big.

Break it up.

"I tend to agree with Doug Henwood that small business is massively over-rated as an answer to anything"

independent action is not i submit
"over rated "
the launching of a hundred thousand new projects every day oughta be a mission
of the credit system

the small group statisfactions
of a venture
socially out weigh those of an aquisition

uncle sugar cain
give us trillions
in
household/community level producer credits

credisherknichtwessencraftequegilgameshenkite

but
for household consumer credit
give us
gornisherhausflopenegedankinneeeesch

"Where are the skilled people to be hired by the federal agencies—the administrators, field implementers, auditors, financial whizzes able to understand the complexity of greed and over-reach; the inspectors, prosecutors and contract negotiators to name a few categories?"

that passage has hayekktk un its underside

racks of managers may be costly
and in short order full of feather bedniks

but we need both

zillions of mittelstand brake outs
and one big credit system

state capitalism is the boundlessly big
good buddy
a zillion small potato projects crave

"...what is actually going on inside companies like the giant financial conglomerate AIG. Since the Goliath’s near collapse in September, the federal government has committed $160 billion... "

walk away from the giant red ink squid uncle
brake off the old line insurance company
uncleize it and throw the squid
to the sharks

"to keep it from splattering its reckless red ink over small businesses, municipalities, 401(k) plans, policyholders ..."

a bold bold big big lie its not even

" the Fortune 500 big companies .."

its only about paying out to
the hedge funds and other trans nat
hi fi privateers
and their foreign sovereign fund confederates
indeed
"...led by the omnipresent Goldman Sachs bank."

walk away from the giant red ink squid uncle

if real producers of any size need funds for producing real stuff
it oghta sound like

call now
a certified uncle loan officer is awaiting your call

Score: Transnational Corporations:100 trillion
Ralph Nader, ascetic crusader without
a movement: 0

Where are the principles of clinging to fantasies of dear old Princeton, dear old Dad, monasticism, solo speechifying, and restoring the good ol' American republic?

The global economy has undergone seismic detonation, and yet all the same old gasbags
predominate. What is the point of more Ralph?

I'm surprised, and we should be glad, that any Democratic senators are questioning the actions of the Fed. If those same senators receive a bunch of mail saying "go for it, Chris, we're mad as hell!", you never know, maybe. . .

Geithner and Summers would really have to change their spots, though, as someone here pointed out, for anything to happen. Jaysus, this is the bank robbery where we have to pay the robbers their expenses afterwards!

What's the point?!

I like him. I cling to things I would blush to mention and my score is 0 too. When you got nothing and are headed for having less than nothing, there's no harm and maybe even some good in a kind word or two, as consonant with the integrity you need to ease your descent.

Maybe it's unfair, but I can't help comparing Ralph to somebody like Chalmers Johnson. Johnson has watched the world devolve and gone from advising the CIA and cheerleading for "industrial policy" to calling for shuttering the CIA and rewriting the rules of the game.

Meanwhile, Nader wants Senators to ask questions...

The comparison with Chalmers Johnson is good. (Have I mentioned recently that I've been re-reading his Sorrows Of Empire, with great delight?)

Both CJ and RN (ill-omened initials, I know) have their limitations and their weak spots, but Jeez, don't we all?

I'm with Al on this one -- things are so bad and so desperate that I'm ready to embrace just about any other mutinous spirit as a brother. Particularly if he or she has limitations. That makes me feel like we have something in common.

CJ and RN have both, in their own respective ways, sufficiently demonstrated their mutinous spirit, I'd say. Very much unlike the Dembot liberals whose whole raison d'etre is a horror of mutiny, and a boundless willingness to help suppress it.

Our two greatest obstacles, progressivism and fraud, are related. Abandon the worldview of scientific optimism, and it's easier to address the institutionalization of fraud.

While prosecuting fraud is a vital and noble endeavor, it can't keep up as long as power is concentrated and public wealth is centrally controlled. Disbursing governance to lower, more appropriate levels whenever possible (termed subsidiarity) is one objective toward the goal of democratization of capital as well as decision making.

One can already observe this trend toward subsidiarity in some parts of Europe and some US states, not to mention the Indigenous Peoples' Movement of self-determination manifested recently in the UN.

