The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Left vs. Right Is Over?

    By Michael Maiello on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 2:54pm |

    In my last career I was fortunate to be able to get to know Barry Ritholtz.  I reviewed his excellent "Bailout Nation" back in 2009 and did a nice Q&A with him soon after.  But enough about me and Barry.  I really want you all to read what he has to say here:

    http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/you-vs-corporations/

    You're back?  Good.  Hope you enjoyed that.  I don't agree with Barry about everything but he really is very good at breaking out of paradigms.  He runs his investment business based on the idea that most people start at a conclusion and then try to defend it (buy gold!) for the rest of their careers, or at least the quarter.  He tries to let the evidence lead him, even if it makes him think stuff he'd rather not.  That's tough to do.

    So when Barry says that the left vs. right fight is over and that it's really individuals vs. corporations, this is not the typical "post-partisan" argument.  Barry has no stake in anything being post-partisan.  The usual solution -- bipartisanship -- doesn't even matter here.  If Barry's right, the corporations would steamroll our bipartisan butts just as easily as our partisan butts.  Though it might be that they like having us distracted and fighting our factional wars while they go about the serious work of dividing the world's resources among themselves.

    Comments

    Yeah, it is us vs. the corps.

    For sure.

    Now get the teabaggers to understand this.

    Good luck!!


    by Richard Day on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 3:12pm

    Unfortunately most of the teabaggers are either part of or work for the corps. AKA "Them" as apposed to US.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 3:30pm

    I don't get this.   The conflict between haves and have-nots, between concentrated great wealth and fragmented modesty and penury , between the rich and powerful and the not-so-rich and the not-so-powerful, <i>is the very essence</i> of the "old Left Right paradigm".

    The old paradigm of the heroic battle battle for equality, against robber-barony; for economic justice, against economic aristocracy; for the Davids and against the Goliaths is what being a "leftist" has always been all about.  The only thing that is disturbingly new in this Ritholz account is that the left has apparently been so successfully fragmented, colonized and confused by decades of right-wing laissez faire assaults that the political primacy of the battle against concentrated wealth and for for equality and redistribution, a struggle that is as clear as a bell to anyone who knows the slightest bit about the history of the past two centuries in the west and around the globe, could now appear to the current generation of neoliberalized zombies as a "new paradigm".

    And let's be clear: this is not the battle of the powerful againt"the individual".  The individual is weak and will always be weak.  There can be no triumph of the dependent and relatively powerless against the powerful without <i>solidarity</i>.  We need an American Solidarnosc, based on a recognition that declining incomes, growing economic insecurity and the gradual destruction of the economic foundations of a decent life in America can only be reversed if a grand coalition of <i>almost everyone</i> in the middle and bottom pools their individual weaknesses into a might social power that can take on and defeat those at the top, who will fight tooth and nail to hold onto everything they have.


    by Dan Kervick on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 4:00pm

    Great post, Dan.  And that's just it... about solidarity.  I sometimes think "it's a democracy... how is it that our government gives us an economy that puts 1 in 10 people out of work and offers stagnant wages to most of the rest?  Well... it's because we let it.


    by Michael Maiello on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 4:49pm

    Destor:

    I love  blog posts, articles, books, movies et al that, in addressing essentials -- like the political framework of our time --  K.I.S.S. Thanks for this link and your commentary. Ritholz does makes it all clear -- voila -- here it is, the unalterable truth. Sort of the anatheadromia of that terrificly funny play "Sister Mary Margaret Explains it All" (Or was it Sister Mary Ignatious? -- never mind).

    OK. So, accepting that what Ritholz says is truth  -- The Left/Right Dispute is so yesterday -- what do we do now?


    by wws on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 4:12pm

    It was Ignatius, hadn't thought about Chris Durang in awhile!

    I had to look up anatheadromia but... uh... the Internet won't tell me what it means!

    As for what we do now? Burn down the corporations.  OK, that won't work.  But we'll need to make the corporations part of the conversation in a way that they're not now.  The thing to attack that would really destroy corporate power is the immortality of the corporation -- no estate lasts forever but a corporation can (at least a C-Corp can) and it can last so long as it has owners.  This is, of course, a problem.  If a person could live forever they'd find themselves being wealthy and powerful at some point, even if only by accident. A corporation, a profit and powerseeking organization in its own right, benefits greatly from life without limit.


    by Michael Maiello on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 4:47pm

    No only are they potentially immortal, but, as it has been said, they have neither corporeal body to incarcerate nor immaterial soul to burn.

    Quite the feat of propaganda that the progenitors of "personal responsibility" also cherish and protect most fiercely the legal form that most savagely limits possibilities in this realm.


    by DF on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 5:14pm

    They actually freed themselves from the prison of their bodies, didn't they?

    It's probably because most of them are ugly.


    by Michael Maiello on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 5:22pm

    Hah!  I suppose if we can't stop them, we can at least make fun of their faces!


    by DF on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 5:39pm