Long Sunday

Matt Taibbi on "The Great American Bubble Machine"

Oh, I'm a huge fan of this guy's investigative journalism, published today "on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression."  (Cue emphatically vague, prosaic protests from the PR wing of Goldman Sachs.)  Especially as at times he seems like the only one who is effectively doing this: translating our reality of economic-apartheid/corporate dictatorship/organized crime to a popular audience, and with proper pathos of indignation.  Taibbi may not have been possible without the likes of Chomsky, but he sure does a better job keeping us awake.  (Needless to say, part of this work is holding otherwise sympathetic but obviously worn-down, increasingly platitudinous critics-become-automatons to a higher standard, which Taibbi also does pretty well.) His conclusion under the fold:

WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN?

The following is Zizek's response to the events currently taking place in Iran.  Surprisingly, they seem rather banal and uncontroversial.  I am curious what people think of his view that "we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists."

The Discomfort of the Establishment

While many have come to see Paul Krugman as a sort of folk hero for the emerging anti-Geithner mass movement, I think he reflects a common view among many mainstream economists.  Experts like Jeffrey Sachs, Dean Baker, Simon Johnson and Joseph Stiglitz all believe the Geithner-Summers banking plan is a thinly desguised scheme to transfer mass public wealth over to the largest financial institutions, in order to keep them from collapse.  And they all believe the plan is not only immoral but that it has no chance for success.  In case one were to suspect that this is only a view held by some snobby, ivory tower academics, I found a shockingly plain statement of concern from a journalist who claimed to be speaking for "the establishment":

It Was 35 Years Ago Today...

On this day in 1973, the Senate began its televised hearings into the Watergate scandal.    

Coincidentally, I just ran across an excerpt from an interesting new book by Rick Perlstein: Nixonland - The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. This book seems to review familiar territory that still resonates today:  it is the story of how the Democractic party lost the support of white blue collar ("hard working") Americans because the Republicans successfully blamed them for the social and racial unrest of the 1960's.

Elitist and Out of touch?

OBAMA: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.

Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter)...

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

What will you do about the Chicago Shock Doctrine, Obama?

Welcome to the age of Milton Friedman's ghost, who looks on all suffering with equal opportunism, linking Argentina's junta, terror in Chile, Tiananmen, Boris Yeltsin's tanks, Margaret Thatcher's Falklands, Asia's financial crisis, Africa and Latin America's debt crisis, Canadian David Frum, and Donald Rumsfeld.  I'm only 40 pages in but can safely say that this book blows the lid completely off the modern zeitgeist. This despite its sociological style in which the author manages to state hir core thesis seventy-five times using different words by page 24!  Say what do we do with this work of actual parrhesia that does with detailed scholarship, historical investigation and synthesized compassion what No End in Sight and Sicko did with these things, and images? 

The Bush administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the "War on Terror" but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering U.S. economy. Best understood as a a "disaster capitalism complex," it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with [...] unending mandate.  In only a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters.  The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state–in effect, to privatize the government.

[...] in market terms, it cannot fail.

Get the man an editorial column, congressional seat, something...

I've voted for Ralph Nader several times,

working days

(What follows is by Chris Okane, a graduate student in social and political thought.  His blog is here.)

As the punditry weighs in on how Hilary Clinton's inevitability became evitable, Clinton has responded in a number of desperate ways.  The brash attacks have got the headlines- as they always do- but I want to focus on her new commercial running in Ohio, as it is far more illuminating for those of us interested in the politics that underlie neo-liberal posturing.

I believe Clinton's new ad was introduced following her speech in Youngstown, a steel town, which has been particularly devastated by the effects of globalization.  This setting reflects the Ad's purpose:  to appeal to the traditional democratic base of lower income workers i.e. the working class.  But the content of the ad backfires because Clinton's attempt to identify with working class is made palpably ludicrous, first by her patronizing empathy, then by the way she identifies with their lives:

On Being Partisan

But I am running for President because I believe that to actually make change happen - to make this time different than all the rest - we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, Independents, and Republicans together to get things done. That's how we'll win this election, and that's how we'll change this country when I am President of the United States...

Many will recognize this as part of the standard stump speech of Senator Barack Obama.  He has often been referred to as the "Cum Bi Ya" candidate or the "Can't we all just get along" politician.  Our own Jodi Dean has ridiculed him as advocating "Let us rejoice and be glad that we are one." I must admit that I myself have struggled with the issue of democrats appealing to bi-partisanship and a message of unity.  With the issues we face as a country so large, and stakes so high, can we afford to white wash the real economic and political divisions in the United States?

Do politics exist?

A not-so-favorable review of the Dylan movie, I'm Not There (previously discussed, and contra others).  Most provocative excerpt being this:

It was during a recreation of the London concert at which a betrayed folk fan screamed “Judas!” at Dylan that I realized the best analogy for I’m Not There is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Only Gibson’s film is equal in its commitment to surreal reverence and literalism. The truly unbearable aspect of the Passion was not its primeval anti-Semitism or pornographic bloodshed; it was its predictability. Despite being a story that so many know down to its barest details (in four separate versions), Gibson retold it with grinding exactitude. Even Gibson’s recourse to dead languages had no effect on the film’s sense of inevitability. The horror that dawned on me when I realized that I knew – and that everyone who had read the Gospel of Matthew (or Ginsberg’s “Howl”) knew – the Aramaic for “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (“Eli, eli, lamma sabacthani?”) was the same horror that gripped me when I realized I’m Not There couldn’t resist a recreation of the “Dylan-goes-electric” 1965 Newport folk festival, replete with the apocryphal story of Pete Seeger attempting to take an axe to the electric cords because he couldn’t hear Dylan explaining that he wasn’t going to work on Maggie’s farm anymore.

Meanwhile the real beef on Saval's part appears to be two-fold: