naked capitalism

DownSouth says:

@McKinsey Quarterly: "State capitalism and the crisis"

When I read Bremmer's article I was reminded of something that the Rev. Al Sharpton said at Michael Jackson's memorial service:

And I want his three children to know, wudn't nothin' strange about yo daddy, it was strange what your daddy had to deal with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MAKLq865bk

Sharpton's comment promted me to think of just how bizarrare it is that we live in a culture that deems someone like Michael Jackson to be "strange," and yet public liars like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield and Colin Powell, who were willing to stand before an entire nation, and indeed an entire world, and spout blatant untruths that carry lethal consequences for millions of innocent people, are judged as "normal."

The following passage by Bremmer is really quite stunning:

As globalization came to seem more and more like a historical inevitability, the assumption among wealthy nations was that the injection of politics was a temporary stage, that these developing economies would mature (each at its own tempo) into a state of grace in which economic balances, not politics, would drive local markets.
~

It boggles the mind how Bremmer could make such a statement. It is as if, for Bremmer, the armies of paid lobbyists, the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, the bought-off national press, the millions of campaign contributions by Wall Street firms that buy access and influence, none of this even exists in Bremmer's mind.

The surreal quality of it all is evidence of something that Cornel West wrote of in The Future of the Race:

My fundamental problem with Du Bois is his inadequate grasp of the tragicomic sense of life–a refusal candidly to confront the sheer absurdity of the human condition. This tragicomic sense- tragicomic rather than simply "tragic," because even ultimate purpose and objective order are called into question–propels us toward suicide or madness unless we are buffered by ritual, cushioned by community, or sustained by art.
~

James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time also wrote of the tendency to live in mythical make-believe worlds in order to escape our responsiblities to this life:

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the ony fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life. It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.