Originally Posted by Arkham '80

Of course, China can do no such thing. It's politically impossible; the outcome would be revolution and/or civil war, which could easily claim several hundred million lives.

And Chinese governments have ever objected to the loss of several hundred million lives?

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

And Chinese governments have ever objected to the loss of several hundred million lives?

Only when objecting suited their purposes. Otherwise, it was 'Oh, well. That's the breaks.'

Originally Posted by Mr. Reed

America is in Crisis, but now, it seems as if the Crisis is spreading globally. 2008 was truly an exceptional year, unlike any that I have experienced. I am doing a search for perspectives on 2008. Perhaps, it deserves its own thread.

Protectionist dominoes are beginning to tumble across the world


The riots have begun. Civil protest is breaking out in cities across Russia, China, and beyond.


By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 10:30AM GMT 22 Dec 2008

Greece has been in turmoil for 11 days. The mood seems to have turned "pre-insurrectionary" in parts of Athens - to borrow from the Marxist handbook.

This is a foretaste of what the world may face as the "crisis of capitalism" - another Marxist phase making a comeback - starts to turn two hundred million lives upside down.

We are advancing to the political stage of this global train wreck. Regimes are being tested. Those relying on perma-boom to mask a lack of democratic or ancestral legitimacy may try to gain time by the usual methods: trade barriers, sabre-rattling, and barbed wire.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, is worried enough to ditch a half-century of IMF orthodoxy, calling for a fiscal boost worth 2pc of world GDP to "prevent global depression".

"If we are not able to do that, then social unrest may happen in many countries, including advanced economies. We are facing an unprecedented decline in output. All around the planet, the people have reacted with feelings going from surprise to anger, and from anger to fear," he said.

Russia has begun to shut down trade as it adjusts to the shock of Urals oil below $40 a barrel. It has imposed import tariffs of 30pc on cars, 15pc on farm kit, and 95pc on poultry (above quota levels). "It is possible during the financial crisis to support domestic producers by raising customs duties," said Premier Vladimir Putin.

Russia is not alone. India and Vietnam have imposed steel tariffs. Indonesia is resorting to special "licences" to choke off imports.

The Kremlin is alarmed by a 13pc fall in industrial output over the last five months. There have been street protests in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok and Barnaul. Police crushed "Dissent Marchers" holding copies of Russia's constitution above their heads in Moscow's Triumfalnaya Square.

"Russia has not seen anything like these nationwide protests before," said Boris Kagarlitsky from Moscow's Globalization Institute.

The Duma is widening the treason law to catch most forms of political dissent, and unwelcome forms of journalism. Jury trials for state crimes are to be abolished.

Yevgeny Kiseloyov at the Moscow Times said it feels eerily like December 1 1934 when Stalin unveiled his "Enemies of the People" law, kicking off the Great Terror.

The omens are not good in China either. Taxis are being bugged by state police. The great unknown is how Beijing will respond as its state-directed export strategy hits a brick wall, leaving exposed a vast eyesore of concrete and excess plant.

Exports fell 2.2pc in November. Toy, textile, footwear, and furniture plants are being closed across Guangdong, now the riot hub of South China. Some 40m Chinese workers are expected to lose their jobs. Party officials have warned of "mass-scale social turmoil".

The Politburo is giving mixed signals. We don't yet know how much of the country's plan to boost domestic demand through a $586bn stimulus package is real, and how much is a wish-list sent to party bosses in the hinterland without funding.

Shortly after President Hu Jintao said China is "losing competitive edge in the world market", we saw a move towards export subsidies for the steel industry and a dip in the yuan peg - even though China already has the world's biggest reserves ($2 trillion) and the biggest trade surplus ($40bn a month).

So is the Communist Party mulling a 1930s "beggar-thy-neighbour" strategy of devaluation to export its way out of trouble? Such raw mercantilism can only draw a sharp retort from Washington and Brussels in this climate.

"During a global slowdown, you can't have countries trying to take advantage of others by manipulating their currencies," said Frank Vargo from the US National Association of Manufacturers.

It is a view shared entirely by President-elect Barack Obama. "China must change its currency practices. Because it pegs its currency at an artificially low rate, China is running massive current account surpluses. This is not good for American firms and workers, not good for the world," he said in October. The new intake of radical Democrats on Capitol Hill will hold him to it.

