At a time when 30-year mortgages seem too long, MIT issues 100-year bonds

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week borrowed $750-million by issuing taxable bonds that it plans to repay not over 30 years, the usual term for capital borrowing by universities, but over 100 years.

All of the handwringing over the future of higher education in this country (or the world) aside, I hope those bondholders buy some good default insurance--or at least require MIT to take out some flood insurance.  It's pretty close to the water. And an EPA study from 2005 predicted that:

By the end of this century, global warming threatens to raise the sea level enough that a heavy storm would send flood waters into Boston's downtown waterfront, the Financial District, and much of the Back Bay, based on projections in a federally funded report to be released today

Animation and follow up here

A response to a response to my response to Koch's letter tot he WSJ

To address your gripe about the "very top" getting "ALL" the benefits of growth. They also shouldered the greatest burden. Remember who pays the lion's share of taxes...

"The top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $...159,619), however, still paid far more than the bottom 95 percent. The top 5 percent earned 34.7 percent of the nation's adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes."
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html

How much do you want the top 5% to pay? All of the federal individual income taxes? That, of course, would be absurd.

And remember the bugs in your data collection:
"Overall, these data on high-income tax returns appear to confirm that the recent recession had the same diminishing effect on income inequality that most recessions have, and that it occurred for the same reason, a sharp decline in income at the high end. This appears to contradict recent reports based upon Census data suggesting the opposite, that this recession had actually increased income inequality. This inconsistency between IRS data and Census data is explained by a number of factors such as: (1) Census doesn't break down data for the extremely high income tax returns (typically stops at the 5 percent threshold), (2) Census income measures do not account for capital gains realizations, and (3) Census data gathered from household surveys are less reliable for income information at the high end of the income spectrum than IRS data."

The assertion that this economic disaster was brought on by "the top 2%" is utter conspiracy-theory nonsense. Millions of middle-class homeowners took out loans, in many cases lying to get them, that far exceeded their ability to pay. They hoped to game the system, perhaps, or "not to miss out." Regardless, this was the core of the housing/leverage super-bubble. This was abetted by government policies allowing low-to-no down payments in an effort to "share the wealth" of homeownership with a broader population. And by an absolutely idiotic Federal Reserve policy of low interest rates (shame on Greenspan for calling himself an objectivist while weilding the club of market intervention). Securitization was a useful tool that became a deadly weapon--but only in the hands of people who deliberately ignored the instruction manual. Somebody very stupid bought that junk. Many of us knew it was unwise, because we are students of the system. We chose not to participate in those markets.

Leverage is your enemy, not "the top 2%". Eliminate or reduce leverage and many evils are defanged--no housing bubble, no hedge funds, no crazy private-equity buyouts. No populace enslaved to their credit cards. I imagine banks would be smaller; they would certainly be more conservative.

For the past decade I've been intimately involved in--and aware of--the workings of the financial system. A bubble is a bubble, and they've been happening for centuries. The enemy is irrational behavior by market participants. Unfortunately, that will probably never change. The best we could do would be limit people's ability to leverage their irrational behavior to the point of collapse.

Sadly, we're using a lot of leverage ourselves at the national level. Too much debt. The problem has moved, like a Whack-a-Mole, from individuals, to corporations, to states, and finally to the federal government.

I know many in the top 0.1% and they don't and didn't have some secret cabal to cause a crash. I wish they did; I'd probably get to have a hand in it. They know very well that the burden will fall on them to fix it (see tax burden, above). Nearly all of them have businesses--and incomes--that depend on good economic times and general prosperity. These people work 18 hours a day for decades to build their wealth, and employ thousands of people in the process--indeed, some of them make their employees or investors very rich. And all this is done not by stealing, but making something better, cheaper, and more appealing when they sell it to their customers. Most of the time, the role of government in that process is to be inefficient, absurd, conflicting, unweildly, and incomprehensible. I've seen it over and over. When I was a broker, I was regulated by FIVE different agencies. And you know what? Not one of them actually ensured any of us were acting ethically. None of them prevented the crash. So all five were a collosal waste. That's government, and "regulation."

Nobody wins in a crash, and the rich--more than anyone--know that very well.

With all the evidence emerging about wall street banks packaging of mortgage backed securities--the crap Goldman knew was crap--and the demand this created for ANY mortgage, however crappy, you still want to nail the blame on "millions of homeowners" who "lied" to get their houses?  This is quite a revelation.  I'd be interested to know how you have such insight into all these people's intentions and level of honesty.  Survey? Ethnography? Any actual data?  If you loan money to someone who shouldn't qualify for a loan simply because you know that you are going to be able to move that crap loan out the back door, where Goldman can polish the turd to sell to a state pension fund, the homeowner is a minor player in the drama.  One that should be held responsible, sure, but pegging it on that player is far more scandalous.

It doesn't have to be a "conspiracy" per se, either--though I think there are plenty of cases where this is exactly what it was (reporting by Matt Taibi, Nomi Prins and others over the past two years confirms this).  The big cause is the set of capital friendly policies that are the centerpiece of neoliberalism as a bipartisan policy regime.  But this was helped along by among other things, the assumption that home prices would never go down, the assumption that there would be a state mechanism to force people to pay, the assumption that the state would likely step in if it got messy, the assumption that they were going to be able to get away free and clear, etc. It was a convergence of factors, to be sure, with homeowners, the Fed and Greenspan (who, BTW, Taibbi calls the biggest asshole in the universe) having some responsibility for this, but the "irrational behavior" is not external to the profitable transaction: this is the central feature of all investments.  And the only thing that can stem its most harmful effect is some form of rules that all the parties in the market have to follow, i.e. regulation.  Since the order of the day--brought about by hefty lobbying by the financial players themselves--was deregulation, well it is no wonder there was no one interested in manning the store.

It is no accident that there are five different agencies regulating you, or that they are completely ineffectual at doing so.  THis is by design and it is one of the flaws that Elizabeth Warren wanted to correct before she was ushered offstage for being to gung ho on actually regulating finance (instead of just creating a nuisance.)  It is regulatory capture pure and simple and even if your fellow .1percenters are not at fault, much of their windfall over the past years has been due to the system being rigged in their favor.  If they actually believe that they need customers and that other people in the bottom 99.9% matter, then it is hard to understand your reluctance to have a more progressive tax system.

Here's where my problem with Mr. Koch and your own little description of how the world works seems to run aground.  The top tier are the titans and the Most Important People in Society (in so far as society exists) because you make money then use that money to employ others ("thousands" of others, by both your counts--which is no small potatoes in a country of 300 million. or...). On this count lowering the tax burden would be the best idea because then more of that money could be used productively, pumped back into the economy, more people go to work etc.  Then the 95% of people who don't pay taxes would.  The alternative, raising taxes, reduces economic activities, taxes, the power of these titans to lift all boats by trickle down economics, etc.  Not to mention it is just plainly against the Objectivist ethic (all praise Ayn Rand).

This is such a blinkered understanding of how things work.  For one thing, it takes the Laffer curve as an absolute sort of value--raising taxes ALWAYS reduces tax receipts.  But the curve, in case you or Koch has forgotten *is a fucking curve.*  There is a point where it actually makes more sense to tax the rich since they aren't really doing much with the money they've managed to squeeze out of the collective and aren't actually doing much productive with it.  In other words, there are times when taxing makes some sense, as Reagan's own tax guru has recently said in response to this line of rhetoric:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/reagan-anniversary-david-stockman

All of this is compounded by the fact that much of this money does absolutely nothing productive except gather interest in offshore bank accounts.  When the average worker's wages are stagnant--when the median wage is almost identical in inflation adjusted dollars from the late 1970s to today--yet we have seen healthy economic growth and rising worker productivity, it is not some crazy marxian observation to point out that, while productive work is being done by many people, some people are able to take more of the rewards for themselves. If the condition of your and Koch's employment solution--let the rich people and only the rich people hire you--is that your PRODUCTIVE labor is rewarded at less than those above you this is hardly fair.  And it makes the argument that people with more wealth are automatically more productive a circular argument.  People with money are able to take advantage of a structural inequality to capture more money from other productive workers who don't happen to have money.  This is not a case of productive vs. unproductive workers, but people who claim they are productive because they have money and people who do a great deal of productive work but have not received much money.

