Tragedy of the Commons

Attending the left forum this year was a fine if exhausting time (The Pace University building’s design strategy of putting windows in the hallways but not the classrooms reminded me once again that I don’t understand modern architecture). The panels were numerous and varied, a high proportion sounded interesting, and the tiny proportion I attended were excellent. Read reports by more famous bloggers Louis Proyect and Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb (who was also a speaker) here, here, and here. Doug Henwood’s talk is here, and a response here. Rather than give a report on every panel, I only want to concentrate on one basic theme, though one that has many twists and turns.

Which is, observations/predictions of the future of American (and more generally ‘Western’) ideology. Depending on who you ask, the end of neoliberalism will inevitably occur when the zombie march of bank bailouts and credit-fueled military adventures encounters its absolute limit with the collapse of the U.S. domestic economy (I am more skeptical). But whether or not neoliberalism as a more or less coherent strategy and set of policies is finished, the ideology of free market evangelism with the U.S. military as security hegemon is certainly ‘bankrupt,’ even in the most conservative press. What will replace it? This is implicitly also a question of what will be the new dynamic sector of the ‘global’ economy.

Let’s go with green technology and green jobs, just because it appears to be the only sane choice. Iain Boal reminded us that not even objective necessity necessarily guarantees anything: Obama’s energy secretary Steven Chu is pitching the environmental crisis as an engineering problem to be solved in large part by heavy investment in synthetic biology and biofuels — which unfortunately seem to be an unconvincing proposition for Wall Street, driving a number of the biofuel distilleries into bankruptcy. Nuclear would seem to be the most economically feasible option at this point at the rate politicians keep cautiously talking it up. But while solar power doesn’t seem to be doing much better than biofuel, neither does nuclear (let’s just not bring up coal). One is inevitably reminded of Carter’s failed attempt at an eco-revolution in the ’70s…and then one must think about something else.

So let’s say the socialists are right, and freedom doesn’t work. Say someone at the top finally figures that out, or is forced to from below, and we get our Green New Deal. Where’s the other shoe? Seymour was part of a panel on market ideology’s better half: human rights (here‘s one of his many posts on the subject). Historian Samuel Moyn argued that key components missing from human rights (and present in Enlightenment formulations of natural/universal rights) are those that involve social and economic rights, and strong support for the political right of self-determination — by the 1970s, any pretense of these older concerns had fallen away, a development coinciding with the rise of ‘free market,’ dollar-regime-driven neoliberalism. He described human rights as a form of Victorian philanthropic ideology, a sort of ‘realism’ which functions to deny the possibility of any solution to mass suffering beyond charity while justifying violent military intervention as needed.  During the Q&A,  someone asked if a much-speculated-upon shift to realpolitik would negate future Clinton-style humanitarian intervention. The answer that this is the script that typically follows the period of adventurist ‘idealism’ — “we tried to give them freedom, but clearly all they’re capable of is stability” — seems convincing enough. Human rights should not be understood as the basis for policy. Though it sometimes returns as blowback (i.e. Guantanamo and the Gaza strip) the framework seems vague enough to remain nonbinding, regardless of how aggressive the state is in using it as a pretext for war.

The construction of this emerging narrative, centering around a global reduction of aspiration, seems basically to involve the throwing up of ghosts of the past in the hopes that something will stick. From where I’m sitting, they focus around three major genres: the 1930s (depression, FDR as iconic patriarch and healer of class conflict), the 1970s (energy crisis, green whatnot) and finally the 1890s. The flipside to Victorian philanthropy is Victorian imperial administration, as (self-consciously) personified by Robert Kagan in this recent piece. Here he is reading the ruling class its horoscope:

“Realist” is now a mark of respect, “neocon” a term of derision. The Vietnam analogy has vanquished that of Munich. Thomas Hobbes, who extolled the moral benefits of fear and saw anarchy as the chief threat to society, has elbowed out Isaiah Berlin as the philosopher of the present cycle. The focus now is less on universal ideals than particular distinctions, from ethnicity to culture to religion. Those who pointed this out a decade ago were sneered at for being “fatalists” or “determinists.” Now they are applauded as “pragmatists.” And this is the key insight of the past two decades—that there are worse things in the world than extreme tyranny, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. I say this having supported the war.

So now, chastened, we have all become realists. Or so we believe. But realism is about more than merely opposing a war in Iraq that we know from hindsight turned out badly. Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom?

And then comes the form of this harsh, purifying knowledge, the new science of society:

And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.

Bureaucratic and economic networks alike find their real ontological ground in the ground itself. The most natural of social sciences provides a new language of globalization, a new way to bypass the claims of rogue and ‘failed’ states. Kagan renders computer and even trade networks phobic. Always open to contamination by nuclear arms, terrorist hate, and uncontrolled populations against which the epidermal layer of national boundaries becomes less and less effective, the world is in need of a new kind of policing for which he will supply the transcendental logic. He counterposes his geographic/strategic realism to liberal humanism and universalism, slyly relying on its homnymy with economic liberalism, the very thing it was supposed to moderate, to bury economic reason even more deeply within the unconscious.

At the same time as it is political realism, we can also call Kagan’s positon the extreme right wing of the new environmental movement: the uninhibited revival of Malthus and MacKinder, the elimination of history in favor of directly using terrain and resource control as a way of controlling political ‘realities.’ As long as we don’t forget the role a certain kind of liberal environmentalism plays in legitimizing its right wing counterpart, keeping both in play for actual decision makers to employ whenever it suits them. The last generation included figures like Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich and Garrett “Tragedy of the Commons” Hardin. The key feature of this group is not so much the metaphysical Malthusian assumptions about fixed population growth rates and absolute ‘carrying capacity’ (though those are, amazingly, a recurring problem), but the idea that nature contains social laws we are obligated first to discover and then abide by. My suspicion is that Jared Diamond is the new chief spokesperson, but I haven’t read enough to say much more than that.