There has been much talk lately of America's Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which set off the protectionist dominoes in 1930. It is usually invoked by free traders to make the wrong point. The relevant message of Smoot-Hawley is that America was then the big exporter, playing the China role. By resorting to tariffs, it set off retaliation, and was the biggest victim of its own folly.

Britain and the Dominions retreated into Imperial Preference. Other countries joined. This became the "growth bloc" of the 1930s, free from the deflation constraints of the Gold Standard. High tariffs stopped the stimulus leaking out.

It was a successful strategy - given the awful alternatives - and was the key reason why Britain's economy contracted by just 5pc during the Depression, against 15pc for France, and 30pc for the US.

Could we see such a closed "growth bloc" emerging now, this time led by the US, entailing a massive rupture of world's trading system? Perhaps.

This crisis has already brought us a monetary revolution as interest rates approach zero across the G10. It may overturn the "New World Order" as well, unless we move with great care in grim months ahead. This is where events turn dangerous.

The last great era of globalisation peaked just before 1914. You know the rest of the story.

I've been reading Krugman's book The Return of Depression Economics and I'm begining to wonder if an age of trade wars and financial MAD is starting. Will Obama threaten a devaluation of the US$ in order to make exports more competitive if China doesn't stop it's currency manipulation?

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

And Chinese governments have ever objected to the loss of several hundred million lives?

Warlords + nukes = epic fail. Neither Russia nor Japan (nor probably India) would sit idly by and watch a crackup in that country, even if both powers shared the Chinese government's attitude toward its "surplus population".

Originally Posted by Odin

I've been reading Krugman's book The Return of Depression Economics and I'm begining to wonder if an age of trade wars and financial MAD is starting. Will Obama threaten a devaluation of the US$ in order to make exports more competitive if China doesn't stop it's currency manipulation?

That would NOT be good! During the last Depression, the various major powers adopted beggar-thy-neighbor policies towards each other, which by the mid 1930s led to them establishing zones of economic influence which were meant to be exclusive. The article you quoted mentioned one of those zones (the British Imperial zone). Other zones included the American zone, which included most of the Western Hemisphere, and the French zone, which was basically their colonial empire. And of course the Soviet Union constituted it's own zone, along with Mongolia and Xinxiang. Unfortunately, the German, Italian, and Japanese zones were apparently insufficient to meet their needs (or perhaps, given their governments by the mid to late 1930s, their greeds), and the result was WWII.

Originally Posted by SVE-KRD

That would NOT be good! During the last Depression, the various major powers adopted beggar-thy-neighbor policies towards each other, which by the mid 1930s led to them establishing zones of economic influence which were meant to be exclusive. The article you quoted mentioned one of those zones (the British Imperial zone). Other zones included the American zone, which included most of the Western Hemisphere, and the French zone, which was basically their colonial empire. And of course the Soviet Union constituted it's own zone, along with Mongolia and Xinxiang. Unfortunately, the German, Italian, and Japanese zones were apparently insufficient to meet their needs (or perhaps, given their governments by the mid to late 1930s, their greeds), and the result was WWII.

Political trends have their own underlying power, and human goodness is not inevitable. Democratic governments recognize responsibilities to their own people first, and they aren't going to starve voters for vague shibboleths of "economic propriety". In a democracy, countries tend to scrap free trade on behalf of essential voters in a democracy or entrenched special interests in dictatorships and oligarchies.

We Americans will have to devalue the dollar to recognize the reality that we are no longer top dog in the economic world -- thank you, George Worthless Bush, for outsourcing every bid of manufacturing possible except for defense contracting. China might as well revalue its currency to reflect the reality that what it sells worldwide really is good stuff and reward workers for their productivity.

In case we're still discussing when the Turning point was, the latest issue of Time Magazine says flatly it was 2005, Hurricane Katrina, which "blew away the last gauzy veil from an ugly specter of executive incompetence... a door swung open for a candidate who would merely stand and deliver. Simple competence - "

I note they are using the iconic campaign portrait of Barack Obama, the one with the big blocks of red and green-grey and tan, that they say was the creation of a skateboarder/ artist. However, the style originated with Andy Warhol back in the Awakening. So Warhol's 15 minutes of fame is essentially stretching to 40 years.