Here your account of the tax burden problem really reverses the issue--as I've said several times before in our interchanges.  The real issue is that, in the current economic distribution a relative handful receive the greatest share of the rewards for their labor--did you actually look at the graph I cited: ALL of the economic growth of the past 30 years has gone to the top 10%--and your complaint is that this means they pay proportionally more taxes!  This is like robbing someone and then expecting them to sympathize with the burden you have to bear carting off their TV: "You may have been robbed, but man this thing is heavy! My back is killing me!"

Many many people in this country work very very hard and can barely scrape by.  The problem in my mind isn't that 95% of people pay only 40% of the taxes, its that they only earn enough relative to the amount of money floating about out there to fall in the tax brackets in this way.  So I'd much rather not have taxes be the primary means of redistribution.  I'd much rather have a distribution of income and the benefits to labor that would alter the basic structure of society.  I'd rather have 95% of the population pay 95% of the taxes because they make 95% of the money off 95% of the work.  In the end it is only an illusion of the automatic superiority of the rich and a degradation and hate for working people that can allow objectivist fantasies to prevail.  I don't believe you really believe this.

The "founders" and Socialized medicine

A meme going around that, in fact, the constitutional architects would have approved government run health care.  Adams approved funding for Government run hospitals for sailors in the late eighteenth century--funded out of a mandatory tax on the sailors and their employers.  

Original blog post here;  follow up by WaPo here; and a diss excerpt on the hospitals here.

All of this is interesting and useful information, but the focus shouldn't really be over how analogous the bills were (as the WaPo historian discusses) but how we still have this in principle today with military hospitals and the US military in general--which Chalmers Johnson calls one of the greatest bastions of socialism in the world.  The question that this historical trivia sidesteps is whether Adams or Jefferson would have approved the "standing" army of the size we have today. A good thing to remember in the week of the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" speech.

Michael Denning on capitalism as primitive accumulation

Michael Denning's contribution to the latest issue of the New Left Review is very provocative.  It is effectively equating capitalism not with wage labor or private property per se, but with primitive accumulation:

However, I want to insist that we decentre wage labour in our conception of life under capitalism. The fetishism of the wage may well be the source of capitalist ideologies of freedom and equality, but the employment contract is not the founding moment. For capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living. Dispossession and expropriation, followed by the enforcement of money taxes and rent: such is the idyll of ‘free labour’. In those rare moments of modern emancipation, the freed people—from slavery, serfdom and other forms of coerced labour—have never chosen to be wage labourers. There may be a ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’, as Adam Smith put it, but there is clearly no propensity to get a job.

Rather than seeing the bread-winning factory worker as the productive base on which a reproductive superstructure is erected, imagine the dispossessed proletarian household as a wageless base of subsistence labour—the ‘women’s work’ of cooking, cleaning and caring—which supports a superstructure of migrant wage seekers who are ambassadors, or perhaps hostages, to the wage economy. These migrations may be short in distance and in interval—the daily streetcars or buses from tenement to factory, apartment block to office, that will come to be called ‘commuting’—or they may be extended to the yearly proletarian globe-hopping of seasonal workers by steamship, railroad and automobile, as well as the radical separation of airborne migration linked by years of remittances and phone calls. Unemployment precedes employment, and the informal economy precedes the formal, both historically and conceptually. We must insist that ‘proletarian’ is not a synonym for ‘wage labourer’ but for dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market. You don’t need a job to be a proletarian: wageless life, not wage labour, is the starting point in understanding the free market. 

The article goes on to catalog the ways this concept of unemployment has evolved--and how the idea of unemployment normalizes employment (and vice versa)--into the present circumstances where the informal sector is growing at a faster pace than the formal.  What this means for our conception of work and labor is unclear but he confirms that, far from being irrelevant, much of this discussion can be found in Marx's own work. 

That globalization produces redundancy would be better understood not through the deceptively concrete image of wasted lives, but through Marx’s two dialectically related concepts: the relative surplus population and the virtual pauper. The one is from Capital; the other from the Grundrisse. In the key chapter on ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’ in Capital, Marx views the problem from the vantage point of capital: ‘it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.’ He continues: ‘this is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population’. Indeed, ‘the relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed.’ The industrial reserve army is thus merely one of these forms; in fact, as might be expected, Marx’s specific examples of the relative surplus population are the most dated part of his analysis. [24]

The fundamental metaphor in Marx’s account is that of opposing forces: it is not as if there are two kinds of workers, employed and unemployed, or two sectors of the economy, formal and informal; rather, there is a process in which ‘greater attraction of workers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion . . . the workers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses’. The ‘higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power’. Intriguingly, almost the entire contemporary vocabulary—redundant, superfluous, precarious—can be found in this chapter. [25]

If the passage in Capital tells the story from the point of view of the accumulation of capital, the parallel passage in the Grundrisse begins from the point of view of living labour: ‘It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he is a pauper: a virtual pauper . . . If the capitalist has no use for his surplus labour, then the worker may not perform his necessary labour’. Marx is not arguing that all workers are or will become beggars, as in the immiseration thesis often attributed to him. Rather, this is his account of bare life: since the exchange required for the means of living—the selling of labour-power—is accidental and indifferent to their organic presence, the worker is a virtual pauper. [26] Virtual paupers: this strange figure—which combines an almost lost word with one that has taken on entirely new connotations—will be my temporary resting place. In a letter written as he turned fifty, Marx wrote: ‘half a century on my shoulders and still a pauper’. A century and a half on again, the spectre of wageless life still weighs upon us.

Whiteness and the Tea party

I see the point, but I'm also inclined to think it is more complex than white privilege per se. I think it is more that the powerful supporters of this movement invoke that idea of white privilege as a way keeping white people from realizing that they are still the majority or plurality of: people who are unemployed, people who are uninsured, people in poverty, etc. It makes the racial element more powerful than the actual material similarity most white people share with others members of their social class. In this, it is somewhat reasonable to think of the tea party as comprised of people who are a part of that "precariat" (in so far as the precariat can be said to exist) as a class "in itself" though not yet "for itself" (Pretty sure I'm misusing those concepts, but I hope not too much.) Therefore the people who say they are against big government but for medicare or SS (or, more ridiculously, who say things like "keep your big government out of my medicare!") In other words, they are focused so much on keeping African Americans and immigrants from having these services, they are willing to side with people who are advocating the complete annihilation of these programs. There is, of course, a long history of this, cataloged by many people. I used this clip of Tim Wise in class this term and it seemed a useful overview of the political use of race:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc

RE: the way those programs initially functioned, the racial and ethnic underpinnings of that are very interesting to hear--especially in terms of the way the policies were written. There was a similar argument about these programs in the Cultural Studies issue on the economic crisis:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g922693654

In any case, maybe I'm reading this article too quickly, but I think saying it is solely about race misses the way that concept--or the concept of whiteness--overlaps significantly with the way class is mis-recognized or completely denied in US culture.

