See You In Health

Joseph Stiglitz has an astute analogy for our economic situation:

A patient arrives at a hospital in serious condition. Now, it may be that the patient has simply fallen victim to one of those debilitating ailments that go around from time to time and can be cured by a massive dose of antibiotics. In this case we have a macro problem with a macro solution. But it could instead be that the patient is suffering from a decade of serious abuse—smoking, drinking, overeating, lack of exercise, a fondness for crystal meth—and that it has not only taken a catastrophic toll but also left him open to opportunistic infections of every kind. In other words, a buildup of micro problems has led to a macro problem, and no cure is possible without addressing the underlying issues. The American economy today is a patient of the second kind.

That analogy could certainly be extended to other areas, such as the obvious fact that it applies as well to the corrosive nature of our corporate-operated political system, and perhaps to societal trends in general. Economic security, to take a rather hawkish stance, is national security. The trillion dollars or so spent in Iraq could have been invested in infrastructure, in American people and American opportunities, or conserved, or whatever. Instead it was spent, with zero dividend to the American taxpayer, while simultaneously another trillion or so (for now) is being pissed down a rathole of esoteric equations and imaginary wealth.

None of that will be recouped, and the neocon fantasists had better hope that their crackpot theories were dead wrong in the first place, because this is the sort of cascading series of catastrophes that undoes empires. Ask the British, and look where they were a hundred years ago.