Alexander Greenberg's Blog

2009-09-13T12:31:00.001-04:00

Guatemalan Court Sets Precendent in the Case of Israel Carías

ZACAPA, GUATEMALA—June 22, 2009, was an historic day for the family of Israel Carías Ortiz, and for the people of Guatemala. The Sentencing Tribunal in Zacapa, Guatemala found two men guilty of the 2007 murder of Ortiz and his two sons Ledwin Anilson (age 9) and Ronald Aroldo (age 11).

The precedent-setting sentence recognizes Carías was killed because of his leadership in the struggle to reassert legal rights to community land, and mandates an investigation into the planning or 'intellectual authorship' of the murder: the finqueros (large land-owners) presumably responsible for contracting the assassins to protect their interests.

In Guatemala, this sentence is referred to as 'dejar abierto,' meaning that though there was a verdict, the judges do not consider the crime resolved. However, due to many obstacles impeding justice in Guatemala, action to persecute intellectual authors remains extremely difficult.

The ruling has implications in establishing guilt for human rights crimes of the past, especially those committed during the 36-year internal armed conflict, over 99 per cent of which, according to the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala (ODHAG), remain in impunity. For the first time, a Guatemalan court established that guilt in attacks against human rights defenders goes beyond the actual perpetrators. Those responsible for orchestrating the attacks must be identified and held accountable for conceiving and financing the crime.

2009-08-25T09:34:00.005-04:00

Inglourious Basterds. Review. Spoiler Warning (but you've already read reviews and know what happens, so it doesn't really matter):

When I was an undergraduate, I took a course entitled "The Bible and the Holocaust" from a short, squeaky, charismatic and funny rabbi-cum-professor, who would lecture twice a week, making jokes about feminism and Blow Pops and the president of the university. This professor, who also taught a class entitled "Quest for the Human Destiny," in which he would draw an intellectual genealogy from the Book of Ecclesiastes to Salinger, Hemingway, and the film, Shane, was not, I realized, talking to us about the Holocaust. Yes, we read Nehama Tec; yes, we watched Shoah. But for this professor, the entirety of the political and social phenomenon that took place between 1938 and 1945 could be reduced to one phrase: Hitler versus King David.

Hitler versus King David. What this phrase meant was a little bit obscure at first. We read Kings and Samuel, the stories of David fighting Goliath (our professor mentioned the fact that the Philistines were uncircumcised); the stories of David unifying Israel; the stories of David abusing his power by killing Bathsheba's husband; the stories of David impotent in his old age. David was, for Holstein, a warrior king, with imperfections, and the perfect human being. But what did any of this have to do with the Holocaust? Certainly, the Holocaust was a clear example of a minority's inability to fight back against the State, and King David represented Jewish autonomy and statehood. Certainly, there was no Jewish leader who managed to take on the Nazis in the way that David took on the Philistines. But transforming the Holocaust into this simple dualism of David/Hitler seemed to be a flashy way for our professor to recapitulate his obsession with History as the creation of great men (he once told his Quest for the Human Destiny lecture crowd that "not one of you will ever be the human being that King David was"). But it all came clear one day in one of his many anecdotes:

"I was in Israel," he told us, "on the day of remembrance. All of the sudden, it got very quiet, and in the silence, three fighter jets made a loud boom as they passed overhead. There was another moment of silence, and then, all in unison, voices rose up shouting 'Never again!'" He repeated the "Never again," a bit teary, and said, "To protect the weakest members of your society... you need your own land, your own territory!"

This is what David versus Hitler meant: the formation of a Jewish state and its securitization through military force. Holstein continually reminded us that "to protect the weakest members of society, one needs strength."

My professor will probably show Inglourious Basterds in future permutations of the "Bible and the Holocaust" class. If ever a film was meant to appeal to Israelis (and Americans) of the Avigdor Lieberman persuasion, this is that film. The two parallel narratives follow a young Jewish woman, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who, at the beginning of the film, escapes from Nazis while her family is murdered and who subsequently becomes the proprietor of a medium-sized cinema in Paris, and the Inglourious Basterds, about whom we know very little, except that they are an elite squad, made up almost entirely of Jews (with the exception of Brad Pitt's character, 1st Lt. Aldo Raine) with very few speaking lines (also with the exception of Brad Pitt's character), whose sole mission in Germany is to "scalp Nazis," as Aldo Raine informs us in the second scene of the film. Both protagonists harbor deep animosity toward the Nazis, for fairly obvious reasons: how could a Jew not hate Nazis, even if a few did buy into Nazi propaganda and were even members of the German military through the Third Reich? The Basterds fulfill their hatred by killing Nazis for being Nazis (sounds a bit like Erik Prince's attitude toward Muslims), while Shosanna, whose cinema is opportunely turned into the venue for the premier of a major Nazi film directed by Joseph Goebbels, Stolz der Nation, is able to fulfill her desire for revenge by burning down the theater filled with all the major members of the Nazi party, including Hitler, and presumably forcing a German surrender and ending the war on the German front in 1944 instead of 1945.

The film is not aiming at realism, and to critique it on such grounds would be worthless. But I want to ask, what does ending the war in 1944 instead of 1945 accomplish, from the perspective of fantasy? It doesn't save the Jews, because the Final Solution was kicked off two years prior. Tarantino's fantasy apparently has nothing to do with saving innocents, then. It doesn't prevent D-Day, which, as we are informed in the course of the film, has already taken place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki would most likely still occur. The only event with a major human cost that would have been likely to be prevented by such a victory would have been the bombing of Berlin in February 1945, certainly not an insignificant achievement, but I doubt at the forefront of Tarantino's mind. Indeed, the major victory of Shosanna Dreyfus and the Basterds seems to be that Jews get to kill Hitler instead of him killing himself.

This film, then, like many of Tarantino's films (is it because he is a nerd?) is about revenge. I can't be harsh on him for this. After all, I have had plenty of revenge fantasies in my life: what if we could kill Hitler before he came to power? what if we could go back in time and arm Nat Turner with M240s, Humvees, and Tomahawk Missiles? I've even outlined a film, entitled Dick Cheney Gets Tortured, in which the former VP (a character, of course) would be subjected to standard CIA interrogation techniques throughout the course of two hours. The question, though, is, What do these fantasies do, in terms of the current world, the current political climate, and arranging people's view of the world around them?

Tarantino outlined one possible response to this question, in a statement quoted by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg in one of the more interesting reviews of the film I have read:

Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims... We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.

This is actually, despite Tarantino's claims that it never happens, an oft-repeated desire, in and out of Hollywood. In the same essay, Goldberg points to Stephen Spielberg's Munich and Edward Zwick's Defiance. In other words, the Jewish audience wants to see the stereotype broken, they want to see Jews, like De Niro's character in Casino who kick ass, who shoot people, who don't simply die en masse. Unlike these other films, Tarantino's film takes this fantasy and plays it out as fantasy, rather than revisionist (in the good sense) history.

But another question arises: what does this type of portrayal accomplish now, in this moment, when a Jewish state exists, and when Germany has paid it reparations and become its largest European trading partner? When strong Jews exist, and they patrol the border between Israel and Gaza, sometimes launching offensives into Palestinian territory? This film, like Jay Holstein's class on the Holocaust, doesn't seem to be about the Holocaust at all, just as portrayals of the Holocaust, by conservative American pundits or liberals advocating for Darfur, are often not about the Holocaust at all. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but we should be aware of it. The violence of the Holocaust often stands in for something else, and in this case, it seems to be an implicit backing of Jewish force.

This is, of course, a good film. I was even surprised at how much I liked it. There is some very good dialogue - for example, the scene in the beginning when the villian, an SS officer named Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) recapitulates the famous dog/swine discussion from Pulp Fiction by discussing the difference between a rat and a squirrel, and asking whether there is any reason we should be more disgusted by rats than squirrels, or any other rodent for that matter. One can't help be impressed by a functionary of a racist regime asking, through animal metaphors, whether racism is arbitrary (yet he carries out his duties). Another great moment is when Eli Roth's character, nicknamed "The Bear Jew," beats a German officer to death with a baseball bat. Roth, in a movie full of actorly actors, is so un-actorly that he actually makes what would a very unpleasant scene incredibly engaging. Rather than retaining some kind of aloof cool, he begins to scream and shout, cursing and saying something along the lines of "I knocked it out of Fenway, motherfuckers!" (Not in the shooting script). There is also an amazing sense of pacing and shot composition, the kind that has led people to see the ultra-violence film as "Quentin's genre" (and the ultra-violence is, as Gerry Canavan points out, not as extreme as some reviewers would lead you to believe, certainly not as extreme as Kill Bill).

But we have to be careful with this kind of film. The temptation is to see critique where there is none, and to mistake our utter enjoyment of the film with profundity on Tarantino's part. The fact is, it recapitulates many of the arguments held in foreign policy circles about intervention and the rights of enemy combatants with no sense of critical distance at all, and it replays the fascist caricature to such an extent that the presence of non-Germans in the burned-down movie theater at the end is explicitly ruled out in a conversation between Joseph Goebbels and the star of the film-within-a-film, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl of Good Bye Lenin! fame). We can read shades of the Bush memos on whether un-uniformed combatants count as enemy combatants and thereby can be protected by Geneva (a false argument, because international courts have ruled that you are either an enemy combatant or a civilian, and are therefore protected by Geneva no matter what), for example, when Aldo Raine tells a Nazi Gefreiter that "We like our Nazis in uniform. That way, we can spot 'em, just like that." And it is hard not to see shades of interventionism and R2P sprinkled throughout this fantasy that, ironically enough, does not save the lives of any of Hitler's victims.

Tarantino does not critique violence. He loves it. The parodies of violence in Kill Bill are not criticisms aimed at violence but criticisms aimed at film. He wants filmmakers to understand that they can make violence fun and to revel in this fact. Of course, for him, film is film and real life is real life, and I agree that one cannot draw a connection between violent acts in film and violent acts in "the real world." But I would add that the relationship between ideology and action is always an ideological one: it shapes opinions and attitudes, forming how people look at the world, in this case, one starkly divided between good and evil, as Eli Roth said in an interview with The Onion AV Club: "[My character is] not taking pleasure in killing. He’s fighting evil on behalf of those who can’t fight. He knows he’s the biggest and strongest one in the bunch, and he wants to terrorize them. But he’s doing it to stop evil." This would sit very well with my "Bible and the Holocaust" professor, who viewed human history as a gigantic contest between David and Hitler. But for those of us who are stuck in the realm of the human, this film adds nothing to the conversation.

2009-08-08T19:34:00.000-04:00

Border wall successfully halting illegal immigration (of wildlife) . "Still, by some measures, the border wall can be considered a success. Since its construction, there have been no reports of pronghorn antelopes enrolling in public schools, and the number of ocelots working in service industries appears to have been sharply reduced."

2009-06-29T12:38:00.002-04:00

xkcd:

2009-06-18T14:22:00.001-04:00

European Solar Power from African Deserts? I think I've seen this movie before.

2009-06-15T20:45:00.003-04:00

This map, which is rather sobering for what it claims, also has a pretty scary physical appearance: it looks like a fire spreading up and torching the southern United States. I took it from Climate Progress, which took it from a posted draft version of the forthcoming "Unified Synthesis Project: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States" to be put out by NOAA. This draft says, "Internal Review Draft: Do Not Cite or Quote," so I'm giving that as a big blaring caveat, but the final draft will be released tomorrow at 1:30 PM EST.

2009-06-08T11:38:00.001-04:00

Long time, no post. The Supreme Court has ruled that elected judges cannot rule in a case involving one of their major campaign contributors. Wow. This seems like something they should have ruled decades ago.

2009-05-14T13:44:00.001-04:00

"Slumdog star's home is demolished":

The Mumbai slum home of one of the child stars of the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire has been demolished by city authorities.

