Tim Wise on structural racism in the housing market and the "culture of irresponsibility."

To all those that would suggest that there are behavioral as well as structural dimensions the problems facing Black communities I would say the following: Why don't you worry about fixing your fucked-up structure, and I'll worry about my behavior.

Congress at work: $70 billion more for War

Chalmers Johnson on the $70 billion dollar down-payment on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for fiscal year 2009 (the rest will be slipped in through "supplemental appropriations"). Johnson thinks that it is strange that the defense budget is not an issue in current economic debates.

Hawks Ascendant

Stephen Zunes takes Obama to task for failing to challenge the reckless and irresponsible foreign policies of McCain and the neocons. Zunes lays out point by point, where Obama could have and should have called McCain's bluster. A language of dissent exists, there are alternative visions of America's role in the world and in history out there. Why won't Obama listen, and lend his voice to chorus? Why must he insist on clinging to a sinking ship?

Fri could have been an important moment in making the discursive shift to a new America. But alas, it was yet another missed opportunity- it was yet another moment in which the cultural, intellectual, and political hegemony of the neoconservative vision/nightmare of American power was discursively reproduced.

Rebert Dreyfuss makes many of the same points.

The Me Too Party

"Naturally, the common people don't want war ... it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
– Hermann Goering

out-Hawking the Hawks

Mr. Congeniality chooses to cede all foreign policy arguments to his rival. But you can't really blame him, the decision to take the Iraq War off the table, and make the election a referendum on economic issues worked brilliantly for John Kerry...

Why Obama continues to embrace discredited neo-conservative interpretations of political developments in places like Georgia and the Middle East is beyond me. He seems to accept the notion that the American electorate is so stupid that it has no tolerance for nuance on issues such as "Israel's right to defend it self against an Iranian nuclear holocaust," or the "threat of Russian aggression." (though in Obama's defense, there is a theory out there that argues that if you treat someone like they are stupid for long enough, they may indeed become stupid. As PT Barnum observed: "you'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." I don't suppose that we should let the fact that Mr. Barnum died in debt overshadow the simple elegance of his formula...)

Obama may get lucky and be able to ride bad economic headlines into the White House, but when it comes to the more fundamental problem of coming to terms with American Empire, apparently we are not the ones we have been waiting for. Apparently they will come along some time later. Perhaps they will be able to reframe foreign policy issues in more realistic, less militaristic and ideological terms than "we" are currently able to.

I wonder how they will manage to do that.

Walden Bello breaks down the current financial situation in terms of capitalism's tendency toward crises of overaccumulation- ie when an economy's productive capacity out paces its capacity to consume. Essentially, workers are not paid enough to buy what they produce. As a consequence inventories grow, prices fall, and firms collapse. Firms with sufficient capital and political connections to withstand the crisis can then swoop in to buy un or under-used assets at bargain basement prices.

Bello analyzes the financialization of capitalism (the shift away from investment in productive enterprises such as agriculture and manufacturing toward speculative enterprises known as FIRE: Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. The theory is that there is always a bigger sucker out there somewhere - I'll buy for $1 because some idiot out there will surely pay $2) as a proposed solution to the 1970s crisis of overaccumulation, and the root of the current meltdown.

In a restaurant yesterday I overheard some pretty undeniable common sense. A patron explained to a fellow patron: "if the problem is that banks are failing because people can't pay their mortgages, why not give homeowners $700b, they can then pay there bills and the problem is solved..."

Nobel prize winning economist, and University Professor at Columbia. Joe Stiglitz makes essentially the same argument.

Updated post: The end of neo-liberalism?

American Bankster: Krugman as Finance Czar?

On Today's Democracy Now! Paul Krugman suggests that as Treasury Secretary he would send shivers down the spine of today's Robber Barrons. Its worth a try...

