Beware of Greeks Bearing Debt

It seems some billionaire Greek shipping tycoon has hit on the novel plan of buying up Greek debt at 12 Euro pennies on the Euro with, he claims, the long term goal of forgiving all the debt. He claims that if each Greek contributes 3,000 Euros they can buy up all the debt and then forgive themselves. He has not as yet forgiven any of the debt because that, he says, would drive the price of the debt up.

Should it be that this an actual, as opposed to Trojan, gift horse, it is a pretty nifty idea.

From Here to There

How do you go from vaguely Dylan incomprehensible poetry like this:



To full on political engagement like this



Or, for that matter, from comedic jazzy whatnot like this



 To the near madness of this



To the philosophical depth of this



And that is leaving aside one of the finest albums ever.

In other words, what seems today to be clear and certain will or might in the fullness of time become if not its opposite at least something both weird and wonderful. Or so I tell my self when surveying the current economy and my  place within it.

Recalled to Life the Final Comment

What exactly the recall election meant or means in Wisconsin politics is, of course, years away from being full understood. However, much of the emergent punditocracy's narrative strikes me as being foolish and wrong and based on a bunch of assumptions that don't hold up to sustained scrutiny.
 
It is difficult to see how the Walker victory constitutes a resounding defeat for the coalition of unions, workers, and politically active leftists. That coalition has now in place a million something network of politically engaged voters; it has a clear message that abhors the ALEC-based retreat to the 19th century; it has stopped an further rightward shift or shenanigans in the immediate future.

Given that, as everyone pointed out, how Obama was AWOL from the fracas it is difficult to see this election as having any bearing on the up-coming presidential election.

The election also, it seems to me, threw the tactics, strategies, and philosophical orientation of Walker and Barret supporters into sharp contrast. For the coalition behind Barret this was largely a state campaign waged with instate money, volunteers, and related etc over issues specific to Wisconsin.  For Walker's campaign this was a national campaign which drew on the power of the plutocrats his policies benefits and the various right-wing organizations that seek to erode the power of state legislatures to set their own agendas, i.e., ALEC.

Indeed, one constant refrain emerging from the noise and confusion is that Walker is a national figure on the right. This indicates, to me in any event, that the way forward for the neoliberal right and conservatives more generally is away from their always dishonest commitment to states' rights and toward and ever more powerful and autocratic centralized state.

On the plus side:

The Salem runner was last in the race and she picked up the other runner after she collapsed and  made sure she crossed the finish line a head of her.

Balderdash, Nonsense, and Bullshit

As one looks round and about the world as it actually is, one of the more compelling conclusions is that the current system isn't all that hot. Indeed, looking backward at the long history of the present, one might conclude that the violence, both moral and physical,[1] necessary to create the various version of a centralized state aren't out weighed by the current misery and its likely continuation. Indeed, as you and I are not moral cretins, when we consider what is to be done, we conclude that it ought to be something rather different.

Perhaps, as Graeber suggestively suggests, the future might look like a society bound together by mutual respect and material reciprocity, which is really just another way of saying the future is not going to be a neoliberal laboratory for the creation of sociopaths.

On the other hand, if you have no moral center and don't particularly care if the world continues past your next paycheck, which is to say you are David Brooks, you might write of seeking an alternative method of social organization and melioration as a

prevailing service religion [that] underestimates the problem of disorder. Many of the activists talk as if the world can be healed if we could only insert more care, compassion and resources into it.

The very idea that improving the world depends on creating a nonviolent, nonhierarchical social solution is impossible because

[h]istory is not kind to this assumption. Most poverty and suffering — whether in a country, a family or a person — flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it. 

Leaving aside what Brooks knows about history and historiography, he seems to think that the socio-political order we currently enjoy, and by we he means America, is not only an but the ideal set of social, political , and economic relations and, furthermore, with no evidence at all, he implies that the long strange path to the present is a natural one.

These are both commonplaces of the neoliberal thinkers, whose job it is convince the rest of us that change is impossible because the inhuman and dehumanizing present is culmination of human progress and the ideal expression of humanities essential nature.

This position is, of course, balderdash, nonsense, and bullshit of the highest order. But it does show how Brooks sticks to his chosen profession with a tenacity that reality cannot dim nor possibility mar. On the plus side, given that he is wrong about everything, the efforts of those he belittles might indicate that they are winning.

