Kony, Jenna Talackova and Trayvon Martin

What does an Internet campaign to stop an African warlord have in common with a trans woman barred from a beauty contest and a black teenager murdered in cold blood by a vigilante? Simple: they're all symptoms of what may be our biggest problem as a society and a culture.

In each case, we react when presented with an individual example of injustice, but ignore the wider context. We enthusiastically share the Kony video, but does anyone care why people like him can run riot in Africa? Probably the single biggest reason is the poverty of most of the continent, which leaves governments powerless. One of the chief causes of that poverty is the agricultural policy of us, the world's developed nations. The majority of Africans are farmers, but we won't let them export their surplus to us. Instead, we subsidize farmers in the West to over-produce food, which we then dump on the world market, driving African subsistence farmers deeper into poverty. Is this even mentioned in, say, discussions on agricultural policy in the West? Nope. Indeed, most of the people I saw going on about Kony think that buying domestically grown produce and "supporting our farmers" is virtuous.

It's heartening that the Trayvon case has stirred up such an outcry. But most of the questions being asked are secondary or irrelevant. The real question isn't stand your ground laws or whether the shooter should have been arrested. The question is: how have you managed to create an environment where a suburban vigilante makes thousands of 911 calls solely to report black men in his neighborhood, shoots one of them for no reason, and not only avoids arrest but has his story unquestioningly believed by the police, who publicly defend him? The question isn't if a particular law or an individual police officer of department is at fault, or even the moronic question of whether the vigilante in question was a racist. It's how incredibly racist your society has to be for this whole sequence of events to unfold at all.

How does Jenna Talackova tie into this? As empirical proof. I offer you this tweet from the formidable Natalie Reed: "Miss Universe Canada petition got 20,000 signatures, Bill C-279 petition only 280. I really, really, really, REALLY hate humanity right now." Bill C-279 is a trans rights bill that you can read about here. So about a hundred times more people support trans rights than... support trans rights. Again, people think that a given individual shouldn't be mistreated because she's a trans woman, but they won't support a bill to end that mistreatment.

Part of the problem is psychological. As my co-blogger put it: "our brains can't multiply". We can, if we choose,empathize with a single individual, but we're really bad at empathy with a group. But it's more than that. The same reaction comes up all the time, in just about every political discussion; the copyright system, police brutality (especially the American practice of senseless SWAT raids and wholesale murdering of dogs), racism, corruption. Confronted with an individual example, people will decry and condemn it, but balk at any suggestion that there could possibly be a wider, even structural, problem. It goes far beyond sensible caution of sweeping political reforms; it's a wholesale denial of the very possibility that we might live in a society where systemic injustice happens.

In my opinion, it's simply a psychological defense mechanism that protects people from having to ask themselves difficult questions about the world they live in. It's hard to think about big political questions. Much easier to live in a fairy-tale world where society is fundamentally good and sound, and all problems are caused by evil individuals. Makes for better Hollywood movies, too. The problem is that it also leads people to passively condone, or even actively support, policies and structures that directly harm the people that they claim to sympathize with.

Dependency theory and conspiracy theory

There was a post at Tiger Beatdown titled "Occupying Europe, when the colonizer reclaims wealth", by Flavia Dzodan. Anyone familiar with leftist discourse knows what's coming from the title, but to prime myself for some intellectual activity this week (I'm writing this Monday morning), I'll go through the motions with it. What I'm trying to do is criticize the worldview that I perceive is behind the text.

A long time ago, when I took a course to become a kickboxing instructor, I was taught to give feedback in the form of a metaphorical hamburger; a prime example of the McDonaldization of education, if you will. The idea is that first you give positive feedback (a bun), then criticism (the meat), and finish off with more positive feedback (the other bun). I like the metaphor, because to me, it implies that the positive reinforcement equates with the useless carbohydrates of the buns, while the criticism is the meat of the whole thing. That's an anachronism, as the example was given at a time when any Finnish person would have thought that "karppaaminen" ("low carb-ing") refers to a type of fish.

