Michael Lewis's sci fi fantasy

I’m a big fan of Michael Lewis. Coming home on the train from Amboise, I finally got to his article on Californin in Vanity Fair. And that's when I had my fan crash moment. Say it ain't so, Michael!

Business Insider dubbed the article a ‘love letter’ to Arnold Schwarzenegger – and unfortunately, this is true. Lewis’s Schwarzenegger bears an odd relation to the real Schwarzenegger, who, spectators of the first decade of the Bush era will recall, was the man who rode to power against Gray Davis by promising tax cuts for business and a tres Bushian solution to California’s debt problem, which I’ve commented on before:

“And now, of course, the bills for the fun filled political vacation come due. When Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, the first thing he did was Charge IT! – to a round of cheers from those scrimpin and savin’ burgermen, working all day, thinking of Jesus Christ all night. After all, why pay for the structures you need every day when – as Mr. Magician said in that beautiful Christmas Classic, It’s a Wonderful Reagan-y Kinda Life, – the magic of the marketplace makes lower taxes bring in more revenue! We owe it to ourselves! We can’t surrender to terrorists! We can’t return to the days of tax and spend! Class warfare! As the man says:


Quelli che son dentro la merda fin qui, oh yeah
Quelli che con una bella dormita passa tutto anche il cancro, oh yeah
Quelli che, quelli che non possono crederci anche adesso che la terra e’ rotonda, oh yeah, oh yeah
Quelli che hanno paura del aeroplano, oh yeah
Quelli che non hanno mai avuto un incidente mortale, oh yeah
Quelli che non ci sentiamo
Quelli che a un certo punto della vita ci vorrebbe una arma segreta, ostia, oh yeah”

Or, in plain English, Gray Davis was dumped by voters who couldn’t stand that oatmeal-soul suit, and in his place Schwarzenegger played the part of a muscle toned Father Christmas, as outlined in a NYT article from 2005:

“The governor's budget relies on continued borrowing, using some of the proceeds of a $15 billion bond issue that Mr. Schwarzenegger won voter approval for last year. Although the bond proceeds helped to get the state through a severe fiscal crisis, the borrowing will have long-term consequences, said Fred Silva, a budget expert at the Public Policy Institute of California and a former fiscal aide in the state Legislature.
"The amount of borrowed money is going to be a budget overhang for many years," Mr. Silva said.
In years past, he said, state policy makers tried to keep the cost of debt service below 4 percent of state revenues. "Now it's going to be twice that," Mr. Silva said. "That's real money."

Hmm, a 15 billion dollar bond issue? And to think... the topic never came up in Michael Lewis’ article about our Good Gubernorator fighting the special interests to bring financial sanity to California. the topic of taxes, the taxes to, well, pay for things like increases in the cost of running the state, the taxes that Schwarzenegger ran against – these, too, never came up. The fact that Schwarzenegger was running against the Governor who wanted to actually pay for the goodies with taxes never came up.

Instead, Lewis’s idea is that the people, the grubby vulgarians whose income, over the 2000-2010 period, went down, somehow became addicted to all the good things of life and became… well, irresponsible.Not the good serfs of yore! Because the brain has a reptilian core, apparently, and can’t handle opulence. He's actually serious:

"The road out of Vallejo passes directly through the office of Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. with a theory about American life. He thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. “Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.”

Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. “When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress,” says Whybrow. “In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”

The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. “What we’re doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don’t have,” says Whybrow. “We’ve created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded.”

So it goes. It used to be, in the roaring 2000s, that it is your money - and now it turns out that it is your debt, you little rat fuck with the reptilian brain? Oh, and that debt is so tasty!

The idea that the American people went on a terrible shopping spree that ruined the economy has now been so inscribed in the reptilian core of the elite brain that it has erased, well, 2001-2008. Remember remember - but it is so hard to remember! Still, as I dimly recall, we took care of the 2001 recession because householders could be just like big companies and unlock the liquidity in their houses through a variety of new and puppy friendly loans! Of course, remembering the giant sucking sound of a tax cut happy elite going for seconds by getting that little extra helping of interest and then happily slicing, dicing and giving themselves bonuses for securitized debt – why that requires such a big memory capacity that the poor reptilian core of the brain starts to pant and gives up. Instead, it wants to see the giant ex-Governor of California in his latest action epic, Mr. Fiscal Responsibility – you know, the one in which new memory is implanted into the old brain so that a certain history didn’t happen, and a certain governor didn’t solve a certain crisis by going for the 15 billion dollar bond issue.

So alas: although Lewis’s concentration on our pension problem is half right, it is a one-eyed correctness: the pension problem was in the end a tax problem. If you don’t want to tax businesses, which is where the money traditionally is, and the wealthy for your social services, and you hire people to staff things like schools and hospitals with low salaries but high future benefits, eventually, you are so fucked. By nice people in business suits, and by Hollywood stars. …
Incidentally, for those of us old enough to remember the California election, Schwarzenneger’s anti-tax and pro-charge it policy was endorsed by ... Warren Buffett.

ps - what the hell! Might as well stretch this post out. The public pension plans that Lewis is writing about are victims of the same investment strategies by which the upper 1 percent has been looting the bottom 99 for years. This is from that now forgetten decade, the 00s - in fact, I wrote this a tremendous six years ago. Wow, that is way too long to remember anything!

I have seen the future, and it is United
Anyone interested in what Bush’s reformed Social Security would look like should look at the NYT article about United Airline’s pension fund today. It is a fun article. Here's how the movie goes: Wall Street persuades a viable pension fund to redo its safe strategy of investing for a much more groovy strategy of growth growth growth in equities. Big money is made by everybody on the Street as the pension fund shrinks, disappears, goes into a black hole. Everybody is very sorry that the beneficiaries of the fund have nothing left, but everybody also points out – the beneficiaries are scum. Mere workers. Pilots, for god’s sakes. Imagine, some stewardess somewhere is bawling cause her measely 200 thou went to some really nice Manhattan bistros. As if she deserved it. The best and the brightest, in the new Hobbesian Randian world, feast upon such little lambs.

Bush’s plan has those advantages too. By targeting middle America’s vast wealth and accelerating the burgling of it, in a record amount of time the top 10 percent income percentile can capture even more of America’s wealth. This money will be used much more efficiently. For instance, many retiring congressmen will be able to find lobbying jobs that will launch them into the higher regions of financial security when the theft is completed. Meanwhile, in a blow against the French, Americans will work harder. They will have to, as their retirement will be approximately equal, in value, to the price you can get for confetti that’s been cleaned off of streets and sidewalks after the parade is over.

The first three grafs of the article map a strategy that is almost a perfect parallel of the Bush reforms:

“HAD anyone listened to Doug Wilsman, tens of thousands of United Airlines employees would not be facing big cuts in their pensions. And the federal agency that guarantees pensions might not be struggling with its biggest losses ever.

So who is Doug Wilsman? He is a retired pilot and a former fiduciary of United's pension plan for pilots, and in 1987 he discovered that the company had abandoned its older, tried-and-true approach of investing retirees' money in bonds timed to pay when the pensions came due. Instead, it had bought into the promises of Wall Street that it could put less money into the plan - and take out more later - if it just put most of the assets into the stock market.

Mr. Wilsman was skeptical of such promises, and soon after learning of the change in strategy, he filed a grievance with his union, the Air Line Pilots Association. "Hey, you guys are really building yourselves a trap," he recalled warning them at the time. "Someday, at the worst possible moment, when the bottom falls out of the stock market, the plan is going to have to come up with new money, and it's going to be enough to kill the company."

Wilsman has got to be a traitor, and one hopes he will be roundly denounced on the rightwing media circuit. More voices like his would blow the perfect caper. He obviously wasn’t clued in that DJ 36,000 was just around the corner.

As even the article admits, the result of the Bush-like investment strategy proved highly satisfactory:

“While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers.”

Million dollar payouts for high level failure have become America’s secret weapon for achieving true greatness. As for the employees – they merely work for a living. Piss on em, as the old Wall Street saying goes. Also, the federal government has proven that almost any problem can be solved if you have a gigantic enough credit card. Put those pensions on the card and have the Chinese buy more of our dollars, as they say in the corridors of the Treasury department.
Here’s a nice window into what Social Security is gonna look like once we get it all licked into shape:
“United is far from unique. Lifting the lid on how most pension funds are invested might raise an outcry if the 44 million Americans covered by company plans knew these things:
Pension investing is largely unregulated, even though the federal government effectively covers the investment losses when a defined-benefit plan fails. At United, this freewheeling approach gave rise to investments in junk bonds, dot-coms and even what appears to be an energy venture in Albania.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said that more than half of the consultants who help pension funds invest their money have outside business relationships that could taint their advice.”
I, for one, am totally psyched.
Three more irresistible grafs. Your congress at work!

"While the federal agency tries to pinpoint its obligations, apparently no one in an official capacity is pausing to ask who the plans' outside investment professionals were, much less how they made their decisions and how they responded as the airline's fortunes faded.

