WAT Christmas gathering - talk by David Caploe

Method to untangling and understanding this multi-dimensional/fast-moving crisis:

CRITICAL THINKING

Ability to evaluate competing accounts of the same situation.


Crisis in US has 6 distinct but inter-related aspects:
1) Financial
2) Economic
3) Ideological
4) Political
5) Intellectual
6) Media

- All countries either sell to the US to sells to countries that sell to the US.

- Solution to the crisis depends on the “good faith and credit” of all governments.

- At the moment, the biggest economic problem is that the political system in US had been broken.


US political system is in a state of advanced breakdown:

- Totally hijacked by corporate interests at the micro level, where votes of Senators and Representatives nakedly reflects the desires of their biggest campaign contributors in a way that would make even Karl Marx at his crudest blush with embarrassment.

- And at the macro level, completely unconstrained by a public discourse in which the most transparent nonsense is taken seriously.

Obama’s Biggest Mistake: “Bribing Middlesmen”

4 biggest issues:
1) “too big to fail” banks
2) Healthcare debate fiasco
3) Collapse of housing market
4) Mystifying “double down” in Afghanistan

Fundamental problem of the economy at this time is political.

Note: Everything that we need to know is in the NY Times. But we have to know where to look and how to read.