Bull (BLEEP!) about the who’s to blame part, and a spending freeze is simply Herbert Hoover style stupidity. The current economic crisis was created over a fifteen-year period after devious Wall Street and Banker folk created instruments (credit default swaps) and a system that allowed banks and other financial institutions to hide REALLY BAD LOANS. THE ANTI-REGULATION REPUBLICAN PARTY / BUSH LED FRENZY of the past eight years allowed that system to continue in perpetuity as loan practices got more and more shoddy over time. As to inferred current White House created diversions - I’m so over the Republican Party diversionary tactic of re-writing our history!
Instead, this crazy old artist has decided to do a bit of research into economic theory because I’m confused by the Republican v. Democratic Party division over President Obama’s stimulus package (Actually the Economic Recovery Act which was constructed basically by Democrats in the Congress and Senate since Republicans refused to have anything to do with it except to put their own PORK into it. To perhaps oversimplify the argument, Republicans wanted nothing to do with the package because they claimed (and still do claim) that it will cause disastrous stagflation, and that our government has no business meddling in the economy. They will probably make a similar claim concerning President Obama’s healthcare initiative. Democrats on the other hand claim that our economy has collapsed, and that without government intervention things will only get worse, perhaps much worse - and they claim that healthcare reform is necessary to an economic recovery.
First, an a priori observation, and it is not based in economic theory, only my concern that the argument stated above is a binary opposition. *1 As is so often the case with such oppositions, two factions argue over the opposition until one side becomes subordinated to the other in the social environment as false or incorrect whether or not that social / cultural outcome is provable. In any event, I’m discovering just how complex and subtle is the gray area between the extremes of the opposition. Also, and before any argument on my part, the next entry in the series will be a brief summary of Economic theory, of which I see very little discussion in all the Republican v. Democrat argument about the failed economy of our nation and the world. Of course, I cannot help but come to a conclusion based on that history, and the argument that is only beginning to take shape coupled with the a priori observation above. I also see that I must do some extensive reading, and a partial list of books and Websites will be one of my future entries on this subject.
As always I will create images as part of each of these entries about the economy because I am an artist, and this journal purports to be an artist’s journal. The entries will be interspersed among my more Art oriented entries over the next several months.
As a side to my excursion into the “History of Economics, 101,” I’m amazed that, like Nero - while we explore and argue (reads fiddle around) the nation and coincidently the world continues to crash and burn.
March 11, 2009 – A Note on Obama Signing Today’s Spending Bill
Several Observations:
1. He has no choice – If he does not sign, congress must write a new bill by midnight and the federal government will shut down. No new president wants that to happen.
2. Republicans approved of this bill, written last summer and fall when Bush was president, and now vociferously oppose it because of earmarks, many of which they wrote into the bill.
3. Republicans oppose the earmarks that keep the poor in housing, and feed poor single mothers and children as pure pork. I say, in almost all Marie Antoinette’s words, “Let them eat pork.” Or perhaps I should say instead, “let them eat their own hot air, and let the poor children eat real food while sitting at a table in their own home instead of garbage on the street.”
Note - Thursday, March 12, 2009 – Comcast, Fox, stands with…
Republican “do nothingism” of course. Yes, I know. I subscribe to Comcast.
IT’S THE ONLY CABLE AVAILABLE! H-m-m-m-m-m-m, isn’t that the definition of a monopoly, and why was it necessary to break-up Ma Bell (Bell Telephone regional companies) in 1984 if Comcast and its monopoly is allowed to stand in the two thousands.
So, I’m stuck using a company that is anathema to my social and increasingly my economic political views!
Note
*1 Binary Opposition - Complete opposites - two things that are related yet completely different - in 360 degrees of circumference in a circle, two things that are 180 degrees apart. In structuralist theory two things that are mutually exclusive. In post-structuralist theory one of the pair of opposites is seen as dominant, and the other as weaker or subordinate.
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