07.12.16
Nietzsche
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen!”
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Ehrenreich-ism for the day
“What is it that American police officers lack? Racial tolerance, common sense, empathy? Well, all of those things, plus something else: A sacrificial sense of duty that can override self-preservation. Their first thought on encountering a person with a gun, toy gun or cellphone should not be ‘how am I going to protect myself?’ but ‘how am I going to handle/defuse this situation with minimal harm to everyone?’ We do not send firefighters into burning buildings to see whether they can get out alive.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, 07/11/16, FB
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07.01.16
Listen, Snob (continued)
“People want more power over their own lives. They want to feel some connection to society. Most particularly, they don’t want to be dictated to by distant bureaucrats who don’t seem to care what they’re going through, and think they know what’s best for everyone …
“These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this past year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who’d exposed a tiny flaw in the system.
“[Self-congratulating] cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population.
Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending.
“Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy.”
In related matters, this sneering and very successful video from Comedy Central:
Thought experiment from the Listen, Snob desk: Do you think someone engaged in pulling the wings off flies for purposes of entertainment is teaching a lesson in civics at the same time? Or just someone who pulls the wings off flies for money? (Shooting fish in a barrel also cost effective as analysis.)
If you think watching cable comedians picking gobbets of flesh off the bodies of selected volunteers from the American polity to studio laughter in 2016 is brilliant work, we’re on different sides of the fence.
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06.30.16
Listen, Snob
I see Trump and Brexit supporters being sniffed at by sober commentators for being “anti-expert,” as if that were proof of insanity. I’ve been anti-expert since the 1970s, when feminists took on the medical profession for various forms of unnecessary surgery, hazardous contraceptives and other abuses of women. In fact, it’s my anti-expertism that turned me against Hillary, whose idea of “health reform” in 1993 was to gather a bunch of guys in suits for secret deliberations, which of course led nowhere. — Barbara Ehrenreich, on FB
As an aside, those sniffing at “anti-expertism” 98 percent of the time are guilty of believing only people of their immediate tribe and pay grade are smart enough to be them.
For as long as I’ve read her, Barbara Ehrenreich has been an — ahem, expert — on the increasingly lethal character of the American way of life.
From above:
“A certain cleaning staff would go through the garbage to find the Chinese food containers left behind by Harvard students that still contained sme food in them because you could take them home to your kids … whoah. Meanwhile, at the other end at Harvard you had a guy named Greg Mankiw, who was an economics professor, who made it his mission to point out why low wage people couldn’t have higher wages. It would destroy the economy, pure and simple.
“I always debated him on the radio. And in the years since 2002, traveling around the country talking about these issues on different college campuses I began to get the impression the whole purpose of economics departments was to teach kids that whatever is going on in the economic status quo is perfect and how it has to be, so shut up.
“Some fresh guy [would] stand up, ‘Well, we learned in economics, you can’t raise wages.” But [you] can make $100,000 or whatever.
“I began to get really impatient and even, in some places, to go so far as to say, ‘What the hell do they teach at this university?’ Because if they taught math you could figure out that on six dollars/hour you’re not going to live anywhere in the environs of Cambridge, Mass., or any property of any other major university. That’s simple.”
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06.29.16
And the Elites Condemn As They Must?
Let’s call it “Ask the Crybaby.”
It’s the news phenom in which US reporters ask Brit-expats, almost always wealthy, what they think of Brexit. The old blog term for it was Shoeshine, that being what the well-off will say or think in support of those at the very top. A high button performance in kickdown on the classes below the chosen and their servants.
From Brattleboro, Vermont, Peter Solley, a Brit hack session producer/musician from the era of classic rock:
“I was shocked. Absolutely shocked … I’m ashamed to call myself English. I see no positive future for the United Kingdom. They’ve taken something that created the longest lasting peace since World War II and just thrown it away.”
Solley runs a snob ice cream gelato company.
In fairness, the newspaper goes on to interview one person with a bit of a different viewpoint.
For the sake of timeliness I’m reading Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book, “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?” on the EU. Obviously written before Brexit, it’s fair to say Varoufakis saw it coming.
