Must We Think Like a State?

Reality checks help. It is almost always a useful exercise to step back from and examine our largely unquestioned assumptions about how the world is and how it works. And it is in this spirit that David C. Scott casts a critical eye on the emergence of our global system of nation states over the past half millennium.

Today we take for granted that the world is divided, or should be, into contiguous nation states with well defined borders that have, or should have, a monopoly on the tools of the political craft, especially on the means of violence. This, we think, is not only how the world is but how it ought to be.

Obviously, though, this is not how things have always been. Nor, many increasingly suggest, is this how it should or must be. This is not a fate and we do have degrees of freedom that are real though far from evident. In our own time we see a good deal of supercession of national powers, particularly those of weaker, mostly southern nation states, by international (though more often than not hegemonic northern) institutions. The IMF and World Bank are of course paradigm exemplars of this. But so too are those that impose hegemony within groupings of wealthier nation states, such as the European Union and NAFTA.

Of course this hardly represents the raising of the black flag. In three works published over the last quarter century, The Art of Not Being Governed, Seeing Like a State and Two Cheers for Anarchy, Scott examines historical spaces of a much more levelling resistance to state formation and hegemony. He suggests that the synoptic view from the “commanding heights,” to use Lenin's term, is one of a need to impose an institutionally self-interested order on locally evolved folkways which do not lend themselves to the ordering, control and extraction on which the institutional apparatus of the state, of whatever political stripe, depends. And he demonstrates how we might today begin to think about and to carve out spaces for the local, non-state and even anarchistic that while understandably threatening to those viewing from the heights, far better serve those on the ground, who are much more subject to the tender mercies of the apparatus of the state, no matter how seemingly benign.

The particular value of this work is that Scott, a political scientist and anthropologist, is able to connect state theory, particularly ideas in ascendency since Hobbes,  that is in fact far from as self-evident as we might imagine with solid ethnographic evidence of alternatives both past and present. And in doing so, he shows us that there are real alternatives to engaging with and living our lives entirely within the confines of the institutionalized norms and structures maintained and reinforced by the sovereign. Indeed, the view from the bottom toward the commanding heights suggests that governments, whatever their claims or seeming inclinations, inevitably serve and reinforce the interests of the already powerful. They are not the 99%. As none other than Conrad Black has argued so convincingly in his biography of Roosevelt, progressive efforts by government are almost inevitably undertaken in the long-term interests of preserving the status-quo and not because of an abiding love of the powerless, a lesson often bitterly learned.

As such, Scott's work serves as a powerful reminder that working within accepted channels inevitably co-opts far more than it changes. The famous and well intentioned long march through the institutions begun by privileged progressives in the 1960s always seemed to end in a suburban enclave or gentrified urban setting where those they claimed to serve were seldom welcome to visit. More than half a century ago, well before the disappointments of Clinton and Obama, Philip Selznik, in his history of the Tennessee Valley Authority, insisted that “power co-opts and absolute power co-opts absolutly.”

Scott's work serves to remind us that there is another way.

The Problem is the Fanatics

My friend Roy recently sent along a note on fanaticism, making the argument that the "silent majority" is almost always irrelevant, as it is the fanatical minority who are responsible for most of history's atrocities and genocides.

This is a difficult argument to refute and in many if not most cases should not be refuted. But I think it needs to be approached with caution. And I think the caution arises from the need to recognize that the line between good and evil runs through each human heart. Perhaps a few examples might help.

The Rwandan genocide was led by evil men. They incited and encouraged. But they were few in number and were clearly incapable of doing the work themselves. That work was done by friends and neighbors of the victims who allowed their hearts to be infused with that hatred. They had a choice. It was often a brutally difficult choice. Yet it was a choice nonetheless.

Timothy Snynder's epic work Bloodlands tells the story of the the decade and a half in which Central Europe erupted in a paroxysm of slaughter unequalled in history. And while much of the killing was carried out in the camps and by Eisnsatzgrupen, much was also simply done directly or abetted by civilian populations in the occupied territories, and in fact continued after formal hostilities had ceased. I.F. Stone has written of the heartbreaking but little known fact. And as the epic film documentary Shoa shows, the holocaust simply could not have occurred on the scale that it did without the willing cooperation of the civilian population of the occupied territories.

We allow ourselves to see others as "less than." The path from here to malignant hatred is short and straight. And we almost inevitably see others as lesser so that we can see ourselves as more. Carry this process far enough, and Jim Crow laws, residential schools for natives, the sexual exploitation of young women and a host of other evils become every more likely.

So the minority incites. And these are truly evil people. But the great majority either actively participates or perhaps even worse is complicit in their silence, thus wrapping themselves in a cloak of righteousness. I know. I have done this. And quite likely, so have you.

In the epic Lord of the Rings (the book), Tolkien, use of the ring shows the extent we are susceptible to evil, all of us, though admittedly some less than others. Sam Gamgee comes to mind.  It is a work of profound theological truth. The movie on the other hand misses this point almost entirely. We are good. They are evil. In so doing, it embraces the narcissistic impulse of our age. The holy we are above reproach and represent all that is true and good. The evil they are worthy only of destruction. We are saved and they are damned.

Jean Vanier tells a story of a German soldier who was assigned to a firing squad that was to execute innocent Italian villagers in retaliation for a partisan attack in the area who refused. As a consequence, the soldier too was shot. Vanier's argument is that in that moment that soldier was truly free. Many would see this as pointless. I would insist that it changes everything. And it changes everything because, without our complicity, evil is powerless.

