“The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”-Gramsci The etymology of the word “morbid” is the Latin word morbidus meaning disease. Let us consider the particular disease that grips America right now. Students of Germany in the early part of the Great [...]
The clearest sign of a society’s priorities is where it chooses to spend its resources. Jeremy Grantham, the super-prescient Boston investor had a few things to say about this recently and I thought it worthwhile to quote him at length. My previous argument in the Economist debate was that the 3% of GDP that was [...]
I’m going to show you three charts that are part of a much larger presentation prepared by the Defense Business Board, an advisory council to the Secretary of Defense that was created in 2001. It is not classified and was sent to me by one of our readers who is as concerned as I am [...]
I have been accused of aggregating data when it comes to my economic analysis of America’s crisis. I plead guilty. If you were to look at the chart above of personal consumption, you would certainly think we were still in a deep recession, if not the second great depression. And yet over the weekend in [...]
The wonderful John Judis writes a “counter-history of the Obama Presidency” in the New Republic. He argues that Obama’s fear of populist rhetoric, not his political program, is the problem. In the United States, politics pivots around the allegiance of the middle class, even as its identity has changed from yeoman farmers and mechanics to [...]
I’ve been trying to understand the Republican Party long-term electoral strategy. Basically they are hitching their wagon to pissed off, old, white people. Now that may work in November of 2010, but how could that be a long-term winner? Start with the Fox News audience. In a survey released by analyst Steve Sternberg, Fox News [...]
As regular readers know, it is the continuing obsession of this writer that we are in a really strange period that comes once a century (if that) where the old compass is broken, but new tools for navigating the choppy waters are unfamiliar to the captains of government or industry. Anyone who felt that the [...]
The Republican Candidate for the Connecticut Senate presents her qualifications for office. Abe Lincoln is rolling over in his grave.
I’ve been saying for a while that predictions of a Republican Majority takeover in November are misguided. I think the next 45 days will tell the tale. First off, even now Democrats continue to lead in the generic ballot. But I think the next month and a half is going to bring a change of [...]
The Washington Post’s new series Top Secret America is a frightening look into the post 9/11 cancerous growth of the spy bureaucracy in our country. The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how [...]