I'm with you folks, you have said your Sunday positions with lyrical suavity, but we need never genuflect to anyone. Kind words are good, but not when they are directed towards someone who is strangling your sister. Who would I rather read - you folks or Ralph? Please, not even close - civic virtue is absolutely tedious these days.

Nader helped define liberalism back in the day, but he also helped define it in 2000 when he ran against Gore. For the next eight years, liberalism took the form of hoping Nader "was satisfied" or something. The labels have changed, but Ralph's pretty much the same guy.

mjosef's astringent comments about civic virtue delighted me more than I can say. Down with virtue! -- that's my new motto.

Poor old Ralph has a weakness for virtue, it's true, but as the years go by it seems to me that his weakness is weakening. If one can say that.

I'm chiming in on agreement with mjosef too, as regards civic virtue. Down with sermonizing, genuflection and kind words for stranglers as well.

One of the things that appeals about Owen's economics is its relegation of civic finger-in-the-dyke virtue to a dusty attic. There's considerably less need for staunch, forensic procedurals in that relentlessly distributive, crypto-Georgist socialism of his.

I tend not to agree with Owen Paine, but lately I've found much of what he has to say congenial--let's hope this reflects well on his part and not badly on mine. I am, perhaps as an aspiring small business owner, in favor of economic devolution as an expedient even if I don't see it as panacea or ultimate solution (besides, as it is many industries cannot conceivably operate as small business--the auto industry as long as cars run on petrol, e.g.). In the long run we need a substantively democratic political economy and reformist measures keeping the general arrangement intact will only go so.

I sink my teeth into a well-written political economy piece on securitized debt shenanigans, the bubble blowing, and the taxpayer bailout -- (such as the one put out by Peter Gowan in the NLR recently) -- and it piques my temper a bit, sometimes a lot. After all, it's hard to top for rank injustice. But the consternation fades until the next time I tuck into a similar piece. I dunno, it's some kind of weird strain of outrage fatigue; it's some kind of post-modern affliction. And blogging isn't curing it. Especially angry blogging about the necessity of doing something more than angry blogging. @#%$, maybe I'm just sleep-deprived, or slipping into terminal self-reflexive crankiness.

As for Citizen Ralph, I stuck with the guy through thick and thin despite my ever-present awareness that he's permanently stuck in petty bourgeois scold mode. That posture had its time and place when DLC standard bearers were exacting allegiance, but the comments here have it right... those days are over. Now Ralph's remonstrations veer too close to those of the paleocons who he has always played footsie with. That we are crossing through a watershed crisis means that we don't have to indulge those unsavory tactical alliances any more. But shit I'm prolly fooling myself; this is America. What repertoire you gonna draw on?

MJS writes, "I'm ready to embrace just about any other mutinous spirit as a brother. Particularly if he or she has limitations..."

This implies that, like everyone else, you're a transgressor. Pray tell, in your own estimation, what indelibly marks you as such? Is it your fixation with the perfidies of the Zionist Lobby, accurate though your analysis may be? Or maybe it's just about the weakness of the flesh, and fetching female cyclists ;)

blue licker
returns to the comment cages
the gowan piece is ...exemplary
of left witch doctor hoodoo

"There is thus a rational, dialectical kernel in the superficial distinction between financial superstructure and the ‘real’ us economy"

this marxian swan dive...
leads to ...nothing

no battalion of factoids
and ghoulash of lefticle phrases
can replace an up and running model
with all its channels plugged in

no one brain
like no simple pair of hands
can juggle
13 balls at once

but some judgements seem sound

china deffinately will leave
the planets reserve system
to uncle apple jack
and his buggered acolytes

So, OP, it's Gowan's judgment on just when and just how China will break from dollar dominance that has you slinging arrows? I thought for him it was simply a question of how fast and how decisively, not a question of if. But yeah he leans towards the "after the worst of the crisis passes" side of things.

"So, OP, it's Gowan's judgment on just when and just how China will break from dollar dominance that has you slinging arrows? "

no no
just the opposite on that point he's dead right

on the leverage bei jing
gets by loans to uncle is however
nonsense

in fact protectionism here
might follow from a protracted stagnation

a green front makes nice camo
for old line protections
but the balance of interests here are still quite fluid

will the world market founder ???
too soon to tell
but if so
the bei jing wall street slurry
is headed for a fluvius interuptus