After Such Knowledge

I've looked at the historical record and seen that every nation that successfully industrialized did it behind tariff walls. This includes South Korea and Mexico. My second take is that because the financial markets are hopelessly corrupt, shortsighted, and technologically illiterate, they are unable to properly value the infrastructure of industrialization. When financialization first started, there were a few protests at the ability of real scoundrels to seize and then cash in on assets they rarely understood, who in the process of their plunder, squandered a system of wealth creation that had taken decades to create. They pissed away USA's industrial crown jewels for a tiny fraction of what they were worth with their get-rich-quick schemes. These protests probably crested with Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street — an effort so excellent, I suspect Stone didn't even know how good it was. Along with the plunder came the justifications for why this did not matter. Around h...

Alas, their paradigms and terms of discourse are dieux-dieux. It's why I trashed that Blakely gal from offa here. All have to go. It's a clearance sale, a liquidation! Not that it hasn't been like Black Friday every goddam day since the Reago-Thatcher Pod-People Takeover. Even in those ritzy stores in the brick-and-mortar malls. Nonetheless the urge to refute and rebuke and revile my rivals at the next ISCSC conference remains strong and renitent, so here goes... Leaving our civ's intellectual plane, where this Maslovian need is being poorly served, let's turn to the economic level. I am not insisting on using the combined expression "political economy" today. We oughta, but Western history did not begin with centralized public authority. The abortive Carolingian kingdom does not count and should never have been. Here we are faced with a series of complex developments. Wouldn't it be nice if we could ignore 'em, but we can't because economic is...

 About that Technocracy map... I submit that we already live in one. When doing "my own research" (oy jeez) I found this very small compact book by a woman whose name I can't remember. Printed during the Depression, it listed and described alternative economic systems much in the news. Fascism's advertised theory was in it. So was Communism. These were fresh back then. Technocracy was in there. I think Social Credit was too. Not the Chicom arm-twisting but something dreamed up by an engineer named Douglas. When I started becoming interested in the Progressive political movements of the North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin arc, there was a sense these folks had created their politics from their interaction between a harsh environment and the plundering robber barons who made their existence infinitely worse than it had to be.  These political movements owed their philosophical ideas to a lot of things but their curiosity was directed by their real economic dilemmas.  The...

I assure you that I prefer cynicism to Leader-worship (unless it's a Progressive). Neither side is right and neither side is telling the whole truth, both sides are manipulating the public and have for decades. It's building up to a second civil war and the GOP (the Neoconfederacy's party after the Southern Strategy) lost control. Neoliberalism was how the Eastern Establishment controlled us using methods described in the Century of the Self. The GOP side is just plain nasty exploiting the lurid fantasies of the p'tit-boos since the John Birch Society, a social class that no rational society ought to produce. It's a basic rule of social processes that power begins as service and ends as abuse. When this affects the rate of growth cults of unreason proliferate. Vested interests will defend their dominant positions by exploiting these. Why make up any of their own? Bob Welch did, but he was only reviving one from 1810. Crowds go mad when denied emotional and psycholog...

  The Broken Economic Order How to Rewire the International System in the Age of Trump Mariana Mazzucato March/April 2025 Published on February 25, 2025 In many ways, Donald Trump’s election to a second term as U.S. president is a story of economic dissatisfaction. For the first time in decades, the Democratic candidate received more support from the richest Americans than from the poorest. In 2020, most voters from households earning less than $50,000 a year opted for the Democrat, Joe Biden; in 2024, they favored the Republican, Trump. Those making more than $100,000 a year, meanwhile, were more likely to vote for Kamala Harris than for Trump. Declining support for the Democratic Party among working-class voters reflects a deep disenchantment with an economic system that, under administrations led by presidents of both parties, has concentrated wealth at the very top, enabled the growth of the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the economy, trapped people in cycles of...