Basic truths of the economic situation, cont.

In case you missed them:

Simon Johnson: The Quiet Coup (excerpt):

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent...

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand....

Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

In some ways, of course, the government has already taken control of the banking system. It has essentially guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their only plausible source of capital today. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the economy—the function that the private banking sector is supposed to be performing, but isn’t. Yet there are limits to what the Fed can do on its own; consumers and businesses are still dependent on banks that lack the balance sheets and the incentives to make the loans the economy needs, and the government has no real control over who runs the banks, or over what they do.

At the root of the banks’ problems are the large losses they have undoubtedly taken on their securities and loan portfolios. But they don’t want to recognize the full extent of their losses, because that would likely expose them as insolvent. So they talk down the problem, and ask for handouts that aren’t enough to make them healthy (again, they can’t reveal the size of the handouts that would be necessary for that), but are enough to keep them upright a little longer. This behavior is corrosive: unhealthy banks either don’t lend (hoarding money to shore up reserves) or they make desperate gambles on high-risk loans and investments that could pay off big, but probably won’t pay off at all. In either case, the economy suffers further, and as it does, bank assets themselves continue to deteriorate—creating a highly destructive vicious cycle.

To break this cycle, the government must force the banks to acknowledge the scale of their problems. As the IMF understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct way to do this is nationalization. Instead, Treasury is trying to negotiate bailouts bank by bank, and behaving as if the banks hold all the cards—contorting the terms of each deal to minimize government ownership while forswearing government influence over bank strategy or operations. Under these conditions, cleaning up bank balance sheets is impossible.

Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC “intervention” is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the problem so that it can be solved before it grows worse.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost close to $1.5trillion (or 10percent of our GDP) in the long term. But only decisive government action—exposing the full extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to publicly verifiable health—can cure the financial sector as a whole.

This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.

Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves impractical—since we’ll want to sell the banks quickly—they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.

This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation. Laws put in place more than 100years ago to combat industrial monopolies were not designed to address the problem we now face. The problem in the financial sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a small set of interconnected firms, by failing, can bring down the economy. The Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus evokes FDR, but what we need to imitate here is Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting...

Matt Taibbi: The Big Takeover (excerpt):

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers...

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

We'll see what Obama's team can accomplish while demurring on these fundamental problems. (We'll have to "hope" there might still be something of an institution left then even capable of Finance Industry-busting.)

UPDATE: And Thomas Geoghegan's article in this month's Harper's also essential reading (login: mchristie password: christie). He lays out the decades-long history of the financial sector's devastating rise to dominance, at the expense of manufacturing and labor, the middle class, wages, economic sustainability, something more like democracy, etc. He makes points Michael Moore would do well to understand a little better:

When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing. Sure, GM is awful. Sure, it doesn't innovate. But the people who could have saved GM and Ford went off to work at AIG, or Merrill Lynch, or even Goldman Sachs. All of this used to be so obvious as not to merit comment. What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it's just the banks.

Which is why the middle class is shrinking. Basically, we're all waiters now; we're bowing and scraping and working for the banks. Look closely at any American, and it's even odds that he or she, directly or indirectly, is somehow employed by the "financial services sector," which covers insurance and real estate and financial instruments of any kind. As brokers, lawyers, loan collectors, loan consolidators, secretaries at big investment firms, chauffeurs of private limousines, or even the high-tech types who exist solely to service banks–all of us, millions of us, are part of it, living off it in some way, as three generations ago we lived off manufacturing.

[...]

...here's the Plan.
First, we have to pass a new type of law against usury that accepts the world in which we all live now[...]let's cap interest at 9 percent, then let a federal agency give exemptions[...]
Second, we should have state-owned banks[...]
Third, we should have at least one or two "public guardians" as directors at the banks and other financial firms we have bailed out with $700 billion in taxes and all the money the Fed has printed[...]
Fourth, we should require the banks we bail out to cancel an appropriate amount of consumer debt–especially in the instances where people would have paid back the principal by now had the interest rate been more reasonable[...]
Finally, we should think about ways to "inject equity" directly into the accounts of working people rather than into banks. The best way to do this is to announce a plan to raise the gross replacement rate of Social Security from 44 percent to something closer to 65 percent, which is still short of the rate in may European social democracies. We can afford this as much as or more than they can[...]

Geithner/Paulson plan

Krugman has my vote, in this roundtable on the Geithner (Paulson) plan... but what do I know, apparently this sort of nausea-inducing repetition is necessary for the political process.

On another, more historical note, I know an older guy whose bumper sticker for years read–in letters large enough to read for half a mile––"IMPEACH THE LYING TREASONOUS LOUTS!" I wonder if he is still interested.

Department of Shredded Pieces of Paper Money

Good intentions, honest platitudes and vague reassurances about "responsibility" in every global media aside, one begins to wonder if Obama is more in love with himself, à la Bill Clinton, than he has a mature clue about the realistic consequences of this gigantic new holding company the taxpayers are now funding. In fairness it seems nobody much does. However as Bernie Sanders gently puts it, Obama needs someone from outside Wall Street giving him advice (titanic understatement of calling this "not easy" uncomfortably noted). Sanders' ideas of where to start are also pretty good.

That calling screaming for a regulatory counter-balance to Wall Street's newly gifted power, if not an alternative structure altogether, should be the position of the net roots seems to me inescapably clear. There's a delusion of grandeur at work when progressive blogs and talk shows are still stuck in damage-control mode for a President with 70% approval, gloating at how unnecessary and easy taking down the Republican "opposition" is these days (while the real conglomerate crooks are still robbing every honest worker blind, needless to say with historically eager help from both corporate Democrat and Republican). As Matt Taibbi characteristically points out in his essential exposé, the only people deemed capable of understanding let alone managing this new thing are the professional gambling class, which fact in itself amounts to an enormous power grab.* And if it wasn't easy to regulate these independent casinos before, how exactly mushing up their weirdly animated corpses and mixing them with other business ventures dead and half-alive and re-selling unidentifiable, over-valued limbs to the taxpayer helps the situation is beyond me (and probably Obama, unless he gets some truly open-minded help).


