Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Braying jackass of the week award -- in a rich week I must add -- to house majority leader Steny Hoyer, for lumping "reform" of the Social Security retirement system with health insurance.

Here's Chris Bowers on the topic, in paraphrase: "Hey, why not? Let's open the tax books here. Maybe we oughta pop the tax cap on SSI!"

Why is raising payroll taxes the hee-haw answer to everything?

At least this raise is on the better-off jobsters, the merit and hustle crowd. But what if, once the cougar's out of the bag, our beloved corporate-congo morph magic steps in, and on our way to the thousand years of solvency we get something more like this --

"Administration officials said that if Congress were to act immediately, the impending gap could be filled three ways: by raising workers' Social Security payroll taxes by 2 percentage points, from 12.4 percent to 14.4 percent; by reducing benefits by 13 percent; or a combination of the two approaches. The officials briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity on the technical aspects of the trustees' findings."

I'm a great fan of Dani Rodrik, shown above. He's for government 'industrial intervention' in the global south states; for regulating cross border private credit flows; for balanced trade; and for an open throttle for job seekers across the north/south borders.

You can hardly ask for more out of an elitist merit class social scientist. But there are some nuts it's pretty hard to crack. Here's Dani on the plight of the developing world in the coming days:

Growth in the developing world tends to come in three distinct variants. First comes growth driven by foreign borrowing. Second is growth as a by-product of commodity booms. Third is growth led by economic restructuring and diversification into new products.

Today the first two models are at greater risk than the third. But we should not lose sleep over them, because they are flawed and ultimately unsustainable. What should be of greater concern is the potential plight of countries in the last group. These countries will need to undertake major changes in their policies to adjust to the new realities.

"By capturing a growing share of world markets for manufactures and other non-primary products, these countries increased their domestic employment opportunities in high-productivity activities. Their governments pursued not just good "fundamentals" (e.g., macroeconomic stability and an outward orientation), but also what might be called "productivist" policies: undervalued currencies, industrial policies, and financial controls.

"China exemplified this approach. Its growth was fueled by an extraordinarily rapid structural transformation toward an increasingly sophisticated set of industrial goods... China also got hooked on a large trade surplus vis-a-vis the U.S. ― the counterpart of its undervalued currency."

"Global macroeconomic stability requires that we avoid such large current-account imbalances in the future. But a return to high growth in developing countries requires that they resume their push into tradable goods and services.... In the past, this push [into world markets] was accommodated by the willingness of the U.S. and a few other developed nations to run large trade deficits. This is no longer a feasible strategy for large or middle-income developing countries."

"Are the requirements of global macroeconomic stability and of growth for developing countries at odds with each other? Will developing countries' need to generate large increases in the supply of industrial products inevitably clash with the world's intolerance of trade imbalances?"

"There is in fact no inherent conflict, once we understand that what matters for growth in developing countries is not the size of their trade surpluses, nor even the volume of their exports. What matters is their output of modern industrial goods (and services), which can expand without limit as long as domestic demand expands simultaneously. "

"encouraging industrial production directly... it is possible to have the upside without the downside."

"There are many ways that this can be done, including reducing the cost of domestic inputs and services through targeted investments in infrastructure."

"Explicit industrial policies can be an even more potent instrument."

"The key point is that developing countries that are concerned about the competitiveness of their modern sectors can afford to allow their currencies to appreciate (in real terms) as long as they have access to alternative policies that promote industrial activities more directly."

"... developing countries will have to substitute real industrial policies for those that operate through the exchange rate.... External policy actors (for example, the World Trade Organization) will have to be more tolerant of these policies as long as the effects on trade balances are neutralized through appropriate adjustments in the real exchange rate. Greater use of industrial policies is the price to be paid for a reduction of macroeconomic imbalances."

Dani, I love you, my man -- but are you shittin' me?

Imagine a city of many millions of people who support themselves and their families solely by arranging words, images and sounds, or in the industries that make this work available to others.... what they do influences most everything, shapes politics and governance, provides a conception of our time, forges the culture such as it is, and stamps the imprint of the present for history to judge.

Note well, in Mark's exordium, the slipped-in phrase "or in the industries that make this work available to others." We will have occasion to return to this idea.

Comes the meta-economics:

"Their work is peculiarly vulnerable in that it is easy to appropriate. If they were farmers, industrialists or surgeons, their problems would be different. It is not possible to copy instantaneously and in virtually unlimited quantities either potatoes, aluminum or gall bladder surgeries, as one might a song or a scanned book.

Were this vulnerability unaddressed, the producers of intellectual property would be put out of business unless they were independently wealthy or worked either as amateurs or drew salaries at the pleasure of, and beholden to, boards, committees and overseers of every type.Always at risk, the independent voice....

So-called public interest groups serve the new information super powers, the Standard Oils of our age, whose interests would be advanced if they did not have to bother with permissions and payments for what they call "content." The Creative Commons organization, for example, is richly financed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Mozilla, Sun, the Hewlett Foundation, and others of the type."

"Copyright is no more a ... monopoly any more than you have a monopoly on the sale of a watermelon you might grow in your garden, or the monopoly a seamstress exercises over her work."

"The opponents of copyright disingenuously maintain that it locks up ideas, comment and debate. Title 17 of the United States Code resoundingly says otherwise, that "in no case does copyright protection... extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described."

