LET IT DIE

[Danascot]

by Douglas Rushkoff

With any luck, the economy will never recover.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It’s not just that I saw the downturn coming—it’s that I feared it wouldn’t come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It’s like arguing to Brooklyn’s latest crop of brownstone buyers that they’ve invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn’t pretty.)

Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it’s a whole lot easier to make these arguments. And, if anything, it’s even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/03/16/let-it-die-rushkoff-on-the-economy/

[Crewleader]

1. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Words of truth...along with the painful knowledge of these bailouts:

Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.

K&R my friend...:hi:

[MadMaddie]

2. Throughout history civilizations that stopped manufacturing

and went into service industry mode eventually failed. When * decided that Technology, Service and Banking would be the industries that would make America lead the pack he screwed America.

The outsourcing and export of the manufacturing base is what is crushing America and until people realize this the recovery won't be a success.

Pumping money into these companies that failed because they failed to follow basic business practices should not be the burdon of American tax payers.

[earthside]

3. Excellent!

Please read the entire article ... Rushkoff is spot on.

We have not "formed a bottom" nor have we "turned the corner" nor are we on the "road to recovery" ... no matter what slogans CNBC touts all day long because the casino called the stock market has gone up for the past few trading sessions.

There are fundamental flaws in our current economic system -- we have to reform from bottom to top if we are going to have a sustainable future.

And ... we have to let Obama and Congress know that we want this kind of change that will really make a difference.

[paulsby]

4. utter crap

i said it before, i'll say it again.

every financial euphoria (bubble, etc.) has been characterized by a singular cry "it's different this time".

similarly, we hear the same crap in every crash and recession "THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT".

it's crap.

remember also, many here even said when oil was at 130+, "oh noes, it's peak oil"

seattle-pi in their infinite stupidity said we would NEVER see oil below 90 a barrel again.

it only took a few months, and it fell about 100 frigging handles!

it isn't over, the market will recover like it always does (and like capital markets have done for centuries).

years from now, we'll look back at the people who bought when there was blood on the street (which is always a good time to buy, historically speaking), and say "man, i wish i bought ^^^^ when it was so cheap"

etc. etc.

bubbles burst, crashes recover. that's the real world.

[earthside]

5. Blind to History

The Easter Islanders believed that there would always be another tree.

It only has to be "different" once.

The actual truth is that human history is replete with times when things don't recover like they always do -- the sack of Rome; the bubonic plague; the Great Depression; so on and so forth.

You can be blind to history in your desire for nothing to really change ... but there are 7 billion people on this planet all consuming and Wall Street is a den of thieves and robbers. We may indeed be at a crucial point, signs certainly indicate that ... belittling those concerns is foolish.

Sorry, but all the pollyannish platitudes you can spout won't make it better for you.

THAT is the real world.

[paulsby]

7. rubbish

the "it's different this time" cry has been heard SCORES of times.

and every frigging time they were wrong.

so, it's an extraordinary claim, and that requires extraordinary evidence, of which you have... none.

it's not pollyannish to study the market, trade it nearly every day, and understand it.

i do. you don't

again, saying "IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME" is just as ignorant as those who claimed dow 14k was "different".

it wasn't. it was yet another bubble.

or the tech bubble

or the orange juice bubble (sell mortimer sell!)

or the silver bubble (see: hunt bros.)

you can ignore history or you can learn from it. you have chosen the former.

[westerebus]

11. In that case, I have a bet for you.

I bet 100,000 Zambian dollars that your American $ 10.oo is worth more? You can keep your $10, you might need it.

[sendero]

10. Maybe...

... but if you think there is blood in the streets right now, just wait a year.

[femrap]

14. Mother Nature

may have a bit to say about this crash.

There is only a finite amount of oil and coal in the ground.

Water? Too much water? Food requires water...not too much and not too little. The quality of the water? How many poisons are in it now?

Monsanto and its crimes against Mother Nature....seeds that work only once? WTF?

Population growth? Just how much do you think Mother Nature can handle? Or maybe the Powers that Be decide there are too many people and figure a nice plague could come in handy.

No, this time is real. I'm glad I'm old and that I didn't reproduce. And anyone who is considering to reproduce should think very very seriously about it. The Earth is facing a terrible time.