* The myth of the impossibly complex nature of these financial giants' operations is an unfortunate piece of propaganda. Obviously the power of Taibbi's account lies in its potential to render public anger more focused and into something less easily dismissed (for instance, with vague reassurances about a new "era of responsibility.") Given the circumstances, blanket blame is profoundly somewhat unjust and questionably helpful. The "bonus" non-issue is downright ridiculous (as the saying goes, "3 trillion dollars is a budget problem, 200 million is a scandal.") I actually think the author of today's NY Times Op-Ed has a valid point, tone-deafness aside (yes, his whining smacks of self-entitlement, he has no sense of real world incomes–honestly what did you expect?). Those "conspicuously unscathed" operators of the casino within the casino who really wrecked the economy (granted, as they were enabled) may amount to only four hundred recently and luxuriously retired dickheads at every conglomerate, but those are the names, along with Bill Clinton/Sandy Weill and especially Larry Summers, that Cuomo and everyone should be calling for, were they interested in something more meaningful than cheap blanket populism, especially as said lynch mob anger blurs itself into irrelevance and helps those who wish to obscure the real stakes. In this regard Time Magazine actually gets a few right. (Not that a little seething resentment of the self-entitled rich in this country isn't long overdue!)

nb. It is entirely possible I am a death-wish Democrat who just doesn't understand politics. Either that or I'm for a political discourse concerned enough for truth and healthy enough to require self-criticism.

not change enough, yet...

Huffington tears into Geithner: "Axelrod was right. And his loss has already cost the young Obama administration a lot."

...

Leonard Cohen's first U.S. concert in 15 years available on NPR (via).

in my abundant spare time...

...So now the basement remodel is finally complete (incl. all new plumbing, electric and altogether too much crawlspace/structural rebuild & insulation, along with the usual drywall, durock & tiling, trimming out, re-leveling, cabinets, appliances & fixtures, built-ins, floor reconditioning, some new hardwood T&G, doors, custom thresholds and endless texturing and paint), maybe there will be time for reading again (or at least little projects for real people, like these), after work.

hickory end-grain chopping block, shipped to New York


hickory edge-grain carving board, shipped to New York




hickory face-grain cheese platter and maple end-grain chop block, shipped to California



reclaimed cedar, hickory, and oak table top, shipped to California

clever-clogs

Jonathan Wolff on the distinction between clever-clog and true scholar (via bookforum).

We Live in "The Borrowed Times"

...so sayeth The Nation's epoch-naming contest judges. I kind of liked "The New Steal."

Update: Huffpo.

Suleiman Baraka

A Palestinian Astrophysicist who used to lecture Palestinian children, and all children, to look beyond the Helicopters, F-16s, for planets "and hope," tells of his son's death

Are you listening? Another interesting take here, though sometimes forgetting how important it is to qualify statements: down to three rockets a month is no solution, but it sure does seem like a potential step toward creating the conditions to negotiate/force a more equal peace (only ever if Israel is genuinely willing). In the end the occupation, and most specifically its relation to the Israeli economy, obviously must be addressed. Sadly, not even Jimmy Carter talks about it.

Bushisms

The BBC already waxes nostalgic. (Digby waxes actual historical.)

Israel's Will to Violence

In which we could sure be talking more about the economy, stupid pundits. After all, the prime motivating factor of this latest slaughter is surely the desire to demonstrate to Israel's new shareholders that the fourth largest arms dealer in the world is capable of better innovation and "success" than in its last performance. Where's Naomi Klein these days?

Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion—an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock-in the occupied territories.

And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror.”

Obama's idiotic economic austerity?

Is this [link fixed] really all we worked so hard for? "Like worrying about watering the plants while the house burns," in the words of one of Amy's guests. Of course some remain more optimistic, with reason.

from the department of too little too late

If his cabinet picks are any measure, Obama's sure going to need lots of netroots pressure. (Poor environmental movement, we hardly even knew you!)

thankyouforthrowingyourshoe.com

The reconstruction of Iraq is now officially "a 100 billion dollar failure."



42 pages and growing...

Happy Birthday Tom

image via

Credo

I just switched phone companies from the criminal, spying-and-Republican-subsidizing Verizon to the ACLU-and-Doctors-Without-Borders-funding CREDO MOBILE and they reimbursed up to $200 of my early termination contract fees (up to four phones per person). Credo uses, that is simply leases Sprint's network, which works fine enough, and in my opinion the only reason everybody who just voted for Obama doesn't switch to CREDO MOBILE is because Working Assets simply lacks the funding (or more likely the gall to spend any of that 60 million on themselves) to get the word out there that CREDO MOBILE is the only cell phone service worth a shit. They'll never ever spy on you. Their service is great. Their phones are cool. Their rates are competitive. Your money goes good places.

And, they give you free ice cream all the time, Ben & Jerry's coupons (7 pints and counting, and I just signed up a week ago). Go do it now, people! Keep your number and let them reimburse your early termination fees!

upon watching BHL pose as an intellectual on Charlie Rose last night

...reminded me of this:

Did Bernard-Henri Lévy comprehend that "the American left" and "the Charlie Rose television program" are, in fact, distinct entities? Might there be aspects of social and political life that do not impinge upon the consciousness of Sharon Stone or Warren Beatty (who, to judge by American Vertigo, are among the American left's most important figures)? Can a thing be, and yet not be, well publicized?

I frame these questions with all due seriousness, for they touch on something one must always keep in mind while reading Lévy's work--his new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (Random House, $25), most emphatically included. For BHL (as he is known in France and, increasingly, the United States) is not simply another pundit. He brings to current affairs a certain philosophical method, which he succinctly unpacked not many years ago in his book War, Evil, and the End of History. There Lévy explained that he found it impossible to recognize as valid any political movement "about which I could not have the feeling, even if illusory, that it began, ended, and found its reasoning in me alone." And so while "the American left" may or may not exist, what Charlie Rose so lovingly calls "this table" certainly does--for BHL has sat at it. Hence certain rigorous deductions are possible....

chop block

some reading...