BTW - though I voted for Obama and an optimistically looking forward to his administration, I still think there should be one White House staffer specifically charged with the same job as the guy who rode second seat in the Ancient Roman triumphal chariot, whispering "Remember, oh, Imperator, that you are merely human."

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

BTW - though I voted for Obama and an optimistically looking forward to his administration, I still think there should be one White House staffer specifically charged with the same job as the guy who rode second seat in the Ancient Roman triumphal chariot, whispering "Remember, oh, Imperator, that you are merely human."

You might log on to change.gov, make a suggestion that this role would be important, and perhaps apply for the job. ™

S&H's prediction that Boomers would be forced to end their consumerist behavior as they entered Elderhood seems to be coming to pass, another turning marker.

http://www.democraticunderground.com...ss=102x3659820

Baby boomer spending habits

I'm wondering just how much the massive cohort of aging baby boomers, like myself, who have basically filled their houses with STUFF for the last few decades, have seriously slowed their spending habits - looking at retirement.

I know that stuff means jobs for those who make it, but it's hard to feel bad about the curtailing of jewelry sales and other luxury items that none of us ever needed - or perhaps really wanted until the corporate masters told us we did.

If there's one person who got Strauss/Howe before Strauss/Howe, it was Gary Trudeau '48 (I think.) Check this one out on moving from 3T to 4T:

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html

This morning I thought of a sure fire 4T indicator. For the last few decades it has been considered more or less 'common sense' for government agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the TVA to try any way possible to 'cut costs', so as to find the money to fund the next round of tax cuts - even if it means cutting corners on service to those very same taxpayers. As the chickens come home to roost, if the public response is one of sustained and growing outrage, and mounting demands for heads to roll, then we definitely be 4T.

Originally Posted by SVE-KRD

This morning I thought of a sure fire 4T indicator. For the last few decades it has been considered more or less 'common sense' for government agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the TVA to try any way possible to 'cut costs', so as to find the money to fund the next round of tax cuts - even if it means cutting corners on service to those very same taxpayers. As the chickens come home to roost, if the public response is one of sustained and growing outrage, and mounting demands for heads to roll, then we definitely be 4T.

Three decades. As late as the mid-1970s my college political science class suggested that government bureaucrats were wise to find ways in which to expand government services as if entrepreneurs. That was in a 2T, of course.

We are 4T because we recognize that 3T solutions achieve little, but at high personal and environmental costs. The only improvements in most lives since the 1970s has been technology whose advances had no connection to 3T policies. The cheap electronics and computer power have been nice, but political corporatism has overpowered the benefits. Were we living better when music came from high-priced stereos that depended on FM mono, vinyl discs that devoured space and offered 15 minutes of sound before one needed to turn them over, or upon either compact cassettes or the infamous 8-track tapes that jammed? Or that to see a movie not in the theaters one needed to stay up late and watch what a broadcast channel offered? Maybe some of our medical miracles have depended upon the concept that society must throw money at Big Pharma... but somehow I think that many of us would be more "sexy" if we weren't broke. About everything 3T has been taken as far as it can be taken.

The 3T went as far as it could in using economic inequality to spur innovation and investment, in atomizing society into people scrapping for everything, and in offering instant gratification in return for debt. We ended up with a culture of "Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies" and a society that resembles the nightmarish alternative to the wholesome "Bedford Falls" that George Bailey finds when he learns what the world would be like without him, one in which people live for intense, ephemeral delights that have unwelcome consequences for lack of anything else.

The cakes have lost their sweetness; the circuses have become bores.

Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination for Secretary of Commerce. A Grand Jury is looking into a deal he had with a California company that got a nice fat state contract and gave him a nice fat campaign contribution. You know - business as usual?

What Richardson said was that he didn't want to hold up the works by delaying the confirmation process. What I think is that Obama or his team dropped an unmistakable hint in Big Bill's ear. You know, six years ago, nobody would have a thought a thing about this? It would have just been business as usual. Even the Republicans, who turned over Bill Clinton's dirtpile with a microscope, wouldn't have said a word (partly because they were all doign it too.)

At any rate, apparently Obama's people, like Caesar's wife, have to be above suspicion. Wow - the revolution IS here!

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination for Secretary of Commerce. A Grand Jury is looking into a deal he had with a California company that got a nice fat state contract and gave him a nice fat campaign contribution. You know - business as usual?