He is a horrid little man, who like nothing better than to smother the potentially effective alternatives to markets because it pays the rent.



[1] By moral, I mean something like Elias' Civilizing Process.

Post Racial

There is some good news to come out of the Derbyshire debacle.  While I disagree with the NRO's decision to fire him, I agree with his childrens' reaction to his "talk." As he explains

[b]oth took it with some skepticism, even some disgust in my daughter's case. Both have been through the public-school system and taken in a lot of the left-liberal PC indoctrination in which that system is marinated. So I'd have to say they weren't very receptive. Was there ever a time when kids listened to their parent's advice? But at least they've heard it, and know that there's another point of view besides the PC flapdoodle, a point of view held by non-crazy persons. One does one's best.

Derbyshire's wife is Chinese and, oddly enough, his "bi-racial" children find his advice to behave as if more often than not black Americans wanted to either rob, kill, or something them because they are, you know, racial inferior scientifically speaking. While there is all manner of positive representations of Asian Americans as a ideal minority this is a new development. Might it be that the PC public education that Derbyshire denigrates taught his kids the actual history of anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese racialist thought in these United States? Might it not be that there skepticism and disgust arose from that set of facts?

A Journey of a Thousand Miles

begins with a single step. Clearly many of the Right's responses to Trayvon Martin's murder have been repugnant. On the other hand, Paul Krugman's op-ed piece shows one way to use the event to focus energy and attention of ALEC and, ideally, convince the non-crazy among us that the time has come to shut down the neoliberals' privatization of everything in their  relentless attempt to destroy America.

Would That We Did

Obviously, Bruce is being ironical here but the fact of the matter is if we did Trayvon Martin would be alive and neoliberals wouldn't run the economy.




In a related matter Obama's choice for the World Bank potentially lightens the darkness of our future.

Game Changer?

The Trayvon Martin story is horrific. The number of Floridians "legally" murdered because of its insane gun laws is horrific. Its economic condition is horrific.  All of these horrific events and conditions result from some neoliberal reform or another.

The Martin story alone ought to be enough to put an end once and for all to the idea that racism, institution if not personal, is dead. The unnecessary gun deaths ought to put an end to the idea that an armed society is a polite society. The economic misery ought to put an end to the neoliberal fantasies.

Any decent society would denounce the Florida syndrome without hesitation. Anybody is actually interested in our common good and collective future would denounce the Florida syndrome.  Anybody who actually cares about the current crises in America would not be running around wringing their hands about contraception and abortion but would rather denounce the Florida syndrome.

Will we? Will they? Will this be the moment when we finally start to get our country back from the small-minded theocratic thugs, the empty-headed political and tv grifters, the lying cultural warriors, the plutocrats and their academic shills?

God, I hope so. But don't hold your breath.

How To Win a Culture War

If the Right loses the ability to lie about other people and then pour vitriol and vile language on their  fellow citizens, the phony "culture war" disappears. Obama, for all his faults, understands or seems to understand this:



Who knows maybe things are look up, all evidence to the contrary.

(video via)

Choose Life

The audio is a Republican "pro-life legislator" explaining his vote for marriage equality:

Morning America

Years ago Ronald Reagan misunderstood, misrepresented, and distorted Springsteen's Born in the USA for narrow partisan reasons. A song and an album about the misery associated with neoliberalism and filled with stories of those Reagan's revolution would completely  discard became in Reagan's hands a paean to conservativism and evidence of America's new dawn. Today, of course, we know that Reagan and his fellow neoliberals and neoconservative had and have no interest in the 99% and were really interested in re-creating the 19th century. They spent the intervening years attempting to convince people that selfishness and disregard for the least among us are both 100% Americanism and real meaning of Christianity's social gospel.

Obama was elected because he promised something better and return to the communal values forged by wars against want and fascism. We are a long way from anything like that. But who knows, maybe the new Springsteen anthem is more than a stunt; perhaps it is, in fact, a promise that the next 4 years will fulfill our hopes and defeat our fears.

In any event, Bruuuuuce:

No Way Out

According to David Brooks there is no way out of the current mess. He argues that

[e]ffective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.