Simon Critchley may be right about so many things; his conclusions are all wrong

...Speaking from a position of perhaps glorified impotence (SPOGI), on Obama's loneliness (and ours) here (sub). I want to say: wrong in part because nobody with Critchley's ideological standards could ever get elected, needless to say. Less obviously wrong because Obama's kind of rational "faith" in community may be the only kind to have, may indeed be the kind that all cultural/ethno-geographic hybrid subjects–those subjects after all with any future–have. Far from suppressing or entirely ignoring agonism, Obama has merely found a way to render the most destructive, distracting and reactionary elements abeyant. Call it sublimation, if you must. But in doing so he clears a space for political action. In any case perhaps another word (or two) is cosmopolitan...homesickness.

Or not...

translation world

An interview with Ross Benjamin on translating Kevin Vennemann's Close to Jedenew.

And so the real work begins...

• it has translations of Tronti, Badiou and other leftist philosophers writing on the financial crisis, ghost of Marx included.

• Bernie Sanders

• William Greider in The Nation:

Washington must assert its full emergency powers and tackle two things at once: manage the gradual downsizing of the financial system in an orderly fashion that sustains lending, and revive production and employment by force-feeding activities of many kinds. This cannot be a voluntary program that simply invites bankers to participate on their terms. The government must impose emergency regulatory controls to keep finance in step with the nation's overall goals. If bankers resist these terms, they should be cut off, isolated from the public's lifesaving assistance.

These are not idle suggestions. The nation is now in the grip of dynamic political change, and this will not stop with the decision on Paulson's grandiose bailout. Presuming the bailout prevails in Congress, Paulson will be handing out public billions to Wall Street players in the next few months. The political counterforce for genuine public-spirited solutions should be pushing back right away. Activists and intellectuals, public citizens and heavyweight financial players, even some members of Congress, are already at work on the details. If Congress reconvenes for a lame-duck session, you will see some of these measures surface for public debate and popular agitation.

The essence of this action will borrow ideas and models from the New Deal and update them to fit our present circumstances. This not simple nostalgia. It is a clearheaded recognition that the public interest has not been served and the crisis will not recede until it is. Here are five concepts for recovery and reconstruction that are in circulation. If we are lucky, these proposals will redefine the next presidency, whoever wins.

1. Stop the easy-money bailout. Instead of buying rotten assets from Wall Street firms with no strings attached, the government should examine their books and decide which banks can be saved with direct infusions of capital in exchange for public ownership--roughly on the terms Warren Buffett got when he aided Goldman Sachs (preferred shares and guaranteed dividends). The failing institutions should get regulatory euthanasia. This approach gives the government direct control over the survivors and ensures that the public is protected from egregious loss. The model is the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s, which recapitalized banks and corporations under stern supervision.

2. Help the folks who are hurting--directly. A homeownership corporation patterned after the New Deal original would have the money and the flexible authority to supervise "workouts" for millions of failing families. This is what bankers do for corporations when they get in over their head. Government can do the same for indebted households: stop the liquidation, stretch out default dates and arrange manageable terms. This is not a bleeding-heart gesture--keeping families in their homes is economic stimulus, and it halts the decay of neighborhoods.

3. Get serious about economic stimulus. We need a recovery program five or six times larger than the pitiful $60 billion proposed by Democratic leaders. These billions should go for the familiar list of neglected priorities--fixing bridges and schools--but should also jump-start the green agenda for alternative fuels and restoration of ruined ecosystems. The government should subsidize the new industries of our age, just as New Deal spending financed the modern development of aircraft, petrochemicals, steelmaking and other key industries in the 1930s.

4. Re-regulate the bad actors and indict the criminals. Start by restoring the law against usury--the predatory lending practices that ruin weak and defenseless borrowers. Government cannot wait for a relaxed debate about restoring regulations. We need newly designed controls over the financiers and well-defined public obligations imposed not only on banking but also on hedge funds and private equity firms. These cannot be discretionary rules. If the money guys don't like them, they should get out of the business. Paulson's Wall Street colleagues are already mobilizing lobbyists for this fight, but they may discover that Washington has been changed by events. The easygoing deference to Big Money seems suddenly out of fashion.

5. Create a new brain for government management of the economy. The crisis and the halting decision-making by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve--not to mention the secrecy and special deal-making on behalf of financial interests--make it clear that deep reform is required. I would start with a special reconstruction and recovery agency, empowered to lead policy and oversee banking regulators and the economic stimulus. The Federal Reserve's so-called independence is an antique concession to the big banks and doesn't make any sense. Monetary policy and fiscal policy must be balanced and decided in the same process. That rational approach might have stopped the Fed from the biases and dereliction that led to this crisis.

These ideas and many others are in gestation. They will reach fruition when politicians and other leaders swallow their bruised egos and rethink their supine posture, arm in arm with Wall Street. That looks improbable at the moment. But voters can help them change their minds. (read the whole thing)

recent work

Solid hickory and solid cherry. These are all for sale. As always, taking custom orders...

McCain, spoiled brat with no honor

The whole world being sick to death of this no-class liar, silver-spooned screw-off, but apparently he is allowed to "debate" once more tonight (hell even the RNC is pulling out), this biographic article on John McCain in Rolling Stone does a good job exposing his true history and character:

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot...(read the whole thing)

via

...

lol

Matt Taibbi poking some much-needed fun at David Ray Griffin (via):

Secondly: what the fuck? What kind of lunatic comes up with this as his "illustrative example"? Your simplifying parable is more fantastic and complicated than the actual story! At first I thought you were kidding, then I had to go back and read it to believe it -- astounding! It should tell the readers of this debate quite a bit that this is your idea of a good way to start an argument: "Say for example that your best friend is killed in broad daylight with a crossbow, and the government frames you for the crime using advanced morphing technology."

Taibbi strikes again here.

steal back your vote

In contrast to NPR's shoddy disservice, DemocracyNow gives the real story on how to make your vote count. For instance, DO vote early, but DON'T mail in your ballot without a photocopy of government ID, and DON'T accept a provisional ballot, especially for reasons relating to your mortgage–they are all thrown out. Listen to the whole show here.

