Re: [Pen-l] Who pays for the Paulson-Bernanke Plan? It's complicated

[Sandwichman <lumpoflabor@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/20/08, Julio Huato <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  Can somebody please measure all this stuff and straighten things out
>  for me? Thanks.

It's not the quantity of the stuff that matters. It's WHICH metric is
used to quantify it. Labor or debt. As long as the discussion can be
constrained to avoid the question of labor, it will be the non-owners
of capital who pay -- one way or another: unemployment, cuts in real
wages, taxes, war.

The point I would insist on is that regardless of the quality of the
mountain of debt heaped up over the past decade or two or three,
without that debt there would have had to have been either massive
unemployment or some sort of profound social upheaval. I would venture
that without the dilution of debt quality there couldn't have been
such a massive expansion of debt. The options thus were bad debt, mass
unemployment or (potentially emancipatory) social upheaval.

Say economic growth after the bailout is slow for several years (a
modest proposition), then the unemployment rate will mount. People may
then attribute the increased unemployment to the aftermath of
financial distress. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. But, rather than being
the CAUSE of unemployment, it would be more accurate to view the
financial distress as simply  the withdrawal of a palliative.

Paulson and  Bernanke can put as much bailout lipstick on the debt pig
as they want, but it's still a pig. The pig is that the bad debt
regime was always already conceived and executed as the pro-capitalist
alternative to an emancipatory social evolution.

-- 
Sandwichman
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l