Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel prize winning economist) has a great new article: “The Book of Jobs“(behind Vanity Fair's paywall, sorry). In it, he makes a convincing case that the first global depression was caused by a process similar to what we are seeing today (I'm very happy somebody in the social sciences is actually attempting to show how technological change was a driver of the first depression, it's about time). Here it is in a nutshell:first depression, it's about time).
Technological change in the form of the internal combustion engine (cars, tractors, trucks) improved transportation and farm productivity. This led to an agricultural revolution that impacted a huge percentage of the US population.
Farm productivity soared and prices dropped. This forced many farmers into bankruptcy and led to a steady migration of people from rural to urban locations driving down incomes/demand.
The downward pressure on incomes this caused resulted in a protraced economic depression that only ended when the US and Europe mobilized/nationalized every segment of the economy during WW2 (put everyone to work, trained them, etc.).
The violence at the heart of colonialism is exposed in Richard Gott's history
Richard Drayton
Guardian, 7 December 2011
Amazon Page for Reviewer's Book Nature's Government
“We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”. Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against “uncivilised tribes”, had called “a lively terror”. Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.
Amazon Page
Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public – always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.
Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.
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What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or “fifth columnists”. He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.
The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to assess the effectiveness of a series of news and information Web sites that have been initiated by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in recent years in a bid to counter extremist messaging. The so-called “influence Web sites” are maintained by various overseas commands and operated by defense contractors.
For fiscal 2012, SOCOM sought $22.6 million in the Overseas Contingency Operations account — primarily intended to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — for the initiative.
Phi Beta Iota: No one now serving in the US Government actually has a clue what Information Operations (IO) should be, because no one now serving in the US Government can combine intelligence and integrity to get to holistic analytics with deep “true cost” data. IO is all information in all languages all the time. Secret intelligence is 10% of all-source intelligence and all-source intelligence is 10% of IO. IO includes policy, acquisition, and operations feed-back loops that must be transparent, truthful, and replete with trust–that pretty much eliminates ALL inter-agency and intra-agency information. We've learned nothing since 1992.
Forgoing the plan to build independent floating cities away from chafing laws, some libertarians—led by Milton Friedman’s grandson, no less—have found something better: desperate countries willing to allow the founding of autonomous libertarian cities within their borders.
The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore. Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman‘s grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by “cutting-edge legal systems.” The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws. Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.
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The brainchild of New York University economist Paul Romer (read his thoughts on FCI here), a charter city combines a host nation’s vacant land (in this case, Honduras) with the legal system and institutions of another (e.g. Canada) and residents drawn from anywhere. Romer’s central insight is that good governance is transplantable—rather than wait for a basket case nation to come around begging, a charter city could help show it the way, as Hong Kong did for Deng Xiaoping.
Phi Beta Iota: The focus on eradicating corruption from day one is most interesting. While the group does not appear to have fully thought through their role as a magnet for criminals, there are regions of Africa, Latin America, and even the now warming Arctic North that could permit this kind of innovation to test its premises.
The evidence of an extensive Western covert program against Tehran, and Iranian retaliation, is now too obvious to ignore
Michael Hirsh
National Journal, 4 December 2011
Two incidents that occurred on Sunday—Iran’s claim of a shoot-down of a U.S. drone, and an explosion outside the British embassy in Bahrain—may have been unrelated. But they appear to add to growing evidence that an escalating covert war by the West is under way against Iran, and that Tehran is retaliating with greater intensity than ever.
Asked whether the United States, in cooperation with Israel, was now engaged in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program that may include the Stuxnet virus, the blowing-up of facilities and the assassination or kidnapping of scientists, one recently retired U.S. official privy to up-to-date intelligence would not deny it.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The United States is awash in gasoline. So much so, in fact, that the country is exporting a record amount of it.
The country exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is about twice the amount at the start of the year, and experts and industry insiders say the trend is here to stay.
The United States began exporting gas in late 2008. For decades prior, starting in 1960, the country used all the gas it producedhere plus had to import gas from places in Europe.
But demand for gas has dropped nearly 10% in recent years. It went from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day in 2007 to 8.8 million barrels today, according to the EIA.
Phi Beta Iota: The entire Tar Sands scheme is a scam on the US public, and atrocity against the Canadian public. In Canada, they are proposing to use precious water they do not have to spare, to flush tar we do not need out of the sands; in the US, there is no need for the tar sands as the sleazy campaigns suggest, the oil companies want the tar sands so they can externalize the costs to the US public and privatize the profits of exporting the gasoline.
While the capital markets may be cheering that in the past month 120,000 people supposedly found jobs, even if these were largely temporary or part-time just in time for the year end shopping sprees, we wonder how they will react when learning that according to the latest update from the Supplemental Nutrition
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Assistance Program (SNAP), some 423,000 Americans found their way to minimum way subsistence, courtesy of Food Stamp handouts from Uncle Sam. Since the start of the Second Great Depression, food stamp participation has increased by 18.7 million, and is now at an all time higher 46.3 million. All Bush's fault, or something. At least the chart below appears to be plateauing… Actually, sorry, no isn't.