Reports say that police smacked the boy, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, with a bamboo stick before ordering him out.

The authorities claim he and other families were squatting on land that was owned by the government.

He played a younger version of one of the main characters in the film, which scooped eight Oscars.

"We are homeless, we have nowhere to go," Azharuddin said after the demolition.

The family lived in a temporary makeshift shelter made up of plastic sheets over bamboo sticks, in a slum near Bandra East in Mumbai.

He said he had been fast asleep when the demolition squad came and asked them to leave, later tearing down the entire row of tents pitched on the land.

The family claim they had not been informed about the planned demolition.

Municipal official, Uma Shankar Mistry, who was present during the demolition, told the BBC that the authorities only razed temporary and illegal homes which had recently been erected next to the slum.

He said the houses were in an area that was meant for a public garden.

2009-05-13T12:37:00.002-04:00

Louis Proyect explains to Slavoj Žižek the need for contextualization (or, why philosophers say so many stupid things):

Although it seems implausible at best that Soviet firing squads in 1922 have anything remotely to do with choosing soft drinks, it might be useful to review exactly what Lenin was talking about in his speech–even though it might subvert the postmodernist exercise that Zizek is engaged in.

To begin with, it took a little bit of digging to find out where Lenin said these words. In poking around in Google (the MIA archives used a different translation so an exact match could not be found), I discovered that Zizek was not the only one lending credence to this version of Lenin as the High Executioner. The super-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party dotes on these words as well. In a book on their website titled “Another view of Stalin” by Ludo Martens, we discover that Lenin’s threats against his opponents demonstrate that he “vehemently dealt with counter-revolutionaries attacking the so-called `bureaucracy’ to overthrow the socialist régime.” In other words, Zizek’s Lenin and that of the PLP is a precursor to Stalin, implicitly and explicitly respectively.

At least I did learn from the PLP article the source of Lenin’s words, which was a Political Report of The Central Committee of the Communist Party at the Eleventh Congress on March 27, 1922. It can be read in its entirety at:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

If you do, you will discover nothing in Lenin’s speech to support such the interpretation of Zizek or the Progressive Labor Party. To begin with, the report is a defense of the turn away from War Communism toward the New Economic Policy, which most historians view as an end to economic, political and legal regimentation–including the use of the death penalty. Immediately upon taking power in 1917, the Bolsheviks did away with the death penalty. It was only restored during the civil war when White terror was unleashed on the civilian population. As soon as the White armies were defeated, there was no use for the firing squad. A January 17, 1920 decree of the Soviet government stated that since the counter-revolution had been defeated, there was no need for executions. Since this occurred more than two years before Lenin’s speech, it is a little difficult to figure out what Lenin was talking about.

As it turns out, Lenin was referring not to an actual firing-squad, but a figurative one as should be obvious from the paragraphs that immediately precede Zizek’s citation:

When a whole army (I speak in the FIGURATIVE sense) [emphasis added] is in retreat, it cannot have the same morale as when it is advancing. At every step you find a certain mood of depression. We even had poets who wrote that people were cold and starving in Moscow, that “everything before was bright and beautiful, but now trade and profiteering abound”. We have had quite a number of poetic effusions of this sort.

Of course, retreat breeds all this. That is where the serious danger lies; it is terribly difficult to retreat after a great victorious advance, for the relations are entirely different. During a victorious advance, even if discipline is relaxed, everybody presses forward on his own accord. During a retreat, however, discipline must be more conscious and is a hundred times more necessary, because, when the entire army is in retreat, it does not know or see where it should halt. It sees only retreat; under such circumstances a few panic-stricken voices are, at times, enough to cause a stampede. The danger here is enormous. When a real army is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.

If, during an incredibly difficult retreat, when everything depends on preserving proper order, anyone spreads panic-even from the best of motives-the slightest breach of discipline must be punished severely, sternly, ruthlessly; and this applies not only to certain of our internal Party affairs, but also, and to a greater extent, to such gentry as the Mensheviks, and to all the gentry of the Two-and-a-Half International.

So Lenin’s words, taken literally by Zizek and the PLP, were specifically regarded by him as a figurative exercise. Lenin was talking about figurative armies, figurative retreats, figurative machine guns and figurative firing squads.

More to the point, there were no SR’s or Mensheviks in the USSR to brandish such threats against by 1922. They were no longer part of the political equation inside Russia and were left to issuing condemnations of the revolution from afar. Of course, the question would certainly arise as to why they were no longer inside the country. Had the Bolsheviks exiled their political adversaries in the same fashion that Lincoln arrested and deported a sitting Congressman to Canada who opposed the Civil War? Or in the fashion that FDR had imprisoned the leaders of the Trotskyist movement for criticizing the motives of the war with Germany and Japan?

2009-04-29T01:30:00.002-04:00

"Rich in sunshine is the city of nine-teen-sixty. Fresh air, fine green parkways, recreational and civic centers, modern and efficient city planning, breathtaking architecture, each city block a complete unit in itself." If you want an idea how we got where we are today, just check out To New Horizons, a 1940 documentary about the General Motors' "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair. The world of 1960 features uncongested urban highways, highways that ascend into mountain passes, rationalized farming, and plenty of leisure time for all the girls and boys. GM was staggeringly efficient in getting their future to come true, although without the lilting, soothing accompaniment of Robert Stein. Oh yeah, and with the pollution and misery.

2009-04-28T12:24:00.002-04:00

Bolivia is "the Saudi Arabia of Lithium." Lithium-ion is what powers the batteries that will run our electric cars, and Bolivia has the largest deposit in the world. This is interesting: what will Morales' socialist government do with/about its new-found "riches." I like the quote from the Bolivian Minister of Mining, Luis Alberto Echazu: "Any company that would like to work with us will have to develop industries here. Otherwise, there's nothing. It's very simple: we will not continue exporting raw materials for another five hundred years. That is over." The problem, as the minister appears to recognize, is that raw-material export countries tend to have huge levels of wealth stratification. If Bolivia can put tight controls on its exports and develop the industry within Bolivia, it may be able to actually benefit from the lithium deposits. Here's CNN's take:

2009-04-20T23:06:00.004-04:00

I apologize in advance for this post. Pass it by if you are at all squeamish. Georges Franju's 1949 film, Le Sang des bêtes, about slaughterhouses in France. I found it at Limited, Inc., where there is an ongoing discussion of the abbatoirs in France.

2009-04-20T22:05:00.002-04:00

I have to say, I like this a lot:

“It’s a reminder for us in the United States,” President Obama was quoted in the New York Times, “that if our only interaction with many of these countries is drug interdiction, if our only interaction is military, then we may not be developing the connections that can, over time, increase our influence.”

I think he may end up being better than a lot on the left are willing to give him credit for. Of course, lets see if he follows through on his words. The CIA thing this week is rather depressing, to say the least.

2009-04-19T14:03:00.002-04:00

I just wanted to make a brief comment on the so-called "easing of the embargo" between the U.S. and Cuba. First of all, there is no easing of the embargo, but rather, an easing of the travel ban. Secondly, this is not some radically new shift in U.S. policy toward Cuba, but simply a movement to a travel policy slightly more permissive than during the Clinton era (yes, certain people could legally travel to Cuba all the way up until 2005; I lived there for four months in 2003). Good, yes. But the left and the right should not delude themselves about what this means. If the embargo ends, that will be something significant. That's not what this is, however.

2009-04-14T23:45:00.007-04:00

I've had at least three conversations lately about begging. I found myself more or less in agreement with one of the people I was discussing this with (less so with the other two), who argued that, while she has respect for begging, one cannot possibly cure the problems of a society by giving money. This is true, and I agree. But perhaps we need to rethink the position of begging in societies. In his book, Shadow Work, Ivan Illich speaks of "a right to beggary that for a thousand years was never challenged" (103). Begging, in other words was a legitimate part of European society for most of its history. What's more, if you look at other cultures today, many have a completely different view of begging than the dominant European one. My parents have been Buddhist for over forty years now (much longer than I have been alive), and for about 10 years of my life, they had a Buddhist teacher who came directly from Tibet, spoke no English and always taught with a translator, and who was completely un-Western in most of his mannerisms. One of the teachings he would constantly reiterate was the need to give to beggars, regardless of what one thought they would do with the money. There was a mandate to give because begging itself was not seen as illegitimate, a subjective "lack," or some kind of result of a deficiency in the beggar. I visited Tibet, myself, when I was 18 and the begging there was completely different than what we see here. It never involves an individual; it always involves groups, and once you give to one person, you are asked by more and more people until you either refuse to give more or have no more to give. There are a number of things to bear in mind here when thinking about begging in so-called "underdeveloped" or "developing" nations: 1) it acts as a kind of global redistribution on a negligible scale: in Tibet, we gave things that the Tibetan beggars didn't have access to; eyedrops were particularly popular, because of the dust in Tibet and the lack of availability of eyedrops at reasonable prices; 2) the existence of a dual economy makes what for me seems like a drop in the bucket actually have some value elsewhere; as tourists, we generally know this, but don't understand it; it does not mean that begging releases beggars from poverty (and a genealogy of the uses of the word "poverty" might be interesting in itself), but that the dollar can buy imported commodities, whereas the local currency usually cannot at any reasonable price (unless the "local" currency is the Yen or the Euro). Now, unlike in Tibet, in the U.S., it is always individuals, and their begging generally relies on "selling themselves." In other words, they try to appeal to emotions, or they try to entertain, or occasionally, they try to intimidate (I've seen this twice in my life). In other words, in a society of producing monads, even begging is a monadological phenomenon.

These are the preliminaries. To better understand begging, we need to stop viewing it as an isolated phenomenon: the (lazy) beggar asking for my (hard-earned) money. This should be patently obvious to most leftists and even to most liberals. Poverty is an outcropping of society and not some effect of laziness. What I think is less obvious is that begging is quite simply an activity that aims to redistribute social wealth in a very direct manner. Begging, like investment, takes wealth from one portion in which it might be swelling or overflowing, and deposits it in a portion where there is a (relative) lack. It is probably not the most effective form of wealth distribution, partly because in liberal societies we are so thoroughly trained to view property rights as unassailable and to view beggars as sub-human, but partly because, structurally, begging is a very "inefficient" way of extracting surplus from those who have it.

The comparison of begging and investment is not an accident. Both of these ask people to hand over surplus. In one, we are giving such a small share of our surplus, in general, that the thought of it going to, say, alcohol rather than food (although anyone who thinks about this should realize that, if I give someone five dollars on the street, and s/he spends the bulk of it on alcohol, he nevertheless has to eat; and he will probably spend something on food, unless s/he gets it from another source) should not particularly distress me. On the other hand, with investment, the idea is to get back more than what is invested - gambling. In this latter case, the figure who is being compared with the beggar, the investor, gets a share; this share is legally his once you have gone through with contracting, and as long as he "plays by the rules" he gets this share. He has begged you to trust him with your wealth; you have done so; he gets something out of it; you may ultimately not. We know how it's played. But what is important is that both begging and investment rely on social surplus; they are means by which individuals and groups secure for themselves a share of the social surplus. In one case (investment), the promise is held out that more surplus will come back the way it came; in the other case (begging), no such promise is made.