In the spirit of this advice, I'd like to start by saying that I very much approve of the author's criticism of "importing" the 99% slogan from the US "Occupy" movement. As a European, I am in general dismayed that so many European political movements seem to be importing agendas directly from North America. For example, it's recently become something of a meme here in Finland to rail against tax breaks for the rich; indeed, I've even seen people claim that our entire budget deficit is caused by tax breaks granted since the early nineties. According to an authoritative study, the opposite is true: tax progression has remained essentially the same, while taxes on low- and medium-income earners have fallen considerably more than for high-income earners. But because tax breaks for the rich are on the agenda in the US, the same must be true here.

However, there is a fundamental issue I disagree on:

The European Union’s wealth is the wealth of Empires. Mainly the British, Dutch, Spanish, Belgium, French, Italian, Austro-German and Portuguese empires. This is the wealth built on the backs of the African slave trade and the colonization of lands as distant from each other as the African continent, the Americas, Asia and Australia. This wealth is made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories. This wealth is also made of resource depletion and subjugation of native populations. This wealth that never belonged to Europe to begin with.

In other words, all you Occupy Whatever protesters with your bizarre neo-swastikas: you're not being leftist enough. All that evil financial capital was created by robbing the Third World:

The very same wealth people now Occupying these public European squares reclaim as their own, demanding it is re-distributed while it was generated as a result of Europe’s occupations in the first place. And yet, none of this is examined or contextualized. Most people operating under the illusion that this wealth they are reclaiming is rightfully theirs, that they are entitled to it.

Though the author gives us the "very basic premises of dependency theory", cribbed from the Wikipedia page, and dresses up these claims with it, what becomes obscured is that dependency theory is, first and foremost, a theory on the current relationships between countries and markets in the world system. It is not, and does not justify, the historical claim that current European prosperity is "made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories". This is a much broader claim, and one that I take great issue with. Many dependency theorists do advocate such a historical worldview, but the difference between the theory of international relations that is dependency theory and that historical worldview must be kept in mind.

**

This claim was formalized as the theory of the "development of underdevelopment" by sociologist Andre Gunder Frank in the article by that name. His specific claim was that the underdevelopment of Latin American countries was not caused by "the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage", but by the international capitalist system, which exploited them for profit.

It's important to see this criticism in context. Frank, and dependency theory in general, was reacting against views of development that saw underdevelopment as principally the fault of the underdeveloped countries themselves, either because they hadn't managed their economic development properly, or even because they were racially inferior. The latter view has been put forward recently here in Finland, and figures in Finnish discussions on development aid, for instance.

While much of the dependency theorists' criticism of existing models of economic development was good and necessary, Frank threw the baby out with the bath water when he claimed that underdevelopment is entirely caused by the world system. If this was true, then Hernando de Soto's (the economist, not the conquistador) reforms would have had no effect. De Soto has led the way in improving standards of living in developing countries precisely by removing antiquated obstacles to economic development and improving the ability of ordinary people to participate in the economy. His success has shown that such obstacles do play a vital role in restricting economic development. By reforming property rights and arguing for a decriminalization of coca growing, de Soto managed to make life so difficult for the Shining Path Peruvian Maoist terrorist organization that they tried to kill him. Read more about de Soto here.

Despite endorsements from people like Kofi Annan ("Hernando is absolutely right") and Bill Clinton ("the world’s greatest living economist"), de Soto infuriates left-wing commentators precisely because he's offering a capitalist solution to underdevelopment. Perhaps the most eloquent defence of de Soto I can offer is to link to the Grauniad, which dedicated a "review" to attacking de Soto, but managed to offer no concrete criticisms whatsoever beyond accusing him of being a front man for international capitalism.

De Soto's work quite concretely demonstrates that legislation and culture in the underdeveloped countries do play a major role in restricting development, even today. To lay everything at the door of a faceless, ill-defined "international capitalism", a left-wing hobbyhorse similar to the Stalinist "international bourgeoisie", is at best a single-cause fallacy.

As a historical view, the idea that Western development is caused by non-Western underdevelopment is fundamentally absurd. It rests on a zero-sum view of world wealth, where Western prosperity cannot be the result of progress within Western society, but must be created by taking resources from other societies.