"It's just a nonstarter," said Richard A. Ippolito, the pension agency's former chief economist, who is now retired. A few years ago, he recalled, a director of the federal pension agency appeared before Congress and suggested that if companies wanted to invest their pension funds in stocks, they should pay more for their pension insurance coverage.
"I could politely say that he was vilified," he said. "They basically accused him of being un-American because he was asking companies to pay for the privilege of investing in stocks. He just dropped that idea."

Hume and the political philosopher 1

There is a famous dispute, among the intellectual historians of the early American Republic, about the extent to which Madison borrowed from Hume. The dispute may, on the surface, be about ‘borrowing’ ideas, but underneath it is about the mechanisms by which nations are formed, and the place of ‘ideas’ in history, one of the great arguments in the White Mythology.

It was Douglass Adair who gave the dispute its modern form by emphasizing, against the economicist views of Charles Beard, the effect of intellectual history on the shaping of the Constitution. Adair pointed to the borrowings from Hume in the Federalist 10. Adair pictured Madison with a book of Hume’s essays, opened to “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”, in which Hume wrote:

“Though it is more difficult to form a republican government in an extensive country than in a city; there is more facility, when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction.”

Hume goes on to suggest a two fold process, in which the people, including the lowest, vote, followed by the work of the highest magistrates, presumably the representatives of the people, who then do something like forming a government – which is exactly how the American Senate was first instituted.

Edward Morgan, coming after Adair, admitted the intertext, but debated the inference: to him, Hume’s passage was about a community without faction, whereas Madison, reaching back to his Montesquieu, advocated a community in which party would block party. This, Morgan claimed, was a trope of a different color. [I take this general history from Mark Spencer’s “Madison and Hume on Faction (2002)]

I’m going to leave behind the argument about Hume’s influence on Madison and focus on Hume’s very negative image of the political intellectual. This type seems to function in two incompatible ways in Hume’s thinking – on the one hand, we cannot credit the political theorist with forming the commonwealth – all Platonic Republics are born and die in the heads of their creators – because the commonwealth is the result of the struggles of the interest and passions of different parts of the population. But if the philospher cannot positively shape the commonwealth according to his ideas, he can, on the other hand, introduce factional strife into the commonwealth.

This sums up a sense of the intellectual that is very much part of the Anglo culture.

James Buchan, in Crowded with Genius, summed up Hume’s dissent from Whig historiography as follows:

“In essays such as ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’, he portrayed Britain as a precarious equilibrium of often disreputable forces – Court patronage, parliamentary corruption, a free press,commercial competition – that were the residue of the violent political conflicts of the seventeenth century. For all his Scottish origins and friendships, he had no time for Whig or indeed any ideology: there was rarely, he later wrote, any ‘philosophical origin to government’.3 The British constitution was for Hume the
product of violence, and its form was both unintended and precarious.It was also, as might have been expected, civilian: a creation, as he also later wrote, of ‘that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty’.(86)

Hume anticipates Burke’s acidic view of the ‘theory men’ who, in his view, were dissolving the organic order of France in order to institute a structure unfounded in custom or piety – one that could only legitimate itself by the appeal to raw economic self-interest. But Hume moves in a different direction than Burke later did, and his eyes were on a story that Burke would have preferred be shrouded in reverent obscurity: that of the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome.

The Lockian subject in Lilliput

I'm recycling this post from 2005. It is certainly pertinent to my character under capitalism theme.
...

There’s a tradition in the literature about Gulliver’s Travel that extracts the Lockean Gull in Gulliver. The argument goes back to a very fine essay by W. B. Carnochan entitled, Gulliver’s Travels: An Essay on the Human Understanding?

Carnochan’s argument is straightforward: “Lemuel Gulliver, like the mad projector of the Modest Proposal, appears to be a version of the Lockean man.” Carnochan is probably on solid ground in thinking that the perceptual changes on which Swift plays like a jazz xylophonist are suggested by Locke’s theory that the human mind is shaped by sensation – ideas themselves being the end product of an experience that begins
externally (mysterious as that beginning may be) with the encounter of a sense instrument and an object. As is well known, this theory leads elsewhere in the empirical tradition – that moment of non-experience hardening into a thing that can’t be, logically, experienced, meaning that the perceived object must be usurped by the philosopher and put in the mind – some mind. Berkeley suggested God’s. This is a theory that a writer like Swift is bound to squeeze all the absurdities out of. Which is why Denis Donoghue takes the Lockean suggestion one step further,
and claims that what we are seeing, in Gulliver’s Travels, is how easily the Lockean subject falls prey to the Stockholm syndrome. He is continually captured, and continually acclimated so to the point of view of his captors that he begins to adopt it. Historically, there's also warrant for this -
Swift lived in a time when English men and women were always getting captured, by Moors, Indians and other heathen, and were continually shocking their countrymen by converting to pagan or Islamic ways.
In other words, Gulliver’s typical peripeteia is that of a man who goes from one ‘brainwashing” to another – and he gets to it by going through funk, animal fear, and his own tradesman’s capacity for fawning, with the power of the mind, here, being wholly in the power of the powers that be.

Donoghue’s thesis seems to explain a larger pattern in Gulliver’s Travels, until one notices that Gulliver seems much too aware of his brainwashing to be merely one of the brainwashed. At least in the Lilliput section, where Gulliver is critical enough of thread dancing and the like. He is not, however, critical of titles – and no matter how small the Liliputians are, the emperor carries a title as big as Louis XIV’s.

To my mind, the way to get a-hold of Gulliver is to see him as the double of M.B. Drapier.

In the first Drapier letter, the narrator (who is, after all, a fiction) says this:

“I will therefore first tell you the plain story of the fact; and then I will lay before you how you ought to act in common prudence, and according to the laws of your country.”

This is in the clear as water style of Gulliver himself. And yet, Drapier’s
letters are all warnings, and the satire runs to that point. Whereas what is
Gulliver writing for? In the letter from Captain Gulliver that prefaces the
book, he does claim that the book is intended as a warning:

“I do in the next Place complain of my own great Want of Judgment, in being prevailed upon by the Intreaties and false Reasonings of you and some others, very much against mine own Opinion, to suffer my Travels to be published.

Pray bring to your Mind how often I desired you to consider, when you
insisted on the Motive of publick good; that the Yahoos were a species
of Animals utterly incapable of Amendment by Precepts or Examples: And so it hath proved; for instead of seeing a full Stop put to all Abuses and
Corruptions, at least in this little Island, as I had Reason to expect:
Behold, after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath
produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions: I desired you
would let me know by a Letter, when Party and Faction were extinguished;
Judges learned and upright; Pleaders honest and modest, with some Tincture of common Sense; and Smithfield blazing with Pyramids of Law-Books; the young Nobility's Education entirely changed; the Physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in Virtue, Honour, Truth and good Sense; Courts and Levees of great Ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; Wit, Merit and Learning rewarded; all Disgracers of the Press in Prose and Verse condemned to eat nothing but their own Cotten, and quench their Thirst with their own Ink. These, and a Thousand other Reformations, I firmly counted upon by your Encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the Precepts delivered in my Book.”

This is a mixture of the satirist’s targets since Aristophanes and Swift’s
fictitious creatures, the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, who are very close to making any system of virtue and vice absurd by embodying it in impossible extremities of the disgusting and ... well, it is hard to find one term to describe the Houyhnhnms, although the idea of these equine stoics is both alarming and funny. It is like the most impossibly inbred English aristocracy. And Swift adds a sentence that seems pointed at his own self: “And, it must be owned that seven Months were a sufficient Time to correct every Vice and Folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their Natures had been capable of the least Disposition to Virtue or Wisdom.”

Is this Gulliver sticking out his tongue at Mr. Drapier?
And is Mr. Drapier Jonathan Swift as tradesman?

The satirist needs a preliminary sketch, acquaintance with the primogenitive caricature. And that caricature happens to be the self.

But Mr. Drapier, too, exists – in fact, his fictiveness is oddly blurred by his entrance into the all too real exploitation of Ireland, which is forever locked in Swift’s unwavering field of vision, a thing to see, a raree show of instituted vice. He feels about it … well, as LI feels about Bush’s America. Bush’s America degrades my mockery by casting itself into forms of such pitiful tastelessness, hypocrisies that have been exposed for so long that the exposures are growing moss, bluster that wouldn’t frighten a sheep, that mockery has to seek restraint – has to seek other tangents to make indignation feel-able. If not to reform the Yahoos, at least to relieve the writer's own spleen.


Mr. Drapier’s way is simply to tell the plain story of fact.
The meta-story is that the British Prime Minister, out of every venal motive, conspires to allow William Wood the right to coin money for use
in Ireland. The contract costs Wood money, and he proposes to make up
that money and make a profit by chiseling on the composition of the coin
– in other words, creating half pence on the cheap, which could be exchanged for good coin. This was at a time when the matter of the coin
was important – a penny should contain a penny’s worth of metal. A gold coin should contain an amount of gold equal to the worth of the coin.
Of course, the coins were routinely shaved, by everybody. But to coin them
pre-shaved, so to speak, was to go one step beyond. The intro to the edition of the Drapier’s Letters on the Gutenberg site says this:

“The patent was really granted to the King's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, who sold it to William Wood for the sum of £10,000, and (as it was reported with, probably, much truth) for a share in the profits of the coining. The job was alluded to by Swift when he wrote:

"When late a feminine magician,
Join'd with a brazen politician,
Expos'd, to blind a nation's eyes,
A parchment of prodigious size."