More Burkean painted history:

"In previous eras, advances in the ease of replication were met by the consistent strengthening of copyright... This did not discourage the production of works, which advanced by orders of magnitude. In Thomas Macaulay's England of 1825, 600 books were published.... 206,000 books [were] published in England in 2005. "One might attempt to argue the counterfactual, that even more books would have been published without copyright, but one would first have to establish that the incentive of being paid for one's work is a disincentive to producing it."

Recall that earlier line: "or in the industries that make this work available to others".

Hmmm. Other shapes crowd into the frame now, alongside the hustling creatives of Mark's Symbol City -- oddly sterile grasping shapes -- corporate shapes. Could they have sponsored this clown?

Here's the final clarion blast:

"What have you done to protect your life's blood and to guarantee the continued independence of your voice? As distressed as you may be now or not long from now, should copyright go the way of all flesh, some of you may soon be unable even to recognize your own profession, if indeed it continues to exist.

-----------------

This post was a Paine/Smith co-production. Neither author is responsible for anything in it.

The arm-waving Princeton pedagogue(*) shown above, clearly full of passionate intensity and bottomless self-regard, is Melissa Harris-Lacewell, pilloried here before for her pretentious double-barreled name, her carefully-paraded Ivy League credentials, and her drooling prose.

I'm sorry to say that we weren't able to shame her into cutting her throat, on that previous occasion, so she's baaack, in the congenial pages of The Nation, searching her deep, sensitive, conscientious -- and highly responsible -- soul about those infamous torture photos that Mr Hope And Change now wants to keep from us:

Photographs of horror are powerful. That power should make us sober and careful in deciding how to use the images.

Power should make "us" sober, Melissa? Who is this "us"? Who gets to decide? And what is this power that "we" have?

You must know, Melissa, ensconced though you are behind the almost-ancient-looking honey-colored brickwork of Old Nassau, that the great unwashed public out there would love to see these pictures. So if you were in the driver's seat -- as you are not, Great Achiever though you are -- what would your justification be for denying the public what it wants?

Our sons and daughters are still overseas. We have not fulfilled the promise to bring them home. Until we do so we have to protect them as best we can from our places of relative privilege here in the United States. I strongly believe that no good is served if even one of our soldiers is abused in retribution for our failings or as a result of our moral self-righteousness.

They also serve who only stand and pontificate.

---------------------

(*) Greek for "boy-herder", as I love to point out.

The antidemocratic, anti-Constitutional, forces that tried torturing captives into confessing Sadaam ordered them to carry out the September 11 attacks (see Senate Armed Services Committee Report) are now trying to torture the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States into confessing she shares their guilt. This is consistent with the purposes of torture; coercion and blackmail.

Link

That's cheap sophistry. Disingenuous from the start. What the Republicans are doing, now, is consistent with vengeful, minatory stool pigeon behavior. They are making it clear that they'll drag her down with them if there's so much as a hint of a real investigation. What they did, previously, was make sure she was too dirty to raise objections. The latter seems like excessive precaution to me, given her mindless enthusiasm, but it's consistent with their criminal mentality.

Moreover, Pelosi's position is nothing like that of a torture victim's. She can bring the wingnuts up short whenever she feels like it. The very worst that will happen to her is she'll lose office and become a hideously wealthy lobbyist. She is certainly not going to be tied hand and foot, smeared with feces, beaten and left to lie on a chilled floor until she goes mad. It's not in the cards. Not remotely. She's not going to be put in full body restraints and force fed. Nor does she face water boarding. She's not going to be tortured. It's grandiose hysterics to even make the comparison. She could put a stop to their media antics, herself, at any time by demanding a full, independent investigation.

Even in the most generous interpretation of her actions, Pelosi is the worst kind of politician. She lacked the street smarts to cope with experts in plausible deniability. She leapt into the role of useful idiot. She lacked the sense of self-preservation, never mind integrity, to sound an alarm once it was clear she'd been set up as a patsy. She was stupidly eager to collude with vicious thugs, and now she's paying the smallest possible price for it. She's an accessory to crimes against humanity, she walked into the role with her eyes wide open, and she shows no signs of remorse. Worse, I'll bet she gets reelected easily. She's perfectly representative of her defenders.

Photo credit to Agitprop

When I was a pre-pubescent schoolboy, I thought it would be so cool to be Mr. Spock. He stalked gracefully through the neurotic meltdowns of life on the Enterprise and gave people crippling nerve spasms in their necks. This was important to me. I attended a school where the headmaster wore a codpiece, a strap-on on his forehead and nothing else. The faculty encouraged studious behavior through forced cannibalism. Every semester around midterms, the headmaster would scream "cull the herd, cull the herd!" over the PA system. Then he'd run through the halls, whinnying, goosing people with the strap-on, as we students cast nervous glances at the caldrons tended by our home room teachers and lined up to sharpen our #2 pencils. It would have been nice to get through this with Spock's splendid indifference. It would have been even better to give the headmaster a crippling nerve spasm. This might have spared my earliest friends the ghastly fate that attends poor test performance and spared the contingently meritorious the sad task of eating them. I had to settle for disgrace and expulsion.

When time permits, I worry about the people who did make it through, I really do. As far as I know, the majority of them became "cultural creatives". That is, they became marketers, marketing consultants, people who sell patented marketing techniques to consultants and people who leverage marketing into consultancies. The trauma of their schooling has scarred them so badly that they force themselves to forget it. Regrettably, they also recreate the same dynamic in their workplaces. For comfort, they seek refuge in a dream, as I did, of salvation through Spockhood. Hence their enthusiasm for Obama.