To take a fairly specific example, it has long been a commonplace for certain leftists to assert that the British "industrial revolution" was built on profits from imperialism and the slave trade. However, it has been pointed out by David Richardson that less than 1% of the domestic investment in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was made up of profits from the slave trade. Furthermore, while it's indisputable that the Atlantic slave trade had a grave human impact on Africa, the idea that it impoverished and destroyed the entire continent is ridiculously exaggerated. It obscures, among others, the fact that there were also Africans who themselves made a considerable profit from selling other Africans into slavery. In my opinion, the bald generalizations offered by supposedly "post-colonial" Marxists that cast all white people as aggressors and all black people as helpless victims are just as racist as the racist views they purport to replace.

Even some Marxist historians like Bill Warren agree:

There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopment…The evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking place…and that this has been a direct result of the west.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the economic development of the entire world, at any stage, is a direct result of anything done by the West, but the simple truth is that throughout the history of the world, all societies have developed economically, and some societies have developed faster than others. This speed has varied, and indeed at times turned negative, and the forms the development has taken have also varied. Development and "undevelopment" have both taken place at all times and in all cultures; there is no truth to the racist ideas that only white westerners can bring about economic prosperity, or that African culture - as if there were such a thing as an "African culture" - is somehow inherently inimical to development.

At its heart, economic development is endogenic. This is not to suggest that exogenic factors can't play major or even decisive parts in specific processes, but it's long since become obvious to me that these kinds of rejoinders of the blindingly obvious are necessary when writing about anything even remotely political. But historically, it has primarily been the endogenic development of a culture or society that determines what its economy is like and how prosperous it is. There is no single cause; the circumstances a society is in, including various environmental variables like natural resources and climate, power relations within the society and of the society with others, cultural and economic structures within the society and a bewildering array of other factors, conspicuously including decisions made in and by the society, determine what path of economic development it takes. If unraveling this was easy, then economic history wouldn't be an academic discipline.

It's precisely the complexity of economic development that makes single-cause explanations like "international capitalism" or the blithering nonsense of Jared Diamond's guns, germs and steel so inadequate. They attempt to reduce a massively complex series of interrelated historical processes to a single cause, and frankly, when they go beyond that to assert that this single mechanism still functions today and people offering alternative views are on its payroll, they enter the realm of conspiracy theory.

These zero-sum theories don't make any sense on their own merits. If the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World is entirely a result of Western capitalism, does this mean that before the advent of the Age of Discovery (which, frankly, is an appallingly Eurocentric term), fundamental global inequalities of wealth didn't exist? If so, how did the diabolical Western capitalists acquire the means to appropriate the wealth of other nations? Surely they had some competitive advantages to start with. These zero-sum views reduce world economic history to a simplistic nonsense of a pillaging West and a pillaged Rest, and don't hold any water when faced with even an elementary knowledge of history.

Even worse, by casting the entire "Rest" as a unitary block of victimized cultures, they completely deny the rich history and heritage of, say, Arabic and Islamic culture, not to mention China, by reducing them to simple victims of Western imperialism who, unable to defend themselves, succumbed to the superior invader. No thought is given to the notion that these societies have their own history and their own processes that might be worthy of study. This simplistic view of the other as an eternal, impersonal suffering victim in fact reinforces the very Eurocentric, orientalist orthodoxy that its proponents claim to oppose.

**

The Tiger Beatdown article goes deeper into the land of conspiracies in its account of the Libyan civil war:

And now, to prove that none of this Dependency Theory is a thing of the past, in a very recent display of neo-colonial power, NATO forces, the pan European military arm, occupies Libya, a former Italian colony, supporting the “good guys”, the rebel insurgent group whose idea of justice was to sodomize Gaddafi minutes before his execution (Warning for extremely graphic content). Europe, once again, behind the pillage of bodies outside their territory, because that’s another concept that Europe laid out the foundations for: the idea of what Judith Butler very aptly named “the non grievable” lives.

