NOTE FOR THE DAY: We haven't had a lot of editing or translating action, lately, over at RWG Communication. So remember, folks, he said in his radio voice, whether you need your paper edited so that it meets the highest academic standards, or you need translation done from French or German into English, contact: rgathman@netzero.net. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program....
LI – who has the ears of a monomaniac for this kind of thing – has noticed that a huge pall has fallen over Iraq’s election in the American press. When the press doesn’t have a narrative – like, Freedom Loving Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi Sets Pace – they don’t have news.
So what is the narrative coming out of Iraq? Alas, it seems that the eight points we printed as a sort of progressive program in Iraq are going to be battered to hell. Not that we expected secularist, anti-occupation forces would win squat in the elections. We didn’t expect, however, that the pro-theocratic element would do quite so awesomely well. LI has always suspected that Iraq would undergo some theocratic regression as it stumbled towards reasserting its sovereignty, but --- if the results are as they seem to be – this will be much harsher than we imagined.
We compared Sistani to a chess player in an analysis we did a few months ago. We should amend that to secret chess player, since according to the Independent:
“Cricket is allowed but chess is "absolutely forbidden". Women may not shake hands with men. Music is permitted but only if it is not for enjoyment. Men cannot pray when wearing earrings.
These are the views of the most powerful man in Iraq. After the US invasion, various American officials and generals believed they occupied this position. They turned out to be wrong. As the election victory of the Shias has confirmed, the most influential figure in Iraq, dressed in tattered grey robe and black turban, is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.”
That we got the balance of forces in Iraq wrong is understandable – our information has to be sieved from the relentlessly insipid and American-o-centric reporting of such journalists as John Burns in the NYT (whose ra ra style reads like a Negroponte press handout) and Jonathan Steele in the Guardian (whose comment, the day of the election, was that it seemed it would be Allawi in a landslide). But LI’s goal has always been to try to see the fragments and slivers of fact we get to their intrinsic connections – not just their connection to U.S. concerns.
We do think that the endlessly repeated new line – that the new Iraqi government won’t ask for a departure timetable from the Americans – is based on a reading of the apparent retreat from that position in the week leading up to the election by the United Iraqi Alliance. However, what was proposed and then non-proposed can be proposed again. The UIA has to tread a delicate path to avoid getting out gunned by Sadr’s people, who are apparently winning local elections in Basra. It is hard to see a combination that would allow the new Iraqi government to comfortably give the occupiers carte blanche, which is what the Americans want.
The Independent story, penned by Patrick Cockburn, is the best wrap up we’ve seen:
“Iraq could be on the verge of seeing the greatest setback to women's rights in the Middle East since Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran in 1979. Laws on marriage, divorce and inheritance could be changed in favour of men. Under Islamic law, daughters inherit less than the sons.
The views of Ayatollah Sistani on chess, cricket, music, earrings and almost any other topic can be found on his highly professional website (Sistani.org). They show tolerance of other religions. Last year he was swift to condemn attacks on Christian churches in Baghdad as "abhorrent crimes". He counselled restraint when Shia leaders demanded retaliation after the bloody bombings of Shia shrines and processions.
There is also no doubt that Iraq is heading towards some form of Islamic republic even if it is more liberal than Iran. This is likely to be reflected in the new constitution to be drafted by the National Assembly just elected. "We call for having Islam as the main and only source of legislation and we reject any article that runs contrary to the Islamic legislation," said Ibrahim al-Ibrahimi, the spokesman of another Grand Ayatollah, Ishaq al-Faladh. "We call on Iraqi officials to preserve the face of Iraq and not to separate religion and state." Ayatollah Faladh is not as influential as Ayatollah Sistani but, politically liberal though the latter may be, his views are in keeping with Islamic social norms.”
Given that the Americans haven’t done anything outrageously stupid in Iraq in a couple of weeks, surely they will be doing something stupid soon – some overt, bungled attempt to elevate one of their puppets to a prominence and power the puppet hasn’t earned – that will piss off the UIA. We’ll see. It will also be interesting if, in the States, it begins to sink in that 1500 Americans lost their lives to bring about the Islamic Republic of Iraq. This is the type of thing that could disturb the narcissistic stupor of the American booboisie. Surely, to forestall the awful consequences of something like that, we need and deserve another good celebrity trial of the century.
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
St. Paul's epistle to the Washingtonians
In The Historical Aims of Science, an essay by the Australian philosopher of science, Stephen Gaukroger, in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, there’s a nice passage on what made the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe different from the boom and bust Renaissances characteristic of previous cultures, from the Greeks to the Arabs in Baghdad to the Sung Chinese. For Gaukroger, what we are looking for is not progress, but consolidation:
“The question we need to raise here is that of the consolidation of the Scientiic Revolution, and the establishment of the legitimacy of the scientific enterprise.
The consolidation of the Scientific Revolution was in part due to the ability of its proponents and apologists to draw on the often novel ways in which theories were being justified, to extrapolate from this to the legitimation of the existence of the new science as a long-term project, and to articulate a range of cognitive values around its own practice. This was not an easy or straightforward process, and its outcome was not guaranteed. It was a difficult struggle, with great efforts, of varying success, being put into establishing the value of experimentation, the public usefulness of knowledge and, from the end of the eighteenth century, largescale public science education programmes and radical reform of university curricula.”
To LI’s mind, this has left us with a persistent asymmetry of cognitive habits, in which, on the one side, we have a pattern of experiment, observations, and relations (the last characterized in the formal language of mathematics), and on the other side, we have the life of power, lust, loss and gain. There are those – Hayek being, perhaps, the most articulate on the Right in the last century – who attribute this asymmetry to the nature of human things. It just so happens that installing a set of procedures among human things that would imitate scientific procedures would quickly produce engineered catastrophe, since scientific procedures are imminently unequipped to deal with contingency and complexity.
We actually believe Hayek has a point. On the other hand, the exportation of something like scientific integrity into talk about politics has its attractions. For LI, this means seeing a political program not in terms of the moral worth of its proponent, but in terms of the coherence or incoherence of its various parts. It is this that is most striking about the American regime we are currently suffering under: its utter inability to mesh means and ends, combined with its utter inability to see inconsistencies in the various scenarios it projects as programs for action. The scenarios are all Christian erotic daydreams. The Christian self-help section of the book store is now in power, and we are officially in search of the miraculous. This being a fallen world, the miraculous reliably doesn’t happen.
Read, for instance, the NYT report on the Bush budget. The report makes clear that the budget is a compendium of malignant lies. Actually, the NYT pulls its punches. No surprise there. It fails to take into account the full extent of the tax cuts Bush wants to make permanent. One has no doubt that the figures in the current budget are as trustworthy as Enron’s projections of future profits, circa 2000. This will be pointed out. This will be discussed.
But what won’t be discussed is what strikes the third party observer – Bush’s deficits have not been rejected by the world financial community. Quite the contrary.
