Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Hooverize Them

I've been having to do a ton of stuff lately besides lament financial dumbness in our time. I was in California when Arnold announced his stunningly bad budget proposal. It's a cross between "Say Anything!" and Andrew Mellon's 1930 "liquidate everything." Republicanism Degree Zero. Mental end times. Unfortunately the dead zone includes the state house.

I also caught up on some back reading (back dreading I wrote). Mike Davis had a very good wrap-up on the election in the New Left Review for March-April. (Or read this borrowed version, and then subscribe to NLR). Davis makes a good case for the Obama-Clinton fusion that will keep his presidency from being an epochal shift, which so far it really is not.

The key thing is that however well Geithner has propped up Morgan Stanley we're dying out here. The states are sinking fast, taking in stimulus money and flushing it right through the big holes in the bottom.

In other places, like Spain, labor is marching again, and against an unemployment rate of 17.4% in the wake of the implosion of their fake real estate bubble economy. So good, and then what?!

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