And for more on the history of the Voter-Fraud Fraud, read Digby.

And for all you swing voters who want to vote for a winner, this prediction is from an exceptional, non-partisan site that corrects for bias in polling and is far more comprehensive:

...set of state polling that follows is so strong for Obama that he continues to hit record marks in all three of our projection metrics. We are now projecting Obama to win the election 90.5 percent of the time, with an average of 346.8 electoral votes, and a 5.4-point margin in the national popular vote.

recent work, to special order

the giant pool of money: root cause of today's financial crisis

This should really be the last post on the economy or politics for a while (if this blog had any self-respect), as anyone can read Firedoglake or DailyKos for themselves....Mentioned before, but "This American Life" had a truly great show on the American and world economy sometime back, called "The Giant Pool of Money."

The show should be required listening for anyone concerned with understanding why things are the way they are, and how to change them.

But are they really that angry?

Nevertheless brilliant, here.

you could ask your Senator

...how they voted on the Sanders amendment (it didn't pass).

A couple interesting posts at Econospeak.

Economy of bubbles and campaigns for real change...

The whole world votes pretty overwhelmingly for Obama.

And now for something even worse

It appears that for the next three months at least, the democrats are still running to the center-right. Like a bunch of fucking politicians.

DemocracyNow covers the revised swindle, and the long-term prospects of a smaller Wall Street, as Paulson picks which criminal friends to reward for their crooked greed and who to sacrifice, all at taxpayer expense, and all without addressing any root causes. On the plus side, it will still be easy for anyone paying any attention at all to predict that another crisis is inevitable. The "feeling" among progressives being that Obama will be in a position to actually do something about it, then. The now inescapably obvious fact that our system is just incredibly fucked up and corrupted by/beholden to Wall Street likewise disheartening, but hardly a surprise. Still it's too bad no leader has emerged to take advantage of this opportunity for the left. Plenty of people, like Defazio, stood up for what was right, although it wasn't enough, passionately and eloquently so. They just weren't real players in the game. Or rather, there aren't hardly enough players worth a shit in the game. We're a sick, election-obsessed country and it's too bad there's no time or ideological room for real leadership.

Plenty of time to pass a terrible bill once hundreds of pages of pork and earmarks have been added to it, though. Not all of them bad, certainly. Some of them criminal. But none of them relating directly to addressing the root causes of the economic crisis. Since the bill itself doesn't do that either, what's the difference right?

Mortgages, from what I understand, are hardly mentioned. No real help is mandated.

Firedoglake.
The Conference Call.
Hunter. Update: And again.

DeFazio/Kaptur, et.al. Alernative Plan

I have no idea if this makes any sense or not. It would be nice if people like Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein could stop clutching their heads long enough to recognize the historic opportunity here and actively think creative and courageous alternatives. Anyway, just catching up on events, courtesy of The Nation and DailyKos, where the idea of a Progressive Shock Doctrine and a New New Deal for the 21st Century have been catching on. Several posts there are worth reading. You know, it worked before, and it can work again.

"Equity or Barbarism"

• Resisting "the core logic of financialization [which] renders real subsumption to come as primitive accumulation now."

• Comparing Crises:
The 1930s, the 1970s, and Today by Ingo Schmidt

• The $700 billion already stolen without Congress seems not to have helped.

72 hours...

Mr. Moore:

Of course, sane people know that nobody "lost" anything yesterday, that stocks go up and down and this too shall pass because the rich will now buy low, hold, then sell off, then buy low again.

But for now, Wall Street and its propaganda arm (the networks and media it owns) will continue to try and scare the bejesus out of you. It will be harder to get a loan. Some people will lose their jobs. A weak nation of wimps won't last long under this torture. Or will we? Is this our line in the sand?

Here's my guess: The Democratic leadership in the House secretly hoped all along that this lousy bill would go down. With Bush's proposals shredded, the Dems knew they could then write their own bill that favors the average American, not the upper 10% who were hoping for another kegger of gold.

So the ball is in the Democrats' hands. The gun from Wall Street remains at their head. Before they make their next move, let me tell you what the media kept silent about while this bill was being debated:

1. The bailout bill had NO enforcement provisions for the so-called oversight group that was going to monitor Wall Street's spending of the $700 billion;

2. It had NO penalties, fines or imprisonment for any executive who might steal any of the people's money;

3. It did NOTHING to force banks and lenders to rewrite people's mortgages to avoid foreclosures -- this bill would not have stopped ONE foreclosure!;

4. It had NO teeth anywhere in the entire piece of legislation, using words like "suggested" when referring to the government being paid back for the bailout;

5. Over 200 economists wrote to Congress and said this bill might actually WORSEN the "financial crisis" and cause even MORE of a meltdown.

Put a fork in this slab of pork. It's over. Now it is time for our side to state very clearly the laws WE want passed. I will send you my proposals later today. We've bought ourselves less than 72 hours.

Alternative plans

So now that outright scam is over, nearly, and a space may have opened up to think actual alternatives, provided enough constituent pressure is put on democrats in congress to do the right thing (and it will take a significant amount), perhaps the Real Populism can be made to stand up and fight.

Some beginnings worth thinking about:

• Progressive Shock Doctrine
• History of a Liberal Shock Doctrine

• Dean Baker
• Ian Walsh
• Robert Reich
(All three via.)
• James K. Galbraith
• DailyKos
• Draft of the No Bail-Outs Act

• Panel of economist reactions at TPM

So where is Obama?

He needs to come out for a healthy New Deal-like alternative NOW.

Why is he letting the Republicans (that is, the Republican Study Group/assorted lunatics who only oppose the bailout because they want more tax cuts for the rich, more deregulation and private profits) steal all the thunder?