On a related note: APB, Have you seen this man:









Robert Rubin has gone missing. In the midst of this crisis we have heard a great deal about Phil Gramm and his merry band of market deregulators, but we seem to have overlooked the chief Fox in the Henhouse. It is interesting to note that after Rubin pushed through the repeal of Glass-Steagall- the 1933 law which erected a firewall between commerical and investment banks (ie commerical banks- those which collect deposits) can not invest our savings in the latest Wall Street ponzi scheme (the ponzi scheme in the 1920, or at least one of them, was real estate specualtion in Florida), he went to work for the investment arm of Citigroup (the merger of the commerical bank Citicorp and the investment bank Travelers). ie, he took the job that he had just legalized.

The end of neo-liberalism?

Is this the end of neo-liberalism? Naomi Klein suggests not (also here). In her view, the ideological fantasy (nightmare) of self-regulating markets will rear its ugly head once again as soon as the storm passes, and now is the time to demand structural reform to defend against the predations that it underwrites. In her view the public debt obligation incurred over the course of this crisis will be used as leverage to push through unpopular reforms in the not-too-distant future. As an example, Obama will be under pressure moderate his already rather anemic (or at least stupidly complex) health-care reform proposals. Or similarly, stupid ideas like "Drill Here, Drill Now!" will gain traction, as people in a state of shock have a hard time keeping their critical faculties in tact (ie they might overlook the fact that oil produced in Alaska's northern slope will enter a world market and have no short or long term impact on local prices at Chevron. They might also be induced to overlook the most basic market principle: there are two ways to affect price: increase supply, or decrease demand. It would take 10 years to increase supply by bringing new sources online (the psychological impact of new exploration would be negligible), whereas we could cut demand virtually overnight. The fastest way to bring down the price of a gallon of gasoline is to demand less of it.

Alexander Cockburn reminds us that the " capitalist system is always in crisis. Crisis is integral to the system," and points out the fact that the two key figures behind the repeal of Glass-Steagall/ the Commodity Futures Modernization Act were John McCain money-man Phil Gram, and Obama money-man Robert Rubin. And he adds this:

"Three and a half years after Black Thursday, 1929, Roosevelt’s job was to bail out capitalism, which he did, with his advisers borrowing policies from Europe, both from Italian fascism and the socialist tradition.

If Obama becomes president what advisors will he recruit? Will he keep Rubin at his side along with his passel of Chicago School economists? His left supporters hope that he has a secret plan under wraps, that a populist T-shirt lies under the decorous mask of bipartisanship."

If Obama can manage to overcome the "Bubba vote" (Stanford study), Deibold the electoral college, and the supreme court, he will have indeed proved himself a super-hero.

Eric Margolis reminds us that historically, fiscal and economic crisis combined with military defeat has been a recipe for Revolution.

On the trillion dollar check to Paulson and his gang before they sneak out the door in November, Krugman says: "No Deal." If it was a matter of the state acquiring valuable assets that would be one thing, but subsidizing Wall Street's losses? No Deal.

Krugman on the "paradox of deleveraging." (ie when the selling of assets further depreciates their value).

"In the Princes' Pocket": Tariq Ali on Robert Vitalis

Obama and the financial meltdown

Just a quick thought: Wouldn't Obama be on better ground in criticizing McCain and Phil Grahm for repealing Glass-Steagle if his two top econ advisers wern't Larry Summers and Robert Rubin?

I have always feared the contradictions in Obama's narrative of change could prove fatal. Laying down with the Big Dogs from Wall Street may appear to offer a great deal in the way of resources, but the problem with laying with dogs is that you wake with fleas.

Kevin Phillips with Bill Moyers on the financial crisis.

Hank Paulson looks worried:

The Re-Birth of a Nation?

The Republicans a have attempted to recast the race as one between a small town (white) "Hockey Mom," and a Big City (black) radical. Obama is now in danger of appearing "disrespectful" to a white woman, and suffering all the consequences that implies.