I had an interesting discussion with my web pal, Paul Craddick, on his site about Keynsian economics in which he brought up a reliable libertarian shibboleth – that Roosevelt’s New Deal worsened the Depression. But from the experience of the past fifty years, it wasn’t the New Deal, but the instinct for balancing budgets that worsened the Depression. WWII was a godsend for the economic health of the American public in that it allowed the State to incur debts on a level not ever seen before, extended by financial institutions that had no choice, and paid back in inflated dollars. And every recession since has been spent out of, with the variable being excuses to spend. Usually, they are military – and now that we have something called Homeland Defense, we have found a way to spend money on absolutely nothing at all – which is a very Zen thing to do for the Christian homebodies in D.C., and the most interesting development in Christian theology since Robin Morgan urged your Southern Baptist housewife to wrap her nude body in Saran wrap and await her Pauline lord and master at the door, in obedience to what Jesus would do, or advise, if there had been Saran wrap in Galilee. In fact, according to the new theology of faith, not works, you can now spend as much money as you want ‘domestically”, label it homeland defense, and ‘shrink’ spending on the “domestic’ budget. This is almost Nirvana.
What needs to be asked is: what does the borrowed money go to? If we were going to borrow a trillion some dollars anyway, why can’t we have national health care, for instance? Why, instead, do we just have a population largely in hock to credit card companies to pay for Junior’s dentistry? why is the enormous wealth of this country, flowing in every pricey restaurant from Miami to Seattle, so hard to find in the East side of Austin Texas, in the South side of Chicago, in the Bronx, etc., etc.
In The Historical Aims of Science, an essay by the Australian philosopher of science, Stephen Gaukroger, in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, there’s a nice passage on what made the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe different from the boom and bust Renaissances characteristic of previous cultures, from the Greeks to the Arabs in Baghdad to the Sung Chinese. For Gaukroger, what we are looking for is not progress, but consolidation:
“The question we need to raise here is that of the consolidation of the Scientiic Revolution, and the establishment of the legitimacy of the scientific enterprise.
The consolidation of the Scientific Revolution was in part due to the ability of its proponents and apologists to draw on the often novel ways in which theories were being justified, to extrapolate from this to the legitimation of the existence of the new science as a long-term project, and to articulate a range of cognitive values around its own practice. This was not an easy or straightforward process, and its outcome was not guaranteed. It was a difficult struggle, with great efforts, of varying success, being put into establishing the value of experimentation, the public usefulness of knowledge and, from the end of the eighteenth century, largescale public science education programmes and radical reform of university curricula.”
To LI’s mind, this has left us with a persistent asymmetry of cognitive habits, in which, on the one side, we have a pattern of experiment, observations, and relations (the last characterized in the formal language of mathematics), and on the other side, we have the life of power, lust, loss and gain. There are those – Hayek being, perhaps, the most articulate on the Right in the last century – who attribute this asymmetry to the nature of human things. It just so happens that installing a set of procedures among human things that would imitate scientific procedures would quickly produce engineered catastrophe, since scientific procedures are imminently unequipped to deal with contingency and complexity.
We actually believe Hayek has a point. On the other hand, the exportation of something like scientific integrity into talk about politics has its attractions. For LI, this means seeing a political program not in terms of the moral worth of its proponent, but in terms of the coherence or incoherence of its various parts. It is this that is most striking about the American regime we are currently suffering under: its utter inability to mesh means and ends, combined with its utter inability to see inconsistencies in the various scenarios it projects as programs for action. The scenarios are all Christian erotic daydreams. The Christian self-help section of the book store is now in power, and we are officially in search of the miraculous. This being a fallen world, the miraculous reliably doesn’t happen.
Read, for instance, the NYT report on the Bush budget. The report makes clear that the budget is a compendium of malignant lies. Actually, the NYT pulls its punches. No surprise there. It fails to take into account the full extent of the tax cuts Bush wants to make permanent. One has no doubt that the figures in the current budget are as trustworthy as Enron’s projections of future profits, circa 2000. This will be pointed out. This will be discussed.
But what won’t be discussed is what strikes the third party observer – Bush’s deficits have not been rejected by the world financial community. Quite the contrary.
I had an interesting discussion with my web pal, Paul Craddick, on his site about Keynsian economics in which he brought up a reliable libertarian shibboleth – that Roosevelt’s New Deal worsened the Depression. But from the experience of the past fifty years, it wasn’t the New Deal, but the instinct for balancing budgets that worsened the Depression. WWII was a godsend for the economic health of the American public in that it allowed the State to incur debts on a level not ever seen before, extended by financial institutions that had no choice, and paid back in inflated dollars. And every recession since has been spent out of, with the variable being excuses to spend. Usually, they are military – and now that we have something called Homeland Defense, we have found a way to spend money on absolutely nothing at all – which is a very Zen thing to do for the Christian homebodies in D.C., and the most interesting development in Christian theology since Robin Morgan urged your Southern Baptist housewife to wrap her nude body in Saran wrap and await her Pauline lord and master at the door, in obedience to what Jesus would do, or advise, if there had been Saran wrap in Galilee. In fact, according to the new theology of faith, not works, you can now spend as much money as you want ‘domestically”, label it homeland defense, and ‘shrink’ spending on the “domestic’ budget. This is almost Nirvana.
What needs to be asked is: what does the borrowed money go to? If we were going to borrow a trillion some dollars anyway, why can’t we have national health care, for instance? Why, instead, do we just have a population largely in hock to credit card companies to pay for Junior’s dentistry? why is the enormous wealth of this country, flowing in every pricey restaurant from Miami to Seattle, so hard to find in the East side of Austin Texas, in the South side of Chicago, in the Bronx, etc., etc.
Monday, February 7, 2005
“As a small child Kipling was brought up by his Indian ayah. The family house in Bombay was near the burning ghats where the dead bodies were incinerated. Vultures flapped and lolloped on the look-out for tidbits. So, one day, a child's hand was found in the family garden. The young Rudyard was forbidden by his mother to mention it. "I wanted to see that hand," he writes in his autobiography, Something of Myself.’
Craig Raine’s rambling essay in the Guardian review ostensibly shows, against the convention of literary criticism and the dictates of common sense, that writing has a descriptive power equal to reality’s power to exist for description. Or is reality’s a power? In any case, we don’t believe Raine’s claim for a second. It leads him to this amusingly absurd passage:
“In an early chapter of The Bostonians, Henry James considers Ransom's Southern dialect and announces that it is not in his power by any combination of words to render Ransom's speech. In a sense, this represents a defeat for language - except that really it is only a local defeat for James's language. Kipling, though less intelligent than James, is a greater writer - at any rate, a writer more interested in capturing externals by means of words.”