I think the real difference in the US is not just in the Tea Party, but in the culture more generally: how many cutbacks and austerity measures here do you think it would take to have students in the streets marching over Social Security? Over Medicare? Hell, even over tuition hikes and unemployment? There might be pockets of activities, but considering the proportion of students in Chicago, New York, LA and most other major US cities, we have nowhere near the activism in Paris and London even among the most obvious contenders for inclusion in the US "precariat"--the college age students who now enjoy something like double the unemployment rate of the rest of the population. That the Tea Party is similarly disillusioned about its own connection to the welfare state is not, I would say, indicative of anything but its own entrenchment in the mainstream of US culture--where people prefer the Swedish model, and therefore assume we are closer than we are.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/poll-wealth-distribution-similar-sweden/

Tea Partiers are just, reasonably, looking for some explanation of why, if we live in this incredibly prosperous land of social mobility, they are feeling less mobile and prosperous. The two options on the table are blame the 1% that owns 50% of everything (most of whom you never see because they live a mysterious parallel existence) or the people who look different than you. The latter has won out almost every time in US history, in no small part because of campaigns funded by the former.

A rainy night in Chicago during the global war on terror

It is easy to sit in your room, listening to the rain, and to forget the wars being fought in your name, with your tacit consent, by the state that you fund with your tax dollars.  It is comfortable to ignore the torture techniques employed to get questionable information then used by law enforcement officials who structure sting operations using paid informants to entrap impressionable, disaffected young Muslim men into hypothetical terror plots.   It is hard to believe that it has almost been a decade since this war on terror began (officially) and it is numbing to realize how little I've done to try to intervene in its execution--and even more numbing to realize there is likely little I could do.

Amitava Kumar's new book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, is a touching collection of essays that capture what Raymond Williams might have called the "structure of feeling" of this moment--though in addition to looking at artists and authors reactions to torture and the GWOT, he looks closely at court documents and interviews suspects, convicts, and their families as living legacies of our twisted conjuncture.  I'm still a few chapters shy of finishing it and would hate to oversell it to those already immersed in much of the material into which he immerses the reader, but it has been a profound reminder for me so far.  As in all of his other non-fiction books--of which Passport Photos is still my favorite--an eloquent elaboration of what the humanities could look like today.  At the very least, his book is an invaluable snapshot of this cultural moment that merits the time you will surely feel compelled to sit with it.

Globish, gibberish

I don't post very much on this blog, but I don't want my posting on this new idea to be misconstrued as an idea I think is important or worthwhile: I just want to make note of it, in the moment, because it is just the kind of ridiculously shallow analysis that passes for cultural criticism in Anglo American media. Like Malcolm Gladwell's little gems or Thomas Friedman's grand pronouncements, the idea of "Globish" has the potential to be a hot word for a few minutes in the Western media (I can already see the little taglines on CNN or MSNBC "Is there a global version of English? The Globish question.") But it is one of the more inane questions I've heard people ask and it only demonstrates the basic insularity of these people. So the poor and oppressed of the world have figured out that the Western media can't be bothered to translate their protest signs? And business people in Japan and Korea have figured out that, because they both have to learn English to talk to the provencial US people they do business with, they can also find a common language between the two of them. So what? Why should we celebrate the fact that the rest of the world has figured out it is largely at the mercy of a dumb, hulking carcass crawling with insular uneducated maggots? And don't even get me started on the historical analysis...English was most certainly not the global language of the 19th century. All in all, reading this just makes me sigh: it is just another set of superficial analyses that we'll have to discuss as relevant--likely even in relation to the work of some of our trendier colleagues--even though it does very little to explain or even understand the phenomena in question or its basic context. Why do white guys of a certain age think they are being smart when they come up with crap like this?

*sigh*

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/29/globish-international-language

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/apr/06/everyone-talking-globish-robert-mccrum

http://www.amazon.com/Globish-English-Language-Became-Worlds/dp/0393062554/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270570386&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Globish-World-Over-Jean-Paul-Nerrière/dp/0578028794/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270570386&sr=8-2

Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story"

My feeling about Moore is typically very contextual. On the one hand, he's obviously not as rigorous in his use of facts as he should be and his theoretical lens is quite flimsy. On the other hand, he is excellent at finding clear illustrations of his point which, even if you don't agree with the point, are a rare space in US culture where these illustrations are even broached. For instance, in Sicko, while his use of Canada, the UK and France (not to mention Cuba) as examples of well run health care programs are likely quite partial and exaggerated; the nuances of each system would likely find places they could be repaired or altered not to mention the people who probably virulently despise them. But it is striking that, in the US conversation about Health Care, there are so few moments when this illustration is made--when even the mention of the fact that every other industrialized world has some system of nationally providing or enabling the provision of health care in a social democratic way. I don't mean people just casually mentioning it as some abstract external category: I mean people using the dominant forms of the visual media to communicate examples of these experiences in anything approaching a coherent, comprehensive, or balanced way. The fact that he has to resort to buffoonish tactics to keep the movie entertaining may be both a plus and a minus--in general, I think it would be better for him to direct a more attractive, less annoying person to do this, but I guess it's part of his blue collar agitation shtick to be fairly unconcerned with appearances. So yes, on one level I find Moore a complete buffoon; on the other hand, it shows the deep impoverishment of our culture that it takes an utter buffoon to make what are clearly relevant points using visual media such as film in a widely distributed fashion. It's like taking a class where there is an annoying almost intolerable student who nonetheless asks the kinds of questions and poses the kinds of dilemmas which should animate any classroom setting--yet which would otherwise be completely absent from the discussion.

I feel roughly the same way about Moore's analysis in his most recent film, Capitalism: A Love Story. Many of his points are sloppy and oversimplified--and his misplaced faith in Obama and the popular agitation of late 2008 is almost unforgivable--but he still represents one of the few voices that actually attempts to articulate a full throated critique of the current economic system. True there are people like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and the late Howard Zinn among public intellectuals who might critique this system: likewise the new generation of critics of the food system--people like Michael Pollin. But Pollin has ambivalent resonance in US culture (it is easy to opt for a gated community of organic food to protect yourself from these evils--or to think you are) and the others are mainly marginal to US culture. They are great resources for the left, but for the most part there are much better resources for actual theory and history; they preach to the already curious. Nader is even more polarizing and in the current circumstances it is unclear how productive his interventions are. Moore, on the other hand, buffoon that he is, can get media attention to his cause and does a decent job of making the critique of capitalism something that is a little cathartic rather than just a downward spiral of endless bad news. Of course the catharsis is an illusion, but without some utopian impulse it is hard to imagine anyone standing up to the system he discusses.

As to this discussion, he is very vague on capitalism per se. He celebrates the post-war economy which was most assuredly capitalist, even if it was less brutal than the current situation. And he is characteristically moralistic and melodramatic in talking about both the people who benefit from the current system and those who are hurt by it. On the other hand, he provides some clear evidence to support the validity of this convention (a memo from Citigroup analogous with the recommendations of the trilateral commission; people put out of their homes by refinance schemes with variable interest rates; a juvenile detention facility that, after being privatized, bribed judges to raise incarceration rates.) And if nothing else he begins to illustrate again what many mainstream outlets refuse to contemplate, namely the claim he begins making early on that capitalism itself is the problem and it can't be regulated. (He calls it "evil" multiple times and gets several interlocutors to agree with this contention.) It is an extreme position, but one that has gotten no play at all in the current discussion: the claims that we are moving toward socialism make an actual discussion of what is capitalist about the current situation almost impossible. Perhaps even more helpful--and less discussed--are his visual representation of the kinds of long term economic indexes that are more relevant to the current situation of the average US citizen than the incessant discussions of fluctuations in the Dow: namely, the changes in the productivity numbers vs. stagnant wages; change in the percentage of household indebtedness; and change in the ratio of wages for average workers vs. CEOs. These three indexes are intricately related to the basic failure of the current model--which is why they are so rarely discussed in depth as problems to solve, much less as problems that were directly caused by certain regimes of policy and ideology or by the capitalist system itself.

Moore brings up this impossible line of inquiry, even if he is sloppy and sentimental in doing so. I could chide him for doing this, but it makes no sense to criticize someone for being less than ideal when there is no one else even close. I wouldn't say he's some sort of national treasure or anything (I reserve that designation for John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who are perhaps the two administrators of a much more regular space of criticism); but he is an index of both what our national conversation could look like in its range and its fundamental failure: if it is up to Michael Moore to say this stuff, we really have a problem. As egotistical as I think he is, I can't help but think he'd agree on some level.