A (Very) Small Glimmer of Hope

Via Peter Beinart, an alternative to the Shas/Haredi tail that is wagging the Israeli dog:

Maverick Shas MK Haim Amsalem formally announced on Tuesday that he would be running for the Knesset as head of his recently formed Am Shalem party.
Amsalem was expelled from Shas in 2010 due to his public criticism of the party for discouraging military service and integration into the work force among the haredi public, but remained an MK.
“The Am Shalem party is setting out on the electoral path in order to bring back moderate and beautiful Judaism to the Jewish people,” Amsalem said at a press conference in Tel Aviv.
“When I speak of moderate Judaism, I’m talking about a Judaism which is Zionist and nationalist, a Judaism of Torah and [earning] a livelihood, of service in the army and which is close to the heart, of accepting those who are different, of live and let live, and of mutual respect,” he said.
Amsalem, who is also an ordained rabbi, also said that his party would seek to redress social problems that have been neglected, and to listen to and help those living in the periphery of the country who he said have been ignored and left to their fate.
He also attacked the existing haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, for having “brought the haredi public into a pit,” claiming that the ultra-Orthodox community is fed up with poverty and wants to integrate into society.
The Am Shalem party would fight for the Jewish people and the haredi public to repair these issues, Amsalem said. During the event, Amsalem also announced the names of other party members who would be appearing on his party list as candidates for election to the Knesset.
Included on the Am Shalem list are Moshe Zarfati, a former colonel in the air force and a hi-tech entrepreneur; businesswoman Tamar Abuhatzeira; Rabbi Ariel Konstantyn, founder of the Tel Aviv International Synagogue and a member of Tzohar, a national-religious rabbinical association; and Maxim Oknin, Deputy Mayor of Arad.
A poll for Channel 10 conducted in September showed that a party led by Amsalem would win two seats in the Knesset.
“We don’t have tens of millions [of shekels] to pour thousands of activists onto the street, but the public knows who will fight for the good of the Jewish people,” he said.
Back in November 2010, Amsalem issued a broadside attack against the Shas party condemning full-time yeshiva students who are married yet prefer to study and live on government subsidies instead of finding work. He also railed against other aspects of haredi life and Shas policies, including the failure to teach core curriculum subjects in haredi schools.
Shas and its spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ostracized Amsalem for his comments at the time, but he refused to give up his Knesset seat despite the demands of the party.

A Richard Nixon for our Time?

One of the real difficulties this election season is trying to figure out why I am just so weirded out by Mitt Romeny. This Stepford candidate cloned in the bowels of Republican Party seems to be a 21st century, information age take on Richard Nixon.

Less a pathological liar than entirely unmoored from any but a utilitarian concept of truth, his ethical bobbing and weaving remind one as nothing so much as Nixon press secretary's Ron Zeigler. This walking moral vaccum, when Nixon shifted course in increasingly desperate and pathetic attempts to stay afloat, would simply assert that previous statements were "no longer operative." Whether the previous or current version was true was not at issue; it was utterly irrelevant.

Similarly, there just seems to be no moral centre to Romney. There is no there there. This creepy Frankensteinian amalgam of right wing republican greed and Reader's Digest hardhat populism is deeply Nixonian. Yet at least Nixon was identifiably nasty. He was bigoted and venal. He drank too much, was deeply paranoid and vindictive. He was very much a crook. He was all too human.

This Nixon 2.0 is just creepy. It is as if an alien race, having studied earth for a few decades, has made a slightly skewed attempt to produce a robotic version of the leader of the free world. It looks real enough, if far too perfect. As Andy Borowitz notes, it can even fake human warmth and empathy, sometimes for an hour or more. But during the debate, I was worried that perhaps the batteries would run down and robocandidate would have to be recharged before the debate could continue.

Creepy.

Give Me a Lever Long Enough . . .

So you think markets are not manipulated? From CNBC . . .

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear. The program placed orders in 25-millisecond bursts involving about 500 stocks, according to Nanex, a market data firm. The algorithm never executed a single trade, and it abruptly ended at about 10:30 a.m. ET Friday “Just goes to show you how just one person can have such an outsized impact on the market,” said Eric Hunsader, head of Nanex and the No. 1 detector of trading anomalies watching Wall Street today. “Exchanges are just not monitoring it.” Hunsader’s sonar picked up that this was a single high-frequency trader after seeing the program’s pattern (200 fake quotes, then 400, then 1,000) repeated over and over. Also, it was being routed from the same place, the Nasdaq 

Helping Professions, Countertransference and the Mask of Love

More than a generation ago, community activist and educator John McKnight described professional helpers as typically wearing a "mask of love," one that hid or obscured a countenance of hate. Anyone who has existed in a state of clienthood has quickly come to realize that more often than not the most caring of professional helpers will turn quite vicious when faced with "non-compliance" on the part of those they would claim to assist.

Of course the reason given, and there is almost always some validity to this, is that those helped are very difficult individuals to deal with. But most observers of this scene will at least recognize and acknowledge the all too common presence of narcissistic helpers for whom clients are a source of ego gratifying supply and often little else.

Yet even beyond this, I would suggest that our reaction as helpers and our experience as clients (and I have been both) is rooted in Freudian concepts of transference and counter transference. Of course, as helpers, we are all too ready to blame clients or others we would help, for projecting or transferring their  issues onto us, the sainted helpers. But are we ever ready to entertain the idea that our negative projections onto those we help arise from our own fears and in particular our overwhelming fear that from the seeming safety of "us" we might somehow become "them" or the other? Better to reject or even destroy than to risk solidarity or identification.

And surely this is the heart of the Christian gospel. This is so much more than noblesse oblige. We are called to step out of us and to become them. I am convinced that this is discipleship and that everything else is self-justifying bullshit. But hey, I'm just a client.

Just saying.

So What's Plan "B", Boss?