Can they be helped? In a word, no. Corporate infantilization has destroyed all hope for change. Owen has argued in favor of rustication as a means of unlearning the corporate "virtues", but there are no salubrious rural areas left. They've been flooded by yuppie NeoAgrarians in search of public servant farmers. The landscapes are dotted with their fair trade yurts and enormous banks of recycling porta-potties block the few remaining migratory paths of the dwindling wildlife. It's time for them to stop sharpening their #2 pencils and come to terms with their fate. The caldrons are ready and their wingnut classmates are hungry.

Where to begin? David Souter announced his resignation from the Supreme Court. Sounds good to have a republican appointee retiring during a democratic administration, but all is not what it seems.

"I will seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role. I will seek somebody who shares my respect for constitutional values on which this nation was founded, and who brings a thoughtful understanding of how to apply them in our time.

As I make this decision, I intend to consult with members of both parties across the political spectrum."

Well, f_ _ k me. I'm sorry to have dropped the old F bomb twice in one day, but I have had enough. When we speak out against the democratic party we are always told to remember the power of judicial appointments. It is terribly important for a democratic president to be able to put his stamp on the judiciary.

OK, if that is the only great thing about a democratic president, why should I be happy that he is planning to consult republicans about his choice? Obama has a 68% approval rating and the republican party has a paltry 21% approval rating. If he can't fight for a liberal on the court what the hell can he fight for?

Limits on the judicial role? What does that mean? It sounds very right wing to me, but then again so does Obama.

Freedom Rider

One of the names I keep coming across is Cass Sunstein, the celebrity professor and tireless promoter of "libertarian paternalism". We'd be better off if Souter stayed.

More at sinkers.org.

"Hundreds of union workers packed a lunchroom at the Hart Schaffner & Marx manufacturing plant here May 11 and voted unanimously to stage a sit-in at their factory if a new owner tries to shut it down. The company, also known as Hartmarx Corp., employs 600 people here and is one of the last and largest remaining suit makers in the U.S."

"Workers at Hartmarx are borrowing a page from the playbook of workers at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory. In that situation, Bank of America cut off credit to the company, leading to its closure last December. The workers and their union fought back, staging a six-day occupation at the plant, which gained national and international attention including support from the Obama administration. The workers eventually won a settlement with the bank, securing sick leave and vacation pay they were owed, and health benefits. Today, new owners have reopened the plant and all 260 former Republic workers are in the process of being re-hired, represented by their union."

http://pww.org/article/articleview/15603/

SMBIVA's own super Al passed along a link to an essay by Thomas Pynchon -- a close impersonal idol of mine, or was, 'till I caught that often incurable thought virus, the Trier flu, in the summer of 1974.

Tommy's piece introduces a new edition of 1984. Here's Tommy:

"... one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse [is] the identification and analysis of doublethink."

"... doublethink is a form of mental discipline whose goal, desirable and necessary to all party members, is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time. This is nothing new, of course. We all do it. In social psychology it has long been known as “cognitive dissonance.” Others like to call it “compartmentalization.” ... the idea seems to have presented Orwell with his own dilemma, a kind of meta-doublethink — repelling him with its limitless potential for harm, while at the same time fascinating him with its promise of a way to transcend opposites..."

"We believe and doubt at the same time — it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever....

[Orwell] in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own—the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR, even the British Labour party—like first drafts of a terrible future.

What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?"

"The question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?

The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, “The Principles of Newspeak” is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past — as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence.

Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored."

In a 1946 article in The Managerial Revolution, an analysis of the world crisis by the American ex-Trotskyist James Burnham, Orwell wrote, “The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.”

In its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps “The Principles of Newspeak” serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending—sending us back out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted."

But didn't "standard English" get memory-holed? What if it's precisely Doublethink that saves the proles from Newspeak -- or better, forces Newspeak to split against itself?

Heeere's ... Hegel!

Profounder insight into the antinomial, or more truly, into the dialectical nature of reason, demonstrates any notion whatever to be a unity of opposed moments

And with that insight, 1984 collapses in on itself -- or for short, becomes 1989.

In this time of supremely self-made meritorious leaderhood in the White House, I'm reminded -- often -- that it wasn't always worse for our president to be born on third base like boy emperor Bush. One need simply recall the gentlemanly child rentier from Hyde Park, shown above, with a Mom who looks to be as formidable a battleaxe as Georgie's own.

My sense of FDR the "reformer" starts and ends with his risk-taking -- his willingness to advocate a heterodox move -- and his shameless moving-on after a blooper.

In times of severe novelty and crisis, like now, a restless, easily bored, annoyingly overconfident risk-taking spirit is just what the powers that be need at the helm, if they want to keep the smurfs on board -- even if, as with FDR, his fearlessness is the result of a lifetime of consequence-free frolicking.

I've been reading a soft book on the tweener years by some bold ex-broker, and it nicely illuminates Roosevelt the political economist manqué.

The man could be positively spoony on matters economic -- a completely wild and wooly overconfident undereducated amateur who was very often as dead wrong as he was dead certain.

Example:

One of his administration's great early achievements, deposit insurance -- he personally fought it to the last House vote. Yes, reader, he was wrong on deposit insurance! Deposit insurance! And in general, he could be, at best, "lightly conflicted" on the depths of deficit spending

One sees the zigzags as his head plays off his hidebound and blatantly silly schoolmarmish analogies to household finance, against his tireless driving need to "do more till we fully recover".