Coxe [a Swift commentator] endeavors to exonerate Walpole from the disgrace attached to this business, by expatiating on Carteret's opposition to Walpole, an opposition which went so far as to attempt to injure the financial minister's reputation by fomenting jealousies and using the Wood patent agitation to arouse against him the popular indignation; but this does not explain away the fact itself. He lays some blame for the agitation on Wood's indiscretion in flaunting his rights and publicly boasting of what the great minister would do for him. At the same time he takes care to censure the government for its misconduct in not consulting with the Lord Lieutenant and his Privy Council before granting the patent. His censure, however, is founded on the consideration that this want of attention was injudicious and was the cause of the spread of exaggerated rumours of the patent's evil tendency. He has nothing to say of the rights and liberties of a people which had thereby been infringed and ignored.”

If you have not read the Drapier’s letter, go to the intro to get some sense of the controversy, and then go to the fourth letter. That’s the hair-raising letter – a blow against the colonial system, a cry against the infamy, a rush at the system that’s truly in rare company. I suppose Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail is the American counterpart, except that King is never bitter. Swift’s letter begins like this:

“Having already written three letters upon so disagreeable a subject as
Mr. Wood and his halfpence; I conceived my task was at an end: But I
find, that cordials must be frequently applied to weak constitutions,
political as well as natural. A people long used to hardships, lose by
degrees the very notions of liberty, they look upon themselves as
creatures at mercy, and that all impositions laid on them by a stronger
hand, are, in the phrase of the Report, legal and obligatory. Hence
proceeds that poverty and lowness of spirit, to which a kingdom may
be subject as well as a particular person. And when Esau came fainting from the field at the point to die, it is no wonder that he sold his
birthright for a mess of pottage.”

Every blow in this letter lands. Gulliver’s Travels – with its Gull for a mockery – plays a double game with its moral points, making them and denying them in the same gesture. One remembers that the point is the wholesale reformation of Yahoo nature in seven months time. This is Jonah waiting for the fire to consume Ninevah, and being bitterly disappointed that it never comes. Or rather, this is taking that spirit of Jonah and both inhabiting the prophet’s disgust and taking up a position outside it to observe with clinical precision the prophet’s vanity. But Drapier is a character who has been transported beyond vanity. In a passage that was considered treasonable, Swift considers that Ireland is no ‘depending kingdom’ with England, but equal in its freedoms. This casts doubt on the charnel foundation of colonialism, which is currently being implemented in Iraq on just the ground that the Iraqis are incorrigible children and the Americans are paragons to be mimicked. Ireland, after all, was the template for all English colonial ventures to follow. This is the Drapier at his most intense. One wants to say that this is the crescendo of the letter, but the rhythm, here, disallows crescendos:

“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the
very definition of slavery: But in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly
subdue one single man in his shirt. But I have done. For those who have used power to cramp liberty have gone so far as to resent even the liberty
of complaining, although a man upon the rack was never known to be refused the liberty of roaring as loud as he thought fit.”

Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for the Holocene!

In his nobel prize speech, Faulkner, at his most Polonian, said that man will ‘not only endure. He will prevail…” This may have made some sense at the dawn of the nuclear bomb age, and perhaps these words have to be set as a sort of defiant humanism against a global war that killed 50 million people.

However, the hope of man prevailing has steadily lost altitude over the last couple of decades, and will, I think, continue to seem more and more the long shot. Man prevailing has meant man creating a treadmill of production and a treadmill of consumption that now seems both unstoppable and disastrous. Parents, today, calmly expect the fish to disappear from the oceans by the time their children have achieved middle age. The elephant, the tiger, and the rain forest are all marked down to be remembered as theme park accessories.

As man prevails, he destroys the Holocene in which he was born, nourished and flourished, and he does this with the calm lack of attention with which a person, say, cleans the lint and old tickets out of his coat pocket. After all, the Holocene might go, but at least BP is back and ready for business – and has purchased its first new lease in the Gulf, thanks to the anti-Holocene Obama administration. Which, as we know, will be succeeded by the anti-Holocene Romney administration, which will basically pursue the same policies.

Thoughts of the Holocene have been with me since last night, when A. and I traveled up to the Cinema St. Michel by bus, forked over an amazing 10.5 Euros each, picked up two clunky dark glasses, and plunged, 3-d-ily, into the depths of the Chauvet cave. I’ve been looking forward to seeing the Herzog film since I first read about it, since I am a big fan of caves. One of my favorite interviews, when I still interviewed – ever since interviewing Gregory Curtis, the ex editor of Texas Monthly who wrote a fascinating book on the subject after having immersed himself in the literature (which is, by all accounts, oddly polemical – every generation seems to have a dominant theories about the Paleolithic people that are then overturned, with maximum contempt, by the next generation) and gone and visited the caves, or those he could. Oh, to go from cave to cave! What a blissful idea.

Here’s what I wrote after reading Curtis, back in 2006:

Reading it, we were struck like by 100 000 volts that during the Upper Paleolithic – that wonderful time when there were, max, 150 000 people in Europe, and life was good for around twenty thousand years - the cave artists generally didn’t draw or paint or engrave people. There were your stray vulvas, the masked bird man, many hand prints, but generally – no people. Instead, there were mammoths. There were lions. There were rhinos and horses. Oddly, much fewer reindeer, even though reindeer meat was the spam of the Paleolithic – it was always poached reindeer for breakfast, fricasseed reindeer for lunch, and reindeer pudding for dinner. We are often told how to evolution stories about this or that human habit, but in reality, the way those how to stories are formed is that evo psychologists extrapolate back from ‘primitive people’ of today to those wandering around 200,000 years ago. However, this habit is in serious disconnect from archeologists, who have long held that ethnography of people today, in no matter what state of society they live in, is essentially unhelpful when trying to reconstruct the way the inhabits of the Eurasia 30,000 years ago lived. It is impossible not to imagine back using our PBS/National Geographic images, but what tribe do we know of that doesn’t draw people? Deleuze and Guattari talk of the special faciality of the West – this seems right, on all accounts – but to show so little interest in people when one has mastered perspective, and the expressive character of animals? That seems quite significant. But of what? Well, this is where speculation is dumb, but irresistible.”

My speculative position is that the cave art of 30,000 years ago, with its absence of the human, marks the time when – just perhaps – humans did not assume they would prevail. They did not even assume they were superior, since of course they knew – the horse was superior for speed, the lion and tiger and bear was superior for strength, the bird for flight, and so on.
There wasn’t - I would speculate, in this scene still dotted with other hominid candidates for most likely to survive - the sense that homo sapiens was superior in any department at all.

Given this sense of an overwhelmingly un-human world, the Chauvet paintings are all the more incredible. But I watched not just for the painting, but for something Curtis’s book had mentioned, which is also mentioned in Judith Thurman’s account of Chauvet:
“Twenty-six thousand years ago (six millennia after the first paintings were created), a lone adolescent left his footprints and torch swipes in the furthest reaches of the western horn, the Gallery of the Crosshatching.”

I don’t know why this stray detail effects me so much, but it does. When Herzog finally showed the footprints, I got dreadfully tearful.

notes on the treason of the clerks

Let’s make a square:

Eternal ---------- Partial


Contemporary-------- Universal


These are the parameters of Benda’s conception of the clerk, or the intellectual, in the 20th century. They also fit, to a degree, Gramsci’s reflection on organic intellectuals – which runs counter to Benda’s notion of the clerk - and Mann’s 1919 idea of the Non-political intellectual.

Mann’s non-political intellectual is the most complex case, because Mann’s irony creates odd combinations, linking the partial (German values) to the eternal (transcendent cultural values), which is an inherently unstable pairing – irony, here, is not simply a rhetorical trope, but a shy conceptual synthesis, one that never quite gets made.

In fact, from the point of view of the contemporary (say, the engaged Intellectual against which Benda fought), it is rather easy to ‘unmask’ the eternal and the universal. After all, these two categories are identified, in the end, very much with a locale and a history. They are identified with the “West”, that semi-region that really designates the continual process of Westernization – a process that operates on the agricultural populations of France as well as on the Nahuatl speaking populations of Mexico.

And yet, when the contemporary critique has done its unmasking, one can, from the point of view of the eternal, unmask the unmasker – for what is this unmasking done in the name of? It is not made outside of universal history- it is, on the contrary, an event within universal history, within modernism, and is inseperable from the development of the world market. It, too, is a carrier of Westernization.

From the Marxist point of view, the contemporary develops its sense of the eternal in the concept of revolution, which is paired with a new universal – one that is made after the World market has created, indeed, a world. This would be the universal working class, which is the only class with a real interest in abolishing class – in, that is, the revolution. Again, these are uneasy pairings.