An anecdote: The similarity between begging and other forms of wealth redistribution really hit home for me recently. Last summer, I had a job of sorts, for Grassroots, Incorporated. I got paid minimum wage (and I didn't get paid for every hour I was working) plus commission (which adds up to nearly zero no matter how much money you make, because commission comes by beating the office average for the week; if you make seven hundred one day and one hundred the next, and the office average is 300, you make 25% of the 100 dollar over the office average, or twenty-five dollars for those two days; sounds good, but if that remains your average for the week, you get a grand total of twenty-five extra dollars for the week). I went door-to-door from about 4 PM to 9 PM asking people to donate money to the Democratic National Committee. I would stand on their doorsteps, asking them from the bottom of my wallet (which was pretty sparse just then) to help fund the war against John McCain. I met some interesting people, some nasty people, some hostile people, and a lot of people who couldn't afford (and others who "couldn't afford") to give me money. I memorized a script and repeated it over and over again until my mind went numb, my personality evaporated, and I was nothing but a smile and a minute-long prefabricated request for money. I began to speak in an obnoxious lilting tone and feel as though I didn't have a self. I quite the job after two weeks, which were the two most emotionally exhausting weeks of my life. More recently, I ran into a beggar while I was in a bit of a hurry. He began talking about his kids, and how he lost his job, and I realized while he was talking that everything he was saying had been rehearsed. Instead of making me hostile to the man, it made me realize just how similar my job knocking on doors was to his job standing on the street corner. I gave him more money than I probably otherwise would have. A beggar is someone who can get five dollars out of you; a fundraiser is someone who can get five thousand.

Of course, the rise of the welfare state has allowed us to forget that in many societies there is no solid line between "beggars" and "workers." In Ecuador, for instance, children beg as a supplementary income for the rest of the family. In other words, the original postulate, i.e., that "we aren't going to fix society by giving money away," is absolutely true, but with this caveat: we should begin to look at begging as a trade; it is thus not about fixing society, at all. If we want to fix society we need to look elsewhere, at larger forces and institutions around us. Begging is simply a means by which one group gains some of the surplus that large civil societies almost inevitably produce. It is not about work and laziness; after all, in a highly capitalized society such as ours, begging has, as I have shown through the comparison to my work at Grassroots, all the appearances, including many of the drawbacks, of a "job." It is about the ways in which social surplus gets redistributed, whether it be to a two dollar 40 Oz bottle of malt liquor, a four dollar hamburger, a ten dollar martini or a two hundred dollar iPod.

2009-04-03T18:35:00.002-04:00

It doesn't get any more blunt than this:

It was the US dollar that was monetized, or more specifically US debt obligations, which are now substantially worthless and will have to take a significant haircut in real terms. This is similar to the Japanese experience in which they monetized their real estate.

Ironically, those expecting this deleveraging to result in a stronger dollar could not be more mistaken. The Obama Administration is scrambling to obtain relief from Europe and Asia, getting them to inflate their own currencies through 'stimulus,' in order to continue to hide the unalterable truth - the US must partially default on its debt as expressed in the dollar and the Bond.

This is the inevitable outcome of all Ponzi schemes. Several smaller, private schemes already have collapsed. The big one is yet to come down. And when it does, the foundations of democracy will shake, several governments will fall, and we will once again experience the kind of uncertainty more familiar to those who lived in the first half of the twentieth century.

The sad truth is that the Obama Administration has barely begun the real work of rebuilding the economy. Everything to date is simple looting, paper-hanging, and the rewriting of history.

Until the median wage improves signficantly in real terms, and the economy is put back on a productive basis without relying on the unsupported expansion of credit, there will be no recovery, merely sound byte opportunities for the smoke and mirror crowd.

This is the reality.

2009-04-03T11:53:00.002-04:00

The census is done only once every ten years, which means it's pretty important that it's done right. We all know that Republicans have a huge investment in doing it wrong, in counting only the people who come to the door and answer the phone and not using statistics and probabilities to figure out who was missed. This year, there are going to be more problems, because of the huge number of foreclosures and the large numbers of people living in tent cities:

“Many people now who have lost their homes to foreclosure are doubling up with relatives, with other families. They might be living in motels . . . tent cities are popping up,” said Terry-Ann Lowenthal, a consultant for many non-profit organisations co-operating with the bureau on the 2010 census. “All of these new living situations create really significant challenges to traditional counting operations.”

One in nine US homeowners with a mortgage was behind on home loan payments or in some stage of foreclosure by the end of last year and reports are growing of the desperate measures to which people are turning when they lose their homes. Almost 300,000 homes received foreclosure filings in February alone, according to RealtyTrac.

There is little data on the rise in “non-traditional” housing, which is something the Census Bureau will generate for the first time as it seeks people out this year.

“Some of the first really hard data we have will come from this census, and it’s a big concern, there’s no question about it,” said Burton H. Reist, assistant to the associate director for communications at the bureau.

2009-04-01T01:47:00.004-04:00

"With RectSYS, fruit pickers living in India can pick tomatoes grown in the USA!"

And see how happy she is. It must be progress we're watching here:

Lest I need to remind you, "Este es el sueño americano: todo el trabajo, sin los trabajadores":

2009-04-01T01:09:00.001-04:00

Life is sweet: I found out today that I have a job for the summer. 20 hours a week, which is what I had asked for.

2009-03-30T18:05:00.002-04:00

Today in class, Walter Mignolo made a very interesting critique of Agamben's "bare life." He said, and I paraphrase, "Slavery is not bare life, in the sense that Jews were bare life; slaves are expendable life." The concept of bare life and homo sacer, drawn from Agamben's studies of Auschwitz, refers to a kind of magic circle, a necessary out-casting of individuals in society, the construction of the scapegoat, etc. It is about the phenomenon of internal exclusion. Slavery, on the other hand, was, first and foremost, about labor, about the appropriation of laboring bodies. Slaves are not bare life, they are chattel, completely expendable, not because the slaveholding west desires to annihilate them, but because it needs them to build up the foundations of mercantile capital and it cannot simultaneously admit their humanity. It is a mistake to conflate racial extermination policies and enslavement policies; they have completely opposite ends. The former is a means of mobilizing the "national" population against an internal/external enemy. The latter is more on a continuum with the wage slavery of the industrial revolution era, but with more brutality. Expendable life is not immoral, but amoral; it is life that serves not for sacrifice but for bodies, and it is really impossible to locate it outside the historical specificities of capitalism (perhaps this is why Agamben, with his intellectual history stemming from the Greeks, misses the point here). "Expendable life" is the kind of nullified life-forms that the institution of slavery produced, wholly constrained by plantation-based merchant capital.

2009-03-19T00:14:00.002-04:00

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street. This is an interesting article, not actually about how the formula itself killed Wall Street but how the eagerness of traders to grab onto a magic bullet led them to tweak a formula for calculating correlation so that it fit their needs. Of course, one thing this article doesn't mention is that, had it not been this formula, it would have been something else. One thing that the financialization of capital has done is to make the international markets incredibly vulnerable to things like this. This fallout of capitalization is the kind of thing that only Marxists and very skeptical chaos-theory liberals like Nassim Nicholas Taleb actually propose in times of economic prosperity, but that people start taking seriously during an economic collapse. The basic principle is that when everyone starts doing the same thing - misusing a specific correlation formula, for example - this creates a bubble that will eventually burst. Anyway, check out the article. Worth reading.

2009-03-13T14:11:00.003-04:00

I'm very excited about Sleep Dealer, which is, according to the trailer, coming out next month. It's already playing in LA and New York. It is a science fiction film (with some not so fictional elements: military drone planes, robotic labor replacing human labor, sealed borders) that takes place in a future Mexico, in which the borders to the U.S. have been completely closed off, and immigrant labor is done through computerized factories (machinery is controlled by Mexican laborers in Mexico, but it operates in the U.S.: "All the Work without the Workers"). It has gotten some acclaim at Sundance and other festivals. This will probably be my favorite film of the year.

Also, check out the blog at the website, which has some interesting links.

2009-03-11T16:21:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about the question of circularity, and I wanted to post something, even if I don't have time right now for a full articulation of my thoughts:

I grew up as a Buddhist in a white Buddhist community (and am now a complete atheist). One thing I would often hear is that, unlike Western notions of history, Eastern religions conceive history in terms of circular processes, be it the process of karma and rebirth in Buddhism, or the cycle of three ages - each represented by a different god, The Creator god, the Sustainer god, and the Destroyer god - in some forms of so-called Hinduism. This complaint strikes me now as utterly blind to how the dominant trope of Western historiography actually functions: not only is there circularity, everything is circular. Western historiography refers back to the past repeatedly, in order to clarify the present: Obama=Lincoln or Obama=FDR, the current crash=Great Depression, 21st Century=20th century=19th century (but the 19th century≠the 18th century, at least not for us any more), Hitler=Napoleon=Ghengis Khan. Our conception of history is utterly circular; we cannot do without the circle. The claim that Western history doesn't recognize the circle simply fails to recognize the circle in Western history. What else is redemption than a restoration of an original state of peace?

A linear conception of time would be quite different. For one thing, it would recognize circles/cycles, but only in certain circumstances. The seasons, for example, are cyclical, but also linear. No two springs are the same, as any farmer can tell you, but we can expect the regularity of the cycle spring/summer/fall/winter (to varying degrees, of course, depending on our global location). Historically valid solutions may work a second time, but under varied conditions. Also, a linear notion of time has to recognize entropy. The movement of energy in the universe does not recapitulate the movement of the seasons. Up to this point, the dominant trope of historiography has been circular; although there have been figures that have argued for a more linear history, Marx among them (periodization is a theory that implies no reversal), the dominant trope is a circular one.

2009-03-03T21:56:00.002-05:00

I haven't put up any new posts in a few days. I'm getting tired of using the link-blog format, even if I appreciate other people's link blogs quite a bit. At some point, not yet, of course, I would like this blog to become something entirely different, more of an outlet for my research. I think this probably won't be until after I've taken my preliminary exams. Or I might split it up, so that I have a second blog devoted entirely to research run-off. I'll leave you with a couple of links. I'm working on a review of the autonomous Marxist Christian Marazzi's first book to be translated into English, Capital and Language (Semiotext(e), 2008), and I've found a couple other reviews of the book here and here. I will say this about William Dixon's review (the second one): I think that his claim that Marazzi ignores history is rather unjust, for two reasons. First, it's not really true; Marazzi continually situates the development of the New Economy (his term for the finance-based, tech-based economy that began to exist in the 1980s and that came into maturity in the 90s) in a historical trajectory based on global legal, political, and social changes. Second, this book is not attempting to fully theorize the totality of the New Economy along with its numerous particulars after the manner of Marx in Capital or Keynes in The General Theory. The series in which it has been released in North America, Semiotext(e)'s "Post-Political Politics" series, consists of a number of short interventions into various theoretical currents rather than massive theoretical treatises on techno-capital. But some of the complaints that Dixon makes are just. See what you think.

2009-02-26T15:28:00.000-05:00

Coen Brothers direct an anti-Clean Coal ad. Enjoy:

2009-02-17T20:45:00.001-05:00

Scenes from the New Depression, via BBC:

2009-02-17T15:35:00.003-05:00

Most Famous Pundits=Most Wrong. From fair.org. Stanford Psychologist Philip Tetlock did an analysis of pundit predictions to see if there were any strong correlations between aspects of the pundit and the degree to which they made accurate and inaccurate predictions. Turns out, being more famous had the strongest correlation with being wrong in one's predictions:

He initially looked at whether accuracy was related to having a Ph.D., being an economist or political scientist rather than a blowhard journalist, having policy experience or access to classified information, or being a realist or neocon, liberal or conservative. The answers were no on all counts. The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit's accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock's first clue. The media's preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced.

I didn't need a crystal ball to see that one coming. Blowhards like O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and, yes, Franken, tend to prefer getting a rise to being right.

2009-02-17T13:00:00.001-05:00

Testing. What just happened to my blog?

2009-02-17T12:53:00.003-05:00

A Fraud Bigger than Madoff. The Independent has a story on the looting of Iraq by American contractors. It's pretty astounding how much the Iraqi people were taken for:

Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad's infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.

Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defence Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armoured cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defence Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud.

As Woody Guthrie said, "Some may rob you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen."

