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‘Bailout’ - psycho-economic denial and...
...are we all doomed to domino down the drain?
The hypothesis I advance here is that ‘bailout’ is a catchword for a systemic breakdown, a cover-up for deep anxiety about its consequences and a quick-fix of the sort Einstein warned us against, namely that “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”
In short, I don’t think it is an economic-only problem so economists have neither monopoly nor the broader wisdom to guide us. Secondly, it is not a passing crisis, it’s a step – one more – towards global system breakdown. The other elements contributing to such global breakdown are things like wars and militarism, global warming, food crisis, the failure to meet the Millennium Goals, the energy crisis, the emptiness that accompanies global materialism, the vulnerability of each actor in the globalization process, the war on terror and the attack on democracy in the direction of disciplining us and make us passive by instilling fear for the future – fearology, as I call it.
If you want to put a name on much of it, it is the U.S. Empire, the Bush-Clinton-Bush self-defeating and world-destroying policies and the prospect that this Empire will go down (it has to, like all other empires and for the same reasons they did) not with a whimper but with a bang. I believe the transition to another really democratic and just world order could turn out to be very painful for very many.
Let me explain in a few points that are by no means intended to be exhaustive.
1. The idea of limits has been ignored for decades. We have known for long that there are limits to quantities, including material growth, but not to qualities. We have not implemented that knowledge.
The Club of Rome reports some 30 years ago and hundreds of others have told us that there are limits to be respected; they have been discussed but no politician has taken the necessary first step to devise a new policy, at least not when in office.
We fool ourselves to believe we are very dynamic and that society is ever-changing; fact is that lower down, paradigm-wise, everything stubbornly remains has remained the same.
2. Democracy promotes irresponsibility. Democracy, or whatever we shall call it, allows no candidate to tell the citizens the truth if it implies some kind of negative change in their eyes. Who can say that some of us have to consume less to allow others to consume enough to not die – and be elected?
No, we are told that there must be eternal growth to enable wealth to trickle down to the needy, irrespective of the fact that there is no empirical evidence, as far as I know, that proves that hypothesis to be true.
3. Only-one-economy possible. After the demise of the thoroughly misguided Soviet socialism, we have been told that there is only one possible economic system and that it is, luckily, the best too: capitalism. Its neo-liberal version has been promoted as universal medicine in most countries around the world, no matter the local diagnosis. But one must wonder how liberalism and pluralism has been made compatible with this type of de facto economic dictatorship? If there is one sphere of society in which there is no democracy anywhere it is that of the economy.
4. Domino effects abound. We are now all solidly integrated in one economic system under a very centralized leadership embodied in Wall Street, global finance institutions dominated by Washington and corporations under mainly U.S. management. Small countries like Sweden have sold major parts of its industries to U.S. corporations; when Lehman Brothers implode, pensioners and small savers over here lose what they had saved for their old age, grandchildren, or both.
When – not if – the U.S. Empire goes down, virtually all other economies will fall, more or less. For far too long those who advanced the hypothesis that there can be more types of economies – mixed and even non-capitalist – and that they can co-exist globally have been ridiculed.
Those of us who advocated global co-operation by actors who were also trying to be strong and highly self-reliant in essential spheres were told that it sounded like autarchy and North Korean Juche.
5. Either/or instead of both/and. Paradoxically perhaps, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao recently had to remind CNN’s viewers that Adam Smith wrote one book on the market and its invisible hand and another one on moral sentiments which he called the visible hand.
In Western economic policy we seem to think that everything is fine if the market’s invisible hand freely dominates – also in fundamentally non-commercial spheres such as health, schooling, culture, balance with Nature, the military (mercenary companies) and even love - and, thus, it has become the rule of economic policies to ignore morality, central guidance, long-term thinking, global responsibilities, and solidarity with those who suffer in the fringes of or outside the market.
6. Infantilized consumerism and waste production. We have all come to think and act like millionaire consumerists. When did you last hear a journalist ask a decision-maker – but can we really afford that? It is taken for granted that everything is possible and we don’t have to make priorities and choices. Thirty per cent of all food is thrown away! How many cars more than 5 year are there in your street? What do we tend to think about someone who wears really old clothes?
