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.

Investors flock to zero percent treasury bills (and what Keynes would say about it)

I saw this story this AM and thought it an interesting example of what's going on at the moment.

NY Times, December 10, 2008
Investors Buy U.S. Debt at Zero Yield
By VIKAS BAJAJ and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

When was the last time you invested in something that you knew wouldn't make money?

In the market equivalent of shoveling cash under the mattress, hordes of buyers were so eager on Tuesday to park money in the world's safest investment, United States government debt, that they agreed to accept a zero percent rate of return.

This got me thinking DeLong's essay earlier this week. People parking assets in zero percent treasury bonds is a good example of what DeLong says of the major hang up in the
world economy at the moment:

[Default Discount] and [Liquidity Discount] together can only account for [$3 trillion of the $20 trillion] decrease in market value. The rest of that decline in the value of global capital — all $17 trillion of it — thus comes by arithmetic from (5): a rise in the risk discount. There has been a massive crash in the risk tolerance of the globe's investors.

Thus we have an impulse — a $2 trillion increase in the default discount from the problems in the mortgage market — but the thing deserving attention is the extraordinary financial accelerator that amplified $2 trillion in actual on-the-ground losses in terms of mortgage payments that will not be made into an extra $17 trillion of lost value because global investors now want to hold less risky portfolios than they wanted two years ago.

[. . . .]

Our models predict that in normal times, with the ability to diversify portfolios that exists today, the risk discount on assets like corporate equities should be around 1% per year. It is more like 5% per year in normal times — and more like 10% per year today. And our models for why the
risk discount has taken such a huge upward leap in the past year and a half are little better than simple handwaving and just-so stories. Our current financial crisis remains largely a mystery: a $2 trillion impulse in lost value of securitized mortgages has set in motion a financial accelerator that we do not understand at any deep level but that has led to ten times the total losses in financial wealth of the impulse.

In reading this I was reminded of John Maynard Keynes' discussion of the role of investors in the economy--and of relying on investors for the economy to prosper. In Chapter 12 of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money he speaks about the need for "spontaneous optimism" which he terms "animal spirits" for anything to get done. This is akin to the "irrational exuberance" that Greenspan spoke of in the late 1990s. I don't know if this is similar to what Friedman, in his new book, discusses in terms of a "green bubble" to restart investment. In the latter case, I think there would have to be some role for the federal government--and in any case, it is funny to think that all the talk about rationality in markets is overlooking their most important characteristic: irrationality. I thought this passage from Keynes was useful so I'll leave off with it.

Section VII

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. Enterprise only pretends to itself to be mainly actuated by the statements in its own prospectus, however candid and sincere. Only a little more than an expedition to the South
Pole, is it based on an exact calculation of benefits to come. Thus if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die;—though fears of loss may have a basis no more reasonable than hopes of profit had before.

It is safe to say that enterprise which depends on hopes stretching into the future benefits the community as a whole. But individual initiative will only be adequate when reasonable calculation is supplemented and supported by animal spirits, so that the thought of ultimate loss which often overtakes pioneers, as experience undoubtedly tells us and them, is put aside as a healthy man puts aside the expectation of death. This means, unfortunately, not only that slumps and depressions are exaggerated in degree, but that economic prosperity is excessively
dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average business man. If the fear of a Labour Government or a New Deal depresses enterprise, this need not be the result either of a reasonable calculation or of a plot with political intent;—it is the mere consequence of upsetting the delicate balance of spontaneous optimism. In estimating the prospects of investment, we must have regard, therefore, to the nerves and hysteria and even the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends.

We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back
for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance

.

PS: if anyone is interested in doing a little reading, there is a reading group on Keynes _General Theory_ going on at both DeLong's blog and at Marginal Revolutions, the blog of a GMU econ professor: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/12/general-theory.html

Bolivia, lithium

BBC had a story about the largest known lithium deposits in the world. They are found in Bolivia, where environmental and world historical concerns are keeping the supply from being exploited. If only the writers of the latest Bond movie had known this they could have focused on a real set of future concerns rather than rehashing an old scenario through what was basically an imperialist lens (i.e. British agent necessary to help the poor Bolivians). More here.

FCC spectrum changes: Cell Phone Companies vs. free public WiFi

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I had the opportunity to use one of these fancy new iPhones--two of them, actually. They really are amazing little pieces of technology--though I confess that, when holding one, my first question was what I should do with it. I didn't need to call anyone and I had little inclination to look something up on the web. Being with other people, surfing the web or watching videos seemed a little anti-social--though during the holidays, being anti-social is a very practical defense mechanism. Since I was mostly in homes that had upwards of 2 different internet connected computers--usually closer to 3 or 4--or well within a few hundred yards of a terminal I could access if really necessary, the idea that it was imperative to have this gadget to get something done was mostly the result of advertising hype and the experience of the technological sublime--only instead of being horrified, you're just smitten. I know I could do it on that computer over there, but it is so much cooooler to do it on this one. In any case, after handling the thing for a few minutes, I could understand why the apps are so popular (and why Apple likes to highlight them in its commercials): it gives you something, anything, to do with the thing. It makes it a use value, one, according to my wife, that you MUST have.