Britain didn’t always have it so great and the City of London, its financialization engine, wasn’t its sole place of super successful economic activity. Things were hard before the EU was called that, the Seventies, when it was the European Communities. Even Margaret Thatcher was not a fan at all, being ridden out of power by peers who wished to be in on the administration of a newer monetary order.
Varoufakis’ book is a history of the EU, its early precursors and the economic policies and tides that have led to where it is today.
There are a numbr of reasons for its genesis, prime among them being the Paul Volcker-devised Nixon shock that did away with the Bretton Woods system.
It’s a complicated story.
But very briefly and incompletely Bretton Woods instituted a system in which the US made the dollar a euro-dollar. The purpose was to re-initialize the economies of Europe after World War II. Germany was in ruins. France had been occupied, turned into a vassal state, and been a battleground, too. And Britain was encumbered with crushing debt. The US used Bretton Woods to back the European reconstruction of currencies and value with gold set at a rigid price in which one ounce was an absolute guarantee of 35 US dollars.
But by the early Seventies, Germany and Japan had been rebuilt, going from deficit to surplus nations. The US had been the supreme global surplus nation, controlling the currents of the world economy. No longer was it the single pole of the engine.
The rise of Germany and Japan meant the US went from being a surplus to a deficit nation. This, along with gold speculation by German bankers and the French, destabilized Bretton Woods.
Paul Volcker, then the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank analyzed what had happened and developed a scheme for keeping America’s upper hand in the global economy. It would no longer honor Bretton Woods. It uncoupled the gold pledge, raised global interest rates and instituted tight money.
Varoufakis explains:
“High interest rates are wonderful for those living on unearned income, the so-called rentiers, but not so good for manufacturers who see their investment costs skyrocket and the purchasing power of their customers plummet. For this reason, combining high returns to financial capital (requiring high interest rates) with high profit rates for American businesses (requiring low interest rates) was never going to be easy, and Volcker knew this. It was a combination that could only come about if another way of providing that profit could be found. And one way to do that would be to reduce wages. On the one hand, the Fed would push interest rates through the roof while, at once, the federal government would turn a blind eye, indeed promote, policies that crushed the real wage prospects of American workers …
“Soon, the fate of America’s working class was to infect the circumstances of weak citizens in Britain, in France and, by the 1990s, even in Germany …
“Disintegration was in the air and the majority of people in a majority of countries eventually acquiesced to the notion that labor was overvalued and overprotected, manufacturing was overrated, while finance was undervalued and in need of unshackling. Everything became increasingly reducible to its financial value.”
Varoufakis’ book is fascinating, particularly as a history in which the European economic engine is assembled in a jerrybilt way as a substitute for Bretton Woods, but regularly misfiring and bringing misery, plagued by the monetary policies of its leading nations, primarily here set by German bankers and their autocratic agendas. The story Varoufakis tells is surely not one at all favored by the current rulers of the EU and American economic machines.
So while the institutional complainers, the shoeshine boys of the ruling elites, go after the the alleged misinformed and nativist flaws of the Leavers, they really don’t know a lot more about what they’re talking of than those they’ve condemned so vehemently. Of course, from their short term point of view, Brexit is bad.
Historically, perhaps something like this was slated to happen. And if a similar political earthquake transpires here, it can’t be unexpected. At least that’s the impression Varoufakis’ reasoning gives me.
Varoufakis continues, mid-book:
When John Connally crudely explained to President Nixon, relying on Volcker’s underlying analysis, that “all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first,” what he meant was that the Bretton Woods balancing act was becoming imbalanced by the surpluses of countries like Germany and Japan.
Impervious to the global responsibility that comes with large trade surpluses, these foreigners were trying, childishly, to take advantage of the United States’ commitment to global balance, the result being a complete collapse of the postwar equilibrium. Like immature children that know not what is good for them, European governments and Japan, sporting increasing surpluses, were taking advantage of America’s difficulty in maintaing order with detrimental results for everyone.
