I Think I'll Skip Piketty's Book

Note:  I submitted this one to The Agonist a few weeks ago.  Got a few comments on it there.

Thee Book to read these days is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty First Century”…, or so I have heard.  But my bookcases are all overflowing and I mostly buy books on the Kindle now…, and am just finishing up Michael Hudson’s (highly recommended) “The Bubble and Beyond”…, so I don’t feel the need or desire to tackle Piketty’s “Capital…”.    At 700 pages, it seems like a lot of space to tell me what David Michael Green told me on his blog a few years ago…, and that I shared with all The Agonistas around at the time.

Let me make it simple, in case anyone wants to share this essay with their idiotic, Republican (pardon the redundancy) cousin Buford: The story of American politics over the last generation is the story of the transfer of wealth from the people to the plutocrats. If you think there is anything else essential going on here, you don’t get it.

I got it right off.  I guess it takes academics like Paul Krugman a few more pages…, say about 700 more…, before they get the point.  PK seemed genuinely amazed, on the Bill Moyers show last week, to find out that there are some people getting filthy rich…,  while some others are wishing they had the bottom of a barrel to scrape.  He admitted that he should have “realized it” himself.  I wanted to ask him if he realized that upwards of 90% of the additional Keynesian Stimulus money that he keeps wanting to throw at this Great Recession would go right into the pockets of those same plutocrats that have been sucking it up before it hits the masses for the last 40 years?  I’m not sure he really “gets it”.

Complete List of All Stories

Just over to the right here..., I have added a link to a "Complete List of Stories".  This page is mostly for me.  Searching for stories when I don't remember when I wrote them is somewhat tedious..., at the least..., on the home page.  So now I can search for titles here and know just what year and month to click on to find them.  And now you do too, if you have a favorite old story you would like to read again..., at least I hope there some you would like to read again :)

Birthday Eve Ruminations

The Clearwater River looking down
on the Greer Bridge

Well…, I was going to say that I have now put my sixty-second winter safely behind me.  But after the winters that most of the folks east of me suffered through in the winter of ’13-’14…, I won’t be making any rash weather predictions.  Monumental snow and cold in the mid-west and northeast…, drought in California and Texas, hurricanes and floods, disappearing glaciers and the arctic ice pack.  There are still a good many politicians that are climate change deniers…, but nobody with a lick of sense or smidgen of self-respect will try to deny that what we have been doing…, and are continuing to do…, to this poor old planet is causing anything but great damage.  And there are some well-respected and credentialed folks like James Hanson and Guy R. McPherson who say that what he have already done has pushed us past the tipping point of being able to do anything about stopping runaway climate change in the not so distant future. 

So I will try to drown that sobering thought with a few more ice cold Hamm’s as I wait for midnight to officially put my sixty-second year behind me…, and listen to a great song from Tom Russell that brings back a lot of old memories.