Debt Rattle December 4 2016
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Wyland Stanley “J.A. Herzog Pontiac, 17th & Valencia Sts., San Francisco.” 1936 • Trump’s Unhappy Fate: A Financial Crisis Far Worse Than The Last (Ri
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle December 4 2016]New President = Same Shit,,,Different Day.
Now that the “election” is over, all eyes are back on the Fed.
Until debt “Does” matter again, the charade marches on.Steve Keen’s “interview” with Michael Hudson sure covers a lot of ground. I found this aside of interest:
“..it was on Erasmus Peshine Smith, the leading American economist of the 19th century who developed the energy theory of GDP. He thought product was ultimately reducible to energy.
Reminds me of a more recent American, ecologist Howard T. Odum, who had the same idea. He wrote several books, including “The Energy Basis of Man and Nature” and “Environment, Power and Society”. His approach also included dynamical systems theory, rather like Jay Forrester, (recently passed) and who was a guiding light in the “Limits to Growth” study. HERE are some more recent thoughts for the curious.
Bless you, TAE, for putting yourselves at the cusp of emerging events. Predicting the past offers far greater accuracy than predicting the future. How can we forget Dennis and Donella Meadows and their work with the Club of Rome in the 1970’s? At that time computers took more space than my house. I remember my Fortran computing class with frustrating trays of punch cards, yet these people performed advanced calculations, modeling the effects of recursive patterns of events on future outcomes. We owe them a great debt of gratitude. TAE is correct in predicting catastrophe of epic proportions. I dedicate my efforts to working with all of you to facilitate our mutual survival.
They keep repeating the breathless trope about computer experts finding “hacking” (Russian, ‘natch), the elections in Michigan and Wisconsin. One problem: Michigan is a paper-voting state. So…how exactly did they determine MI is “hacked” when the process was on paper? Why? How? What? Nevermind, we’re all reality-optional today. Then when Stein says on national TV that they had no evidence whatsoever except her ‘feels’, trope goes nowhere. Such is the state of the news.
For those overseas wondering about our nonsensical Electoral College, history lesson: The U.S. is supposed to be a union of sovereign nations, bound together slightly stronger than a Confederacy, but where the Union level should only need to do a few things, like National Defense. Being 13 totally different nations of different sizes, outlooks, histories, desires, there was a serious problem with voting for the national representatives: it was thought inevitable that large states like Virginia, or possibly an alliance of states, like Pennsylvania and New York, would simply combine to exclusive power, and dominate and run roughshod over the smaller or outsider states. Then the Union would fail, as some states would be unrepresented and leave. Worse, it would be the one thing the Founders feared most: Democracy. That is, the 51% would run over the rights and property of the 49%
As you can see if you try for yourself, there isn’t really any good solution to this problem. Large states will have a disproportionate power, and if they didn’t you’d have a tyranny of a small states controlling the people in a large state. So what did they do? What the whole system is and always was: they hammered out a tolerable compromise. Instead of voting per man or per state, they made the Electoral College which roughly reflected the number of Senators + Representatives in Congress. That way even the smallest states had 3. Since the present U.S. population should have like 100 Congressmen per state, there’s a lot of arcana here, but the idea is the same even if it’s mostly overrun by the far larger number of Electors than was originally envisioned.
Even so, the original plan works somewhat like intended, even if watered down: the smaller (today less populous) states in Flyoverland, are disproportionally represented in terms of their Presidential voting power. If there were a direct popular vote, no one would visit 39 of the states nor represent them in policy, as they basically already don’t. As we very nearly saw, those states would then rebel and secede against a system that did not represent them. The Union would fall in a bloody civil war as “Democracy” would indeed try to steal the world of the 49% to favor the 51%, more or less as it has does today, only worse. Although not settled, the present election and perception of a turn at the wheelhouse has forestalled that rebellion and perhaps will preserve the Union yet.
Anyway, far from being an arcane, incomprehensible relic of the 18th century, we find it showing forethought and the intended function. Nevertheless we revisit the original compromise: is it fair to override the popular will? And if we don’t, how can we prevent a populous minority from enslaving their countrymen? And we try our best to show goodwill.
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