I don’t mean to imprison the topic of the ‘intellectual’ or clerk in a structural cage: but rather to show the broad semantic elements of the narrative of the intellectual as it was put together in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and its disappointments.

insurance for the wealthy, bandaids for the rest

Over at Crooked Timber, there is a short but clarifying post about the cause of the 2008 crash, put in the form of a reply to Brad Delong, who has maintained that what I will call the inequality view of the crash is not true - that is, it isn't true that “we are in a recession basically because of the disppearance of a huge amount of household sector wealth”.

The Crooked Timber post arms itself with an arresting statistic from, I suppose, the Census, recycled through Nate Silver's column in the NYT: "The median American’s non-household wealth declined by 14% between 2001 and 2007. So when household wealth evaporated, guess what happened?"

Although Brian doesn't go into it in depth, he does use this statistic to point out that the 'boom' in the 2000s covered a bust - the bust in income. Which should lead us to some reflection about the policies that were and are being pursued that contributed to that bust.

I have urged the view that it is wrong to view the housing bubble solely as an accident or a disaster - a point of view fatally colored by the bubble's bust. The housing bubble, far from being an accident, was a necessity – that is, if we were to pursue the remedies to the solution to the recession of 2000-2001 suggested by Bush, and that are being recycled, in a more pernicious form, by both Obama and the Republicans in this round. The tax cuts – the most important of which may well have been the cut to capital gains taxes – and the deficit financial policy that was enacted via war spending, an enormous increase in Medicare due to the new drug supplement package, are important factors here. The third leg of the political economy of the 2000s was Fed policy. Famously, the interest rate was used by the Fed not as an index reflecting the real state of the American economy, but increasingly as a tool to maintain financial security wealth - in fact, Bernanke became so obsessed with trying to maintain stock market values, as we saw in 2007, that he pursued an utterly bizarre policy, dictated solely by an attempt to keep the stock market from sliding. All three parts of this policy were responses to the long range crisis, which was squarely and simply one of wealth inequality. That is at the very basis of these crises, and that will continue to be at the basis of the crises as the Reps and the Dems do everything they can to ignore it. Unfortunately, this inequality crisis can only be solved politically – and no political player on the horizon even sees it.

Thus, to understand the recession of 2008, you have to understand the effects of the solution to the recession of 2001. I don’t think the name for the sum of those solutions is “Bush” – the Democrats made no attempt to make inequality an issue, because they had neutered themselves on that front in the 90s. Let’s call it, instead, neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal model is always going to lead, is structurally dedicated to, increasing wealth inequality – for which it uses the government as a backstop, as we saw in the Treasury-Fed program of feeding trillions of dollars to Wall Street in the form of 1 percent or below loans, and as a dispensor of band-aids, as we saw with the marginal increases in EITC.
French political scientists around Foucault liked to talk about l’etat providence – the welfare state, if you like. Neoliberalism does not, as its proponents like to say, break with l’etat providence – they simply change its focus. The state now operates as a Wallfare state – redistributing upwards.

Are the clerks on the barricades this time?

One day Tolstoy, who was at that time an officer in the army, confronted a fellow officer who he had seen whipping a peasant and asked him: Have you never read the New Testament? The officer replied with a question of his own: ‘have you never read the army’s rules and regulations? Julien Benda put this story as an emblem at the beginning of La Trahison des Clercs, a pamphlet that became famous in the late twenties, because to Benda, Tolstoy’s question was central to what it used to mean to be a clerk – that is, an educated person who defends humanistic values. And the nameless officer’s reply, Benda thought, was what it meant to be a clerk, as the intellectuals abandoned the side of the eternal for the side of pure doxa. The clerk now serves a political passion, and speaks for the interests of a temporal and limited group, whether economic, national, or party. The clerk now sides with the army’s rules and regulations.

I, too, am interested in the clerk as a figure, although I betray humanity, in Benda’s eyes, by thinking of the clerk as, primordially, in the Great Transformation to an industrial and market economy, an agent of circulation. On the other hand, the clerk is dialectically riven – both the promoter of those routines that, in the countryside, the factory, and the store, generated a capitalist mentality, and the first responders to the elevation of the level of alienation this entailed. The clerks are the poets of the routinized world.

It is in this sense that Benda’s fight for eternal and against the engaged ‘intellectual’ is not, as it would seem to be at first glance, simply a reactionary gesture, a Christian nostalgia.

Benda started writing for the dreyfusard part of the press – he was published in Peguy’s Cahiers – and his career lasted well into the era of the existentialists, against which he took aim with furious quotations in his long second preface to The Betrayal of the Clerks, when it was reissued after WWII.

So: I want to look at Benda, Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Non-political Man, and Russell Jacoby’s book on the last intellectuals – all in the light of the Occupy Wall Street movement – in some upcoming posts.

Don't let the Fed enact another quiet bailout!

Suggestion for a Occupy Wall Street Sign: Stop Bank of America from Getting FREE US INSURANCE on ITS DERIVATIVES!

And here's today's story:

Ben Bernanke apparently used a rear entrance in Boston, yesterday, to avoid the Occupy Boston protestors.
That's par for the course, as Bernanke and his Fed are masters of the rear entrance.
For example, take the Bank of America announcement of its 6 + billion dollars in profits for this quarter. Doesn't that mean that bailing out the banks worked? Our 16 trillion in loans for the behemoths can be criticized on many levels, but surely we can't criticize the techno genius that resulted in a solvent bank system, eh?
Well, apparently not. This is what is happening before our eyes, from the Economic populist site:

"It appears Bank of America moved Merrill Lynch derivatives to a FDIC insured subsidiary. Bloomberg:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

By moving toxic assets, i.e. derivatives, into a FDIC insured subsidiary, gives BoA's Merrill derivative holdings indirect access to the Federal Reserve discount window and also if the bank fails where the derivatives are now located, the FDIC is required to pay depositors through their insurance guarantee. It appears from Bloomberg's report that $53 trillion of BoA's derivatives are being tied into depositors*, which implies the Federal Reserve and the U.S. taxpayer have the potential to be on the hook.

Bank of America’s holding company -- the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit -- held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.

Nice huh? Bank of America just transferred risk to the taxpayer with no approval by regulators, Congress and of course the public."

I'm reminded of the scene in Chinatown in which Jack Nicholson discovers that the city has been dumping water during a drought - in the service of a land development scheme, as it turns out. He goes to the water department and talks with the head of it, a man beaufitully named Yelburton, yed there, who tells him:

"Wait -- please sit down, Mr. Gittes.
We're... well, we're not anxious
for this to get around, but we have
been diverting a little water
to irrigate avocado and walnut
groves in the northwest
valley. As you know, the farmers
there have no legal right to our
water, and since the drought we've
had to cut them off -- the city
comes first, naturally. But,
well, we've been trying to help
some of them out, keep them from
going under. Naturally when you
divert water -- you get a little
runoff."

A little runoff. That is what the 99 percent is living through! But the Fed has a beautiful system all in place to help the people who really count.



http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/bank-americas-socialize-risk-and-reap-reward-business-model

destruction is the ultimate luxury

I'm dredging this up from a post I wrote in 2002, because I think it is relevant to the psychology of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And to the psychology of the academic and policy elite who criticize the movement.

In 2002, two British professors, Andrew Oswald and Daniel Zizzo, reported on an experiment in which various subjects were gathered together and given cash, distributed – by arbitrary gift and betting – in such a way that some got more and some got less. Then, subjects were allowed to anonymously burn other people’s money – only, however, if they were willing to reduce their own.

62% of those tested chose to destroy part of other test subjects' cash, and half of all the cash was destroyed by other subjects.

A story about this experiment on the site Mindpixel contains this summing up of the burners:

"The researchers found that those who gained the most additional money at the betting stage burned poor and rich alike, while disadvantaged laboratory subjects mainly targeted those subjects they saw getting what they perceived as undeserved financial windfalls."

The libertarian magazine Reason reported on Oswald and Zizzo's experiment, too, under the headline, Burn the Rich. This is, in fact, not so far from the way Oswald and Zizzo presented their results themselves. Curiously, what the experiment clearly shows is that the rich also burned the poor and the rich. The difference is that the poor showed solidarity – they burned only those with higher amounts of cash – while the rich did not.
That the rich burned the poor and the rich seems not to have impressed itself on Reason, even though, as they correctly reported:
"Zizzo and Oswald found that nearly two-thirds of players happily paid for the privilege of impoverishing their fellow participants. Even as the price of burning went up, the percentage of people who chose to burn other players did not fall substantially."

Z. and O. had labels for two classes of burnings, depending on the rank of the burner. One they call rank egalitarianism. Most of the burners who were poorer sacrificed to burn the rich. The other they call reciprocity. Their thesis is that the rich burners were simply responding to being burned.