Besides his shaky grip on massive deficit budgeteering -- the key to the recovery -- he was also way wrong on -- well, the list is endless. But here's what's important: his apparent working rule was, "keep punching".

And he sure did that. He followed his instincts till they blew up in his face and he took chances like he was "on the booze", as Keynes remarked. And in a pinch, where his personal idiosyncratic notions failed to guide him, he'd follow someone else's sexy-sounding hunch.

And if that flopped too, if he suffered a knockdown, he jumped to his feet and threw the opposite punch. Punch punch punch! Keep punching! In rapid crisscrossing combinations.

Take gold pricing and the hallowed gold standard: FDR was no Cleveland democrat. He was a de facto "debaser and repudiator" by deepest inclination. And he had no sense of the sacred cow when it came to the price of gold or its alleged "spinal necessity" at the center of any "sound" monetary system.

Nope. One of his first acts in office amounted to taking us off the "procrustean gold standard". In a move worthy of Nixon at his best, Roosevelt "suspended" gold exports. And in a followup move well beyond Nixon's best, a month later before the much anticipated "world economic conference", he allowed the old free-silverist remnants in the House to slip in an amendment authorizing the president to devalue the dollar against gold by up to 50%, and issue a slew of "unbacked dollars."

Man, did this bit of policy send central bankers worldwide into a frenzy, scrambling for advantage while solemnly proclaiming the need for "currency stabilization".

Franklin went on to torpedo the conference itself that summer, with pre-emptive strikes that scotched any chance at a return to gold. Such bankster-type sober moves he waved off, like some louche Moses, as "a specious fallacy".

Brilliant, brilliant moves -- moves he could no more defend "theoretically" than he could have written the Phenomenology Of Spirit.

Actually, that's not quite right. FDR did have a Merlin. Consider my favorite move against the "good as gold dollar".

After he sank the banksters' worl confab, during the next few months King Frank spent the better part of each morning personally buying gold on Uncle's behalf.

Why? For the same reason he did everything else that first year -- so he could raise the price of cotton, timber, coal, steel and corn.

Enter here his guru. Ever the gregarious frat-boy, Frank always had a confederate in these escapades, and in this case it was an agricultural economist from a what Franklin surely considered a second-tier university -- namely, Cornell. The chap's name was George Warren -- bless him.

After an exhaustive study of 213 years of commodity price moves, George claimed to have unearthed the secret origins of the trajectory of commodity prices in nothing less than the rate of increase in the supply of -- gold.

Now as the great Pauli might say, this theory isn't even important enough to be usefully wrong. But homely as it was, this notion and his confidence in himself ultimately led to yet another official indignity aimed at the sacred cow.

Backstory: as everyone recalls, commodity prices had taken a jagged course down and down since 1930, and by '33 were in the deepest smelliest of dumpsters -- all of 'em, across the board, and of course farm mortgages and other such productive borrowings hadn't adjusted their principal values or payments commensurately, so producers were getting pretty badly squeezed.

Now enter the Warren theory of absolute commodity prices and -- you end up with Uncle's prez buying up the magic shiny glowing shit with freshly produced greenbacks.

Was this wrong headed? Well no, it was harmless enough. But did it work? Why yes it did, in one way. It raised the price of gold, causing international currency markets to continue to roil like cheap foil, and yes, it made the respectable financial community in this country and beyond furious -- in my book that oughta count as a home run or two right there -- but no, it prolly had next to zero effect on long-run farm relief, let alone industrial relief.

But as a sample of FDR's contempt for well-heeled authority and for contemporary academic orthodoxy, this adventure was part of a process of bold experimentation in a time of failed theory.

So at the end of the day, yes yes yes.

His aim was correct: to reduce our small producer debt burden we needed -- and got -- producer price inflation.

Keynes would shortly (1936) come up with a theory that led to a straighter more powerful way to accomplish this than a gold price tinker, or for that matter FDR's bigger Gyro Gearloose effort, the NRA.

Roosevelt was a bit like Squire Western in Tom Jones: off in his methods, but he kept groping for his target and punching away, and of course, most importantly, he hardly ever had a problem changing his views swiftly, without the least sense of shame.

Why not keep a bold posture amidst a world of smoking failures?

"He was just a well-intended amateur" -- like this nation's founding planters. This rentier gentleman policy dabbler, with the political kinetics of an alley cat, had a bred-in-the-bone advantage over his merit class "peers":

You couldn't shame him -- even, or especially, when he had a mind to betray his class. And least of all by citing "a recent Harvard study".

Alas, merit rex Obama, on the other hand....

Got your attention, eh? Yours and every spammer in the universe. God help me.

On one of my lefty mailing lists, a participant -- let's call him Skanderbeg -- recently used this potent word. Here's the context; he's talking about the Taliban:

Sorry i dont want to live in a country where women will be hit for just going out of there house without a man.Sorry i dont want to live in a country where music is banned.Sorry i dont want to live in a country where im not allowed to shave.These are just samples of monstrous laws the taliban made.If any1 supports these Cunts than they need to really understand what there agenda is.

Now you may think, as I did, that berating the Taliban is not particularly original or particularly Left or particularly interesting. Read the post, said ho-hum, went on to other things.

An hour later, an email check opened up a firestorm of abuse from the comrades. Not about Skanderbeg's rather routine New York Times assessment of the Taliban, but about his use of the word "cunt".