Farmer's Branch rental ordinance shot down by Feds

I'm sure that there could be some adverse effects of immigrants living in your neighborhood, but I doubt the people who would find this a problem would be at all charmed by their actual immigration status: xenophobia is pretty much equal opportunity and will apply to brown people whether the have a green card or not. Even from your statement that "immigrants drive neighborhoods down" I can't parse what part of this is in reference to identifiable indexes like assessments of home values (which are also subjective no matter what entity is carrying them out) or just to some perceived impurity moving into the neighborhood. When you say things like this, ask yourself if you'd feel illegal immigrants from Australia, Germany, or the UK "drive neighborhoods down." In Britain, for instance, it is far more likely that there will be illegal immigrants from Australia, and that the average person from Pakistan in the UK is there legally--maybe even born there: the perception is that illegal immigration is a Brown menace when it is, in practice, largely White.

If it is really the fact of their illegality, then the country of origin shouldn't matter. I sympathize with whatever perceived injustice you feel (the preschool thing is definitely problematic--though it seems like the answer would be to expand the program so your kids could go rather than eliminating the participation of immigrants legal or otherwise), but I also can't help but think you're basically trying to rationalize a set of anxious racial biases. It's fine if you have these and I'm sure you have your reasons for feeling them: but don't try to make them objective indexes for social policy.

The constitutionality issue has to do with who has the authority to enforce the law. This is a form of vigilantism--vigilantism that is carried out by a local government, sure, but vigilantism nonetheless. True there may be a problem with illegal immigration but there are also many problems with legal immigration. In that sense, I would be very interested to know if either of you could explain the procedure (and cost in legal fees) of obtaining a legal immigration visa from Mexico or Central America. I ask because in an attempt to discuss how complicated it was, I tried to find said information, but it seems spread out over many webpages between the ICE, State Dept. and different US embassies. The closest I can come is this list of possible visas--though I'd note that the actual visa you'd need to get in from Mexico is not on this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_visas

And in most of the cases where you can get a work visa, you need to have your employer in the US help you file the visa--in other words, you'd already have to have the job here to even apply for the visa--and your visa status would depend on you staying with that employer. (note also that it is a $1500 fee just to get the visa and in most cases, to get even a STUDENT visa approved [muchless a work visa] you'd have to prove that you had a certain amount of money in the bank--usually about US$25K: any sense of the class of immigrants we're talking about here?)

http://mexico.usembassy.gov/eng/evisas_work.html

In this sense it's worth noting that many of the currently "illegal" immigrants came in with visas but then overstayed them when they expired or were unable to get them renewed. That's just one kind of visa: immigration is far more difficult (i.e. when you apply for a green card or naturalization). But many of the temporary workers are unlikely to want to immigrate forever--they just want to work here temporarily, contribute to our economy, and go home (or at least that was the way it was: On this I'd also note that, before the border was militarized and the policies of border crossing more stringent, there was far more possibility of an immigrant only coming here for two or three years tops, then returning home once they'd made a little money. Now it is far more likely that, once they get here, they are afraid to leave because they don't think they'll be able to come back if need be.) Our current policy is set up so that it is increasingly difficult to get a temporary work visa--and since we've already pushed the practice into informal (and illegal) channels, it's unlikely that we could dig it out without a very public concerted effort on par with the 1950s Bracero program. Even then we generally lack the personnel to do this in a timely manner: people want to get a job and get working as fast as possible. They don't want to wait for three years for the privilege of mowing lawns and washing dishes.

If you were coming to the country to live with your cousin and wash dishes for a few months at a restaurant where he already worked, what do you think is the likelihood that you'd go through these processes? What's the likelihood that the employer was so interested in getting a new dishwasher that he'd help you with that visa? That you'd have $1500 fee and $25K in the bank? What if you tried to get a visa and were rejected? What if you had no other way to make the kind of money you needed in you village in Mexico because NAFTA had decimated your local industries or because the "War on Drugs" had empowered a violent mafia to make your life miserable: would you let your family starve just to honor US law? Would you flinch if you had to find a fake set of papers in order to rent a house in Farmer's Branch? Maybe I'm wrong and it is far easier to get here legally, but if that's the case, it isn't very easy to find out how to do that. Maybe you have a better sense of this than me, but I have never gotten the sense from anyone who's had to deal with the INS or ICE that it is a straightforward process.

In any case, the economy is doing a far better job of keeping immigrants away than the Farmer's Branch city council. Last year there was a 22% decline in the number of people leaving Mexico and that number is likely to be even lower this year (though it could rise because of the pressure the US has put on the Mexican government to fight its drug war, an increasingly violent proposition.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803429.html

You can rest assured that if the tea partiers agenda of the complete abandonment of a true government supported jobs program is enacted, the collapse of the economy will send all those nasty immigrants packing: its sort of like shooting yourself in the foot, but at least you won't have to worry about renters in Farmer's Branch.

For the record, learning to speak Spanish would, indeed, be a good idea in general: more people speak Spanish in the word than English

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

Friedman bloviates

Commenting on the passage of the Health Care bill, Friedman tries to make the necessary conservative framing of our current political environment a boon (though one he thinks he's coming up with on his own [asshat]):

That is why we need political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.

I think this is pretty much what Walter Lippmann recommended in the early 20th century--a democracy governed by experts rather than people. But the end result of this is all the lobbyists and interest groups do their best to present their position not as "interested" but as the objectively better position for everyone (i.e. hegemonic common sense.) Dewey recognized the problem of this and instead recommended that the government be charged with expanding education and access to information such that more people would be informed and reach a more enlightened conclusion about what needed to happen. But this, too, can get hijacked.

In any case, the only way that Friedman--or Cass Sunstein and his pal Obama--can recommend something like the radical center (or as Mark Satin called it the Radical Middle http://www.amazon.com/dp/0813341906/) is if we already agree not only on how to accomplish the goal, but on what principles and ideals we should try to accomplish. All Friedman seems to do here is throw together a bunch of policy angles that would appeal to a variety of already centrist constituencies. The actual balance between them and how they are regulated and measured after the fact are devilish details in themselves; but when you have people who, for instance, want to abolish public schools altogether (or who would oversee their destruction if it seemed politically viable--like the current education secretary) then it is evident that all the talk about raising standards and increasing accountability is in no way an honest approach to reforming education: it is just ideological cover for privatization.

In other words, there is no true balance here, just ceding the center to the right (which, in my opinion, is one of Friedman's most often executed moves). If the "radical center" of health care reform is to have "market reforms" to keep costs down, then you've already given up the basic ground of the struggle--namely, should health care be a commodity regulated by the free market, for profit corporations instead of a public good overseen by public institutions; likewise, if reforming energy is limited to offshore drilling while we build more nuclear power plants, it is difficult to see what's centrist about this: all it does is adopt the rhetoric of the environmental movement to give cover to the expansion of two industries counter to its very principles. I have no faith that the people who want to have offshore drilling and nuclear power have any interest in either energy independence or any environmental purpose--and it shows zero creativity on Friedman's part to limit our options in this way.

All I think this proves is that the left is so disempowered and illegitimate in US culture that, in order to have even a half measure of rational public policy (i.e. in order to allow the government to do anything at all) they must be ready to concede 90% of the principles behind the policies they would support. And in the current congress, I have complete confidence that 90% of those in the Democratic party would gladly concede this since they never held those principles all that strongly to begin with. I suppose the same argument could be made of certain GOP senators as well, but they appear this way only in relation to a much more active, visible base (and one animated for political purposes to make the current administration appear as fascists so Republicans can ride in on a horse of freedom--a strategy that will likely backfire if they win the 2010 midterms). The recent democratic bill is basically a plan taken wholesale from a republican plan of five years ago, yet current republicans refuse to support it because now even that is too leftist. In that sense, even the "radical center" proposal of abandoning all principles on the left (public option, support for abortion rights, etc.) is pragmatically unacceptable to the minority party--a party who is drumming up animosity with the hopes that it will win them political points. The democrats are rightfully unafraid of abandoning their principles since they will obviously face no political repercussions for doing so: winning is enough, no matter what the prize.

