Good News in the Bad News
The markets got a bit spooked today by the unexpected drop in GDP for the final quarter of 2012. But buried in the numbers are signs of a positive transition from a war to a peace economy.
The drop in gross domestic product was driven by a plunge in military spending, as well as fewer exports and a steep slowdown in the buildup of inventories by businesses…Despite the overall contraction, there was underlying data in the report suggesting the economy is not on the brink of a recession or an extended slump. Residential investment jumped 15.3 percent, a sign that the housing sector continues to recover, for one. Similarly, investment in equipment and software by businesses rose 12.4 percent, an indicator that companies are still spending.
I continue to be very optimistic about the direction of American policy as we emerge from our eight year Interregnum. Imagine if the 11 million undocumented workers emerged from the underground (cash) economy and started paying taxes. What would that do to the actuarial calculations of Social Security and Medicare? Imagine if Lockheed Martin started to manufacture wind turbines instead of fighter jets.
The greatest task of the next ten years will be Economic Conversion, the process of converting from a military economy to a civilian/peace economy. The economist Seymour Melman, who did the most important work on this subject, noted that the task ahead of us will not be easy.
“The problem of conversion from military to civilian work is fundamentally different now from the problem that existed after World War II. At that time, the issue was reconversion; the firms could and did go back to doing the work they had been involved in before the war. They could literally draw the olds sets of blueprints and tools from the shelf and go to work on the old products. At the present time, the bulk of military production is concentrated in industries, firms, or plants that have been specialized for this work, and frequently have no prior history of civilian work”
A larger part of the problem will be that the Military Industrial complex is situated deeply in the Red States, particularly Texas and the Deep South. Alex Bowles has pointed out to me that this could create even more Anti-Obama anger. Any attempt to pacify the South with some sort of Government aid to ease the Conversion, will be met with resistance.
The upshot is the mollifying the GOP will be easier said than done. Their response to the last election (“We’ll just rig the next one”) makes their contempt for both outsiders and democracy explicit. They are becoming, in a very real sense, un-American in that the overarching ideal of Government of, by, and for the people is becoming the focal point for organized rage directed at both the government and the people.
Increased investment drives economic growth, while retrenched investment leads to recession and reduced employment–and it always has. Those who blame our stagnation on a lack of consumer demand rely on a toxic brew of dubious data and dangerous theory.
It seems to me that the American public has already made a shift to a culture in which spending at the mall will be a lot less important and yet the politicians are acting like their job is to restore the status quo ante–a world the public no longer cares about. Larry Summers talks about getting the big banks lending again, but what business wants to borrow when there is so much excess capacity? There are too many damn malls. Too many car dealerships. What person in their right mind would start a new retail clothing business today?
Lest We Forget: Six Million Is the Lie; Eleven Million is the Truth. Gentiles somehow don’t count. Gypsies Are Mythical Animals.
I interviewed Simon Wiesenthal in L.A. In the 1970s and he didn’t like this fiction. Gentiles do not understand the Jewish theological doctrine of “Specialness” that permits Six commended in our memory as though another five million, totalling eleven million in all, had not also been systematically named, ridiculed, expelled, humiliated, tortured and put to death. Only Jews. Deliberately forget the remnant. Lest we forget the Six so special. What’s Five Million, give or take a dozen?
@Alex Bowles
All kinds of hedgehogs. Like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps9Sr0HNcp8
Or this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_hedgehog
Innovation and ingenuity at their best…
@JTMcPhee
And then there’s the irresistible seductions of threat perception, mission identification, and TECHNOLOGY! to make it all even ever better and better! And Cost Effective, and Affordable, and stuff, TOO! And wait! There’s more! and more…. just follow the youtube path through all the related stuff that the Game is bringing to us… gotta love that calm, serene voice of the annouincer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=6rXc9FUGfEU&NR=1
@Rick Turner Wait, they eat them? That shows how naive I am. I thought they were putting cute animals on their web site to make Portugal seem generally inviting. I didn’t realize it was an invitation to dinner.
As ever McPhee your subversive humor tickles & pricks, but lemme aks U: have you ever imagined empathicly what it must be like to sit as the Pentagon’s Undersecretary of Defense for Procurement? I mean, there is such a person. What if you’d been him? Would you have pressed Carter toward Stealth, or Reagan toward missile defense, or Clinton toward non-lethal warfighting, or Obama toward cyber-defense? Any or all of the above? When finally we the Peeps shrink the defense budget, obviously the remaining Pentagon dollars will count all the more. How would you bet the chips? You’re probably seven or eight years older but we seem to share the old habit of ridiculing and spoofing Pentagonian Jabber, but seriously in recent years the big Suits and Brass do seem quite dangerously lost in the illogic of their weird locutions, e.g. “defensive weaponry” and “defensive warfare”. This newer kind of oxymoronic un-thinking seems quite different from, say, thinking up tools with which to defend an expressly offensive force such as USMC strike teams. (But please let’s not go Hedgehog –> Warthog). Seriously, I guess I’m asking whether the voters, or their civvie Prez, stand any chance of determining whether the fewer dollars are not as perversely misspent as the too many dollars have been squandered heretofore. I’m talking about cash payments for goods; am not questioning the Military’s quasi-civilian R&D structure. Were you the appointee whose recommended military procurements have to be approved and then defended by the President in lean times, what would you propose?