Sure he's still only campaigning, and such principled, ideological bravery against his political nature (not to mention economic advisors). But what an opportunity to fight for and write a moment of history that actually punished, instead of rewarded predatory Wall Street criminals, definitively closed the book on a failed ideology of fundamentalist free market capitalism (Reagan included, though his name is NEVER mentioned in conjunction with the crash of '87) and accomplished some enduring good for the middle class and America as a whole for potentially decades to come.

Update: Digby truly gets it.

Update II: Digby also unearths an article written by Rick Perlstein last month which argues the historical problem and opportunity even better. Read all of both. And hope this spirit of spine-building catches on.

Update III: America Needs a New New Deal, by Katrina vanden Heuvel & Eric Schlosser (via)

Bernie

Of all the dozens of Senators' and Congresswens' aids I've (uncharacteristically) called and emailed over the past week one has responded, and he did it within days. Hell, he may have even read directly to the Senate.

The House on Monday rejected a $700 billion Wall Street bailout that would have been the biggest government intervention in the financial system since the Great Depression. "Vermonters and people across America are saying very clearly that this bailout is a bad idea and that the struggling middle class should not have to pay for the greed and excesses of Wall Street.

“With the House vote today,” the senator added, “it is time to send a loud and clear message that if a bailout is necessary, it must be paid for by those on Wall Street who caused the problem and the very wealthy who pocketed huge profits. Any effective program to help the economy also should re-regulate the financial services industry that has gotten a pass in the past decade, include an economic recovery program to put Americans to work at decent wages, and break up huge companies so that there is no longer anything that is too big to fail.”

Sanders’ letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson calls for a five-year, 10 percent surtax on individuals with more than $500,000 income and couples with combined incomes of more than $1 million. The surtax would raise more than $300 billion to help pay for losses on assets taken over by the government.

In addition to the 50 thousand co-signers of Sanders’ letter that was first posted only one week ago, a new Web poll today also is reflecting overwhelming opposition to the bailout that the House rejected.

To read and sign the letter to the Treasury secretary, click here.

grabbing the silver on their way out, today

Well it's nearly official:

top managers will continue to receive million-dollar-a-month paychecks under this new bill. There is no direct ownership given to the American people for the money being handed over. Foreign banks and investors will be allowed to receive billion-dollar handouts.

...the reason so many Dems are behind this is because Wall Street this weekend put a gun to their heads and said either turn over the $700 billion or the first thing we'll start blowing up are the pension funds and 401(k)s of your middle class constituents.

Here's someone who's read the bill and plans to vote against it.

the suicide of the writer

Alistair McCartney:

...in these early days of the twenty-first century, the suicide of a writer does not mark their body of work, does not inflect it, in the same manner in which it did previously, during the epoch of Romanticism. Is literary Romanticism dead? Perhaps, although it is still too early to say; either way, the terrain in which we are writing and living and dying is shifting; the definition of tragedy today also needs to be examined further. Although we could argue that everything is anachronistic, that we live in an epoch with no sense of itself, and that we occupy a dislocated era, an age out of its proper time, an age Foster Wallace predicted, from a literary perspective, the suicide of David Foster Wallace, or for that matter, the suicide of any writer in the 21st century, is of no importance.

Paul Newman

Holy mangled words and sentences, does the NY Times not have a copy-editor anymore?

The fuck McCain says?

How many opportunities must Obama pass up to appear congenial and non-threatening enough to begin actually confronting and challenging this shit? I counted at least ten of these last night.

McCain is not a healthy man

Shock Doctrine, Stupid

Radical wingnut ideas built and floated by the Chicago School, or fueled by the Republican Study Committee, are of course not only "lying around" as Milton Friedman encouraged, but fiercely lobbied any time we get a rainy day. Or preferably a flood. As Naomi Klein documents, radically unpopular change that hurts most people can only be forced through in a time of emergency. Maybe we should think of them as ark-builders for the super-rich.

Only they're not supposed to talk about this agenda openly. Because it makes them seem like blatant opportunists, liars and crooks. Here's naive and idiotic Sarah Palin talking about it openly (or trying to), seemingly offering a string of non-sequitors in direct response to a question about the bailout.

She seems to have grasped, or overheard somewhere, that this disaster means an opportunity down the road for things like health care "reform" (of the wildly unpopular, hatchet sort), but she obviously hasn't grasped that she isn't supposed to talk about it quite that way. Expect her to be kept out of sight until she can be made to understand the game, or at least keep her mouth shut and memorize some equivocal slogans and platitudes to respond to questions on economics.

Preemptive parsing: the Policy Facts of Obama and McCain's Tax Plans

Why argue in the abstract or with slogans when the facts are available? To follow up on this post, I've culled directly from this fine blog here:

• 95% of working families would get a tax cut from Obama
• 100 million Americans would get NO tax cut from McCain
• Most would get a larger tax cut from Obama

They also have a handy, non-partisan tax calculator under each plan. And links to everything you might be curious to know.

Quoting again:

Here are the numbers:

1. Pre-tax $200-500k: Obama raises taxes $3,546, McCain cuts $1,892.
2. Pre-tax $500-1mil: Obama raises taxes $30,499, McCain cuts $6,825.
3. Pre-tax $1mil+: Obama raises taxes $262,371, McCain cuts $58,632.

In sum, Obama's plan involves

* large increases in taxes paid by the highest-earning Americans, who represent a very small share of people but take in a (relatively) very large share of pre-tax income, coupled with
* moderate-to-large reductions in the net tax bill faced by everyone else.

By contrast, McCain's plan involves

* smaller, but still large, reductions in taxes paid by the highest-earning Americans, coupled with
* very small reductions in the net tax bill faced by everyone else.

(I stress again that both plans add substantially to the federal debt relative to current law, which means that someone will have to pay the bill later; again, though, that bill would be smaller with Obama's plan than with McCain's.)

This chart tells a pretty simple story. McCain's plan would reduce all groups' average tax rates, though generally by very little. Except for those making more than a million dollars a year, who would see a drop in average tax rates of 1.8 points, McCain's plan would reduce the average tax rate by less than one percentage point across the board.

