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Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life.

the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States.

From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much.

From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite.

Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system.

A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both.

There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened.

The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt.

Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.

What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.

The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks

One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government

The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods.

Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.

The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.

The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated.

The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.

This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes.

The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.

China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both.

In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy.

In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more.

In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased.

In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance.

In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists

It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries.

In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation

Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy.

Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China.

Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites.

This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own.

The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis.

The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.

The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’

In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all. However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.

The human world we build is established in mind and heart and spirit.  It will come down to what we hold sacred. Yes those words spirit and sacred must be included however you choose to define it.

it makes sense that people would keep an eye on them just in case they come up with something worthwhile again.

could go from being in the woods one day to being front and center the next

Their freedom makes it more likely that they will generate some good practices if for no other reason than that they will generate more practices total.

4.  In the US this pattern has recently been hidden by health care, which is one aspect of the welfare state that was never completed in the statist era (although it was completed in all other developed countries.)

5.  During the megatrends, there are periods of consolidation, which are falsely viewed as countertrends.  They are not countertrends.  The trend is still intact.  In the US the 1920s and 1950s were falsely viewed as countertrends.  Don’t be fooled, we are only 1/3 of the way through the neoliberalism megatrend.

Set up a rough-and-ready ideological Turing Test.  I'll take it first.  Then invite Krugman to make me eat my words.

This is not a critique of market economics; it is simply a description of them. If we want a world with cheap (if uncomfortable) air travel and amazing smartphones, then bless the market. (Although it doesn’t hurt to remember that the smartphone, like the Internet that it surfs, depends in ways direct and indirect on government seeding.) If we want a world with productions of “Così Fan Tutte” and radiation treatments for clerical workers who get breast cancer, then submitting ourselves solely to the market is not the way to get them.

In these debates, it is the mixed-up liberal who is the actual pragmatist, seeing what works, while the free marketers are the slaves of a beautifully utopian line of thought.

Lots of things are unprofitable if you narrowly consider outlays and income—including most of our roadways. To say that the post office runs at a loss is to say that it subsidizes a system of conveyance and communication. This in turn makes possible trillions of dollars’ worth of enterprise. (The magazine business, for instance.) Nobody asks whether the Interstate Highway System is profitable, but if you did you’d have to point to its vast maintenance costs, which are in the billions, and mostly paid for by state and federal taxes. At the same time, of course, the system contributes substantially to national productivity. The right unit of consideration isn’t the road; it’s everyone who uses it, and how we benefit from its existence—its “externalities.” The same goes for public-transportation systems that alleviate the residential pressures on the big city, reduce traffic congestion, bring in employees, and enable a substantial amount of “value creation”—but none of that will ever show up on the balance sheets. Running at a loss represents the subvention of public goods.

The United States, with its array of advanced anti-submarine warfare assets and hydrographic research vessels deployed throughout the region, gives Beijing the unwelcome impression that Uncle Sam can’t stop peering into its nuclear nursery.

This concern helps explain China's growing intolerance to foreign military activities in the South China Sea. Tellingly, some of the most nerve-wracking standoffs involving US and Chinese forces have unfolded in close proximity to Hainan.

Similarly, the USNS Impeccable incident, during which a US hydrographic vessel was dangerously harassed by five Chinese ships, took place approximately seventy miles to the south of Hainan. During the confrontation, Chinese sailors reportedly attempted to unhook the Impeccable’s towed acoustic array sonars.

Thus in the course of a discussion with a former Chinese official, I was told that “even though territorial issues are of importance, our major concern is the sanctity of our future sea-based deterrent.”

He then went on to describe, with a flicker of amusement, how fishermen off the coast of Hainan regularly snag US sonars in their nets, and are encouraged to sell them back to the local authorities in exchange for financial compensation.

Needless to say, this location is hardly ideal.

Absolute control over the remote Spratly islands, in addition to the more proximate Paracels, would greatly facilitate this concentric defensive configuration.

Until not long ago, China’s strategic submarine force wasn’t really taken seriously.