Friedman is as much a symptom as a booster of this set of circumstances. Is he not basically a product of Clinton's instantiation of Gidden's "Third Way" with "American characteristics?" Globalization, Lexus and the Olive Tree and all that? And are we not immersed in a crisis that has been facilitated by that very package of policies? Then how is returning to that "radical center" going to help us out of it? If we begin from the premise that there is nothing valid in the radical left and anything that was previously a liberal left version of social democracy is still too far to that side (where merely raising taxes is "socialism") the idea of the radical center is only radical in its elision of any actual options for change. Calling for a radical center is just a kind of journalistic pablum meant to create balance by blaming both sides equally rather than actually engaging with ideas and arguments on an objective plane of rational political judgement. (Though I think Friedman has famously proven he can't be trusted to engage in this--not because he's shifty, but because he's a buffoon: http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html )

The fact is that the center has shifted so far to the right that to ask for a radical commitment to it on even these pragmatic principles means obscuring not only the causes of the crisis, but the radical potential for reform and realignment that should be produced by the crisis. I think the Health Care bill is clear evidence of where the radical center leads us and I don't think it is a path we should be taking. On the other hand, it seems to be the path we're on already, which makes Friedman just a Monday morning quarterback.

New Left and the (next) new conjuncture.

Just finished reading Hall's account of what he calls the "first new left" (and the first "New Left Review" which is to say the NLR before Perry Anderson took over.) I am struck by several things but most centrally, I notice a certain amount of anxiety about how a socialist movement can arise in the midst of basic material affluence. Pace,

We also challenged the prevailing view that the so-called affluent society would of itself erode the appeal of socialist propaganda—that socialism could arise only out of immiseration and degradation. Our emphasis on people taking action for themselves, ‘building socialism from below’ and ‘in the here and now’, not waiting for some abstract Revolution to transform everything in the twinkling of an eye, proved, in the light of the re-emergence of these themes after 1968, strikingly prefigurative.

In other words, the orthodox Marxist claim that the only thing that might help push the revolution along was a dramatic material change seemed like an unlikely engine for social change at the time . As he says elsewhere in the article, "socialism was a conscious democratic movement and socialists were made, not born or given by the inevitable laws of history or the objective processes of the mode of production alone." On the one hand, the politics this inspired were quite important--in ways that I've not before heard. He writes of project of creating NLR clubs around Britain in order to engage people "where they were" and get conversations going about socialism, etc. They weren't alone, of course, in doing this and it's not entirely contextualized, but there is a real attention to politically engaging "the people" and getting them interested in these ideas and their importance for social change. In practice, this meant opening the conversations more and getting people engaged in the discussion rather than giving a top down proscription of what the discussion should look like--or such was Hall's ideal. While he draws a distinction between himself and Thompson earlier in the essay, by the end it is clear that, in terms of how he understood socialist activism at the time, he was also deeply inspired by Thompson's work on William Morris (presaging his work in Making of the Working Class). He quotes from his editorial in the first issue of NLR:

We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and—as Morris said—make socialists there. We have come through 200 years of capitalism and 100 years of imperialism. Why should people—naturally—turn to socialism? There is no law which says that the Labour Movement, like a great inhuman engine, is going to throb its way into socialism or that we can, any longer . . . rely upon poverty and exploitation to drive people, like blind animals, towards socialism. Socialism is, and will remain, an active faith in a new society, to which we turn as conscious, thinking human beings. People have to be confronted with experience, called to the ‘society of equals’, not because they have never had it so bad, but because the ‘society of equals’ is better than the best soft-selling consumer capitalist society, and life is something lived, not something one passes through like tea through a strainer.

Two things are evident in this--as in the rest of the essay--which gives what I think is great insight into what the Thompson and Hall agreed on in this movement. One is that they are connecting their struggle to a much longer one (interpreted through the lens of Thompson's historical account of Morris). And in so doing they prized the democratic process of "populist" discussion above having a clear set of political and theoretical principles which they would address to the people. According to Hall, it was actually the inability to operate a journal in this context--"the editorial board the fear that a journal of ideas could not be effectively run by committees"--which ultimately led him to resign as editor. This is, I think, a telling foible of Hall's--though perhaps one of the more forgivable ones: namely that he prized process over the content of the ideas. At the time, this was a very sensible principle (as he demonstrates by contextualizing it in relation to the left factions vying for control over the dominant narrative.) However, as time went on, it seems to have become a serious liability. His discussion of the CND campaign and the way it became an articulated struggle spanning lines of class and social status is obviously included as a nod to--if not refracted as a memory through--the more prominent understanding of socialist politics adopted at the time he was writing (in 1988) LaClau and Mouffe's hegemony and socialist strategy. (I'll return to this below--especially to LaClau's own more recent idea of how you need to "construct a people."

On the other hand, Anderson's more vigorous approach to making it a serious journal of ideas provides the flipside of this problem: as happy as I am in retrospect that it became such a muscular exercise in theoretical and political discourse (alongside Verso and its earlier iteration New Left Books) it is clear that this divergence made it impossible to carry on with the political engagement that Hall discusses so enthusiastically above--"We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and—as Morris said—make socialists there."

more here

But equally visible is the reason behind two dominant themes that emerge from this moment--often seen as being opposed in discussions of the New Left and nascent Cultural Studies, but here clearly of a piece with their historical moment. In Hall's description of the need for a new approach at the time, he notes the importance of socialist humanism and the problem of talking about the role that culture was playing in keeping people from thinking about the problems of capitalism. Alienation on the one hand, was a good way of framing this--and the emphasis on "directly living" one's conditions and being active in their creation seems to be the principle that Thompson wants to recommend for getting the people active again. This was needed because, as Hall says, the labor movement had been hijacked to a certain extent by the dominant corporate capitalism. People, in other words, were materially more well off than they had been before. The only appeal from the socialist front had to be the resurrection of some primal sense of anomie at how, despite material comfort, there was less control over the realm of representations and less creativity possible both there and in the workplace (hence the importance of Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital as Denning mentioned recently alongside Althusser and Thompson.) Alienation, in this regard, was a strategicly chosen line of critique, admittedly elaborated most fully in the line of the Post-Frankfurt school critic Herbert Marcuse. And, to be sure, much of this was already prefigured (though in much more dour German tones) in the interwar Frankfurt School critique of culture industry and state capitalism.

On the other hand, Althusser was focused less on the stimulation of agency and more on the rigorous elaboration of a theoretical paradigm fit for this new age. In effect, he was not all that interested in the possibility that the economic realm would ever be undermined again--that class consciousness per se would not become prominent because of a direct material change in circumstances. The remoteness of the economy's power (in the last instance), though it was still too close for the critics of economism, shifted the focus to the way the cultural realm was able to secure and reproduce the system despite the remaining inequality and oppression at its heart.

As a tangent, it is worth noting that the economic reinterpretation of Althusser--by what Alain Lepietz calls "the rebel sons of Althusser"--of Regulationist Economics...

In all these sets of ideas, the presumption is that the economic system will remain as it was--that class as a directly experienced difference in relation to either the mode of production or the realities of distribution and opportunity would, for the forseeable future, be less salient than people's feeling of alienation in relation to "the spectacle."

Not entirely true, Jessop (regulationist) vs. hall.

still, worth noting that the fact that the decline of our alienation in relation to the spectacle (i.e. Jenkins) corresponds to the moment when class power is more pronounced than at any time in the 20th century--or at least the second half. In this, the curious fact is that the movement remains unemergent, making Cultural Studies questions all the more urgent even as they realize that one of the basic premises was fundamentally incorrect.

