By Jim Kulk · Monday, February 2, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
As a reader of Telos for over 35 years, I’ve admired Paul Piccone’s courage in investigating areas considered verboten on the Left, specifically: Telos‘s critique of Soviet power and the prediction of its demise, Telos‘s ongoing examination of custom, tradition, and religion in political thinking, and Telos‘s re-assessment of populism, decentralization, federalism, and the New Class.[1]
My presentation this morning looks at political divisions and the financial crisis. The underlying hypothesis is that the financial crisis cannot be genuinely solved by the traditional workings of the market and the state because the prominence of the logic of both sectors has now overwhelmed the process of internalization and a new balance must be reasserted.[2]
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By Jim Kulk · Monday, July 28, 2008 Who does the financing and what is financed have always been key questions in the evolution and behavior of American capitalism. Historically, powerful financial institutions in the United States have tended to follow a strategy of profiting from the capital development of the country. But over the past 25 years, “sophisticated” financial players (investment banks, the major money center banks, hedge funds, and Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs)—all implicitly backed by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury—have come to dominate financial decision-making and, in turn, the American economy.[1] The essence of their recently acquired power was in their ability to create and finance enormous quantities of new debt through the manufacture of “innovative” financial instruments. As a consequence, financial profits as a percentage of U.S. corporate profits grew from a low of 12% in 1984 to 37.6% in 2007, with non-productive debt supplanting the financing of sound business investment.[2]
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