DJIA Holiday Savings: Now 44% Off!
In less than 2-years, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone from it’s all time high of 14,164 to today’s value of 7,990. In other words, it has lost 44% of it’s value.
At least social security savings aren’t in the market.
Global capitalism at work.
There Have Always Been Crises
Posted at 9:28 PMTwo relates links:
- Harold Bloom writes in the New York Times about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the notion of “self-reliance” during hard economic times. (Via Ads Without Products.)
- Steve Shaviro discusses Marx’s crisis theory in relation to Fredric Jameson’s ostensible “pessimism” about the necessity of a future crisis (written prior to 2008).
Both are worth checking out.
The New Socialism
Matthew Yglesias:
Over the past 30-35 years or so, the world as a whole has retreated from the high tide of state management of the economy that was reached around midcentury, and moved more in the direction of laissez faire. But I think it’s fair to say that though the trend has been perfectly general, the political leadership in this movement has tended to come from Washington and London, where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the loudest and clearest exponents of it and their successors on the center-left tended to confirm, rather than reverse, a new Anglophone consensus. And yet:
The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans. […] The Treasury’s openness to direct infusions of cash is a remarkable change in tone from a few weeks ago, when the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, discouraged such actions in testimony before Congress. “Putting capital in institutions is about failure,” Mr. Paulson declared on Sept. 23. “This is about success.”
This is what a lot of left-of-center economists said in the first place, but the ideological taboo against nationalization was very strong. Now, though, the forces of looming collapse in the banking sector are proving even stronger. Thus, it looks like it’ll be George W. Bush, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke who bring a very strong dose of socialism to the United States of America. And yet Andy McCarthy’s busy worrying if Barack Obama is a closet Maoist.
The End of Freedom
Lenin:
… This is what is important in Marx’s ‘ideology criticism’ - far from upholding a banal dichotomy between ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’, Marx collapsed the distance between the two. They are not identical, but nor are they autonomous. As he argued in the Grundrisse, against Proudhon and his followers, social equality is precisely not just a false claim made for markets. Rather, individuals are “stipulated for each other”, in the context of an exchange of equivalents, as free and equal agents. Market transactions do not express themselves as involuntary expropriation, even where that is in fact what is happening, but as voluntary engagements.
That explains the context in which the ideas of neoliberalism could even be comprehensible; the historic collapse of the postwar social democratic compromise provided the occasion for their aggressive relaunch; and the liberalisation of the stock exchange announced their hegemony. The true believers really do see the broad historical shift that is taking place…
AIG Goes On Vacation
The Consumerist:
Now that AIG has been nationalized, some folks are wondering just how their tax dollars are being spent. If you’re among them, we have some bad news for you from ABC. They are reporting that papers uncovered by congressional investigators show that “less than a week after the federal government committed $85 billion to bail out AIG, executives of the giant AIG insurance company headed for a week-long retreat at a luxury resort and spa, the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California.” Ouch.
ABC says that the documents show that the company, yes the company, paid more than $400,000 for a week long retreat at the resort. The bill included $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 in spa charges.
Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists
N. Pepperell on the ontological dimension of Marx’s critique of capital:
Saving capitalism from the capitalists - the language of gambling, of speculation, of irresponsible and reckless individuals - it’s all over the coverage. There are historical resonances here too - framings that were once used to push through the reforms of the welfare state. I’m also interested, though, in this specific distinction between “capitalism” and “capitalists” - this is a distinction that was, I think, quite important in Marx’s work: individuals as bearers of economic roles - individuals as beneficiaries and as more or less wilful and abhorrent exploiters of social circumstances - but capitalism itself having an ontological status that is in some meaningful sense externalised in relation to those individuals whose actions nevertheless perform the reproduction of capital. For Marx - and I’ll try to write more on this in the future - this externalisation opens up some important options for critique and transformation, while at the same time, and within current circumstances, operating as a form of domination of the collective consequences of social action over the actors. The passage above treats the externalised entity capitalism as distinct from its imprudent bearers - and this entity also becomes an ideal that must be preserved, at the expense of those bearers if needed. The capitalists can go - capitalism, no. The bearers are more contingent that the process they bear - the process is taken to carry, not simply hard force, but a distinctively normative power.
The Transfer of Wealth
According to Senator Byron Dorgan, the total amount of wealth being transferred amounts to $1.7 trillion or $12,200 per taxpayer, via Lenin. I also love this little tidbit from Section 8 of the Treasury Financial Bail-out Proposal:
“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
Check out Karyn Strickler’s and Robin Varghese’s comments on this.
Slavoj Žižek v. Bernard-Henry Lévy
The New York Public Library hosts a debate that sounds like it was narrated by Werner Herzog:
Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s “rock-star philosopher,” and Slavoj Žižek, the Slovanian “Elvis of cultural theory,” will scrutinize the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those of the future, as they argue for a new political and moral vision for our times and investigate the limits of tolerance.
Does the advent of capitalism cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of the neighbor? asks Zizek in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.
Are human rights Western or Universal? How is it that progressives themselves-those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism-have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes? asks Lévy in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against New Barbarism.
Audio available here. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
‘All of a Sudden’
Senator Bernie Sanders:
For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford — that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.
Watch the video interview here. (Via Daring Fireball.)
Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
William Greider in The Nation:
Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses—many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?
If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public—all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics—exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.
(Via A Tiny Revolution.)
The Free Market
Atrios over at Eschaton:
The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they’re lamenting the possibility of more regulation. I don’t think the sports/referee metaphor is perfect, but it’s probably good enough. People who prattle on about “the free market” are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the “rules” had to be to to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc… etc…, did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created.
The Sound of Raining Bullshit
Lenin chimes in with his usual perspicuous analysis of the situation:
… The news can’t talk sensibly about this, because they can’t talk about class. They implicitly favour the capitalist purview in their focus, but they cannot directly address the issues involved. That is why no one relying on the papers and the television for enlightenment is going to have a clue what is going on…. In fact, the best explanation you are likely to end up with is that some banks made some horribly bad bets on mortgages for poor people (and, therefore, what? - poor people shouldn’t have mortgages?). To talk realistically about this crisis is to talk about what has happened to wages and profits for thirty years, the contours of class struggle and the associated political projects (socialism, social democracy, neoliberalism, etc), as well as the basic mechanism of exploitation behind that. To talk realistically about the issues raised by this crisis is also to talk about class, and particularly the impact on working class people. You can’t understand why those who gain most from the system suffer least when it fails, while those who gain least suffer most unless you at least mention the fact that there is such a thing as highly concentrated class power in the society…
Change We Can Believe In
While John McCain is out and about touting how the “fundamentals” of the economy are strong (as to what he means by “fundamentals,” I’m sure he has a very thorough answer), because to say they aren’t means that you are insulting hard-working Americans (unlike, say, actively voting against workers’ rights), McCain’s economic council is busy pretending that they had nothing to do with bringing about one of the worst economic crises in U.S. history. Worth mentioning in particular is Phil “A Nation of Whiners” Gramm’s special role:
Gramm orchestrated the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 which “destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies.” He also pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, which made legal “the mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector.” The Nation writes that “those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community.”
So basically, if this chart of Obama’s and McCain’s respective tax proposals hadn’t already convinced you that it’s in your best interest to vote for Obama, then McCain’s surreal ineptitude regarding the economy, as well as his cadre of buffoons, should perhaps be some food for thought.