gerard, November 9 at 12:00 am #

It occurs to me that the low opinion of the ordinary American which is put forth so often in these comments, is shared by many liberals.

It occurs to me that your comment is unsupported by any example, is an ideological driven assumption not born out by any fact, and seems pretty silly. But thanks for playing.

paul bass, November 8 at 9:57 pm #

I think your citing of Voltaire an off the mark example, especially when the subject was reasons , and motivations, for political actions.

“If they can convince you of absurdities they can coerce you into atrocities.”

It occurs to me that the low opinion of the ordinary American which is put forth so often in these comments, is shared by many liberals. Unfortunately, it is also shared by most of the capitalists causing Wall Street’s debauchery of the financial system.   
  Tet to make any significant change in the unregulated capitalist system we have now, would require the awareness and efforts of a sizeable number of those ordinary Americans, unless we are to give up on democracy and turn to permanent exclusion of the participation of the “masses” so-called. 
  Frankly, I personally think the average knowledge and capability is not as low as frequently indicated. People can do better than the right or left wings would have one believe.
  Of course that point is arguable, but to do anything significant for change, the facts would have to be established because two very different systems would have to be considered, depending on results. One would necessarily be much more democratic than the other.
  I also think that, if a system of working together to solve the nation’s problems could be esstablished, not all the millionaires would fight against it, and some would even help out. In other words, the picture is many shades of gray, not just one extreme or the other.
  It would take a major moral/psychological shift, that’s for sure, but there are groups working in that direction.
  To think this way may seem “idealistic” to people whose analysis is more severe or simplistic.  On the other hand, it might prove to be more true to the facts, and admittedly more nuanced and complicated. Certainly it would be more inclusive and tend to revitalize what democracy we have remaining.

ardee, November 8 at 5:56 pm:
‘No , I think you cannot. A pessimist simply would not bother to even begin in the first place, seems pretty obvious. ...’

One may choose to make an effort because passive acceptance of the thing one is struggling against is simply unacceptable, regardless of the outcome of the struggle.

Also, one may choose to make an effort for a long shot because the alternative is nothing, zero, annihilation, total loss.

Also, one may choose to make an effort because one thinks the way of struggle is more amusing and aesthetically attractive than the way of submission.

Anarcissie, November 8 at 12:45 pm #

ardee—I can work for change without being an optimist; in fact I think optimism is something of a crutch which seems to help and winds up impeding.  When things turn out badly, the optimist has to deal with the failure of his optimism, whereas the pessimist can just keep on keeping on.

No , I think you cannot. A pessimist simply would not bother to even begin in the first place, seems pretty obvious. An optimist can, after each failure, try again because of that optimism. I am optimistic that you will eventually understand this.

As to your opinion of the majority of Americans; if you do indeed hold such why the heck bother at all? That there are, indeed some who fit your description is moot. That they are in the majority is not an opinion I can share, or condone.

ardee—I can work for change without being an optimist; in fact I think optimism is something of a crutch which seems to help and winds up impeding.  When things turn out badly, the optimist has to deal with the failure of his optimism, whereas the pessimist can just keep on keeping on.

However, there is the question of what change we are supposed to desire.  I don’t see technological domination of a world of sweatshops and plantations by the U.S. as a particularly desirable or attractive goal.  Fortunately nothing like that is happening; things are going the other way, and optimist or not, if you want to contribute to your goal (or any other) you will probably have to face the situation squarely and think of how to deal with it.  It is simply a fact that, by and large, the population of the U.S. is poorly trained, uneducated, ignorant, anti-intellectual and superstitious.  Very large segments of the population believe in UFOs, astrology, creationism, and the like and have no concept of the scientific method or even simple logic.  Many people cannot read or write.  Don’t believe me, go out and look around and ask some questions.  The situation may change but pretending it isn’t so isn’t going to change it.

Anarcissie, November 7 at 10:13 pm

Oh yes I am an optimist. How else to continue to work for ones vision?

Oh no I do not characterize my fellow Americans as you so denigrate them. Surely there is a very vocal minority that fits your description, but we are 320 million and most are not as you show them to be.

Gerard—-If you think you know little about economics
then cut in half the amount of knowledge you have
and I will have less.  However, much to the dismay
of many who post on Truthdig, I can read.  So I’ll
share a few quotes from an article “Japan’s Reorientation” from a Christian magazine titled
“The Philadelphia Trumpet.”

“Yukio Hatoyama is Japan’s new leader.  He is threatening to split with the United States.
He blames America for the global economic crisis
and says that the U.S. is responsible for the destruction of human dignity.  He campaigned on’
protecting traditional Japanese economic activities
and reducing U.S. led globalization.
During the run-up to the election, Hatoyama’s finance
minister told the BBC he was worried about the future
value of the dollar, and that if his party were elected, it would refuse to purchase any more U.S.
treasuries unless they were denominated in Japanese
yen.
Japan is the world’s second-largest economy.  It is
also America’s second most important creditor.
Washington owes Japan over $724 billion.  The only
nation America owes more money to is China($800
billion). The U.S. also imports $140 billion worth
of goods from Japan each year.
If Japan were to follow through with its threat to
only lend in yen, the dollar would probably fall hard.  That would mean more expensive consumer goods,
higher unemployment and currency inflation in America.  If other nations like China were to follow
suit, we would witness a currency crisis, Zimbabwe
style.
The new government in Japan has also pledged to diversify its foreign currency reserves away from the
dollar.  Thus, at some point, it will need to dramatically reduce how much money it lends to America.  America is planning to borrow record amounts over the next coupleof years, so something
isn’t adding up here.  Where will the money come
from?
“The financial crisis has suggested to many that the
era of U.S. unilateralism may come to an end,”
Hatoyama wrote in an August 26th New York Times
article titled “A New Path for Japan.”  It also
raised doubts about the permanence of the dollar as
the key global currency.
But Hatoyama isn’t just charting a separate economic
course for Japan.  His campaign also promised a more
independent foreign policy from Washington—and
closer relations with Japan’s Asian neighbors.
Clearly, Japan is rapidly losing interest in being
allied with America.  More so than at any time since
WWII, it is identifying far more with its Asian
neighbors. Practically, America sits 5,500 miles
across the Pacific Ocean.  The Chinese could fly to
Tokyo for breakfast, Taiwan for lunch, and back home
for kung pan dinner before America’s fastest jets
could make it much past Hawaii.  America’s star is
descending.  Asia’s is rising.
He continued with some hard but undeniable words,
“I also feel that as a result of the failure of the
Iraq war and the financial crisis, the era of U.S.
led globalism is coming to an end. Thus, Japan must
spare no effort to build the permanent security
frameworks essintial to creating a new anti-dollar
regional Asian currency shared by China, Japan, South
Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.”
Hatoyama not only believes America’s economy and
power are fading fast, he’s publishing it in the
New York Times.  He see Japan’s future as being
with Asia.

ardee, November 6 at 8:23 am:
’... It is past time to understand that things change, that the US is now a technological based nation, and service based as well. We will invent, create and support, and there is huge revenue involved in that. ...’

What an optimist you are!  When is the great change going to take place, so that the U.S. goes from having a poorly informed, poorly trained, anti-intellectual, superstitious population to just the opposite, ready and able to compete in the world with earnest, learned competitors like India and China?  The last time I worked in a big corporation, a few years ago, almost all the systems designers and programmers were Asians.  Who’s going to do the innovating, developing, and supporting when they go home?

Gosh, you worked in the mines, Christian.  that’s pretty impressive.  and dangerous.  Just going down in one one time scared me.  I helped pull a coke oven once though.  I wonder if strip mining replacing deep mining had anything to do with destroying the mine union, which at one time was very strong.

I wish you’d get over your religious phobia about sex.  You have sex on the brain the way Inherit has anti-ssemitism on the brain.

I know very little about economics, so probably should keep out of this one, but can’t resist a Reminder: 
  We are also “what we sell and how we sell it.”  We are the biggest arms dealer in the world.  We’ve traded so much debt to China, for example, that if they called it in we couldn’t pay the interest.  And democracy? Through Guantanamo and Homeland Security we’ve sold most of that out cheap, and the rest we are about to “give” to Iraq and Afghanistan (whether they want it or not,  We are sprinkling any left-overs around the world in the form of hundreds of socio-political resentment centers called “military bases.”
  One big problem capitalism has is that it wants to turn everything in the world into a “product” that it can sell to someone called a “consumer” at as high a “profit” as possible, and the “system” just ain’t working out right because the world is much bigger and broader and more interesting and complex than that.

Begonia—-You forgot to mention that America is
the leading exporter of PORNOGRAPHY.  Sadly, I saw
porn in the Holy city of Jerusalem when I was there
in 1999.

“Even less shocking, that apocalyptic reality has been largely ignored by a political and media establishment that believes economic emergencies are only those that threaten Wall Street bankers. Indeed, if the Beltway chattering class has paid attention to trade reform at all, it has portrayed the cause as a boring “special interest” crusade of supposedly selfish unionists and crazed anarchists.”