In the often reality challenged world of economic public policy,  the ideas of Lord Keynes continued to define reality, whether you were for or against. And yet, at present, with the U.S. committed to trillion dollar deficit as far as the eye can see and hence committed to fiscal expansion and with the print key permanently stuck (see graphic of Ben's keyboard)

the world economy continues to sputter and wheeze. And the chattering classes continue to gather in conclaves of the like minded to reassure us, but mostly themselves, that their models, whether of the left or of the right, continue to work, if only the idiots on the other side would listen. Stephen Stills said it so well more than forty years ago

There's battle lines being drawn 

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

If expansionary policies still worked, we would surely be pushing production boundaries, there would be emerging labour and material scarcities, interest rates would be rising and that fourth horseman of the rich people apocalypse, inflation, would be galloping forward to slay the truly righteous -- those with lots of stuff. But that is on planet "policy." 

Here on planet "where we are fucking stuck," however, the picture is somewhat different. Here, the economy continues to have vast slack capacity as those who might actually buy stuff that producers produce are watching their economic prospects, and their children's, decline by the day. There is an already huge but still growing class of surplus people who no one wants to acknowledge because they scare the shit out of us, particularly those of us who might become them. Interest rates only matter to people who can produce or buy stuff. And inflation? We fucking wish!

You see, we are no longer much interesting in actually producing stuff. That we leave to Chinese slaves and Bangladeshi children. Instead, we modern day alchemists think we have discovered how to spin the boring dross of actually doing shit into financialized gold.  So of course, there is asset inflation. There is lots of asset inflation. Stock prices, defying all that is decent and true, continue to rise, as do real estate and commodity prices. This is because these are things that the people who actually have resources, particularly those alchemists who are finding increasingly creative ways to gut the economy, spend their money on: "investments." 

And this is deemed to be a good thing. This is "wealth creation."  And as that learned organ of middle class values, The Ladies Home Journal, told us on the eve of the last cataclysm, in 1929, "everybody ought to be rich." This power of positive thinking horseshit was then, and is now, the sound of the Titanic's orchestra playing Nearer My God to Thee as the great ship and its remaining mostly steerage passengers slip beneath the waves and the rich row away in the limited lifeboats, the honourable among them shedding a tear for those who remain behind. How gallant.

Perhaps it is the case that Lord Keynes' prescriptions will now only offer better and more secure lifeboats for those fortunate few able to escape the fate of the many who remain behind. And perhaps we need to admit that even if we manage a spot on one of the few remaining lifeboats, we do so collectively by leaving our children behind. Keynes' goal, and that of his disciple, Roosevelt, was to save the good ship capitalism from a crisis of its own making. Perhaps it is time to admit that the hubristic "unsinkable" ship is itself the problem.

The Dead Kennedys?

Watching a Jesse Ventura Google Talk from earlier in the year where ex Navy SEAL and governor Jesse Ventura trots out his new and improved E. Howard Hunt killed Kennedy trope, wherein the CIA bagged a twofer, first in 63 and then in 68.

This raises the intriguing question of whether a former elite special forces operative and state governor is batshit, tinfoil hat crazy or alternatively whether an extraordinarily well connected and informed citizen concludes on the evidence that the course of 20th century history was altered by an overthrow of an administration by senior military and intelligence officials.

I'm going with batshit crazy, but it is interesting.

Bibi and the Bomb

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Yesterday, everyone's favorite scary uncle brought his omigod we're all gonna to die dog and pony show to the UN. Anyone with a pulse and an internet connection knows that this is far more about influencing an election that is otherwise hopelessly lost. Unless. Unless there is an "October surprise" circa. 1980 when the hapless Carter had his fate sealed by misadventure in, wait for it, Iran.

An Israeli attack in the run-up to the election would leave Obama with no good option. Join in and he is a patsy to the bellicose Bibi. Or take a pass and be seen as a stooge of the Muslim lunatic fringe. The thought that this election might turn on this kind of manipulation is sad beyond words.

So cheer up, have a drink or five and enjoy someone who really did have to worry about a bomb.

Night Trading?

Something else you should never, never do while you are drunk because it seems like such a good idea:

Steve Perkins was left with a bigger black hole in his memory than most when his employer rang one morning to ask what he'd done with 520m It was 7.45am on June 30 last year when the senior, longstanding broker for PVM Oil Futures was contacted by an admin clerk querying why he'd bought 7m barrels of crude in the middle of the night The 34-year old broker at first claimed he had spent the night trading alongside a client. But the story began to fall apart when he refused to put the customer in touch with his desk for official approval of the trades. By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a "drunken blackout". Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

So did the earth move for you too?

Sarah Silverman Takedown

So Fuck You and the Horse You Rode in On

No doubt the good citizens of Kentucky are sleeping more soundly now that law enforcement has determined that a horse is a vehicle and that driving one (where is the steering wheel?) while impaired is an offence. Apparently the fact that the horse itself was sober is not a mitigating circumstance. The rider was busted, and the marijuana and moonshine found on board said horse were confiscated.

As usual, the British have a far more civilized approach to this:

Wolfgang Heinrich, 40, from the German town Wiesenburg, had been riding with his Haflinger horse Sammy when he stopped to have a drink with friends. But when he left the pub he realised he was too drunk to ride all the way home - and because it was cold, he decided to use his bank card to open up a nearby bank foyer and take himself and Sammy inside to sleep it off. 

Heinrich and his horse were found in the early hours of the morning by local man Stephan Hanelt, 36, who came to the bank to take out some money. He said: 'It was a bit of a shock to find a man and a horse asleep in the foyer of the bank. I rang the police straight away. 

Heinrich was let off with a warning and rode home. But bank staff were less than impressed when they arrived and had to clean up after the horse, who had left a deposit of his own on the foyer floor.