Samples:

• Well if you want to be an opponent of sexism you should probably eliminate the sexist 'c-word' from your list of insults. Its insulting to see that word used on a marxism list.
• Why is a reference to a woman's genitals the most offensive thing you think you can say to a man? .... That word has no place on a Marxist list, has no place anywhere. It is a word derived from the subjugation and degradation of women. No matter how you think you are using it, your use of it alone provides explicit approval of that treatment of women.
• Tell you what you do comrade ask women what they think of being called that term. No more a simply anatomical term than calling you an asshole would be simply anatomical.
• I hope [Skanderbeg] has learned exactly how English speaking Americans hear that word, and therefore why it would never be used by politically conscious people.

You are still flesh of the flesh of the imperialist nation you happen to live in, using the same parcellizing view as your imperialist master and the same disregard of them for the oppressed nations of this world.

All this nonsense got me to thinking. What is it about Pwogs -- I was about to say "American pwogs", but then remembered Herr Evangelus -- that creates this Pharisaical hysteria about the words people use?

Partly it's the campus context. Much of what passes of the "left" dwells in the hothouse atmosphere of the credentialling sector, where discourse is the world. Control the words, and you can move the earth. Abolish "oppressive" language, and you've abolished oppression, as near as dammit.

Then there's several decades of identity politics. Every oppressed group claims its turf partly by defining permissible vocabulary. There are so many oppressed groups -- how do you stand out from the crowd? Beat somebody over the head if they use the wrong word. They'll remember that.

But alas, it seems likely that the deepest determinant of diction-policing is simply middle-class morality, brushed up and provided with a post-hoc political rationale. We are hearing the voice of Nanny here.

There are nice words and naughty words. The naughty words are usually Anglo-Saxon (or, in the case of "cunt", Anglo-Norman). They frequently have four letters, and they often refer to naughty bits of one's body -- the bits one hides in public.

The nice words come from Latin and Greek. They include items like "vagina", "vulva", "clitoris", "penis", and so on. (Nanny doesn't realize -- not having had a classical education -- that some of these were just as naughty in Latin or Greek as "cunt" is in English. But Nanny is a great believer, as the man said, in the "decent obscurity of a learned language.")

A few years back, PC diction-policing was a great gift to right-wing humorists. We kinda handed it to them on a platter: here, we said -- this is just how weedy, and nattering, and priggish, and fatuous, we are. If you say "cunt" in our presence, we'll either froth at the mouth, or faint.

I thought we'd learned from the experience. Alas -- some of us, it appears, will never learn.

These poor folks must have had the Nannies From Hell.

Here's the Frisco Fed:

"U.S. household leverage, as measured by the ratio of debt to personal disposable income, increased modestly from 55% in 1960 to 65% by the mid-1980s. Then, over the next two decades, leverage proceeded to more than double, reaching an all-time high of 133% in 2007."

"In the long-run [household expenditures] cannot grow faster than income because there is an upper limit to how much debt households can service, based on their incomes."

The payment has two terms: principal and interest. You can keep raisin' the principal if you keep lowering the interest. Voila! Much much more carrying capacity emerges, till, well, you know.

So now given all those households' likely income prospects, what lies ahead for 'em looks like one huge shitload of "deleveraging", as the business community terms it.

How do they -- we -- get back to a workable ratio of household income to debt service? There's a fork here -- a choice. Either the poor bastards spend less or they default more.

Big benchmark of deleveraging:

"From 1929 to 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, nominal debt held by U.S. households declined by one-third."

But we're lookin' at a few years of continued tight-belting ahead of us -- well, some of us -- that is, unless more of us just pull the hillbilly barefoot settlin'-up method and walk away from our underwater burnt-grass house lots, and learn -- like me -- to live beneath the plastic money floor created by our chthonic credit gods.

Frisco Fed's sum-up:

"Going forward, it seems probable that many U.S. households will reduce their debt. If accomplished through increased saving, the deleveraging process could result in a substantial and prolonged slowdown in consumer spending relative to pre-recession growth rates."

"Alternatively, if accomplished through some form of default on existing debt, such as real estate short sales, foreclosures, or bankruptcy... deleveraging could involve significant costs for consumers, including tax liabilities on forgiven debt, legal fees, and lower credit scores."

Horse feathers! I say -- and they admit as much, once they catch their breath:

"Moreover, this form of deleveraging would simply shift the problem onto banks that hold these loans as assets on their balance sheets."

Ahh, that felt good. But we must all come together in the end, so here's the Frisco kids' parting words:

"Either way, the process of household deleveraging will not be painless."

It's remarkable, isn't it, how Obie has managed to abolish due process of law -- and nobody who has noticed has said anything about it.

Here's the New York Times:

Obama Would Move Some Detainees to U.S.

In a speech at the National Archives here, Mr. Obama gave a full-throated defense of his antiterrorism policies and his commitment to closing the Guantánamo prison....

“We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security,” Mr. Obama declared.

Obie has, in other words, ratified the Bush doctrine that the Prez can issue lettres de cachet for anybody he deems a threat to national security.

But Obie has also improved on Bush. Bush at least retained the fig leaf: you couldn't do this kind of thing on American soil. You had to preserve the decencies by doing it offshore.

Obie, by contrast, has eliminated the due-process clause without any quibbles; without even a stroke of the pen. We're going to lock people up indefinitely, without trial, whenever we want to. Get used to it.