Again though, what someone like Kagan offers to the world’s bosses is not a set of rules to follow or ideal solutions to implement, but something more like freedom of movement — ideological flexibility.

Regardless of how the economic crisis is solved, or even if it’s not, it seems to me hopelessly naive at this point to think that a good solution will be arrived at through right argument. A proposal along these lines is just a potential tool with a certain set of use-values. The more easily it can travel, the more comprehensive it is, the more easily it lends itself to use by the most powerful as ideology. Doug Henwood and David Harvey’s hand waves toward “creeping socialism” at the conference, where alternatives to capitalist institutions are designed and employed at the local level, more or less gradually displacing existing structures — coupled with occasional campaigns to shift policy in more favorable directions — still seems like the most effective way to build the base that everyone on the left knows we don’t have. Without the capacity to realize them ourselves, all our great ideas are just fodder for the open source think tank.

Fear and Trembling vs. Laughter and Forgetting

Recent outrages:

In yesterday’s news, Zero Hedge (via naked capitalism) with a report from “trader Lou”:

During Jan/Feb AIG would call up and just ask for complete unwind prices from the credit desk in the relevant jurisdiction. These were not single deal unwinds as are typically more price transparent – these were whole portfolio unwinds. The size of these unwinds were enormous, the quotes I have heard were “we have never done as big or as profitable trades – ever“.

As these trades are unwound, the correlation desk needs to unwind the single name risk through the single name desks – effectively the AIG-FP unwinds caused massive single name protection buying. This caused single name credit to massively underperform equities – run a chart from say last September to current of say S&P 500 and Itraxx – credit has underperformed massively. This is largely due to AIG-FP unwinds.

I can only guess/extrapolate what sort of PnL this put into the major global banks (both correlation and single names desks) during this period. Allowing for significant reserve release and trade PnL, I think for the big correlation players this could have easily been US$1-2bn per bank in this period.“

For those to whom this is merely a lot of mumbo-jumbo, let me explain in layman’s terms:

AIG, knowing it would need to ask for much more capital from the Treasury imminently, decided to throw in the towel, and gifted major bank counter-parties with trades which were egregiously profitable to the banks, and even more egregiously money losing to the U.S. taxpayers, who had to dump more and more cash into AIG, without having the U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner disclose the real extent of this, for lack of a better word, fraudulent scam.

In simple terms think of it as an auto dealer, which knows that U.S. taxpayers will provide for an infinite amount of money to fund its ongoing sales of horrendous vehicles (think Pontiac Azteks): the company decides to sell all the cars currently in contract, to lessors at far below the amortized market value, thereby generating huge profits for these lessors, as these turn around and sell the cars at a major profit, funded exclusively by U.S. taxpayers (readers should feel free to provide more gripping allegories).

What this all means is that the statements by major banks, i.e. JPM, Citi, and BofA, regarding abnormal profitability in January and February were true, however these profits were 1) one-time in nature due to wholesale unwinds of AIG portfolios, 2) entirely at the expense of AIG, and thus taxpayers, 3) executed with Tim Geithner’s (and thus the administration’s) full knowledge and intent, 4) were basically a transfer of money from taxpayers to banks (in yet another form) using AIG as an intermediary.

Further down the page, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA, the only real supervisor of the over-the-counter CDS market) is allowing fiction to rule once again.

That this and inevitable further ‘unwinds’ chased by taxpayer money can be explained away as ‘normal’ fluctuations in a turbulent market or the natural and obvious result of misguided government policy is a testament to the strength of recently outdated ideologies, the natural theology of the market and the atomization of choice. Their intellectual support is gone, but they linger as blinders, assumptions too well ingrained to be conscious. In the benighted universe they project, society becomes more of a wargame the further one travels from the site of middle class domesticity, more a bunch of pieces scattered arbitrarily around a board, unreadable to one another and bent on increasing their individual score, whatever the cost. One is too polite even to guess at what goes on behind closed doors.

In order to manage the first glimmerings of the awareness of teamwork, and its application to understanding social reality, official discourse must add a few enhancements.

MR. GREGORY:  I want to turn to the issue of anger on Wall Street and those AIG bonuses.  The president said a couple of weeks ago this:

(Videotape, March 18, 2009)

PRES. OBAMA:  I don’t want to quell anger.  I think people are right to be angry.  I’m angry.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  You shared–you said in a letter, you shared the president’s outrage, and yet the reality is that these bonuses first came to light back in October of 2008.  You were still at the New York Fed.  They were also the subject of hundreds of e-mails between Treasury and the Fed and AIG during the transition and when you came into office.  In fact, the Treasury Department even negotiated with Senator Dodd with regard to executive compensation when the Treasury Department said, “No, no, don’t have this deal with retroactive bonuses.  We can’t abrogate those contracts.” So if you were so outraged about all of this, why didn’t you deal with this back when these first came up?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  David, how could people not be angry with this?  With the challenges we’re facing now as a country in part because of risks our financial sector took on, how could people not be angry?  But our obligation and our deep obligation responsibility is, again, to try to fix this problem so that the trauma in the financial system is not causing more damage to the lives and fortunes of Americans and businesses across the country.  That’s the most important thing we do.  Everything we do has to be judged by the test of whether we’re getting the economy going again and recover…