Mitt Romney, Parasite

So Mitt Romney spoke truth to power (i.e. his base) and pooched the  election. But what nobody seems prepared to say is that in terms of dollars received and absolute dependency, it is (irony drumroll) Romney's buddies, in other words the audience for this clusterfuck, who are the real parasites.

We, the great unwashed, don't simply subsidize their work ethic, sexual indiscretions or drug habits, as they imagine they do ours, but underwrite a gambling addiction of world-historic proportions. Indeed, Romney's gaffe came just days after Uncle Ben had announced that the Fed would  for now be printing a few additional trillions to try to re-inflate asset prices in order to save us and his buddies from their ongoing financial evil.

Welfare queens indeed!

Has Anyone Else Noticed This?

When we elected the brothers Ford, Rob and Doug, we not only got a twofer for mayor, we got a real life embodiment of the original hosers, Bob and Doug, a couple of amiable idiot drunks, the originals harmless, the clones maybe less so.

How Canadian is that, eh?

We Have Learned Nothing

One of my favourite weekly visits is to James Howard Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation. It is what penetrating, no bullshit comment is all about.

This week's letter looks at the latest attempt by the U.S. Fed to put off the increasingly inevitable by pumping an additional $45 billion a month in newly printed greenbacks into an economy that so wants to deflate. While I talked about this in my last post, one point that is made here, that I missed, is that this new money is to be used to buy subprime mortgage debt.

What the fuck?

This means that for all the bitching and moaning about dishonest bankers and their ways, we are now giving them an additional half trillion dollars a year incentive to do exactly what they were doing in 2008 to bringt the world economy to its knees -- writing garbage mortgages that  ultimately prey upon the poor and that U.S. taxpayers not just backstop, but pay for on an ongoing basis. And this will be done forever!

I reiterate: what the fuck?

This will of course also free up bank reserves so that they can plow more money into increasingly shaky equity markets so that we can continue to pretend that the economy is OK on that front as well. So the two main false hopes for economic health, commodities and equities for the rich (and for middle class pensions for those few who still have them) and reinflating real estate prices for the middle class. But of course at the price of setting up the next round of financial institution failures, mass foreclosures and socialized losses paid for by those of us poor losers who actually still pay taxes.

Kunstler rightly argues that the only viable path now is to wipe the slate clean -- to allow equities, real estate and commodities to decline or even collapse in the absence of world-historic monetary expansion. This is debt repudiation and an end to asset inflation and it is needed to do what bankruptcy is meant to do: to wipe the slate clean and allow us to start over.

To Infinity and Beyond!

So the question of the week is: what does it mean to pump $85 billion (with a "b") a month, or $20 billion a week into asset inflation in the interests of making us all feel rich in time for the U.S. election. What is truly alarming about QE3 is its foreverness. Our American cousins are simply going to print vast amounts of money forever. No fiscal stimulus that would reignite a rebuilding of a broken infrastructure or a shoring up of social programs but a fiscal infusion that amounts to permanent life support for various classes of equities: i.e. for the rich. And the Europeans are apparently going to act in concert.

Oddly, the market reaction thus far is tepid. A half percent and a market that remains firmly range bound. It will take time to see if other asset classes react more robustly, but there appears to be an weird calm as if all of this pumping up is simply keeping a very leaky balloon from deflating.

As I noted earlier, we remain at the cusp of an historic two decade topping pattern. Patterns morph, and this one might. An S&P500 moving strongly through the 1500 mark would be just such a change. But volume continues to decline. The fundamentals are horrid. And there is a growing concern that this phase of capitalist development has run its course. If that is the case, technical analysis suggests that a 60-70% decline followed by a semi-permanent flatline is not out of the question, as the Japanese found out a generation ago.

Andy Borowitz nails it!

New Yorker satirical columnist Andy Borowitz on the new iPhone 5:

Apple rocked the gadget world today with the news that the iPhone 5 includes a new feature that gives shape and purpose to previously empty and meaningless lives.
As Apple explained at its launch of the device, the new feature is an improved version of its personal assistant, Siri, that has been endowed with a quality missing from the previous model: empathy.
In a demonstration before a hushed crowd of Apple enthusiasts, an app developer named Josh asked the new Siri, “Why didn’t my parents love me?”
Siri’s response, “Your parents were too self-absorbed and narcissistic to recognize your essential beauty and value as a human being,” brought many in the Yerba Buena Center audience close to tears.
Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook closed out the launch with perhaps his boldest claim to date about the company’s new phone: “We believe that the iPhone 5 will make your current relationship obsolete.”
Wall Street rallied on the news, with tech analysts expecting millions of Apple customers to purchase an iPhone 5 to replace their existing boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse. But in the words of Apple devotee Tracy Klugian, who was present at today’s launch, such expectations are overdone: “Most Apple snobs I know started putting their Apple products before their relationships a long time ago.” 

This will surely put Apple over the trillion dollar valuation hump and keep an otherwise inexplicable bull market going for another few months.

We Are Rome -- Part Deux?

For more than three decades, Michael Hudson has been writing about the financialization of western capitalist economies and indeed of the global economy. His latest is The Bubble and Beyond. The concepts are difficult and complex and so his books and articles are necessarily dense and challenging. But the essence of his argument is that the wealthy western economies no longer grow wealth by making and selling things but by inflating assets at home and stripping assets abroad through financial manipulation.

Though he doesn't put it this way, we have become what economic anthropologists call a tribute economy -- an economy, like ancient Rome's, based on conquest, thuggery and forcible extraction. What he does recognize is that rather than Roman  Legions we now send private financial institutions, non-state actors such as the IMF and inter-governmental aid agencies, such as, in our case, CIDA. It is only when things fuck up that we send the Marines (and JTF2).