Many countries, the U.S. in particular, has ignored simple questions such as: Can we really afford this? – and has thus become not only a world economic leader but also the country with the largest debt. No family can operate on such irresponsible assumptions – but when governments do it hits the families.
The ‘bailout’ is about US $ 700 billion. It is a little more that the annual military spending of the United States but less than one years of the MIMAC the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex’s ravaging the economy if you add what it costs the U.S. to annually also pay for its loans to Japan and China; remember, the U.S. militarism would be impossible without borrowing abroad.
7. Thinking within the box. I’ve already referred to what allegedly was Einstein’s simple wisdom – that a problem cannot be solved by the same thinking that has lead us into the problem. Galtung has recently called the ‘bailout’ an example of throwing bad money after bad money.
The ‘bailout’ is nothing but one more example of applying more of the medicine that has caused the disease to worsen. Conveniently, it helps the decision-makers to not address the more fundamental problems – in addition to forcing the people to pay for the essential economic incompetence of the banks, corporations, Wall Street, MIMAC and irresponsible politicians. In addition, a huge transfer from the poor to the rich – the exactly opposite of what the U.S. and the world economy needs to do now.
8. Consumerism and alienation. Consumerism is much stronger than communism and other isms. It’s become a drug, whatever the problem is people are told to consume more. They compensate unhappy, stressful lives and the lack of real influence by going to the shopping malls and feel that they are somebody when they walk out and go home to consume in private or show off in the new clothes in the public sphere.
Economic issues dominate the news, materialism now means little use and rapid throw-away, keeping up with your neighbor and not to be attached for years to beautiful, functioning objects. We could produce cars that last for a life time – and once we actually did, my own is 39 years old and running perfectly because I have maintained it – but we are told that having the same car for more than 3 years is “uneconomic”. Excuse me, for whom and in relation to what?
9. System size - control and compass lost. There is a factor we are not supposed to talk about: the sheer size of the systems we build. One must wonder whether there is any human group anywhere who has the overview technically – not to speak of the wisdom – to really manage the world economy or, for that matter, the U.S. Empire in all its spheres of operation? Remember, it is only a few weeks ago, high-level experts, secretaries and CEOs told us that the U.S. economy was strong, fundamentally solid, and it is “just a small recession, etc.?
The ‘bailout’ looks to me like a system running people, not people running a system. The rest is ‘serious’ faces trying to persuade us that everything will be well tomorrow. But can you really fool all the people all of the time?
Perhaps it is time to think again of balancing big systems with at least a doze of ‘small is beautiful’ – and peaceful and human too. Citizens in democracies feel so alienated today, global news flooding them and making them feel powerless exactly when their input and everyday experience is most needed.
10. It’s time to think of a new science of economics. There are attempts here and there, but the present consumerist capitalist system is extremely resistant to alternatives. It’s actually as strong in its belief that it cannot be wrong as was the Soviet Communist party – meaning headed for collapse due to dangerous ‘group think’ and autism. We are simply the best so why listen to warnings and critics?
While I have studied economic textbooks many years ago, I am not an economist, so I would start out my thinking about an alternative economic science by reading Gandhi, who was also an economist. I would read a series of other alternative economic theories: green, development, Buddhist, commune-ist, Islamic, global models, co-operativist, anarchist, planetary, feminist, win-win, stewardship, non-profit, Quaker, and sustainability economics. And I would consult the visible hand of Smith’s moral philosophy. I’m not saying: throw out everything capitalist, the system has some good features too. But I am saying both-and, balancing, mitigating – listen to the global voice: life can be lived in many and different ways. And ‘ another world is possible’ – but not with the same system. I would do away with the fundamentalism in capitalist reasoning and make the invisible and the visible hand hold each other, to stay in that imagery.
These and many more things is what the ‘bailout’ is all about. I shall be happily surprised be if the U.S. empire’s ‘bailout’ will do more good than harm to the world.
Empires going down are dangerous. That of the U.S. could end up – in contrast to the British and Soviet empires – with the combination of economic melt down and nuclear war.
Therefore, we desperately need a completely different global dialogue on the meaning of economic life. We need to help each other move out of the cul-de-sac of the authoritarian economic policies that cost about 100 000 people their lives (September 11 x 30 per day), threaten to make life impossible on earth for our grandchildren and future generations and is imposed on us every day as the only economy thinkable.