And the good gray Times, and all my neighbors who got drawn into the maelstrom by falling in love with Obie -- they're focused on instrumental issues. Is supermax good enough? Is it fair to the good people of Canon City, Colorado?

These lefty mailing lists are a mixed bag. The same list that embroiled itself recently in a purplefaced cunno-machia brought me yesterday this nice bit of news:

'1 in 4 Israelis would consider leaving country if Iran gets nukes'
By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz Correspondent

Some 23 percent of Israelis would consider leaving the country if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, according to a poll conducted on behalf of the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Here's to Iran obtaining FOUR nukes!

It's well known that Marxists are overoptimistic, and mostly no good at arithmetic -- even the Old Man labored over his long division. These things combine multiplicatively, not additively.

So scaring away three-quarters of the Israeli population would require about 5.3 Iranian nukes ((1 - 0.23)^5.3 ≈ 0.25). Getting the population scared down to 10% of its present size would require almost 9 Iranian nukes -- a hair over 8.8.

Still, we're on the right track. Contributions to the Iranian nuclear program can be sent directly to me. I'll see that they get into the right hands.

Robert Ransdell writes:

Wow, you mean somewhere in the world politicians still have a sense of shame? Considering what it's like here that's amazing!

If he were a U.S. politician he would deny having done anything wrong till the bitter end, no matter how damning the evidence was. Then if things got really bad he would appear before the media and announce with fake remorse that he merely made a "mistake".

The PR firm that handles him would advise him to check into an booze rehab facility even if he didn't have a drinking problem (The devil drink made me do it!).

Then he'd write a book for six figures and go on "The View" and the "Oprah Winfrey Show" show to promote it and sell the idea of that he had reformed himself.

He'd wind up marrying a beautiful woman (a former lobbyist) and go to work for a big investment bank on Wall Street. (Or he'd reenter politics and they'd put him on an anti-corruption task force.)

Jumping off a cliff is a little melodramatic of course, but who wants to go out with a whimper? Still, if Nancy Pelosi would prefer some gentler quietus, like an overdose of barbiturates, that's fine with me.

Cap-and-trade is a nice model for price mechanisms driven by social policy.

Unlike a tax, which slaps on a price increase, a cap and trade arrives at the price increase -- but that's ahhh theory -- then there's the details.

Here's Matt Yglesias, snub-gun journalist, on carbon emission markets:

"Capping the amount of allowable carbon dioxide emissions creates a new source of wealth in the economy — permission to emit carbon dioxide.

This, in turn, raises a question about how to allocate that resource. One suggestion, popular with industry and its tame dogs in congress, is to allocate it to industry. Give the permits away, and let companies either use them themselves or sell them to others.

Another suggestion, more popular with environmentalists and economists, is to auction the permits and then use the funds thereby raised to accomplish something useful....

They have the same macroeconomic impact, and presumably the same ecological impact. But the cap-and-rebate proposal results in gains for the bottom 40 percent of households, a tiny loss for the median quintile, and small losses for the top 40 percent.

The cap-and-giveaway proposal results in large losses for the bottom 80 percent of the population and a large gain for the top 20 percent.

Pinkos better get up to speed on this region of applied public economics, and start calling the balls and strikes accurately. Just unleashing the dogmas of class war to bark, bay, and howl benightedly at the rising of the congressional harvest moon is no good. Much more comes from understanding this shit from the inside out than screaming for the ultimo option that isn't an option.

Yes, in theory there is a Pigou tax that can do anything cap and trade can do -- like the carbon tax advocated by Father Smiff's pal Charles Komanoff.

And yes, single payer is a final solution devoutly to be sought.

But but but -- and the irony here gives me a tingle -- all you decentralizin' Eric Blair types get a wedgy over -- THE STATE.

To Josephine Average Wage Schmuckette, nothing, nothing more accurately operates as the lightning bolt of the state than a tax slap or a mandate. On this green stuff, and health stuff both, a few shrewd market mechanism designs (as in cap and trade on carbon emissions, and a fightin' pub op in the health sector) is a path to decentralization and lower-archy.

Interested? If so, here's a nice Ivy League site for your reading pleasure.

Or maybe it should be "Larval Mothra Attacks" -- that's him over on the right, I believe.

Comrade Owen has recently been taking, if I understand him, a devil's advocate position: first about public-option health care (as opposed to single-payer), and most recently about cap-and-trade for CO₂ emissions.

Owen allows as how these approaches are not be as desirable as single-payer and (maybe) a carbon tax respectively, but maybe there's something to be said for 'em. Here he is on the subject of single-payer vs. public-option:

One big slice, straight through the neck -- Conyers' uncle payer plan (HR 676); or the slow bleed to death -- Stark's free-to-choose Medicare bill?

.... Is there a serious difference here? I doubt there is, in the long run -- given a choice, a la Stark, the citizenry will gradually opt for uncle's medicare system, obviously.

So why, besides the art of the impossibly superior, prefer Conyers' plan?

Yes, in theory there is a Pigou tax that can do anything cap and trade can do -- like the carbon tax advocated by Father Smiff's pal Charles Komanoff.

And yes, single payer is a final solution devoutly to be sought.

But [o]n this green stuff, and health stuff both, a few shrewd market mechanism designs (as in cap and trade on carbon emissions, and a fightin' pub op in the health sector) is a path to decentralization and lower-archy.

