Author Archive

George Soros: We are facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression

Friday, April 4th, 2008

The difference between how the mainstream media is reporting the current economic situation and how people who actually understand the stuff because they work with it day to day is quite astounding. This is the kind of article that you have to read yourselves, pretty much every sentence is worth some pretty serious thought.

“We are facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”, Soros writes in The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, a book rushed online this week. The culprit, he says, is a misconception that markets can correct themselves, no matter how we short-circuit them with easy money, massive leverage and brain-bending synthetic instruments.

“The belief that markets tend towards equilibrium is directly responsible for the current turmoil,” the billionaire philanthropist writes. “It encouraged the regulators to abandon their responsibility and rely on the market mechanism to correct its own excesses.”

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SuperCapitalism – A Liberal View of the 20th Century

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

SuperCapitalism
The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
Author: Robert B. Reich
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

It was hard to not pick this book up, it’s by the former secretary of labor Robert Reich. I like seeing how people in the system think about things, although I have to admit I’ve been avoiding the more classical liberal material, since there’s so much stuff that’s even more critical of the current system coming from what used to be called the ‘right’, but which now is starting to sound almost sane. Books like Conservatives Without Conscience, by John Dean, come to mind, for example.

Although the preface almost made my put the book down since it wasn’t very promising, with some pretty serious distortions of our currrent realities, like pretending that our media isn’t dominated by 5 large conglomerates, once the book actually started, it got increasingly more interesting, although sadly it also becomes increasingly more obvious why the Democratic party has so little of substance to say. Reich, as a party insider, shows us just what the Democratic party is missing today: a sense of outrage, coupled with a willingness to fundamentally question the status quo.

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Welcome to A Drop of Rain

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

What’s going on? Things are getting confusing, and changes are going to be coming faster and faster. Peak commodities/population are going to translate to into ongoing patterns of extreme volatility globally, while locally we’ll see how things adapt and evolve. Nature will struggle to adapt, but it will be hard going. Get out there on the trails and see for yourselves how things change during the coming years.

Now and then, when affairs / free time warrant it, a drop of rain will try to make sense of it all, or at least of a piece or two, here or there. Probably won’t succeed, but it’s worth a try, you just never know what will happen, or how.

Maybe a drop will fall, at just the right time, to let something or other grow that might not have done so otherwise, or maybe it will just fall on dead earth, with nobody the wiser.

It’s not every day, after all, that you can say we’ve hit the peak of human existence, in pretty much every way you can imagine, water, oil, raw materials, population, food, soil, you name it. Well, ok, maybe not a cultural peak.

We’ve certainly gotten away from pretty much everything that actually matters in any larger sense. That sorry situation will hopefully change at some point, but again, only time will tell.