Having gone as record with the analogy that economics is to finance what gardening is to landscape design, I am now confident in going one step further. Finance is the little demon of the macroeconomy, hopping around and messing everything up.
Wait a second – Obama wins Iowa and South Carolina, and loses New Hampshire (nestled deep in New England) and Nevada (the land of liberal vice)?
You don’t need a Master’s degree in United States history to know the conventional wisdom that the first two of these states , and South Carolina especially, have a checkered past (to put it kindly) on racial issues. Why are they voting for America’s first black president?
Could it be us (the liberals) that harbor some subconscious incapability to vote for the black guy? Have we been picking on a straw man “red state racist” all the while, whilst secretly indulging our own sense of cappuccino-sipping, Foucault-loving, prejudice?
If this is true, it casts a sudden and unprecedented doubt on the good-intentions of a generation of leftist initiatives, from affirmative action (which I myself support) to any range of holier-than-thou editorials, recruitment videos, and global initiatives. Have the Democrats been hiding in New England and the West Coast all these years, behind a facade of political correctness, only to conceal their more insidious inner convictions?
It’s possible; the more one looks at it, the more it makes sense.
(Of course, there is an entirely different possibility that Hillary Clinton won on her merits. There are a number of reasons to think this improbable.)
This is what it’s about:
One poignant reminder of South Carolina’s historic racial divide, the Confederate flag, was swaying in the cool breeze on Saturday only a few yards from where supporters waved placards for Mr. Obama, who would become the nation’s first black president.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the Fed’s move today to lower bank-to-bank interest rates by three quarters of a percentage point, coupled with congress’s move towards a substantial tax rebate package, translates into two things in Econ 101 speak: expansionary fiscal and expansionary monetary policy. The correct answer is a.), massive inflation on the horizon.
Looks like the capitalist system has finally found someone to blame for the financial roller coaster of the past week. Here is the New York Times profile of Public Enemy Number One, complete with references to the “average college” we went to, his apparent incapability to rise above the level of green belt in the karate circuit, and of course, the real cincher – “too middling to be considered a loser.” Because, obviously, this whole mess could not possibly have been caused by the Ivy League Type-A personalities who shelved a lifetime of learning for a six figure income in the Big Apple. That would be too Faustian.
I’d tell you what I think about it all this, but Orwell did it better:
“In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark- haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off.”
- 1984
I’m preparing for the 2008 International Model United Nations, and the more I learn about the country I will be representing – Nicaragua, about which I know nothing – the more I recall just how interwoven the world has become, well-intentioned contemporary grandstanding about the advent of ‘globalization’ notwithstanding.
Having majored in Economics, Middle Eastern History, and Math, I always thought myself hard-pressed to find a coherent synthesis between three topics that, at first (and second) glance have little in common. In reality, the most critical economic shock of the latter twentieth century occurred at the intersection of all three – the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks (caused by a war in Israel and a revolution in Iran respectively) transformed our understanding of Neoclassical (or, as they call it here at the London School of Economics, Neoliberal) economics and the importance of economic shocks in the form of oil and petrodollars.
This brings me back to Nicaragua, which I soon found out, was at itself connected with the Hezbollah guerilla movement and Iran by the Iran-Contra affair – the target of which, then-revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega, is now again in power after a 2006 election in which he promised unity and the peaceful consensus of a technocratic peace.