Be Careful What You Wish For

2009-02-15T12:51:00.003-05:00

Liberals have, for a while, been pointing out how hypocritical it is that people can die for "our" country, but can still be denied citizenship after they fight. Well, that debate is over, because the military is now offering a path to citizenship:

Immigrants who are permanent residents, with documents commonly known as green cards, have long been eligible to enlist. But the new effort, for the first time since the Vietnam War, will open the armed forces to temporary immigrants if they have lived in the United States for a minimum of two years, according to military officials familiar with the plan.

Of course, the fact of the matter is that this creates a huge incentive for military enlistment - people now have a very strong reason to enlist even if they have no interest in the military. Given the army's general views on politics, I would assume that this move on the part of the U.S. military (obviously with the aid of congress) has very little to do with the liberal desire for a global community with free citizenship for all, and quite a bit to do with military expansion and the need for bodies (variable capital) to man the machines (fixed capital).

2009-02-11T12:21:00.004-05:00

This piece by Steve Keen on his Debtwatch blog is very enlightening and also - for the five people in the world who have any faith that massive payouts to banks and the printing of money are going to get us out of recession (or, dare I say it, depression) - very distressing. He argues that we do not live in a world where printed money precedes credit; in fact, it is the reverse, the overextension of credit creates the need for the Fed to print more money. Keen argues that this is the normal functioning of a credit market. His argument is very compelling.

Note Bernanke’s assumption (highlighted above) [that if the feds print massive amounts of money, a "helicopter effect will occur, and inflation will counteract the rampant deflation created by stagnant credit] in his argument that printing money would always ultimately cause inflation: “under a fiat money system“. The point made by endogenous money theorists is that we don’t live in a fiat-money system, but in a credit-money system which has had a relatively small and subservient fiat money system tacked onto it.

We are therefore not in a “fractional reserve banking system”, but in a credit-money one, where the dynamics of money and debt are vastly different to those assumed by Bernanke and neoclassical economics in general.[10]

Calling our current financial system a “fiat money” or “fractional reserve banking system” is akin to the blind man who classified an elephant as a snake, because he felt its trunk. We live in a credit money system with a fiat money subsystem that has some independence, but certainly doesn’t rule the monetary roost—far from it.

*Bernanke thinks it's really cute when Geithner stands up with his paws in the air, "like he's people"*

Keen, an economist at Western Sydney University, is someone whose work I have just found, but who seems to offer a needed corrective to econometrics. As he says in this description of his method, he is taking a very different approach:

While I am an academic economist, I don’t build nor believe in the type of econometric models that dominate economics these days–generally so-called “New Keynesian” or “Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium” models.

Instead I build nonlinear dynamic models based on Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis”, and I have started constructing a strictly monetary model of a pure credit economy.

My predictions based on these models are qualitative rather than quantitative, but on the grounds of Minsky’s extremely prescient hypothesis the sheer scale of private debt that has been accumulated, and the abundant historical data on debt with which we can review past economic performance in the light of Minsky’s hypothesis, I have been arguing that this crisis is beyond bailouts.

2009-02-08T12:08:00.002-05:00

Toward a better understanding of wikipedia:

Despite warnings from many high-school teachers and college professors, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world (not to mention the biggest encyclopedia ever created). But even as Wikipedia's popularity has grown, so has the debate over its trustworthiness. One of the most serious concerns remains the fact that its articles are written and edited by a hidden army of people with unknown interests and biases.

Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool, called WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia's most controversial pages in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be.

The people who malign wikipedia tend to be blockheads who think that people are completely incapable of filtering information on their own. But I applaud this tool, which significantly aids in the filtering of information. My own experience with wikipedia is that political figures and pharmaceuticals tend to be very scrubbed and full of disinformation; posts in the humanities tend to be too short and lacking a great deal of information; and posts on the sciences and mathematics tend to feature everything you could possibly want to know about a subject with very few organizing principles. The tool is useful, straightforward, and astoundingly simple.

2009-02-07T14:44:00.003-05:00

I found a new blog that some of you (whoever you are) might be interested in. It's squattercity.blogspot.com, a blog written by Robert Neuwirth, a journalist who spent four years living in squatter communities around the globe, working on a book entitled Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. The blog Squattercity is a collection of blurbs and news items on squatter towns around the globe. A large portion of the blog focuses on evictions, but there is also a great deal on the nature of squatting, squatter networks, the politics of squatting, and so forth. Check it out.

2009-02-05T21:06:00.001-05:00

2009-02-03T08:55:00.002-05:00

Judd Gregg: bad cabinet pick or worst cabinet pick? Judd Gregg was such a bad pick. More and more people are sounding off on this. At Open Left, Chris Bowers discusses his lifetime Progressive Punch rating of 10.08 out of 100.00. At Climate Progress, what comes to the fore is, naturally, his terrible record on the climate. To top it all off, it looks like they're not even going to replace him with a Democratic senator, which, it would seem, would be the entire point of putting such a schmuck on your cabinet in the first place. Good grief, says Charlie Brown.

2009-02-02T21:41:00.003-05:00

From Mark Bousquet's "How the University Works" blog, I found the following interview with graduate student strikers at NYU (who lost when the NLRB ruled against them; NB: this was under the Bush administration). There's several interesting moments in this interview, but I was particularly interested in when the guy in front points, at the end, that while academia is expanding its understanding of what constitutes work (or labor) - affective labor, domestic work, intellectual labor - corporate legal practice is trying to narrow that definition. I'm not sure this is quite accurate, but the point is very illuminating to me. Instead, he perhaps should have pointed out that, as the labor force becomes increasingly non-industrial, it becomes easier for corporations to deny unionization to those facets of the workforce that try to attain it, by denying their status as workers, etc. There are, of course, a number of other social processes involved here; but the point is nevertheless very illuminating (to me, at least.)

2009-02-02T19:19:00.003-05:00

I've compiled all of the Superbowl commercials from this year that either talk about the economic downturn, the misery of working, or downsizing. The most depressing is the first one, an ad for careerbuilder.com that appeared in the third quarter. Also, although the GM Robot commercial didn't appear in this Superbowl, I thought I would include it to demonstrate how unbelievably insensitive GM advertising executives are to their labor force (second ad down). Granted, when the ad aired in 2007, GM appeared to be doing just fine. In any case, it is far more depressing right now than it was then.

2009-01-27T18:31:00.003-05:00

I've been avoiding blogging for a while, and that might remain the case. Nevertheless, I thought I'd post an update on global warming. I've been following the trends, and it seems that even those who recognize that global warming is real don't always know what's going on. The short version is that 2008 was the coldest year since 2001, which still makes it the tenth warmest year on record. This was because of a La Niña temperature anomaly which kept the Pacific particularly cold (hence our cold winter). La Niña and El Niño are two phases of the same climate cycle, the former being the cold phase, the latter being the warm phase. The effects of La Niña were particularly strong in 2008, and thus brought about cold temperatures. Nevertheless, the Arctic remained exceptionally warm, in fact much warmer than the average for the previous 7 years. That has led to a drop in the sea ice levels to below 2007 levels, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (see the daily snow and ice data chart for October through December with comparisons for 2006 and 2007 here; Joe Romm's analysis at Climate Progress here). It's easy to forget that global warming continues despite cold weather, so I just thought I'd give everyone a reminder.

2008-12-29T19:50:00.001-05:00

Stanley Fish gets what he deserves:

The first obstacle, of course, was getting through to someone. The prompts did not correspond to any of my concerns, but finally, after pressing a number of zeros, I was rewarded with the voice of a live person who said, “With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”

Visions of Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine the telephone operator danced in my head, but I bit my tongue and made my simple request.

“I’ve been away for some time and my services were reduced. I’d like to have them restored to what they were when I left in June.”

It turned out that this was not possible. Even though I had paid to retain my phone number, I was going to be treated as a new customer, which meant that I would have to answer a bunch of questions and decline services I had never had. After much back and forth I signed up for a package that included voice mail.

I should have quit when I was (somewhat) ahead, but I couldn’t resist returning to the greeting, with its double and ungrammatical “with.” I explained that the second “with” was superfluous, as the second “to” would be if the offending question had been, “to whom am I speaking to?”, or the second “about” if the question had been “about what are you worrying about?"

...

I was more exasperated than relieved, and I made the mistake of re-raising the “with-whom-do-I-have-the-pleasure-of-speaking-with” matter. He listened and suggested that I make a complaint. You mean call another 800 number, I wailed. No, he replied, I’ll do it for you, just tell me what you want to say. I went through the nature of the error, but when I talked about the unseemliness of a major corporation managing to sound pompous and ignorant at the same time, he interrupted me and said that he would not transmit that kind of language. I thought about pointing out that this was a complaint, not a love letter, but I just gave up.

This epic was not over. When I got to Florida after a three-day drive I found that I didn’t have voice mail. I called and was told that there was no record of my having placed an order. record of my having placed an order. I was assured that the matter would be taken care of in 24 hours. It wasn’t. I called back the next day, but a mechanical voice informed me that there was no service on Sunday. (Don’t people make phone calls on Sundays and pay for them?) Finally, on Monday, I reached someone who assured me that I would have voice mail the next day, and he turned out to be right.

2008-12-24T13:44:00.003-05:00

I thought I'd do a few 30-second Christmas movie reviews, for shits and giggles:

White Christmas (1954, dir. Michael Curtiz): White Christmas is pure war propaganda. It starts off with a stage (scene-within-a-scene) performance featuring Bing Crosby as Captain Bob Wallace, singing the eponymous song, written by Crosby and Irving Berlin, "White Christmas" ("I'm dreaming of a white Christmas..."). Crosby gives a sendoff to the unit's benevolent Major General Thomas F. Waverley (Dean Jagger) as he returns to civilian life and is replaced by General Harold G. Coughlin (Gavin Gordon). Crosby and the squadron sing "The Old Man," ("We'll follow the old man wherever he wants to go... because we love him!"). The next leg of the film takes Crosby and Danny Kaye into civilian life as a popular duet who, in classical Hollywood fashion, meet a sister act, with whom they go on an adventure (to Vermont, where there is supposed to be snow). There, they re-encounter Major General Waverley, who has become an inkeeper, but who will have to quit because there are no guests. Thus, predictably, Crosby and Kaye bring their act to the inn to attract guests. In an effort to get the old squadron to appear for the performance, Crosby goes on The Ed Harrison Show and sings the most despicable, propagandistic song of the entire film, "What Can You Do With a General?" This song makes the demonstrably false claim that G.I.'s after the war have a much easier time reacquainting themselves with civilian life than generals:

When the war was over, why, there were jobs galore
For the G.I. Josephs who were in the war
But for generals things were not so grand
And it's not so hard to understand

What can you do with a general
When he stops being a general?
Oh, what can you do with a general who retires?

Who's got a job for a general
When he stops being a general?
They all get a job but a general no one hires

In an era in which retired generals get paid by the Pentagon to go on CNN and lie, we should rightfully be cynical about this claim. Dean Jagger's constantly pitiful General Waverly is a blatant misrepresentation. White Christmas is nauseating.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas(1966, dir. Chuck Jones and Ben Washam): There seems to be two ways of interpreting this film: either, the Grinch is the pariah, the outsider, the wandering Jew; he lives on the outskirts of Whoville and haunts the inhabitants with his malicious deeds, or, and this seems more accurate, he is a landlord or capitalist living on the outskirts of town who exploits the Whos and takes their property (through mechanisms legal and "etra-legal"). The Grinch is old and green: greed, miserliness. He has a lacky who is at his beck and call. He lives above the town (rather than in the slough or the swamp, which would be reserved for the pariah figure, as in Wagners Rheingold). Granted, his interior decoration is sparse, but his stealing of Christmas seems to stem less from need than from a desire to make others miserable. Furthermore, when he gives back to the residents of Whoville that which already belonged to them (wages), they treat him as a guest of honor and welcome him into their homes.