We admit that the idea of James doing a Southern accent is as funny as Mark Twain creating a Portrait of a Lady. The Kipling reference gets Raine off his high horse – which is good, as he is riding nowhere on it, quickly – and the rest of the essay makes some interesting observations about Kipling. Which is why we recommend looking at it. We were fascinated by Kipling’s own fascination with Japanese cruelty – we didn’t know. After the graf we fronted this post with, Raine continues:
“The impulse here is cognate with Kipling's strange injunction in From Sea to Sea: "When you come to Japan, look at Farsari's hara-kiri pictures and his photos of the last crucifixion (twenty years ago) in Japan." The aesthetic cannot really afford to be squeamish. Of course, the moral will always make itself felt. Here Kipling concedes that there is "a strain of bloodthirstiness in their [Japanese] compositions". And he knows their "grim fidelity" will "make you uncomfortable"
Who knew? We couldn’t find Farsari’s photo of the last crucifixion in Japan on the web. We suspect Kipling really meant Felice Beato, whose crucifixion photo, here, is strangely placid.
Craig Raine’s rambling essay in the Guardian review ostensibly shows, against the convention of literary criticism and the dictates of common sense, that writing has a descriptive power equal to reality’s power to exist for description. Or is reality’s a power? In any case, we don’t believe Raine’s claim for a second. It leads him to this amusingly absurd passage:
“In an early chapter of The Bostonians, Henry James considers Ransom's Southern dialect and announces that it is not in his power by any combination of words to render Ransom's speech. In a sense, this represents a defeat for language - except that really it is only a local defeat for James's language. Kipling, though less intelligent than James, is a greater writer - at any rate, a writer more interested in capturing externals by means of words.”
We admit that the idea of James doing a Southern accent is as funny as Mark Twain creating a Portrait of a Lady. The Kipling reference gets Raine off his high horse – which is good, as he is riding nowhere on it, quickly – and the rest of the essay makes some interesting observations about Kipling. Which is why we recommend looking at it. We were fascinated by Kipling’s own fascination with Japanese cruelty – we didn’t know. After the graf we fronted this post with, Raine continues:
“The impulse here is cognate with Kipling's strange injunction in From Sea to Sea: "When you come to Japan, look at Farsari's hara-kiri pictures and his photos of the last crucifixion (twenty years ago) in Japan." The aesthetic cannot really afford to be squeamish. Of course, the moral will always make itself felt. Here Kipling concedes that there is "a strain of bloodthirstiness in their [Japanese] compositions". And he knows their "grim fidelity" will "make you uncomfortable"
Who knew? We couldn’t find Farsari’s photo of the last crucifixion in Japan on the web. We suspect Kipling really meant Felice Beato, whose crucifixion photo, here, is strangely placid.
Sunday, February 6, 2005
Over at Pierrot’s Folly (aka Scratchings) they’ve been having a lively discussion about the numerous sins of the Democratic party and what to do about it from a lefty perspective. Is it time to found a new party? Go to the Greens? What?
Ever since LI was a little wet behind the ears protestor in the Reagan era (my eyes were firmly directed to America’s support for mass murder in Central America, and not the major disaster, Afghanistan being cooked up by Reagan’s busy little paramilitary rightists), I’ve heard the cries of outrage, and uttered many a cry myself.
Lately, however, in the light of the cold rage lit in my belly by the election of 2004, I’ve been rethinking the terms of that outrage. At the time, I was struck by the free rider paradox that seemed, to me, to explain the election. My perspective since then has broadened, but along the same lines. At some future time, we will mount a defense of deficit spending and an analysis of how progressives became the curious inheritors of the ghost of Herbert Hoover – a fatal legacy, we think, in the 2004 election, which turned on the ability of the electorate to afford to vote on its vilest prejudices instead of considering the index of its absolute impoverishment, at least as a share of the national wealth.
In any case, we believe the real issue is the difference between a movement and a party.
Between the thirties and the eighties, the left in the U.S. did a very interesting thing: it invented a number of movements. From labor movements in the 30s to the Gay rights movements in the seventies, these movements originated political change. They had a galvanizing effect on the Democratic party. In 1900, there was nothing particularly progressive about the Democratic party, but in 1960, there was. However, the party itself didn’t originate progressive politics – it rather responded to an exterior pressure. Anybody who looks at how, say, the Kennedys dealt with the civil rights movement sees this. The gun was in the hand of the movements.
On the philosophical plane, the sixties philosophers who broadcast a distaste for representation (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, etc.) were, in some manner, reflecting the revolt against the party as a political unit. This was obviously inflected by the Communist party. But in the U.S., the same thing was happening on a less philosophical, more pragmatic plane. The Black Panther/Civil Rights duo, for instance, destroyed the remnants of Democratic party machines in Chicago, Detroit, and Newark. In general, the perspective at the time was that the party exists as a vehicle for the movement; that the relationship between party and movement is purely tactical. The party never represents the movement. It never represents anything but itself. It is a vehicle. You don't ask your car where it wants you to go. You simply drive it, or fix it, or junk it.
The counter-attack came in the eighties. Movements were relabeled ‘special interests” by party intelligentsia. The New Republic played its one historic card during this era by actually generating writers and a vocabulary to crush movement politics, and to reverse the power relationship between movements and party. However, what was really important was the absorption of movements into various D.C. centered institutions. and the dispersion of movement figures into various institutions, academic and political. In the eighties, the Democratic party came to monopolize opposition in America, with fatal results for the Opposition.
What this means, to LI, is that it is a mug’s game to beat up on the Democrats. The party is structurally in contradiction with itself – its leadership is from a different social niche – overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy – than its membership. That niche has used its position to discipline the membership – to crush the possibility of movement politics – and the answer to that is not to fight back by “saving” the party, but simply establishing a non-fetishistic relationship with it. The Republican party, ironically, doesn’t have this problem because the Republican party resembles a movement. The extra-party element – corporations and businesses and religious organizations – have a firm independent existence outside of the party. Thus, they can ignore that directive niche that occasionally tries to impose the same kind of discipline on movements as the Dem leadership does. The Doles that call out the far right evangelicals, for instance, simply get stomped. Whereas every Dem leader longs to display his racism in a sister soulja moment, to send the message that white rule is still at the heart of the Dem party.
So – who cares? Use the Dems in some things, don’t use them in other. Skip em, fuck em, and work on the movement rather than the party level. I guess that is LI’s position.
Ever since LI was a little wet behind the ears protestor in the Reagan era (my eyes were firmly directed to America’s support for mass murder in Central America, and not the major disaster, Afghanistan being cooked up by Reagan’s busy little paramilitary rightists), I’ve heard the cries of outrage, and uttered many a cry myself.
Lately, however, in the light of the cold rage lit in my belly by the election of 2004, I’ve been rethinking the terms of that outrage. At the time, I was struck by the free rider paradox that seemed, to me, to explain the election. My perspective since then has broadened, but along the same lines. At some future time, we will mount a defense of deficit spending and an analysis of how progressives became the curious inheritors of the ghost of Herbert Hoover – a fatal legacy, we think, in the 2004 election, which turned on the ability of the electorate to afford to vote on its vilest prejudices instead of considering the index of its absolute impoverishment, at least as a share of the national wealth.