"In the case of our money burning experiment, advantaged and disadvantaged subjects may,
because of the existence of the advantage, perceive the game differently. This different game
perception implies that subjects prime differently two social categories, one based on deservingness and one on reciprocity. For disadvantaged subjects, what matters is the fact that advantaged subjects got the advantage undeservedly, and they did not. Advantaged subjects may think not only in terms of deservingness, but also in a different light, namely, in the light of the fact that disadvantaged subjects will burn them. They may then want to reciprocate the favour.'"

But how does this explain their earlier result, that the rich burn the rich? Moreover, hidden in the paper is an interesting paragraph about the behavior of the "undeserving" rich -- those who accrued money arbitrarily (in the experiment, money could be made by betting, but money was also randomly allocated at intervals, thus randomly favoring certain individuals).

"In the twin experiment run in Oxford, Zizzo (1999) crossed advantage and deservingness in a factorial design, and found that deservingness mattered. More specifically, he found significantly more negative interdependent preferences in sessions where the advantage was induced unfairly than when it was induced according to a relatively fair procedure. Moreover, in one condition of that experiment, stealing was possible. Zizzo then found that there was substantially more stealing by advantaged subjects if they had got the advantage undeservedly. One possible interpretation of this interaction effect was that undeservedly advantaged subjects expected themselves to be stolen or burnt significantly more, and behaved using a reciprocity logic, in defending their own gains significantly more."

It is interesting how neoclassical models and ‘rational’ choice has bent the minds of academics, which is the only reason I can think of for calling the rich burning the poor or each other a reciprocity hypothesis. After all, O. and Z. assumes that the rich are the very epitome of rationality. They are profit maximizers. Thus, they couldn’t be burning because, well, they could get away with it. Oswald and Zizzo accord the egalitarian strategy a sequential primacy that exists psychologically, even if it doesn't exist empirically. That is, the rich could be striking in the expectation that they will be struck.
However, one should notice -- or an old deconstructive veteran like myself notices -- the binary which is operating here. While the rich are operating on "intention" -- that is cognitively -- the poor are operating on "passion" -- the envy aroused by riches. Why, actually, don't we think that the poor are striking pre-emptively, like the rich? Especially as Zizzo's earlier experiment shows that the perception of the "unfair" accrual of wealth, which is prevalant among its benificiaries as well as among its victims, prompts further "unfair" action among its benificiaries. I.e., the undeserving rich steal. The unconscious bias of the experimenter consists in this: poverty denies one a full sense of self-interest. Thus, we interpret the actions of the poor, sacrificing to burn the rich, as envy, while we accord a sense of intellectual strategy to the wealthy who do the same thing. Oswald and Zizzo show themselves to be the worthy heirs of those nineteenth century economists who saw the laboring classes as so much betail, so much dangerous animality. An entity to be organized by the police, always liable to filch from the fortunate.

To put this another way -- we think the reciprocal thesis explains too much, is bounded by a circular definition, and is ultimately inseparable from passion itself. This passion expresses itself in the wealthy burning the wealthy -- surely, here, we aren't seeing a response to rank egalitarianism, but the play of pure power. Let's suggest to Z. and O. a most non-Anglo explanation for their findings, one explored by Mauss in his classic essai sur la don: one of the attributes of being rich is the ability to destroy. Destruction is the ultimate luxury. This is as true among Manhattanites as among the Kwaikutl. Zizzo and Oswald might want to reference such classics, in this vein, as various Beverly Hillbilly episodes, the tv show Dallas, and the dot com parties of 1999.
It is such power that the Occupy Wall Street people are protesting. Nobody gets wealthy just to continue getting wealthy – the miser is an obsolete figure. More and more wealth is needed to reinforce another passion, the cruel and relentless passion for power. At the heart of power is the power to destroy. Far from simply being envious, the poor are wise enough not to be deluded by the veil of rationality. The same can’t be said for many social scientists.

my own humble attempt at tax simplification

Simplifying the tax system on the 9-9-9 system (which, fans of the Book will notice, is 6-6-6 upside down) is all the rage right now.

I have an even simpler plan. It is based on a phrase used over and over by the anti-tax (the rich) crowd. The phrase is simple – taxes take dollars from your pocketbook. Or your wallet.

My plan takes this phrase very seriously, because it gives us a nice way to visualize money. The anthropologist, George Marcus, has theorized, from his ethnographic research among the rich, that one of the salient characteristics of fortune is its invisibility. That invisibility has many semiotic effects: one of them is obviously to reverse the marginal disutility thesis, which would make it seem like the millionaire of the billionaire would discount the added dollar. Invisibility melds together all money as one thing – which means that the 4.9 billion dollars made by hedgefund manager John Paulson (the man who, in conjunction with Goldman Sachs, shorted mortgage backed securities while Goldman sold its suckers, er, clients, mortgage backed security ) is to him one unified thing. Not perhaps in all instances. Paulson could well chip off a bit of that 4.9 billion for a coupla yachts, or a home. For instance, a nice 25 million dollar ranch in Aspen. The 3 million dollar Olympic tower “pad”. But when it comes to taxes, every invisible bit needs defending.

This is where my tax plan comes in. It is called the envision the wealth tax plan, and it is pretty simple. It uses a standard – the Tommy Hilfinger Men’s Tilton Front Pocket Wallet. According to the specs, it is made of Soft Polished Lamb, and features 4 credit card pockets, an ID window, and a metal hinged moneyclip – just the kind of wallet that the rightwing pundit wants to conjure up with the government taking dollars out of it!

So, here’s the scheme. It is pretty easy to assess how many Tommy Hilfinger Tilton Front Pocket Wallets would be needed to contain 4.9 billion dollars. A bill has a width of around .005 inches. You need to stuff 49 million of them in the wallets. The capacity of those wallets is, at best, able to accommodate, say, 50 one hundred dollar bills, or 5,000 dollars. That gives us nine hundred eighty thousand Tommy Hilfinger Tilton Front Pocket Wallets. Now, lets compare this to, say, the janitor who works in thePaulson and company building. The average salary for a janitor in NYC comes to a whopping 21,000 per year, which is the equivalent of four THFP wallets, and a little change. So we have four of these wallets, and we line them up against nine hundred eighty thousand THTFP wallets, and we ask – is it fair that the four wallet guy didn’t pay the same percentage tax as the guy with nine hundred eighty thousand THTFP wallets?

And then we hit ourselves on the head and go, dude, are you on acid?
And then we do our tax reform! Which is simple – no tax for the janitor. No tax for even people who have 20 THTFP wallets. No, make it 40. After that, the government starts seriously collecting your THTFP wallets. After you reach 100 hundred, it really gets down to business, going with the 90 percent marginal rate that was common in good king Dwight D. Eisenhower’s day.
See how simple this is? It is called the visualize their fuckin’ fortunes tax. It is beautiful, and will save the country a load of grief from self pitying people who have done nothing world historical, or even necessary, to earn nine hundred eighty thousand THTFP wallets stuffed to the gills with 100 dollar bills.

pascalian peasant economics

Paul Warde makes useful distinction (in Subsistence and Sales: the peasant economy of Württemberg in the early seventeenth century, Economic History Review, 2006) between a school of the economic historiography of peasant economies that emphasized Ricardian decreasing returns and Malthusian limits to resources, and a school that emphasized a Smithian growth approach, in which the peasant’s natural inclination to barter and trade and maximize profit is merely hindered by rent seeking and anachronistic guild like institutions. One of the star representatives of the latter approach, Sheilagh Ogilvie, attacks any theory that holds that the peasant economy is somehow special, because, according to her, such a theory is founded on the idea that peasants are irrational. Her reading, then, of Polanyi style analysis is that it is deeply patronizing to peasants and blind to the way peasants were struggling to become capitalists against the dead weight of feudal institutions:

“But whether 'irrational' or 'differently rational', peasants lack the conventional economic concepts of wages, capital, interest, rent, and profit. [Ogilvie here is criticizing non-Smithian approaches] Consequently they can neither minimize costs nor maximize profits; instead, they minimize risks and seek to 'satisfice' culturally defined consumption targets.9 These theories regard peasant minimization of risk as excluding 'capitalist' maximization of profit, a distinction puz-zling to mainstream economics, which regards all economic agents as seeking to obtain the lowest possible risk for the highest possible return.”

If this were an accurate criticism of what is the dominant anthropological paradigm of peasant economies, Ogilvie has chosen the right method to smash it – finding records of peasants minimizing costs, making profits, trading, using money, etc.

But as Ward points out, this pushes the non-Smithian approach into absurdities it never articulates. Far from thinking that peasants have no conception of opportunity costs, as Ogilvie puts it, the school she attacks most harshly bases its whole analysis on the peasant’s awareness of opportunity costs.

Ward is, I think, correct here:

“Historians have not recently argued, at least for central and western Europe, that peasants did not understand profit generally. They have argued that they were not profit maximizers , or primarily motivated by profitability, a rather different position, although it is in truth rather difficult to establish if, or indeed how, peasants might have conceptualized profit or loss across a range of activities over any given period of time.”