Christmas Vacation (1989, dir. Jeremiah Chechick):: Critique of the American Dream. Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase )desires to play the patriarch; he wants to create the "perfect" Christmas, i.e. the Christmas that most mirrors the Hollywood Imaginary of Christmas. He seems to want to fulfill all of the fantasies that he held as a child: a gigantic tree, lights that illuminate the entire neighborhood, a private swimming pool. He is the model of American infantile consumerism, and he terrorizes his family with his schemes, forcing them to participate, occasionally at great personal risk (e.g., the opening scene in which they go to get a Christmas tree and nearly kill themselves in the process).

Christmas Vacation is a model movie for the current recession: Clark Griswold buys a swimming pool on credit in the belief that his Christmas bonus will cover the purchase, but the owner of the company decides on no bonuses in order to secure the "bottom line." Griswold is the model consumer, going in over his head in debt in order to purchase completely worthless, extraneous material goods. In the end, of course, something happens that would never happen in the real world: the boss is made to feel remorse at his decision and reinstates bonuses with a 20 percent increase. Griswold is ultimately triumphant (the last words of the film are him saying, "I did it"); although the film begins as a critique of the Christmas fantasy, Griswold's triumph is a spur for the viewer to ignore his misery. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that, in the final scene, the senile aunt begins to sing the Star Spangled Banner as a rocket display (Santa on a sled) takes place. Rather than laughing off her silliness, the entire Griswold family (plus extended family) joins in. The message: sentimental ideology serves the same purpose no matter what the circumstances.

2008-12-09T09:44:00.004-05:00

Why is William Kristol so stupid? Martha Nussbaum wrote an article recently, first appearing in the Los Angeles Times, and subsequently appearing on the University of Chicago Law Faculty Blog, in which she points out that what happened in Mumbai may have very dire consequences for India's Muslim populations, and that Muslims have often been the victims of terrorism in India, the most recent example being "the slaughter of as many as 2,000 Muslim civilians by Hindu right-wing mobs in the state of Gujarat over several months in 2002." Kristol responds to this sensible post, which points out that mass violence against Muslims should be prevented by the Indian government, with huffing, bluster, and bullshit:

[Nussbaum] deplores past acts of Hindu terror against India’s Muslims. She worries about Muslim youths being rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence. And she notes that this is “an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.”

So jihadists kill innocents in Mumbai — and Nussbaum ends up decrying racial profiling here. Is it just that liberal academics are required to include some alleged ugly American phenomenon in everything they write?

Okay, so far so bad, but it gets worse. In response to former (moderate Republican) senator Jim Leach's claim that we should view the attacks in Mumbai not as an act of war but of barbarism - Leach's attempt to restrain Indian military action in Pakistan - Kristol tells us

if terror groups are to be defeated, it is national governments that will have to do so. In nations like India (and the United States), governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists. In a nation like Pakistan, the government will have to be persuaded to deal with those in their midst who are complicit. This can happen if those nations’ citizens decide they don’t want their own country to be dishonored by allegiances with terror groups. Otherwise, other nations may have to act.

And in case anyone was wondering where the reference to Samuel Huntington was, it comes up in the last paragraph: "Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism." What is it with these realpolitik foreign policy wogs who think that they're being sensible when in fact they're just taking everyone else's moderation and exaggerating it so that it becomes nationalistic bluster. When everyone else is still figuring out the level of Pakistan's complicity in the attacks, Kristol is already contemplating invasion. Perhaps he can personally lynch all of Pakistan's terrorists. Perhaps him, John Wayne, and Rambo can take Pakistan by force and restore to it a functioning democracy. I hope Kristol is enjoying his brilliant vice-presidential pick (Palin) and writing mediocre op-eds, because it's going to be a long time before the Republicans have any power in this country again.

2008-12-08T17:56:00.002-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted. I lessened my news consumption following on the heels of the election, and I found myself with less to say. I thought I'd post this, however, from Yale Environment 360. It turns out that the major gas used in the production of numerous tech-products, including thin-film solar photovoltaic cells (not to be confused with crystalline silicon cells) is a huge (HUGE!) contributor to global warming:

It may sound like somebody’s idea of a bad joke. But last month, a study from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reported that nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), with a global warming potential of 17,000 [In contrast, the GWP of CO2 = 1, Alex], is now present in the atmosphere at four times the expected level and rapidly rising. Use of NF3 is currently booming, for products from computer chips and flats-screen LCDs to thin-film solar photovoltaics, an economical and increasingly popular solar power format.

The production method with NF3 allows producers to only produce about 2 per cent emissions; however, most large scale production releases around 8 per cent, and most smaller scale production, not equipped with the appropriate sequestration tools, tends to release closer to 20 per cent. Right now, production of NF3 is around 7,300 tons per year, and it is expected to rise to 20,000 tons over the next four years. Now would be a good time for everyone to read John Bellamy Foster.

2008-11-28T17:47:00.003-05:00

Consumerism gone wild: A Wal-Mart employee in New York City was killed by stampeding consumers this morning (Black Friday). I know we would all love to get 75% off of a toaster oven, but this kind of nonsense is utterly ridiculous. There's a reason I don't go shopping on Black Friday. Here's a snippet from the AP Report:

A worker was killed in the crush Friday after a throng of shoppers eager for post-Thanksgiving bargains burst through the doors at a suburban Wal-Mart, authorities said.

At least four other people were injured, and the store in Valley Stream on Long Island was closed.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in Bentonville, Ark., called the incident a "tragic situation" and said the employee came from a temporary agency and was doing maintenance work at the store.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," co-worker Jimmy Overby, 43, told the Daily News. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too. ... I literally had to fight people off my back."

Boingboing also has some links discussing union action following this incident. According to the Director of Special Reports for Local 1500, "Wal-mart must step up to the plate and ensure that all those injured, as well as the family of the deceased, be financially compensated for their injuries and their losses. Their words are weak. The community demands action."

2008-11-11T08:05:00.002-05:00

One of the classic claims coming from those who believe global warming to be just another scare tactic is that "We had a scientific consensus about global cooling in the '70s. One decade, you have cooling; one decade you have warming. It's all just cycles." Turns out, people who say this are flat out wrong. Over at Climate Progress, Joseph Romm discusses a new scientific review article that shows that not only was there not consensus on global cooling in the seventies, but the majority of scientific articles on climate change pointed to a warming effect.

The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations.

The myth of global cooling was two things: 1) a man bites dog media phenomenon and 2) something perpetuated by the late and not-so-great Michael Crichton in his novel State of Fear. There's a handy graph (copied below) that shows that there were only two year in the 60s and 70s in which the number of cooling articles matched the number of warming articles.

My Palin Fantasy

2008-11-07T11:08:00.002-05:00

I know it's a little late, but I have a Palin fantasy. Here goes:

Now that the election is over, I fantasize that Palin goes back to Alaska with her family. She continues to be governor for the next two years, but loses the race to a no-name Democratic challenger in 2010 because it has come out that she helped doctor the election results in Alaska (in favor of Ted Stevens and Don Young), and she is on trial for felony election fraud. She is ultimately cleared of fraud, but her administration is in shambles. Continuing lawsuits from the McCain camp over the clothing mishap and defamation suits as her rhetoric towards them gets more hostile, ultimately force her, in 2011, to declare bankruptcy (all of my revenge fantasies include bankruptcy). In 2012, no one even considers her for a presidential nomination, and by 2016, she is living in a much smaller home in Wasilla, working as a manager at Wendy's and watching television for six hours a day. In 2011, Track Palin moves to New York and shortly thereafter comes out of the closet. He becomes a successful lawyer and soon is one of the pre-eminent gay rights' activists in the country, ultimately being an instrumental figure in the nationwide legalization of gay marriage. He eventually runs for mayor of New York and becomes their first openly gay mayor. Meanwhile, Bristol and her hubby are perpetually poor and continually draining the modest funds that Tod and Sarah have. As they watch their son on television, giving stump speeches advocating equality for everyone, they sit back and wonder what happened, living a regretful and argumentative life into their old age.

And that is my Sarah Palin fantasy.

2008-11-06T22:49:00.002-05:00

Election oddities in Alaska, at Open Left. I suspected fraud the moment the results came in (and I commented on it over at Gerry's blog). The pre-election polls just aren't off by that much without something fishy going on.

2008-11-06T21:15:00.002-05:00

I'm reading part 5 of Newsweek's "Secrets of the 2008 Campaign", which is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at everything that went on (an undergraduate working at the coffee shop asked me what I was reading today, and when I told him, he said, "That's really important." Not really. But it's fun to read). Right now, I'm reading about the selection of Palin, and I'm kind of surprised by how accurately Gerry assessed McCain's choice back in August. McCain is a chronic gambler. He is impulsive and addicted to risk. There's no other way to see it:

But McCain didn't want the safe choice. A top adviser would later recall that telling McCain that Pawlenty was "safe" was "like guaranteeing" that McCain would not pick him. Prodded by Schmidt and Rick Davis, McCain began asking about Palin, a first-term governor who had shaken up the Alaska political establishment by taking on her own party elders, who was fearless and defiant, who was … a little bit like McCain. He had called her that Sunday morning while she was attending the Alaska State Fair. It was a quick phone call, only about five minutes, and Palin had trouble hearing McCain over the noisy crowd. But McCain was intrigued. He told Salter and Schmidt to fly her down to Arizona and take a close look.

Needless to say, if McCain had picked Pawlenty, this would have been a closer race. Palin soured so many moderates. She is the embodiement of "The Authoritarian Personality": infantile, paranoid, defensive, aggressive, scheming, uninformed, and self-righteous (I honestly believe that with Palin as President, we would find ourselves in a police state overnight). In any case, I'm both glad and sad that John McCain the gambler ultimately picked Palin. Glad because it gave us that much more of a win. Sad because she really fueled a lot of aggression and hatred in the conservative base, and I worry where that is going to take us in the future.

2008-11-04T23:00:00.001-05:00

11 PM: "Barack Obama is projected to be the next President of the United States of America."

2008-11-04T22:46:00.002-05:00

Just got back from Gerry's house. He's liveblogging, if you're interested. Looks like we've routed them. Kay Hagen takes NC; Obama has taken Ohio, it looks like New Mexico, etc. It's a good day.

2008-11-04T12:36:00.001-05:00

To watch the Republicans steal votes in real time, go to Our Vote Live, the site of the nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition. Most of the voting problems thus far are coming from (surprise) swing states and are in (surprise again) heavily Democratic areas.

2008-11-04T08:42:00.001-05:00

A post entitled "Ugh" from a conservative poll tracking site is always a good thing for us:

Before Sunday, McCain was actually in a better poll position than many imagined. Not that he was in a good poll position, but it wasn't hopeless. The tracking poll range was about a 2 to 9 point lead for Obama, which was actually the final ranges for Bush against Gore. As we know Gore ended up winning the popular vote, and about half the country is convinced he won the electoral vote as well. There was also a good case for McCain getting the lion's share of the undecideds, given their demographic makeup and the fact that Obama had spent three quarters of a billion dollars and had still not won them over. Add into that the fact that the difference between the 2-point poll and the 9-point poll appeared to be structural, having more to do with the model for likely voter turnout than simply arising from random variance, and you had at least a straight-faced argument for McCain winning.

Sunday night, that changed. All the the tracking polls moved toward Obama. Even IBD and Battleground, the two polls whose models seemed to be the most favorable toward McCain, shifted from 2-point races to 4- or 5-point races. At that point, even under the best-case McCain turnout scenario, it became much harder to argue that undecideds and error margins could result in a McCain electoral win.

At that point the only hope was that this would be a one-day blip. That's part of the reason that I've held off doing electoral college projections -- I wanted to see what the trackers did today.