MR. GREGORY:  Well, and that’s all fair.  But if you were so outraged, why didn’t you say that then?  Instead, you said, “I was outraged and we should try to get this money back.” The government knew about these bonuses several months ago.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Look, we had no good choices in that context, David.  These were contracts written before the government got involved, before Ed Liddy became CEO of AIG.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  We’re a nation of laws.  We cannot get the economy going again if there’s an expectation the government’s going to come in and break contracts.  Just not a tenable thing to do.  But what we did is–and we had no good choices, David–was when, when I was informed about the details of those provisions, we moved very quickly to ask that they–those that could be renegotiated get renegotiated, the government get those–or reduce those payments going forward.  And we’re going to use the authority we have to go recoup those payments where we have a good legal basis for doing that.  And you’ve already–we’re seeing a lot of those payments returned.  But the important thing is going forward that we establish clear conditions, clear rules of the game, prevent this kind of compensation practice in the future from coming back and putting our system at risk.  And we want to make sure that where the government is putting up assistance for these, for these banks, that that assistance is going to get lending going again…

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  …not to enrich the people that helped get us in this mess.

MR. GREGORY:  But, but my question is, is this:  If you thought this was so outrageous at the time, why didn’t you put this on the agenda then?  And if you felt that you didn’t have any good choices, that you really couldn’t dissolve those contracts, then when it came to light, why didn’t you and the president stand up and say, “This populist anger is understandable, but you have to understand it has to be put in context and it has to stop”?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Well, that–but that’s what the president did say.  And again, we’re trying to make sure that people understand…

MR. GREGORY:  The president said, “We shouldn’t govern in anger,” and then he said, “Yes, I’m angry, too.  I don’t want to quell the anger.” You said this was outrageous.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  But…

MR. GREGORY:  Did anybody stand up and say, “Let’s put this in context.  We didn’t have good choices.  This is not worth getting so upset about”?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  But, but, as you’ve seen the president say over the course of the week, the most important thing is we recognize that of course we don’t want to reward failure and we don’t want the government assistance going to reward failure, but we need to make sure we get this economy on–back on track.  That’s going to require the financial system getting fixed and repaired.  Of course we’re going to put strong conditions on the compensation…(unintelligible).  Remember, the first–the second week in office, the president put out very, very broad, ambitious standards on compensation practice.  That was before the Congress acted.  He was a–took early initiative in this area because we knew this was going to be a significant problem.

We’re angry too. Because, again, the primary fault here is to be a moral one, to be directed at individuals who made bad choices, who retain unfair benefits like the AIG chiefs, at allegedly individual rackets like Madoff’s, and finally at a ‘system’ that is morally compromised as a whole because of it. Obama and Geithner understand the cleansing effect of punishment, but also the mature public’s capacity for realism. A realism born of forgiveness, born of the public acknowledgement of personal sin. Progressives also get mad. But we will watch the chastisement and humiliation of a powerful few, and the mature assurances of accountability by our newly elected officials, with the knowledge that our punishment will be quieter, better distributed, longer lasting. For progressives also live off credit. And on this basis we will come to a reconciliation. We can all be forgiven. We are a nation of laws.

Earlier:

(GEITHNER:) Now, just, just one more thing.  We’re not going to get through this unless we get a–willing to take risk again.  You know, the financials took too much risk.  The great danger for us now is they’re going to take too little risk, they’re not going to take a chance on a viable business or a family that wants to put their kids through college.  So we need to get them working with us in this context.  And of course, for them to take risk they’re going to need to have more confidence about what the rules of the game are going forward, that there’s clarity about conditions and they don’t face the risk of great uncertainty about those conditions going forward.

MR. GREGORY:  And to that point, are you this morning providing a guarantee to those investors that the rules of the games will not change?  If they make money in these transactions, that Congress won’t try to go get their gains and change the rules?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  We have to do that or they won’t come.  And it’s a simple proposition.  Again, for these, all these programs to work, all these programs to work…

MR. GREGORY:  So the rules of this, of this program won’t change?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  No, they cannot change.

Laws. And meanwhile the possibility that the rules could really change passes us by, until one day we’ll look back on it as a childhood dream, magically absorbed into the same dream that brought us a black president:

The problem with the Geithner plan, as with all other varieties of bailout largesse, is that it depletes our limited resources with no particular likelihood of success. I would ask everyone to consider what our situation will be if the dollar spigot is exhausted before the financial system is back in approximate working order. My candidate adjective: dire.

The alternative continues to be the same: invest public money in a good, new public bank. Make sure the economy has a working, well-capitalized, unencumbered financial infrastructure; then, if you want, sort through the legacy institutions and assets.

— Peter Dorman at EconoSpeak

The truth appears as if behind a television screen, a bit of untranslatable common sense. But this simple truth that politicians and wall street are in bed with one another, popular and on the tips of all tongues, has a real referent, and there’s no use pretending this isn’t it. When a former IMF chief economist describes the handling of the financial crisis as “late night, back-room dealing, pure and simple” and (in the final paragraph) all but calls for revolution, it’s clearer than clear our troubles have come home.

What I Keep SAYING

Greenwald on one of my favorite talking points:

Our political class has trained so many citizens not only to tolerate, but to endorse, cowardly behavior on the part of their political leaders.  When politicians take bad positions, ones that are opposed by large numbers of their supporters, it is not only the politicians, but also huge numbers of their supporters, who step forward to offer excuses and justifications:  well, they have to take that position because it’s too politically risky not to; they have no choice and it’s the smart thing to do. That’s the excuse one heard for years as Democrats meekly acquiesced to or actively supported virtually every extremist Bush policy from the attack on Iraq to torture and warrantless eavesdropping; it’s the excuse which even progressives offer for why their political leaders won’t advocate for marriage equality or defense spending cuts; and it’s the same excuse one hears now to justify virtually every Obama “disappointment.”

