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Issue #126 was published in May 2010.
suboptimal disillusionment • c’mon, Slavoj, tell us the secret! • Greece and the EU crisis • recovery, now what? • CPI-Elderly • buying green makes you nasty
a little taste of each...
This newsletter has long touted the productive possibilities of disillusionment. Most recently, that meant there might be some potential for radicalization when the left–liberal version of Obamamania crashed into his ardor for capitalism and imperial war. Things haven’t worked out that way yet. So it’s time to ask, as Sarah Palin put it, how is that hopey–changey thing working out?
Not so well for Obama’s ratings. Despite the huzzahs of the pundits after the health care thing passed, Obama’s standing with the public eroded slightly by Gallup’s measure. At 48%, Obama’s approval rating is 11 points below the average for a president 16 months into his term. His trajectory of approval is way below average, and matches fairly well that of Ronald Reagan, who also took office in a deep recession and suffered for it. Reagan’s popularity bottomed in January 1983, two months after the recession ended, then tacked on 25 points over the next two years. Obama’s popularity hasn’t bottomed yet, nine months after the recession’s putative end—though, in a spot of bad luck for him (not to mention 15 million unemployed), the job market doesn’t bounce back like it used to.
Let’s savor some disappointments of a regime characterized, as Tariq Ali nicely put it, by “sonorous banality.” Let’s start with...
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Slavoj Zizek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (London and New York: Verso, October 2009), 168 pp., $12.95.
Comparing Slavoj Zizek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce with his earlier work is not unlike comparing a masterpiece of erotic art with actually having sex: the former pleasurable on many levels but ultimately frustrating. Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby!
The book critiques “what we believe we believe,” but fails to accomplish its intent—articulating an alternative to “really existing” capitalism.
Dusty balls.
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A bit of horn-tooting to start. In a 1998 article on the imminent creation of the euro, LBO noted several intensely serious problems with the project. In the economic realm, the architects of monetary union seemed not to have appreciated the risk of yoking together countries as disparate as Portugal and Spain with France and Germany; the first pair had average incomes about half that of the second pair, with technology gaps to match, into a single currency zone. And in the political realm, there was the problem of a lack of any common politics—each country had its own fiscal policy, there was no common foreign policy, internal labor mobility was modest, citizens voted mainly in national rather than continental elections, and there was little popular support for or even understanding of the whole project of economic unification. The outcome could be, as the article said, “financial chaos.” We are now living through that chaos.
It did take some time to get here. But nothing like a once-in-2.5 generations global economic crisis to reveal the fissures underlying what from a distance seemed like a relatively placid surface. At first, Europe looked...
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Until the Greek crisis prompted second thoughts, the financial markets had been pleasing themselves by savoring recovery. It is now virtually certain that the U.S. recession ended sometime around last June, when a mediocre upturn began. Depending on your preference, you can pick any number of stats to prove the “upturn” or the “mediocre” part.
Let’s start with the upturn...
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Cost of living long. One of the austerity party’s favorite proposals for greater fiscal rectitude is taking a knife to Social Security—lowering the initial benefit in the coming years, and also cutting the regular yearly cost of living adjustment (COLA). The latter idea, invariably called the Diet COLA, was a favorite of Alan Simpson when he was in the Senate in the 1980s and 1990s. Now that Obama has anointed Simpson co-chair of his deficit reduction commission, the idea is likely to return.
Now, Social Security benefits are adjusted for inflation using...
License to steal. People who shop sensitively are nicer people, right? Psychological research says, “Maybe not.”
In a recent paper...
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