In any case, we believe the real issue is the difference between a movement and a party.
Between the thirties and the eighties, the left in the U.S. did a very interesting thing: it invented a number of movements. From labor movements in the 30s to the Gay rights movements in the seventies, these movements originated political change. They had a galvanizing effect on the Democratic party. In 1900, there was nothing particularly progressive about the Democratic party, but in 1960, there was. However, the party itself didn’t originate progressive politics – it rather responded to an exterior pressure. Anybody who looks at how, say, the Kennedys dealt with the civil rights movement sees this. The gun was in the hand of the movements.
On the philosophical plane, the sixties philosophers who broadcast a distaste for representation (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, etc.) were, in some manner, reflecting the revolt against the party as a political unit. This was obviously inflected by the Communist party. But in the U.S., the same thing was happening on a less philosophical, more pragmatic plane. The Black Panther/Civil Rights duo, for instance, destroyed the remnants of Democratic party machines in Chicago, Detroit, and Newark. In general, the perspective at the time was that the party exists as a vehicle for the movement; that the relationship between party and movement is purely tactical. The party never represents the movement. It never represents anything but itself. It is a vehicle. You don't ask your car where it wants you to go. You simply drive it, or fix it, or junk it.
The counter-attack came in the eighties. Movements were relabeled ‘special interests” by party intelligentsia. The New Republic played its one historic card during this era by actually generating writers and a vocabulary to crush movement politics, and to reverse the power relationship between movements and party. However, what was really important was the absorption of movements into various D.C. centered institutions. and the dispersion of movement figures into various institutions, academic and political. In the eighties, the Democratic party came to monopolize opposition in America, with fatal results for the Opposition.
What this means, to LI, is that it is a mug’s game to beat up on the Democrats. The party is structurally in contradiction with itself – its leadership is from a different social niche – overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy – than its membership. That niche has used its position to discipline the membership – to crush the possibility of movement politics – and the answer to that is not to fight back by “saving” the party, but simply establishing a non-fetishistic relationship with it. The Republican party, ironically, doesn’t have this problem because the Republican party resembles a movement. The extra-party element – corporations and businesses and religious organizations – have a firm independent existence outside of the party. Thus, they can ignore that directive niche that occasionally tries to impose the same kind of discipline on movements as the Dem leadership does. The Doles that call out the far right evangelicals, for instance, simply get stomped. Whereas every Dem leader longs to display his racism in a sister soulja moment, to send the message that white rule is still at the heart of the Dem party.
So – who cares? Use the Dems in some things, don’t use them in other. Skip em, fuck em, and work on the movement rather than the party level. I guess that is LI’s position.
Saturday, February 5, 2005
Juliette, the debauched sister of Justine, is traveling in Italy with Clairwil, her monstrous male counterpart. It is the usual Sadean tour, orgies in churches and castles, delicious tortures on technologically superior racks, etc., etc. Coming into Naples, Juliette falls in with the court of the Bourbon king there, Ferdinand. Of course, the hot chocolate and the fucking flows easily. But, this being Sade, the crowded intervals of passing bodily fluids back and forth are interspersed with philosophic dialogues. At a country retreat, the King, Juliette, and the Prince Francaville are stirred by a question not posed in Plato’s Symposium: “In a word,” Juliette asks her companions, has the Supreme Being put you on earth to be fucked?”
The response to this question from Prince Francaville is quoted by A. and H. in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well it should be. We’ve already seen Francaville, in his temple to Priapus, abundantly sodomized with that strange ritual choreography that Adorno was right to compare to organized sports: there was the usual cohort of victims to participate in what ends up being, after all, nothing more than a minor orgasm, in the same way that, for all the strenuous efforts of the athletes on the football team, for all the money spent on the stadium, for all the emotion generated by the game, the goal is the strangely abject one of putting a ball over one particular chalky line. The mechanics dwarf the goal. Festivities like this have backgrounded Juliette’s question. Francaville begins by explaining that he is “at such a point of impiety and the abandonment of all religious sentiments” that he can’t hear, coldly, the invocation of that “deific phantom.” His Voltarian tirade against God draws the measured rebuke of Ferdinand, who reminds him that monarchs defend deities. Which draws this further outburst of impiety from Juliette:
“If you wish to judge these matters as a philosopher and not a despot, you will agree that the universe would only be happier if there were neither tyrants nor priests.”
As so often in De Sade’s dialogues, the positions taken by the speakers can suffer sudden and improbable shifts that reflect not so much the logic of an argument but induction from an existential position. Juliette’s former invocation of God becomes, now, an invocation of happiness. From Christianity, or at least deism, to liberalism – our Juliette is a regular Hegelian figure.
Prince Francaville, however, has his doubts: “… I adopt part of your reasoning, Juliette – no God – assuredly she is right; but this brake destroyed, we must find another for the people: the philosopher has no need of one, I know, but the mob definitely does. It is on the mob alone that I would wish to have royal power keenly felt.”
In De Sade, it is always a question of exploring the gap between pleasure and happiness. This is the curdled remnant of that stoicism that formed the everyday piety of the humanists and the philosophes in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
Francaville follows this salutary warning about extending the enlightenment project among the vulgar with the utopian speech Adorno and Horkheimer noticed:
- Thus, said Francaville, taking up the thread, we must replace religious illusions by the most extreme terror; if you deliver the people from the fear of a hell in the next life, they will yield themselves to everything; but replace this fear with penal laws of a prodigious severity, which, moreover, strike at nobody except them – for they alone trouble the State: all the discontents are nourished in this single class. What does the idea of a brake matter to the rich, for whom it is never a weight when he buys his vain status by the right to vigorously vex in his turn all those who live under his yoke?You will never discover a single one of those who will not permit the thickest shadow of tyranny when he has his own right to exercise it over others. These bases established, it is thus necessary that a king rule with the most extreme severity, and that in order that the people understand that he has the right to do anything he wishs to them, he permits those who sustain him with their daggers to do all that it pleases them to undertake. He should actually wrap about them his credit, his power, his consideration. He should tell them:… in order that my blows be solid and my throne unshakeable, support my power with that portion of power I’ve permitted you, and enjoy it in peace.”
From one angle, this is exactly what the capitalist system is all about, of course. Thus, the freedom from the state claimed by the libertarian is sacrificed by the masses in ‘contracting’ with other organs of governance – the corporation, in which all positive freedoms (of speech, of assembly, etc.) are distributed solely on the basis of economic position – the regression to a caste system of money becoming the great fact of daily life for most people in most liberal bourgeois countries. Meanwhile, to get back to Sade’s historical place, the catastrophe that had befallen the Indians of the New World in the name of the Christian God was being prepared for the rest of the globe in the name of 'free enterprise." In India (the Utilitarians), in China (the great white whale of 19th century capitalism, with its vast potential market in opium), in the liberalism of Latin American and Central American regimes (the rounding up of Indian land for coffee plantations and the enrollment of the remant masses in wage slavery), and. finally, in the technology of war – to the art of which liberal democracies have devoted their best libidinous energies. The welfare state, after all, was legitimized only by pledging itself unconditionally to the unlimited production of weaponry of every kind – congratulating itself, along the way, that it never released the missiles, while of course profiting enormously from the small arms, heatseaking missiles, aircraft and other forms of burning the skin off the human body or poking holes in it that have flooded the globe and produced their thousands of little Hiroshimas. Meanwhile, the system of excuses reaches its exhaustion point in Bush’s clichés, who rules the country much like Jim Thompson’s cliché wielding sheriff in The Killer Inside Me.