So I ask when MLK and others worked on creating a new society in which the older institutions of white supremacy were overthrown in favor of a truly egalitarian and just society, where did they look for "authorities and institutions"? Christ's message was clearly King's finger post but the world he and his fellows sought to create wasn't reliant and indeed could not be reliant on any older set of institutions because all the older sets of institutions relied on some kind of hierarchy in which some subset of this or that civilization ruled while others were ruled and in which inequality was assumed to be natural.

In short, what Brooks here advocates for, as I read him he sees Marx and socialism as ruled out of court always already becuase -- you know -- Stalin, grasping some early erroneous system of hierarchy and privilege.

One of the reasons that I thought Graeber's book on debt was so intellectually stimulating was his refusal to make predictions or to impose on a chaotic moment some self-limiting solutions. What happens next is unknowable but our best hope is to try something new.

Good News

Germany's neoliberal Free Democrats Party is in disarray and losing support. The SPD isn't a "real" socialist party anymore and its seems unlikely that either the Greens of the Linke are going to seize power. On the other hand, as Salvado Allende argued democracy allowed to function leads to social democracy and, we can only hope, this news out of Germany is the first step in people voting against neoliberalism.

Speaking of which, that is free and fair elections, Connecticut shows that getting private money out of elections allows the government to be responsible and responsive to the people, which in  turn creates a decent society. This is why I am voting more often. Not, of course, that voting is going to overcome Citizens United, but rather because the option is lying in bed with the covers over my head more than I do already.

New Year

Last year wasn't nearly as bad as it could of been; after all, no nuclear war or pandemic struck. Let's hope that next January OWS isn't necessary and not because the cockroach rules the roost.

Killing or Kisses

The New York Times reports on a horrific case of bullying and a resultant suicide of an American who was trying to serve his country. The world, one want to say, sucks. On the other hand, adults who love one another are increasingly able to show the love:

Hunger Chancellor

Italy and Greece are set 

to replace elected leaders with respected, veteran officials known for their expertise rather than their political skills

 in order to enforce more austerity, which is now the neoliberal orthodoxy, despite the fact that it makes no sense.

It seems to me that Bruening's failure at the end of Weimar was less a failure of technocratisme as such but rather the limitations of technocratisme in a time crises, which undermine political legitimacy more generally. In the case of Weimar the Negative Majority created a situation in which governmental action was impossible. Increased reliance on unelected technocrats to resolve the serious economic problems through a doctrinaire neoliberalism will be a disaster. Why? The neoliberal global economy didn't fail because of some exogenous shocks combined with inflation; it failed because unregulated profit-maximization leads to this state of affairs.

1) Fewer people have more money and need to get some kind of a return on that money
2) They all begin investing in the same set of things
3) The "value" of those things rises
4) The Bubble Emerges
5) Nonregulation lets the bubble grow
5) The bubble bursts
6) Socialize the Losses

If you could get rid of 6, the problem of the bursted bubble would be the loss of some small number of rentiers' incomes.  But because of 1, the politics are such that 6 has to happen.

So if our technocrats are going to succeed, they are going to have to overcome 1 and 6, which at this stage of the game means abandoning neoliberalism and the notion of the market state. This strikes me as unlikely and, as a consequence, we might find the European periphery at the least in a crisis of political legitimacy that could end in a more democratic, which is to say authentically social democratic moment. Or not.

The point is if they are really technocrats and not zombie ideologues, they will realize that the failure to create a climate of democratic legitimacy will fatally undermine their attempt to "fix" the mess in which those seeking profit maximization led the world. This means, doesn't it?, either some kind of pr campaign explaining why austerity is necessary or shifting their preferred policies to a mix of austerity combined with tax increases in order to preserve public employment and/or public services.

The Current Crises Explained

Alerted by one or another of my siblings to this insanely great David Harvey discussion and animation, I offer it to my many devoted readers:

What a Wonderful World it Could Be: Danish Edition

Via, Danish cops doing the kind of non-man-with-the-stick things that offer some dim hope for the future.

Money and How it Got That Way

I urge all interested in the history of money, debt, and nonsense of economics as a scientific discipline to read this, this, and this. While we're at it, I strongly urge reading this ignorant and hostile response and the comments in which hostility and ignorance vie against and lose to reason and evidence.