![]() ![]() Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. But check out what Michael Pollan wrote last October: “In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. The death of capitalism, or rather the revelation of its profound diseasedness, is an opportunity it would be ironic to call golden. This unforeseen moment has many possibilities. I have never been able to confirm the adage that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of the characters for disaster and opportunity, but if it isn’t true it ought to be. It became clear that the American economy had been for almost four decades a desperately ill patient requiring more and more life support to keep it going: get off the gold standard in 1971, then deregulate markets, globalize capital, go for “financialization” - the conversion of more and more aspects of life on Earth into investment opportunities - unto the derivatives and hedges and bundled mortgages that brought it all down. What exactly collapsed? Not just the financial assumptions of the Bush era, or the Clinton and Bush eras of globalization, or of Reaganomics with its cult of the free market, but something bigger and deeper. ![]() Even trying to grasp it is dizzying, like looking - as Mike Davis put it - into the Grand Canyon and trying to understand its vastness. When these markets fell apart, so did many of the fundamental premises of the past few decades, which is part of what makes this moment in history so interesting, and so unpredictable. In early 2008, some distinguished sources were predicting an economic apocalypse too, including German president and former International Monetary Fund chair Horst Köhler, who declared, “International financial markets have developed into a monster that must be put back in its place.” At the beginning of the Bush era, now passing from the face of the Earth more like a toxic plume than a morning mist, the then-functional FEMA predicted three major catastrophic risks for the United States: a terrorist attack in New York, a hurricane strike on New Orleans, and a major earthquake in San Francisco. That is, underregulated free-market capitalism ate itself before our eyes. ![]() But electoral politics, even as they unfolded with all the richness of a Shakespearian drama (with the Clintons doing a splendid Lord and Lady Macbeth in the primary season and McCain topping them with his King Lear to Faust meltdown), were hardly the only arena where change prevailed.Ĭapitalism imploded more dramatically than anyone had imagined, though once it had, its collapse seemed as obvious as inevitable. I myself expected we’d see a nonwhite or nonmale presidency in my lifetime, but not that it’d come so soon, and with it came a profound symbolic shift within the United States, a redefinition of “us” and “them,” as well as a sign to the rest of the world that this country is some kind of hybrid, turbulent bridge between global north and global south, the white and the nonwhite, wealth and poverty, as the poles weirdly united in Barack Obama, whose symbolic currency is immeasurable, whatever his limitations. Now that everything has changed, the despair of four years ago - not just that Bush had been re-elected but that he would prevail forever in a nation that would forever believe his lies and follow his cult of imperial war and climate-change denial and free-market fundamentalism - has vanished like morning mist.Įverything changes. “Everything changes,” said Suzuki Roshi without missing a beat, then moved on to another question. A STUDENT of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, once sheepishly asked him whether he could sum up the essence of Zen in a single sentence. ![]()
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