Alex, and in Ecuador they eat cuy…otherwise known as guinea pigs…yes, the pets of daughters all over the US…
@Rick Turner I do know about the Cuy. When I was in high school I spent a summer in Ecuador doing volunteer community development work. One of my partners on the project, a really sweet girl from Texas, thought we were just being awful when we explained they weren’t pets. And then, one fateful day, we took a trip into town, where darling Wendy saw the succulent truth slowly roasting on a spit.
“Oh. My. Gawd.”
And that was all she said.
Wonderful! Bully! Excelsior!
Jesus, you guys. What pisses you off? It’s not a parlour trick, just look back at your various ugly assertions. Does any of you suppose that by diminishing the Romany he is correspondingly, auto-mechanically elevating Jews and Judaism? I’m sorry but that’s lame. The Roma belong to nobody, not even to me. They were so more thoroughly slain than were anyone else that the The Third Reich’s last official documents, written under condition of ravenous Russians in the suburbs, gloated over the thoroughness of the Gypsy slaughter even while lamenting the lack of time to finish off Jewry. And now, seventy years later, it seems anti-Semitic to point out that there are millions and millions missing from the funeral. You know, that’s flat weird.
@Hugo St. Victor
Hugo, why ask me? I’m just a piss-ant $30k a year/0 net worth guy, to establish exactly how meaningless I am, cursed with a millstone of a notion that it’s somehow important to try to figure out how stuff actually works. Knowing that IT DOESN’T MATTER, even if I get any of it right. See, e.g., your above comment on the fate of the Roma. The question of the 5-yr-old is “WHY?” And the answer of the exasperated parent is, eventually, “JUST BECAUSE!”
You got a pretty good idea how we have gotten to where we are. Words don’t do it, there’s no way to de-syncretize it all one phoneme at a time. it’s a I guess grokogestalt, or nothing. All the interest holders and players, the liars, the creators of world visions that are hehephenomenal frauds, born out of some combination of realism, greed, paranoia, the urge to Rule and Control, mingled with myth-particles of kindness and reason, every little subterfuge of Interested Parties from the line guy at Lockheed-Martin “who knows who he works for” to the engineer with an IDEA! pickled off by something he saw at the latest trade show or read about in the trade press or dreamed up out of some nightmare after one too many “Terminator” runs on cable, to the bureaucrats who are Just Doing A Job to all the consultants and contractors who have shoulders to the wheeeeeeels, all the Brass whose careers are linked to this or that procurement and whose post-careers are linked to the continued Victory! of the System, all the Charlie Wilsons and other Friends of Defense! in Congress and their aides and associates, all the huge egos on the bodies of sneaky little Al Haig shits in the West Wing doing their thing, the petroleum extracters, the utilities, the coders and the companies they work for, and of course the whole psychedelic lunacies of human interaction where people who seek and use POWER! are always looking for some advantage over the village idiot with money or land or OIL! or whatever, read Tuchman on how we got to WW I and WW II and how the human system operates and all the smart folks before and since who have smaller or larger windows and lenses and filters into what we humans do and why, big picture views with smaller or larger azimuths and ranges, all tending, to my nerveless view at least, toward one single pole, one sigularity, which is STUPID! writ in florid cursive, unable to control our passions, rewarded for our idiocies that are locally beneficial to a few, a very few usually, and mortal to the rest taken as an integral of all the points on the spread. Who will be the last GI to die in Notagainistan? And what follows that? “U.S., Afghanistan At Odds Over Weapons Wish List.” http://www.npr.org/2013/02/06/171194064/u-s-afghanistan-at-odds-over-weapons-wish-list. Hmmmmm- which weapons have the highest “CQ” (corruption quotient)? F-16s? 155mm cannons? Can’t help but wonder what the little guys in green and berets are thinking in the cover shot…
What would I do? The choices are self-limiting by the processes that bring the Undersecretary into position, with thousand-dollar pen in hand, to sign off on ideas and commitments written in white ink by others who are interested, in the sense of self-interest, with a pastiche of Patriotism and a flappery of flags, in being the little Richelieus who can bow away from the throne with their imprimaturs, heh heh heh heh…
Old wooden ships of war had rudders, but were mostly steered by the selection and trim of a whole shipload of different sails, from the spanker to the fore-topmast-skysail-studdingsail to the flying jib and jib of jibs. The rudder could kind of generally direct things, but this huge crew with its hierarchies of officers and Marines to maintain order and its whole dependency on “the land” to provide iron balls and gunpowder, salt beef and tallow, sailcloth and spongers and swabs and marlinspikes and all the rest, was what moved the cannons from one place of violence against other humans to another. Progress. Procurement and logistics, all nudged by shits like McNamara and Rumsfeld and Petraeus and the People of the Project for a New American Deadend and all the others who add a bit of vectored energy to the mix. All part of a