What Richardson said was that he didn't want to hold up the works by delaying the confirmation process. What I think is that Obama or his team dropped an unmistakable hint in Big Bill's ear. You know, six years ago, nobody would have a thought a thing about this? It would have just been business as usual. Even the Republicans, who turned over Bill Clinton's dirtpile with a microscope, wouldn't have said a word (partly because they were all doign it too.)

At any rate, apparently Obama's people, like Caesar's wife, have to be above suspicion. Wow - the revolution IS here!

It is, however, being televised .

Originally Posted by Roadbldr '59

It is, however, being televised .

Absolutely. "The revolution will not be televised" can only have one referent, when you think about it: the stuff going on inside peoples' heads or being talked of in small groups in the coffee shop. (The other end of the age spectrum from the old-timers declaiming on what's wrong with the world?). The action phase will always be televised, until some other medium replaces it.

"The next revolution will not be on YouTube"?

Frugal is cool in cash-strapped US

In the grip of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, America has undergone radical changes. Greed is no longer good and luxury is a shameful word. Paul Harris in New York analyses the tests facing the new president of a shattered nation

Paul Harris in New York

• The Observer, Sunday 4 January 2009

When writer Héctor Tobar returned to America last year after seven years living in Latin America, he came back to a profoundly changed land. He had left a United States riding an economic boom. House prices were soaring, suburbs were gobbling up farmland and good times were rolling on Wall Street.

Now all that has gone. Tobar, an acclaimed author and essayist, was stunned to find America in the grip of an economic turmoil that was changing his native country before his eyes, plunging it into the worst crisis since the Great Depression. "There is a sense of mourning and confusion and a real feeling of living in the last days of empire," Tobar said.

This new America is what Barack Obama has inherited. It is in many ways a broken country. When Obama takes the oath of office on 20 January watched by millions of Americans, his burden will be heavy in the extreme. The scale of the disaster is so large that Obama being America's first black president will almost be a historical footnote. The numbers describe the extent of the catastrophe best. Seven trillion dollars has been wiped off a stock market that has dropped 33%, its biggest fall since 1931. Two million jobs have disappeared, wages are frozen and millions have lost their homes. The Federal Reserve is printing billions of dollars to keep the economy afloat. Banks have been part nationalised and the car industry of Detroit - once the symbol of the all-American lifestyle - is on life support and may not see the end of 2009.

These terrible facts are accompanied by a profound cultural shift. The era of individualistic consumption that swept aside the Great Society of the 1960s has come to an end. For three decades, American culture has celebrated the glories of unabashed capitalism and the ideals of the rich. No longer. From Hollywood movies to celebrity culture to television, frugalism is taking hold. Consumers are cutting back. Luxury brands are falling by the wayside. Even the excesses of the sporting world, from the Super Bowl to Nascar, are being curbed.

A national belt-tightening is having an impact on everything from restaurants and books to a collapse in the demand for cosmetic surgery. The recession is reshaping the cultural landscape in which ordinary people live their lives. As it prepares to inaugurate a new president, America is also trying to forge a fresh identity in a world unimaginably different from the one inherited by George W Bush only eight years ago.

Mike Levine, founder of leading Los Angeles PR firm Levine Communications, believes the cultural change is even hitting the ethereal world of the über-rich celebrities who inhabit La-La land. Gone are the days of bling and Beluga caviar, of quaffing Krug in high-end clubs and driving around Hollywood in a Hummer. "The new year will be marked by a cultural trend I am calling 'Luxury Shame'," he said. "In the extraordinary recessionary times, it seems vulgar to flaunt one's luxurious lifestyle."

Paris Hilton - not usually a name associated with economic hard times - has already run foul of the new cultural mood. On a trip to Australia for New Year's Eve, a shopping splurge on luxury items earned her a barrage of negative headlines. On the TV show Entourage, which normally celebrates its male cast's acquisition of brand-name products, the rapper Bow Wow recently bought a Toyota Prius.

"I caution even the most successful celebrities to go bling-less," Levine said.

Perhaps not coincidentally, several forthcoming Hollywood movies, such as Clive Owen's The International, have as their main villains banks or financiers. In a recent trailer for the film, Owen's character is seen preparing to execute a rogue banker at gunpoint - no doubt a satisfying moment for many multiplex audiences.