Volcker’s 1978 Warwick speech had given the Europeans ample warning. He effectively threw down the gauntlet to Bonn, Paris, London and Tokyo. Between the lines he was foreshadowing the second phase of America’s postwar global dominance. In 1971, Volcker implicitly told his audience, America dismantled the monetary system whose integrity Europeans had foolishly undermined. Its next move would be to bring about a highly imbalanced global system that the United States controlled fully because, rather than in spite, of America’s twin deficits (its trade deficit and its federal government budget deficit).
The price for that new system, which would extend America’s dominance, was high: weak people and fragile countries were, once more, left to their own devices, suffering not what was globally optimal but that which they “must??? in a world economy unrestrained by New Deal–like rules and institutions. Politics would become toxic, social solidarity would weaken, international relations would turn nastier, abject poverty would multiply in Latin America and Africa. Nonetheless, the United States was bound to emerge as a net beneficiary of this painful “disintegration???…
I can’t do the book all the justice it deserves. At best, I have cherry-picked pieces with which I have great affinity. Yet there is much food for thought here from every angle and you must read “And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future” yourself.
The morning after “Brexit” our “elites” were wringing their hands in opinion pages everywhere over how Leave delivered to Britain’s “elites” an epic punch in the face.
But did you notice that while the “elites” were doing all the explaining, excusing and bemoaning, there was no initial invitation to let any people who felt they had to throw that punch to the public speakers table?
For examples of the shunning of the common pariahs, you only needed to look at the opinion pages of the New York Times. One of the six-figure explainers, Roger Cohen, delivered no less than two condemnations.
From the first, it’s final bit: “My nephew wrote on Facebook that he had never been less proud of his country. I feel the same way about the country I grew up in and left.”
Ashamed and shamed, from the gold-plated opinion-maker to the upper crust Facebook lad to the hoity-toity ice cream vendor.
But where was opinion from the winning side? Missing entirely.
A day later, Owen Jones, author of “Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class” was in the Guardian:
“Above all else, it was about immigration, which has become the prism through which millions of people see everyday problems: the lack of affordable housing; the lack of secure jobs; stagnating living standards; strained public services. Young remainers living in major urban centres tend to feel limited hostility towards immigration; it could hardly be more different for older working-class leavers in many northern cities and smaller towns.”
The sentiments are familiar. The “social problem” is here, too, quite obviously so.
The betters have had years to extend a hand. Telling people to suck it up, get more education and not be bigots because your station comes inevitably as a result of your choices and talents. That worked for awhile. Now it’s seen for what it always was, a fob.
This is what destroyed the GOP. And it’s what threatens the Democratic Party and the predicted inevitable presidency of Hillary Clinton. They have no answers, either. In fact, they’re pretty much all right with how things have turned out, Brexit, a mere inconvenience in this hemisphere.
We have to work together, not tear each other down, they say. The words are hollow.
06.27.16
Unfortunately, it’s that time of year …
Every year, Vibrio vulnificus infections begin with the arrival of summer. When I worked with the organism, it was the lab’s take that it was fairly common in estuarine and beach waters along the Gulf Coast. Infections, catastrophic ones, happened in those with underlying medical conditions.
Upticks in V. vulnificus infections in recent years are probably attributed to more vulnerable people being in the water during summer months and possibly increased growth of the organism during the same period when conditions are especially favorable to it.
The problems started on May 12, when Kelly Kohen Blomberg was in the Gulf of Mexico near Grand Isle, a barrier island known for fishing…
[Small scratches] had turned into an oozing, gaping wound — and Blomberg had to head back to the hospital to get a skin graft and have dead tissue surgically removed. She’s now had two surgeries and there’s still a gaping hole in her foot, though doctors are hoping the skin graft will take so the wound can start healing over.
A Father’s Day celebration on the Texas Gulf Coast has left a Central Texas man, Adrian Ruiz, fighting to keep his leg after it became infected with a flesh-eating bacteria, friends and relatives said Thursday …
But on Monday afternoon, he was admitted to the intensive care unit at Seton Medical Center Hays. He was diagnosed with an infection of Vibrio vulnificus, a flesh-eating bacteria that has spread through his right leg …
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that earlier this week, 50-year-old Brian Parrott, a Houston-area man, lost part of his leg after contracting the same bacterial infection in the waters off Galveston Island.
