Tuesday, November 24, 2009

House 'Audit the Fed' bill persists, teeth intact.

From Politico:
The House Financial Services Committee has approved Rep. Ron Paul’s measure to drastically expand the government’s power to audit the Federal Reserve.

The measure, based on a Paul proposal that has attracted more than 300 co-sponsors, passed, 43-26, as an amendment to a financial reform bill. Florida Democrat and fellow Fed critic Alan Grayson co-sponsored the amendment with Paul and played a leading role drumming up support for it among committee members. The adoption of this amendment is an extraordinary victory for Paul, whose libertarian, anti-Fed leanings have often been dismissed by the political establishment.

[...]

The House Financial Services Committee will vote on approving the underlying bill after Thanksgiving recess.
This is precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about when I call for a tactical alliance of left and right in the interest of advancing populist measures.

True, I oppose the extreme laissez faire economic philosophy of Paul and the libertarian tendency. He favors a system with severe restrictions upon the regulation and oversight of markets. By contrast, I favor a social democratic model that protects ordinary people against the inescapable perils of market activity.

But so what? The fact is that left- and right-populism share the interest of instituting democratic checks against powerful, and currently insular and unaccountable, monetary policy-making agencies. As the poet said: in politics, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and it has always been this way. I don't have to want to play cribbage with someone in order to share some or many of his political interests.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Washington Times: Obama, "Sired by Kenyon father," lacks "blood impulse" for what America "is about."

The Washington Times has never been a serious newspaper. It was conceived as little more than a mouthpiece for the extreme right-wing ideology favored by its founder and owner, the singular Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The Korean jet-setting businessman/evangelical-cult cleric Moon helms the Unification Church -- you know: the Moonies.

Still, despite its track record, I somehow wasn't quite prepared for overt and deep-seated racism on display in a Times editorial contributed yesterday by editor-in-chief emeritus Wesley Pruden (brought to my attention through Media Matters). Old Man Pruden begins by ranting hysterically -- you might say that he waxes impenetrable -- about Obama's current diplomatic visit to Asia. But just wait until you get to the final paragraph (if you can make it that far without becoming nauseous):
So far it's a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue's gallery showing how other national leaders - the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them - have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).

Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he's strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with.

[...]

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to "hope" for "change." It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of "the 57 states" is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.  [Emphasis added.]
What's truly disgusting about this Old Coot is that not only is he a racist, but there's something distinctly old-timey about his racism. Pruden is a species of racist from whom we haven't heard all of that much in this country since the days when a succession of United States Presidents had weird facial hair and wives were considered property and black people had only recently attained legal status of human beings and were frequently tarred and feathered. And shit: what fate do you suppose befell white women who were "attracted to men [of color]" in the Jim Crow South?

It would appear that I have just described the world to which the Cretinous Bigot Pruden pines for his everlasting return.* More accurately, it's the wold in which Pruden lives.**

***ADDENDUM***
A couple of things. First, sample other people's outrage over Pruden's editorial (it's never good to be outraged alone!) at the blog The Atlantic Wire, on the Web site of the Atlantic Monthly.

Second, having conducted some light spade-work, it appears that the editor-in-chief emeritus of The Washington Times and Arkansas native has been a longtime activist for neo-Confederate causes. Frankly, I'm somewhat stumped as to what those causes could be. But in the meantime, behold the following picture of Pruden saluting the Confederate Flag:

UPDATE: It's him all right. Will the South rise again? Not on Pruden's watch. Under his stewardship, the South probably can't even get a date.

(Although multiple credible-seeming sources cite it as such, I am still not 100% certain of the picture's legitimacy. I will remove it if I'm convinced that it's phony. Mind you, I'm not even saying I have cause to call its legitimacy into question. I'm just being careful 'cause I try always to be fair and accurate, even when it comes to bigoted dickheads...)

_________________________
* That's right. I said Cretinous Bigot.

** Oh, and Hawaii is a state, dick. Once upon a time, people like you spewed the same hot air about...uh...California.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Obama's memorial address at Fort Hood (& a brief excursus on how cable news isn't news).