China could soon equip its new class of Jin submarines with the JL-2 ballistic missile, which has a range of approximately 4 600 miles. This would enable Beijing, the report adds, to establish a “near-continuous at-sea strategic deterrent”.

 it’s not clear why protecting utility shareholders ought to outrank other social goals. EEI’s recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt.

As solar customers pay less to the utility, they contribute less to the maintenance of the electric grid and other utility “fixed” assets. The utility’s fixed costs (as opposed to the variable costs of fuel and electricity) must be recovered from the other ratepayers.

In some ways, EEI’s discussion reflects utilities’ instinctive hostility toward distributed energy. It makes a great deal of the costs of incorporating rooftop solar PV into the system, but says little about the benefits.

(The study was commissioned by the Vote Solar Initiative.) The costs are those described above — all utility customers pay for credits to solar customers and for the metering and billing necessary to integrate them in the grid.

But as utilities get power from solar, they don’t have to get it elsewhere. There are “avoided costs,” which benefit all ratepayers, not just the solar few. Here are the benefits Crossborder considered (and the California PUC has considered in rate cases): • Avoided energy costs • Avoided capacity costs for generation • Reduced costs for ancillary services • Lower line losses on the transmission and distribution system (T&D) • Reduced investments in T&D facilities • Lower costs for the utility’s purchase of other renewable generation

Now, obviously this doesn’t mean distributed solar always and everywhere lowers costs for non-solar utility customers. But it does suggest that utilities shouldn’t assume the inverse either.

Midwest Energy News (which you should be reading) did a great piece on this subject recently. I thought this bit captured it well: “This is exactly the same as when a private company, an electric utility, for example, is approved by its regulator to build a conventional power plant ‘in the public interest’,” says [renewable energy analyst Paul] Gipe. The costs and benefits are studied, and if regulators think the plant is in the public’s interest, they will approve it even if it results in new costs for customers.

First, EEI wants all power bills to include a flat charge for fixed costs, which would apply to all grid-connected customers.

Second, they want solar customers charged for the services the grid provides them: “off-peak service, back-up interruptible service, and the pathway to sell [distributed energy resources] to the utility or other energy supply providers.”

And third, it wants net-metering programs revised to pay solar customers only the going market rate, not some fancy subsidized rate.

the utilities cannot be locked into a death spiral this far in advance. It’s not healthy for them to be in a pitched battle with their customers and the planet. It’s politically untenable.

On energy efficiency, which poses many of the same threats to utilities, the conflict has been somewhat papered over by “decoupling,” whereby a utility’s profits are disassociated from its sales of energy.

But decoupling has always struck me as a classic kludge. It amounts to forcing utilities to slowly dig their own graves, strand their own assets.

Over at NDN, Michael Moynihan did a great report called “Electricity 2.0: Unlocking the Power of the Open Energy Network.” It wrestles with exactly these issues in an incisive and comprehensive way.

At the Center for American Progress, Bracken Hendricks and Adam James recently put out a report called “The Networked Energy Web” that addresses many of the same questions.

The Rocky Mountain Institute has a program called eLab devoted to creating a modern electricity system. Check out this video they made and see if it doesn’t sound familiar!

I first heard the “s”-word from by my sixth grade history teacher—this was in the early days of Yeltsin. She said socialism is when you have to wait in line for hours just for a Happy Meal.

Read the fine print: it’s 5% of wages, income from “investments” is excluded. Tax the poor wage-slave, spare the wealthy rentier. Americans still can’t see the play even with Buffett rubbing his secretary’s tax return in our faces.

And it’s a servitude from which we can never escape. Forget bankruptcy. Default on a student loan and the government will garnish your wages until they get it all back, plus interest. They can even go after your social security money, off limits for all other debts.

Mike Konczal sees this as just another sign of a “submerged state”—the unholy fertilizer that keeps the American libertarian discourse in full bloom. None of the “welfare,” but all of the “state.”