We are living in dark times. In darkness it is, by definition, difficult to see. There must be some who can light some candles? For the big deception remains that this globalized, raw capitalism is the only and the best humankind can come up with. Well, let’s hope the ‘crisis’ leads to new thinking outside the box.
Blind following leaders into the darkness means doomed to domino down the drain.
Jan Oberg
September 29, 2008 – Black Bailout Day?
[# 1228]
The hypothesis I advance here is that ‘bailout’ is a catchword for a systemic breakdown, a cover-up for deep anxiety about its consequences and a quick-fix of the sort Einstein warned us against, namely that “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”
In short, I don’t think it is an economic-only problem so economists have neither monopoly nor the broader wisdom to guide us. Secondly, it is not a passing crisis, it’s a step – one more – towards global system breakdown. The other elements contributing to such global breakdown are things like wars and militarism, global warming, food crisis, the failure to meet the Millennium Goals, the energy crisis, the emptiness that accompanies global materialism, the vulnerability of each actor in the globalization process, the war on terror and the attack on democracy in the direction of disciplining us and make us passive by instilling fear for the future – fearology, as I call it.
If you want to put a name on much of it, it is the U.S. Empire, the Bush-Clinton-Bush self-defeating and world-destroying policies and the prospect that this Empire will go down (it has to, like all other empires and for the same reasons they did) not with a whimper but with a bang. I believe the transition to another really democratic and just world order could turn out to be very painful for very many.
Let me explain in a few points that are by no means intended to be exhaustive.
1. The idea of limits has been ignored for decades. We have known for long that there are limits to quantities, including material growth, but not to qualities. We have not implemented that knowledge.
The Club of Rome reports some 30 years ago and hundreds of others have told us that there are limits to be respected; they have been discussed but no politician has taken the necessary first step to devise a new policy, at least not when in office.
We fool ourselves to believe we are very dynamic and that society is ever-changing; fact is that lower down, paradigm-wise, everything stubbornly remains has remained the same.
2. Democracy promotes irresponsibility. Democracy, or whatever we shall call it, allows no candidate to tell the citizens the truth if it implies some kind of negative change in their eyes. Who can say that some of us have to consume less to allow others to consume enough to not die – and be elected?
No, we are told that there must be eternal growth to enable wealth to trickle down to the needy, irrespective of the fact that there is no empirical evidence, as far as I know, that proves that hypothesis to be true.
3. Only-one-economy possible. After the demise of the thoroughly misguided Soviet socialism, we have been told that there is only one possible economic system and that it is, luckily, the best too: capitalism. Its neo-liberal version has been promoted as universal medicine in most countries around the world, no matter the local diagnosis. But one must wonder how liberalism and pluralism has been made compatible with this type of de facto economic dictatorship? If there is one sphere of society in which there is no democracy anywhere it is that of the economy.
4. Domino effects abound. We are now all solidly integrated in one economic system under a very centralized leadership embodied in Wall Street, global finance institutions dominated by Washington and corporations under mainly U.S. management. Small countries like Sweden have sold major parts of its industries to U.S. corporations; when Lehman Brothers implode, pensioners and small savers over here lose what they had saved for their old age, grandchildren, or both.
When – not if – the U.S. Empire goes down, virtually all other economies will fall, more or less. For far too long those who advanced the hypothesis that there can be more types of economies – mixed and even non-capitalist – and that they can co-exist globally have been ridiculed.
Those of us who advocated global co-operation by actors who were also trying to be strong and highly self-reliant in essential spheres were told that it sounded like autarchy and North Korean Juche.
5. Either/or instead of both/and. Paradoxically perhaps, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao recently had to remind CNN’s viewers that Adam Smith wrote one book on the market and its invisible hand and another one on moral sentiments which he called the visible hand.
In Western economic policy we seem to think that everything is fine if the market’s invisible hand freely dominates – also in fundamentally non-commercial spheres such as health, schooling, culture, balance with Nature, the military (mercenary companies) and even love - and, thus, it has become the rule of economic policies to ignore morality, central guidance, long-term thinking, global responsibilities, and solidarity with those who suffer in the fringes of or outside the market.