Many experts see the cultural rejection of luxury and excess as a watershed moment which for many Americans seemed to descend out of a clear blue sky. "This is about a rethinking of the fundamentals that comes about because society is suddenly under a large amount of stress," said Miles Orvell, a professor of American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.

It certainly seems a cultural milestone every bit as significant as the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which ushered in an era of conservatism, deregulation, free markets and muscular nationalism. The Reagan revolution ended the progressive era of presidents such as Lyndon Johnson and John F Kennedy. It celebrated Wall Street and making money. It was the era of Gordon Gekko and Rambo.

The presidency of Bill Clinton did little to change its course, and it continued unabated into the Bush years as hedge funds became the new masters of the universe and America became the world's only superpower. In both high finance and global politics, it seemed that the wealthy and powerful had written their own rulebook.

But, culturally at least, that book is being redrawn in the face of the recession and the election of a president whose mantra was based on rejecting conflict and trying to forge a consensus. Cultural historians now see echoes of the 1930s when the Great Depression inspired works that focused on the troubles of ordinary people, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and the non-fiction of James Agee, whose Let Us Now Praise Famous Men examined poverty in the south. Orvell believes the coming recession will see a similar flowering of art and literature, reflecting the changed times. He is predicting a greater focus on community and an end to individualism as the dominant ideal.

"Stress brings new ways of thinking. This will have a profound effect on culture from people at the bottom to people at the very top, like Obama," he said. The new president is likely both to lead and to encapsulate these changes. Dealing with the economy is the number one topic in America, greater than Iraq, greater than the "war on terror". Obama's actions there are the yardstick by which he will be judged.

But the recession is already reshaping people's lives in ways trivial and profound. Sales of red meat are falling, while cheaper foodstuffs, such as pasta, are going up. Car sales have collapsed by up to 30%, perhaps meaning that the greatest American icon of the 20th century is struggling.
Frugal is the new cool, putting an end to hyperconsumption. The orgy of credit card abuse is over. A website called Debt Proof Living launched a daily email tipsheet last summer which now has 100,000 subscribers. Oprah Winfrey forsook her annual holiday list of expensive gift suggestions in favour of more modest "favourite things". Salons and spas are seeing customers desert them as women pamper themselves on the cheap at home.

The demand for cosmetic surgery has collapsed with some clinics reporting a fall in patients of 30-40%. What was once seen as a standard luxury for the wealthy elite - inspiring the TV series Nip/Tuck - is now regarded as grotesque excess, alongside owning a polluting big car. "It's the new SUV," declared Victoria Pitts-Taylor, author of Surgery Junkies Tobar sees the changes in America reflected in his own life. While living in Latin America he would return to the US with his young son. "He would always say: why are the cookies so big here? And he was right. Everything was bigger, including the people." That sort of excess, on everything from cookies to cars, is now on the way out. The era of supersizing is over. There has been a cultural humbling that makes consumption and sheer size more unacceptable than at any time in the past three decades.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has tapped into the zeitgeist better than most. In a recent column that became a huge hit across the blogosphere and a talking point on cable news, he took America to task. "I've got a new year's resolution and a new slogan for the country," he wrote before going on to eviscerate the culture of debt-spending, blind consumption and rampant consumerism which, he said, had created everything from the Iraq war to the housing crisis. Herbert's new slogan was simple enough: "Stop Being Stupid."

Hollywood is rightly often seen as the psyche of the American public. So perhaps it is no wonder that the villain of 2008 was Heath Ledger's chilling portrayal of the Joker. Transcending the comic book genre, Ledger created a villain who sowed anarchy and chaotic destruction with little regard to motivation or the consequences for the innocent. For many Americans, who have seen their houses repossessed, their pension funds wiped out and millions of jobs vanish, that is a pretty accurate reflection of what 2008 felt like. And that sort of destruction produces a cultural cost as well as a cultural shift.

Across America, theatres from Broadway to Hollywood are closing shows as crowds stay away. Attendances at the cinema are falling, hitting the production of new movies and putting actors and support workers out of jobs. Art galleries are closing, auction houses are laying off workers. The art market is going into a recession as deep as the rest of the economy. The great US sports are all being hit hard in a major blow to national pride. The National Football League has laid off 10% of its staff. Major league baseball has followed suit. Nascar, whose roaring car fans and Nascar dads became a demographic, has a hiring freeze in place.