Owen knows a good deal more than I do about this sort of thing, and even if I thought he was wrong, I'd be hard-pressed to argue the point. But the problem doesn't arise: as a technical matter I don't doubt that he is right. A "fighting" public-option -- and a "shrewd" cap and trade program -- would no doubt be better than what we have now, at the very least, and might lead to systemic change further on (though the certainty of that seems less clear).

The qualifications -- "fighting" and "shrewd" -- are quite important, however.

It's pretty clear that single-payer isn't on the table; and if a carbon tax hasn't been ruled out, it's only because nobody who matters has ever considered it. And why? Because -- of course -- corporate America doesn't want either of these things, and corporate America -- unlike the enviro wonkery and the academic wonkery -- deploys the big battalions.

But what reason is there to believe, then, that they would stand for a "fighting" public option, or a "shrewd" cap and trade, either? What reason is there to think that we won't get Hillary Rediviva, with no-fight Romneycare sauce, by way of health care reform; and by way of emissions reduction, yet another flood of new kinds of securities to trade -- with shrewdness to be seen only in the parasites and cormorants who will make their living swapping these grubby bits of paper, made into valuable property by Uncle's fiat?

So I wonder why -- apart from professional pride -- Owen is spending his time fighting this corner.

He writes:

Pinkos better get up to speed on this region of applied public economics, and start calling the balls and strikes accurately. Just unleashing the dogmas of class war to bark, bay, and howl benightedly at the rising of the congressional harvest moon is no good.

But folks like us have very little influence on events. This fact has some implications. Since we don't have to be "responsible" -- responsible, that is for the misery that the responsables in Washington are certainly going to cause -- we also don't have to be realistic. In fact, it would be a ridiculous affectation for us to be realistic. Who, after all, do we think we are? Congressional aides? What on earth is the downside for us to be maximalists, incorrigibles, millennarians? Is anything we do going to forfeit the good in favor of the unattainable best?

Still, I share Owen's pain, or some of it, anyway. Too much Left scenography introduces a tired old cast of pasteboard personifications onto the stage -- the Bourgeoisie, the Working Class, the Sellout Politicians and their pets, the Running Dogs. If Owen's goal is to sketch in some more detail and bring a breath of life to this stale discourse, then one can only applaud.

I'd like Dean Baker more if he had as much paranoia in him as thi picture below seems to promise:

... But alas, he's all too grounded. He does have his moments, though. Take this recent offering reproduced at Counterpunch: "Waterboard the Fed!" he cries, and I say 'damn straight'!

What in hell have them white-cuffed clowns gone and done with our precious 2 trillion dollars they lent out to the banksters anyway? As Dean notes:

"there is no public paper trail for the Fed’s [bailout] loans, even though it has more than three times as much money outstanding as does the Treasury through TARP -- it is not possible to find out how much money Goldman Sachs borrowed, at what interest rate, and which assets it posted as collateral. The Fed has explicitly refused to make information about specific borrowers public. In fact, the inspector general who has the responsibility for overseeing the Fed told Congress that she does not have this information. Apparently the Fed doesn’t even trust its inspector general with information on its lending practices....

It is difficult to understand the rationale for this secrecy.... After all, this money... belongs to us."

"The Fed has more direct control over the direction of the economy than the President and Congress, yet it carries through its actions... outside of the public’s view....

In a democracy, it is difficult to justify a situation in which the most important economic policymaking body is, by design, more answerable to the banking industry than [to] democratically elected officials."

Enter, stage left, the pwoposed pwogwessive wesponse: The Fedewal Weserve Twanspawency Act, which requires the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit the Fed’s books and report to Congress.

Yes, the GAO -- that posse of Elmer Fudds with green eyeshades. Just try to imagine what heroic scenes must ensue as these shock troops of accountability fan out among the hushed offices of the Fed, kicking in paneled doors and demanding, "The secwet books! Pwoduce 'em, you sowwy ass pwicks!"

... to this? --

So says the Marlboro Man manque below, Pecos Paul Romer:

Romer is among other distinctions the father of a particularly kinky model of economic "grohfffff"(*) -- based on Father Smiff's bete noire, "intellectual property" -- that set off a few gongs about 15 years ago.

Now, it seems he wants to play Solon to a Hanseatic League of black African Hong Kongs -- no, really, he does. Honest.

"The idea is to create city-states along the coast of Africa that can become economic hubs for the region and at the same time be insulated from the continent's notorious corruption and political chaos. In a sense, it's what the British did with Hong Kong in the 19th century when China was relatively unstable....

"I am going to put my whole career on the line with this new idea."

If ever the trans-nat limited-liability crowd had a Don Quixote of Filibuster Incorporated, this guy has got to be him.

"Romer envisions a Nordic country, perhaps, emerging as a champion for his concept. The European host could accelerate economic growth by taking charge of police forces, jails, and courts. Local government would take care of the rest....

Romer said he would not trust the United States to serve as a steward in Africa, and he even doesn't think even the European Union is up for the task.... [He] prefers to focus on the Nordic countries and their history of conflict mediation and peacekeeping operations, working closely with the U.N."

-----------------

(*) Sample -- this is the setup:

"A traditional explanation for the persistent poverty of many less developed countries is that they lack objects such as natural resources or capital goods. But Taiwan stared with little of either and still grew rapidly. Something else must be involved.