6. Infantilized consumerism and waste production. We have all come to think and act like millionaire consumerists. When did you last hear a journalist ask a decision-maker – but can we really afford that? It is taken for granted that everything is possible and we don’t have to make priorities and choices. Thirty per cent of all food is thrown away! How many cars more than 5 year are there in your street? What do we tend to think about someone who wears really old clothes?
Many countries, the U.S. in particular, has ignored simple questions such as: Can we really afford this? – and has thus become not only a world economic leader but also the country with the largest debt. No family can operate on such irresponsible assumptions – but when governments do it hits the families.
The ‘bailout’ is about US $ 700 billion. It is a little more that the annual military spending of the United States but less than one years of the MIMAC the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex’s ravaging the economy if you add what it costs the U.S. to annually also pay for its loans to Japan and China; remember, the U.S. militarism would be impossible without borrowing abroad.
7. Thinking within the box. I’ve already referred to what allegedly was Einstein’s simple wisdom – that a problem cannot be solved by the same thinking that has lead us into the problem. Galtung has recently called the ‘bailout’ an example of throwing bad money after bad money.
The ‘bailout’ is nothing but one more example of applying more of the medicine that has caused the disease to worsen. Conveniently, it helps the decision-makers to not address the more fundamental problems – in addition to forcing the people to pay for the essential economic incompetence of the banks, corporations, Wall Street, MIMAC and irresponsible politicians. In addition, a huge transfer from the poor to the rich – the exactly opposite of what the U.S. and the world economy needs to do now.
8. Consumerism and alienation. Consumerism is much stronger than communism and other isms. It’s become a drug, whatever the problem is people are told to consume more. They compensate unhappy, stressful lives and the lack of real influence by going to the shopping malls and feel that they are somebody when they walk out and go home to consume in private or show off in the new clothes in the public sphere.
Economic issues dominate the news, materialism now means little use and rapid throw-away, keeping up with your neighbor and not to be attached for years to beautiful, functioning objects. We could produce cars that last for a life time – and once we actually did, my own is 39 years old and running perfectly because I have maintained it – but we are told that having the same car for more than 3 years is “uneconomic”. Excuse me, for whom and in relation to what?
9. System size - control and compass lost. There is a factor we are not supposed to talk about: the sheer size of the systems we build. One must wonder whether there is any human group anywhere who has the overview technically – not to speak of the wisdom – to really manage the world economy or, for that matter, the U.S. Empire in all its spheres of operation? Remember, it is only a few weeks ago, high-level experts, secretaries and CEOs told us that the U.S. economy was strong, fundamentally solid, and it is “just a small recession, etc.?
The ‘bailout’ looks to me like a system running people, not people running a system. The rest is ‘serious’ faces trying to persuade us that everything will be well tomorrow. But can you really fool all the people all of the time?
Perhaps it is time to think again of balancing big systems with at least a doze of ‘small is beautiful’ – and peaceful and human too. Citizens in democracies feel so alienated today, global news flooding them and making them feel powerless exactly when their input and everyday experience is most needed.
10. It’s time to think of a new science of economics. There are attempts here and there, but the present consumerist capitalist system is extremely resistant to alternatives. It’s actually as strong in its belief that it cannot be wrong as was the Soviet Communist party – meaning headed for collapse due to dangerous ‘group think’ and autism. We are simply the best so why listen to warnings and critics?
While I have studied economic textbooks many years ago, I am not an economist, so I would start out my thinking about an alternative economic science by reading Gandhi, who was also an economist. I would read a series of other alternative economic theories: green, development, Buddhist, commune-ist, Islamic, global models, co-operativist, anarchist, planetary, feminist, win-win, stewardship, non-profit, Quaker, and sustainability economics. And I would consult the visible hand of Smith’s moral philosophy. I’m not saying: throw out everything capitalist, the system has some good features too. But I am saying both-and, balancing, mitigating – listen to the global voice: life can be lived in many and different ways. And ‘ another world is possible’ – but not with the same system. I would do away with the fundamentalism in capitalist reasoning and make the invisible and the visible hand hold each other, to stay in that imagery.
These and many more things is what the ‘bailout’ is all about. I shall be happily surprised be if the U.S. empire’s ‘bailout’ will do more good than harm to the world.
