For those of us still searching for a way to illuminate the often murky reasons why we all (or most of us) grow endlessly poorer and more desperate, here's a great post.
A Comment to Frank Richs' great column of yesterday, turned up on Krugman's blog this morning.

Damn! So THAT'S how it works!

Great Job, #81.

Read it and weep.

Here, it's comment #2 on Krugman's post.
 

 A few years ago Kcurie and I got into a disagreement about the nature of reality. It revolved around what I thought was an extreme position, in which I thought he was overstating the role of perception as essentially ALL of reality.  Like all good arguments, it has made me think. So thank you, Kcurie. Our discussion has informed much of what I've done since then on these pages.
I've read the very good discussions led by by Miguel on the meltdown, the equally good ones about the mid-terms and the aftermath- the "what now" question, and I think I see a  hole in the discussion. Once again.

A header caught my eye the other day, and opened up an entire closet full of carefully stashed and locked knowledge. A closet that I had decided to defer sorting till a later time. Perhaps the time is now.

Epidemic? Half of US teens `meet criteria for mental disorder'
By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, October 14th, 2010
WASHINGTON -- Around half of US teens meet the criteria for a mental disorder and nearly one in four report having a mood, behavior or anxiety disorder that interferes with daily life, American researchers say.

front-paged by afew

In the privacy of my musty attic, among the boxes of experiences filtered by each other and the piles of old insights turned stale or perhaps even (god forbid) wrong, I too cannot resist the urge to indulge myself in futurology. Risky business. This rather chaotic diary grew out of a comment to fairleft's important diary called "Obama cancels Withdrawal", etc

Anyone interested in the byzantine workings of the U.S.Supreme Court will probably already have asked these questions :
Why now?
Why bother?
The recent split decision essentially erasing limits on the use of corporate funds to influence the democratic process is already deeply controversial, it's legal reasoning suspect and it's logic fragile. It enshrines into law a reality already firmly bolted to the deck- that corporate money pulls the strings.  So why bring down on your head all the heat?
A diversion? Makes no sense. All the right needs to do is to keep feeding Obama rope.
An added layer of legal fig leaves over the pubes of the corporate person? Perhaps, but that seems a secondary issue to me. The preposterous notion of the "corporate person" is as solid a fantasy as any plutocrat could want.
 It's a message, I think. And a revealing one.

ARGeezer's recent burst of insightful contributions has moved me to write once again on a familiar theme, but with hopefully deeper insight, and a few grins.

Living outside the US sometimes gives perspective, and can lead to conclusions, concerns that are at variance with those held by insiders. Sometimes the whole thing's a waste, and we take our blinders with us, and our view is limited to the same old narrow slot. But time and experience has an insidious way of reeducating even the most hidebound. Sometimes the things we learn have wide application. Education is coming, for Europe as well as the US....

The level of misinformation about the UBS-tax dodgers story is only equaled by the level of vitriol and hypocrisy.
Almost everyone has it wrong. Perhaps it's the need to have a villain to throw rocks at, or perhaps it's just hate-the-rich, sour grapes. In any case, here's my attempt to set the record straight.

I admire Krugman as a halfway house for those still suffering from Uncle Miltie withdrawal. I quote this piece to note, however, the careful wording he uses to poke holes in the Chicago boys, and also to note the apparent limits to his own willingness to accept the failure of Market Capialism, as well as his unwillingness to see it as a system of predation, rather than efficient production and distribution.

Perhaps he's keeping his head down?

Diary bump by afew

Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com has done a great job of doing a quick-and-dirty model to prove what we all knew all along- that money buys policy. So why am I excited? Because I'm one of those odd people who question my own certainties-- who likes to find that, once in a while, I was certainly wrong.
Not this time.

The Dallas Fed:

"Banks actually create money when they lend it. Here's how it works: Most of a bank's loans are made to its own customers and are deposited in their checking accounts. Because the loan becomes a new deposit, just like a paycheck does, the bank...holds a small percentage of that new amount in reserve and again lends the remainder to someone else, repeating the money-creation process many times.

Dallas Federal Reserve

Obama, at Georgetown University:

"Although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks -- "where's our bailout?" they ask -- the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth."

NYT quoting a speech by Obama

Obama unfortunately fails to mention the fact that the institutions he has chosen to manage this "multiplier effect" have a track record -indeed a legal obligation- of multiplying mostly their own profits, without regard to social needs. It has been repeatedly estimated that the average ratio of interest costs to developmental investment is about 1 to 1. Yes, that's right. a full 50% of the cost of private bank- managed investment projects is raked off in interest or profits.

This diary is not at all US-centric, since the same problems are europe-wide, and the same principles would work almost anywhere--and have done so.