Ogilvie, in other words, is using the evidence from the record, which amply demonstrates trading, quantifying, and wage labor, as something that demonstrates a collective social tendency on the part of the peasants to conform their economic activity to these kinds of proto-capitalist features. But she actually shows nothing of the kind, since she thinks it is sufficient to show trading in order to show all the institutionally driven activities that result from the circulation of commodities. In fact, the peasants in her example often show exactly the kind of limited good mentality that would make investment and profit maximization not only institutionally difficult, but culturally suspect.

…
How capitalism arrives is a question that is wrapped up with how the capitalist character is formed. It seems, in a sense, that capitalism, with its double aspect – of a certain form of production and a certain form of circulation – is boobytrapped. One must understand the mentality of the agents of circulation in order to understand the condition of the agents of production, and one must understand the limits imposed on the agents of production in order to understand the possibility of circulation. One must, then, understand not only technology, but ideology.

Mainstream economics is proud of its methodological individualism, but it doesn’t believe it. The individual, as the economists understand, does not spontaneously produce his acts. The man in an office, or behind a plow, or behind a gun, did not find his places by inventing his scene. The idea that the individual invents society is, evidently, an act that has never attributed to any individual. So the mainstream economist has come up with a wonderful concept saver: the individual, in their terms, is essentially a chooser. Goethe’s Faust cried out that in the beginning was the act – but the economist’s homo economicus counters that in the beginning was the choice. The cosmology of the preference wraps the societal world in a mystery – for one never seems to come to acts, only to choices. Every blade of wheat, every board of wood, every drop of ink, is not what it seems to be, but is instead an agglomeration of atomic choices. By some inexplicable accident, these choices also seem to be matter, and have weight and chemistry. The only thing that isn’t chosen is choice itself.

This is a rich cosmology, but not necessarily a believable one. So it is reinforced by the time honored method of scolding. If we don’t hold to individualism, all responsibility is lost, and anarchy and concentration camps are loosed upon the world.

The origin of this cosmology is surely to be found in the period between around 1650 and 1789. And it did not arise among the peasant masses, yearning to profit maximize, but among a varied assortment of clerks and policymakers. Intellectuals in Edinburgh universities and ministers at Louis XVI’s court, as well as slave traders and sugar merchants were all starting to put it together.

By the late twentieth century, the capitalist operation had become so dominant – at least among intellectuals – that historians could not believe the cosmos had ever been different. Thus, in the spirit of conquest, the historians went back to pre-capitalist societies and attempted to rescue them for capitalism. Thus, theorems of market equilibrium, or of public choice, are imposed as the real language of rationality that the peasants were, as it were, articulating in mime.

My own sense is that the peasant economies were not irrational, nor are the rational capitalist economies non-peasant – the rational economic institutions are colonized by non-equilibrium, non-growth, non-maximizing kinds of behavior, and peasant economies surely involved calculations to some end. However, instead of the models that Ward and Ogilvie use to understand rationality of peasant economics, I think one should turn to contemporaries, like Blaise Pascal, for the vocabulary of what was afoot. Pascal’s three forms of the spirit – l’esprit geometrique, l’esprit de finesse, and l’esprit juste give us a much deeper sense of what was in question, in the maintenance of the household, the community, and the person in peasant economies, than we are going to get from Ogilivie’s grid. yet historians in the 21st century, who don't yet face a powerful alternative to capitalism, are unlikely to give up the project of conquering the past with the models of the present, even if the rules they are using predict a much different past than the one that we have. Actually, they also predict a much different present, which must be adjusted, nudged, and jammed to fit into the mainstream economist's rational formats. But the present is malleable, while the past, ah, the past - the problem is that the past can't be fired.
More's the pity.

I'm gonna tell you how its gonna be...

At the moment, I presume that on inauguration day, January 19th, 2012, President Obama will hand the reins to President Romney. Romney will have a brilliant political prospect: he’ll be dealing with a Senate and House of Representatives that will be solidly Republican.


But what of the quality of life of the American public? That will have declined precipitously during Obama’s four years. The African-American community will have declined, economically, to where it was in 1990. The American middle class will have continued to lose asset wealth and income, returning to the 1995 point. The housing market will be in deep freeze. Unemployment will be around 9 percent, but in terms of labor participation, the number of Americans working will be in the 1980s levels. The environment, in the meantime, will be starting to show the first signs of its crash. We know its coming, but we don’t know how it will manifest itself – although we know that the government will respond to it in the truly clueless way that it responded to the Gulf Oil disaster, which, I have read, will result in ‘millions’ of fines for BP – instead of the billion plus that BP would owe if the Obama administration had chosen to, well, enforce the law. Perhaps the environmental collapse will be represented by a small thing – for instance, Obama’s FDA has approved sea food from the Gulf in spite of the fact that they have made a much smaller and narrower investigation of the toxins released in the Gulf than George Bush I’s FDA made after the Valdez disaster. That may mean cancers, but cancers a long way down the road. Maybe a series of birth defects, though, or something equally mediagenic. My outside bet, though, is on a negative flood: that we will have the first drought incident soon – some town, say Reno, in the West will simply run out of water. The kind of thing that the townspeople will actually have to flee.


Quality of life for the 20-29 set will, of course, continue to be grim, except for those who are the children of the wealthy. Unemployment in that demo is now at 33 percent, and it isn’t going to go down. As for the mortgage cramdown, that has been an utter failure. Luckily, Obama’s Justice department has failed so far in creating a ‘compromise’ that will let banks off the robo-signer fraud hook. Here, the weakness of the administration has actually created a vacuum that is being exploited for good – a rare instance.


Under President Romney, I think it is safe to say, some big banks will fail again. The Fed, perhaps under the same leadership, and the Treasury – under a Geithner like figure – will save the banks through massive welfare, disguised as a loan. What was broached under Bush and Obama was obviously a template for the next phase of neo-liberalism, which – in its first phase - was never about ‘shrinking the government’, and always about cementing an alliance between newly assertive plutocrats and policymaking elites. The second phase is not going to find money in some interest bearing scheme, as the debt slaves have been tapped, so the new scheme will be to use the powers of the government to create and issue money at an amazingly low price for the use of the speculators.


No man can see into the next minute, much less the next five years. But if the spirit of Christmas future is any guide, Romney, too, is destined to failure and a single term.

Radical idea: let's stop kissing the ass of the rich

In its story about a trader going to jail for inside trading, the NYT injected an explanation of the trader's status that is, well, a sort of thermostat reading of the temperature of this here plutocracy.


"Though Mr. Kimelman lived comfortably, he was hardly a Wall Street titan. In his best year, Mr. Kimelman said he earned about $400,000 and never had more than $1 million in the bank."

I love it when the plutocratic libido scratches a hole in the placid news discourse that tries to normalize it.

Compare this to Heritage Foundation's recent study of the poor, showing the American poor really have nothing whatsoever to bitch about. Here's the rundown from a Bill O'Reilly show:

"O'REILLY: The Census Bureau reports that 43 million Americans are currently living in poverty. The bureau defines poverty as a family of four earning less than $22,000 a year. But the conservative Heritage Foundation says that many poor American families have lots of stuff. Here now to analyze, Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs.

[...]

O'REILLY: Eight-two percent have a microwave. This is 82 percent of American poor families. Seventy-eight percent have air conditioning. More than one television, 65 percent. Cable or satellite TV, 64 percent -- thank God.

DOBBS: Amen, brother.

O'REILLY: Cell phones, 55 percent. Personal computer, 39 percent."

Wow, heady stuff for the poor, there. In fact, the conservative case for the poor being rich poses the question: why aren't the rich lucky enough to be poor? One would think that the logical next step would be Eisenhower era taxation, since the rich, too, I have heard, have air conditioning, tv, personal computers, and - a sad note - often only a million in a bank account at any one time.

But all mocking aside - one demand I think the 99 percent can and should agree on is: the rich should no longer expect us to continually kiss their ass.

age of the bark beetles

Photo by Josh Haner, NYT

“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.” – Ralph Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

In 1975, two years before he was tortured and murdered, Pasolini wrote a column in the Corriere della serra entitled “on the fireflies’. He begins with a question much debated on the Italian left at the time – how fascist was the ruling order in Italy? – but he quickly left the usual pro and contra behind, instead moving to a new view of Italy’s history by pointing to an unremarked moment, an unnoticed threshold. This threshold was not unique to Italy, but could be extrapolated to the the history of any capitalist or industrial country:

‘Since I am a writer and I polemicize, or at least I discuss with other writers, permit me to give a definition of a poetic-literary character to this phenomenon, which has intervened in the Italy of our times…

In the beginning of the sixties, because of air pollution and, chiefly in the countryside, because of water pollution (azure streams and limpid ditches), the fireflies began to disappear.”

Pasolini’s poetic-literary approach brings together natural and human history in one enormous stroke. The disappearance of the fireflies is not simply a fact of concern for naturalists – it is a fact that has a bearing on memory, on the bonds of one generation to the other, and even on the enormous invisible losses that come with ‘creative destruction’ and that refuse to be registered by the political forces that express themselves day after day, and now minute after minute, in the media. By noticing the fireflies, Pasolini breaks out of the parochial discourse of blame and offense in which both the hegemonic party and the oppositional movements in Italy were stuck, like flies to flypaper.