To end on A and H:
The totalitarian state manipulates the nations. “That’s it!’ replied the Prince,” Sade writes, governments must even regulate the populations, they must have in their hands all the means to cull them when it is time to inculcate fear and to increase them when the State deems it necessary, and their must never be another counter-weight to their justice than interest or passion, bound up, individually, with the passions and interests of those who, as we’ve said, have, from the rulers, so much as they find necessary in order to increase their own property. [un die eigene zu vervielfachen.]” The Prince shows the way to imperialism as the most fearful shape of ratio that has ever been taken. “… take their gods from the people that you wish to put under the yoke and demoralize them; as long as they pray to no other god than you, have no other morals than yours, you will always remain their master… and then leave them the most extensive faculties for crime; never punish them unless they direct the needle at you.”
A rule faithfully followed by neo-liberal regime after regime, as any survey of the bidonvilles of Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Nairobi, or Bombay can affirm.
The response to this question from Prince Francaville is quoted by A. and H. in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well it should be. We’ve already seen Francaville, in his temple to Priapus, abundantly sodomized with that strange ritual choreography that Adorno was right to compare to organized sports: there was the usual cohort of victims to participate in what ends up being, after all, nothing more than a minor orgasm, in the same way that, for all the strenuous efforts of the athletes on the football team, for all the money spent on the stadium, for all the emotion generated by the game, the goal is the strangely abject one of putting a ball over one particular chalky line. The mechanics dwarf the goal. Festivities like this have backgrounded Juliette’s question. Francaville begins by explaining that he is “at such a point of impiety and the abandonment of all religious sentiments” that he can’t hear, coldly, the invocation of that “deific phantom.” His Voltarian tirade against God draws the measured rebuke of Ferdinand, who reminds him that monarchs defend deities. Which draws this further outburst of impiety from Juliette:
“If you wish to judge these matters as a philosopher and not a despot, you will agree that the universe would only be happier if there were neither tyrants nor priests.”
As so often in De Sade’s dialogues, the positions taken by the speakers can suffer sudden and improbable shifts that reflect not so much the logic of an argument but induction from an existential position. Juliette’s former invocation of God becomes, now, an invocation of happiness. From Christianity, or at least deism, to liberalism – our Juliette is a regular Hegelian figure.
Prince Francaville, however, has his doubts: “… I adopt part of your reasoning, Juliette – no God – assuredly she is right; but this brake destroyed, we must find another for the people: the philosopher has no need of one, I know, but the mob definitely does. It is on the mob alone that I would wish to have royal power keenly felt.”
In De Sade, it is always a question of exploring the gap between pleasure and happiness. This is the curdled remnant of that stoicism that formed the everyday piety of the humanists and the philosophes in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
Francaville follows this salutary warning about extending the enlightenment project among the vulgar with the utopian speech Adorno and Horkheimer noticed:
- Thus, said Francaville, taking up the thread, we must replace religious illusions by the most extreme terror; if you deliver the people from the fear of a hell in the next life, they will yield themselves to everything; but replace this fear with penal laws of a prodigious severity, which, moreover, strike at nobody except them – for they alone trouble the State: all the discontents are nourished in this single class. What does the idea of a brake matter to the rich, for whom it is never a weight when he buys his vain status by the right to vigorously vex in his turn all those who live under his yoke?You will never discover a single one of those who will not permit the thickest shadow of tyranny when he has his own right to exercise it over others. These bases established, it is thus necessary that a king rule with the most extreme severity, and that in order that the people understand that he has the right to do anything he wishs to them, he permits those who sustain him with their daggers to do all that it pleases them to undertake. He should actually wrap about them his credit, his power, his consideration. He should tell them:… in order that my blows be solid and my throne unshakeable, support my power with that portion of power I’ve permitted you, and enjoy it in peace.”
From one angle, this is exactly what the capitalist system is all about, of course. Thus, the freedom from the state claimed by the libertarian is sacrificed by the masses in ‘contracting’ with other organs of governance – the corporation, in which all positive freedoms (of speech, of assembly, etc.) are distributed solely on the basis of economic position – the regression to a caste system of money becoming the great fact of daily life for most people in most liberal bourgeois countries. Meanwhile, to get back to Sade’s historical place, the catastrophe that had befallen the Indians of the New World in the name of the Christian God was being prepared for the rest of the globe in the name of 'free enterprise." In India (the Utilitarians), in China (the great white whale of 19th century capitalism, with its vast potential market in opium), in the liberalism of Latin American and Central American regimes (the rounding up of Indian land for coffee plantations and the enrollment of the remant masses in wage slavery), and. finally, in the technology of war – to the art of which liberal democracies have devoted their best libidinous energies. The welfare state, after all, was legitimized only by pledging itself unconditionally to the unlimited production of weaponry of every kind – congratulating itself, along the way, that it never released the missiles, while of course profiting enormously from the small arms, heatseaking missiles, aircraft and other forms of burning the skin off the human body or poking holes in it that have flooded the globe and produced their thousands of little Hiroshimas. Meanwhile, the system of excuses reaches its exhaustion point in Bush’s clichés, who rules the country much like Jim Thompson’s cliché wielding sheriff in The Killer Inside Me.
To end on A and H:
The totalitarian state manipulates the nations. “That’s it!’ replied the Prince,” Sade writes, governments must even regulate the populations, they must have in their hands all the means to cull them when it is time to inculcate fear and to increase them when the State deems it necessary, and their must never be another counter-weight to their justice than interest or passion, bound up, individually, with the passions and interests of those who, as we’ve said, have, from the rulers, so much as they find necessary in order to increase their own property. [un die eigene zu vervielfachen.]” The Prince shows the way to imperialism as the most fearful shape of ratio that has ever been taken. “… take their gods from the people that you wish to put under the yoke and demoralize them; as long as they pray to no other god than you, have no other morals than yours, you will always remain their master… and then leave them the most extensive faculties for crime; never punish them unless they direct the needle at you.”
A rule faithfully followed by neo-liberal regime after regime, as any survey of the bidonvilles of Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Nairobi, or Bombay can affirm.
Friday, February 4, 2005
LI has fallen into the habit of quoting ourselves. Such are the ignoble patterns that mark the shut in and the braggart. We are going to do it again As the NYT’s John Burns writes:
“A second round of preliminary election returns released today by Iraqi authorities showed that 67 percent of the 3.3 million votes counted so far from Sunday's election went to an alliance of Shiite parties dominated by religious groups with strong links to Iran. Only 18 percent went to a group led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who favors strong ties to the United States. Few votes went to Sunni candidates.