…

We’ve been trained how we talk about our political leaders primarily by a media that worships political cynicism and can only understand the world through political game-playing.  Thus, so many Americans have been taught to believe not only that politicians shouldn’t have the obligation of leadership imposed on them — i.e., to persuade the public of what is right — but that it’s actually smart and wise of them to avoid positions they believe in when doing so is politically risky.

People love now to assume the role of super-sophisticated political consultant rather than a citizen demanding actions from their representatives.  Due to the prism of gamesmanship through which political pundits understand and discuss politics, many citizens have learned to talk about their political leaders as though they’re political strategists advising their clients as to the politically shrewd steps that should be taken (“this law is awful and unjust and he was being craven by voting for it, but he was absolutely right to vote for it because the public wouldn’t understand if he opposed it”), rather than as citizens demanding that their public servants do the right thing (“this law is awful and unjust and, for that reason alone, he should oppose it and show leadership by making the case to the public as to why it’s awful and unjust”).

…

In fact, the more citizens are willing to excuse and even urge political cowardice in the name of “realism” or “pragmatism” (“he was smart to take this bad, unjust position because Americans are too stupid or primitive for him to do otherwise and he needs to be re-elected”), the more common that behavior will be.

I should add another rule to how to watch the news:

You Are Not A Political Strategist Unless You’re Getting Paid For It (in which case let me politely ask you to quit).

Tell Me If You’ve Seen This One

I mean I know you already have, but still:

Greenwald:

Identically, The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius actually praised the media’s failure to object to pre-war Bush lies as a reflection of what Ignatius said is the media’s supreme “professionalism”:

In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn’t create a debate on our own. And because major news organizations knew the war was coming, we spent a lot of energy in the last three months before the war preparing to cover it.

It’s fine to praise Jon Stewart for the great interview he conducted and to mock and scoff at Jim Cramer and CNBC.  That’s absolutely warranted.  But just as was true for Judy Miller (and her still-celebrated cohort, Michael Gordon), Jim Cramer isn’t an aberration.  What he did and the excuses he offered are ones that are embraced as gospel to this day by most of our establishment press corps, and to know that this is true, just look at what they do and say about their roles.  But at least Cramer wants to appear to be contrite for the complicit role he played in disseminating incredibly destructive and false claims from the politically powerful.  That stands in stark contrast to David Gregory, Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams, David Ignatius and most of their friends, who continue to be defiantly and pompously proud of the exact same role they play.

On Nonviolence

Came across this old thing from John Berger a few days ago. Characteristically sharp. The whole thing is great (and short), but this bit stayed with me:

It is in the nature of a demonstration to provoke violence upon itself. Its provocation may also be violent. But in the end it is bound to suffer more than it inflicts. This is a tactical truth and an historical one. The historical role of demonstrations is to show the injustice, cruelty, irrationality of the existing State authority. Demonstrations are protests of innocence.

But the innocence is of two kinds, which can only be treated as though they were one at a symbolic level. For the purposes of political analysis and the planning of revolutionary action, they must be separated. There is an innocence to be defended and an innocence which must finally be lost: an innocence which derives from justice, and an innocence which is the consequence of a lack of experience.

Events in Greece, Iceland, Paris (this is good analysis on Iceland) bring back the question of violence for a predominantly nonviolent U.S. activist culture. But this can only feel like an unprecedented challenge if one forgets Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq — and this is just a few currently active sites — all involve popular armed struggle against violent occupation. If there is a widespread attitude that oppositional politics in the ‘first world’ West have a special mandate not to be violent, whether this is conceived in moral or pragmatic terms, then the U.S. is its center. With ‘unrest’ in Europe, which attacks property, which occasionally throws things at police, a set of class, racial, and cultural distinctions has at least been frayed. Governments seem to be capitalizing on the specter of more serious violence in order to establish the uprisings as ‘riots’ and justify preemptive suppression. They even go so far as to incite violence against themselves. All established practice in the U.S. The most convincing rationale for nonviolence is that the state wants it; violence from any side makes it stronger.

It’s difficult, however, to see how this situation could be permanent. Police and nonviolent demonstrators maintain a precarious equilibrium — the demonstrators reject all violence against people and most against property; the police threaten absolute and crushing violence if any of those edicts are bent. More and more often, the police cross the line at the barest provocation. And if demonstrators never crossed the line, they wouldn’t amount to much more than a parade group, celebrating their right to exist and thereby legitimating their permissive, enlightened government. There are all sorts of good practical reasons for a general policy of nonviolence for activists in most Western nations and many others. But they come down to the ideological fact that violence is morally unacceptable to ‘mainstream liberals’ — whoever they are — and can be relied upon to instantly discredit anyone who uses it without the permission of the state.  Violence can’t ‘work’ in this climate — even to otherwise sympathetic parties it always appears as an excess or at best a mistake.

Zizek’s distinction (warning: extreme bullshit) between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ violence is rephrased in all its essentials by the Joker in The Dark Knight: ‘objective’ violence is “all part of the plan,” ‘subjective’ violence is noticed, identified, attributed to specific agents and subjected to legal and ethical judgment.  But their oft-cited separation is precisely the ideological effect of mass media, not a ‘rigorous’ analytic tool; that most of us in the hypermediated first world get stuck experiencing ‘the system’ and its consequences as ‘ontologically’ distinct phenomena we struggle vainly to establish a relationship between is a symptom of our subjection.