By implication at least, the author seems to be claiming that the Western intervention in Libya is grounded in economic policy, and is part of this transfer of wealth from the Rest to the West. This is utterly ridiculous. No arguments or facts in its favor are advanced, beyond simply stating that the intervention occurred. And surely, if we are to mention atrocities committed by the rebels against al-Qaḏḏāfī, we might also remember that his regime was hardly benevolent? It seems odd to posthumously cast the Libyan dictator as a victim of Western economic repression, but these are the strange lengths to which Marxist conspiracy theories will go.

The leftist attitude to Western intervention is frequently a sort of Catch-22. If the West intervenes in a country like Libya or Iraq, then the intervention is an instance of Chomsky's "New Military Humanism"; an exercise in economically motivated power politics that in itself proves how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. If, however, the West does not intervene, as in Syria or most conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, then its callousness and disregard are proof of how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. In the eyes of these critics, the West is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

**

To end on some more positive feedback (the lower bun of this hamburger, if you will), I'd like to turn to racism again.

All European Empires were built on this notion of “the Other”, the non human that was only good in so far as she could produce labor and resources and, in turn, more children to be exploited. Nowadays, these ideas constantly framed as “the immigrant menace” and the inevitable raising of xenophobia and racism; European governments passing laws demanding more and more stringent requirements to access a documented residency status. The non Western immigrant that did manage to acquire a residency, forced to learn the language of the country or risk deportation. The old colonial practices now enforced on European territories under the guise of “cultural preservation” and “integration”.

Again, I can't agree with the Marxist notion that "the other" is economically defined, or that the other is acceptable as a producer of labor and resources. To proper racists, the racially constructed Other is inherently repulsive and must be kept away, not from economic interests but from pure political prejudice. In Finland, for instance, the main anti-immigrant party is also heavily in favor of reducing Finnish dependence on international trade and, at worst, almost a striving for autarchy. Certainly this view doesn't see the immigrants as economic resources to be exploited: on the contrary, pseudo-Fascist movements see the immigrant as a threat to the health and integrity of the "national body". In my opinion, to see European racism as economically motivated is senseless, as such a theory as to its origins and motivations entirely fails to account for its political manifestations without pseudo-conspiracy theories of "false consciousnesses".

However, in the context of the current European "debate" - which it hardly is by any sensible standards - on immigration, it's important to highlight the very real racist nature of these policies of "assimilation". Fundamentally, they insist that immigrants have no right to their own culture or language, but must abandon their identity and take on a new one, imposed by the hegemonic culture. In other words:

Nowadays, European States (the Netherlands and Denmark are two such examples) have laws that demand Non Westerners learn and speak the local languages or risk fines or, failing to comply, eventual deportation. Their right to occupy a space subject to assimilation.

This is precisely the kind of immigration policy that Finnish political racists are advancing: immigrants must "assimilate", i.e. give up their identity, or be forcibly deported or otherwise penalized. We should recognize that this is inhuman. For instance, a Finnish racist movement states in its election program for the previous election that everyone has a right to their own culture and language. They then go on to state that immigrants must assimilate and abandon their own culture, or be deported. It could hardly be made clearer that to these movements and their supporters, immigrants aren't people at all. In Finland, even the biggest left-wing party, the Social Democrats, campaigned with a slogan calling for immigrants to assimilate.

So I would like to take this opportunity to give my unqualified support for the demand that the "Occupy" movement, in Europe at least, concern itself with the "others" of our society as well:

Travelers and Roma people constantly evicted from European spaces, their right to Occupy anything denied while a complacent media enforces their status as “Other” and as such, undeserving of the right to inhabit spaces that should be reserved for legitimate Europeans. Because, let’s be clear here once and for all: only people who are legitimized by the State can occupy anything. The rest, the undocumented immigrants, the refuges, the Roma, the asylum seekers, had their right to occupy revoked. However, the European Occupy movement is not widely addressing this deprivation and their role, as rightful subjects, in it. Instead, I insist, the movement claims a bigger portion of the tainted pie.

To echo the point I made earlier in my Finnish-language blog post on transgender rights in Finland, Mahathma Gandhi has reputedly said that a nation is measured by how it treats its lesser members. I object to the idea that, say, the non-cisgendered or immigrants are somehow "lesser" members of society than the more outwardly conforming, but I'll again suggest a rewording: a movement for socio-economic change can be judged by who it wants to enact socio-economic change for. So far, the Occupy movement is a movement of the mainstream, for the mainstream, and the Others remain marginalized.