I'll tell you, it ain't pretty. Zogby has gone from an 8-point Obama lead to a 13.5-point Obama lead. IBD/TIPP went from O+4.5% to O+7%. Given that tracking polls are rolling averages, and are therefore "sticky," the move is probably even more pronounced than we are seeing. In other words, undecideds seem to be breaking heavily for Obama.

2008-11-02T13:49:00.003-05:00

The headline: "Wave of Midnight Regulations Expected". The meaning: "Bush administration plans to finish off environment before end of presidential tenure." Via eenews (subs req'd, but campuses and some public libraries should have access). The Bush administration is planning to put through a number of "minor" regulatory changes after the end of the Nov. 1 rule proposal deadline, using yet another exception clause (for which the Bush administration is so well known). Here's a sample:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued proposed regulations to implement new car fuel-efficiency standards in April 2008, and final regulations are expected soon. "The Bush administration has proposed to use unrealistically low predictions of future gasoline prices for these calculations," the report says.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a proposed rule changing its environmental regulations to update its "waste confidence" finding, which determines the safety of spent nuclear fuel. NRC is currently deliberating a final rule to require new nuclear reactor applicants to provide an assessment of how the reactor would respond in the event of a large commercial aircraft impact, the report said.

The Interior Department also has a slew of regulations expected to come out before the end of the year. In April, it proposed a rule that would allow visitors to carry loaded guns into national parks and wildlife refuges unless state laws prevent them from doing so. Another Interior proposal would govern offshore leasing for renewable energy generators, such as wind turbines.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has also been rushing to complete changes to Endangered Species Act regulations that would fundamentally change how agencies consider potential threats to protected species from federal projects.

In an environmental assessment released this week, Interior said the rules would have little impact on the environment. Environmentalists decried the report as a rush job by political appointees that does not assess the full range of possible harm to species or court rulings on previous ESA decisions. The agency gave the minimum of 10 days for public comment on the assessment.

The Office of Surface Mining is expected to issue a final rule that would extend the current rule on mountaintop removal coal mining so that protections apply to all bodies of water, not just streams. But the rule would also exempt some practices or venues such as permanent coal waste disposal facilities and could allow for changing a waterway's flow.

The Bureau of Land Management could complete rules on issuing leases for commercial oil shale development now that Congress has allowed a moratorium to expire that had prevented the agency from finalizing such regulations during fiscal 2008. BLM also is expected to come out with a final rule establishing energy transmission corridors that would criss-cross through 11 states in the West. The agency also proposed a rule this month to eliminate a regulation that allows for emergency withdrawals of public land from energy production and mineral extraction to protect natural resources.

The National Park Service plans to change decades-old regulations within the next two months to open more trails to mountain biking. The agency is working on a draft proposal that it plans to release in time to have a 30-day public comment period and have the new rule in effect by mid-December. The service also plans to have a proposed rule for snowmobile use in Yellowstone this winter ready for public comment by early November and in place by Dec. 15, after a federal judge threw out a previous plan.

A federal judge also ruled last December that the Fish and Wildlife Service must reconsider its refusal to list the sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act, and a decision is expected by December.

And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is working on rules that would toss out part of a longstanding environmental law in federal fisheries management decisions.

2008-11-02T09:16:00.003-05:00

Make It Simple, Stupid: Richard L. Hansen, at slate.com, has an article detailing why congress should pass legislation that makes voter registration automatic. The county-by-county, semiannual registration process is one of the stupidities of the election format in the U.S., which gives rise to immense controversy and numerous court battles, when instead, it could be solved with the cooperation of the post office and the Census Bureau:

The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information.

This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud. Government employees would not have an incentive to pad registration lists with additional people in order to keep their jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches between state databases, a problem that has proved so troublesome because of the bad quality of the data. The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York. States would not have to use the system for their state and local elections, but most would choose to do so because of the cost savings.

2008-10-30T21:34:00.001-04:00

A picture is worth 700 billion words (via boing boing):

2008-10-30T15:00:00.001-04:00

Idea: Exxon Mobil, enjoying the largest US quarterly profit ever, should help bail out the next failed banking institution.

2008-10-30T11:30:00.000-04:00

Gnarls Barkley makes the best music videos:

2008-10-30T09:19:00.002-04:00

Conservative prodigal son Christopher Buckley has now written a concession speech for John McCain, demonstrating clearly that even reprobate Republicans are not funny:

My friends, this is a historic night. Tonight America elected its first African-American president. I’m proud of my country for doing that, though I kind of wish it hadn’t done it on this particular November 4. But no, seriously, I congratulate Senator Obama on a tremendous achievement. And I congratulate the country. Tonight, America has shown that it truly is the land of limitless opportunity. If a self-described “skinny black guy with big ears and a funny name” can become president of the United States – well, my friends, I guess there’s hope for just about anyone. Who knows, maybe next time it’ll be a Martian or some other type of little green man off a spaceship. Well, as that great philosopher, Yogi Berra, said when someone told him a Jewish man had been elected mayor of Dublin: “Only in America.”

2008-10-29T20:56:00.002-04:00

I'm a little bit burnt out on the race. I don't know if one more belligerent Palin comment, one more voter suppression scare, one more Obama taking a state that he normally wouldn't take (well, maybe that), one more "Kill him," one more "Who is yada yada yada?" is going to register with me. I think I've had enough shock and/or outrage and/or surprise and/or news (which isn't to say I won't keep reading/blogging about it). But for now, I've been reading the blogs of so-called TI's, or "targeted individuals," people who believe that the government is controlling their minds and reading their thoughts. It really is the usual run of paranoia turned up a notch; there's not that much of a gap between a person viewing a misplaced envelope of money as the work of government operatives and a person connecting an acquaintance with a former member of the Weather Underground with active terrorism. Moreover, the individual who writes this blog is not stupid. About police brutality he writes, "Such viciousness by the police is indicative of their being brainwashed into committing the most sadistic and unconscionable of crimes." There's brainwashed and there's brainwashed, right? Are they literally sat down in a chair with waves shooting into their brains? Probably not. Are they indoctrinated with a sense of superiority and self-righteousness? Often, yes. I'll leave you with my favorite illustration from the site.

2008-10-27T11:55:00.000-04:00

AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka on Barack Obama and race:

2008-10-26T21:45:00.003-04:00

James Pinkerton, apparently so desperate that he would even establish a link between himself and Obama if it could damage the latter's credibility, has devolved to Church Lady:

Could Lucifer play a role in this presidential election? It may sound crazy, but one of the candidates in this race has publicly praised, even emulated, a writer-activist who himself paid tribute to Lucifer. That’s right, Lucifer, also known as the Devil, Satan, Beelzebub—you get the idea.

2008-10-26T16:56:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading State Capitalism and World Revolution by C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee [Boggs], the founders of what came to be known as the "Forest-Johnson Tendency," after the pseudonyms that James and Dunayevskaya used in many of their first collaborative projects. The book is incredibly timely because it confronts the question of what socialism is. Right now, there are two public debates running concurrently, both of which use the term "socialism" rather liberally. The first has to do with Obama's plan for moderate tax cuts to the middle and lower classes and tax hikes for the wealthy. The specter of socialism is raised here, and strenuously denied by the Obama camp, simply as a tactic to divert the argument from tax policy to political philosophy. I don't think it is worth discussing. The second deals with the Treasury's billions of dollars in loans to banks and their plan (TARP) to buy up hundreds of billions in bad assets; this move amounts to strong-arming taxpayers into becoming corporate investors in incredibly risky ventures. The claim is that this is state socialism - the state is stepping in to take control of the banks, and becoming de facto socialist. But State Capitalism and World Revolution takes aim against precisely this notion of socialism, i.e. the Stalinist, Titoist model of state "socialism." They argue that centralization in the state and state property is capitalism of a specific kind: state capitalism. Instead of Capitalists, you have bureaucrats, but their function is essentially the same; they are to keep power out of the hands of the proletariat, to keep the workers chained to the factories, and to work at the constant intensification of labor. Russian Stakhanovism is the same as American Taylorism:

With the Stakhanovites, the bureaucratic administration acquires a social base, and alongside, there grows the instability and cirsis in the economy. It is the counter-revolution of state-capital.

In capitalism, surplus value amasses in the hands of individual capitalists and capitalist trusts. Under Stalin, on the other hand, it amasses in the hands of the state. The results, seen from the standpoint of the workers, are identical: constant intensification of labor, prevention of unionization, by force if necessary, the growth of a managerial class to keep workers on pace and prevent worker uprisings. What State Capitalism and World Revolution highlights is that 1) not only can the means of production be nationalized without being socialized, but 2) nationalization manifests itself as the concentration of wealth at the expense of the working majority. In a word, TARP is not socialism except insofar as socialism has been equated with Stalinism in this country, the better to demonize it. James, Dunayevskaya, and Lee confront the claims that nationalization is tantamount to socialism. Instead, they argue that the task for the Fourth International (which is the major anti-Stalinist Socialist body circa 1950, the year of the composition of SC&WR) is to denounce all state dictatorships in favor of World Revolution. The discussions on the possibility for revolution right now (as opposed to 1950, when the world did see various revolutions in the so-called "third world") are numerous, and I will not go into the account here. Virtually every paper written in the humanities makes what has been called by one of my colleagues the "shrug toward Utopia." If nothing else, this book offers a set of principals through which to view the scare-tactics of anti-socialism in our own period, and also a lens with which to view the strategy of Paulson, which I think can only facetiously be called "socialism."

2008-10-25T13:54:00.002-04:00

So one of the more interesting explanations of the McCain camp's move to Pennsylvania is that the Obama camp faked them out:

The Obama campaign is doing a major head fake in PA. They "accidentally" leaked an "internal" poll showing Obama up by only 2 percent in PA. I guarantee you that no such poll exists and that this was done both to motivate volunteers in the state (and maybe elsewhere) and prevent them from getting too complacent and also to sucker the McCain campaign into spending more time there. Ed Rendell has asked Obama to come back and campaign in the state-another major ruse. They know that McCain makes most of the decisions for his campaign and that they can goad him into spending more time in PA by pretending that it is close there. Let's see if Obama actually returns to PA before November 4th, but I sincerely doubt it. They are brilliant.

This was forwarded by a New Republic reader. The idea that Obama leaked fake polls is pretty ingenious. I'm not sure it's entirely accurate. There is the simple electoral math: McCain cannot win this election without turning a blue state red; he probably can't win this election anyway. If the reader is right, however, that would be a very exciting thing.

2008-10-24T11:01:00.002-04:00

Ballast looks to be a great film. The reviews from Sundance have nothing but good things to say about it. The trailer is very good, and I hope I get a chance to see this film in the near future. Lance Hammer, the film's director, has chosen self-distribution, which means that it will probably have to get screened mostly at film festivals and university screenings. With any luck, Carolina Theatre will screen it (I have my doubts), but it's not on their "coming soon" list.

2008-10-23T21:26:00.000-04:00

The New York Times endorses Barack Obama:

Mr. McCain offers more of the Republican every-man-for-himself ideology, now lying in shards on Wall Street and in Americans’ bank accounts. Mr. Obama has another vision of government’s role and responsibilities.

In his convention speech in Denver, Mr. Obama said, “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”

Since the financial crisis, he has correctly identified the abject failure of government regulation that has brought the markets to the brink of collapse.

2008-10-23T10:50:00.001-04:00

This might turn a few heads. Notice the scarf she's wearing.

2008-10-23T10:33:00.000-04:00

Oh, and I forgot to post on this last night. Frontline has a great new documentary on the climate crisis, entitled Heat. You can watch the whole thing online.

2008-10-23T10:22:00.001-04:00

Foreclosure Filings Rise 71% 3Q 2008 vs. 3Q 2007. From Naked Capitalism (Yves Smith).