As John Perkins described in a much more colloquial way in  Confessions of an Economic Hitman, foreign loans are not a means of assistance but of conquest. But this is true domestically as well. The historic run up in real estate prices has not been captured by the middle class, for the most part, but by the banks who hold mortgages on these inflated assets.

Financial capitalism is a zero sum game wherein the goal is to transfer wealth or tribute from the conquered to the conqueror. It produces nothing and contributes little of its vast booty to the public good. And because it is parasitic, it is ultimately unsustainable. You may get blood out of that stone, but only so much. So whether it is Bain Capital using largely borrowed money to raid vulnerable manufacturers and strip them of pensions and labour costs, all the while charging hefty fees for this service or the IMF or similar institutions bearing dubious gifts wrapped in attached strings, these parasites will eventually bleed their hosts, us, dry.

Sam Gamgee and the Power of the Powerless

Surely the greatest pleasure in re-reading LOTR after a long absence is the pleasant and shocking encounter with an entirely new story. And the best of this new story this time through has been the epic heroism of Sam Gamgee. Indeed Tolkien was clear in his letters that Sam is the real hero in LOTR.

Sam, of course, is an every man who rises far beyond his circumstances. Leaving humble circumstances in a humble place he reluctantly sets out on an historical errand, not because he desires fame or fortune or is born to greatness but because he desires to serve his friend and master.

This of course is obvious to anyone who reads Tolkien. But what is perhaps not so clear is that Sam, more than any other character in LOTR, is utterly unconcerned with power, whether the power of birth or position or wealth or achievement, as with all of the other characters except perhaps the two young hobbits, Pippin and Merry. Nor is he drawn to the power of the Ring itself and all that it represents.

When Sam puts on the ring, in Shelob's Lair, he wears it longer than any other, except of course Gollum/Smeagol. But the ring has at most a transitory effect on him. Sam, it seems, is immune to the predations of power because even in the rare instances he wields it, it is for a transitory purpose, in this case saving his master from the foul and hated orcs.

So it is Sam's utter unconcern with power that makes him most able to safely wield it. And it is this, of course, that makes him singularly qualified as mayor of the Shire. And though Tolkien rejected the use of allegory, surely there is no better allegory for a political season.

One Ring to Rule Them All and In The Darkness Bind Them

Over the past week or so I have been re-visiting Tolkien for the first time in more than fifteen years. And one theme that has emerged so strongly this time through is the irresistible temptation to seize and employ the ring, the very embodiment of corrupted and worldly power, in order to achieve worthy ends or even ultimate goods.

Tolkien's message here is unequivocal: the ring cannot be used thus. Indeed it inevitably corrupts those who would so employ it. And the more noble the aims and the greater the power, the greater the fall. Or to use Phillip Selznick's wonderful quip: "power co-opts and absolute power co-opts absolutely." Those who would use the ring as a tool for good become tools for evil.

With this in mind, I stumbled upon Bill Moyers' wonderful little video essay on Barrack Obama's seeming abandonment of the poor and vulnerable:




Here he quotes a line from Obama's Dreams from my Father about power and indeed about grasping the ring:

I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail” and “bring it back like Promethean fire.

Indeed.

The entire sense of this presidency is that while the promise was that progress would grasp power, instead power has grasped progress, as Tolkien would say, to the peril of us all.

One More Reason to Move to a Cave

An "interesting" piece on the New Yorker site this morning, showing how Obama will stand or fall on the votes of fewer than a million "less informed" voters in a handful of swing states. This is where advances in the science of politics have taken us. We can accurately identify the small groups of swing voters who determine elections, and by targeting vast resources at this small and intellectually challenged group, can largely shape that vote. The argument in brief?

The undecideds, . . . “are rather less knowledgeable about politics, and much more likely to say they follow news and public affairs ‘only now and then’ or ‘hardly at all.’ (Almost 40 percent are unsure which party currently has more members in the House of Representatives, and another 20 percent wrongly answered that it was the Democrats.)”

In other words, this incredibly powerful sliver of the population is both suggestible and none to bright. As Rachel Maddow likes to say: what could possibly go wrong?

The fate of the world is in the hands of a small minority gun-toting climate deniers who think that Elvis is still working at that Taco Bell in Des Moines.

Cave, anyone?

Just Feel a Compelling Need for a F**king Rant!

Just went out for a few groceries along my favorite routes: along the Danforth from Donlands to Chester, and found out that one of its pivotal businesses is about to close. It will be replaced by a Rexall drug store which will be one of three large chain drug stores in a four block stretch.

Sun Valley Foods has been in the neighborhood for the past three decades. It is a family run business that caters to the local community and I (and many, many others) have found it to be a true pleasure to shop at -- a delightful staff, quality food and reasonable prices.

But they are unable to compete with what is increasingly a duopoly that controls the Ontario grocery business. Despite the fact that the store was packed every day of the week it could no longer maintain profit margins. So rather than taking the subway to an excellent grocery store that buys and sells locally, we will be more and more compelled to drive to a megachain, park in their untaxed parking lot and buy whatever shit, trucked in from whatever third world hellhole, that they decide to serve up. And a shopping district that is one of the best in the city will lose one of its anchor businesses. Inevitably, other businesses will begin to be shuttered.

And this is the real tragedy. A vibrant, alive and pedestrian and cycle oriented streetscape will begin to become just one more corridor for moving cars from suburb to downtown. The spillover value that businesses such as this provide is never recognized until it is gone. Though the jobs are important, it is so much more than jobs.