In 1915, DW Griffith's The Brith of a Nation presented a mythistory of the origins of the Ku Klux Klan as an organization the emerged to protect the honor and virtue of white women threatened by the sexual predations of black men. The film operated according to a cultural logic that appears to be alive and well a century later. There seems to be a strong and deep current of racist sentiment that runs through this political system. This is euphemistically referred to a the "Buba Vote," but this characterization simply scapegoats poor whites and elides any analysis of what is a fundamentally racist power structure owned and operated by economic elites.

Obama should have recognized this fact and spent more time inspiring the marginalized, excluded and oppressed, and less time reassuring the wealthy and powerful. But unfortunately, if he loses, Democrats will draw the wrong lesson from the race and choose to assume that he lost because he did not move fast enough or hard enough to "the center." I don't know how much farther or faster he could have gone. In my view, that was the fatal mistake and Huffington was exactly on point. By compromising on the core principles upon which he had built his brand name, he undermined the whole rationale for his candidacy.

Juan Cole on the only difference between Sarah Palin and Muslim fundamentalist: Lipstick.

Let them eat cake?

Here's a blast from the past:

Barbara Bush on Katrina, 5 September 2005 (CNN):

"But I really didn't hear that [criticism of the President] at all today. People came up to me all day long and said 'God bless your son,' people of different races and it was very, very moving and touching and they felt like when he flew over that it made all the difference in their lives so I just don't hear that."

It must have felt so touching to see the Presidents jet soaring overhead...

Voting from the Gut

UCB Linguist George Lakoff on the perennial Democratic mistake of assuming that elections are about "issues" as opposed to personality and character.

The Cost of Empire

Economist Joseph Stiglitz on the moral and economic costs of US policy in Iraq.

TINA?

Sociologist Robert Engler on democratic alternatives to corporate globalization.

SecDef Gates and the Politics of Counterrevolution

Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council Senior Staff under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (he resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia) and bestselling author of biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Clintons, offers a three part study of Robert Gates and the cultural and institutional history of the CIA.



“The Specialist: Robert Gates and the Tortured World of American Intelligence” (Part 1), 19 June 2007.

Morris comments on "the Baltic Syndrome":

"Washington sent its Kennans to study Soviet affairs at European universities. The "experts" they found there, however, were almost exclusively exiles from Tsarist Russia, expatriates by class, outlook, and personal history, loathing -- but also largely ignorant of -- Soviet rule, and often financially as well as sentimentally nostalgic for the fallen autocracy."

"From that corrupted tutelage, freshly minted U.S. specialists were commonly assigned to Latvia or Estonia, small Baltic states conquered by Russia in the eighteenth century but now (briefly) independent. These became Meccas for the anti-Soviet Diaspora, in many respects small replicas of the caste system and reactionary politics of Imperial Russia itself. So it was that America's diplomats, expected to understand and interpret the Soviet Union for vast stakes, were shaped not only by an insular and fearful American culture, but also by the pervasive lost-world bias of their trainers."

On the CIA and Orientalism:

"The CIA was not to be confused with -- or disposed to confuse the President and his top officials with -- genuine intelligence about countries of the world in and for themselves. The Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Africa -- a region mattered, for the most part, only as it related to the struggle with the Soviet Union. From the Vietnam War to Afghanistan and Iraq -- with scores of lesser-known disasters in between -- that willful negligence was, and remains, immensely damaging."

On the CIA in the Origins of Ba'thist rule Iraq:

"In Iraq, a CIA-supported corrupt monarchy, inherited from the British, stifled democratic stirrings in the 1950s; then, CIA-instigated Ba'ath Party coups in 1963, and again in 1968, killed reformers and reforms (along with any hopes of sectarian equity), and led to Saddam Hussein's tribal-clan despotism."

On the doctrine of plausible deniability:

"Deniability-minded postwar presidents were surely prone to Henry II's demure order -- "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" -- to his zealous knights to hack to death Archbishop Thomas Beckett in the sanctity of the cathedral."


“The CIA and the Politics of Counterrevolution: Robert Gates, The Specialist” (Part 2), 21 June 2007.