At this point it’s beyond, the emergency phase, and gone on to being on life support, government intervention is doing our breathing for us.

The corporations would like to pull the plug on that too.

Pentagon infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world are booming and are not scrutinized or need to be approved by Congress. Their are no concerns with cost overruns or audits to investigate corruption because their are no audit trails available for auditing. The money flow is outside the the USA and sub contracting practices make audits all but impossible and the ability for wanton and gratuitous graft and corruption obviously lucrative.

If ‘we’ are what ‘we’ trade, we’re really in deep shit (in case there were any doubts) cause the only thing ‘we’ trade is weapons, war, hate & ignorance.

I have always taken an unpopular position on globalization, one that, despite failing to get support, I believe correct.

I see globalization as a natural leveling of the playing field. How long did we in the west, luxuriating in an artificially comfortable lifestyle, built upon the hardships of the third world whose resources we plundered at will, expect those third world nations to remain in the poverty of colonialism?

We are no longer a manufacturing based nation. Those who call for the return of industries fled to climates wherein wages are a tenth ( or less) of those demanded here, unions and environmental concerns nonexistent, are simply unrealistic I think. In the fullness of time the nations now experiencing the “largesse” of the incoming manufacture will also experience the labor movement as did the industrialized west.

It is past time to understand that things change, that the US is now a technological based nation, and service based as well. We will invent, create and support, and there is huge revenue involved in that. Retraining of our work force to meet the challenges of this new economy are, obviously, necessary.

As to the mining industry mentioned by our favorite religionista. I am reminded of the difference in our safety regulations compared to those of Canada. The story christian relates about that mining disaster is best seen in comparing it to a similar event in Canada, wherein 39 miners were trapped for over 30 days in a mine disaster. They all walked out of that incident alive, due to the insistence by the union in having safe rooms stocked with oxygen, medical and food supplies, a room that moved along with the shaft. The coal industry has just about killed unionism in the mines, and those mines have become increasingly unsafe.

When NAFTA passed I recognized the serious downside that our political leaders (including Reagan) downplayed ... that high paying American jobs would be lost to Mexico due to much lower wages and non-existent regulation of industry.  The same went for globalization which was falsely sold as a really good thing for all of us ... low cost goods.  And today we are living the “benefits” of this disaster.  But you would be hard pressed to find more than a few legislators who will even talk about what industry and Wall Street have really done to this country.  Forget the financial disaster ... that is just the visible tip of a huge iceberg.  The massive migration of jobs and futures overseas has destroyed America.  There is no argument anyone can make to convince me that this country has a future other than as a third-world banana republic (unless we act now).

If we really want to fix this country, we need to force corporations to return high paying manufacturing jobs.  Period.  I don’t care how much they whine and cry about their bottom line.  They either bring jobs back or can pack up their executive offices and move elsewhere.  And take their products with them.  We need to start rebuilding the industrial base of this country and to start being concerned about our future.  I don’t care about China and their growth ... it is not my concern.  Let them develop their domestic market instead of taking the easy way out and exporting.

This sounds harsh but I can’t think of any other way to save our homeland.  We need to create a domestic economy that is based on making things and not on shuffling money from one account to another.  We can do this and also significantly decrease dependence on foreign (and expensive) oil.  We have the ability to make clean energy systems and to perhaps even make a significant contribution to a cleaner future for our children.  Don’t we owe them that much?

excellent article.  I openly admit I know very little
about economics.  I’m just ignorant.  Money and
economics never interested me.  I was more interested
in people.  It is refreshing to read an article
when the person knows what they are talking about.
I read somewhere that Ronald Regan was responsible
for breaking the unions in America.  I can’t recall
how he did it but it has had devastating effects
in many ways.  I worked midnight shift in a coal
mines in West Virginia while going to undergraduate
school.  I had a personality conflict with a boss
who fired me.  My father worked 40 years in the
mines.  He told me to go down to the union hall and
file a case against the supervisor.  I did and won
my job back.  Thanks to the union.  Several years
ago 12 or 13 miners in West Virginia lost their
lives because they were trapped and there was only
30 minutes worth of oxygen stored in the mines.
They suffocated to death.  Our country can go to
the moon and back but owners of coal mines won’t
put a month’s worth of water, food, and oxygen
throughout a coal mines.  If you work in a non-union
mine and detect a safety issue you can’t report it
to the bosses or owners because there is a good
chance you’ll lose your job.  Therefore with no
union protection coal miners are afraid to report
safety violations.  I’m suprised there hasn’t been
more mine explosions.