It’s not as if the cur­rent eco­nom­ic slump came as a sur­prise to any­one with horse-sense. Those of us who can add two and two and get four have been pre­dict­ing it for a long time. North Amer­i­cans have long lived in a bizarre Con­ser­v­a­tive fan­ta­sy world in which “pros­per­i­ty” and “con­sump­tion” have been inter­change­able words. Thir­ty years of Con­ser­v­a­tive mum­bo-jum­bo has con­vinced an entire gen­er­a­tion that you mag­i­cal­ly get rich mere­ly by buy­ing things ― and mak­ing things is an unnec­es­sary process, a tir­ing and incon­ve­nient, low class kind of busi­ness that we needn’t dirty our hands with. Now we are in a bloody big mess.  Read more »

To under­stand how polit­i­cal pow­er works, you have to under­stand the basic unit of pol­i­tics, which is the indi­vid­ual “con-job”. Polit­i­cal pow­er struc­tures are not the result of neb­u­lous col­lec­tive forces or abstrac­tions. They are cre­at­ed by indi­vid­ual human beings. These are not ordi­nary human beings, with ordi­nary motives, but spe­cial­ists, with motives dis­tinct from those that move you or me. In fact, it is the very ordi­nar­i­ness, rea­son­able­ness, and pre­dictabil­i­ty of our motives that enables spe­cial­ists in pow­er acqui­si­tion to flour­ish among us. The spe­cial­ist in pow­er acqui­si­tion oper­ates, like any preda­tor, by strate­gies of which it is con­scious, but its prey is not. The­o­ries of his­to­ry which inter­pret the activ­i­ties of rulers, aris­toc­ra­cies, and pow­er elites as act­ing uncon­scious­ly, or dri­ven by col­lec­tive “belief sys­tems” or ide­olo­gies are pro­found­ly off the mark. Read more »