2008-10-23T09:56:00.000-04:00

David Sedaris has the following to say about undecided voters. I saw it over at Gerry's website, and while I know that it is likely that anyone reading my blog will already have read Gerry's, I found it too good to pass up:

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

2008-10-23T08:49:00.001-04:00

Benoit Mandelbrot: "I don't know if we're entering the most difficult period, not since the Great Depression [but] since the American Revolution."

2008-10-22T23:04:00.001-04:00

I added some new links to reflect what I've been reading.

2008-10-22T21:42:00.000-04:00

I got in an argument tonight with a friend about whether it is worth it to vote for Obama, whether he will represent anything like progressive action in this country and whether, if he won't, it is worth voting against McCain. There are a number of arguments on both sides. Obama has a "squishy" record on NAFTA, for instance (David Sirota, openleft.com), switching his stance on the issue numerous times. Obama gets most of his funding from law organizations, a large chunk of change from hedge funds, and a not insignificant amount (although half of the Republican amount) from tobacco. Nor does Obama take the firm anti-war, anti-military stance that many on the left desire (and it's one thing we will never get). On the other hand, Obama's health care plan is vastly superior to McCain's, his positions on engaging in large superpower conflict are far less hysterical, his position on education is far more productive, and if global warming is at all important to you then you shouldn't even have second thoughts about voting Obama. Also, for those leftists who have a strong interest in Latin America, it should be hastily pointed out that Obama is unique among leaders of European or Anglo-Saxon nations in not jumping on the coattails of Uribe and even going so far as to confront the Uribe government with its violations of human rights (while France is still giddy about the rescue of Irene Betancourt). Will Obama make miracles? Obviously not. I wouldn't expect miracles of Nader, either. I feel that the left who reject Obama on the grounds that he is not radical enough for them are making a grave error. I have no doubt that, had the European Left had a second chance following the victories of Fascism in the first half of the twentieth century, they would have made a concerted effort to ally themselves with Social Democrats rather than let the Fascists have a solid victory.

About a half hour after my argument, I found the following videos online, and I felt extremely vindicated. Both Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are voting for Obama and recommend others do the same. They are both, particularly Chomsky, more cynical than myself about the potential of an Obama presidency, but as Chomsky says, "People treat voting for the lesser of two evils as a bad thing. Maybe that's because of the way it is phrased. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing."

2008-10-22T19:19:00.000-04:00

I went on the New York Times website around 5 PM today and saw one of the stupidest financial headlines I've seen in a while: "Despite End of Credit Freeze, Dow Drops 5.7%." The stupidity of this headline wouldn't have been so glaring at CNN or Fox News, but right below it, there was another headline, "Wachovia Reports $23.9 Billion Loss" and next to that "Merck Announces Big Job Cuts." Anyway, the Times must have realized how stupid they sounded, because now the headline reads "Stocks Dive as Crisis Erodes Earnings; Dow Drops 5.7%". People really do have a tendency to mystify the markets, as if rubbing one's hands together and saying "alakazam" (and injecting hundreds of billions in cash) should cure all the problems of the economy in one fell swoop. My only explanation is that the people who don't understand how the markets could plummet after the press and the President had declared that the markets shouldn't plummet anymore are so personally invested in stock market performance that they can't see any other facets of the economy besides the stock market.

2008-10-22T10:21:00.000-04:00

Wachovia just released its quarterly. It posted $23.7 billion dollars in quarterly losses! Should I be emptying my accounts?

2008-10-22T08:25:00.000-04:00

ACORN just put out a video defending itself and turning the tables on the Republicans, pointing to their voter-suppression campaign. I hope this pushes Republican voter suppression further into the open.

2008-10-21T06:37:00.000-04:00

Gerry has a post about North Carolina's election woes: a reporter was assaulted at a McCain-Palin rally, black voters were heckled, an Obama supporter's tires were slashed at a Fayetteville rally, and, the most bizarre and disgusting, a dead bear, shot in the head, was dropped on West Carolina University's campus draped in Obama signs. I hope everything goes okay in the next weeks.

2008-10-20T08:55:00.001-04:00

This week is going to be a very bad week for McCain (unless there's something I don't know):

* The press is reversing on ACORN. My guess is that this is the result of the Obama camp requesting that the special investigator who is looking into the attorney firings also look into the FBI's investigation of ACORN. I don't expect a full reversal, but I do think that CNN, among others, will back down from their condemnation of ACORN and point out that registration fraud is a very different thing from voter fraud, and that it's not a centrally-controlled thing.

* Colin Powell endorsed Obama, yesterday, and one imagines this will bring another wave of defections from moderate-right pundits against the McCain camp. The endorsement included Powell's condemnation of the press for letting "Muslim" become a slur and his condemnation of the press and the McCain camp for harping on Ayers. This will dominate the news this week.

* David Letterman seems to have almost pushed the G. Gordon Liddy/McCain friendship out into the open. It was well-known on blogs for weeks, but it hasn't yet made its way to the mainstream press. My guess is that it gets mentioned once or twice this week, but that the press doesn't pull out the stops. This is a man who has plotted multiple assassinations and kidnappings (this is only what we know he did) and has said as recently as 1990 that, if his listeners ever want to shoot an ATF agent, to aim for the head.

* Obama raised $150 Million this month. This will also dominate the news this week.

* The issue of health records is also coming back into the spotlight. The New York Times has a five page story on why candidates should release their health records. This may be ostensibly aimed at all the candidates, but McCain clearly has the most to lose.

(I'll hyperlink all of this later). Update: Hyperlinked.

2008-10-19T15:04:00.000-04:00

The best part of a financial crisis is the photos of stockbrokers with their hands on their faces and heads, which is why it's nice to see that there's a whole blog devoted to the subject. I have to admit, a few of them made me feel kind of bad for the guys, especially the one at the bottom of this post, although in reality, the worst that's going to happen to this guy is apartment living, which is what I do, anyway, and which I find not only adequate but preferable.

2008-10-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

My favorite part of W., by the way: When George Bush, Sr. lost to Clinton, the Bushes are portrayed sitting in the White House watching the television. Barbara Bush (Ellen Burstyn) says, weeping, "The best man didn't win this time, George. The best man didn't win." A woman in the audience at this point yelled out, "Oh yes, he did!"

The Banality of Empire

2008-10-19T08:34:00.000-04:00

I feel like there is something missing from many of the reviews of W. I've read thus far. Yes, the film is a pastiche of quotations from the Bush years fit into a fairly short (for Oliver Stone) biopic. Yes, it is a farce, and doesn't always reflect reality. Thandie Newton as Condoleeza Rice is particularly terrible, mouthing about six lines in the entire movie and standing awkwardly close to foreign dignitaries (leading one to think that Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser can't write women, unless they are arguing with someone). Yes, Oliver Stone's typical stylistic flare, replete with jump cuts and shots filtered through media, is missing. Admittedly, the film has a lot of bad moments.

But what is ignored is the central aim of the film. Many are disappointed that this film is not Nixon, with its paranoid rendering of a nation under siege. We're letting the nefariousness of the Bush Years off the hook, as the argument runs, by portraying them as the escapades of a formerly-alcoholic fraternity boy turned with a daddy issue. Yet something is being ignored. The film is not concerned with plumbing the secrets of the elite but with the "banality of evil." Every film is an argument, and this film is trying to make the case that destruction is not a heart of darkness. In Nixon, there is a scene in which Nixon meets with CIA Director Richard Helms, played by Sam Waterson, and at one point, Helms looks up, and his eyes are completely black, as though we are looking into the soul of the CIA. This is not the path that W. chooses to take. Instead, we see shot after shot of alcohol being imbibed, food being eaten, groups of old codgers waddling through the forest. Because Stone would never avoid pointing to the path of destruction behind the facade, we also see media footage of anti-war protests, of the shock-and-awe of both Gulf Wars, and of the turnaround in Baghdad, when people started protesting, fighting, and blowing one another up in the streets. Yet what we are supposed to understand is that the entire war unwound under Bush's eyes, and he remained clueless the entire time.

Stone does not include all of the Bush presidency. This seems to have bothered many, but I'm not exactly sure why. Watching it, it seems that it could end at any point and allude to the future: it could have ended with Bush first entering Iraq (although a couple of important scenes would have been lost), it could have ended with Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished," it could have ended with Rumsfeld eating pie. The end would have alluded to this future (which does beg the question of whether this film will make any sense to people twenty years down the road). It didn't go into Katrina, it didn't go into warrantless wiretapping and the erosion of the constitution, but it would seem that it's easy to read those things into it. The same buffoonery and arrogance that got us into Iraq also led to the entire edifice of power under Bush. In the end, we watch the bad men, and their actions strike us as absurd, but their results are all the more clear.

2008-10-17T10:22:00.000-04:00

A study by a professor at the University of Georgia interviewed men on their level of disgust with homosexuality. It subsequently had them watch gay porn. Those who expressed the highest levels of disgust in the interview were the most aroused watching the porn. More at the University of Chicago Law Faculty Blog.

2008-10-16T21:27:00.000-04:00

I found this old Cat and Girl strip. It seemed very apropos.

2008-10-15T10:36:00.001-04:00

Those damned liberals and their political divisiveness. Forcing the Sacramento GOP to take down their "Waterboard Obama" slogan from their website. Seriously. Can someone be arrested for saying something like that? Does politics get any worse? (Answer: yes. Look at Bolivia.)

2008-10-14T16:13:00.001-04:00

If, after this revelation, the right-wing base is still actively boosting McCain and calling Obama a terrorist, then they're even more hypocritical than I would have expected. The head of McCain's transition team lobbied for Saddam Hussein.

2008-10-14T14:48:00.001-04:00

The Times Online has a fantastic interview with Oliver Stone on his new film W. There are some really strong statements in this interview. One of the most interesting is on John McCain's war career:

“I think McCain’s a very special story because he was never a soldier,” Stone says coldly. “He’s said he never saw the results of his own bombing. I saw the damage we did, I saw the corpses, the decay, I smelt the flesh, I saw people who’d been napalmed, people who’d been killed by shrapnel, mutilated. I saw horrible things. McCain was a prisoner and he has a siege mentality. He doesn’t see a balanced portrait of cause and effect – there’s something missing in the man, mentally."

2008-10-14T12:34:00.000-04:00

Recently, Andrew Sullivan compared Obama and McCain to Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. Obama remains cool and lets his opponents self-destruct. Today, The Washington Monthly has a post that goes a long way toward confirming this pseudo-hypothesis. It seems that the McCain ticket, unsatisfied with the results of the Troopergate probe, decided to launch a different probe, spearheaded by Alaska's Personnel Board. The assumption was that the Personnel Board would play partisan politics, clear Palin of any wrongdoing, and "the new talking point would be, 'One investigation cleared Palin, one didn't, so let's just forget the whole thing.'" It turns out, this may backfire for the McCain camp:

[T]he board ended up hiring an aggressive Anchorage trial lawyer, Timothy Petumenos, as an independent counsel. McCain aides were chagrined to discover that Petumenos was a Democrat who had contributed to Palin's 2006 opponent for governor, Tony Knowles. Palin is now scheduled to be questioned next week, and the counsel's report could be released soon after. "We took a gamble when we went to the personnel board," said a McCain aide who asked not to be identified discussing strategy. While the McCain camp still insists Palin "has nothing to hide," it acknowledges a critical finding by Petumenos would be even harder to dismiss.

Oops.

2008-10-14T10:15:00.000-04:00

The Big Picture has the most scathing critique I've seen yet of the stupid right-wing idea that the liberals and the poor caused the current credit crisis:

Understand this simple fact: In an ultra-low rate environment, where prices are appreciating rapidily, and mortgaes are being securitized, ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT THE BORROWER NOT DEFAULT IN 90 days (or 6 Months). The goal was to make a loan that did not default in that period of time, it cannot be put back to the originator.