Why it does what it does. I did that.
Every year, V. vulnificus infects and hospitalizes more people than ricin, a poison in castor seeds, has killed in the last 20 years. (Score, ricin deaths by terrorism and/or crime = ZERO; by suicide = 1.) The United States spends more money on countermeasures and vaccines for ricin than it does on V. vulnficus.
Just so you know the priorities and whose bread gets buttered.
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06.25.16
Are there enough Rust Belt counties?
The people in my peer group of the educated and urban, a group I find myself increasingly at odds with this year would say, no, there aren’t enough Rust Belt counties to hand the presidency to Donald Trump.
A Politico article, touched down in Cambria County, PA, collects some anecdotal and statistical evidence. They visit Johnstown, the place of Slap Shot and the Charlestown Chiefs, previously used as for framing purposes here.
Today Karlheim—blue-eyed, 58, and graying around the temples—spends his days behind the wheel of a giant coal truck, but the declining coal industry has hit Karlheim hard. He’s making $10,000 less than he was just three years ago, he said, and he’s worried about his mortgage. “How do you make those payments???? he asked. This spring, after years of not voting for anyone, in either party, in any presidential election, his anxiety compelled him to cast a vote in the Democratic primary. For Bernie Sanders.
His vote helped the socialist from Vermont beat Hillary Clinton in the county—while Trump won big, claiming more votes than either Democratic candidate …
And he has some bad news for the former secretary of state.
While there are some things that worry him about the GOP nominee—“We don’t know his background,??? Karlheim said, and “He’s a bit outspoken.???—he likes that Trump is talking about jobs. “That’s what we need,??? which is why, Karlheim said, “In the big election … I’m going for Trump.???
“In the past, people here have turned to the Democrats,??? said Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown, Pa., 200 miles to the east. “They were the ones who looked after working-class interests, in their minds. But there is a belief that that isn’t the case anymore—and now they’re shopping around for an alternative.???
The interior, and environs around Pittsburgh, will go for Trump the article continues. But it may not be nearly enough to offset the weight of Clinton voters in “more affluent” southeastern Pennsylvania.
A picture of Johnstown’s steel mill could just as well have been looking at Bethlehem Steel from the bridge over the Lehigh River in south Bethlehem when I was there.
It comes down to class war. The Democratic Party has no interest in those left behind by the decades-long shocks of globalization. It’s all right with the consequences.
The presidency of Hillary Clinton will be an anathema to those left behind, despite her statement that “there’s a need for us to pull together to solve the challenges of our country …”
For the Clinton’s, that hasn’t been true for a long time. The words are fine-sounding but unbelievable.
06.22.16
A New Renaissance is here: Sad, very sad, if you don’t see it
While things pretty much suck here and there’s no shortage of people living out of cars on the street, Tom Friedman, alarmed at the rise of Donald Trump, declares that we’re actually in a New Renaissance.
And after checking his stack of recent book press releases sent by wise people who want publicity, he’s found an expert to say so, Ian Goldin, director of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.
Consulting by e-mail, readers are told:
“Now, like then, new media have democratized information exchange, amplifying the voices of those who feel they have been injured in the upheaval,??? said Goldin. “Now, like then, public leaders and public institutions have failed to keep up with rapid change, and popular trust has been deeply eroded.??? Now, like then, “this is the best moment in history to be alive??? — human health, literacy, aggregate wealth and education are flourishing — and “there are more scientists alive today than in all previous generations … as in the Renaissance, key anchors in people’s lives — like the workplace and community — are being fundamentally dislocated. The pace of technological change is outstripping the average person’s ability to adapt. Now, like then, said Goldin, “sizable parts of the population found their skills were no longer needed, or they lived in places left behind, so inequality grew.???
The answer to all the turmoil is, of course, found by consulting the Internet’s Box of Crackerjack tech-spertise: “More risk-taking is required when things change more rapidly, both for workers who have to change jobs and for businesses who have to constantly innovate to stay ahead.”
