Groping With A Different Hand

You should go and read John Robb's blog from yesterday.

He basically says that the global economic system is too big and too complex for anyone to effectively understand it (like I said a while ago!) and, being so fucking big and complex, it is 1. constantly changing and 2. these constant changes are occurring so rapidly and effect so much that 3. It is impossible for nation-states to effectively respond to it.

The ultimate result, sayeth Robb? The ultimate failure of the state and the resulting hollow state:

The hollow state has the trappings of a modern nation-state ("leaders", membership in international organizations, regulations, laws, and a bureaucracy) but it lacks any of the legitimacy, services, and control of its historical counter-part. It is merely a shell that has some influence over the spoils of the economy.

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In considering this I'm reminded of the systems theorist Donella Meadows writing:

So one day I was sitting in a meeting about the new global trade regime, NAFTA and GATT and the World Trade Organization. The more I listened, the more I began to simmer inside. "This is a huge new system people are inventing!" I said to myself. "They haven't the slightest idea how it will behave," myself said back to me. "It's cranking the system in the wrong direction—growth, growth at any price!! And the control measures these nice folks are talking about—small parameter adjustments, weak negative feedback loops—are puny!"

Meadows goes on to present a very interesting set of "leverage points" or "places to intervene in a system" in ascending order of effectiveness.

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These sort of analyses allow us to step outside the obscenely narrow ideological framework of the Democrats and Republicans -- What did I call them the other day? The Corporate Party and the Other Corporate Party? -- and also the slightly expanded framework that includes Marxists and "red anarchists" and "21st Century Socialists" and other relics of the 1800s and try to understand the new world we actually find ourselves in.

What is that world?

I don't know.

But I have some ideas as to what its important features are.

This is the most important feature:

None of the important features are discussed in the major public forums (the "mainstream media," the left/right "alternative media") or by major public officials (Obama/McCain).

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Just one example.

In 2006, American corporations received $92 billion in subsidies, according to one study.

In an article the other day, Georgia Monbiot pointed out that

USAid used to boast on its website that "the principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the USAid's contracts and grants go directly to American firms."

Good Jobs First released a study documenting at least $1 billion in subsidies to Wal*Mart.

And over the last few posts we've learned how Congress changed the rules for the big investment banks and the government sponsored industries; and how the latter pumped money into both parties (but especially the Democrats) for years; and how the people at the head of these organizations made out like bandits in consequence.

But in the "mainstream" and most of the "alternative" media the debate continues to be whether it's the Bush Administration's fault for encouraging shady loans to create the illusion of the Ownership Society or whether its the Democrats' fault for encouraging loans to poor people.

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An incomprehensible world, led by people complicit in the obfuscation. That's what we have. That's what we choose during election year: Which set of lies we prefer to believe in.

And it continues because, for us Americans, and hey, for everyone getting richer in East Asia etc. it's really just not that bad.