Money and jobs

In these desperate economic times, here's some interrelated economics articles for you to read. Enjoy.

Douglas Rushkoff: Are jobs obsolete?

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

The Economist: Social networkers of the world, unite

In the future, then, rather than a mystified system in which networking and fame lead to wealth only indirectly, the top economies will directly pay people to network and become famous. Economies that fail to institute such systems will naturally decay, collapse, and be digested, much as America's cash economy digested the non-cash economies of its aboriginal peoples, or as the global capitalist economy digested the state-socialist economies of the former communist world. Cash will become identical to social points, which is the ultimate point of the money system anyway.

David Graeber: On the Invention of Money – Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics

The persistence of the barter myth is curious. It originally goes back to Adam Smith. Other elements of Smith’s argument have long since been abandoned by mainstream economists—the labor theory of value being only the most famous example. Why in this one case are there so many desperately trying to concoct imaginary times and places where something like this must have happened, despite the overwhelming evidence that it did not?

The economics of emigration

Read Michael A. Clemens's paper Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?, from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should make economists’ jaws hit their desks. When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.

The paper goes on to argue that not only are the negative economical effects of emigration, on both the country of departure and arrival, overestimated, but that the positive impact on the world economy is greatly underestimated. For instance:

In historical cases of large reductions in barriers to labor mobility between high-income and low-income populations or regions, those with high wages have not experienced a large decline. For example, wages of whites in South Africa have not shown important declines since the end of the apartheid regime, despite the total removal of very large barriers to the physical movement and occupational choice of a poor population that outnumbered the rich population six to one. The recent advent of unlimited labor mobility between some Eastern European countries and Great Britain, though accompanied by large and sudden migration flows, has not caused important declines in British wages.

Or, in other words:

In my mind, what this simply means is that the most effective development aid we can give to third world countries is to let more of their citizens move here. This would lead to increased prosperity for us and them, or in other words, everyone. Most often, the economic argument against immigration is framed as in the video above. Perhaps the second-most common argument seems to assume that in each country, there are a fixed amount of jobs. Given that this involves jettisoning even the most basic understandings of how a market economy works, it's almost unbelievable that it can be advanced as an argument. To some extent, I suppose that speaks to the level of economic understanding imparted by our school systems.



There is no data that suggests that "unchecked immigration" would destroy Europe economically; on the contrary, there is data that much broader immigration would enrich the world immensely.

Timo Soini is no free marketer

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a text in Timo Soini's name. He's the leader of the Finnish Fundamentalist Party (the "True Finns" in official parlance), and the piece is supposedly his reasoning for opposing the Portugal bailout.

WSH: Why I Won't Support More Bailouts

Fortunately, it is not too late to stop the rot. For the banks, we need honest, serious stress tests. Stop the current politically inspired farce. Instead, have parallel assessments done by regulators and independent groups including stakeholders and academics. Trust, but verify.

Insolvent banks and financial institutions must be shut down, purging insolvency from the system. We must restore the market principle of freedom to fail.

If some banks are recapitalized with taxpayer money, taxpayers should get ownership stakes in return, and the entire board should be kicked out. But before any such taxpayer participation can be contemplated, it is essential to first apply big haircuts to bondholders.

For sovereign debt, the freedom to fail is again key. Significant restructuring is needed for genuine recovery. Yes, markets will punish defaulting states, but they are also quick to forgive. Current plans are destroying the real economies of Europe through elevated taxes and transfers of wealth from ordinary families to the coffers of insolvent states and banks. A restructuring that left a country's debt burden at a manageable level and encouraged a return to growth-oriented policies could lead to a swift return to international debt markets.

On the face of it, this is an incredibly sensible free-market critique of the European bailouts.

There's a problem with it: its supposed author is an agrarian populist who heads a party that proclaims itself to be "Christian Socialist". He's no free market proponent. While he condemns deficit spending in other European countries, he and his party are firmly in favor of massive deficit spending in Finland.