Since I don't have cable and wouldn't watch cable news even if I could, I'm not familiar with exactly what idiotic statements from the Washington DC political mercenaries led Time magazine's David von Drehle to decry the idiotic framing and commentary with which "television culture" obscured the immediacy and impact of Obama's Fort Hood address.

While I'm certain that von Drehle is telling the truth, maybe it's time someone suggested to him just not watching cable news. It isn't -- after all -- news, is it?


I'm not bragging, by the way, about the fact that I don't watch cable news. I'm just saying: Cable news is a perfectly valid form of entertainment, of distraction from the headaches of quotidian reality, and I just happen to prefer other forms of distraction. Like playing my antique zithers and fucking.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, Obama's address was a truly exceptional and praiseworthy bit of speechifying. And it appears that lots of others -- like Slate's John Dickerson -- agree with me:
[...]

These men and women came from all parts of the country. Some had long careers in the military. Some had signed up to serve in the shadow of 9/11. Some had known intense combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some cared for those did. Their lives speak to the strength, the dignity and the decency of those who serve, and that is how they will be remembered.

That same spirit is embodied in the community here at Fort Hood, and in the many wounded who are still recovering. In those terrible minutes during the attack, soldiers made makeshift tourniquets out of their clothes. They braved gunfire to reach the wounded, and ferried them to safety in the backs of cars and a pick-up truck.

One young soldier, Amber Bahr, was so intent on helping others that she did not realize for some time that she, herself, had been shot in the back. Two police officers - Mark Todd and Kim Munley - saved countless lives by risking their own. One medic - Francisco de la Serna - treated both Officer Munley and the gunman who shot her.

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice - in this world, and the next.

These are trying times for our country. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis. In Iraq, we are working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.

As we face these challenges, the stories of those at Fort Hood reaffirm the core values that we are fighting for, and the strength that we must draw upon. Theirs are tales of American men and women answering an extraordinary call - the call to serve their comrades, their communities, and their country. In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans.

We are a nation that endures because of the courage of those who defend it. We saw that valor in those who braved bullets here at Fort Hood, just as surely as we see it in those who signed up knowing that they would serve in harm's way.

We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes.

We are a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses. And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God.

We are a nation that is dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal. We live that truth within our military, and see it in the varied backgrounds of those we lay to rest today. We defend that truth at home and abroad, and we know that Americans will always be found on the side of liberty and equality. That is who we are as a people.

[...]

Saturday, November 7, 2009

SURMISE: The illusion of comfort as commodity.

The advent of the current global economic crisis has brought some things into sharper focus, don't you think? One example of this is that as regards the United States and probably also in much of Western Europe, it is difficult to dispute that
  • comfort is an illusion, that this illusion is a commodity, and that

  • any commodity is itself an illusion, the purchase of which confers comfort upon its purchaser.
People want to believe that they are comfortable. It's much easier to encourage people to believe that they're comfortable than it is to convince them that they're not.

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States, staunch opponent of labor strikes and noted exponent of laissez faire governance is famous for having said:
The chief business of the American people is business.
Now, the fact is that Coolidge has gotten a bit of a bum rap, because this remark is actually taken from a lengthier piece of speechifying that argued that the generating of wealth and profits is virtuous and useful only insofar as it is applied to the funding of measures that further the public good (like education), and that when wealth is not so applied, it bespeaks nothing more than the selfishness of those who accumulate it.

This caveat notwithstanding, the mythologies concerning the assumed virtuousness of hard work, productivity and profit have been ubiquitous in America since the aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin (as noted specifically by the German sociologist Max Weber, who was the first thinker to expound the Protestant Ethic).

