With the United States stumbling toward a new post- pre-modernity, a state of unknowing where technocratic pedantry guided by an unrepentant id defines the realm of social truth, a remnant of the past is re-asserted through the division of social analysis into realms of alleged expertise. Economists address the economy, environmental scientists address the environment, political scientists address the political and historians address the historical.
Less certain is the state of political economy that once united these to define the realm of social concern. In the domain of history the pitch of the sun, the smell of the grass, the feel of the breeze and the ties through remembrance to how these were, aren’t tales of land wars and presidents and anti-trust legislation, but neither are they nothing. And in fact, this embeddedness is political in the sense of grounding the social-discursive in ways that aren’t fungible.
Graph: the question of why CEO compensation soared relative to everyone else’s around the time Bill Clinton was first elected president can be reduced to a single word: financialization. Through complicit Boards of Directors, corporate executives granted themselves stock options in the midst of manufactured stock market booms. Of note is that CEOs barely suffered in the Great Recession as others did. Source: EPI.
Where I currently live the local underclass, about 70% of the population, ‘beneficiaries’ of three decades of de-industrialization, hate…