The mainstream PR version of the move to suck everyone into an equivalent sense of ‘responsibility’ for the planet encourages identification with ‘the system,’ bad or good. Solutions then fall neatly within established boundaries, generally involving lots of self-abnegation, the advertising of ‘awareness,’ and the beefing up of NGOs. Its structural ally, often deployed by capitalists (and which Zizek chides ‘terrorists’ for in the video), defers all individual responsibility to ‘the system,’ and reads individual actions as inevitable consequences of ‘the economy’ or ‘heavy pressure from private interests and stakeholders.’ Both rely on the appropriation of the reified product of theoretical activity, the hard-won complexity of its limited, incomplete understanding of the world reduced to an image on a T-shirt. Thus the capitalist elect can avoid accountability and the seizure of their power by invoking ‘socialist’ arguments.

A universal refusal of violence has a debilitating effect on our ability to judge non-Western or even simply non-bourgeois oppositional activity in an adult way, and supplies ideologists with an easy weapon. But this problem is it itself an ideologeme — to try to discern whether it’s ‘really true’ is the question of whether to legitimate it. Attempts by leftist philosophers to theorize more appropriate universal attitudes toward violence — what I can only understand as attempts to integrate recent popular violence into some sort of spiritual substitute for an official Left party policy that doesn’t and can’t currently exist — seem, whatever their position, beside the point and even counterproductive. The proper role of a ‘utopian’ ethics in a structurally unjust class society seems an insoluble problem from within the undemocratic models of academic philosophy, even more obviously so from within the mass media debating societies that on occasion serve as theoria‘s sanctioned parody.

How to watch the news

1. Nobody believes in ‘neoliberal ideology,’ including the the neoliberals themselves.

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2. ‘Smart’ = conformist (via Alex)

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3. Obama exists to sell you two things. The first is the socialization of loss.

4. The second is the spectacular suppression of spectacular atrocity (Guantanamo) as legitimation for a renewed commitment to structural atrocity (American exceptionalism).

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5. Human rights and the associated interventionist politics of the ’90s boom years are too expensive for the new green globalism. Which is more humanitarian anyway, statistically speaking.

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6. The expansion of morality is both a reaction to credit failure and the utopian expression of the green energy bubble. This development itself can be used for ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ but like other bubbles, will eventually burst.

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7. Crisis is the only justification capitalism has left.

Special Guest Post From Rod Bogdanižinsky

Obamaniac Radmatism (With a Double Shot of Espresso)

Hi. The other day, while skimming the latest online edition of my favorite liberal newspaper in the organic free-trade coffee shop across the street from my apartment, I came across a news item that made me shoot cappuccino out my nose, drenching my laptop screen in hot, dark liquid. While wiping it off, I accidentally closed the browser. By the time I regained an unobstructed view of my desktop, I had no way of recovering the contents of the page, which by then I had of course forgotten. Is this not the perfect metaphor for the Obama inauguration, broadcast on the high-definition television directly to my left at top volume?

The plain message of Obama’s heroic rhetoric during the inauguration speech reveals a fundamental shift in American political discourse; rather than offer the all-encompassing promise of Hope and Change (reminding us in fact of the opposite, politics as usual), he delivered a series of moral imperatives: ‘Work!’ ‘Green!’ ‘Service!’ ‘Responsibility!’ Hear that, America? See it? It’s coming. It’s here! We’re finally getting a glimpse of what Change looks like ‘on the ground.’ It’s a new way of doing business.

The temptation for the left is to dismiss Obama’s call to action as yet another empty liberal platitude. But are we not already drowning in hot, dark liquid? And when immersed in the collective struggle for breath, does not every brick resemble a life preserver?

When every paper in the country reinforces Obama’s message of service, comparing him again and again to FDR, and so on, we should forget our cynicism and radically accept these slogans as the truths of this historic event (in the Badiouian sense). George W. Bush is now being classed as a ‘radical,’ as a totalitarian ruler who ‘bent the facts to fit his ideology.’ Liberal enthusiasm for Obama, meanwhile, is usually attributed to his non-ideological, ‘pragmatic’ attitude regarding our economic and ecological crises, that he will ‘restore science to its place of honor’ and so on. But is this not precisely the reverse of the authentic situation? Obama has told us nothing about the facts of global warming (which after all are still challenged in the world of science) or the financial system (which his cabinet was involved in creating), he’s hotwired himself directly into the cockpit of America’s political soul. Let’s call it: Radmatic!

4 Noble Truths of Radmatism:

1) Get organized

2) Stay cool

3) Don’t tell it like it is, tell it like you mean it

4) Waiting kills

What this means is a new America. The old America, scared, distrustful, apathetic, is literally [the day before — Ed.] yesterday’s news. And don’t even start with how it’s because Obama’s been canonized or whatever. Such statements are merely an establishment ploy to tie his hands in advance! What he’s done is he’s gone rogue. He’s not Superman, he’s Batman. Though he looks like Bruce Wayne. He’s not David Palmer, he’s Jack Bauer. Though he looks like Kiefer Sutherland.

Obama’s war for America has climaxed in a dialectical reversal worthy of that great master of political jiu-jutsu, Vladimir Lenin (historians can say what they want about him, the man got things done). For does not this equally unlikely leader, also reviled by opponents as a ‘populist’ and a ‘totalitarian dictator,’ also abandon his throne, ‘sleeves rolled up,’ not to hear our petitions, but to petition us, from beyond the grave? To “reorganize our machinery of state,”  to “drastically reorganize,” to enact “educational work among the peasants” — precisely to stage a “cultural revolution?”  You bet your parachute he does.

Yes, Obama’s a president with an unprecedented ‘mandate for change,’ but it’s true: we did it. Let’s think carefully about what this means. If he creates green jobs, then we did it first. If he screws things up with Israel, we screwed them first. If he gives the banking system another bailout and then stops paying attention, that’s our monetized desire flowing from where he was. And if he forgets things sometimes, well, fill in the blank. We’re the change we wanted to see in the world. And no one else.

