Hoover was a failure and his policies bankrupted the entire middle of the 
country and he didn't give a huckapuck.     His Osage Vice-President Curtis has 
been in disgrace in Indian Country since the 1930s.    Every now and then the 
Kaw Clan tries to re-invent him but Curtis was a Mestizo typical capitalist who 
never missed an opportunity to sell what others had developed and nurtured and 
sacrificed for.    

 

A good example of that true development is the herding methods of the plains 
peoples, including Curtis's relatives,  the Osage, who for 10,000 years studied 
and developed the Buffalo and fired the plains every year to keep back the 
trees and  develop the great herds of Buffalo, Antelope and the smaller 
animals.    When the AE peoples arrived there were estimated to be 60 million 
buffalo in that garden not counting the the great herds of Antelope.     Those 
animals were precious to all Indian people but President Lincoln, with the 
Homestead Act, opened the plains to the exploiters and within one hundred years 
the fertility of the plains was dropped, according to the Canadian Government, 
by 70% and the Buffalo and Antelope were gone.     Now the're killing the 
water.     

 

Capitalism is a method not a Foundation and a very poorly thought out 
theoretical structure.    The real order of sustainability is 1. Foundation,   
2.Theory,  3.  Methodology, 4. Applicability,  5.  Observation,  6.  Adjustment 
and 7.  Sustainability.      American Immigrant folks call that "Systems" 
traditional American Indians call it "Spirituality." 

 

REH

 

From: Ed Weick [mailto:ewe...@rogers.com] 
Sent: Saturday, May 25, 2013 10:43 AM
To: Ray Harrell
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes and the EU

 

Don't know if it's different, but it is more recent.

 

Ed

 

  _____  

From: Ray Harrell <mc...@nyc.rr.com>
To: 'Ed Weick' <ewe...@rogers.com>; "'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, 
EDUCATION'" <futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca> 
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 10:32:49 AM
Subject: RE: [Futurework] Keynes and the EU

 

Is this different from Herbert Hoover?

 

REH

 

From: futurework-boun...@lists.uwaterloo.ca 
[mailto:futurework-boun...@lists.uwaterloo.ca] On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 9:52 AM
To: Futurework; dissenters
Subject: [Futurework] Keynes and the EU

 

>From today's Globe and Mail.  Kenneth Rogoff argues that Keynesian economics 
>would have little application to the the financial problems of the European 
>Union.  Without a single fiscal system and perhaps a single governmental 
>system, the EU is not likely to last much longer.  In its current state, there 
>is little possibility that its ideology and reality can ever meet.

 

Ed

 

----------------------

 

KENNETH ROGOFF


Anti-austerity: Keynes never met the euro zone 


There is no magic Keynesian bullet for the euro zone’s woes. But the 
spectacularly muddle-headed argument nowadays that too much austerity is 
killing Europe is not surprising. Commentators are consumed by politics, 
flailing away at any available target, while the “anti-austerity” masses 
apparently believe that there are easy cyclical solutions to tough structural 
problems.


The euro zone’s difficulties, I have long argued, stem from European financial 
and monetary integration having gotten too far ahead of actual political, 
fiscal and banking union. This is not a problem with which John Maynard Keynes 
was familiar, much less one that he sought to address.


Above all, any realistic strategy for dealing with the euro zone crisis must 
involve massive write-downs (forgiveness) of peripheral countries’ debt. These 
countries’ massive combined bank and government debt – the distinction 
everywhere in Europe has become blurred – makes rapid sustained growth a dream.

 

This is hardly the first time I have stressed the need for wholesale debt 
write-downs. Two years ago, I wrote that Europe “is in constitutional crisis. 
No one seems to have the power to impose a sensible resolution of its 
peripheral countries’ debt crisis. Instead of restructuring the manifestly 
unsustainable debt burdens of Portugal, Ireland and Greece (the PIGs), 
politicians and policy-makers are pushing for ever-larger bailout packages with 
ever-less-realistic austerity conditions.”

 

My sometime co-author Carmen Reinhart makes the same point, perhaps even more 
clearly. In 2010, she described 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/07/AR2010050703436.html?sid=ST2010050704340>
  five myths about the European debt crisis – among them, the myth that fiscal 
austerity “will solve Europe’s debt woes.” We have repeated the mantra dozens 
of times in various settings.

 

In a debt restructuring, the northern euro zone countries (including France) 
will see hundreds of billions of euros go up in smoke. Northern taxpayers will 
be forced to inject massive amounts of capital into banks, even if the 
authorities impose significant losses on banks’ large and wholesale creditors, 
as well they should. These hundreds of billions of euros are already lost, and 
the game of pretending otherwise cannot continue indefinitely.

 

A gentler way to achieve some modest reduction in public and private debt 
burdens would be to commit to a period of sustained but moderate inflation, as 
I recommended in 2008. Sustained moderate inflation would help to bring down 
the real value of real estate more quickly, and potentially make it easier for 
German wages to rise faster than those in peripheral countries. It would have 
been a great idea 41/2 years ago. It remains a good idea today.

 

What else needs to happen? The other steps involve economic restructuring at 
the national level and political integration of the euro zone. Last year, I 
concluded 
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a-centerless-euro-cannot-hold>  
that “without further profound political and economic integration – which may 
not end up including all current euro zone members – the euro may not make it 
even to the end of this decade.”

 

Here, all eyes may be on Germany, but it is really France that will play the 
central role in deciding the euro’s fate. Germany cannot carry the euro on its 
shoulders alone indefinitely. France needs to become a second anchor of growth 
and stability.

 

Temporary Keynesian demand measures may help to sustain short-run internal 
growth, but they will not solve France’s long-run competitiveness problems. At 
the same time, France and Germany must both come to terms with an approach that 
leads to far greater political union within a couple of decades. Otherwise, the 
coming banking union and fiscal transfers will lack the necessary political 
legitimacy.

 

As macroeconomist Jeffrey Frankel 
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/contributor/jeffrey-frankel>  has remarked, 
for more than 20 years, Germany’s elites have insisted that the euro zone will 
not be a transfer union. But, in the end, ordinary Germans have been proved 
right, and the elites have been proved wrong. Indeed, if the euro zone is to 
survive, the northern countries will have to continue to help the periphery 
with new loans until access to private markets is restored.

 

So, given that Germany will be picking up many more bills, how can it best use 
the strength of its balance sheet to alleviate Europe’s growth problems? 
Certainly, Germany must continue to acquiesce in an ever-larger role for the 
European Central Bank, despite the obvious implicit fiscal risks. There is no 
safe path forward.

 

There are a number of schemes floating around for leveraging Germany’s lower 
borrowing costs to help its partner countries, beyond simply expanding the 
ECB’s balance sheet. For meaningful burden-sharing to work, however, euro zone 
leaders must stop dreaming that the single currency can survive another 20 or 
30 years without much greater political union.

 

Debt write-downs and guarantees will inevitably bloat Germany’s government 
debt, as the authorities are forced to bail out German banks (and probably some 
neighbouring countries’ banks). But the sooner the underlying reality is made 
transparent and becomes widely recognized, the lower the long-run cost will be.

 

To my mind, using Germany’s balance sheet to help its neighbours directly is 
far more likely to work than is the presumed “trickle-down” effect of a 
German-led fiscal expansion. This, unfortunately, is what has been lost in the 
debate about Europe of late: However loud and aggressive the anti-austerity 
movement becomes, there still will be no simple Keynesian cure for the single 
currency’s debt and growth woes.

 

Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist of the IMF, is professor of economics 
and public policy at Harvard University.

 

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