Radio Segment: Mark Ames Reads An Unforgettable Letter To America’s Grandchildren

eXiled Radio / May 6, 2009

By Mark Ames

In the newest radio installment, Mark Ames reads to listeners a most unusual and fascinating letter from a member of the “generation of retirees” to their grandchildren. It’s an eye-opener! This segment was aired on Los Angeles’ KPFK radio on May 5, 2009, on the show “Four O’Clock Tuesdays With Gustavo Arellano.”

Listen to Ames butting in on Los Angeles radio KPFK 90.7 every Tuesday at 4p.m. on Gustavo Arellano’s “Four O’Clock Tuesdays” show. Check out Arellano’s blog here, it’s said to be Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s favorite bedtime reading!

Buy Mark Ames’ book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

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26 Comments

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1. joe stone | May 6th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
is this supposed to be funny?
2. mechagodzilla | May 7th, 2009 at 3:07 am
kahahahahahaha.
You little grand-fetus!
3. geo8rge | May 7th, 2009 at 4:30 am
Ames, if you wanted to retire you should have gotten a job with the government.
France? How about Romania?
4. Geroine Puff | May 7th, 2009 at 5:54 am
Mark stop stop I implore you
And look around.
Look at the eyes of your compatriots. See see
(AAAAAAAAA000) (AAAAAAAAA000) xxxx aaaa
tock tock
5. Realist | May 7th, 2009 at 6:12 am
All hail the Ames!
Seriously:
The Babyboomers are the failed generation. Never before has a more egocentrical and useless crop of humanity walked the face of this earth. The current looting is just the predictable move and last curtain in the tragedy of a generation which fell in love with itself.
6. Natedogg | May 7th, 2009 at 8:47 am
not exiled’s best work.
7. Charles Freedom | May 7th, 2009 at 9:19 am
There’s some serious shit going down in Swat, Pakistan…where in the fuck is our War Nerd article? Or at least some kind of hint on where to get video coverage, because AJE is fucked.
8. Ned Kelly | May 7th, 2009 at 11:09 am
This is on a par with Jonathan Swift.
9. chance mcgee | May 7th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
nice, except jack kemp’s daughters’ names are Jennifer and Judith, not Hannah. methinks the letter is from a different jack kemp if its from a jack kemp at all
10. weldon rumproast | May 7th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Fuck you Gramps! I can only hope your dreams have been ruined once you took a peep at your retirement fund…
OOPS! They canceled that when your 35-year-old coke fiend boss blew the company up with bad investments and shitty decision making! Guess you will have to spend the rest of your Depends-wearing life in the most decrepit state-run (ha socialism!) nursing home money can’t buy!
11. Balqis | May 7th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Much better, sarcastic
12. hydro-car | May 7th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Well the supply siders tried to cut spending but they couldn’t do it. National bankruptcy was inevitable even if Reagan had never happened, because there would never have been enough revenue for social security and the empire no matter what tax rates were. The only difference is timing. Now or 2030. And don’t worry, nobody’s gonna have to work three jobs to pay it off. We’re gonna default or devalue and stiff all the Sheikhs and Asians holding US debt, sooner than everyone thinks too. And if not, just go underground. Paying taxes is for suckers. If you can’t make a living under the radar in the Internet age, you ain’t trying hard enough.
13. Jared | May 7th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Why is vimeo being used? Why not use youtube or some easily accessible video player?
14. rick | May 7th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
This is brilliant, but I tried to listen to it earlier and it lost me right before the punchline. Heads up.
15. Delfosse | May 7th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
It’s recession, but is it that bad? Can’t Mark get a microphone? Is he recording it through his loudspeakers?
16. pete | May 7th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
where the hell is the war nerd article indeed!
17. badnewswade | May 8th, 2009 at 1:18 am
WE WANT WAR NERD! WE WANT WAR NERD!
18. Tam | May 8th, 2009 at 6:33 am
Ned Kelly : ‘This is on a par with Jonathan Swift.’
If you think that you clearly need to go and reread your Gulliver’s Travels. Swift sucks compared to Ames.
Actually, come to think of it, I’d strongly recommend that everyone read Mark Ames more. I do.
19. kmbence | May 9th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
ok, this was funny, but, getting serious, people have a completely false notion of what government debt just really is. it is not like private debt, that have to be “paid down”.
ever heard of the expression “fallacy of composition”?
check out this:
http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/pn/pn0601.htm
“We can divide the economy into 3 sectors. Let’s keep this as simple as possible: there is a private sector that includes both households and firms. There is a government sector that includes both the federal government as well as all levels of state and local governments. And there is a foreign sector that includes imports and exports; (in the simplest model, we can summarize that as net exports—the difference between imports and exports—although to be entirely accurate, we use the current account balance as the measure of the impact of the foreign sector on the balance of income and spending).
At the aggregate level, the dollar spending of all three sectors combined must equal the income received by the three sectors combined. Aggregate spending equals aggregate income. But there is no reason why any one sector must spend an amount exactly equal to its income. One sector can run a surplus (spend less than its income) so long as another runs a deficit (spends more than its income).
Historically the US private sector spends less than its income—that is it runs a surplus. Another way of saying that is that the private sector saves. In the past, on average the private sector spent about 97 cents for every dollar of income.
Historically, the US on average ran a balanced current account—our imports were just about equal to our exports. (As discussed below, that has changed in recent years, so that today the US runs a huge current account deficit.)
Now, if the foreign sector is balanced and the private sector runs a surplus, this means by identity that the government sector runs a deficit. And, in fact, historically the government sector taken as a whole averaged a deficit: it spent about $1.03 for every dollar of national income.