No, for the first time in a long time, we are the ones in charge. For too long, the world was strapped to the hood of a spaceship no one was driving. But you know what? The steering wheel’s been jammed into our hands. And we can’t let go! In Obama’s words: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” Welcome to Supercapitalism, America. If you do it hard enough, no one’s gonna ask to see your license.

the new moral seriousness

The moment when the twin stars of consumerism and Christianity converge seems the proper time to reflect on the intensified assault, building for years now but perhaps peaking in this one, on the conscience of the American consumer.

From the mortgage crisis and its mutant offspring to global warming, the consumer (sometimes universalized with phrases like ‘our culture of excess’ or some such) is painted as the ultimate bearer of responsibility, a PR campaign masquerading as empowerment. The notorious Time cover from 2006 managed to contain differences in class, consumer demographics, and less directly, the difference between politics and shopping, in the reflective image of a computer screen that then erased them with the anonymous Time reader’s own concerned face. From the slightly Orwellian consolation following Your replacement by Vladimir Putin in ’07: “It’s still Your world, after all. They just pretend to run it.”

This year, a series of crises has been presented to audiences in the old fashioned way, via a colorful cast of characters who are supposed to be exaggerated versions of ourselves, personifications of our sins, products of our actions. There’s the greedy Wall Street trader, heroic grassroots President-Elect, and, riding off into the sunset, the symbol of ‘our’ confusion made flesh, the Great Fly himself, enabling a clean break with the past through his obvious inadequacy not only before the future Commander-in-Chief but next to his whole awe-inspiring list of ‘failures’ as well. Given the reams of academic and popular criticism leveled at televised politics, a point I don’t see often is that the significance of these characters rests on an underlying sense of community, and it is probably this imaginary ‘connection’ between spectator and ideal object that gives even the most shocking media events their aura of rightness and inevitability. ‘Humanizing’ someone on television only makes them superhuman; subjection to  masters and idols is taught at the same time and in the same way as complicity with their ‘excesses.’ Who says gods don’t walk the earth?

Though you will never hear anyone famous say this, blaming consumer capitalism on the consumer is like blaming industrial capitalism on the factory worker. Strong, independent people (in their capacity as pundits) don’t admit things like this. In our capacity as shoppers we are forced by marketers, monotheists, activists, and psychoanalysts to acknowledge that all our habits have meaning. Strong, independent people don’t allow that meaning to belong to others. ‘Our choices must reflect our values.’ The conscious consumer of today purchases organic produce, locally grown if possible, eats little to no meat, rides bicycles or takes the bus instead of driving her hybrid, practices energy conservation, avoids clothing manufactured in sweatshops, donates to nonprofits, crafts perfect counterarguments to TV news according to blogs, checks the reviews for movies before (or instead of) going to see them, and reads serious literature. Immediately to her left is the raw vegan urban farmer who buys nothing and doesn’t shower, immediately to her right is the prototypical meat-eating liberal. As Joy Williams so elegantly put it back in 2000, “concern is the new consumerism.”

This is of course not politics but morality. Much like social welfare, environmental reform has largely been left to charity and individual choice, a policy that’s had about the same level of success. Against the worst predictions of global warming the individual absolutely cannot make a difference. Even significant groups of people buying some stuff instead of other stuff amounts to little more than changing the channel — if politicians and capitalists feel it’s necessary to make major alterations in the way they do business, they will, but they vastly prefer to direct popular will toward preselected compromises (hybrid cars, Barack Obama, socially critical superhero movies, etc.). It’s an illusion that choosing these ersatz solutions is progress, that it will somehow lead to future change. Progress is whatever forced the inadequate concession to even be presented. Our identities are indeed at stake in choosing between several bad options, but unfortunately the fate of the world is not.

But this is how we’re shown the world. TV news stories and the entertainment based on them are presented as so many allegories of shopping — whether in the form of the uncontrolled binge (mortgage crisis), or moral dilemmas where the complexities of each ‘choice’ between who to bomb and who to bail out are packaged as a compelling commodity, allowing for more efficient debate and betting on possible outcomes, the finished product a charming fable about ignorance, crisis, shame, and redemption that can be repeated forever. The philosopher’s question: what is morality when the dominant organization of social life is immoral, is answered in America with every scandal, talk show confession, the official response to every latest atrocity. American morality consists of retrospectively judging individuals based on how willing they were to act against their interests, or refuse to take advantage of their privileges, in light of some now obviously bad outcome. Call it ‘pragmatic Puritanism.’ In order to destroy their unions, the auto industry is labeled ‘corrupt’ because with full government support it suppressed green alternatives and refused to ‘modernize.’ That Wall Street is evil because its employees refused to regulate themselves, or refused to not pursue the best interests of their investors by any legal means, helps relativize the Treasury and Fed’s bank consolidation assistance program. And American consumers are evil because we buy what we’re sold. The worst sin of any individual in this situation is not greed but conformity, and attacks on this or that are so vicious because everyone knows it, and we know why, too.

Just a minute

I really am going to post here again.

Until then, keep watching the other hand.

“The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report [from Celent consulting] released on Thursday says…The report, much of which is based on U.S. Federal Reserve data, challenges a long list of assumptions one by one, arguing that there is indeed a financial crisis but that, on aggregate, the problems of a few are by no means those of the many when it comes to obtaining credit.”It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson’s remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead,” said the report.