And it seems to me that as citizens, if we truly give a shit about this, we have to begin to live differently. First, we can spend differently. We can refuse to shop at the major chains no matter how enticing or convenient. And when we stop for a coffee while out shopping we can not make it a Starbucks but instead stop in at a locally owned cafe (or bar, heaven forbid in these puritan times). In other words, rather than blathering on about a hundred mile diet and such nonsense, we can live a life of two or three mile shopping, sans car and at locally owned businesses.

We can also start taxing parking lots as developed land and start pricing gasoline at its social cost, all externalities in, so that we recognize, where it hurts, that driving and parking aren't free and that they impose huge costs. In short, we can start pricing the collective aspects of our lives as if we actually care about liveable urban environments. Or I guess we could simply give up and move to fucking Scarborough.

Revolutionary Subsidiarity

From Matt Taibbi, a tale of the David of local government taking on the Goliath of the financial sector through the use of powers of eminent domain.

This particular idea is a response to a uniquely American problem -- vast numbers of underwater mortgages. But the idea surely has almost unlimited potential: local governments, responsive to the needs of the people rather than corporate power and drawing on capacities unique to them, taking on issues that higher levels of government cannot or will not because they are beholden to those powers.

Moyers and Hedges Interview

This week's guest on Bill Moyers' show was Chris Hedges. Hedges has had a very high profile over the last year or so and has taken on a sort of guru-like status. Still, he has some very important points to make and his latest book, the graphic novel Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt tells an incredibly poignant story of those most left behind in a wealthy society.

Moreover, Moyers is more able than most to zero in on the faith foundation of Hedges work. Here is the interview in its entirety:

Just Saying . . .

I was messing around with charting software this morning looking at the S&P500 over various time periods, trying to get a feel for where this nowhere market might be going. Here is one I found particularly interesting:

This chart shows the broad based index from the mid-seventies until now in monthly increments. For those of a technical bent, two things stand out here. The first is that two simple moving averages, a 200 period, or about seventeen years, and a shorter 50 period, or about four years, have converged and are about to cross. Such a cross usually signals a long term decline.

The second is an emerging pattern in the price data, which is referred to in the literature as a head and shoulder pattern of a high, at the end of the dot com boom, followed by a somewhat higher high, in this case in leading up to the latest debacle and then a somewhat lower high, in this case the peaks of the previous two years. This too is often indicative of a pending long term decline. What is particularly interesting is that both of these are emerging together and are confirmed by falling volume, which is shown in the second pane of the chart.

It would be the height of folly to base predictions on charting such as this, but together with obvious deep structural problems such as the impending demise of the euro zone, historic levels of inequality and unprecedented levels of public, corporate and personal debt fueled by unprecedented interest rates, the long-term outlook is beginning to look frighteningly uncertain.

Indeed, I have believed for some time that much of the developed world is following the Japanese example with a generational lag. If this is the case, then we may be entering a very long period of deflationary decline -- a sort of semi-permanent state of stagnation, with obviously disturbing social and political implications.

Loss of the Commons, Commodification and Powerlesssness

This excerpt from Illich's work popped up on my RSS feed yesterday. It was a reminder that so much that we lament has roots much deeper than we imagine.


The loss of the commons, for instance, whether through enclosures at the dawn of the industrial revolution or through the capture of vernacular practices and ways of life by technology or professional privilege commodifies that which was once freely available and so forces more and more of our lives into the confines of markets with all of the inequalities and suffering that this implies.


But Illich's great contribution was to recognize that this loss of common space, competencies and tools means much more. It alienates us from nature and from each other. It destroys community by rendering all relations between now commodified individuals competitive, often viciously so, and makes plunder of the environment, now a mere commodity as well, inevitable. And in doing so, he shows us, it leaves us powerless and thus dependent on those who would exploit us. 


Illich's arguments are almost always difficult. And they can be frustratingly vague and open ended. He painted on a very large canvas and sometimes seems impatient with those who don't grasp this larger picture. But I would suggest that several decades after his most groundbreaking work, he has more to tell us now then when he first spoke. Though much of his writing is out of print, it has found new life on the internet. Though there are many sites that host his work, this is a particularly useful one.

Crisis? What Crisis?

In a demonstration of breathtaking denial, RIM CEO Heins Thorsten joined CBC Metro Morning's Matt Galloway to explain that RIM, far from being at death's door, is undergoing a "major transition," continues to be a "world leader" and with the release of its new platform (if it ever happens) will regain a dominant position in the smartphone market.

This from a company that has lost 95% of its market value, can no longer execute on new products and maintains its customer base by deeply discounting its hardware, particularly in the third world where other products remain prohibitively expensive.

To my untrained eye, this appears to simply be a breathtaking denial. The beautiful Norwegian Blue parrot is dead. It is not resting. And it is not pining for the fiords.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Seems hizzoner thinks that those little stop signs on streetcar doors are for other people. You know, people who aren't important mayors. Today's Star  reports that Mayor Rob passed the rear door of a 505 car stopped at Dundas and McCaul, usually a very busy stop. When the driver left his seat to chew out this driver, unbeknownst to him who it was, our fearless leader phoned TTC HQ to complain.

We will miss this guy when he is gone. We will. We really will.

First Impressions on OneCity

Once again, everyone is talking about what is not happening and not talking about what is. Those who are interested in facts rather than spin might check out the website.

First, the plan does not call for an across the board rate hike. Instead it calls for existing rates to be applied to a portion of increases in property value. Specifically, if you $400 thousand condo becomes a $500 thousandone, you will be taxed on a value of $440 thousand or 40% of increased value. This is equivalent to a 1.9% rate hike. It is not a rate increase. We would hope that even the lightbulbs in the press (and the mayor's office) would be able to digest this.