Although the early votes were drawn primarily from Baghdad and from southern provinces where the Shiite parties were expected to score strongly, and from only 35 percent of the 5,216 polling stations, the scale of the vote for both religious and secular Shiites underscored the probability of a crushing triumph and a historic shift from decades of Sunni minority rule in Iraq.”
The Financial Times reports this:
According to the Financial Times, the United Iraqi Alliance is starting to feel a lot more confident:
“Mr Hakim, [Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the UIA] apparently confident of a sweep, announced on Wednesday that the Alliance could put forward a "group of suitable candidates" for prime minister, ruling out previous speculation that Mr Allawi might be chosen as a widely acceptable compromise leader.
If the Alliance, through its own seats as well as alliances with smaller parties, can put together a two-thirds majority in the national assembly, it should be able to dictate the choice of prime minister through horse-trading for the posts on the presidential council. “
The election result is going to travel down the cobra-like gorge of the American media like an port-a-let. No, it won't be a pleasant sight. The narrative was all set up: another statue crashing moment, another tearful hug from our good Iraqi friends, secret Christians all. But now it looks like they are hard hearts after all. Is this gratitude? Allawi looked so nice, mouthing neo-con platitudes, before Congress last year -- a real freedom lovin Iraqi. You could look into his eyes and see into his heart (an outstanding remodeling job had transformed that vault, in which various anti-Ba'ath activists had been tortured over the years, into a beautiful self-service gas station to fill all your SUV needs).
Our original analysis of Allawi and the American terror and awe strategy was on November 25th. Golem like, we are going to gloat in our prescience. Although Cassandra like, our curses and prognostications vanish, unheard, in the cruel air. Such is fate:
“LI has been pondering the strategy in Iraq the last couple of days. Blowing up Fallujah, breaking into Baghdad’s most famous mosque and shooting randomly, clamping down in Mosul – what this amounts to, we think, is the American response to the dilemma it faces in the elections.
The dilemma is this: given the state of opinion imperfectly revealed by even those polls conducted by biased American agencies, Allawi is not the most popular Iraqi politician. In fact, Sadr could easily give him a run for his money. Other Iraqi figures who have no fame in the U.S., but who register positively with the Iraqi public, are more popular than Allawi. Having failed to create a united confederacy of parties to present to the voters at election time (peculiarly, the U.S., in its role as occupier-democratizer, wanted to make sure that the elections were pre-rigged, and offered no choice whatsoever to the voter), the U.S. does face the slight problem that an unacceptable choice might actually take the prize in the election. That is, some party or personage representing a slightly anti-occupation bent might displace Allawi. Although it is unclear whether that is possible – this is an election for a transitional congress, not for the executive branch of the government. Still, that is the kind of embarrassment that the Americans would prefer to avoid.
So the task is: make Allawi popular in the next two months. How to do this? Taking a page from Milosevic’s book, the U.S. has evidently decided to take a wager on stirring up such ethnic/religious hatred as would inflate Allawi’s support. In the early stages of the occupation, there was a struggle in the Bush administration between those, mainly at the State department, who distrusted the Shi’ites, fearing Iraq’s becoming an Iran style theocracy, and those, mainly among the Pentagon Pump House gang, who urged the desuetude of this fear. The reality of the war against the occupiers has shifted the terms of the struggle, adjusting U.S. strategy not only to a pro-Shi’ite stance, but one that uses the revanchist tendency among the Shi’a, who have vivid memories of past oppression, to invigorate the flagging popularity of the American puppet government. They are doing this by associating Allawi with gross and powerful violence against the Sunnis. It was notable that Sadr himself did not protest, with his usual spirit, the razing of Fallujah. The Americans are favored here by the jihadist element in the war, with its face of comic book evil, Zarqawi. Zarqawi, from all that one gathers about him, is a trailer trash version of Osama bin. Al Qaeda has operated in Pakistan as, among other things, an on call death squad to effect anti-Shi’ite pograms. Zarqawi’s associates have the same program. Thus, there is a perfect demonic synergy between the horrors dreamt of by Zarqawi’s people and the horrors perpetrated by the Americans.
Still, it is not even the silence that greeted the displacement of 200,000 Iraqis by the Americans that is the strangest part of the recent episodes in the war. That honor goes to the raid on the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad. While the Mosque had been raided before, to raid it while Fallujah was being destroyed and to raid it in the manner reported could only amount to a provocation intended to send people out into the street. The better to shoot them down, my dear. These tactics have been so refined during the twentieth century among innumerable petty authoritarian states unti they have a dreary predictability. Resistance is many things -- a romance, a neurosis, a political program, a desperation -- but it is, under certain specific circumstances, a real opportunity for an uncertain governing power. The sudden crackdown on Sunni imams for committing “treason” by urging resistance to the Allawi government that is the real sign of the times in Iraq.
Allawi, with American assistance, is creating the usual authoritarian matrix: singling out some minority enemy, using that enemy to enforce censorship, using the recess from scrutiny produced by that censorship to imprison, torture and kill, and, finally, using the fear that emanates from that to reinforce his image as an impenetrable force. Also sprach Saddam, of whom Allawi is a dutiful pupil. As the election approaches, the conditions in which a free election has meaning are nullified one by one, ultimately to the gain of the current leadership. This, we think, is the ultimate meaning of the sudden American appetite for largescale violence in Iraq. It is a strategy that has worked in the past. We will see if it erodes the support of anti-occupation forces in Iraq in the next two months. We think Sadr, for one, definitely miscalculated by maintaining an unwonted silence in the midst of the latest round of violence. He, of all political figures, has the most to lose if Allawi identifies himself with a revanchist Shi’ite politics.”
There are good things and bad things about the defeat of Allawi. The great good thing is that this is a victory for a time table out of Iraq. We would be surprised if Sistani’s coalition insists on this first thing, but we expect that the population has spoken loud enough that the government will lose all credibility if it continues to comply with American pressure in this regard. In order to forestall this, the Americans will doubtless be looking to stir up military action – perhaps flattening half of Mosul and kicking out another 200,000 inhabitants will do the trick, or maybe another run at Samarra.
“A second round of preliminary election returns released today by Iraqi authorities showed that 67 percent of the 3.3 million votes counted so far from Sunday's election went to an alliance of Shiite parties dominated by religious groups with strong links to Iran. Only 18 percent went to a group led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who favors strong ties to the United States. Few votes went to Sunni candidates.
Although the early votes were drawn primarily from Baghdad and from southern provinces where the Shiite parties were expected to score strongly, and from only 35 percent of the 5,216 polling stations, the scale of the vote for both religious and secular Shiites underscored the probability of a crushing triumph and a historic shift from decades of Sunni minority rule in Iraq.”