Empires going down are dangerous. That of the U.S. could end up – in contrast to the British and Soviet empires – with the combination of economic melt down and nuclear war.
Therefore, we desperately need a completely different global dialogue on the meaning of economic life. We need to help each other move out of the cul-de-sac of the authoritarian economic policies that cost about 100 000 people their lives (September 11 x 30 per day), threaten to make life impossible on earth for our grandchildren and future generations and is imposed on us every day as the only economy thinkable.
We are living in dark times. In darkness it is, by definition, difficult to see. There must be some who can light some candles? For the big deception remains that this globalized, raw capitalism is the only and the best humankind can come up with. Well, let’s hope the ‘crisis’ leads to new thinking outside the box.
Blind following leaders into the darkness means doomed to domino down the drain.
Jan Oberg
September 29, 2008 – Black Bailout Day?
[# 1228]
Tags: 11, bailout, capitalism, democracy, economics, empire, fundamentalism, galtung, globalization, hand
Add a Comment
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Comment by Damonegro on October 5, 2008 at 6:41am -
Dear Jan,
I am wondering that you forget the main problem and consequence of USA capitalism – suffering to the rest of the world. It is not bad to mention and I expected that from this author something about USA military presence around the world. That is something totally giant in world history and it is the main obligation in USA budget. Exporting of $ in system of world economy WE ARE ALL PAYING their military forces and action world around. Main task of these forces is not to take care about peace or to defense USA from attacks. Their main job is to ALLOW USA COMPANIES TO TAKE CONTROL over the world economy and specially oil and other resources. The main income from this is going directly to the pockets of the most powerful people that are controlling USA foreign policy and DE FACTO ruling USA from shadow.
So, as my small contribution to help us to overcome this crisis is not to help USA to go on with this. We should give up from $ as a world currency and send to them back all their money. USA would be economically dead in few years but the rest of the world will benefit in two ways:
- At first our economy will grow up on real bases and will be almost independent from USA influence
- USA Military forces will stay in their land because there would not be money for them to go around the world and make new and new wars
- USA citizens will have to learn that they are just like other people in the world. So THEY SHOULD CHANGE THEIR ECONOMICAL AND POLITICAL SYSTEM. They need to take power in hands of ordinary people and to give better life based to their contribution to their own economy - not to suffer of rest of the world
So, we are all expecting from you never to forget this aspect of USA system and their presence in our life, economy, and almost everything that painfully exist all around the world.
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Comment by Biljana Vankovska on October 3, 2008 at 7:28am - Brilliant, straightforward and painfuly true! Thank you, Jan! I also posted your text on my Macedonian blog along with the articles written by JOhan Galtung, Naomi Klein and Zarko Puhovski (in Croatian). Of course, the Macedonian Government is "untouchable" and still deeply involved into our "bright future" ponce we are members of NATO and EU. No Plan B whatsoever... Take care!
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Comment by abbie jenks on October 1, 2008 at 6:57pm - Thanks Jan. Here in Western Massachusetts, USA, we are beginning discussions of an alternative currency with which to do business. Your insights are helpful.
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Comment by Tony Jenkins on October 1, 2008 at 5:52pm - Jan - I enjoyed the article very much. I especially got a chuckle out of the google advertisement (which I assume you have no control over) that appeared on the right side of the page asking us to "Help Republicans Rebuild the Economy: Contribute to the RNC." That's a perfect example of "throwing bad money at bad money."
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Comment by Erle Frayne Argonza on October 1, 2008 at 9:27am - Very nice piece, Friend! I support your opinion regarding our collective search for a new economic system that will be based on non-hoarding principles. Communism/socialism and capitalism belong to old boxes, and can't be rehashed without draconian-totalitarian systems to reinforce them. So the direction of non-hoarding or 'sharing economics' is provided by those spiritually guided paradigms, such as: Gandhi's swadeshi & macro-economics, PR Sarkar's 'progresive utilization theory', Buddhist economics ala Ernst Schumacher, Sri Aurubindo's para-cooperatives, Baha'ullah's economics (founder of Bahai faith), and Vivekanda's propositions about economic questions.
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Comment by sotiris koukios on September 30, 2008 at 3:36am -
dear Jan.
i was excited by your post and i reproduce it on my blog
Sotiris
http://koukios.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/jan-ober/
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