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Riches to Rags
Daniel Gross, New York Times
As a rule, one should avoid books in which sentences begin, “I wrote back in 1994 that. ...” But Kevin Phillips, who has migrated from avatar of angry populist Republicanism in the early 1970s to avatar of angry populist both-parties-be-damnedism in the current decade, is such a prolific writer that self-reference is inevitable.

... The problems besetting America today are ones Phillips has identified before: an increasing dependence on trading and speculation (a phenomenon he calls “financialization”), the Bush family’s friendliness to oil producers, and the bond between evangelical Christians and the Republican Party. Today, these factors - along with the weak dollar and a financial sector in shambles - have created a toxic mix that he calls “bad money.”

... Phillips layers several other themes on top of his repurposed scaffolding. There’s a discussion of peak oil, and a side trip into the thicket of government statistics, from which he emerges with the plausible charge that the government’s tally of the Consumer Price Index probably understates inflation.

... At root, he sees the American political economy as a system in which supercapable policy makers and businesspeople sit around and decide what will happen and then put the policies in place to make sure it does. The reality is that the financial elite contains as many screw-ups as it does masters of the universe.

... It’s convenient and easy to ascribe the dislocations we’re experiencing - the high cost of food and oil, the sale of major American companies to foreigners, the weak dollar - to a conspiracy hatched by a cabal of well-connected Americans. But it’s increasingly apparent that interest rates, and the prices of commodities like oil and wheat, all of which are determined in global markets, are no longer in the control of the Federal Reserve, the White House or Wall Street. Phillips believes the agony of the American consumer is a function of “the global crisis of American capitalism.” But he’s got it backward.

We’re experiencing the first American crisis of global capitalism.
Daniel Gross writes the Money Culture column for Newsweek and the Moneybox column for Slate.
(3 August 2008)

Energy boom in West threatens Indian artifacts
Kirk Johnson, New York Times
The dusty documentation of the Anasazi Indians a thousand years ago, from their pit houses and kivas to the observatories from which they charted the heavens, lies thick in the ground near here at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

Or so archaeologists believe. Less than a fifth of the park has been surveyed for artifacts because of limited federal money.

Much more definite is that a giant new project to drill for carbon dioxide is gathering steam on the park’s eastern flank. Miles of green pipe snake along the roadways, as trucks ply the dirt roads from a big gas compressor station. About 80 percent of the monument’s 164,000 acres is leased for energy development.

The consequences of energy exploration for wildlife and air quality have long been contentious in unspoiled corners of the West. But now with the urgent push for even more energy, there are new worries that history and prehistory - much of it still unexplored or unknown - could be lost.
(2 August 2008)

The suicide solution
Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation
A few days before Congress passed its housing bill, Carlene Balderrama of Taunton, Massachusetts, found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH Corporation--may its name live in infamy--was to auction off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband's rifle.

This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay titled "Why No Outrage?" "One might infer from the lack of popular anger," the famed Wall Street contrarian wrote, "that the credit crisis was God's fault rather than the doing of the bankers and the rating agencies and the government's snoozing watchdogs." For contrast, he cites the spirited response to the depression of the 1890s, when lawyer/agitator Mary Lease stirred crowds with the message that "We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out.... We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary."

... Dry your eyes, already: death is an effective remedy for debt, along with anything else that may be bothering you too. And try to think of it too from a lofty, corner-office, perspective: if you can't pay your debts or afford to play your role as a consumer, and if, in addition-- like an ever-rising number of Americans--you're no longer needed at the workplace, then there's no further point to your existence. I'm not saying that the creditors, the bankers and the mortgage companies actually want you dead, but in a culture where one's credit rating is routinely held up as a three-digit measure of personal self-worth, the correct response to insoluble debt is, in fact, "Just shoot me!"

The alternative is to value yourself more than any amount of money and turn the guns, metaphorically speaking, in the other direction. It wasn't God, or some abstract economic climate change, that caused the credit crisis. Actual humans--often masked as financial institutions-- did that ...
(28 July 2008)