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Several years ago I came across a cynical enumeration of the “Six Phases of a Project” somewhere online; I saved it though I didn’t keep the original url. Oh well. I was thinking about these today:

Six Phases of a Project

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. A Search for the Guilty
5. The Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honor for the Non-participants

I think it’s easy to see this same arc in a lot of human screw-ups, beyond just the workplace project context which I think they were originally meant to describe.

For example, isn’t this similar in a lot of ways to the international financial crisis and its fallout? First, enthusiasm for the bubble economy: this is awesome, we’re all getting rich, don’t listen to those Chicken Littles, real estate can only keep going up in value forever, just get in now! Then, disillusionment: oh, crap, it was a bubble after all. Followed by panic: oh god, no one can possibly repay all of these debts and apparently letting Lehman Brothers collapse didn’t shock everyone back into line and our entire financial system could really fucking disintegrate here.

Stage four, “a search for the guilty,” might not seem to apply given that most of the guilty got away scot free. But stage four has to be considered in context of the whole list, which clearly does not include “punishment of the guilty.” (more…)

So, Whither the Occupy (Wall Street, etc.) protests?

I can’t do a whole lot here other than echo what others have said. On the one hand, I have to agree with Uncle Paul in that this seems like a favor, or at least an opportunity, for the Occupy protests in some ways. They had kind of plateaued, in terms of raising awareness of inequality and winner-take-all-capitalism concerns, and appeared in danger of fading away. That may still happen, but I think that if “The Man” had wanted to silence their voices he would have been better off letting short attention spans and cold weather do the work through slow attrition.

Frankly I can’t quite figure out the thinking behind this crackdown. It really does seem to do nothing but make the protesters look more relevant than before, and make Bloomberg, et al., look like heavy-handed dictators. In return for what? Is it just an instinctive reflex, “this rabble is challenging my authority, I will destroy them” i.e.? Is the establishment actually admitting that Occupy Wall Street has rattled them, then? Why?

Honestly, it’s tough for me to see the threat; interest in the protests seemed to be waning, as noted, and in the meantime I’m unsure what they were disrupting. To be blunt, the parasitic business of Wall Street seems to have continued pretty much uninterrupted despite its “occupation.” Are the big city bosses really that sensitive? And, more to the point, that sensitive on the issue of questioning the prevailing wealth=virtue dogma? I suppose they probably are, as Uncle Paul among others has chronicled since Obama took office (“Ma, he’s looking at me funny,” etc.).

Still, whatever the reasoning it all looks like a horrible reactionary assault. I have difficulty believing that, whatever Bloomberg, et al. may tell themselves, there isn’t a big ideological element to this establishment repression of protesters. The official justifications are just so easy to poke holes in that they’re pathetic, though at the same time also scary. (more…)

I wish I had something useful or insightful to say about the crisis unfolding in Greece. If only because being able to somehow “master the situation,” if only intellectually, might make it seem less worrying.

As-is: very worrying.

What seems the most worrying is the seeming absolute denial of the men* in suits that there is simply no painless way out of this.

Those with a better grasp of the situation than mine have been writing for quite some time about “haircuts,” their favored euphemism for creditors getting less money than they have heretofore expected to get. Now we’re to the point where a Greek exit from the Euro is beginning to look like a matter of “when, not if” to even sober, skeptical observers.

Whatever may happen, the one thing which seems completely impossible is for the matter to just fix itself if alleged “leaders” simply temporize long enough. Short of the Greek government stumbling upon the buried treasure of all classical-antiquity treasures and promptly putting it up for auction, I fail to see how exactly Greece can just “fix itself” without anyone else being inconvenienced in any way. (more…)