The Financial Times reports this:
According to the Financial Times, the United Iraqi Alliance is starting to feel a lot more confident:
“Mr Hakim, [Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the UIA] apparently confident of a sweep, announced on Wednesday that the Alliance could put forward a "group of suitable candidates" for prime minister, ruling out previous speculation that Mr Allawi might be chosen as a widely acceptable compromise leader.
If the Alliance, through its own seats as well as alliances with smaller parties, can put together a two-thirds majority in the national assembly, it should be able to dictate the choice of prime minister through horse-trading for the posts on the presidential council. “
The election result is going to travel down the cobra-like gorge of the American media like an port-a-let. No, it won't be a pleasant sight. The narrative was all set up: another statue crashing moment, another tearful hug from our good Iraqi friends, secret Christians all. But now it looks like they are hard hearts after all. Is this gratitude? Allawi looked so nice, mouthing neo-con platitudes, before Congress last year -- a real freedom lovin Iraqi. You could look into his eyes and see into his heart (an outstanding remodeling job had transformed that vault, in which various anti-Ba'ath activists had been tortured over the years, into a beautiful self-service gas station to fill all your SUV needs).
Our original analysis of Allawi and the American terror and awe strategy was on November 25th. Golem like, we are going to gloat in our prescience. Although Cassandra like, our curses and prognostications vanish, unheard, in the cruel air. Such is fate:
“LI has been pondering the strategy in Iraq the last couple of days. Blowing up Fallujah, breaking into Baghdad’s most famous mosque and shooting randomly, clamping down in Mosul – what this amounts to, we think, is the American response to the dilemma it faces in the elections.
The dilemma is this: given the state of opinion imperfectly revealed by even those polls conducted by biased American agencies, Allawi is not the most popular Iraqi politician. In fact, Sadr could easily give him a run for his money. Other Iraqi figures who have no fame in the U.S., but who register positively with the Iraqi public, are more popular than Allawi. Having failed to create a united confederacy of parties to present to the voters at election time (peculiarly, the U.S., in its role as occupier-democratizer, wanted to make sure that the elections were pre-rigged, and offered no choice whatsoever to the voter), the U.S. does face the slight problem that an unacceptable choice might actually take the prize in the election. That is, some party or personage representing a slightly anti-occupation bent might displace Allawi. Although it is unclear whether that is possible – this is an election for a transitional congress, not for the executive branch of the government. Still, that is the kind of embarrassment that the Americans would prefer to avoid.
So the task is: make Allawi popular in the next two months. How to do this? Taking a page from Milosevic’s book, the U.S. has evidently decided to take a wager on stirring up such ethnic/religious hatred as would inflate Allawi’s support. In the early stages of the occupation, there was a struggle in the Bush administration between those, mainly at the State department, who distrusted the Shi’ites, fearing Iraq’s becoming an Iran style theocracy, and those, mainly among the Pentagon Pump House gang, who urged the desuetude of this fear. The reality of the war against the occupiers has shifted the terms of the struggle, adjusting U.S. strategy not only to a pro-Shi’ite stance, but one that uses the revanchist tendency among the Shi’a, who have vivid memories of past oppression, to invigorate the flagging popularity of the American puppet government. They are doing this by associating Allawi with gross and powerful violence against the Sunnis. It was notable that Sadr himself did not protest, with his usual spirit, the razing of Fallujah. The Americans are favored here by the jihadist element in the war, with its face of comic book evil, Zarqawi. Zarqawi, from all that one gathers about him, is a trailer trash version of Osama bin. Al Qaeda has operated in Pakistan as, among other things, an on call death squad to effect anti-Shi’ite pograms. Zarqawi’s associates have the same program. Thus, there is a perfect demonic synergy between the horrors dreamt of by Zarqawi’s people and the horrors perpetrated by the Americans.
Still, it is not even the silence that greeted the displacement of 200,000 Iraqis by the Americans that is the strangest part of the recent episodes in the war. That honor goes to the raid on the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad. While the Mosque had been raided before, to raid it while Fallujah was being destroyed and to raid it in the manner reported could only amount to a provocation intended to send people out into the street. The better to shoot them down, my dear. These tactics have been so refined during the twentieth century among innumerable petty authoritarian states unti they have a dreary predictability. Resistance is many things -- a romance, a neurosis, a political program, a desperation -- but it is, under certain specific circumstances, a real opportunity for an uncertain governing power. The sudden crackdown on Sunni imams for committing “treason” by urging resistance to the Allawi government that is the real sign of the times in Iraq.
Allawi, with American assistance, is creating the usual authoritarian matrix: singling out some minority enemy, using that enemy to enforce censorship, using the recess from scrutiny produced by that censorship to imprison, torture and kill, and, finally, using the fear that emanates from that to reinforce his image as an impenetrable force. Also sprach Saddam, of whom Allawi is a dutiful pupil. As the election approaches, the conditions in which a free election has meaning are nullified one by one, ultimately to the gain of the current leadership. This, we think, is the ultimate meaning of the sudden American appetite for largescale violence in Iraq. It is a strategy that has worked in the past. We will see if it erodes the support of anti-occupation forces in Iraq in the next two months. We think Sadr, for one, definitely miscalculated by maintaining an unwonted silence in the midst of the latest round of violence. He, of all political figures, has the most to lose if Allawi identifies himself with a revanchist Shi’ite politics.”
There are good things and bad things about the defeat of Allawi. The great good thing is that this is a victory for a time table out of Iraq. We would be surprised if Sistani’s coalition insists on this first thing, but we expect that the population has spoken loud enough that the government will lose all credibility if it continues to comply with American pressure in this regard. In order to forestall this, the Americans will doubtless be looking to stir up military action – perhaps flattening half of Mosul and kicking out another 200,000 inhabitants will do the trick, or maybe another run at Samarra.
Thursday, February 3, 2005
“The emperor was devoted to the worship of the gods, to the study of magic, and to the belief of oracles. The prophets or philosophers, whom he revered as the favorites of Heaven, were frequently raised to the government of provinces, and admitted into his most secret councils.”
Bush’s Social Security plan, the NYT intones with all the solemnity of a eunuch’s mass, will establish his place in history. This is rich – the issue isn’t, as you might have thought, the wholesale robbery of your social security, already borrowed against to provide tax breaks for the investor class, but whether, in the future, some school textbook will mention Bush II. The paragraph devoted to him composes itself, no? “Lucky pinhead, elevated by corrupt court, takes vacation and allows U.S. buildings to be blown up, blows up wrong Middle Eastern country in retaliation, blows up national pensions, blows up U.S. economy at large, ascends to heaven from banks of Potomac in the midst of angelic choirs, de-Christianizing disgusted country, Beginning of great U.S. conversion to Islam.” Or something like that.
More interesting than the predator’s ball is this report from a blog we were not aware of, run by Tim Horrocks. In a conference at the Washington University Law School, there was give and take between the head of the odious private military company, Blackwater, and a National Defense University professor:
"They made enemies everywhere," Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, an expert on guerrilla warfare and a senior fellow at the National Defense University told a conference on military contracting last week. He was referring to the tactics used by Blackwater USA, the North Carolina company that was hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide security for L. Paul Bremer, the US administrator who was dispatched by the Bush administration to run Iraq in 2003.
