Neo-con lap poodle Niall Ferguson has written another book rationalizing just how great white guys are and just how lame everybody else is called “Civilization: The West And The Rest”. London Review of Books reviewer Pankaj Mishra totally pwns him in this recent review. And since I originally read the review, Ferguson himself has replied to the piece in the comments, starting a comment war with Mishra that is a thing of beauty to behold.
A few links about the neverending clusterfuck we have gotten ourselves into economically:
Harvard professor and darling-of-the-right Niall Ferguson gave this interview to Vanity Fair, where he asserts that the United States really has no choice but to walk away from its colossal foreign debt, because the only other option is complete collapse. He makes a few other salient points along the way, most notably that China is also completely fucked because of us and can’t really do anything about it economically, but absolutely has the upper hand on any diplomatic disputes that might arise for a long, long time to come. Coincidentally, he’s plugging his new book The Ascent of Money, which he says he planned to have published just as the entire world economy fell into the shitter, since that’s a GREAT way to sell books.
But it looks like he’s not talking out of his ass on this. This article on a financial news website called Seeking Alpha offers pretty much the same conclusions as Ferguson’s, albeit in more technical financial jargon (via Polymeme). The whole damn country is about to miss its mortgage payment, and when that happens you’ll be using your 401(k) statements for toilet paper. So don’t go calling Cash4Gold.com just yet.
Meanwhile, I think a lot of people are still trying to pick their jaws up off the floor over the reports of $18 BILLION dollars being handed out to Wall Street executives using our precious “bailout” money. Not to mention the daily stream of stories about banks spending millions on stadium naming rights, the BofA CEO with the multimillion-dollar decorating bill, and other such rubbing-your-nose-in-it shenanigans. At The Seminal, contributor Chris Edelson did a little quick math to come up with some of the other things we could have done with that $18B besides piss it away on the bailout. For example, the S-CHIP bill, which was passed by both houses of Congress last week (and was vetoed TWICE by George Bush) will add $32 billion per year to a program that already costs $25 billion per year. The bailout bonus money could have paid for that increase for two years running without the increase in cigarette taxes which will be the funding mechanism.
Now, some regular visitors here don’t much like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but I think he’s one of the best representatives any state in America could ask for. Like a lot of us, Bernie is simply PISSED OFF about the bailout and the flagrant contempt with which the Wall Street criminals are raping this country. Last week, Bernie sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry “Gutless Wonder” Reid demanding that the Senate begin investigations into the disbursement and use of TARP funds. President Obama’s “salary cap” proposal is a first step, but a laughable one when you consider the scope of the fraud being committed, and nothing short of an investigating committee with a freshly-sharpened guillotine is going to have any real impact.
Regular readers know that I have posted a couple of times about the economic disaster as it has played out in Iceland, and you probably heard that the government there fell, as well as the story about the new prime minister being a lesbian (which, like Obama being black is all well and good but not particularly relevant at this moment in history). But next on the chopping block is Latvia, where rioting nearly brought down the government last week. The problems in Latvia are strikingly similar to those in Iceland, but a compounding issue for the Balkan country is that a third of the population is Russian, and they are agitating over what they call discrimination against them. That, in turn, could give Russia an excuse to cause trouble, if it so chose.
And while those two cold northern countries are struggling, so is the “Las Vegas of the Arab World”, Dubai. Unlike Iceland and Latvia, though, Dubai’s troubles all come from their overheated real estate speculation. This post at The Daily Clarity outlines the heart of the problem, which has manifested itself in the rapid departure of hundreds of ex-pat workers and businessmen who were fueling the Dubai land grabs. They point to this Times of London article about the recent phenomenon of luxury cars being abandoned at Dubai’s international airport by businessmen getting out while the getting is good. I’m actually a little surprised that American businessmen haven’t started pulling the same shit, but maybe they’re waiting for those bailout bonus checks to clear first.
Noted British historian Niall Ferguson has an article in the December issue of Vanity Fair that tries to explain the current economic crisis by putting it into historical context. It’s a good way to get some perspective on the whole thing and doesn’t bog down in trying to explain all the financial technobabble*. If you read the “phony economy” piece from Harper’s that I linked to yesterday, this is a good expansion on that idea, as Ferguson looks at the historical origins of the finance sector as the driving force of American capitalism. I don’t know that I agree that the “American Dream” of single-family home ownership only dates back to the 1930s; I would argue that every pioneer who hitched up a wagon team and headed west across North America was looking for his own land and a home, and that the central notion of the land not belonging to the nobility but to whomever could make that land productive is as old as America itself. Nevertheless, the institutionalization of home ownership is indeed a unique American idea, and the impact it has had on our current economic state of affairs is undeniable.
*If you’d like a comprehensible explanation of the technobabble, I recommend these two “This American Life” programs: “Giant Pool Of Money” from May of this year, and “Another Frightening Show About The Economy” from October.
Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy is only the latest person to consider the obvious comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire in his new book “Are We Rome”, but I liked this interview with him on The Atlantic Monthly’s website (prior to joining Vanity Fair, Murphy was the editor of The Atlantic for many years). Compared to the pro-empire voices of people like Niall Ferguson, it’s worth having someone remind us that being the “New Rome” isn’t entirely a good thing.
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