Harvey on class power of neo-liberalism.

“To live under neo-liberalism also means to accept or submit to that liberal bundle of rights necessary for capital accumulation. We live, therefore, in a society in which the inalienable rights of individuals (and, recall, corporations are defined as individuals before the law) to private property and the profit rate trump any other conception of inalienable rights you can think of. Defenders of this regime of rights plausibly argue that it encourages "bourgeois virtues," without which everyone in the world would be far worse off. These include individual responsibility and liability, independence from state interference (which often places this regime of rights in severe opposition to those defined within the state), equality of opportunity in the market and before the law, rewards for initiative and entrepreneurial endeavors, care for oneself and one's own, and an open market place that allows for wide-ranging freedoms of choice of both contract and exchange. This system of rights appears even more persuasive when extended to the right of private property in one's own body (which underpins the right of the person to freely contract to sell his or her labor power as well as to be treated with dignity and respect and to be free from bodily coercions such as slavery) and the right to freedom of thought, of expression and of speech. Let us admit it: these derivative rights are appealing. Many of us rely heavily upon them. But we do so much as beggars live off the crumbs from the rich man's table. Let me explain

“I cannot convince anyone by philosophical argument that the neo-liberal regime of rights is unjust. But the objection to this regime of rights is quite simple: to accept it is to accept that we have no alternative except to live under a regime of endless capital accumulation and economic, growth no matter what the social, ecological or political consequences. Reciprocally, endless capital accumulation implies that the neo-liberal regime of rights must be geographically expanded across the globe by violence (as in Chile and Iraq), by imperialist practices (such as those the World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank) or through primitive accumulation (as in China and Russia) if necessary. By hook or by crook, the inalienable rights of private property and the' profit rate will he universally established. This is precisely what Bush means when he says the US dedicates itself to extend the sphere of liberty and freedom across the globe.

“But these are not the only set of rights available to us. Even within the liberal conception as laid out in the UN Charter there are derivative fights such as freedoms of speech and expression, of education and economic security, rights to organize unions, and the like. Enforcing these rights would have posed a serious challenge to the hegemonic practices of neo-liberalism. Making these derivative rights primary and the primary right of private property and the profit rate derivative would entail a revolution in political-economic practices of great significance. There are also entirely different conceptions of rights to which we may appeal—of access to the global commons or to basic food security, for example. ‘Between equal rights force decides’ and political struggles over the proper conception of rights moves center stage to how possibilities and alternatives get represented, articulated and eventually born forward into transformative political-economic practices. The point, as Bartholomew and Breakspear argue, ‘is to recuperate human rights politics as part of a critical cosmopolitan project aimed explicitly against imperialism’ and, I would add, neo-liberalism itself” (56-57).

here more on the issue of rights and the state, culture process etc.

"making bad history:" law, ideology, and the 9/11 trials

I've been pretty out of it this semester with the new job and trying to adjust to Chicago, etc. I'm only skimming news occasionally, much less getting a sense of the positions being taken on various issues. The trials for 9/11 planners, for instance, seem like an absurd bit of political theatre, meant to consecrate the law as objective and the US as a just society. It is a welcome change from people who shirk the law and try to re-write it by executive edict; but on the other hand, it is one of those things where the rule is only proven by exceptions. In other words, it is unlikely that this is a whole lot different than a show trial by military tribunal, yet it is perceived as such. The perception that there could be a chance of acquittal is seen by some as a downfall of this process; but the assertion that justice will be served is supposed to give assurance that, as in the trial of Saddam Hussein, there will be a hanging at the end of the process.

I am too foggy to reflect on much of the details here, but I was struck by one exchange in the Senate questioning of AG Eric Holder about this trial. In skimming through today's version of the Neo-Con Patriot Post, I came across this passage:

"Can you give me a case in United States history," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked of Attorney General Eric Holder this week, "where an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?" Holder, the chief surrender-facilitator, was outlining to Congress the administration's latest ploy to appease its über-Left base, namely, moving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) -- the self-proclaimed mastermind of 9/11 -- and four other al-Qa'ida 9/11 planners from Guantanamo to New York to be tried like ordinary civilians in a Manhattan federal court. When Holder hemmed and hawed ("I don't know. I'd have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I've made..."), Graham shot back, "We're making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I'll answer it for you. The answer is no."

I can't really comment on the history of wartime trials--though I imagine that the courts in the Hague and Nuremberg would be similar presidents--but I'm really struck by the way that Graham is able to render the facts of the case using the ideology of the war on terror as completely unproblematic. It is a classic example of how ideology can tweak facts in a certain direction--and be so unquestionable that the leading lawyer in the country is unable to muster a response. The facts are the following: during the time that we were at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, these five people were all caught in Pakistan.

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - initially killed, then caught by the Pakistani ISI on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan
• Ramzi Binalshibh - on FBI most wanted terrorist list since 2002; caught by the Pakistani ISI (conveniently) on September 11, 2002 in Karachi, the same day that KSM was supposedly killed in Karachi, Pakistan ostensibly on intelligence procured by the torture of Abu Zubaida, though video tape the evidence of this interrogation was one of those destroyed by the CIA.
• Mustafa Al Hawsawi - Also captured on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
• Ammar al-Baluchi and Walid bin 'Attash - both captured in Karachi, Pakistan, in April, 2003.

None of these men, in other words, were caught on a battlefield or in the process of fighting against our troops. None of them were caught in Iraq or Afghanistan. None of them were caught in either of the official wars with actual countries. All of them, in fact, were caught by police and intelligence forces sort of like, well, criminals. In other words, to call them enemy combatants, one would have to apply the label very loosely--unless of course, the war on terror has no borders. In this case, the unprecedented thing is not that war crimes are being tried in a civilian court, but that the definition of war has been so tediously stretched that it barely resembles what it was meant to signify. The field of the war has become so ubiquitous that it is all a game in performative language--a game which is meant to make it legitimate to torture, run secret prisons, and deny people on trial access to the charges or evidence against them. Calling them "enemy combatants" is a ridiculous holdover from a (more obviously) corrupt set of agents.

This is precisely what the Bush administration asserted when it applied the label of "enemy combatants" to these prisoners, upon their transfer from previously undisclosed CIA secret prisons. This label is basically an executive order, meant to justify their being detained, but to prevent them from being able to claim the protection of the Geneva Conventions since they weren't lawful combatants. In this case, among the other technicalities (i.e. they weren't wearing uniforms) they weren't lawful combatants because they weren't actually engaged in a war, at least not in the classical sense. In fact, they were basically just criminal terrorists, who had, up until the Bush administrations, been dealt with through law enforcement channels such as police, FBI, courts, etc. Timothy McVeigh, the Lockerbie Pan Am bomber, and the people responsible for the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were all dealt with as criminals through the so-called justice system (I bracket for a moment how or if this really worked and focus merely on the formal facts).

In other words, the current administration is not the one changing history; this trial only appears as a revision of the process because it had been so thoroughly perverted under the previous administration. What is amazing is that this isn't the response of Holder to this line of questioning. Why not say, "well no, we've never tried an Enemy Combatant in a US court, but then that definition was basically a fabrication of the previous administration so we're not dealing with a long period of time." Better yet, why not point out that, as of last March, the US government no longer honors this designation, something which Holder himself said at the time:

The Obama administration stopped calling Guantanamo inmates "enemy combatants" on Friday and incorporated international law as its basis for holding the prisoners while it works to close the facility.

The U.S. Justice Department filed court papers outlining a further legal and linguistic shift from the anti-terrorism policies of Republican President George W. Bush, which drew worldwide condemnation as violations of human rights and international law.