Pasolini’s words became famous, but the signal he sent out died. Nobody ever formed a firefly party. The machine did not stop. The treadmill of production and consumption continued to roll over the planet, producing the routines that make it really impossible to notice that there are no fireflies, that you can’t see the stars at night, that the elms are disappearing, that there are no bluebirds in the garden. Making it impossible to see where you live and what has changed.

Perhaps just as the disappearance of the fireflies marked a cut in the Holocene humanness of Italy, the appearance of the bark beetles mark a cut in the Holocene humanness of Americans. And perhaps, or so I, ever the exaggerator, hope, the appearance of the OWS movement marks an awareness that the treadmill is now running us into the ground.

The bark beetle has a pretty simple lifecycle. The adult beetles dig into the bark of trees, and lay eggs there, as well using the cover of the bark to survive the cold weather. Many of the pupae that hatch from the eggs die off, due to cold temperatures. Some, however, survive, enough that another generation of pine beetles will again lay its eggs.

This simple lifecycle has been sped up by the last Conquista – the conquest of the atmosphere. In terms of the lifecycle of the European movement outward, the first conquest was that of the Americas, the second the partial conquest of Asia, and the third that of Africa. The fourth seizure is of uninhabited atmosphere, which is “free”, and which has been laid claim to by Western industry and now global industry. Just as the conquest of the Americas was accompanied and made possible by a mass dying – the mass dying of the Amerindians, due to the diseases carried by the Europeans – the conquest of the atmosphere is also leading to a mass dying, from which the descendents of the Europeans are averting their eyes.

“From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.
The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.”
The natural history of the Americas and the political history of the moment are, it seems, joined in ways that are a mystery – or rather, that are made a mystery. We actually register these things, but out of the corner of our eye.

And this is the political party we need to form: a corner of the eye party. A firefly party. An aspen party. The treadmill of production is deafening, but perhaps we can plug our ears enough to look around. Look around and recognize that the unemployment we face and the massive inequality of wealth that has seized the developed world with the implacable and mechanical force of a bark beetle infestation and that infestation itself are all parts of one thing: the politics of the Holocene. These are the stakes. And if we lose the Holocene to the hedge funders or the coal plants or BP, we lose everything.

“But for the natives…God’s hand hath so pursued them as, for three hundred mile’s space, the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox, which still continues amongst them. So as God hath hereby cleared our title to this place…” John Winthrop

smash the revolving door - another demand for the OWS crowd!

The Democratic party is supposedly divided between a rightwing faction and a liberal faction. In reality, the Democratic party, like the GOP, is in thrall to the revolving door faction. The revolving door Dems found their emblem and hero in Peter Orszag, the Obama advisor who, going from strength to strength, helped plan Obama’s “pivot” to the issue of the deficit before launching a career for himself in the financial world that Obama’s Treasury and Obama’s appointee to the head of the Federal Reserve so amply supported with 16 trillion dollars in loans over the last three years.

Orszag, though, is easy pickings, an amoral DLC-er who pathetically wowed the kids hired to fluff for Obama in the press – people like Ezra Klein – because he had that shark vibe and was reportedly good with the babes – wow! How neat! It is hard to take the likes of him seriously, given the likes of those who take him seriously.

The revolving door is a term that helps us understand the government/corporation complex as one big building. It involves SEC enforcers who go on to become Goldman Sachs shills, and then sometimes even go back to the SEC, where they become ever more valuable by diverting or blocking enforcement until they go out again. It involves Congressmen, Senators, and their aids, who go from legislating energy policy to shilling for Nukes. The revolving door zone is the shadow government that operates much like shadow finance – it is where all the disgusting bits are stuffed. You as the voter want the Public Option, and vote for the candidate who promises it? Tom Daschle, as the big Pharma lobbyists, tweaks your desire and out comes – crap mandatory private insurance accounts for the middle class!

The on and on goes on and on, we can rock this way to the break of dawn…

So lets examine a bit of the career of Rob Cogorno, a true poster boy of the Obama era. As his peppy bio tells us at the Elmerdorf/Ryan site:

“With experience at the center of the major public policy fights in Congress over the last fifteen years, Rob Cogorno brings an unparalleled expertise in the legislative process to Elmendorf | Ryan. In particular, Cogorno offers clients a singular understanding of the complex dynam- ics in the House of Representatives and the House Democratic Caucus that ultimately shape legislative decisions for the two parties on both sides of the Capitol.”

Bringing experience – how delightful! What is this entity to which he has brought his experience in ‘shaping legislative decisions”?

Here’s a little hint, from a Reuters story:

“Expert network firm Gerson Lehrman Group has hired a Washington lobby firm with close ties to the Democratic party as it braces for fallout from a U.S. insider trading investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Gerson Lehrman, the largest of a group of firms that specialize in matching hedge funds with industry consultants, began interviewing lobbying firms a few weeks ago and selected Elmendorf Ryan in the past few days, said these people, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to disclose the information to the media.
The hiring of Elmendorf Ryan comes as federal prosecutors in New York have charged at least eight people associated with a rival expert network firm with giving confidential corporate information to traders and analysts with hedge funds.
The unfolding investigation has caused some hedge funds to scale back their use of expert network firms.”
The strong ties with the Democratic party are the result of the firms close association with some of the sterling losers of the past twenty years. You remember the clueless opposition that, during the Bush years, proved that the worm doesn’t necessarily turn? This is where they ended up! The firm is headed by Dick Gephardt’s former top aid, Steven Elmendorf. And as you’d suspect, Rob Cogorno also used to work for Gephardt. You see, times have changed since old soldier’s fade away – now they fade into fat jobs with lobbying firms, and so do retired or defeated Congressmen. Congress is now something like a prep school for the real money –a fact well known to all Congressmen and their staffers. Thus, even before you make the leap for the revolving door, you want to show that you are a player. This is the ‘experience’ you can bring to K street.

Interestingly, while campaign finance reform has a strong claque among editors, who love to opine about it partly because it is a freebie – nothing is ever going to get done, as everybody knows – the revolving door culture is never discussed in terms of ‘reform’. So in 2008, the Politico could put in this announcement about Rob Cogorno and everybody in the know politely applauded:

“Cogorno joins Elmendorf
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) has shuffled his staff a lot lately, starting with Rob Cogorno.
Most recently, Cogorno was the floor director to Hoyer in both his majority leader and Democratic whip offices, until Cogorno recently joined Elmendorf Strategies.
Prior to working with Hoyer, Cogorno was the research director and appropriations policy adviser to then-House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt (Mo.), where he developed floor strategy for the consideration of all appropriations bills and was Gephardt’s chief liaison to the House Appropriations Committee.
“As a counselor to House Democratic Leaders Steny Hoyer and Dick Gephardt, Rob has been at the center of every major public policy fight in Congress over the last 15 years,” said Steve Elmendorf, founder and president of the firm. “Rob brings an unparalleled expertise in legislative process to Elmendorf Strategies, offering our clients a singular understanding of the complex dynamics in the House of Representatives and the House Democratic caucus. Those dynamics ultimately shape legislative decisions for the two parties on both sides of the Capitol.”
Elmendorf’s prose here has all the charm of the smell of a nasty aftershave lotion clinging to a cheap suit. More interesting is the fact that such parasites on the Republic can strut their stuff as though this were normal business. It isn’t. It can be changed. There is no way the ‘singular understanding’ of a Rob Cogorno should be used to help Gerson Lehrman skate around an investigation. We would be up in arms if suspected bank robbers were able to make donations to the Judge Retirement Fund before trial, but we let such stinky business transpire in the supposed halls of power. Our halls of power. We shouldn’t. No top aid should be able to work for a lobbying firm for a goodly period of time – say five years – after he leaves the aid business. And for Congress folk, the period should be longer – ten years at least. Election to public office shouldn’t be a preface to gorging on the gravy train.

Let's pour rat poison in the gravy train. And if that means we can't get 'qualified' people to advise us on legislative policy - if that means the plutocrats don't have their clawprints all over the legislation meant to rein them in - all the better. .

What is the natural economy

Historians who try to describe the rupture between capitalism and pre-capitalist modes of production face a dilemma. The predominant narrative that describes this rupture places capitalism in a teleological position vis-à-vis what came before it, and this makes it hard to describe pre-capitalistic economies in their own terms. This is especially true in as much as the clerks who existed in these pre-capitalist economies did not conceptualize the economy in the same way that economists conceptualize economies. The grounding condition for economics as a science is a recognition of economics as a social fact – and this conditions indissolubly binds together economics and capitalism.

Even anti-capitalist economics, given its most systematic form by Marx, often falls prey to the teleological assumption that history slouches, inevitably, towards capitalism – although Marx backed away from that interpretation, as is clear from the letters he exchanged with Russian populists, where he confines the history he sketches in Capital to Western Europe, and declines to provide a ‘general philosophico-historical’ theory – in other words, Marx quits the universal history business. But universal history, disguised as the World Market, had by this time has armed itself with gunboats and penetrated into Chinese ports and taken up machetes and gone into Congolese jungles. The world market, celebrated in the Communist Manifesto, was not giving a-capitalist societies much choice in the matter.