“After the Great Society program in the 1960s,” says Leo Panitch, “left-wing Democrats, rather than calling for more public housing to rebuild America’s cities instead called for the banks to lend money to poor black communities…one of the effects of winning those demands was a channeling of those communities more deeply into the structures of finance, the most dynamic sector of neoliberal capitalism.”

While a liberal looks upon the New Deal and Great Society generation as a pantheon of benevolent patriarchs, I see a bunch of technocrats who slapped together a crude simulacrum of social democracy and called it “free-enterprise.”

Unlike the nations of Western Europe, American workers failed to get a good deal of the social democratic compact written into law, which means it was all the easier to dismantle over here.

There are the wars, of course—now pretty much the only way for a good many of us to get a debt-free education.

Then there’s the ever-popular Drug War, always trolling for some fresh blood. The Millennials are, after all, the least white generation in U.S. history, making us perfect fodder for the country’s ongoing race war.

As The Wire’s David Simon has pointed out, it was Clinton—the first Boomer president—that passed some of the most draconian “anti-crime” laws. Even business in the for-profit juvenile prisons sector is a-boomin’. Same goes for our expanding network of privatized immigration detention centers—a direct beneficiary of the Tea Party campaign for a brutal crackdown on “illegals.”

Much of the Patriot Act itself was comprised of legislation creeping around the halls of powers well before 9/11, much of it written with the burgeoning “anti-globalization” movement

The fact is that being arrested is pretty much a rite of passage today—or the end-of-the-line for your hopes and dreams if you happen to be a darker shade of pale.

Which is why I love the Tea Party so much. They don’t dick around about any of this. It’s a full-scale generational war they’re after.

The Ryan Budget—and the GOP campaign around it—divides the American populace into “those who are 55 or older now, and those who are younger.” Meaning Boomers will receive Medicare and Social Security checks unchanged, whereas Millennials get the axe—despite the fact that many of us have been paying into these programs for the past 15 years. Let the record show that it was they who fired the first shot.

All of the hippies who skulked off into the world of children’s programming to ride out the counterrevolution have cursed us with both our potential salvation (respect for the commons) and our ultimate weakness (pacifist nonsense).

But mostly our decency stems from the fact that we’ve all been muzzled and defanged by student debt, slave wages and mass unemployment. Unlike our parents, we’ll never even get the chance to gobble up our own children and leave them with the tab.

Which is why, psychologically, this Great Depression of ours can never hurt us like it hurts them. I see it all the time: the unemployed Boomer thinks himself a loser. He’s spent his life watching his peers accumulate wealth and power. Now he feels like the rug has been pulled from under him. Something has gone terribly wrong. When he files for food-stamps, he feels exactly what the Ruling Class wants him to feel: shame and personal failing.

Whereas a Millennial shrugs and swipes the SNAP card at the farmer’s market for a quart of fresh cider and a pomegranate muffin. Why should she feel guilty?

Way back in 1892, Friedrich Engels knew that success was the real curse of the USA. And that a powerful, anti-capitalist left could never take off in this country until the game stopped paying out: “Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America.” Sound familiar? That’s what Occupy is for most of us—a guttural roar that capitalism will not do.

Conservative apostate David Frum recently characterized the contemporary GOP’s platform as “a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boomer generation.” Which is pretty much the Democrats’ platform too. They just have better table manners.

Boomers know what they’ve wrought. Climate change? Don’t believe the polls. They know it’s happening. Yeah, if you confront one of them, he might put up a denialist front for a couple of minutes. But keep pelting him and it all crumbles, giving way to “well, it’s too late.” Translated: “I’ll be on, or near, my deathbed when the shit really hits the fan. You, youngster, will be hauling your family across the country George Romero style, scavenging for orphans to sell off as catamites to the warlord chieftains.”

Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has spent the past few years chronicling this ghastly mutation step-by-step—unraveling the seemingly incongruous strands and the hideous parentage of Boomer ideology. Their embrace of American libertarianism—with all of its absurdities, vulgarities and utopianism—was the final cry for help.