dagblog - Comments for "Repent! The end is near... or maybe not"

You betcha! (Palinese)

we are stardust — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:37:20 +0000

In reply to Los tuyos

You betcha! (Palinese)

Los tuyos

David Seaton — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:39:20 +0000

In reply to And ¡Viva zapatos!

Los tuyos

And ¡Viva zapatos!

Desider — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:56:37 +0000

In reply to ¡Vaya cuadrilla!

And ¡Viva zapatos!

¡Vaya cuadrilla!

David Seaton — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:04:50 +0000

In reply to Ow, I've been out-Francaised,

¡Vaya cuadrilla!

Ow, I've been out-Francaised,

Desider — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:23:02 +0000

In reply to Or Trumping the Beckwhich in

Ow, I've been out-Francaised, je suis trompé - touché. Fetchez le vichyssoise, mon Pétain.... il faut arrêter les socialistes un fois de plus - le canal rénard m'a dit c'est vrai, bien sûr c'est indubitable, non? L'Europe pour les europayennes...

Or Trumping the Beckwhich in

Obey — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:31:09 +0000

In reply to A Hun watching the Fox

Or Trumping the Beck

which in French - tremper le bec - just means "extortion"!!

i.e. I'm sure there's a euro-socialist conspiracy behind all this, Glenn...

A Hun watching the Fox

Desider — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:51:00 +0000

In reply to Quinn, It would be prudent to

A Hun watching the Fox House?

At his Beck and call?

Over-Trumped?

Here is an old post of mine

David Seaton — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:16:09 +0000

In reply to We can barely conceive of the

Here is an old post of mine that compliments this Marx business:

“The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.” [Marx - Capital, Volume III, Chapter 30]

There are certain ancient temples, where, perhaps once in decades, the sunlight will shine through a tiny, hidden crack in the temple wall and for only a moment illuminate a small, unnoticed, obscure, hieroglyph among thousands... the one that contains the mystery of mysteries... The old chestnut quoted above is like that, for decades and decades it made little sense and now, sweet mystery of life, at last I know the meaning of it all.

It goes like this:

Because of the intense pressure of needing to be "competitive", over the years business has found ways of producing more and more things to sell, using fewer people at home or using "cheaper" people in other countries to produce them. That is why for many years now workers salaries have been more or less stagnant in real terms. This makes it difficult for impoverished people to purchase all the things that business can produce. This has been "solved" on one hand by more and more "efficiency", technology and cheap foreign labor (thus keeping salaries and prices down) and by lowering interest rates below the rate of inflation, practically begging them to take loans so, in this way, people wouldn't notice that they were poor... almost like giving money away... almost.

Like when Wile E. Coyote, out chasing the roadrunner, runs off a cliff and everything is fine until he looks down and then hoo hooo hooooooooooo thud he crashes to the canyon floor, the lenders got nervous, didn't want to loan any more and wanted their money back, but there actually wasn't any money there when the credit dried up.

Here we see that the "invisible hand" has been working for years and years like a cosmic Bernie Madoff... but unlike in Bernie's case, now the rest of us have to do his time.

But hey, it gets worse.

The Chinese and the Indians are not content with pressing their noses to the candy store window, they want to consume too. Here is my favorite conservative economist Martin Hutchinson on what is coming down the pipe:

I have been predicting for some time now that the inflation-suppressing effect of globalization would soon come to an end, with unpleasant results for all the cheap-money western economies. The decision by the Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn to raise wages in its 300,000-employee Chinese factory by 30%, with an additional 66% to be paid as bonuses based on output, suggests that the cost revolution in outsourcing is now fully upon us. Needless to say, we are wholly unprepared.(...) Food prices in India are currently 16.7% above those of a year ago, while overall wholesale price inflation is rising at 9.6%. Like Chinese, Indian labor costs are outpacing any possible productivity improvements, with wage rises of as much as 20% in urban areas. Not only does this indicate that Indian interest rates need to rise sharply from their current 3.75%, but it also suggests that outsourcers are going to find India as well as China an increasingly expensive place to do business.(...) If the two largest sources of cheap labor that provide manufacturing and service capacity for globalized businesses both have high inflation and there are few alternatives available, then the conclusion is inescapable: cost inflation is about to hit Western economies in a big way.(...) Western sentimentalists are rejoicing currently at the vast improvements in living standards for the Foxconn workforce. They should withhold their joy; the long-term costs of those wage increases will be paid in the West.

So on top of unemployment, stagnant salaries, paying down debt, reassuring the markets and no credit, we are going to have inflation too. The answer to all of this of course is more productivity, more efficiency, not raising salaries, while inflation eats away what little buying power those salaries had.

But, of course if people are out of work and prices are going up, they are not going to be buying much stuff, so a lot of Chinese and Indian factories are going to close

This is what the old guy who opened this rant used to call "contradictions".

The result... Well, many years ago, when I was a little boy, my dad, who though a Brooks Brothers clad executive, was a fanatical Democrat, used to play a practical joke at election time; when he took cabs or went for lunch at expensive restaurants, he would leave really stingy tips with a cheery, "Vote Republican!".

When I was a boy that was a joke...

Nowadays that is probably what the people getting stiffed are going to do... vote Republican.

That is the part old Karl never really got figured out.

We can barely conceive of the

David Seaton — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:10:50 +0000

In reply to What? Have you given up your

We can barely conceive of the working conditions then.

All you have to do is look at the working conditions in the "emerging nations" to get an idea what it was like then... and that is where all the union jobs that Americans used to have... have gone.

One of the reasons Marx was wrong about revolution was because the progressive and labor movements reformed capitalism's worst excesses.

Totally correct! That's why it would be stupid to play with that formula... which is exactly what is happening now.

AIDS is a wonderful political metaphor: you remove an immune system and diseases that haven't been seen or clinically described in a hundred years suddenly appear in the hospitals.

Have you given up your predictions of imminent collapse?

It is hard to imagine a system as intrinsically corrupt as that shown in "Inside Job" barreling along forever, but perhaps it will... more's the pity. Many very fine people know what is wrong and what to do about it, but nobody seems able to change anything... The empires of Rome and Spain took a long time -- centuries-- to collapse in their decadence... maybe we'll be lucky too.

Quinn, It would be prudent to

David Seaton — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 07:08:30 +0000

In reply to HEY SEATON! THE JEWS! THE

Quinn,

It would be prudent to wait a couple of beats before you count Beck out.

(...) he was unhappy from almost his first day on the job, which happened to be the day before Mr. Obama was inaugurated. Even in his first year, he was contemplating an exit from Fox and wondering if he could start his own channel.(...) Fox has retained all its other high-rated hosts in the past, but they didn’t come under the intense scrutiny that Mr. Beck has faced, nor the mass opposition from advertisers. As onerous as that might have been to Fox financially, it did not seem to be an issue for Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the News Corporation. In two recent comments to shareholders, Mr. Murdoch defended Mr. Beck. He said of the advertiser boycott, “They don’t boycott watching it. We’re getting incredible numbers.” He followed that by pointing out that even with his diminished ratings, Mr. Beck’s show provided a “terrific kickoff” to the lineup of Fox shows that followed.(...) A senior Fox News executive, Joel Cheatwood, will join Mr. Beck at Mercury Radio Arts later this month. NYT

Reading this article in the NYT, it seems to me that Murdoch would like some sort of platform, that is even (gasp) farther to the right than Fox. It will be interesting to see what links may develop between News Corporation and Beck's new project.

News Flash: Glenn Beck may be replaced at Fox by... Donald Trump... (out of the frying pan).