By contrast, Obama's plan would reduce average tax rates by a moderate to large amount (between 1.4 and 8.1 percentage points) for all groups with pre-tax income below $75k; those in the $75-100k and $100-200k groups would see average tax rates fall by 0.8 and 0.3 percent. Most notably, those in the three highest groups would see moderately small (1.2 percent for $200-500k) to large (4.1 and 8.0 percent for those making $500k-$1mil and $1mil+) increases in their average tax rates.

RateTheDebates.Org

Rate the media, that is. Here. Apparently they need it.

Incidentally John McCain has already bought ads declaring his victory.

Contempt For Rove, Contempt for Wall Street and Contempt for the Shock Doctrine

So there is no gas for the second day in a row in all of Western North Carolina. Apparently people are convinced the sky is falling. And as the Shock Doctrine kicks into full gear, with Paulson rigging the first stage for either McCain's far worse debt explosion, economic apartheid and privatizing of Social Security or Obama's neoliberal, neo-Clintonian, Robert Rubin trickle-down-light, Karl Rove gets a free pass to rig the D.O.J. and escape with more immunity than has ever been granted anyone in his position in the history of America. Unless Congress votes to hold him in contempt before they adjourn at the end of this week.

After pointlessly signing the above, well worth listening to Naomi Klein on Democracy Now:

I’m also arguing that this is only stage one of the shock doctrine. They’re getting this—they’re lobbying for this huge bailout, obviously, but this bailout is a kind of a time bomb, because it’s all these bad debts, and they are going to explode on the next administration. I mean, we know that the Bush administration has already left the next administration with huge debt and deficit problems. They’ve just exploded those, expanded them. And what that means is that whoever the next president is is going to be inheriting this economic crisis that is being exacerbated by this bailout.

So, in the case of McCain, I think—if he’s the president, then I think we know what he’ll do, because we know he wants to privatize Social Security, which is something that Wall Street’s been wanting for a long time, another bubble. We know he has said in the next—in the first 100 days of his administration he’ll look at every program and either reform it or shut it down. This is really a recipe for economic shock therapy. So, while you have all of these trivial issues being discussed in the election season, I think what we could—what we’re really—you know, under the surface, they’re actually being quite clear. They’re going to take—if they take power, it will be in the midst of an economic emergency. They’ll invoke that emergency to push through very, very radical changes. So, you know, what I’ve been saying is, this is not four more years of Bush; it’s much, much worse in the case of another Republican administration.

But there’s huge problems for Democrats, as well, if they win this election, because, you know, we need to only think back to the situation in which Clinton took power, where he ran an election on an economic populist platform, promising to renegotiate NAFTA. Then there was an economic crisis. Clinton came under intense lobbying by people like Robert Rubin, who’s also advising Obama right now, and by the time he took office, he had embraced economic austerity.

So, people need to understand these tactics, need to put pressure on the candidates, the parties, and reject this tactic. And I’ve actually been really heartened, Amy, that people are onto these shock tactics and aren’t falling for it. And, you know, to the extent that we’re seeing a little bit of spine from the Democrats, it is only, as Chris Dodd said, because they are hearing it from their constituents. So people need to keep up this pressure right now.

there is pressure being put on Congress from Democrats who—you know, we’ve heard the proposals to cap executive pay and to have a moratorium on foreclosures. It’s coming not from all Democrats, but from some. But there’s something going on on the Republican side, where you have people like Newt Gingrich, and you also have the Republican Study Committee, which is a group of very influential Republican lawmakers who are saying that they’re opposed to the bailout, and they also have their wish list. And I think it is that it’s not that they’re going to oppose a bailout completely; it’s that they want economic changes, right-wing, pro-corporate economic changes, attached to a bailout. So, Newt Gingrich has his list. He’s got eighteen demands. But I think even more important than that is the Republican Study Committee, and I raise this because they’ve just issued their ransom list. It starts with suspending the capital gains tax, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, suspending mark-to-market accounting, which is the rule that requires companies to assess their assets at current market values.

So, what’s so stunning about this, Amy, is that here you have a crisis that everyone seems to agree is borne of deregulation, and they’re actually calling for more deregulation. We have a situation where the debt is exploding on American taxpayers, and they want to suspend corporate profits—sorry, corporate taxes, which is actually what might defray some of those costs from regular taxpayers. So it’s an incredible display of opportunism. And this is what I mean by stage two of the shock doctrine. The first stage is just the bailout, but the second stage are all of these radical reforms that are going to be invoked in the name of the crisis that the bailout is creating, whether it’s pushed through right now or whether it’s pushed through later.

But what’s important—you know, Amy, in the book, I talk about—I start the book with a quote from Milton Friedman that has really made the rounds a lot lately, which is that—and this is a Friedman quote—that “only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. And when the crisis occurs, the change depends on the ideas that are lying around." And then he goes on to say, “That, I believe, is our basic function: to keep the ideas ready until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” So I think it’s really important for people to look at the ideas that are lying around.

There’s enormous corporate lobbying going on to, for instance, eliminate the post-Enron collapse regulations, to actually say that the way to save the American economy—you know, you heard Henry Paulson equating—still equating the interests of the financial sector with the interests of everyone else. We know that’s simply not true. But it’s that—precisely that logic that then is used to say, OK, these are the—this is what the financial community, this is what the corporate world needs in order to revive the economy: they need less regulation, they need less taxation.

So, we should be really, really wary of this claim that we’re hearing that free market ideology is dead, that this marks the end of, you know, of capitalism. You know, I’m sorry, that is not the case. It may be going dormant for a little while to rationalize these massive bailouts, but it will come roaring back, and the crisis that is being deepened right now through these bailouts will be invoked for even more radical deregulation, privatization, tax cuts and so on...

I don't think we can stress this enough...Henry Paulson ["Mr. Risk" himself, former Nixon administration pal] is one of the key people, one of the top people responsible for creating the crisis that he is now claiming he will solve...it's this state of regression that we go into...Henry Paulson has been cast as an economic Rudy Guiliani, saving the day, impartial, bi-partisan, a strong leader....Henry Paulson is...bailing out his colleagues [and himself].

