The More Things Change...

Via Digby, here's a bit of old history I've been reminded of too, thought about, too, and it does give a sense of déjà vu—

WASHINGTON -- On Jan. 1, 2000, the world awoke to find that little had changed since the night before. After years of hype around what was then called Y2K -- the fear that computer systems across the globe would collapse, unable to handle the year shifting from '99 to '00 -- the date change turned out to be a momentous non-event.

Next week, the United States is in for much the same, after months of frantic hype about the economic disruption that awaits if Congress and the president fail to reach a deal and the federal government goes "over the fiscal cliff." (The difference between Y2K and the fiscal cliff being that computer programmers worked around the clock to ensure the former was a non-event.)

The so-called fiscal cliff is a combination of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1. But the agencies responsible for implementing those changes, including the IRS and the Pentagon, are well aware that congressional and White House negotiators will most likely come to some sort of deal within weeks or months -- and so they are planning to carry on as usual, according to a broad review of private and public government plans.

In other words, there will be no cliff. There won't even be a slope. Congress and the president can have their public and private dramas, but the government officials responsible for carrying out their eventual orders have seen this movie before, and they know how it ends.

Oh well: some truth in labeling, at last. Though the "post-bipartisan" has always amounted to as much.

The libraries have wait lists for copies of this, but I have heard David Graeber's Majority Report interviews, including this.

As I remember his historical summary, cash markets evolved around military operations. When paper money came into use, a bank would lend cash to the king, who would go into in debt. The king would then lend his debt to the populace, who used it for the exchanges that make up an economy, before sending it back as taxes.

"If the king ever paid back the debt," says Graeber, "there'd be no money."