recurrent themes in a very old song

Paul Krugman: "...what we’re seeing now is what happens when influential people exploit a crisis rather than try to solve it."

A commenter, John Emerson, at Brad DeLong:

"...shouldn't we be asking whether some of the people who seem so stupid have an agenda that they're not sharing with the rest of us? They know that Social Security isn't bankrupt. They know that spending isn't out of control. They know that taxes aren't high. There's something else going on.

Arguing with their explicit public statements, or critiquing these statement, is a waste of time. Their public statements are meant to get today's political job done by scaring the bejesus out of a sufficient number of people. These statements will be inoperative very soon and no one will acknowledge that they were ever made.

The players I'm talking about include Democrats and some of them in the Obama administration.

Technocracy has always been the mask of power politics. The economic questions have never been as decidable as the technocrats claimed. The deficiencies were compensated for with ideology and mystification.

The corollary of this is the technocrats aren't really advocates of using the technology for anything other than personal gain.

Then there's the inescapable conclusion that if the economy's being taken to the cleaner's someone's making money off of the laundry.

The Economy could be settled if the SEC wasn't owned by the bank$ters.

Then there's the small matter of tax-free highly profitable mega corporations, the effectively untaxed 1% of us who own 90% of everything, and the cost of Endless War for the sake of Endless War.

The energy crisis could be solved by bacterial hydrocarbon production, but the foxes own a piece of that henhouse too. It won't go anywhere as long as the Company has a controlling interest.

And then there's NASA. A huge cash cow for the Company for decades, if there was ever an organization that existed for purely political reasons, it's NASA. The very last thing they ever wanted to do was put people on the moon or into the solar system in viable, independent colonies. After all, look how that turned out here in the Americas.

It's almost as if it existed to prove unequivocally that technology was futile, and all the hope and dreams of space and new frontiers were pointless.



They did and continue to do that pretty well.