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Punk Economics: Lesson 1 - YouTube
I don't agree with David McWilliams on all things, but this time I must say he has hit it out of the park.
Punk Economics: Lesson 1 - YouTube
I don't agree with David McWilliams on all things, but this time I must say he has hit it out of the park.
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense?" -- Patrick Henry, June 9th, 1788
_ His reference to Marx is completely wrong,my guess is that he has not read Karl Marx. The remainder of the sketch is very good but is not totally original, it is up on Youtube at least a year but put in a global context. Great to see it improved on and brought to an Irish audience.
A lot of writers mix up Karl Mark's writings with Soviet Communism. They are very different.
Infact most modern Corporate Capitalist Dictatorships with business controled politicians, meaningless elections between parties all in the pockets of big business are in fact tending closer to the defunct Soviet style communist dictatorship each year.
I bought some of McWilliam's books & recommend them. He mixes ideas from alternative media with ideas of his own and sometimes cookes up some very good stuff and then manages to get it printed in the corporate/bankster owned/controled mainstreem media along side the regular false propagenda of others.
Last edited by Vote_No_on_Everything; 31st January 2012 at 02:25 AM.
Where there is brass there is poverty near by. We are getting nearer to a dictatorship where your purpose is to slave,live in debt, ratify agreements and consume rubbish.
entertainment value yes,
final conclusions that "Something must be done to get an equitable arrangement for everybody" yeah sure why not, nothing new there.
black and white generalisations and drawing questionable links along the way as the soundtrack makes it look like it all hangs together, no.
Drawing horns on the baddies, having Jesus as the debt forgiver, and the Evil German Eagle along the way turn me off massively. This is seriously dumbing it down. But who will buy his books or attend his evening classes if ti doesn't appear accessible somehow? He is more and more a televangelist.
If you have followed his website, and other people over the last few years, he was once a rebel with foresight, now to keep up the momentum he is all about synthesising other people's thoughts that he knows will feed back well to the general population. What this video is all about is striking a chord with people who have an initial set of data, and making it seem like he has all the answers by giving them their superficial understanding back to them in story format. Basically, he believes his own hype. He is no longer an economist (who was spot on about the housing bubble) he is an evangelist. Beware the evangelists who "simplify" the truth.
Sure, we know that there is too much debt out there. You think the politicians don't know that? What is all the politicking in Europe about? Its about getting to a stage where people agree to taking the pain.
The boston example cannot be compared with the EU example, as Boston is actually part of the US. What McW seems to advocate is a united states of Europe.
A certain head of one of the major partners in our Irish economic situation once said to me on the topic of debt resolution and Ireland's situation "Of course there has to be debt forgiveness, but how can we keep this information from the markets?". The approach of the politicians is that they are scared of the markets (as they don't properly understand them) and want to get things resolved in a political way where they have control over the process. That's what it boils down to. They want a political solution. The alternative is the punkonomics-occupywhateverstreet-bankersofbrusselshearmyroar rebels who want to show the establishment a thing or two.
There is no Protestantisation of Europe happening. Tell that to the rabidly secular French. Anyhow. People who pour scorn on Germans should ask themselves what it is that the Germans (except the German lenders) have been doing right all along? And why it is that we are in this mess?
Ireland is a globalised economy providing services. Germans make things that will be forever associated with Germany. They can't reinveint themselves every ten years. Something about the Catholic forgiveness model that McW touts as the right one doesn't gel with the fact that the germans are rich because they are diligent and stick to the plan. Frankly, if this is the choice, I'll be a German.
Spain is screwed because they have never shared wealth equitably or rewarded hard work. It is the culture there to shaft young school leavers and force them to work for free for a long time. Same in Italy. They are NOT equitable societies. Ireland's issues are different we are in the same lot as Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy because of excessive emphasis on easy money resulting from lending, lending done by Irish banks to Irish consumers as overseen by the Irish government. Sure, German banks lent to the profligate Irish, and they shoudl get a hit. But would we hate the Americans if they lent to us? Their banks would if they could have done as easily. No problem. It's not a German thing. The Brits have lent us stacks of cash and if they were in the Euro, you can be damn sure Barclays would be all over us like a rash. As it was, a few British banks got stung, but not as many as there could be.
Yes, the lack of currency risk meant that German and rench banks lent to Irish banks. But the euro was not the problem. It was the lac of education on the part of government and bankers. Investment bankers generally recruit people based on personal and cultural fit to the team. They can tell if you will cause trouble or not (i.e. be excessively independent). This is a bad thing where big money is concerned. The culture of consensus is what has weakenend the DNA of the top banks, causing hubris and corruption.
