Limited, Inc.

Japan was the first of the industrial economies to emerge from the Great Depression. This was due to many factors: getting off the Gold standard, Keynesian-like government policies to drive up private demand, and of course the expansion of the Japanese Imperial Military, which combined with the industrial cartels – the zaibatsu – to revamp Japan’s industrial base. Of course, these Japanese policies had a cost: war in China, millions dead, the war in the Pacific, the bombing of Japan, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc. But the technocrat and his followers simply bracket the paltry negative externalities. I thought about those externalities reading John Cassidy’s assessment of Lawrence Summers stint as Obama’s economic guru in the New Yorker. Now, I like John Cassidy, but here he gives vent to the sort of praise for ‘saving the system’ that, of course, takes it as unquestioned that the system should be saved. More, that is blind to the consequences of saving the system. You can tell the apologet

The sufferin’s gonna come – to everyone—some day I have no time to write today or probably tomorrow, as I’ve been sick and now must edit for my meat. But I did want to refer readers to Frédéric Lordon’s article, don’t destroy the banks, seize them in Le Monde. I’m going to translate this paragraph: To the question of how all of this is going to finish, the response is thus: badly. And this all the more so since the social bodies are beginning to rail seriously. Without doubt, the enchainment of facts is complicated to follow in its technical detail, but the picture of the whole is more clear to them, and all the world now sees perfectly well its disgusting colors.: 1) private finance is the author of the most gigantic crisis in the history of capitalism; 2) the banks only are able to force the public powers to support them by the fact that they occupy that neurological place in the structure of the whole of capitalism which permits them to enchain the social body as a whole entirely