On Orientalism:
"Yet there was something more insidious than crude Eurocentric racism at work. Imbibed by a new generation of bureaucrats and analysts with winning-hearts-and-minds, career-making fervor was another kind of bigotry dressed in the clothes of scholarly authority and of knowledge in service to power. It took an eminent literary critic and expatriate from one of the most abused "areas" of the world to expose it."

"A revolutionary book when it appeared in the late 1970s, Orientalism by Palestinian Edward Said revealed the intellectual hollowness of the predominant Western view of the Arab world (and, by implication, of much of the rest of the globe as well). Professor Said's naked emperor proved to be the views of two centuries of Western academics and novelists, clerks and clerics, soldiers and tourists, diplomats and dilettantes that created a collective, stereotypical, paradoxical Muslim Orient -- stagnant yet ever-roiling; childlike yet cunning; femininely weak yet no less macho-menacing for that; indolent but agitated; always prone to feudal despotism, though available for capitalist liberation; congenitally terrorist and genocidal by nature; presumptively inferior; endlessly devious; and, above all, relentlessly alien. Said's Orient of Western mythology was what one author aptly called "the quintessential ‘Other.'"

"They're our boys bought and paid for, but you always gotta remember that these people can't be trusted," said Archie Roosevelt, Kermit's cousin and a CIA deputy for the Middle East in the later 1960s. His weary exasperation with the supposedly innate Arab traits of treachery and corruptibility -- he was speaking of Iraqi Ba'ath Party officers on his payroll in the 1963 and 1968 Baghdad coups -- caught an American official mood extending from the 1940s to 2007, from Iraq to Vietnam to Afghanistan and back to Iraq again. It was part of the territory, diplomats and spies understood, a cost of doing business beyond the English Channel with what many called, in the privacy of inter-agency meetings, the "rug merchants."

The colonial sociology of knowledge of the specialists, when placed alongside the cultural illiteracy of senior bureaucrats, policy-makers, and politicians -- to say nothing of a blanketing pro-Israeli bias -- produced a half-century of American patronage of repressive regimes in North Africa and the Middle East.

Stations in Cairo, Beirut, and Amman spent years plotting the February 1963 Ba'athist coup in Iraq that led to the murder of reformist Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, who was deemed too sympathetic to the left. ("The target suffered a terminal illness," a CIA officer quipped to a Senate committee, "before a firing squad in Baghdad.") That bloody succession led to the murder of thousands of Iraq's educated elite, communist and non-communist alike, from lists the CIA gave Ba'ath Party death squads. When that coup faltered, the Agency staged a further one in 1968, almost a month to the day before Gates began his job, installing a Ba'athist dictator -- along with his kinsman and protégé, security chief Saddam Hussein.

All in all, CIA intelligence on Vietnam was so shallow that, by 1969-1970, President Richard Nixon's White House policy-makers had essentially stopped paying attention.

CIA estimates elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, were no less suspect in the White House and the Pentagon -- except for reports passed on from CIA client regimes or kindred spy agencies. This was especially true of Israel's Mossad, widely (and mistakenly) believed in Washington to be omniscient, if not omnipotent, and invariably imagined to be synonymous with American interests.

"The Rise and Rise of Robert Gates: The Specialist" (Part 3), 25 June 2007.

Mad McCain

Truthout 9/10/08

Klein and Cockburn on Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein defends her "shock doctrine" thesis against her Chicago School critics.

Patrick Cockburn assesses the book from a traditional Marxian perpsective and argues that Klein "overstates the the strength and mystery of the enemy" (to borrow Hunter S. Thompson's formulation). vitality of capitalism. For him the system is still doomed.

Krugman on asset deflation

Paul Krugman on the financial crisis:

"Falling home prices, in turn, have led to the much-feared phenomenon of "debt deflation." Yes, deflation: prices are going up at the checkout counter, but the prices of assets, which are what matter for balance sheets, are dropping fast."