As a mortgage salesman, you only lose your a fee if a borrower defaults within 3 or 6 months. What do you do to maximize your returns? The best way to do that -- to put people in houses that would not default in 90 days -- was the 2/28 ARM mortgages. Cheap teaser rates for 24 months, then the big reset. By then, it was no longer your problem.

Can you grasp what a monumental change this was? Instead of making sure that borrowers could pay back ALL OF THE 30 YEAR FIXED MORTGAGE, you only had to find people who could afford the teaser rate for a a few months. THIS WAS AN ENORMOUS AND UNPRECEDENTED SHIFT IN LENDING.

2008-10-14T10:01:00.001-04:00

Being a lefty pinko kook, I'm always suspicious of any good financial news. Yesterday's bounce in stock prices is no exception, and it seems I'm not alone. At the Financial Times, John Authers talks about "Tigger Markets" (they bounce and bounce and bounce and bounce). Wild fluctuations in the market are expected, especially in crisis periods. Authers goes on to argue that this could be a rally, but it depends on whether the money markets unfreeze. Over at Boom2Bust, there is a summary of the writings of economists who are bringing up the specter of recession (can't they let us dance while Rome is burning?). After Paulson's recent injection of capital into banks, Brad de Long, for one, has resorted to prayer as the best means of resuscitating the financial markets. The good news is that another financial shock would rocket Obama in the polls (oops, I'm not supposed to say that).

2008-10-13T18:39:00.001-04:00

Ezra Klein has an article directed against tipping in restaurants. I never thought very seriously about this before, but tipping is a very deceitful custom: the premise is that we are being nice and tipping our waiters because we feel some common human bond with them. This is true; I know waiters, I've known waiters; I've never been a waiter, mostly because I'm awkward and clumsy; I've worked in food service. I feel that people deserve tips. But in reality, the custom supports a system in which low wages are supposed to be compensated by tips. Waiters, particularly at places like diners, make dirt. The only reason the state permits them to be paid so low is that tips are supposed to compensate. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But they can continue to receive incredibly low wages on the grounds that they receive tips, as well.

Let's imagine, though, a counter-scenario. We abolish tipping, and instead add that money to the menu price of the food. Waiters are subsequently paid livable wages. Assuming waiters didn't get screwed in the transition, this would arguably be a more honest way of going about it. Then again, it seems that customers would simply be angry and the wait staff would continue to get the short end of the stick. So perhaps tipping remains the best way to confuse people into paying the full value of their meal.

Update: Over in the comments section at Ezra Klein's blog, a reader actually developed a model to explain tipping as a means to transfer risk.

2008-10-13T14:15:00.000-04:00

I just found this video, over at Think Progress, of Sarah Palin claiming that McCain is going to reign in abuses of power, days after she was confirmed to have abused her power. Something else I noted in this video, however, is that Palin has toned down her accent; the vowels are not as wide and the tone is not as high-pitched. We still hear some of the down-home, aw shucksness of it, but she's learning to sound like one of them arugula-eating, east-coast liberals.

2008-10-13T12:00:00.000-04:00

Move On has a new ad, reflecting that both Elizabeth Dole and John McCain are on the ropes in North Carolina:

2008-10-13T09:24:00.000-04:00

The New York Times has an article today on the increasing problems of No Child Left Behind. In the first years of the bill, it tells us, the required gains in student proficiency were relatively modest, but last year they jumped a very large amount, and as a result, the number of schools failing to meet NCLB goals has shot up.

But this year, California schools were required to make what experts call a gigantic leap, increasing the students proficient in every group by 11 percentage points. For the first time, Prairie, and hundreds of other California schools, fell short, a failure that results in probation and, unless reversed, federal sanctions within a year.

“And they’re asking for another 11 percent increase next year and the next, and that’s where I’m saying I just don’t know how,” Fawzia Keval, the school’s principal, said. “I’m spending sleepless nights.”

Given the administration that put NCLB through, I wouldn't be surprised if this was part of the plan: make schools fail so that we can privatize everything. A 100 percent proficiency rate in reading and math, the requirement of NCLB by 2014 (thanks, Gerry), is ~~probably~~ impossible. I doubt that any public school in the country would be able to meet it; in another seven to ten years, were NCLB to continue as written, the public school system in the U.S. would be abolished. I honestly do not think that the bill was ever intended to improve schools by leaps and bounds.

Update:Gerry, in the comments section, clarifies some issues from my post and provides a link to an old Washington Monthly article on the subject.

2008-10-11T00:28:00.000-04:00

Three things:

1) Inquiry concludes Palin abused power. Isn't that a gosh darn surprise there?

2) There's no doubt going to be cynicism about the fact that McCain is finally telling his supporters to calm down. I don't doubt that there is political motivation, but because that is precisely what I wanted of him, I respect his decision to do so. I'm glad he wrangled with his virulent supporters, regardless of the motivation.

3) The Republican National Committee sent me a flyer today, presumably aimed at Dems, with the line, "Do you know what the Democratic leadership really thinks about Obama?" Then it had a series of quotes from the primaries. I believe that the Republican National Committee is not actually waging their campaign against Obama. I believe that the entire premise of running a presidential nominee is actually a cover-up for their ultimate goal: trying to piss me off. I believe that, in 2007, Karl Rove got together with a couple of henchmen, identified a democratic voter, and said, "Gentlemen, our aim is to get his goat."

2008-10-10T08:52:00.001-04:00

I'm having trouble with my Internets today. I'm wondering if anyone else is having a problem: a) seeing streaming video on typically leftist blogs; b) accessing anti-McCain articles on the web. It's an oddly selective problem, not a general one, so I'm suspicious.

2008-10-09T16:48:00.000-04:00

Things I hate:

Murder
SUVs
Grading papers (but not for the reasons you might think)
The phrase, "I'm a fiscal conservative, not a social conservative"
Fiscal conservatives
"24"
Non-partisanship
The Laffer Curve
Feather boas
"My Country: Love It or Leave It"
Global warming

2008-10-09T11:46:00.000-04:00

Yglesias has some music recommendations for McCain:

Thinking about John McCain’s Foo Fighters problem, some of the issue here is that not only are there few contemporary rock bands that are inclined to support McCain, but there are few contemporary rock songs that are thematically appropriate to the McCain campaign. If it were actually the case that “My Hero” is about the need to look up to a war veteran, then I’m not sure that Dave Grohl’s personal opinion would matter. This problem goes back, of course, to Ronald Reagan’s (mis)appropriation of “Born in the USA.” It’s somewhat counterintuitive, but I think conservative politicians would actually do better to turn to the world of commercial hip-hop, where key conservative values like greed and violence are frequently lauded.

2008-10-09T11:31:00.000-04:00

Only the dirtiest campaign in history could, the day after calling their opponent a terrorist, refer to his campaign as "the dirtiest campaign in history." Just when you thought the McCain camp couldn't get any worse, Cindy McCain gets co-opted to play second to Sarah Palin.

2008-10-08T08:40:00.000-04:00

One thing that needs to get more play with the debates, foregoing the obvious discussions of McCain's "That one" comment or Bill Ayers, or whatever else we can dredge up, is the fact that McCain is proposing two very, very bad policy suggestions that are also radically new (not to mention all the other bad policy that McCain brought up last night): the first I have already talked about - that is, the League of Democracies. Since that post, Matthew Yglesias has brought the idea up a few times. I am tempted to paraphrase Barack Obama on taxation with regard to the league of democracies: "John McCain supports a league with other democracies, who don't need it and didn't ask for it." Support from other Democratic nations for the League is almost nil: ex-British Prime Ministers might support it, but the only acting head of a country who supports the idea, to my knowledge, is the conservative PM of Denmark. Because, despite claims to the contrary, the League of Democracies would be no more effective in policing global crisis than the UN, the entire idea behind the League seems to be, not to create a positive force for good in the world, but to diminish the influence of China and Russia. McCain would like to use it as a foreign policy hammer. Another example of him, again paraphrasing Obama, this time on the budget, "using a hatchet where we need a scalpel."

The other issue that McCain keeps trumpeting, and that the mainstream press seems to be supporting him on (my only explanation is that they are thickheaded) is a budget freeze. As Yglesias puts it, "a lot of the press’ leading lights seem to think we ought to follow Herbert Hoover off the cliff. Everyone’s been living too high on the hog and we need to liquidate everything. Massive suffering will be good for us." The belief that reigning in government spending is what is going to get us out of the credit crisis is absurd. Again, from Yglesias:

Meanwhile, as you may have noticed, there’s a credit crunch afoot. A lot of people or business who might think they have solid ideas about how to invest some money in new production or sales are finding they can’t get the loans they need to do that. One of the few entities that still can easily raise large quantities of money on favorable terms is the federal government. If the feds don’t take up that opportunity and borrow cash that gets plowed into something or other, then there’s going to be no new economic activity at all. What we ought to be doing is debating not whether to spend, but what to spend the money on since, clearly, it’s much better to have the money spent on something useful than on something pointless.

The low-budget government mantra makes no sense. McCain likes to attack earmarks, and certainly there are absurd earmarks, but if we break down the budget (and our current deficit), it is not earmarks that are the problem. Indeed, many earmarks are very important, and provide good things: the earmark in the current bailout bill that provided funding for renewable energy, for example. But the budget problem is not one of earmarks. For starters, we have a 10 billion dollar-a-month war going on. Defense spending is ludicrous, and it is to McCain's credit that he offered to reign it in (unfortunate as it may be, given his record, that most of the budget cuts will probably be to veterans' affairs organizations and not to military spending).

2008-10-07T10:52:00.001-04:00

I'm sure everyone has heard that Sarah Palin is turning political rallies into lynch mobs in Florida, so I won't go into it, although Gerry has a couple posts on the issue. It conjures up some of my worst fears about the Republican party, but I don't want to be accused of jumping the gun, so I'll let them be for now. She's also attacking Obama for his support of the troops, which is utterly absurd:

See our opponent voted to cut off funding for our troops even after saying that he would never do so.

(Boos.)

And he said that our troops in Afghanistan are just quote, "raiding villages and killing civilians."

(Boos.)

And that's not what our brave men and women in uniform are doing in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is fighting terrorism and protecting us and our values.

What happened is pretty clear: Obama voted against the troop funding bill without a timetable, McCain voted against the troop funding bill with a time table. In other words, they both voted to cut funding for the war (not for "troops"), but the issue was the timeline, not the funding. But to claim that McCain loves the troops is thoroughly dishonest and disgusting. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America just released its congressional scorecard and gave McCain a "D." Like most associations and unions, the IAVA does not use particularly subjective criteria to make its assessments (e.g., "What do our members think of McCain?"). They simply assess how often the candidate, compared to other candidates, voted yes on IAVA issues. Think Progress has more.

Update: Obama got a B, which is not up there with Jim Webb (A+), but it's much better than his "I love the troops" opponent.

Update: The report card does not award F's, which means that McCain got the lowest grade possible.

Update Update: The report card does reward F's. If one were present at all or almost all of the IAVA votes and voted no on every single issue, one would get an F (there are two total).

2008-10-02T23:36:00.000-04:00

Also, Climate Progress points out something I noticed as well: both times that Palin has talked about man-made climate change - first on Couric, now in the debate - she made the same gaff. The first time, she said, "I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate." The second time, she said, "I’m not one to attribute every man... activity of man to the changes in the climate." She got the order backwards each time: she's not blaming human activity on the climate. That's good to know. That means that if I'm grumpy tomorrow, it won't be the weather's fault.^*

^*It will be Sarah Palin's.

2008-10-02T22:56:00.000-04:00

To Sarah
From The National Society of Atomic Scientists^*:

^[*]Doesn't really exist