MORPHEAL'S COMMENTARY - February 9, 2009 (US Stimulus Junky Economy, And Cold War Plus 20)
Morpheal
The United States economic stimulus plan, now passed through Congress
and Senate, does not go far enough, despite the fact that 3 trillion
in total is now being promised for fighting the economic depression.
In fact 6 or even 9 trillion would not be enough in the long term.
That might seem surprising, but it is all a matter of time. It does
not matter how much stimulus you inject into the economic body, it
will only become a stimulus junky, addicted to more and more, in ever
tighter cycles of needing another fix.
One of the main strategic short comings is its lack of an effective
strategy to recover the bulk of the stimulus investment, to
recirculate the same amount back again into the economy. (This point
was made evident to the US administration in a private, earlier,
correspondence.) In fact the budget deficit that already exists, in
the trillions of dollars, is derived from that same fact, repeated at
regular intervals. Each new deficit is part of the same failure, but
it is not simply a matter of over spending the nation’s government’s
revenues. That simple mindedness obscures the real problem, which is
far more deadly at the socio-economic level.
Look on the economy as the metaphor of a big pond. You toss money in
so that it sinks to the bottom, but you know it will rise up. The
bottom of the pond is the poorest. It rises up towards the richest,
slowly and persistently. It never remains at the bottom.
As the system stands the stimulus money will eventually be skimmed off
the top of the pond as profit by those who need it the least, never
really returning to the bottom levels of the economy where it is
needed the most. So despite short term help to the lower 2/3 of the
economy it still becomes a gradual hand out to the wealthy and to
large corporations who tend to take it off the top, from the system it
is supposed to remedy.
Other flaws are less severe, but investment in technology and science
requires a new infrastructure to avoid wasteful competition. Science
planning, and technology management, needs to exist to rationalize
those efforts, to maximize returns, and to assure that new discoveries
not only benefit humanity, but that a significant portion of the
revenues gained return to support R&D and to stimulate the economy.
The existing system has some of the same flaws as the rest of the
economy, when it comes to stimulus. No matter how insistent you are on
getting the funding to the grass roots, it rises up and gets skimmed
off. It never really returns to support more R&D effort, and much less
in regards to basic science. That suffers even more, because basic
science is poorer and nearer to the bottom.
The existing system is flawed and failed and it needs radical revision
or the huge, in terms of trillions of dollars that will ultimately be
spent, band aid stimulus package cannot stop the long term fatal
bleeding of a system gone completely wrong. The addict will always
demand another fix, get high, and then come down hard, into another
deeper recession. There is no staying up, in the current socio-
economic system, junky economics.
We might hope that Prime Minister Brown, and other commonwealth and EU
leaders will do significantly better in their efforts to create
effective, long term, stimulus. President Obama is showing signs of
conservatism, making the same old mistakes and thus pleasing Congress
and Senate sufficiently to get the same old mistakes to pass through.
in a system that needs radical change, and therefore is threatened
with total long term fatal failure.
20 YEARS AFTER THE DECLINE AND FALL OF SOVIET COMMUNISM:
The end of the Cold War will perplex historians for a very long time
to come. At one level it was the result of the realization that a
Soviet Union pushed against the wall by its opponents had become very
unstable, desperate and dangerous. Although this was the fault of the
west, and should never have happened, the scenario that resulted
demanded a survivable ending, rather than mutually assured
destruction. The compromise that resulted was to grant western
Capitalism its day, declaring the end of the Cold War as the death of
communist economics. Capitalists had always blamed the communists for
all of capitalism’s problems. Capitalist paradise was being promised
right around the Cold War corner. All we had to do was to bring the
war to a survivable ending. So be it. The spell was cast and the war
was ended. We moved on to see what the capitalist cauldron would then
cook up.
Twenty years later we do live in a much more stable, survivable,
world, but knowing that the promises of unbridled capitalism have
largely become a very tragic failure. Capitalism, with its
increasingly extreme emphasis on an ever increasing, tightening
spiral, of ever more self centeredness, social divisiveness (ever
increasing and more psychologically and socially violent means and
ways of competition), along with an ever more rigidly petrified and
impenetrable class structure, combined with more and more selfish
greed, as its primary motivational goads, turns out to be unwilling to
help even the most talented to succeed, and quicker to kill rather
than to facilitate meaningful opportunities. Where did capitalist
paradise really go, and what happened to it ? After all, wasn’t
communism the devil to be exorcised, who had been persistently ruining
the capitalist god’s divine workmanship, and utterly spoiling the new
garden of Eden ? One bite of the capitalist apple, twenty years ago,
and the experience becomes one of persistent poison, fear and anxiety,
rather than security and tranquility. One strange religion, communism,
seems to have been supplanted by another strange religion, capitalism.
Neither is truly inspiring of sufficient belief to satisfy its
priesthood. It seems one can never believe wholly and deeply enough,
knowing that the scientific facts speak against it.
The new revolution, twenty years later, will necessarily be one of
socio-economic systemic change, but it cannot be the purely American
unbridled Capitalism, unplanned, decentralized, chaotic, greed driven
Americanism that Cold War victory piped in. It cannot be Stalinist
Soviet oppressive communism either. Compromise and cooperation to
overcome the thwarted progress of the past 20 years, to better the
human condition, is becoming the necessity and we must leave behind
the era of two failed systems, each built on opposing false
principles, locked in deadly dialectic, to move ahead for the sake of
humanity. Certainly we must never fall under the same old Cold War
spells, but we still have not melted the ice sufficiently, to free the
magic we really need, to rebuild any variation of a new Camelot.
Robert Morpheal