A nation that has continuously changed its identity in a globalised world is Singapore. Because they don't has an internal market big enough to create a lot of products to sell the world over, they adapt constantly. But slowly, surely, they are buildign products and services for the long term. For example, their airline is the world's number two, their education and health providers are regional leaders (as an export) and they are climbing up the ranks ever so slowly and surely in areas like port management, oil rig creation (3/4 of the world's oil rigs are made in Singapore), and now.. casinos (more revenue generated from two resorts in Singapore in two years of operation than all Las Vegas). But, and this is important, they do not reset the clock every few years, they reset their direction.
DMcW may be a political influencer due to the accessibility and continuous refinement of his message based on populist feedback, and that is why it is fair to discuss his publications on p.ie etc, but the video there clearly shows that he now focuses on the medium, not the message. He was once a voice crying in the wilderness with a simple true message, when it would have been better if her were crying in the Dail or corporate boardrooms. But that time is now past, he has to move on, and get stuck in to the difficult bits, like solutions. Enough pied piping.
The reason that we are not defaulting and resetting is due to the fact that our politicians believe that we should get a pan-European solution with a view to keeping the European project together. They want the Euopean family to stay unified. McW is more for a bunch of Switzerlands. Fair enough. My view is that Europe sticking together however dysfunctional is better than Europe straying apart. We have super-blocs in the world now, China, India and then next stage of Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia. They are the economic game to watch, and they will divide and conquer unless we stay united.
We are not facing ruin because of austerity, but because we didn't build infrastructure when we had the money, we didn't save for a rainy day and we didn't learn skills and adaptability to deal with uncertainty. I feel that people who emigrate because there are no construction jobs in Ireland are simply thumbing their nose to the education that they had access to and decided was too much like hard work. The Germans for their part embody the old fable of the ants and the grasshopper. The grasshopper farted around gaily til winter came laughing at the ants, who saved his ass in winter. They bailed him out, basically. The story goes that they fed him in the ant hill until spring came. The capitalist reality would be that they would feast on his carcass, the german version woudl be that after some reeducation the grasshopper put on his overalls, showed them that he could chip in and work his way out, and then got a pat on the back in February along with a meal package for good luck even though he hadn't worked off the entire bill and then, more than likely once out of the "austerity straitjacket" proceeded to gaily fart about in good catholic fashion, waiting for confession and absolution in October.
How the fable makes sense... until it is applied to us.
@NiceView - it'll be a while before I fully digest your post, but I think it's a really good contribution to the debate.
Precisely!Originally Posted by NiceView
This is the thing that I find most truly depressing: in my heart of hearts I'm sometimes forced to admit to myself that, several years into this car crash, I've seen and heard little to suggest to me that, given half a chance, Ireland wouldn't behave in exactly the same way again.
I'm the opposite. Usually give McWilliams tonnes of kudos for his bubble picking from 2000 on in the face of the whole state telling him he was wrong. It bugs me that people stilll don't give him enough credit for this.
Here though, I have three massive, massive issues.
First, it is stupendously condescending to package it as somehow "punk" or radical or subversive to think we shouldn't repay the bank debt. FFS, who thinks we should? Nobody. So I don't like being spoken to as though there's an evil pro-repayment cabal somewhere (Enda and Noonan? Come on) gagging to take money from our pensioners and sick kids and hand it to Goldman Sachs, and it's up to the little people to "punk" the repayment. Total nonsense.
Second, he links austerity with our debt. But the Troika deal which mandates austerity - ***clears throat, de-phlegms, stern voice*** - doesn't even mention our debt! Not a peep about it! The bank debt has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Troika deal (at least, in the short and medium term). Until our deficit is zero his argument on this point is invalid. And by the time it becomes valid, we'll be 5 years down the road which is a different aeon in this process.
Third, he's blaming austerity for making things worse. We should consider the counter-factual on that: if there is no austerity it means extra money sloshes around the economy, meaning I continue to pay €90 for a check-up at the dentist, pay 20% more for a car than the UK, still fund through my taxes the 3rd highest minimum wage in Europe, gobble Big Macs that are 20% more expensive than Paris (Big Mac Index gives economists more food for thought . . . - Irish, Business - Independent.ie) and generally continue to operate in a country being suffocated by high rents, high prices, astronomical professional fees and grocery prices in line with some of the this richest countries in the world. The truth is, non-austerity will suck the life out of us more surely than austerity. A halt to austerity means a return to Ireland 2006. No fkn thank you.
Event better, he was forecasting imminent doom in 1999 - complete collapse was only 18 months away then.
There is no Keyser Soze
Marx is wrong. Marxism ends up as totalitarianism at the end of the day.
"The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.” -Golda Meir
It shows it was uploaded yesterday. Brilliant video btw.
The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.
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