Whatever the origin of this 'ethic', the functions it has served have been manifold. Among the most obvious ones are the legitimation of America's pervasive socioeconomic stratification -- think, everything from the oeuvre of Horatio Alger to the ascent of Social Darwinism. This function of legitimation applies, by the way, both to those at the top of the ladder -- for whom the myth of meritocracy (or a kind of biological determinism, beyond the purview of man) is a bulwark against pangs of guilt about the socioeconomic disparities -- and those at the bottom of the ladder -- for whom the myth of meritocracy encourages them to chalk up their lot in life to their own faults (or those of their families and loved ones) of laziness, stupidity, drunkenness, insufficient religiosity, or just plain old everyday lack of industriousness.

But, let us return to our consideration of the advent of the present global economic crisis, with its various peculiarities, such as the specter of the declining wealth, access to social and cultural capital and education and economic opportunity available to wide swathes of the nation's population, including large parts of the middle class. This is accompanied by the likelihood of a continued sharp decline in upward social mobility, a trend totally unheard of among Baby Boomers and the generation of their parents.

It seems to me that in the bleak geopolitical and global-economic era upon which we are likely embarking, the so-called 'Protestant Ethic' and the corresponding myth of meritocracy perform a function whose salience will supplant those associated with mere legitimation.

This new function is a much more basic one: rootedness within a seemingly fixed structure of social relations. American/Western-capitalist human self-perception will come increasingly to depend for its sustenance upon its ability to perceive itself as being somehow embedded in a framework that provides some semblance -- even if it's chimerical -- of predictability.

In other words, people will -- and have already begun to -- pay huge amounts of treasure (whether it's in the form of cash or in the form of the human soul) for the illusion of comfort. As Crib From This has surmised in the past, the ability to see the world as it is turns not upon your intelligence -- and certainly not in the vulgar/scientistic sense of this overused word/concept -- but upon your bravery.

Most of us -- particularly in the West -- aren't brave.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

These Times: Nobody ever believes anything anybody ever has to say about anything...

...and why should he (or she)?

As an illustration of the Samuel Beckett-esque times in which we live, take a look at this most recent post from the left-leaning economics blogger Yves Smith, in which she reveals that she -- in her capacity as one among a "small group of bloggers" -- was invited to participate in a pseudo-off-the-record discussion with "senior officials" of the Obama Treasury Department. Smith:
It wasn’t obvious what the objective of the meeting was (aside the obvious idea that if they were nice to us we might reciprocate. Unfortunately, some of us are not housebroken). I will give them credit for having the session be almost entirely a Q&A, not much in the way of presentation. One official made some remarks about the state of financial institutions; later another said a few things about regulatory reform. The funniest moment was when, right after the spiel on regulatory reform, Steve Waldman said, “I’ve read your bill and I think it’s terrible.” They did offer to go over it with him. It will be interesting to see if that happens.

Four of us [bloggers of various political orientations from the aforementioned "small group"] had a drink afterward and none of us felt that we learned anything (not that we expected to per se; if the ground rules are “not for attribution” in an official setting, we are certainly not going to be told anything new or juicy). But my feeling, and it seemed to be shared, was that we bloggers and the government officials kept talking past each other, in that one of us would ask a question, the reply would leave the questioner or someone in the audience unsatisfied, there might be a follow up question (either same person or someone interested), get another responsive-sounding but not really answer, and then another person would get the floor. The fact that the social convention of no individual hogging air time meant that no one could follow a particular line of inquiry very far.

My bottom line is that the people we met are very cognitively captured, assuming one can take their remarks at face value. Although they kept stressing all the things that had changed or they were planning to change, the polite pushback from pretty all [sic] the attendees was that what Treasury thought of as major progress was insufficient. It was instructive to observe that Tyler Cowen, who is on the other side of the ideological page from yours truly, had pretty much the same concerns as your humble blogger does.

[...]
Read the rest of this fascinating-if-frustrating post-meeting report at the blog Naked Capitalism.

LATE-BREAKING ADDENDUM:
It occurs to me that I nowhere explained what's "Samuel Beckett-esque" about our "times." Not sure that's really the correct characterization. Well, anyway, you have a lot of men (and some women) in suits talking back-and-forth, everyone politely waiting his turn, statements being made that take the form of answers and questions without always actually necessarily being answers and questions (or even maybe statements), and in the end it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or something. (As it were.)