As for "Dems that don't suck" as Corrente aptly puts it, watch Marcy Kaptur.

Calling Paulson's Bluff

Josh Marshall, Bernie Sanders, Paul Krugman, etc. etc.

Alexander Cockburn

I'm a limited fan of Alexander Cockburn because I support the idea of humanitarian intervention. Among other things. But if it's satisfying and self-riteous parrhesia (as in, speaking the distinct truth to power that almost always comes from a position of perhaps glorified impotence), this article should work (sub). May he not get all of this right, yet:

In cruder language the operators of these two giants [Fannie and Freddie] had been engaged in the pleasant activity of cooking the books by borrowing at low-interest government rates, selling the repackaged mortgages at a higher-interest markup and then lying about the their actual exposures. "Fannie and Freddie were almost single-handedly supporting the junk mortgage market that was making Wall Street rich," economist Michael Hudson told Counterpunch the Monday after the takeover, protecting themselves from regulatory harassment by shoveling campaign contributions at the relevant lawmakers sitting on the financial committees in Washington.

Now the Treasure is refloating these two huge casinos and sending them down the river again ["sticking the taxpayers with a $300 billion tab"], so that Wall Street can stay happy and China and the other overseas lenders can be assured that the money they're lending the United States....is at least partly secured.[...]

Even Swift could not depict...McCain offering himself as the foe of special interests when his economic advisor is former Senator Phil Gramm, the key player in Congress in the late '90s in the deregulatory assaults that overthrew Glass-Steagall, opened the door to the derivatives scams and greased Wall Street's wheels as it plunged the economy into the present crisis. Obama alluded obliquely to Gramm without naming him in his Denver speech[...] But why not identify McCain's detestable associate [who recently called America "a nation of whiners"]? The problem is that co-conspiring in Gramm's deregulatory rampages in the late '90s was the Clinton Administration, spurred on by the Democratic Leadership Council. On the ticket with Obama is that lifelong serf of the banks, Joe Biden[...]

When they look back on it, people will surely see this election as one of the larger missed opportunities in the nation's history for scrutiny and shake-up of our economic and imperial arrangements: an unpopular war abroad, brazen thievery by the rich and powerful at home, widespread discontent of huge slabs of the electorate, beleaguered by debt, low wages and joblessness. How easy it should have been for a politician as eloquent and intelligent as Obama to create an irresistible popular constituency challenging business as usual. But what's positively eerie is the cautious sensitivity of his political antennas, alerting him time and again to the risks of actually saying or pledging anything substantive[...] Small wonder it's hard to remember much that he says, because so little that he does say is ever substantively memorable or surprising or exciting; no wonder that Sarah Palin is proving so successful a distraction.

support The Nation Magazine.

Too bad for Cockburn the distraction is already wearing out...

David Foster Wallace...

Sad. Just sad. To be updated...

For various reasons, I recommend this.

See also:
Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. novels >1960

The Know(e):dfw

The Uncollected DFW

Interviews and Audio

Boyd Tonkin:

Wallace dramatised the need and urge to keep the proliferating networks of our culture in view and under control, at a time when they have passed beyond the compass of any human mind. Addiction, the oft-cited overarching "theme" of Infinite Jest, means nothing if not a quest for an always-elusive mastery of fate. And his memorialising fans now seem addicted to the same pursuit of an integrated, it-all-adds-up meaning.

But that is not quite right.

Update: I like what The Existence Machine has to say, very much. Although I prefer to remember the non-fiction right now, particularly for its humor, and maybe the hint of a different relation to his sadness that–who knows–might have led to somewhere else. But it was not his truest voice. Wallace's writing seemed lighter, which is to say the perpetual note of sadness became muted, perhaps in deference to some journalistic style that one could argue was a little false, in the end. Still, I'll re-read A Supposedly Fun Thing before Brief Interviews...if only to work up the patience for the latter. It will be hard to see the sadness as anything but king, finally.

Update II: This is extremely good, by A. O. Scott (sub - now partially liberated):

Reviewing a biography of Jorge Luis Borges in The New York Times Book Review a few years back, David Foster Wallace attacked the standard biographical procedure of mining the lives of writers for clues to their work, and vice versa. Borges’s stories, he insisted, “so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant.”

What’s true of writers’ lives is also, surely, true of their deaths. The temptation to regard Mr. Wallace’s suicide last weekend as anything other than a private tragedy must be resisted. But the strength of the temptation should nonetheless be acknowledged. Mr. Wallace was hardly one to conceal himself within his work; on the contrary, his personality is stamped on every page — so much so that the life and the work can seem not just connected but continuous.

[...]

The moods that Mr. Wallace distilled so vividly on the page — the gradations of sadness and madness embedded in the obsessive, recursive, exhausting prose style that characterized both his journalism and his fiction — crystallized an unhappy collective consciousness. And it came through most vividly in his voice. Hyperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware (and nearly impossible to quote in increments smaller than a thousand words) — it was something you instantly recognized even hearing it for the first time. It was — is — the voice in your own head.

Or mine, at any rate. When, as an undergraduate with a head full of literary theory and a heartsick longing for authenticity, I first encountered David Foster Wallace, I experienced what is commonly called the shock of recognition. Actually, shock is too clean, too safe a word for my uncomfortable sense that not only did I know this guy, but he knew me. He could have been a T.A. in one of my college courses, or the slightly older guy in Advanced Approaches to Interpretation who sat slightly aloof from the others and had not only mastered the abstruse and trendy texts everyone else was reading, but also skipped backward, sideways and ahead. It was impressive enough that he could do philosophy — the mathematical kind, not just the French kind. But he also played tennis — Mr. Wallace, in fact, had competed seriously in the sport — and could quote lyrics from bands you only pretended you’d heard of. Without even trying, he was cooler than everyone else.

All this shone through Mr. Wallace’s fiction. He had the intellectual moves and literary tricks diagrammed in advance: the raised-eyebrow, mock-earnest references to old TV shows and comic books; the acknowledgment that truth was a language game. He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.

