Beyond the crash - and MORE
Beyond the crash | Adam Tooze
Politics don’t matter; market forces shape our world. So ran the dominant ethos before 2008. Adam Tooze, the author of a landmark book, says it was always an illusion
‘I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” That was Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, in October 2005.
Two years later, in the autumn of 2007, Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, was asked by a Swiss newspaper which candidate he was supporting in the forthcoming US presidential election. His response was striking. How he voted did not matter, Greenspan declared, because “[we] are fortunate that, thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.”
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What really went wrong in the 2008 financial crisis? | Financial Times
Jul 16, 2018 ... Instead, Crashed gives readers a detailed and superbly researched account of ... Such a huge crisis, Tooze points out, has inevitably deeply affected ... of
Review: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the ...
Jul 22, 2018 ... The Great Crash 1929, JK Galbraith's classic account of Wall Street's ... Adam Tooze, the British economic historian who is professor of history ...
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Jul 17, 2018 ... Few are likely to match Adam Tooze's Crashed in scope, ambition or rigour. This is truly contemporary history-the book runs right up to the ...
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We should be aware that both Brexit and Donald Trump are consequences of the crash of 2007-2008. So is Bernie. And 5-Star. In both Europe and the USA, Millenials are a different breed to Baby Boomers and their Gen X cohorts. They pinch pennies, are socially conservative, cautious and handicapped by student debt - yet they still think outside the box when it comes to new ideas like computers and a Universal Living Wage. The crash of 2007-2008 was a Boomer crash - a bursting bubble of real estate hubris - a bonfire of the vanities. There was only so far they could stretch the promises of supply-side economics, premised on an old hippie ethic of selfishness, basically - or that is what it was eventually shaped into.
Anyway, a lot of hinterlanders got bashed by the economic decline caused by the crash. That includes blacks, women, millennials, and rural whites. Notice, we are seeing movements for all of these groups or sectors, but they are not focusing on economic justice, really. Instead, they are playing into identity groupism, being played one against another by the powers that be. I watched in habituated horror as the whole "OCCUPY" movement was undone by a cunning manipulation of an issue called Trevor Martin. Too easilly, issues of economics are rerouted through issues of racism, and nobody wins in the end, except for those at the top. I remain astounded at how daft the people remain. Willfully. Because they require authorities and celebrities to venerate - as if they are avatar-gods fighting out their video game wars for them. Go team U$A!
A lot of people's wealth dropped after that crash. Simultaneously, somehow, (!), the rich got richer. And now we have such monsters as Donald Trump. What people don't recognise is that Trump is married to several different mass-interest vectors, or underlying, ulterior motives... He has his base, which, geographically, is not conventional. It contains a LOT of anti-globalists, as did Bernie supporters, which are reinterpreted to be nationalists, which are mistaken for WHITE-NATIONALIST RACISTS, and, the fact that so many of his base DO resent competition from immigrants and, 'welfare minorities', it is not always too difficult to make this association - even though it is widely incorrect.
A lot of Trump's base are simply alienated people who want a return to economic health, most of whom happen to be white, because that's how it was. Indeed, some whites want a return to the days of white priviledge, but blacks want a return to the days of a little more opportunity as so do most whites. The same days. Everybody wants to return to the 70's or something, yet they are all marketing this return in terms of racism and groupism. So. That means the return ain't gonna happen, yo. And THAT means, the most powerful group, whites, is going to strive to MAKE their version of the game happen. I do foresee a problem of growing white racism. Its in the dynamics.
But Donald Trump has other interest vectors. He has his own agenda, which is to prove he is right, and good. He does so demagogically by appealing to his base, in speaches and Tweets. But he also has the conventional vector of the GOP, which can be the same establishment as the DNC dems, both of whom conspire to promote GLOBALISM. Globalism is directly antithetical to Trump's base, as it is to a lot of those who oppose his base yet who do support it nevertheless. There are two reasons why Trump often forays away from the interests of his base into supporting globalism. One, is that the GOP/DNC demands that he do so - and they make their demands via the DEEP STATE. The National Security Apparatus. The Military Industrial Complex.
The other reason he so often supports globalism is that he is a billionaire, who sympathizes with billionairism, and who has a lot of billionaire friends, who got to where they are today by being corrupt bastards - and that probably includes mobsters, banksters and Russians. Trust me, big-time real estate wheelers-and-dealers around NYC have ALL dipped into this slough of depravity, because it is part of the whole game. Out in the moneyed east, corruption is par for the course. SO. Anyone who didn't expect Trump to be corrupt was just naive from the start. From his point of view, corruption was just a silly technicality that had to be fulfilled on the way to goodness/greateness.
I would like people to be able to separate these different vectors pulling at Trump. Because, sometimes, Trump serves the same interests as sported by, e.g., Bernie Bros, and other populists. There is nothing wrong with being anti-globalist. What is wrong, is being classified into these various divisive groups of nationalism, Nazism, socialist, BLM, antifa, and so on and on. Pretty soon, society begins to resemble a smouldering cauldren of chaos and ignorance - ignorance of all the glorific promises of globalism - that it becomes inevitable that CONTROL measures are deemed to be necessary by the elites. Who are these elites? We never really see them. They reportedly are fleeing into bunkers and South Pacific Islands, for frear of impending war - with Iran, most probably.
The game is playing itself out, according to stupid prophesies. Christian catechism. American ideals. But I beg everyone to please try to remove yourself from the standard thought patterns, and don't fall for any of it. Because they are just preparing you to be the next cannon fodder, all because they fucked up a decade ago. Don't vote or move according to personalities. Vote and move ACCORDING TO ISSUES. The first issue is this:
ECONOMIC JUSTICE.