The U.S. is facing comeuppance and I wonder if the 20 or 30-somethings will be able to handle it.

Imagination and creativity are barely flickering...the only creativity of late: create a business model that can steal $5 billion from the poor.

See any creativity in music? Clothing? Movies? Theater? Lots of remakes. Lots of violence. Lots of blood. Lots of potty humor. Lots of humiliating porn. We're done. It's over. Say buh bye. Hello Comeuppance! Greed is bad.

[FlyingSquirrel]

6. K & R

[NotGivingUp]

8. If you haven't already, go to the link. It's a great read.

All of our systems are totally corrupt. We neeed a new start. So much of people's lives do not make sense. Most are only chasing dollars...not caring who else get screwed along the way. The system is set up that way. There's alway someone else to stomp down upon to raise yourself higher.

k & r!

[RoyGBiv]

9. I want his source for this statement ...

"Late Middle Ages workers were paid more for less work time than at any point in history. Women were taller in England in that era than they are today—an indication of their relative health."

I am suspicious of anyone who hearkens to "the good old days" as the proper path to the future, and his premise seems to be just that. Localized currency: good. Middle Ages: high wages, healthier women. Cathedral building: local community improvement.

He basically says the world was a better place 500 years ago.

What utter crap.

Now, having said that, I don't think he's all wrong. Rushkoff is a smart cookie with a keen insight into modern popular culture. His view of the world shows him to be an astute observer of the way things function in the now.

But then he makes statements like this:

"As painful as it might be to watch, and as irritating as it might be to those with shrinking retirement savings, the collapse of the centralized corporate economy is ultimately a good thing."

I hate to break this to everyone, but we're not going to be watching anything. We're going to be living it, experiencing it, and, yes, dying from it. This is not a spectator sport.

[Blue Meany]

13. Timing is Everything

"Late Middle Ages workers were paid more for less work time than at any point in history. Women were taller in England in that era than they are today—an indication of their relative health."

He seems to be harkening back to the period just after the plague had decimated much of Europe's population. As a result of this depopulation, there was a labor shortage resulting in higher wages; there was also more land available for peasant farming, so those living at this time may have been generally more prosperous than the preceding generations (when malnutrition among the peasantry was common) or the succeeding ones (when increasing population again strained the "carrying power" of European ecosystems).

[Blue Meany]

12. I think the core of the problem is not the financial system, which

has been allowed to siphon off our productive capacity and which is in itself a big problem. But I think the core problem is the myth that the economy can (and should) continue to grow, that there are no limits to potential wealth, and that technological fixes can be found for whatever problems we encounter vis-a-vis resource depletion and pollution. These ideas are simply false, yet they implicit assumptions underlying much of the decision making in both public and private sectors.

There are numerous examples from history of societies that collapsed as a result of degrading the ecosystems on which they depended for survival. There are also societies that adapted to environmental conditions and became more sustainable, but none of them did this with an ideology that encouraged constant growth and increased consumption. It is the underlying ideology of the virtue of growth that encouraged and provided cover for a financial system as it divorced itself from reality and created fantasy wealth that had no relationship with the real world. An economy and society anchored in the reality of environmental limits would not, I think, encourage and reward such excess.

[lib2DaBone]

15. Over a Quadrillian in Credit Default Swaps.....

..Can anyone explain to me a Quadrillion Dollars?

We will never be able to bail out all the Bankster/Gangsters.

Wouldnt it be more prudent to let the book notations of a Quadrillion Dollars ...just go belly up.. and start over?

[creeksneakers2]

16. Let it live

I like the products big corporations produce. I don't see how any local outfit can build a chevy and sell it to me for less than GM does. I like watching DVDs. How many blockbusters are going to come out of Harrisburg,PA?

I don't see how trading with my neighbors would be any better than trading with big corporations. They both want to get what they can out of a deal.

The system now works great. People 500 years ago didn't have stoves or refrigerators or weed whackers. Life sucked for them. Most didn't go to school for long so they were ignorant too.

Our economy isn't going to completely collapse. People can work more and get less and we'll still have plenty or room for the luxuries we enjoy. At least until the oil runs out.