Regarding U.S. business access to credit, the report says: Overall U.S. bank lending is at its highest level ever; U.S. commercial bank lending is at record highs and growing particularly fast since May 2007; Corporate bond issuance has declined but increased commercial lending has compensated for this; [Interbank] Lending hit its highest level ever in September 2008 and remained high in October and that overall interbank lending is up 22 percent; The cost of interbank lending…dropped to its lowest level ever in early November and remains at very low levels; [consumer credit] was at a record high in September; and local government bond issuance had continued at similar levels to those before the credit crisis, while bank lending for real estate reached a record level in October 2008, it says.”

What everyone seems too polite to point out is that this essentially makes Bernanke and Paulson (at least) criminally ‘negligent.’ It is at any rate clear that neither of these people, nor anyone associated with them and their policies, has the interests in mind of anyone you are statistically likely to care about.

(another incomplete history for the forgetful)

The Opacity of Hope

Saw this the other day (find the link to the whole video after the gap)

The best of the Obama-as-blank-screen readings — at once totally fascinating and symptomatic of a certain type of boomer leftist intellectual, the one driven to irrational exuberance over the contradiction between traditional origin myths and ‘radical breaks.’ The archetype Critchley summons to contain Obama is that of the empty postmodern hero, drained of all positive qualities, ‘open’ for being ultimately enigmatic, bearer of an essential mystery identified with his origin. Critchley invokes psychoanalysis to penetrate this mystery, using it to structure the more common fixations on the future president’s mixed race and international upbringing. Perhaps the most fascinating film versions of the postmodern man without qualities to come out of the ’70s (when his generation came into maturity) were aliens: the David Bowie character in Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) and Christopher Reeve’s Superman (1978). Both were updates of characters inherited from the ’50s — Klaatu and the George Reeves Superman. Subtracting the then-discredited rational paternalism magnified their strangeness, their aura of vulnerability and their capacity to reflect and transcend, through personal, moral suffering, the divisions of the Cold War society into which they had been thrust.

Right and left boomer critiques of Obama’s immense popularity tend to be carried out in the standard language of the belittling of Generation X, i.e. that his rhetoric is basically devoid of content, unoriginal, unpolitical, inauthentic, etc. This resistance partially stems from the fact that Obama defies readings based on identity or origin. Despite Critchley and others’ best efforts, not even the ambiguity of his racial politics can be fetishized in the usual way (as ‘oppositional,’ ‘transgressive,’ etc.), nor is he particularly convincing as a sex object, ‘alternative’ or otherwise. But he is also not, as Gen X heroes have tended to be (from the amoral ciphers of Bret Easton Ellis to Beavis and Butthead), aimless, apathetic, or nihilistic. What wins these critics over despite themselves, I think, is that as the first black president, Obama has actually realized the symbolic victory that American culture under Reagan and then the New World Order had dismissed as either impossible or irrelevant. He offers the opportunity to move on from battles over representation which a) seem to be all the American left has been capable of winning since the ’70s and b) seem to be carried out based on questionable assumptions about identity and identification that have nevertheless been protected from criticism due to their increasingly limited political utility. Obama’s election was not a victory over racial prejudice, but over an identity-based rhetoric of opposition. Though it’s been monopolized in mainstream politics by the Republicans, it has also been largely accepted by the Left as the only authentically political discourse. Reactions from this quarter have been accordingly ambivalent.

What sensible responses by people like Judith Butler(via) leave out, which exhort supporters to have their fun but be emotionally and practically ready for inevitable disappointment, is an analysis of how Obama’s rhetoric functions. They start from the assumption that his slogans are ’empty’ in the sense of being without content, and therefore not worth taking seriously. She is led to question her naive friends, but not the political assumptions she shares with them. It’s of course true that Obama relies on the same myths of ‘the American people,’ the overcoming of internal division, freedom, and inevitable sacrifice as just about every president before him. But, while the language of American presidential politics may not change, emphasis and strategic function do. So it’s important to understand these shifts, no matter how minute they may appear when written in books.

First we have to remember that every definition of ‘real’ Americans insists on their impatience with ideology and partisanship, a trait usually connected to good, honest work. Though the transcending of ideology despite/as intense nationalism is a feature of liberal ideology in general, what Habermas identified as “the Janus-face of the modern nation,” Americans seem especially invested in denying even its occasional suspension; any decline in the political capital of ‘natural unity’ always seems to coincide with a long and painful period of disillusionment. Recall that, despite their reputations, Bush and McCain both based their success on calls to unity: Bush’s “compassionate conservativism,” McCain’s “reaching across the aisle.” Indeed, they established their singularity precisely by touting consensus against partisanship — “uniter, not a divider” — another recurring feature of American political rhetoric. We find the distinctive qualities of American presidents in how they stage the reestablishment of continuity.

The following is from The Audacity of Hope, after Obama describes his ‘real America’ as those who “understand that politics today is a business and not a mission”:

“A government that truly represents these Americans — that truly serves these Americans — will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be prepackaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspect of our past. we will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.”

Despite the mix of assertions and provisions, Obama defines consensus negatively: it is not autonomous from the everyday (“will need to reflect our lives”), not a commodity (“prepackaged”), not ahistorical or historical in a purely aesthetic way (i.e. quoting the Founding Fathers and celebrating WWII), not given (“constructed”). Our national scene, lacking consensus, is figured as premodern (full of “tribal hatreds”). In the last line, the naturalness of community is reasserted; the work necessary to construct it is also the work of remembering the eternally true. Of these themes, repeated again and again in Obama’s speeches, the attention to history is probably where he most distinguishes himself from Bush, most strikingly in his settling of accounts with the ’60s.