Pirates! Egad, John, what can we do?
"Help the Captain! Load 'em up with grapeshot, sweep the decks! Show no mercy, for these evil men will show us none! Scum of the earth, I say!"

As is so often the case, The Nation has produced a thought-provoking piece. This time it's  about financial regulation and the clear unwillingness of the US to really change the business model that got us all in the shit.
Does Europe have the means to regulate without the US?
Does Europe have the will?

Promoted by whataboutbob

The foundation of democracy- or of any even temporarily viable form of government- is education. In the case of Democracy, high quality mass education. In the case of authoritarian, patriarchal systems, the education of an elite, and the propagandizing of the rest.
Both require, for long-term survival a rather special sort of  education, that enables, and in fact requires the questioning of assumptions and authority, the hunger for different, even alien analyses and policy ideas to chew on, --and an unwillingness to abide the superficial and the convenient that masquerade as the truth. Authoritarian systems are uneasy with the creation of a small but necessary subset who question effectively.
Democracy- or any form of populist government- is therefore based on the assumption (so far unproven) that the general population of a social group of national size is capable of applying this education in iconoclasm to the understanding of social needs. And that this understanding, once achieved, will be allowed to guide the political process.

Education that produces a well-trained disciplined, productive, competitive elite is the death of democracy, not it's support. Democracies fail miserably under this circumstance, and become shabby theaters of the absurd.

promoted by afew

If history is any indication, Obama will now get cautious, and play it safe.
A double digit lead causes candidates' advisers to counsel caution- "park your mouth before you run over your own foot" -sort of thing.
Bad Idea.

Polls tend to have a range of uncertainty of around three percent, even in the absence of fraud.
My wild guess is that the GOP will push the results by another 3%, using the tried and true traditional fraud techniques, and another 2% or so using the latest Rovian creations.
And anyone who discounts the Bradley effect is making a bad mistake. The best estimates suggest at least another 3-4% difference between poll words and voter deeds.
Since all these elements (except the normal polling error) work against Obama, the current 8-9% lead adds up to ---Zero, with a 3% error one way or the other.

He could sure as hell lose this. If he wins thin, he will still lose it.

Here's an idea about what I'd like to see in that 30-minute block of time he just bought.

Another game of "Starve The Beast"?

An IED for Obama, post-election?

A massive rip-off by the financial rats, --just before they leave the ship, carpetbags in hand?

Or just another illustration of Democratic spinelessness?

--- or--Did someone in the Chinese/Japanese/ ministry of finance pick up the phone and put in a call to Pennsylvania avenue to chat about the growing bad smell coming, as of late,  from US Treasury paper, and how much they like the graphic design of the Euro?

"Our thesis ... is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively `strong democracy' instead of a `failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos--"a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office." Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.

As a long-term fan of Chalmers Johnson, I read with interest his latest book review, in Truthdig, of a new piece by his old college professor, Sheldon Wolin.
"Democracy incorporated, and the specter of inverted totalitarianism" .
Chalmers Johnson on "managed Democracy"

Johnson makes this suggestion: "Wolin's work is fully accessible. Understanding his argument does not depend on possessing any specialized knowledge, but it would still be wise to read him in short bursts and think about what he is saying before moving on."
This may be a disqualifier for some who worship specialized knowledge, the more impenetrable the better, as a positional marker, but-- it's probably a good book for us ordinaries.

Let's debate democracy and elitism some more - Promoted by Migeru

As the hard corners of reality finally begin to dig into the well-padded bottoms of the pronouncing class as well as the leaner tushes of the working class, the need to trot out and spruce up the story emerges. Here's a couple little short stories from two different universes.
The marvel here, for me, is the tenacity with which one story edits.

No great insights here-just a remarkable juxtaposition I read today that struck me.  

Promoted by Migeru

AP, Via MSNBC:

THERMAL, Calif. - At Las Palmitas Elementary School, nestled between rundown homes and fields of grapes, peppers and dates in Southern California, 99 percent of students live in poverty and fewer than 20 percent speak English fluently.

Las Palmitas and other schools in the Coachella Valley Unified School District are just the type policy makers had in mind when Congress passed the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 to shed light on the disparities facing poor and minority children.

Sorry, --not true. The law was intended to punish those who failed--to yammer  after the loosers. The mostly non-white loosers.

Richard Layard is a director at the Center for Economic Performance, London School of Economics.
However, please don't hold that against him-- he's really a unique treasure for us lowly creatures, species Economicus Ignoramus--- a superb economic thinker who is also intelligible. He gave a series of lectures that was useful to me, and I'd like to talk with those whose opinions I respect about these lectures.

But first, I gotta get you folks to read them.

Here's a teaser.