Here is Tina Brown trying to rescue The Daily Beast from a richly deserved obscurity, by having one of her paid right wing hacks ,her contract workers write an ‘opinion piece’ on the Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the credit of America. Although it’s hard not to see Mr. Carter as just another economic fundamentalist raging at the President for having transgressed against the God of the Market, thereby setting in motion a calamity of Abrahamic proportion. He thunders his contempt, a la the American fixture of the tent preacher, for the infidels who would dare to disrespect the Great God. He even quotes Hernando de Soto on the ‘The Mystery of Capital’ an analogy to the 'Mystery of Transubstantiation', perhaps? There is no real mystery to Mr. Hernando de Soto Polar’s fealty to a demonstrably failed Neo-Liberalism, notwithstanding Mr. Carter’s genuflection. What Mr. Carter misses is that what was accomplished in the Debt Crisis is a Structural Adjustment, a Monetarist economic tool used by the IMF to bring the recalcitrant economies of the world to heel: meaning to bring an economy into the benighted 21st Century and its romance with retrograde politics masquerading as economic theory and practice. Or, perhaps, Mr. Carter thinks that this settlement does not go far enough.Mr. Polar is here historically invested as political ally of The Chicago Boys and other forms of Capitalist apologetics, fully in line with Mr. Carter’s own faith in The Holy Market.
Should we as readers, given this information, be even the least suspicious of the motives of Mr. Carter? That is of course a rhetorical question, but in sum, Mr. Carter being a true believer asks us to rely on the ‘Wisdom of the Market’ as a fact of economic life: but given the performance of The Market in the last three years, I cannot place my faith in this patent delusion, this unwarranted ,capricious act of faith in an obviously failed notion, abetted by Republican Party manufactured hysteria. The idea of Austerity is the new idea that the Free Marketeers have adopted after the failure of the Economic Reform of 1999 to foreclose any further attempts at Keynesian or Neo-Keynesian economic/political redress. And Mr. Carter engages in the time honored rhetorical ploy of the political operative by a self-presentation as the voice of reason mediating between the extremes.
Almost Marx
StephenKMackSD's Blog 