In Germany, the attempt to find terms with which to conceptualize pre-capitalist systems revolved around the idea of the “natural economy.” This would be an economy dependent on in kind exchange – barter. It was an economy in which credit was not developed, and money was treated with suspicion. It was an economy, moreover, pervaded by a non-individualistic mentality. The latter is what makes it natural, because it takes the dynamics of the household – whose “naturalness” was assumed by Aristotle, but of which the wild varieties of form were known to the 19th century sociologists – and projects it upon the world.

The natural economy is associated with the historical school in Germany, but in the contemporary study of peasant societies, it is associated with theory of A.V. Chayanov, the economist who wrote a very influential book about peasant economies that was re-discovered in the 1960s – although Chayanov himself was not, for by that time his bones had long decayed in some Gulag camp. Chayanov infused it, as well, with suggestions from Rousseau’s brilliant reconstruction of the primitive economy in the Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau’s keen sense of the function – the necessary function – of idleness, revery and sleep in the existence of his primitives finds its economic language in Chayanov’s thesis. This is how how Charles Perrings, in “The Natural Economy Revisited”, describes it:

“He proposed … that the objectives of the head of such a household are qualitatively different from those of a capitalist enterprise, in that the former seeks not to maximize either output or profits but to balance the marginal utility of income and the marginal disutility (the drudgery) of the work of all members of the household. In general, he claimed, the intensity of labor expended by members of the household is inversely related to its productive capability, implying a sharply declining marginal utility of income in excess of that deemed
"necessary."

On the other hand, there is a line of French anthropological thought that dismisses the concept of the natural economy. Marcel Mauss, for instance, in his essay on the gift, writes that this category deforms the notion of the gift and counter-gift that forms the economic background, in his view, of not only primitive, but also modern societies. From the German historicists to Chayanov, there is an insistence on the supreme value of utility as the basis of all calculation, even if these calculations are not made with well defined units.

Mauss summed up his comparisons and analyses of various rites and customs of gift and counter gift in a last chapter that reads like a blast at utilitarian economic thinking and its projection upon all forms of human activity:

“These facts respond as well to a crowd of questions concerning the forms and reasons that one names so inappropriately exchange, the barter, the permutatio of useful things, that following the prudent Latins, who were following themselves Aristotle, a economic history puts at the base of the division of labor. It is something other than the useful that circulates in these societies of all types, the most of which have already been illuminated. Clans, ages and generally sexs – due to the multiple relations to which contacts give rise – are in a state of perpetual economic effervescence and this excitement is itself very little material; it is much less prosaic than our sales and purchases, then our wages of service or our plays on the stock market.”

Mauss, I think, is approaching economics not through the calculation of advantage as the economists see it, which is even prevalent in the historical school’s nostalgia for a natural economy, but instead as a form of life in which advantage encloses qualities and adventures that quantity does not cover.

It is against this background that I’d like to look at a controversy in the historiography of ‘peasant economies’ and proto-industrialisation in an upcoming post.

the golden bullet proof golf shirt

In the 1990s, Thomas Friedman wrote a book that, in a sense, was the founding document of neo-smarm – a pundit style for the end of history crowd. It was called the Lexus and the Olive Tree, or something like that, and it was littered with phrases that are instantly bullet point-able - amply demonstrating the difference between the art of the epigram and the banality of the sound byte. Neo-smarm is neo-liberalism that has kicked off its shoes, and Friedman is its master.

I mention this not to attack the latest Friedman column – who cares about the latest Friedman column, or the one before that, or the one before that? Rather, it is to borrow a phrase from his book that struck me at the time. Friedman coined the phrase ‘golden strait-jacket’ to refer to the ‘de-politicizing’ of economic decisions. By de-politicizing, he really means the segregating of political decisions from the will of the people, as evidenced in elections and other such Christmas ornaments. . Not that Friedman was opposed to democracy, now – he loved the use of democratization. For him, day trading ‘democratizes’ the stock market. In fact, any popular consumerist fad immediately gets the “democratizing” label from Friedman, who’d like the producers of wealth to confine their politics to the consumption of brands. Meanwhile, the smart guys in the room, in Treasury, the Fed, and the board rooms of the great and good banks, make all the macro economic decisions for us. Cause they have the models, you see.

Since Friedman’s paen to the end of the business cycle, we’ve had – the business cycle. The first one whipped the butt of NASDAQ, and the second one whipped the butt of about every American corporation, including the business of shopping malls, from which Friedman’s wife, and Friedman, derived their considerable wealth.

And yet, the golden strait-jacket survives and flourishes. Its biggest fan is the President. And its effects are strewn across the Great Recession. What other democratic society would look at the destruction of the wealth of the middle class – the destruction of 12 trillion dollars in their assets – and decide to loan, at less than one percent, 16 trillion dollars to the investor class? The answer is no democracy would do that. For that, we need a golden straight jacket.

It has taken some time, but the rest of the populace, it now appears, understands that golden strait jackets are really made of another material – one excreted, I believe, by mammals.

And so, as the golden straitjacket evolved, so did the bullet proof golf shirt. Via a fascinating article on couture for the plutocrats in the New Yorker by David Owen, it appears that Colombians, after having to undergo the violent wars of the 80s and 90s that pitted a pathological guerilla left against a pathological paramilitary right and both against a pathological network of cocaine cartels, have emerged from that din and casualty count with some innovative ideas about safety. Just as Big Pharma learned from the dime drug dealer how to market its anti-depressants and other various pills, so, too, from the world of kidnapping and drive-bys has emerged a cottage industry for protecting the plutocratic gut from the hollow tipped bullet.

The man the article centers on is a designer named Manuel Cabellero, who demonstrates his product by shooting the visitor: “the founder and chief executive of a company that makes "specialized personal protection," and when he shot me I was wearing one of his products, a black suede jacket with lightweight bulletproof panels in the lining. The company, which is called Miguel Caballero, makes fashion-oriented body armor, and sells it mainly to executives, celebrities, political figures, and others who have security concerns but don't want to dress like members of a SWAT team.

Popular items include a three-button blazer, a V-necked wool sweater, a Nehru vest (for customers in the subcontinent and, conceivably, for anxious idolizers of Sammy Davis, Jr.), and a polo shirt, which, because of its extra bulk, may usefully promote a compact golf swing. Caballero also makes bulletproof camouflaged hunting clothes, to protect hunters from misdirected shots fired by their companions--an eventuality that he referred to as "a Dick Cheney accident."

Are we all seeing ‘growth industry” here? We should be. As from the American ashes there begins to grow an American third world culture, I do not think the plutocrats are going to be able to do without the third world billionaire’s accessories, among which are the four car squadron (which I have seen, negotiating the streets of Mexico City), the bodyguards and bodyguards of bodyguards (the latter selected to stop the first line of bodyguard if, as it sometimes turns out, the first line gets the idea to kidnap the body they are guarding) and the appropriate security procedures. The age of the golden bulletproof polo shirt is definitely here.

“When he started making bulletproof garments, nineteen years ago, his customers were almost exclusively Colombian--a reflection both of the small scale of his original enterprise and of the turmoil in the country at the time. Today, ninety-eight per cent of his production is for export. He has dealers in two dozen countries and customers in more than fifty, and he has a retail boutique in Harrods, where some of his golf shirts sell for the equivalent of about twelve thousand dollars.”

Twelve thousand dollars is a significant sum. How significant? According to a recent probe into the underbelly of the wondrous neo-liberal age prophecied by Tom Friedman: From Andy Kroll in Tom's Dispatch

“According to Census data, between 2009 and 2010 alone the black poverty rate jumped from 25% to 27%. For Hispanics, it climbed from 25% to 26%, and for whites, from 9.4% to 9.9%. At 16.4 million, more children now live in poverty than at any time since 1962. Put another way, 22% of kids currently live below the poverty line, a 17-year record.

America’s lost decade also did a remarkable job of destroying the wealth of nonwhite families, the Pew Research Center reported in July. Between 2005 and 2009, the household wealth of a typical black family dropped off a cliff, plunging by a whopping 53%; for a typical Hispanic family, it was even worse, at 66%. For white middle-class households, losses on average totaled “only” 16%.
Here's a more eye-opening way to look at it: in 2009, the median wealth for a white family was $113,149, for a black family $5,677, and for a Hispanic family $6,325. The second half of the lost decade, in other words, laid ruin to whatever wealth was possessed by blacks and Hispanics -- largely home ownership devastated by the popping of the housing bubble.”

So, we can evaluate the golf shirt as double the wealth of a median Hispanic family. Fun, eh?

“I had heard that President Obama, during his Inauguration, wore clothing made by Caballero. Neither Ballesteros nor Caballero would say anything about that, but they did tell me that the company's customers include King Abdullah II of Jordan, the Prince of Asturias, a Thai princess, and the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Panama, and Malaysia.”