We'll be putting off that kind of purchase for a while. We could probably afford to buy the phone--it is, after all, the holidays--but getting service for it (or one of the similar devices like the Sprint network's Instinct) would double our monthly cellular bill for the indeterminate future. Within a year the $300 phone would have cost us an additional $600 in phone bills. I suppose that is an expense we are really supposed to be able to overlook for the tremendous power we are given by the AT&T or Sprint networks. Recent advertisements have highlighted this--both competing to claim they have "The Nation's Fastest 3G network."

This is important because, it seems, anyway, the network is somewhat separate from the devices themselves. Yes they are phones, so having a phone service is useful. But they are basically handheld computers that are being plugged into the already computer-saturated lifeworld of the contemporary, North/Western bourgeoisie. I noticed this as I was trying to search using the iPhone, in one of these computer hotspots, and it offered to connect me to two of the local WiFi networks. I confess I don't know exactly how this works or what degree of functionality the device would have using only this kind of connection--I suppose that's why I'm encouraged by ads to think mostly about the 3G network speed. Still, it seems feasible that you could buy the device--which is still less than even the cheapest laptop--and not connect it to Sprint, AT&T or whoever was the proprietary owner of the network service for that device (a problem in itself, as far as I'm concerned.)

This got me thinking about these devices in relation to another big story in the news--the switch to digital TV, which will leave wide swaths of public airwaves open for future use, determined in part by the rules the FCC will decide later this month. The future of communications networks, especially in relation to the role the current incumbents will play, will likely be determined by rules made before Christmas.

The current proposal, which is championed by Republican (!) chairman Kevin Martin (who will be replaced when Obama takes office) is similar to the plan advocated by a venture capital firm M2Z, which includes CEOs of Google. It would require whoever wins the spectrum auction to provide free WiFi access at a speed of at least 768 kbps downstream. According to ars technica, over ten years it would provide service to 95% of the US population. On the downside, the proposal says it would also have to include some sort of filtering mechanism to keep out the pron, an almost unworkable feature, which, of course, will likely the be death knell of the whole proposal as it is implemented. Still, The Washington Post overplays the resistance of the plan for this reason, citing Ben Scott from the communication activist org Free Press as if he is an opponent of the plan on free speech grounds (I don't have any word from Scott on this either way, but the Free Press statement of support for the plan says nothing about these issues.)

The real opponents are some current incumbents (which the Post says "question whether investors are willing to create the needed infrastructure for free Internet access in the recession-hit economy) as well as T-Mobile, which claims free WiFi will interfere with its ability to use the spectrum it just bought in 2006.

Google, on the other hand, is a very vocal advocate of the plan--and for good reason. In 2006 it launched a free WiFi service in San Francisco and later filed three patents related to the provision of free, but advertiser supported, WiFi (the patents related to being able to subsidize the service using geo-specific, user-oriented advertising on a dynamic browser platform that would change based on the above specifications. It has long been building a network of not only WiFi but wired capacity, as reported in 2005:

For the past year, it has quietly been shopping for miles and miles of "dark," or unused, fiber-optic cable across the country from wholesalers such as New York's AboveNet. It's also acquiring superfast connections from Cogent Communications and WilTel, among others, between East Coast cities including Atlanta, Miami, and New York. Such large-scale purchases are unprecedented for an Internet company, but Google's timing is impeccable. The rash of telecom bankruptcies has freed up a ton of bargain-priced capacity, which Google needs as it prepares to unleash a flood of new, bandwidth-hungry applications.

I don't know the status of this infrastructure, but I do know that Verizon's chairman got pissed off about it shortly afterwards, though he phrased it as if the problem was Google using existing lines. Here the issue was basically one of net-neutrality--he wanted Google to pay extra to use the internet. At the moment Google seemed poised to create it's own network, bypassing these majors. It's recent patent filing on "Flexible Communication Systems and Methods" seems to confirm that this is eventually its intent, especially with regard to the somewhat fabled (though evidently in existence for almost six weeks now) Google Phone.

Google’s filing describes cellular, WiFi and WiMAX networks as all being potential routes, with the technicalities invisible to the user; their example is a mobile handset that works on home WiFi then seamlessly transitions to a WiFi hotspot or cellular network when outside.

As WIRED put it, this could kill off cell phone contracts as we know them. Interestingly, the GooglePhone is currently supported by T-Mobile, the company rejecting the current FCC proposal.