"As we work toward developing a new policy to govern detainees, it is essential that we operate in a manner that strengthens our national security, is consistent with our values, and is governed by law," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

Holder had, himself, played a part in redefining these prisoners as, well criminals. It baffles the mind that this wouldn't be his response. Yet he basically affirms not only the dispute Graham raises about the historical precedent but the idea that this is an attempt to, in Graham's words, "criminalize the war."

"We're making bad history here," Graham said. "The big problem I have is that you're criminalizing the war. ... I think you've made a fundamental mistake here."

Testifying for the first time on the decision, Holder delivered a point-by-point rebuttal to his critics who say he's treating the suspects with a "pre-9/11 mentality."

"I know that we are at war," Holder declared.

In other words, unlike the previous administration, which did everything in its power to construct an alternative reality, this one basically cowers in the face of that reality, acts as if the alteration didn't occur and we can simply pick up from where we were before it set about redefining what was legal and what laws applied to what. In the present case, this is pragmatically difficult since the evidence in many of these cases was obtained through questionable methods--perhaps the underlying fear many of the people involved in trying to bring this case to justice (or trying to prevent it from being brought to justice.) But if that is the case, the error isn't with the present administration for trying to bring it to trial but with the previous one for utterly failing to have any long term plan for how these people would be tried or punished. It seems as if their only plan was to leave them rotting in a dungeon in Cuba till they died, in a state of perpetual legal and political limbo--the ultimate state of exception. If they had thought about this in any length of time, they would have known they need to come up with an alternative plan--or a plan at all. Even using their perverted logic of denying them Geneva Conventions to begin with (so that they could torture them, etc.) ,after a person has been in custody for a certain length of time, they aren't going to yield much in the way of useful information: were they just supposed to sit there indefinitely with no one asking any questions? Just logistically, it is screwy. What was the plan? The fact that the current administration is going to have to go through all sorts of contortions to make this appear legal and just is not their fault or the fault of their choice of venue: it is because the previous administration had so little regard for not only the law, but the future administrations' burden of dealing with their mess. No one can dispute that the history being made is bad; it is just that this process began several years before.

What conservatives seem to be less interested in is the fact that the law isn't the law just because you say it is: people don't just listen to the law and obey because they respect authority as a source of power and repression. They listen to the law because, on some level, they believe it represents some higher process of legitimation. In the case of US law, this is because it supposedly guarantees due process. I agree that this is a bit of political theatre, but it is being done to reinstitute the belief in the law--a reasonable move for a lawyer president to do. The ideological process involved in this is a topic for another day, but needless to say their fetish of authority evidently only extends to certain people: now that there is a new president, it is evidently not important that they observe him with respect--or that they find it important that he try to establish his authority on the basis of law and justice rather than some crusty trust in old white men.

Hummer: the conclusion?

Following up from an essay I wrote long ago on the Hummer, A friend just passed along a link to the news that the Hummer brand will likely be sold to a Chinese company. At the jump, the article says:

General Motors Corp. has struck a deal to sell its Hummer truck unit to a Chinese industrial business, the two companies confirmed Tuesday.

Privately owned Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd., based in China, will acquire the truck brand, which has been part of GM since 1999. Tengzhong said it plans to keep Hummer's management team.

The Chinese company are really just buying the trademark (i.e. the IP), just like GM did in 1999--though now with all the social improvements made to it through the process of cultural efficacy over the past decade (the Chinese corporation now owns all those little references you have to the H2). When GM made the H2, they just built it on a chassis for one of their trucks (I think the Tahoe). In other words, ultimately the only thing that is changing is the brand relationship. And in this case, the local cultural experts--the management of GM which always only in charge of the marketing and design of the more fashionable H2--are being kept on. So the real change is just who is going to supply the credit--and who will get the most profits. In this case, the Chinese corporation is now replicating the relationship of the Chinese state to the US treasury: supplying credit and expecting returns. The job losses the article mentions are from the closure of dealerships. And in that case, one could basically argue that the losses are the collapse of the move to make cars more consumer oriented--with a variety of brands that can supposedly identify with a particular consumer. On the other hand, this could be only the first of several purchases by Chinese corporations--Saab, Saturn, etc. could all get sold this way. It is a predictable way for them to move up the value chain quickly in the US and world market. Who knows, it might also be purchased by Chinese companies that already produce counterfeit cars or car parts.

And I don't know that GM ever made the Hummer (as opposed to the military Humvee) on its own; I think it always contracted with the company that originally made the Humvee of gulf war fame, which makes most of its money from making actual Humvees for the army.

So, contrary to the article, AM General makes most of the H2 and 3s, though on a contract from GM. It should be a more striking fact that, if all the arrangements remain the same, a Chinese company will be contracting with a company that primarily makes US military vehicles to make a supposedly civilian truck. From the article, it looks like the answer is to move all production of Hummers to Shreveport, where GM currently makes some of the H3s.

As part of the deal, some GM plants will continue to build the Hummer brand for the new owner, at least for awhile. The company said its Shreveport, La., plant will keep building Hummers for the new owner until at least 2010

But in the interim, it is likely that the US military contractor will help the Chinese with both the production in the meantime and the conversion in Shreveport. I point this out not because I'm trying to illuminate some traitorious relationship of the US government or US business, except in so far as I'm saying that it is always ultimately that. In other words, the main reason the government and capitalism work so closely is that the one is always the foundation of the other. My earlier essay pointed to this in the early development of both the Hummer and the consumer SUV. Now the difference is that capitalism is global--and capitalists in question are supposedly communist.

So in the future, not only will the communists lend us the money and sell us the rope with which we'll hang ourselves; but they will also have US workers produce that rope. One could say that this would be a final way to make the Communism global--by injecting its political economic power into the US like a virus. In other words, they will defeat the US by coopting it into their financial orbit. A few years ago, Barry Lynn speculated that the control over the world's labor supply would ultimately create monopoly control wielded by both Asian manufacturers and states.

If terrorists ever want to strike at the heart of American manufacturing, they need not sneak into Ohio to do so. More certain success, with more concentrated results, awaits along the industrial boulevards of Taiwan. And what of the Philippine colonel or Indonesian autocrat who one day wakes to find that the electronics industry, in its rational wisdom, has placed 80 percent of the world's chip-assembly, or even chip-testing, operations in his country? Must we now abide and buy off cranks such as Malaysia's Mahathir the way we must abide the Dos Santoses of the world and the families Saud? As our companies continue to scatter industrial capacity to the far comers of the globe, then to trim slack at home until they come to depend on that distant capacity, are we not witnessing the creation of a new strategic commodity like oil, control of which can be exploited to wrangle away our wealth and security? And once a country expropriates industrial capacity in this way would it not be able to use its influence to prevent the affected industry from ever building competing capacity elsewhere again?

I still think there is much that is correct about this--though, again without the nationalistic moralizing. My dissertation is largely centered around how IPR makes much of this possible. By making the IP the only thing that links US brands to US corporations, it is all the more likely that more production will be shipped overseas. In this way, the only thing keeping Lynn's nightmare from coming true would be the use of IP. But what Lynn neglects to note is that this relationship would supposedly be limited by the fact that the consumers for those products would be predominantly located in the US--thus the Taiwanese producer would find little joy in owning a plant to produce cars that were mostly purchased by US consumers unless it could also guarantee the legal sale of its products to those US consumers. The key relationship, therefore, was between the capitalist and the state protection of IP and trade.

