1/ Jane Dark:

Over at the sud­denly and excel­lently renascent Ads With­out Prod­ucts, the sud­denly and excel­lently erst­while CR has been making a vital record of the guilty half-​repressed flow­er­ing of nation­al­iza­tion talk in the national dis­course — patiently noting that while the mea­sures dis­cussed are always simul­ta­ne­ously dis­avowed, and not really full-​nationalization (much less social­ism), it remains the case that

…every time they dress the win­dows with this sort of talk, every time the gov­ern­ment play­ers offer the argu­ment that Gen­eral Motors or Chrysler would have been better man­aged by respon­si­ble, sane, and forward-​thinking bureau­crats rather than their board and cor­po­rate man­age­ment, they turn the wheel of dis­cur­sive nor­ma­tiv­ity a click toward state man­age­ment and the eco­nom­ics of planning….

…

[W]e fear one could make what is, in effect, a quite con­trary claim. Yes, there is a hys­ter­i­cal leap from “nationalization” to “socialism,” and it ain’t CR’s. But one might be leery of that hys­te­ria — which is, after all, indica­tive of an already-​existing delu­sion, not a rising new under­stand­ing — as being an indi­ca­tion of what is sud­denly imaginable.

After all, he 20th cen­tury has (at least) two clear tra­di­tions of a cen­tral­ized and planned econ­omy. One is what our patri­ots call social­ism. The other is (tellingly) ever more for­got­ten and ever more with us, which is some­thing like Alfredo Rocco’s (and later Mussolini’s) cor­po­ratism, which can be rec­og­nized in muta­tions of the devel­op­men­tal state such as Sin­ga­pore or South Korea. And it strikes us that, of these “two nationalizations,” it is the latter that we are swerv­ing toward. Tellingly, Russia’s spasm of nation­al­iza­tions simply makes evi­dent that the Soviet Union’s final eco­nomic form wasn’t com­mu­nism at all, for there is no return to worker own­er­ship or any­thing of the sort, but a rever­sal of their own dis­as­trous neolib­eral adven­ture for global hard times.

…

So one might say that we are seeing not the tender creep of social­ist pos­si­bil­i­ties into the national dis­course, but their fur­ther era­sure. Every time that we agree that the word “socialism” might refer to some­thing other than, at a min­i­mum, worker own­er­ship if not indeed the end of sur­plus value extrac­tion; every time that we mis­rec­og­nize state cor­po­ratism as some­thing other than a moment in capital’s “equilibrium in motion,” we “turn the wheel of dis­cur­sive nor­ma­tiv­ity a click” away from social­ism. We forget what that word promises.

2/ Yves Smith:

The ques­tion du jour is why does the US have such a phobia regard­ing nationalization….

While the ini­tial (cor­rect) reflex is that undue gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence in a well-​functioning pri­vate sector is not a good idea, the indus­tries in ques­tion (finan­cial ser­vices and auto­mo­biles) have top play­ers that are now abject fail­ures on tax­payer life sup­port. These com­pa­nies have been exempted from market dis­ci­pline (aka bank­ruptcy) thanks to state intervention.

The very fact that they oper­ated with min­i­mal gov­ern­ment over­sight, drove them­selves to the verge of bank­ruptcy, and man­aged to make them­selves so essen­tial that they cannot be per­mit­ted to col­lapse says they cannot be left in their former hands (incum­bent man­age­ment is either colos­sal incom­pe­tent, amaz­ingly cor­rupt and schem­ing, or both).

But unlike the UK, and Sweden during its early 1990s crisis (widely touted as best prac­tice) which were both ready to assume con­trol of banks that wrecked them­selves, the US con­tin­ues to ratio­nal­ize, nay, pro­mote, the worst of all pos­si­ble worlds: social­iza­tion of losses, the bozo man­age­ment teams still largely (often entirely, as in the case of Cit­i­group) intact, inad­e­quate to no super­vi­sion (where are the board seats?) and no upside par­tic­i­pa­tion, not even much expla­na­tion of what they intend to do with the dough (well, now great the­ater is being made of the auto indus­try, because it is easy to pick on guys from the grubby Mid­west, but the bank­ing crowd, which did far more damage and has gotten much bigger hand­outs and no unpleas­ant questions).

…

That is a long-​winded way of saying that gov­ern­ment inef­fi­ciency and incom­pe­tence is not a given, as is often depicted in the US. The demo­niza­tion of gov­ern­ment ser­vice has prob­a­bly dis­cour­aged able people from seek­ing public sector jobs. Even so, some areas still get high marks (the FDIC). And the con­tin­ued dis­par­age­ment of gov­ern­ment serves as cover for those who want sub­si­dies and res­cues but hope to avoid the demands that should prop­erly go with them.

This New York Times arti­cle deals with the Obama team’s reluc­tance †o be seen as “nationalizing”. I see. So we would rather pander to the bank­rupt ide­ol­ogy that helped create this mess, let the perps con­tinue to get unde­served princely pay, and stick the hap­less sop tax­payer with the guaranteed-to-be-rotten fruit of this exer­cise rather than demon­strate lead­er­ship and reframe the issues. The hes­i­ta­tion to demand even modest quid pro quos is beyond belief. No pri­vate sector nego­tia­tor would ever accept such a deal.

Is this “Change We Can Believe In?” Looks like the same old crap to me, with better sales­men in charge.

The golden rule is that he who pro­vides the gold, makes the rules. Time to get over pros­trat­ing before the pri­vate sector when it has abjectly screwed up.