In relation to the FCC wireless WiFi bid, however, this seems to make sense. If you had a device that could move from cellular network to WiFi hotpot--which, though I admit I'm not exactly clear on the technology, the iPhone seems to be able to do--then using the 3G network would be just one way to use this device. Of course this is not just about internet service: as VOIS services--and even free video chatting via services like Skype--have shown, the internet is more efficient at providing phone service than the phone companies. If this is true of land lines, why not cell phones? Sure, the iPhone is marketed as if the nifty thing about it is that it could provide internet access at your fingertips--the cool thing about Blackberries, etc. as well. But this supposes that it is just a layer of gravy that you pay extra for in your cellular phone bill. What if the device, using free (even if ad supported) WiFi, was able to provide not only Internet capabilities, but phone service? Evidently, this idea is not lost on Google (or T-Mobile) as in NYT's review of what could be called the "Google Phone" they explicitly mention it:

Google insists that its store will be completely open. Unlike Apple, it will not reject software submissions if they don’t serve the mother ship’s commercial interests. For example, Apple rejects programs that would let you make phone calls over the Internet, thereby avoiding using up cellular airtime. Google and T-Mobile swear they would permit such a thing

This would create an incredible devalorization of the investments Sprint, AT&T and others have sunk into building these networks--but it would also erase two of my most significant monthly costs--cell phone and Internet service (I no longer pay for a land line). This is especially significant since it would likely reduce my costs while giving me more services. I know that is the promise of modernity and the supposed productivity revolution technology is claimed to catalyze, but neither of these are usually the goal of capitalist organizations.

Google is certainly one of these organizations, but it seems more able to look at the long term as a space of new possibilities rather than simply amortizing investments and raking in profits. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop--for Google to announce that, from here on out, they will begin to "do evil." As for who would pick up the tab on this public WiFi or its infrastructure, especially, as the Post speculates, "in a recession-hit economy:" Nancy Pelosi, the Representative of California's 8th district, where Google has had much trouble getting a proposed free-wifi system launched, has proposed that building this infrastructure be part of the bailout plan. If this sounds socialistic, it should be noted that, as NPR reported earlier this week, the US is well behind most countries in Europe, where WiFi provision is much cheaper and infrastructure publicly subsidized.

In any case, the possibility of this framework for communication is there and the devices are probably well within reach. A big piece of the puzzle about the future of wireless communication in the US is the way the legislation is written to allow Google and its venture capitalist pals to use this area of the spectrum for broadband--oh and whether the legislation favors incumbent providers or not.

Interestingly, AT&T--which could have much to lose--favors the Martin proposal, as does Verizon, which famously tried to scuttle a public WiFi system in Phili a few years back; while Google phone partner T-Mobile opposes it. So much for seeing clearly where these lines of interest are drawn (I'm sure someone with more information on the background relationships could help me understand it). In the meantime, I'm most taken by the fact that the two most established industries of spectrum use--TV and radio--seem only as involved in resisting the plan as Broadway theatres. Again, the supposed reason for this is that the use of the white space for anything else would cause potential interference. I'm more partial to Martin's claim that the real interference they fear is with their business model:

“We’re being very cautious about protecting the broadcasters, but at the same time making sure the technology allows us to make greater use of this invaluable resource,” Mr. Martin said. He added that he thought some opponents, like the broadcasters, were fighting the proposal because they were unnerved by the rise of interactive tools that offered a less passive media experience. “The empowerment of consumers is threatening,” he said

On this point, I am forced to recall Michael Power, the former FCC chair, and to say that I too hastily judged him. He was in charge of trying to push through the ownership changes that led to a broad public backlash in 2003--an event which formed the backbone of Free Press' advocacy and sits as a central event in Robert McChesney's The Problem of the Media. At the time, I thought Powell was being cavalier and somewhat utopian when he claimed that the FCC had little Constitutional right to regulate spectrum because,

Moreover, unique scarcity as a justification for lesser constitutional protection for broadcasters is demonstrably unsupportable. Technology makes ever more efficient use of spectrum. Broadcast channels are continually increasing. Cable, internet, and VCRs provide an untold number of outlets for speech. We must admit to these realities and quit subverting the Constitution in order for the government to be free to impose its speech preferences on the public. [. . . .] The fact is that spectrum is not really scarce. It may actually be infinite, dependent only on advances in technology that can make ever-increasing efficient use of it.... Perhaps, it is uniquely abundant rather than uniquely scarce.

At the time I didn't doubt the technological possibilities--and still don't--but the institutional possibilities within the current media oligopoly. Here I think the major difference between the way principled libertarians and principled leftists see the relationship between the state and the market is that "freedom" in libertarian terms is always mediated by the immense power of control over monetary resources. I still basically believe that as well (and the proposed changes could just as easily lead to the kind of concentrated, media monopoly, Google(dis)topia that all of us should fear), but I suppose Powell is sort of being proven right in the sense that these changes are taking place so rapidly it is hard to retain a monopoly. So increases in technology may, indeed, allow for more space for competition--and that could have undermined the concentration that would have followed the 2003 changes he advocated. 2003 is ages ago in terms of the media (there was no bittorrent, at least in widespread use; no flash video; etc.). It is hard to imagine what would have happened had the public protest not prevented those changes taking place. Still, in so far as the new changes might make that more efficient spectrum available for other uses, Powell has been vindicated in what appears, in retrospect, as a principled stand. Only time--and the Dec. 18 FCC meetings--will tell just how true this is. Like the iPhones and Google Phones that will likely pop up if the changes are approved, after that it will be up to the rest of us to figure out what we're going to do with it.