Looking for Today's Roosevelt

If you are a politician and would dear to pronounce a speech like this today: please, launch yourself.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Address, October 1936

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred."

The whole speech is in the link.

Global or Western Crisis?

Photo by El Adelantado de Segovia

There is not a better way of coming back to work (and reality) than to plunge into the Hay Festival in Segovia. Global Crisis: is the world economic system out of control? was the event held on Friday.

At the beginning, the moderator Adam Austerfield (LSE) said that people blame them (economists) for the crisis, and that that was unfair. I agree that economists are not the only to blame as almost everybody finds extremely difficult to think about the way we all think. The root of the crisis is exactly there: current western mentality in which we all are involved.

This crisis is consequence of thinking that mathematics, which is at the base of economy, is able to solve human problems stand-alone. On Friday, in Segovia, the ideal of humanity as a balance between rationality, ethics and aesthetics was truly far away: while the public used their chance asking where to put the money, Danny Quah, the expert in economics from the LSE, simply recommended the Golf Countries without the slightest sign of regret.

This crisis will be solved, no doubt. But the risk of not rectifying our mentality is going to be the prevalence of the political version of the Gresham Law John Gray exposed in his False Dawn: bad capitalism is going to expel good one. By the way, Gray thinks that this is not just another crisis but the fall of USA just as the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. Here is the article at The Guardian in which he says so few days ago.