The plan itself is breathtaking. It would make not only Toronto, but the GTA, a truly transit friendly urban region. This would take an enormous load off of a road system that provides what has been judged as the worst commuting experience in North America. And it would provide vastly better services to poorer neighborhoods where most are utterly dependent on transit. It is perhaps the most positive vision of the city since the glory days of the 50s and 60s.

Which brings us to the second thing not being talked about. This is that Counselor Stintz is doing what Adam Giambroni so failed to: turning the TTC chair into a springboard into the Mayor's office. As Ford looks more and more like a one term embarrassment (what were we thinking?) and to the extent that we remember the Miller regimes foibles, a smart, technocratically competent and somewhat more photogenic (less comical) mayor with extraordinary political skills and a willingness to cooperate rather than alienate is going to look extremely attractive. In short, she provides rock solid support for the argument that partisan politics in municipal administration, of whatever stripe, is counterproductive.

A combination of vision and managerial competence. And she won't show up drunk to hockey games,  physically assault opponents or scream obscenities at those who stand in her way.

RIM Death Watch

With the markets opening in a little more than two hours, we are about to see a reprise of the Northern Telecom meltdown last decade. They are now bleeding cash. The stern is in the air and it is about to slip under.

Blackberry 10, if it ever arrives, may be dead on arrival. The release of Google's Nexus, with its $200 price tag and 7" form factor and a real developer community, kills the Playbook. And if the phone that will surely follow is as good and as cheap, then there seems to be little reason for Blackberry hardware.

The seventy million plus subscribers are a selling point, as is perhaps the upcoming OS. And of course the couple of billion cash in the bank. But make no mistake, RIM is over and the impact on Kitchener Waterloo will be devastating.

Taibbi on Wall Street as Organized Crime

Matt Taibbi has an hugely entertaining and informative piece on Wall Street's manipulation of municipal bond markets in the current Rolling Stone.

His book on the banks,Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, is by far the most entertaining of the financial collapse genre and his feisty and incredibly persistent attacks on the criminal behavior of this class are a constant reminder of how lame the response has been to this theft of trillions of dollars by the teflon dons of the financial sector mafiosi.

What is Unfolding in Paraguay?

The president of Paraguay has been removed in an impeachment process that most neighbouring states are calling into question. Former bishop and noted liberation theologian Fernando Lugo has apparently has left Paraguay and it would appear that members of the opposition Colorado, backed by the military, are in control.

Paraguay was ruled for more than sixty years by the rightist Colorado party prior to Lugo's election victory in 2008 and for most of that period, from 1954-1989, by the truly odious Alfredo Stroessner, an ardent admirer of Adolph Hitler and a standout thug even by the standards of 1970s and 80s Latin America.

Paraguay is among the poorest countries in the world and the poorest in Latin America. Crippling disparities of wealth are rooted in the vast landholdings of a small elite in what is largely an agricultural export economy. Not surprisingly, Lugo's government faced stiff opposition from the start. Land reform efforts were sporadic and had limited success. Of course, they will  end altogether now that Stroessner's Colorado party has returned to power.

Canada was one of three nations who quickly announced recognition of the new government. And the Vatican apparently stopped short of condemning what very much looks like a bloodless coup. What better illustration could there be that fundamentalist belief and conservative religious reaction are not expressions of Christian faith but negations of it.

How it Works

Today's Toronto Star has a wonderful account of how government works at its most senior levels.

My graduate and doctoral work in public policy included several stints in both central agencies and policy departments and this is as accurate a reflection as I have seen on life at this altitude.

If the streamlined booking of boardrooms so clearly baffles the best and brightest in government, there would seem to be no hope for the larger issues.

Read and weep!

Where is This Economy Going

Markets are down about 2% at mid day today, which is but a single data point in an increasingly unstable market that looks very much like last summer. More worrisome is the longer term prospects for western economies reflected in market trends and in macroeconomic numbers.

If the market dips this summer, as it did last, this will represent the third turn back in three years from post-recession highs. And each of these peaks was fueled by dumping vast amounts of cash into the financial sector, primarily via the U.S. Fed. Despite these historical infusions, inflation remains near zero, suggesting that absent such intervention we would be in a period of long-term deflation.

Normally, as U.S. election year would see an uptick in markets and this may well happen later in the summer. And Bernanke does not want to determine the election either by sitting tight or being overly aggressive. So we might yet see a modest QE 3 as the election nears. But the economic numbers out of Canada and the U.S. as well as the BRICS are not inspiring. And Europe dances along the edge of the abyss month after month and year after year.

My own guess is that the most likely outcome moving forward is more of the same. Like the Japanese, we might be entering an extended period of perhaps decades of economic malaise -- a sort of lost generation or generations. This will be driven by unprecedented concentrations of wealth that both limit purchasing power and created vast pools of investment capital that have no place to go because demand, limited by that purchasing power, remains flat.

Welcome to the root canal economy -- a sort of permanent condition of chronic pain that is not serious enough to demand immediate alleviation but sufficient to make life more or less permanently miserable.

The Church for Whom?

Over the weekend, at the suggestion of a friend who has a very mixed view of all things 'church', I dug into the work of Gretta Vosper. Vosper's message is very similar to that of John Shelby Spong and others in its attempt to carve out a space separate from both an increasingly tepid and irrelevant liberal Christianity and an increasingly muscular fundamentalism that certainly scares me and probably should scare you too.

For her, this space is one in which we can become entirely at ease with, and even supportive of, a secular world view and focus instead and shared ethics and values -- on building a better world "with or without God." In North America at least, the question of who ultimately occupies this very contested space may well emerge as the key question regarding the future of the church. It is where almost all that is interesting for us is happening right now. And in this context, her argument is compelling. But, for me at least, it is not ultimately persuasive.