complexity that’s beyond “management,” since it’s a multiple-body-collision reality compounded by the character of the table surface, the balls, the cues, the spin applied, the friction coefficients of all the surfaces, the motions of the impinging air molecules, the initial conditions and the constraints of the GAME, that requires all thought to be torqued tightly through whatever the current Received Wisdom and “serious thinking” is, in a seductive diction of Parenthesized Acronymized Nomenklatur Tribalism (PANT) which in turn are the product of an infinity of person-moments given structure and meaning by whatever the belief structures and opportunities for gain, pleasure, revenge, dominance happen to be at the moment. It’s all part of the Occupation that really counts: the human occupation of the planet, and why is the notion of the Badness of the aliens in “Independence Day” so noxious to us (mimesis? projection?), since hey, that is exactly where we are headed? there are Netizens who are all on about how we use up Planet Earth, then go on to mine the asteroids and colonize and eat up the terraformable planets and moons of our local space, and then HO! for the possible lightspeed=plus drive and WHOOP and WAHOO! we’ll be on our way! to what is the fucking endpoint again? Guns Are Fun! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAXVgKcRHhQ (Note the proud momma, capturing the moment on imperishable silicon… “All right! You DID iiittt!”) “Wise” is sparse and shrinking; “Stupid” is wide and deep and heavy and self-generating.
Nice thought experiment though.
@JTMcPhee
And, randomly, lest we forget:
http://jontaplin.com/2008/03/13/iraq-five-years-later/
Victory!
(Cue the Wagner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz3Cc7wlfkI — imagine the Krupps’ engineers imagining those 305 and 405mm cannon, oh the technical challenges of making them sufficiently portable across all those landscapes! and the marketing guys imagining all those sales to Japan and Russia and stuff, 50% to Germany, 50% to everywhere else… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp)
How come, with Google (0+ / 0-)
and all, people still just revert to their “religions” when there’s the possibility of maybe some kind of epiphany that might lead to, I don’t know, survival of the species? Purely a rhetorical question, of course. We all have those damn limbic systems as our principal source of initiation and principal obstacle to cognition.
All I got is two notions:
We are perforce, willy-nilly, beyond peradventure, all in this together — cats with our tails tied together by some naughty G_D and hung over a clothesline, cats who could figure out how to cooperate and chew ourselves free, if we weren’t so busy clawing and biting each other…
And
There is more than enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, if only we could keep the tiny Few from cramming all the chops and broccoli and chocolate chips into their infinitely elastic cheeks and bellies, and if only we were smart enough to not be then suckered by those same Few into glaring suspiciously at each other and then all reaching for the crumbs at once, and fighting over them.
Well obviously I asked because I respect your opinion. And you gave it. “Guns are fun”. I’m afraid that’s just about right. Not many other than you have the moxie to distill such things so. Whenever the lab results come back terminal I’ll want some No B.S. SOB like you to deliver the news. Fortunately nobody here takes the Body Politic unseriously, so it’s just well that we be real: the Department of Defense should be disestablished, and the Pentagon razed. Done. Now, how is it that I can discern, through your acerbity, a patriotic insistence upon better forms of governance and better structures for civil defense? You’re a softie, JTM. Admit it. You’re among friends. Why hell, I myself attack the NEA and even the old schooling structure from time to time, so that goes to show that I want Americans ignorant just as you want them dead.
But seriously, (a) thank you for that mindbending response; (b) neither you nor I ever should vie for Undersecretary for Procurement; and (c) it occurs to me that there’s a little-known book I reckon you’d enjoy, one I commend for no personal purpose: Daniel Calhoun’s “Intelligence of a People”. Certainly on Amazon it’s greatly undervalued. You remind me not of its irascible author but of his bloody brilliant book.
Just saw your antireligoius post, JTM. I may be an old chaplain but I won’t call the MPs. You can’t say anything about religious constructs that’ll offend me. I confess Three, not a manufactured fourth.
…and con-fess, in plaintive praise, bestest for the mustest, and about as good as we can do right now unless you traffic in pleasantly plentiful untruths! Well done. Masterful mindbending. Normally we turn our thoughts to happier endeavors, frequently in consideration of the young, but hell, if you power maniacs want to go for it then what the hell. I mean, absolutely, What The Hell. Period. No partisan claim. Total blanket. As in, Deal. Most of us won’t like it, but are too chicken to resist, as I personally believe most persons would do, depending horribly upon who constructs the Scales. n
At that point it can go one way or the other, and whichever way it swings surely will augur Truth, Happyness, and adolescent measurings and joinings that nobody thought quite legal. Nobody any longer has the balls. I’m so sorry, but on the other hand only a whore could afford not to