And while luxury may fall out of fashion, it is not as if quality is replacing it. The stores that are booming in these grim times are the huge big-box outlets of Walmart and Target. Anyone expecting the recession to drive Americans back into the arms of quaint family-owned shops on Main Street is likely to get an ugly wake-up call. Low-paying Walmart, stuffed with cheap goods from China and with a famously union-busting management, is booming. So busy were the crowds at one recent sales day at a Long Island Walmart that one employee was crushed to death.

Neither will the recession and the collapse of the car industry immediately bring about a greener, more public transport-friendly America. Faced with hard times, Americans are not going out to buy electric cars or hybrid vehicles. They are too expensive. Instead, they are patching up and mending their old gas guzzlers and keeping them on the road longer. America's sense of rugged individualism and distrust of government solutions will remain, for good or for ill. In this sense Obama's new America will be just like the old one.

"It is too deeply ingrained, that sense of the individual. It was right there at the founding of the republic," said Tobar.

The hard times are also bringing real pain to the most vulnerable. In Los Angeles, calls to suicide hotlines are up 60%. Like the first wave of a pandemic, the crisis is picking off the weak first. It is hitting the young, who cannot find jobs in a marketplace where employers are not hiring and the old are refusing to retire because of their wrecked pensions. It is destroying the lives of ten million or more illegal immigrants, who are the first to lose their jobs in a weakened economy.

Americans have even started doing their own gardening, which may be great for them but has put thousands of mainly Mexican landscape crews out of business. Similarly with restaurants. As Americans stay at home more, eateries across the nation are closing down and their mostly immigrant kitchen staffs are being laid off. Money sent back to Mexico by illegal immigrants, which supports many communities there, is down about 7% on last year.

The truth is that the rippling impact of the broken America that Obama is inheriting has spread out across the world, just as the influence of Reagan's policies once did. America now is more frugal, less consumerist and more community-minded. But it is also poorer, angry and afraid.

Obama's job is to address those fears. America is a country desperately looking for a new president who can provide the answers to its problems. But this will be no easy task. Obama is truly inheriting a different country than his predecessor did. It is too early to say whether it is a better one.

Scale of the problem

The size of the US economic collapse is huge. Here are some of the main problems Barack Obama will have to face as 44th US president.

• Almost $7 trillion has been wiped off the stock market as Wall Street posted its worst performance since 1931. Millions of retirement plans and pensions were devastated.

• Some reports predict as many as eight million home repossessions in the next four years.

• Obama aides are working on a fiscal stimulus plan worth $850bn over the next two years, much of it for infrastructure projects, in effect a second New Deal.

• More than 1.9 million Americans lost their jobs in 2008 up to November, and the year may end up at 2.3 million, the worst total since 1945.

• Consumer spending has dropped at the worst rate since 1980.

• House prices have declined at the fastest rate since the 1930s. The economy has been shrinking for 12 months with no end in sight, making it the largest downturn for a generation.

It is entirely possible that Obama will propel the crisis. I like him, he may have great potential, and I know that many are hoping he is the cure for the Bush years.

Rather than letting the system restore to equilibrium, he is revving up the spending machines and the presses. If my favorite contrarians are right, then we are only speeding up the devaluation of the dollar, we are only spending more of our children's inheritance, we are only desperately trying to reflate bubbles. This has the possibility to be a catastrophically failing plan. We are trying to deal with our old problems, the way we always dealt with these old problems, the same ways that got us here.

I hope he is all we want him to be. I am afraid that he could be the last nail in the coffin.

Fear not. He seems to be so much of a pragmatist that if what he's doing isn't working, he will switch tactics - because IMO, he sees them as 'tactics' and not as the One True Way. Don't forget - his core personality is Xer, pragmatic, and rational rather than Boomer, ideological, and idealist. Or so I read him. And Michelle.

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

Fear not. He seems to be so much of a pragmatist that if what he's doing isn't working, he will switch tactics - because IMO, he sees them as 'tactics' and not as the One True Way. Don't forget - his core personality is Xer, pragmatic, and rational rather than Boomer, ideological, and idealist. Or so I read him. And Michelle.

IIRCit was FDR that said that what was needed in his time was "bold, persistent experimentation" and that "if something doesn't work we should admit it frankly and try something else."

Originally Posted by Odin

IIRCit was FDR that said that what was needed in his time was "bold, persistent experimentation" and that "if something doesn't work we should admit it frankly and try something else."