It is compelling because she like so many others makes such a strong case both for setting aside rigid strictures on belief so beloved of the fundamentalist crowd and many others as well and of centering the church and its work on the building of community instead. Indeed, this accords with much of what we can know of the early message of the Jesus community. So far, so good.

Why is this unpersuasive? In a passage on the work of the Jesus Seminar in recovering evidence of the historical Jesus, she insists that the message of this itinerant prophet that emerges is utterly impractical in 21st century North America. Yet this is to miss the point. It was pretty impractical in 1st century Roman occupied Palestine too.  It got people dispossessed and killed. And it did so because it rejected the dominant norms, even the progressive and inclusive dominant norms, of the day. It was meant to be, and was, a faith by and for losers. And just as with Forrest Gump, belief was as belief did. It was a liberation of the dispossessed and it scared the Romans because it should have.

So in a sense, Vosper is right. All of the dogma and ritual and power and money (and not just for the Catholics) are accretion. Using the social scientific, historical and literary tools now available to us, we can now dig back much further, to at least the very early church. And our inability to relate to that early church, I would suggest, arises not from our modernity but from our power and wealth. This helps to explain why when the urban and rural poor in Latin America, most nominal church members, began to form communities of faith autonomous from the Roman hierarchy the message of this early church was clearly evident in their reading of scripture. And it was here in the second half of the last century that a theology of liberation arose.

Yet this is not very evident in North America, particularly from our upper-middle class perch. Here what we see on the one hand is the religion of empire in the suburban megachurches catering to the Chevy Tahoe crowd and on the other, empire lite (less filling but tastes great) in the dying liberal churches catering primarily to the soon to be departed. And of course an attempt, of which Vosper is a part, to carve out a new space which might attract  those members of our class rightly disaffected with both. This is not a perspective that encourages great hope.


Yet in urban slums and rural backwaters throughout the world, the church is growing explosively. And here the church is again a church of the dispossessed -- of the losers. Here as well, however, the religion of empire can be found both in an evangelical movement that is a thinly disguised prosperity gospel and in a conservative catholicism and protestantism that has all too often served the forces of reaction. But it is here as well that the message that Vosper and others reject as impractical is also gaining a toehold, however tenuous.

Deje Vu All Over Again

A blog entry today by Paul Krugman reminds us of bigger picture that should be far more obvious to policy makers and pundits than it is.

In the face of declining employment numbers and wobbly markets in the U.S. and impending doom in the Euro zone, the increasingly dominant policy prescription is retrenchment. Neo-hooverism is alive and well, and inexplicably, we seem determined to repeat the mistakes of 1937 and push the world economy off the cliff again.

This zombie recession that just won't die seems to be gathering life once again. Andrew Mellon, Hoover's treasury secretary, lives! And a seemingly progressive president, like Roosevelt then, seems determined to place political expediency and fear of an intransigent right ahead of economic common sense.

The Bears are Getting Vewy Excited

Following the elections in France and Greece, markets are once again starting to look very shaky. Not surprisingly, the bears are out in force this morning portending doom and gloom.

But perhaps what is most interesting is a technical pattern that has been forming for more than a year.and that might signal a historic reversal of the long boom that began in the early 1980s and showed the first signs of real trouble with the dotcom boom and bust at the turn of the century.

If this pattern were to hold, then we could be entering into the decline of a mode of economic development that began in the 1970s with the collapse of consensus that emerged from depression and war in the 1930s and 40s. It is important to remember, though, that technical analysis is never about predicting the future but rather is about identifying emerging possibilities.

Yet if this pattern does hold, then the repugnant outcomes of neoliberalism and the recent resurgence of the more radical left may point toward an emergent consensus, one possibly far more progressive than that which has dominated the previous decades. And if this proves to be true, then early adapters will be particularly rewarded. And of course defenders of a collapsing status quo are likely to fare poorly.

So the question of the moment to institutional leadership everywhere is: which side are you on?

Wall Street and Welfare

I have not been a participant in this years remarkable market run-up. In part this is because of what is happening in my life outside of investing. But in part it is because something about this market just seems wrong.

And what seems wrong is that it is becoming increasingly apparent that this market is seemingly far more reliant on free money handouts than on economic fundamentals.  We appear to have gone from casino capitalism to welfare capitalism. So for the third time in three years as hopes for further printing runs are dashed the markets retreat.  And I wonder if this signals not only a gut-wrenching correction like last summer and fall, but either a prolonged period of market stagnation or decline  stabilized only by periodic infusions of free money.

Chris Hedges on Black Bloc & Occupy

Chris Hedges has a new post on the Truthdig.com website talking about the infiltration of the occupy movement by the lumpen of the Black Bloc..

There is much to agree with here. The 1% would clearly welcome any opportunity to tar the occupy movement with this brush. And there is little doubt that this lunatic fringe is deeply compromised by infiltration.

And yet we should be cautious about throwing the anarchist baby out with the Black Bloc bathwater. The very heart of the Occupy movement is an anarchist sensibility that refuses to institutionalize in order to fit more comfortably into the mainstream. David Graeber in particular has spoken eloquently and at length on this movement as a new political ethos that rejects the institutional norms of politics as usual.

Non-violent resistance and civil disobedience is and must remain the very foundation of this movement or all hope really is lost. And that means rejecting all tactics such as the Black Bloc that preach a mindless politics of hate and destruction. But it also means resisting the much more alluring siren call of institutional normalcy.

The form of this movement is its message. This is the very difficult path that the real (as opposed to the sanitized and airbrushed) MLK walked to such great effect. Let us hope that this wonderful movement is able to continue on this very narrow and difficult path.