Ray Wylie Hubbard “Screw You, We’re From Texas”
History is Bunk
In case it’s necessary to remind people, our economy plunged due to the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also the large deficits of the last five years.
Prior to collapse of the bubble, the budget deficits were quite modest. In 2007 the deficit was just 1.7 percent of GDP, a level that can be sustained indefinitely. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficits would remain small for the near future, with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 projected to push the budget into surplus.
“Did Social Security and Medicare Crash the Economy?,” Dean Baker
One of my favorite bands, The Gang of Four, has a song (“History is Bunk“) based on Henry Ford’s famous contention that “History is bunk” (or myth or several other things Mr. Ford said). The thing is, to a capitalist, or to capitalism, anything that cannot be used for generating profit is bunk. That’s what Ford meant– and what he felt, no doubt, at a very visceral level– and even after 100 years of more history piling up, modern capitalism is no different.
Capital seeks profit, not knowledge or insight. This is one of the many ways that critical thinking is, by definition, anti-capitalist: analytic thinking is founded on the idea that history, even for its own sake, isn’t bunk. Yet American culture has a remarkably poor memory and the commercial media, in its rush to profit, seems all too ready to declare history bunk again and again and to forget even the most basic, very recent, historical facts.
As Baker emphasizes, we cannot forget this fact: it was not the elderly and the poor who collapsed the economy and it should not be the elderly and the poor who pay for the repairs. So far, the people who caused the collapse have escaped all of the possible repercussions, from criminal charges to fines. That history really is bunk. Any budget fix that touches Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security will turn more history into more bunk.
In other words, to choose an adviser is nevertheless to commit oneself by that choice. If you are a Christian, you will say, consult a priest; but there are collaborationists, priests who are resisters and priests who wait for the tide to turn: which will you choose? Had this young man chosen a priest of the resistance, or one of the collaboration, he would have decided beforehand the kind of advice he was to receive. Similarly, in coming to me, he knew what advice I should give him, and I had but one reply to make. You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world.
“Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Jean Paul Sartre
Established in May by Governor Rick Scott, a Republican who has said he wants to run Florida’s education system more like a business, the task force includes legislators, businesspeople and educators appointed by various parties. It finalized its recommendations earlier this month. The governor is now reviewing the report, which divides reform into three different but interlinked areas: accountability, funding and governance.
Recommendations for accountability include a call for more metrics to determine university success and performance, while those for governance include allowing the state university system’s Board of Governors more control over funding (currently the state legislature holds much of that control). Funding recommendations call for non-uniform tuition among the state’s 12 universities and a further look into differential tuition among degree programs.
“Pricing Out the Humanities” Colleen Flaherty
It may seem a bit of a stretch, but this morning when I was reading about this program at the University of Florida, it was Sartre that came to mind. In the mid-twentieth century the great enemy of freedom was a kind of mindless submission to authority, religious or otherwise. Among other things, in “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre hoped to show that individual choice was nonetheless inescapable.
There are still people who submit to authority mindlessly, of course, but in our time the object of worship and submission is more likely to be the market than the cross, which is, as with all gods, said to be the last authority on what it means to be human. As Sartre knew, if you ask a priest, you have to expect a Catholic answer; if you ask a Republican, you have to expect a market answer. That doesn’t make our choice inevitable.
Lake Street Dive “I Want You Back”