In their election manifesto, the "True Finns" demand an increased role for government in the Finnish economy and increased taxation. They specifically oppose the Finnish government's few efforts to introduce any kind of productivity and cost-efficiency standards into the public sector, and are in favor of increased intervention. As an example, in their manifesto on agriculture policy, Soini's party calls for maintaining gigantic agricultural subsidies but reducing oversight, and for ridiculous public works projects like a railway to the Arctic Ocean.

Before the election, Soini even proposed that the Finnish government invest the money curently held in pension funds into infrastructure projects like roads and railways (HS). He told Finland's state broadcasting company that some of this money should be used for the aforementioned Arctic Ocean railway (YLE). This is a lunatic idea that would simply result in the pension fund money vanishing into the black hole of pork barrel politics.

So don't be fooled by Soini's apparent free market stance. He's an old-fashioned pork-barrel politician who opposes the bailouts purely on nationalistic grounds: no Finnish money for foreigners! The text published in his name was almost certainly written by one of his many ghostwriters and image consultants, who his fans like to pretend he doesn't employ. The "True Finns" espouse none of the free market principles laid out in the text, and in fact, support their polar opposites in Finland.

Dead economists

Here's a couple of educational videos from Econstories introducing the principles of Keynesian economics and Austrian School, and their takes on economic cycles. Enjoy.

Independent links

Today is Finland's independence day, and to appropriately honor this country's history and its people's patriotism, I'm going to ignore it. Here's some links instead.

* Johan Norberg: GDP and its enemies

* (via The Agitator): Legalizing child pornography is linked to lower rates of child sex abuse: study

Results from the Czech Republic showed, as seen everywhere else studied (Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden, USA), that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalization and wide availability of pornography. And most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan. Their findings are published online today in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.

* Wired: Lieberman Introduces Anti-WikiLeaks Legislation

The so-called SHIELD Act (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination) would amend a section of the Espionage Act that already forbids publishing classified information on U.S. cryptographic secrets or overseas communications intelligence — i.e., wiretapping. The bill would extend that prohibition to information on HUMINT, human intelligence, making it a crime to publish information “concerning the identity of a classified source or informant of an element of the intelligence community of the United States,” or “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government” if such publication is prejudicial to U.S. interests.

Leaking such information in the first place is already a crime, so the measure is aimed squarely at publishers.

In short, videogame hater Joe Lieberman is now going after Wikileaks by trying to criminalize publishing information concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States. Free what?

You have got to be kidding me

This is unreal.

Guardian: Treasury plan to force banks to lend in poorer communities

Plans to force Britain's banks to pump money into poor communities in exchange for their massive taxpayer bailouts are being drawn up by the Treasury, a senior minister has revealed.

Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, said last week that the time was ripe to consider a UK version of America's Community Reinvestment Act, introduced in the 1970s to prevent banks abandoning deprived areas.

The CRA has resulted in American banks lending billions of dollars in rundown inner-city districts, and, with public anger at the activities of financial institutions running high, Byrne said he was actively considering a similar scheme for Britain.

"It is an interesting idea, which we are exploring earnestly at the Treasury," he told a fringe meeting at last week's Labour conference in Brighton.

The chief secretary added that there were two issues that worried him and his Treasury team – the lack of any hard evidence that particular communities were being frozen out by the British banking industry, and concerns that CRA-induced lending to poor households in the US had triggered the sub-prime crisis.

"These are serious questions for us to explore," Byrne said. "But we wouldn't be looking at it if we didn't think it would be a good idea."

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding.

For those of you not keeping score, the financial crisis was, in my opinion at least, primarily caused by two things: reckless mortgages that led to the housing bubble, and reckless financing. The first was based, at least in part, on the CRA; the second was based, at least in part, on the fact that all major Western banks know their governments won't let them go bankrupt, so they can basically do what they like.

So, in order to avoid another crisis like this, what are we doing?

- the Obama administration wants to label certain companies "systemically important", and extend a guarantee that they are never going to go bankrupt (Bloomberg.com)

- the British Labour Party wants to bring subprime mortgages to Europe

Are they even trying to fix anything?