Saturday, November 15, 2008

Not So Good News

In another parallel from the Great Depression comes this article in the Toronto Star on the International Conference on the Capitalist Crisis that occurerd in 1933 after the election of FDR. The conference was a failure as America wrapped itself in the cloak of isolationism and protectionism.

Experts say the efforts in London in 1933 collapsed in part on the spasms of isms – the tangled web of conceits driving the dying days of British imperialism, post-crash American capitalism, Stalin's iron-fisted communism and, in Germany, the newly installed fascism of Adolf Hitler. That, and a very intense hangover from the Great War. "The good news for today is that what the world faced then was so much worse. In terms of debt defaults, it was about three times the size of the crisis today, and almost all of it stemming from the bills owed from the First World War," said Albrecht Ritschl, a London School of Economics historian.

Good news? Ah excuse me did we miss the trillions of debt incurred in the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Debt that caused this crisis just as it created the post WWI crisis.
And we still the world political economy divided up amongst various styles of state capitalist regimes, including the US Military Industrial Complex.

Yes the parallels are striking, and all those right wing neo-cons and stock market pundits in the media keep saying they didn't see this coming. Because of course they had their rose coloured ideological blinders on.


SEE:
FDR and the origins of State Capitalism
Huh?
Last One Out Turn Off The Lights
Whiners and Losers
Super Bubble Burst
October Surprise Was The Market Crash
No Austrians In Foxholes
Pension Rip Off
CRASH
The Return Of Hawley—Smoot
Canadian Banks and The Great Depression
U.S. Economy Entering Twilight Zone
Neo-Liberal State Capitalism In Asia
State Capitalism in the USSR
China: The Truimph of State Capitalism
US vs China for Global Hegemony


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1 comment:

Nick Manley said...

And there is still more debt to come in a fundamentally corporatist context...

You should email D.C. with your idea of a worker's buyout ( :

As a Progressive minded individualist anarchist, it's one of my pet peeves that people equate FDRish bailouts with revolutionary change or "socialist" radicalism.