Increasingly, emphasis is shifting to the notion that it is ideas, not objects, that poor countries lack. The knowledge needed to provide citizens of the poorest countries with a vastly improved standard of living already exists in the advanced countries. If a poor nation invests in education and does not destroy the incentives for its citizens to acquire ideas from the rest of the world, it can rapidly take advantage of the publicly available part of the worldwide stock of knowledge."

"If, in addition, it offers incentives for privately held ideas to be put to use within its borders—for example, by protecting foreign patents, copyrights, and licenses, by permitting direct investment by foreign firms, by protecting property rights, and by avoiding heavy regulation and high marginal tax rates—its citizens can soon work in state-of-the-art productive activities."

Nice suggestive piece from the immortal Ralph:

Once upon a time early in the 19th century, corporations came into existence by state legislatures approving charters, which were granted for a limited period of time and for limited purposes. These corporations - producing textiles and other products in New England - raised capital in part because their investors had limited liability. That meant they could not lose any more than their investment if things went wrong.

Since corporations were artificial legal entities and not human, these lawmakers feared that without some strong leashes, they could be creating Frankensteins.

Over the following two hundred years, these ever larger corporations and their attorneys have been driving relentlessly, dynamically to erect systems of privileges and immunities....

Their first big move was to take the chartering authority from the state legislature and place it inside an executive agency where chartering became automatic, shorn of the conditions the lawmakers once imposed.

Once chartering became automatic, perpetual and open-ended, corporate lawyers moved to have the courts - not the legislatures - turn corporations into "persons" for purposes of constitutional rights.

Their big breakthrough came with the Santa Clara case in 1886 when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed its summary headnotes to declare that the railroad in the case was a "person" for purposes of the 14th amendment.

It's always good to be reminded how contingent and contrived are the institutions we take for granted as necessary and ineluctable.

You'd think somebody would long since have written a good book on Ralph's particular topic here -- the creation of the corporation-as-subject. I'm too lazy to research it right now. But does some kind reader have the needful -- and therefore, surely extant -- citation?

I may have mentioned before that I regularly get begging emails from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). I got one a couple months ago signed by Al Gore. More recently I've had a few signed by James Carville. Why anybody would think that people would want to send money to James Carville or anything associated with him is hard to fathom, but presumably the DCCC know their target market.

Today's mail jumped the shark, though:

From: Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Subject: Because of You
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 10:44:50 -0400
X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.71-blue_mailer]

Dear Michael,

You are among a special group of committed Democrats whose sacrifice and dedication made our victories last November possible. For all you've done to support the Democratic Party and to move America in a New Direction you have my deepest gratitude.

I want to offer you and a guest a special invitation for a chance to join me at my table at our dinner with President Obama in Washington, DC on June 18th for the President's Dinner.

Contribute $5, $10, or more and be automatically entered for a chance to win a free trip to Washington, D.C. to join President Obama and me....

1. What's second prize -- two dinners with Nancy Pelosi?
2. If I don't contribute, will Nancy come to my house and waterboard me?

... Though not the inner circle, of course. That's reserved for nations which have actually used nuclear weapons for mass-destruction purposes. So far, it's a circle with one member.

North Korea has tested its second nuclear weapon -- a huge improvement on the first, apparently. Number Two seems to have had about a tenth of the power of the bomb that dear old Harry Truman dropped over the paper houses of Hiroshima. Number One, by contrast, barely registered on the seismographs.

International response has been quite indignant, for the most part, though the esteemed Islamic Republic of Iran dryly commented that it was an "internal matter." Israel didn't agree. Israel felt that the NoKo nuclear test was a threat to Israel's "region" -- which makes one wonder, not for the first time, just how big Israel thinks its "region" is.

Many of my lefty comrades have stated their views on this development. The usual pattern is to begin with an observation about how bad nuclear weapons are. From there, the argument develops along predictable lines:

Of course -- they say -- North Korea had the "right" to develop nukes. National sovereignty, and all that. And of course it's hypocritical for the US or any other nuclear power to give the North Koreans a hard time about it.

But -- and here's the money shot -- it was nevertheless "provocative" and "stupid" for the North Koreans to do this. Sometimes the argument is insultingly reinforced with a reference to Cuba: those cool Caribbean socialist stalwarts never felt that they had to soil their hands with anything as wicked as a nuclear weapon.

Now I personally believe that the only good reason to develop a nuclear weapon is to counter the threat that an opponent with a nuclear weapon could otherwise hold over your head. By this standard, it was bad for the US to develop the first nuclear weapons; bad for India to do the same in its "region"; bad for Israel -- and good for the USSR, and China, and Pakistan, and if Iran gets one or ten or twenty, good for Iran. And would have been good for Cuba -- if they had felt it necessary, or been able to accomplish it.

As for North Korea: they narrowly escaped getting nuked fifty-odd years ago -- the US military noticed, in the nick of time, that the prevailing winds blow from the north in that part of the world.

The same outfit that would have loved to nuke the NoKo's back in the 50's still maintains a considerable presence in South Korea -- and by all accounts, nuclear weapons are very much part of the picture. It would be amazing if they weren't, considering how many of them the US has manufactured between Harry the Incinerator's time and ours. So maybe the NoKo's have reason to feel that there's something to worry about.

The Cubans, too, had their worries back in the day. I'd be willing to bet that they would have loved to get a nuke or two or ten -- but I suspect the Soviets didn't let 'em. This is sheer speculation, of course.

But just think -- how wonderful would that have been? Those Miami emigres -- their heads would have exploded with near-nuclear force, and seismographs around the world would have picked up the tremors.