[...]

he was not only preoccupied with staking out a position in relation to other writers. Again and again, he returned to a basic, perhaps the basic, philosophical question facing anyone with a blank screen and a story to tell. What am I going to say? How am I going to say it? It’s never an easy question, but perhaps no one illustrated its difficulty with so much energy, good humor and conceptual rigor. In the story “Octet,” a section begins “you are, unfortunately, a fiction writer” and then proceeds, hilariously and infuriatingly, to diagram the dimensions of that misfortune. One long, brilliant, crazy footnote ends: “None of that was very clearly put and might well ought to get cut. It may be that none of this real-narrative-honesty-v.-sham-narrative-honesty stuff can even be talked about up front.”

And yet Mr. Wallace never stopped trying. Even when his subject matter took him outside himself — into the world of lobsters, tennis players, cruise-ship vacationers or presidential campaigners — the fundamental problems of writing remained in the foreground. I suspect that Mr. Wallace’s persona — at once unbearably sophisticated and hopelessly naïve, infinitely knowing and endlessly curious — will be his most durable creation.

“Infinite Jest” is a masterpiece that’s also a monster — nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric. The other big books published since by members of Mr. Wallace’s age cohort — “Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides; “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen; “The Fortress of Solitude,” by Jonathan Lethem; “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon — are more accessible, easier to connect with and to give prizes to. They are family chronicles, congenial hybrids of domestic melodrama, immigrant chronicle, magic realism as well as the more traditional kind. Not easy books, necessarily, but not aggressively difficult, either.

In their different ways, though, these novels and their authors — along with other itchy late- and post-boomer white guys like Richard Powers, Rick Moody and Dave Eggers — stand in Mr. Wallace’s shadow. Not because his version of their generational crisis was better or truer than theirs, but rather because it was purer and more rigorous. In some ways, the figure he resembles most is Ezra Pound. Not the loony, ranting figure Pound eventually became, but rather the innovative and uncompromising modernist he was in his prime. Pound, in the teens and 1920s, understood the literary logic of modernism, with its poetics of difficulty and allusiveness, more clearly than any of his contemporaries. He pushed his insights further, into an extreme, enormous, all-but-unreadable book — the “Cantos” — that is to high modernism what “Infinite Jest” is to late postmodernism.

Outside of graduate classrooms, not many readers swallow the “Cantos” whole, and a similar fate may lie in store for “Infinite Jest.”[...]

sharecropper society

Article bears mentioning again. I wish a banker could explain it all to me.

Gotta love Alaskans...

Memories of seasons on a fishing boat come drifting back and I really do miss the people as much as the clean air as they are mostly not like Palin.

President Opportunist Liar/Big CEO Government, or President Sarah-geddon? No thanks.

McCain is a "Serial Shameless Liar".



Last week, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin declared that she was willing to go to war against Russia on behalf of Georgia.:

The issue of "conflict of interest" takes on a new and apocalyptic meaning when you consider the role of energy giant BP in all of this. Palin's husband has spent most of his adult life, eighteen years, working for BP. The company is even more important to his wife, as BP owns Alaska's (and America's) largest gas and oil fields. BP hates Russia at least as much as their tools Palin and McCain: the company has been locked in a nasty battle over its 50 percent stake in Russian energy giant TNK--BP's stake in that company is key to BP's stock price. If BP loses TNK to Putin's goons, then billions could be wiped off the stock price. That's something to go to war for.

The Global Financial Mess: blaming the victims

America's Financial Meltdown: Lessons and Prospects

new(er) cold wars

Belatedly, R.I.P. Obit.

Toward a New New Cold War:

"...threat inflation work[s] to the advantage of both the US and the SU military-industrial complexes...A new new cold war is on the starting blocks, and the initiating party most certainly has been the United States."

...somewhat lost in the focus on Palin trying to censore books, build bridges, and requiring help to run a city of 5,000

(all that here and here and best of all here...)

Glen Greenwald:

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.

...

recommended reading

From a review of Kevin Vennemann's recently translated novel Close to Jedenew:

The trick to both the immediacy of these memories (building a treehouse, drinking punch next to the pond) and the duration of the immediate events (Wasznar’s barn, converted to house Marek and Antonina’s family, burns in the background of the whole book) is that the narration never once detours from the present tense. This is much more unusual in German than it is in English: German fiction is written almost exclusively in the simple past tense, which is rarely a part of spoken speech. (Past events in spoken German are almost invariably described as, effectively, “having been done” rather than simply “done.”) The chief challenge of the translation has been to render this strangeness in English, where the present tense is an ordinary literary device. The translator, Ross Benjamin, who with his second effort proves himself perhaps the great German translator of Vennemann’s generation, has come up with an elegant and effective solution. He uses a historical present that English doesn’t have, as in the first quotation above: “we hear their songs for hours already.” This formulation is quite normal in German, but it jars in English in a way that communicates the strangeness of the tense usage[...]

One can’t help reading this as a reflection on the German storyteller’s anxiety that in writing about the Holocaust—in writing a story, in Vennemann’s case, about an event in which there are no survivors—he has pilfered from here and there and devised what has become his story. But, Close to Jedenew says, that might, by now, be okay; there is no other choice but to inhabit the invention. This is what it means to be the first Holocaust book from a generation of writers who do not feel burdened by guilt. It is a harrowing, remarkable, serious novel, in part because it is not a guilty one. This is no “never forget” platitude. This is new remembrance.

a common thought

Upon witnessing in commercial break intervals yet another of their deeply disturbing and unpleasant, entirely false-hearted and unsexy, predictably uninspired conventions on TV: aside from being mostly bored and boring as only arrogant solipsists and soundbite-ideology sustained thought-reduction plagiarists can be, so painfully stilted, yawning (particularly the Veterans are bored, but also Bush Sr. as he checks his watch every thirty seconds), Republicans are clearly and identifiably vapid, castrated and just plain fucking odd human beings. The spectacle of a 30-year ruling party built on floor-licking numbskulls and those who exploit them so shamelessly and cruelly (to the point where they themselves believe the bullshit because it's all that's left), hurts to watch.