Note that that budget deficit exactly offsets the private sector’s surplus—which was about 3 cents of every dollar of income. In fact, if we have a balanced foreign sector, there is no way for the private sector as a whole to save unless the government runs a deficit. Without a government deficit, there would be no private saving. Sure, one individual can spend less than her income, but another would have to spend more than his income.”
20. Chikita-235 | May 9th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
There were news about Ameses biological kid found in Moscow. Anyone keeps the track how old the boy must be today?
21. Finnegan Waist | May 9th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
There was info on some exile affiliated moscow expat forum that I have been stalking Ames during his stay. While stalking him, I imagined that I had his children. But then 2 of them died because I am a stalker freak and even in my fantasies bad things happen. I better go cut myself now.
22. Plamen Petkov | May 11th, 2009 at 3:10 am
to kmbence:
oh but ALL government debt eventually has to be paid, same as private debt.
Well presented article you got posted there but all you are doing is citing some other guy. Did you write all that yourself? macro, micro, Dick(NEVER right Cheney) said debt doesn’t matter), whatever. All you are doing is parroting some other guys.
When USA’s Treasury Bonds mature, they MUST be paid to whoever country bough them. That used to be Japan, now it’s China. But China recently has been getting cold feet about buying any more new TBs. Paying the TBs is paying debt. Don’t play ignorant.
USA went from the largest creditor to the largest debtor in just 25 years. That’s fine as long as somebody is willing to finance its debt. How long will that be? 30 years? 50?
China recently became Brazil’s favorite trading partner. While all USA does is import wars of conquest, China and Russia make finance. Debt doesn’t equal money either. All it equals is …debt.
About that article you linked to: oh so predicable to place the 2000 recession on Clinton. Same as placing the housing crisis on some law Carter passed way back in 1977 or 1978(like Reagan couldn’t have revoked it) Which Democrat should we place the current crisis on?
23. Zim | May 11th, 2009 at 3:39 am
War Nerd… Where is he?
24. kmbence | May 11th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Plamen Pletkov:
I’m not parroting anyone. Stop insulting others and show us some arguments. All I did was to cite a good, easily comprehensible introductory essay on the topic by an excellent economist specialized in monetary/financial matters. Didn’t have the time and energy to put it all down myself.
No, gov. debt is not like private debt, as modern governments always have had (and will have) debt and deficits and will never pay them down completely, as opposed to a private firm or household.
They create money and are thus sovereign as long as they operate in their own currency, as opposed to firms and households who do not create money and can simply and literally run out of it. If the US has a huge CA deficit (which is of course a problem and should be dealt with) and you do not want the private sector to run a deficit (becoming indebted even more) then, by simple arithmetics, the gov has to run a deficit (by definition). When Treasuries mature, yes, then they have to be paid, but usually they are paid by issuing new treasuries, and the US gov can (and does) also borrow from the FED itself (in fact much of US public debt is owned to the FED, that is, it is IOUs within the government), whereas firms and household cannot. US net public debt is somewhere in the order of 60% of GDP (depends how you define it), which is not very high, Japan’s is roughly at 200% of its GDP, and that does NOT mean that the Japanese gov is insolvent (it cannot be in its own currency). (BTW the expression „financing its debt” also reflects a misconception of money and finance in general…won’t go into it.)
Yes gov debt does matter, but not in the way you imagine, it matters through how deficits are spent (and THIS is the problem right now in the US: it is spent on subsidising insolvent banks owned by superrich capitalists, instead of taking these banks over and spending government money on useful and badly needed things like education, health care, public transportation and so on), and through its possible inflationary effects. No, deficits (and/or expansionary monetary policy) are not necessarily inflationary: Japan has been expanding its money supply like crazy ever since 1989, and not only did this NOT result in inflation, on the contrary, they couldn’t even get out of the deflationary spiral. this is because money (the money supply) is endogenous, and monetarism (AKA the ‘quantity theory of money’) is false.
Check out here: “In other words, the monetarists have got the wrong end of the stick – money supply responds to the demand for money not vice versa.”
http://www.monthlyreview.org/090413-vasudevan.php
No, China did not get cold feet about buying Treasuries, actually it boosted its purchases of TBs.
see it here: http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/2009/03/04/how-a-us-financial-crises-rebounded-to-benefit-the-dollar-three-pictures especially this picture: http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/files/2009/03/dec-tic-4.png
No, Wray does not “blame” the 2000-2001 crisis on Clinton (who does not matter), as he does not blame the present crisis on Carter (which would be very silly indeed) – both of these crises have much deeper roots than the minuscule, negligible variations of policy that happen between Dem and Rep administrations. Will you please try and forget the Republocrats? There’s no difference between them anyhow.
However, the 2000-2001 crisis could have been probably averted, or at least mitigated by adopting less restrictive fiscal policies. BY the way, Wray and his colleagues at the Levy Institute precisely foretold both of these recessions (2000-2001 and 2008-?), but they weren’t listened to…Check out the “strategic analysis” section at the Levy Inst website (pieces between 2003-2007)…it is quite astonishing to see how they tried to draw attention again and again to the looming crisis, but were invariably ignored…
I could go on.
And finally: yes, you need to learn more political economy.
(of course that applies to all of us (including me))
(This is, obviously, not to endorse the bank-bailout which is a scandolous robbery of the American public by the corporate-financial élite…But that’s another story…)
25. yourfather | May 11th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
kmbence: Thank you for the informative post. You can ignore Petkov. It’s just another one of those Eastern European fatheads who believes in the existence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and thinks that the Japanese are more liberal than Americans just because he enjoys masturbating to manga (I bet he hasn’t even been to Japan).
26. Krupskaya, N. K. | May 12th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
‘KPFK’?
Еб меня к смерти! Слава Cталину!