A few minutes earlier, Chris Taylor, Blackwater's vice president for strategic initiatives, had boasted about the protective cordon his company provided to Bremer. Under a "turnkey security package" with the CPA, Bremer was accompanied by 36 "personnel protection specialists," two K-9 dog teams and three MD-530 helicopters built by Boeing Corporation.”
Bremer’s court reminds us irresistibly of Gibbon’s description of the Eastern Court as Julian found it:
“He questioned the man concerning the profits of his employment and was informed, that besides a large salary, and some valuable perquisites, he enjoyed a daily allowance for twenty servants, and as many horses. A thousand barbers, a thousand cup-bearers, a thousand cooks, were distributed in the several offices of luxury; and the number of eunuchs could be compared only with the insects of a summer's day. The monarch who resigned to his subjects the superiority of merit and virtue, was distinguished by the oppressive magnificence of his dress, his table, his buildings, and his train.”
...
This is a post of random thoughts today. Let's end it with a little idea about pensions. We've debated these things with the excellent, libertarian inclined Paul Craddick on his weblog. Paul claims that left bloggers are sticking their heads in the ground and acting like ostriches if they don't see the crisis looming in Social Security. An aging population, a benefits package that has to be supported with funding that gradually runs short. Sounds, actually, just like GM's pension problems. The real key to the 'social security crisis' is that it is the sum of the crisis in American pay, starting about 1980. As the country's economic policies tilted towards banana republic rewards for the rich, those same policies pegged wages at a level that has risen remarkably little, given inflation, over the past twenty five years. The solution Middle Class America found was sending both parents into the market place, and taking advantage of the end of the Usury laws. But, of course, if your economy is going to massively chisel the producers of wealth and reward the parasitic upper management class, and if you are going to base your social security on the wages of the producers, you do get a variety of crises. Solution: redress the balance. Distribute money back to the producers. Double the minimum wage, encourage unions, tax the wealthy at a pre-Reagan rate, and keep the Polizei (on all levels) from interfering with the massive strikes necessary to redo our business organizations. Pretty simple. Capitalism isn't going to be, and we'd say shouldn't be, overthrown by these simple measures -- it will simply work more efficiently on the distribution end than on the production end for a while. If wages stagnate, we get funding shortfalls for everything. There is, indeed, something bold and brassy about a President who has presided over the various audacious raids on the American economy to reward the wealthiest, while watching unemployment reach irrational levels and wages, in real terms, diminish, then throw up his hands in horror at a pension crisis. This is high comedy, fit for an administration that has the intellectual punch of a cancelled sit com.
Well, we bet the call for diminishing inequality of wealth to solve the so called Social Security crisis isn't going to get a hearing anytime soon, but someday, yes, the NYT will be wondering if this was LI's ploy to go down in the history books.
Bush’s Social Security plan, the NYT intones with all the solemnity of a eunuch’s mass, will establish his place in history. This is rich – the issue isn’t, as you might have thought, the wholesale robbery of your social security, already borrowed against to provide tax breaks for the investor class, but whether, in the future, some school textbook will mention Bush II. The paragraph devoted to him composes itself, no? “Lucky pinhead, elevated by corrupt court, takes vacation and allows U.S. buildings to be blown up, blows up wrong Middle Eastern country in retaliation, blows up national pensions, blows up U.S. economy at large, ascends to heaven from banks of Potomac in the midst of angelic choirs, de-Christianizing disgusted country, Beginning of great U.S. conversion to Islam.” Or something like that.
More interesting than the predator’s ball is this report from a blog we were not aware of, run by Tim Horrocks. In a conference at the Washington University Law School, there was give and take between the head of the odious private military company, Blackwater, and a National Defense University professor:
"They made enemies everywhere," Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, an expert on guerrilla warfare and a senior fellow at the National Defense University told a conference on military contracting last week. He was referring to the tactics used by Blackwater USA, the North Carolina company that was hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide security for L. Paul Bremer, the US administrator who was dispatched by the Bush administration to run Iraq in 2003.
A few minutes earlier, Chris Taylor, Blackwater's vice president for strategic initiatives, had boasted about the protective cordon his company provided to Bremer. Under a "turnkey security package" with the CPA, Bremer was accompanied by 36 "personnel protection specialists," two K-9 dog teams and three MD-530 helicopters built by Boeing Corporation.”
Bremer’s court reminds us irresistibly of Gibbon’s description of the Eastern Court as Julian found it:
“He questioned the man concerning the profits of his employment and was informed, that besides a large salary, and some valuable perquisites, he enjoyed a daily allowance for twenty servants, and as many horses. A thousand barbers, a thousand cup-bearers, a thousand cooks, were distributed in the several offices of luxury; and the number of eunuchs could be compared only with the insects of a summer's day. The monarch who resigned to his subjects the superiority of merit and virtue, was distinguished by the oppressive magnificence of his dress, his table, his buildings, and his train.”
...
This is a post of random thoughts today. Let's end it with a little idea about pensions. We've debated these things with the excellent, libertarian inclined Paul Craddick on his weblog. Paul claims that left bloggers are sticking their heads in the ground and acting like ostriches if they don't see the crisis looming in Social Security. An aging population, a benefits package that has to be supported with funding that gradually runs short. Sounds, actually, just like GM's pension problems. The real key to the 'social security crisis' is that it is the sum of the crisis in American pay, starting about 1980. As the country's economic policies tilted towards banana republic rewards for the rich, those same policies pegged wages at a level that has risen remarkably little, given inflation, over the past twenty five years. The solution Middle Class America found was sending both parents into the market place, and taking advantage of the end of the Usury laws. But, of course, if your economy is going to massively chisel the producers of wealth and reward the parasitic upper management class, and if you are going to base your social security on the wages of the producers, you do get a variety of crises. Solution: redress the balance. Distribute money back to the producers. Double the minimum wage, encourage unions, tax the wealthy at a pre-Reagan rate, and keep the Polizei (on all levels) from interfering with the massive strikes necessary to redo our business organizations. Pretty simple. Capitalism isn't going to be, and we'd say shouldn't be, overthrown by these simple measures -- it will simply work more efficiently on the distribution end than on the production end for a while. If wages stagnate, we get funding shortfalls for everything. There is, indeed, something bold and brassy about a President who has presided over the various audacious raids on the American economy to reward the wealthiest, while watching unemployment reach irrational levels and wages, in real terms, diminish, then throw up his hands in horror at a pension crisis. This is high comedy, fit for an administration that has the intellectual punch of a cancelled sit com.
Well, we bet the call for diminishing inequality of wealth to solve the so called Social Security crisis isn't going to get a hearing anytime soon, but someday, yes, the NYT will be wondering if this was LI's ploy to go down in the history books.
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