I imagined that the situation would ultimately result in the closure of US plants, but lately Asian corps are setting up shop in US to buld cars they will ultimately sell to the US. In this, the capital relationship proves to be equally mobile in the opposite direction. THe fixed equipment of the US might be put right back to work--provided there is transnational control over US labor standards--using Chinese capital and to the benefit of the continued stockholders in these companies, many of which would be US citizens as well. In short, far from the divisive relationship predicted by Lynn, China would not hold the US hostage by withholding labor; instead, China and its Communist government would coopt US labor (much like US car corporations did in the 1940s) and much of US society. It would never need to build up its military or engage in a top down revolution: it would simply own more and more of the world's capital and therefore eventually be able to dictate the labor standards. I have no illusions about how many legs are good or bad (in this case, it's hard to tell if there are any pigs involved) but it is an interesting scenario which would provide the Chinese government--which could probably nationalize any of these companies and their capital and labor supplies at any time--with an amazing lever over the future development of US industry. They would never need to fire a shot. IP, therefore, would prove to be an unlikely pivot to having the Chinese state gain control of US society. On the other hand, this replays the xenophobic debates in the 90s about the Japanese owning the US, so I wouldn't want to push it too far.

I will have to review my Arrighi, but there is surely something in the pattern of capitalist development here--he touches on the Japanese connection in Long Twentieth Century, but I have yet to read his new book on China. (something here about venitians, Dutch or Spain not having their own army.) On the other hand, as I understand it, the Russian mafia is supposedly integral to the trade in conuterfeit goods (discussion I'm hoping to follow on in looking at the book McMafia). These organizations might be willing to pony up some money if it meant buying a legitimate US shop for really cheap. But I don't know how strong that brick of the BRIC is in this great wall.

On tea parties

Can't really say much about the tea party stuff at this point since I haven't had any time outside of the major project of the "Title Pending" above, but Thom Hartmann had a good column on the actual event that centered on this fact I hadn't heard of (or had forgotten.)

The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.

In this sense, it is the G-20 protesters who better represent the spirit of that revolt--making Glenn Beck's attempt at disparaging the latter (by comparing them to Lenin and Stalin) telling. Of course he also compares them to the actual communist revolution, in which case I guess he's right--though I wish the comparison was less unequivocally understood in our culture.

back to it...

The permanent adolescence of the CATO institute

I'm responding to this ridiculous post by a CATO institute guy, which tries to sum up the problems of Keynesianism. Of course it is also making the rounds on the usual blogs and lists (like the Austrians). And as I watch it, I can't help but ask: Does he really believe that the reason we are saying government spending should increase it to "improve growth?" I'm all for improved growth, but in the present moment I think the belief is that it will stave off a collapse. On the other hand, in the long run it could be useful for the average worker to have more money--you know, just something more than the 450:1 ratio of the average CEO pay to the average worker pay. But I doubt a plan as radical as that would find many backers there.

Then he makes this fantastic ploy to prove the "logical fallacy" Keynesianism: "The government can't put money into the economy without taking money out of it." The money, as in Keynes' time is first of all raise through the same sorts of loans we've already been taking out--mostly from abroad. I'm always puzzled by how reactionary these tracts can get when they want to: it's a global economy when we're shipping jobs overseas but the inflow of capital from abroad is completely impossible when it's funding government spending.

Then he acts as if "slicing the pie differently" would be, in itself, a bad idea--as if having no pie at all would be a better alternative.

In addressing Keynes argument about the division between savings and investment, he basically denies facts on the ground: money *does* sit idle. What this basically advocates is letting rich people keep their earnings sheltered during a time of crisis--where they neither have an inclination to expose it to the "gales" of creative destruction through investment or are asked to pitch in to help at least keep the rest of the country alive during the crisis. This is where Keynes' chapter on "long run prospects" seems most pertinent: the "animal spirits" of investors are dulled and, if we are to be dependent on them for all forms of social production, these spirits must be lifted. How is this supposed to happen? Consumers have no money to spend and potential business customers (the "dept II" he conveniently leaves out of his equation) see the lack of confidence and spending. He gets uppity because Keynesian wants to get money out of banks and into the economy--but, he says, if you give it to consumers they will probably just save it anyway--as if people would, in large numbers, rather sock away their income than pay for food and--especially today--shelter.

The whole point of making the economy a national issue is getting money into the hands of the average person so that they can meet their basic needs through cash-based commodity consumption. "The Economy" is not separate from that (as his nifty graphic shows). This is essential to the economy: you can't have businesses produce things without workers or consumers, however much these titans would wish they could (or try to get around it by outsourcing.)

Throughout the video this is the real anxiety. We may ask, "Why are we supposed to give all our money to the capitalists instead of the government?" Our good CATO interlocutor promises, "Because they will rationally invest it--not like those irrational investors who, anyway, were only led astray by tiny government programs." And if they don't? If none of these magical small businesses that are supposed to replace the industrial economy of yore crop up? If all of them that do are ridiculous dot.com pyramid schemes that workers invest time and energy only to have their future employment and pensions evaporate with the shell companies that were set up? Well just sit and wait: the capitalists will eventually get around to it: they're busy helping build up the Chinese economy. When the US population has been properly disciplined (to accept third world wages, benefits, and labor rights) they'll be back to exploit the people who haven't died off. Hold your horses...geez.

His final argument about why Keynesianism is so popular is classic: he says it is used only because politicians like to spend other people's money. Is this guy trying to parody himself? Obviously there are actual academics who believe in this policy: they have data too. More than that, there is this pretention that all these decisions are being taken by elite members of society rather than resulting from popular pressures. It is a strange kind of populism that acts as popular pressure doesn't exist. I'll agree that it is being decided by elite members of society--but so is neo-liberalism.

And, far from it being something Marxists or even radical leftists would see as a step forward, those who are paying attention know exactly who this will benefit in the long run. Capitalism is prone to terrible crises. It is an inherently unstable system--a quality that people on this site seem to see as generally laudable. If only it wasn't so often paired with the pesky pressure of democracy--of all the rabble wanting to "eat" and "live" while obviously serving no purpose in society since they aren't being paid (enough) by capitalists--well then it would likely work out fine. The little nugget this video fails to mention were the forces pushing for outright fascism (then seen in very different light) or full communism. Roosevelt was not just working with fancy abstractions that tailored, tenured CATO baffoons can scrape out of the (Keynesian inspired) data: he was trying to stave off a popular revolt to right totalitarianism or left wing radicalism. Businesses and the US government realized this as well hence, as Staughton Lynd chronciles, legislation was sponsored to recognize unions and collective bargaining:

It was the hope of those sponsoring this legislation that strikes would decrease. In the short run, strikes increased and took the more militant form of sit-downs. But the national government stuck to its strategy of benevolent neutrality. It is as if the government consciously took its chances on militancy in order to be sure of forestalling radicalism. At some point (whether before or after the governmental initiative seems still unclear), a part of the American business community endorsed this cooptive strategy and independently implemented it. (37)

He gives the example of United States Steel, which recognized their unions even before the US government mandated it as they realized this was the best way to stifle the revolt. For Lynd, this is exactly what it did, mostly killing off the radicalism that threatened American business.

If we were to look at Keynesianism in truth, it would be in the post-war economy, which, even then was largely based on an impressive set of new, imperial strategies. Still, it is a more reasonable place to look for when Keynesianism was succeeding--and when workers wages were far better than they are today in real terms. For many radicals--such as the economist and former editor of the Monthly Review, Harry Magdoff--this represented not a challenge to capitalism, but it's saving grace. On the whole, nothing was changed in terms of the class structure of production, just its distribution. And even that only looks desireable in retrospect. It certainly isn't the best we can do. More importantly, for the entire post war period--and more so today--the bulk of government spending (aside from payments on the debt itself and social security obligations) goes towards military spending.

As John Stewart wondered last week, why do libertarian minded folks “trust government with tanks and nuclear weapons, but not to pass out cheese to poor people." It doesn't seem to make sense but judging from the frenzy of activity on the topic of the great depression (as opposed to the hangover we still have from much larger build up of the "military industrial complex" there is little principle involved other than making sure people who have the bulk of the money today come out on the other side of this crisis with their wealth intact. How that happens is a mystery, but they seem to be banking on bailouts with no takebacks--once again confirming the permanent adolescence of the capitalist consciousness.