“I’ve always felt a curious relationship to the sixties,” he writes, and he singles out the basic contradiction of the Democratic Party since Carter defined it as the party of social values. The movements of the ’60s were for social values against the political-economic values of American imperialism, capitalism, chauvinism, and racism, and were only really coherent in that context. Their ‘values’ did not mix well with reconciliation, no matter how many of their activists eventually did. The usual response is repression. Part of what makes Obama so exciting is what his race forces a president to admit about the last 50 years of American life. In his speeches, he reconstructs the ’60s as an exciting era of struggles against injustice, and in the book locates himself as its “product.” His distance from the civil rights movement (his youth, his upbringing abroad, his white mother) leads him to seek a separation of its culture from its politics. He is not a product of its ideology, not a bearer of ‘black identity’ as constructed by and through Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and their successors in the cultural sphere, but of the political struggles, defined in terms of their victories. In this way he subtly replaces the old ideology with a new one — his blackness is not a condmenation of America but its redemption, its ‘spirit’ authenticated in the fact of his election: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

There are two disciplines associated with the ’60s he rejects: economics and rhetoric. He is for a “dynamic free market” against the various radicals (including both Bush and environmentalists) and their oppositional, divisive politics even though he Feels Their Pain. Here is his reconciliation between right and left in the sphere of political economy, free market vs. social welfare:

“But our history should give us confidence that we don’t have to choose between an oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. It tells us that we can emerge from great economic upheavals stronger, not weaker. Like those who came before us, we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility. And we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately.
In other words, we should be guided by what works.”

The various threads in this argument coalesce in his characterization of Reagan. Reagan’s aggressive foreign and domestic policies and his divisive rhetoric only worked for a tiny elite. But they did work. The ideological success of Reaganism was not just that it defended a certain position, still less that it made good on its populist promises (quite the opposite), but that it used what Obama identifies as the New Left’s rhetoric of intense partisanship to change the field of American political discourse against the left: “the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he had written for them — a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites.” It’s not difficult to see in retrospect that the rewriting of political language and the marginalization in advance of his opponents has always been key to Obama’s strategy.

Idealized pragmatism allows the establishment of formal equivalence between right and left radicals, rejecting them together as “cynical.” Their real differences are politely bracketed — the Iraq war and the financial crisis join the collapse of communism as undeniable proofs of failed, impractical ideologies. The (obviously flawed) existing popular language with which to debate “socialism” vs. “capitalism,” or “free market” vs. “social welfare” has been swept aside, but their defenders are redeemed by shared American values, welcomed back into the fold. In this transitional period at least, when Obama’s policies are still unclear, his success in reframing American politics in strictly idealist terms — “idealism” against “cynicism” — is undeniable. His ability to turn the Iraq war and the finance crisis in his favor has closed off any attempt to analyze him in terms of existing theory; we critics are virtually locked into waiting patiently for the results.

We are now finally able to get at the truly unique aspect of Obama’s politics. Almost no one seems to recognize that he has already anticipated the most common criticism of him, that his rhetoric and even his person are ’empty’ and meaningless. The point of his slogans is not just that they remain open to different meanings, in the typical fashion of traditional advertising. They are open to different uses; they open outward, as a call to fill an empty signifier with concrete action (like contemporary advertising). Reid Kotlas of Planomenology is one of the few to get it right: “The republican criticism that Obama talks a lot about change, but doesn’t tell us what exactly this change is, is thus poorly aimed: it is by virtue of leaving the goal of this change open, by entrusting us with its realization, that Obama’s message is truly effective.” Critchley remains focused on the out-of-context “blank screen” quote. Also his “listlessness” which “generates in us a desire to love him,” but in a “restrained,” liberal sort of way. I think Grant Park proves this reading is at least incomplete. Obamamania was always just as fervent as Palin-mania, just without the threat of violence. Critchley’s psychoanalytic reading acknowledges the political valence of the ethical demand Obama makes on his supporters, restaging boring liberal compromise as potentially radical. “No one is exempt from the call to find common ground,” Obama asserts; to substitute mere words for action is “to relinquish our best selves.” But he pointedly declines to critique it. Critique, however, is necessary to understand that Obama’s rhetoric is directed at organizing, not just generating fantasy fodder.

His opacity, his refusal, we might say, to entirely identify with himself, instead offering his biography and campaign together as a kind of open-source “vehicle” for emotional and practical investment, is his most important political move. As Critchley does note, the prophetic plays a big role here. “Change we can believe in” is pure speculation, open to further speculation. If we have (as the pessimists say) been witnessing the steady deterioration of political discourse over the past however many years, then this would have to be its absolute nadir. And yet at the same time it spawned a massive popular mobilization. What Butler has to say about left disavowal should also be applied to Obama himself, with the proviso that his provoked the movement that got him elected while ours produced it: beyond liberalism’s politics of anti-politics, Obama, by visibly taking a step back from his own power, has inspired the masses to create their own anti-politics under his brand. His election is not his victory, it’s our victory — his win has nothing to do with his race, but our enlightened attitude toward race — he’s done everything shy of announcing that his office will not be in his power but in our power. We are not led to identify with him. We are led to identify our politics through him.

This is not to say that his supporters do not think, only that the campaign is (pragmatically) indifferent to any thoughts they might have which can’t be incorporated into the ‘movement.’

Doesn’t all the increasingly anxious speculation about Obama (this post included) have something to do with the fear that when he actually becomes president, something precious will have been lost? We already have intimations that this will be the case, though it’s impossible to tell exactly how the actual dynamics of his relationship with his activists will play out. Just as ironic distance fails to negate its real investments, the image of Change fails to negate its material function as an image, a commodity bought and paid for by Wall Street with the American people as (now) minority shareholders. If the image America just opted into is that of Future President Obama giving our politics back to us, then the Left, if there is still to be one apart from Team Change, has to ask itself: would this obviously compromised image be so appealing if the practical (anti-) politics it enabled were not ten times more radical than the most radical of ideologies?