Lincoln certainly used that approach to selecting generals.

Hey. Maybe it's part of your culture. As Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.”

Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, opened an announcement of a "Make America Happen" program with the following words...

For discussion purposes...

Not since the darkest days of the Great Depression has an American President taken office with so many challenges awaiting him. But here's the good news: America has overcome similar challenges before. And we can do it again.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office, he promised the nation bold and dynamic leadership and proved that government can be a partner with the American people to see us through dark times. Through robust public investment, FDR created jobs, provided relief and guaranteed a more secure retirement for working men and women. Today, the challenges awaiting President-elect Obama are different, but the solutions are similar: we need to reinvest in the long term stability and prosperity of our communities.

Just another routine sighting of a new New Deal FDR echo.

From the same era, "We did it before, and we can do it again, and we can do it again...."

http://www.avclub.com/articles/willi...ence-co,22227/

Over at the new conservative showbiz-opinion site Big Hollywood, Fables creator Bill Willingham--interviewed here by our own Tasha Robinson--wrote a short column decrying the decline of the superhero genre into excessive violence and moral ambiguity. While admitting his own culpability as a superhero comics writer/artist in the past--and while allowing that comics are a broad enough medium to allow for mature explorations of complicated social issues--Willingham calls for a return to more straightforward notions of heroism in stories featuring some of America's most iconic superhero characters.

Are unconflicted heroes coming back? One writer doesn't make a trend, but it does sound a bit like "A sense of public urgency contributes to a clampdown on “bad” conduct or “anti-social” lifestyles. "

Originally Posted by DonRobbie

http://www.avclub.com/articles/willi...ence-co,22227/



Are unconflicted heroes coming back? One writer doesn't make a trend, but it does sound a bit like "A sense of public urgency contributes to a clampdown on “bad” conduct or “anti-social” lifestyles. "

Big, bad Bill!! My erstwhile housemate and hubby's recent fishin' buddy.

I liked him better when he was edgy.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

In recent years, Boomers have quit being the new young parents -- especially mothers -- as they have entered at the least the late 40s. Like other other Idealist generations they are better described as authoritative parents and teachers (and still are, but now no longer as parents of toddlers): firmly, but selectively disciplinarian. They tolerate intellectual curiosity but not self-destructive behavior. Contrast the Silent (poor parents because they were finally pushing the boundaries in life for themselves and their children, as is typical for Adaptives) and Generation X who are more pervasively repressive as the antithesis of the permissiveness that their parents thought 'liberating'.

Pervasively repressive? Really? That sounds more like the Howe & Strauss prediction of how "13ers" would parent than the consensus on this board as to what current Xers are really like as parents.

That's not so problematic. The Lost and the GIs raised Silent children. By 1925, Missionaries had almost entirely aged out of the new-parent role as they entered their mid-forties while GIs were just beginning to enter the years of independent child-rearing. By 1943, the Lost had largely abandoned the role of new parents. Between 1925 and 1943 the Lost seemed to dominate the role in shaping the institution of the family even if the parents were GIs... as elementary-school teachers who had certain expectations of children between 5 and 10. Although 50-year-old and older new fathers are always possible, those fathers usually have wives decidedly younger... and in such cases the wives have more influence than their husbands upon children. Let's remember that many marriages are between people across the arbitrary lines of generations, so there were plenty of families in which one spouse was born in 1898 and the other in 1902 --- and of course 1888 and 1904 (in which the younger spouse was likely the woman who was likely to have more influence upon a child).

But how would the parents of a Silent child have parented him/her if they were both GI's?

When the new parents are in two different generations split largely between the thirties and twenties, the older generation more shapes the patterns of child-rearing.

So what keeps the GI's feeling of "My parents were too strict and didn't respect my rights, I'd better respect my choldren's rights" from coming up and influencing their parenting while the Lost are in control?

Fair estimates, as people between 21 and 42 are in general the new parents; people between 42 and 63 are often becoming new grandparents; people between 63 and 84 are typically becoming the new great-grandparents; and people over 84 have generally little personal influence upon infants.

63 soonds young for a great-grandparent. And where I live, in Moraga, a 42-year-old is more likely to become a parent than to become a grandparent. (When I came to nearby San Pablo, however, people started having children in their teens and twenties instead of in their thirties and forties.)