They’d probably tar and feather the guy in Pennsylvania. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Check the appropriate song. You’ve heard it before, “China Toilet Blues, still timely, with me channeling Captain Beefheart, somewhere between Trout Mask Replica and Bongo Fury.
Downloadable for your device, just go to the site. Tell your friends. Share. Make me happy for a minute.
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Exit, Stage Right
Having just read “Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class” by Owen Jones, I’d expect the Brexit vote to break along class and perceived class lines. Older, northern England, shafted by the Tories and New Labour for exit. Everyone else for staying.
Many exceptions, too, like this rationalization, part of old vs. young in a piece yesterday from the New York Times, plus worries about a plunging economy:
“Louise said she understood the pressures that immigration placed on schools and hospitals. But leaving the European Union worried her, she said, because it risked wrecking the economy and making it hard for young people to secure employment. It took her eight months to find work as a barista, she said.”
This is all through “Chavs,” the updated edition which I have, dating from 2012.
As in the US, government policies, in the UK, starting with Thatcher, made the British economy lethal for millions of its workers. “Chavs” explains the result in terms of the UK not being able to generate sufficient jobs, period. Those that exist pay very poorly.
If it takes eight months to find work as a barista, it seems to me the underlying problem of simply finding even subsistence work is so severe that it won’t be affected by either staying or leaving.
And the argument left out of the anecdotaly New York Times piece, which I did not know, is that a number of Tories vigorously support Brexit because a vote for leaving the E.U. will allow them to apply even more pressure to the working class.
A columnist describes it at the Guardian:
“But, all over Britain, people have fallen for the scam. In the Brexit referendum, we’ve seen what happens when working-class culture gets hijacked – and when the party that is supposed to be defending working people just cannot find the language or the offer to separate a fake revolt from a real one. In many working-class communities, people are getting ready to vote leave not just as a way of telling the neoliberal elite to get stuffed. They also want to discomfort the metropolitan, liberal, university-educated salariat for good measure…
“I want to have one last go at convincing you that leaving now, under these conditions, would be a disaster. First, let’s recognise the problem. For people in the working classes, wages are at rock bottom. Their employers treat them like dirt. Their high streets are lined with empty shops. Their grownup kids cannot afford to buy a home. Class sizes at school are too high. NHS waiting times are too long …
“But a Brexit led by Ukip and the Tory right will not make any of these things better: it will make them worse. Take a look at the people leading the Brexit movement. Nigel Farage, Neil Hamilton, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove. They have fought all their lives for one objective: to give more power to employers and less to workers. Many leading Brexiters are on record as wanting to privatise the NHS. They revelled in the destruction of the working-class communities and cultures capable of staging real revolt.”
Achingly familiar, is it not?
From Democracy Now, where Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interviewed Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal:
JUAN GONZ??LEZ: And, Thomas Frank, to get to Donald Trump, as well, and his appeal, obviously he has focused a lot of his attention on these trade deals, on NAFTA and the Pacific trade partnership. What about the appeal of Trump to working-class voters? Is that real or not, from what you can tell?
THOMAS FRANK: Well, it’s real, but it’s—I mean, it’s shrinking fast. I mean, this guy is—this guy is a gold-plated buffoon, you know? What we have to—what we have to consider here with Donald Trump is we have to understand that what’s happening with Donald Trump, this is not—you know, there’s all sorts of different ways of describing it, but what we’re really seeing here is a reaction to—I mean, you know, to inequality. This is what it looks like when vast parts of America are—you know, when the economy has basically dried up and blown away. You know, this is what deindustrialization—at the end of the day, this is what it looks like, when, you know, Democrats go around celebrating this wonderful new information economy that we’re in. And by the way, they’re doing it today on The New York Times op-ed page; they do it all the time. They celebrate that. And the other side of the coin is that, you know, the middle class is shrinking. Wages never go anywhere. You know, the percentage of the gross national product that is—that goes to labor these days is the lowest it has ever been since World War II. You know, look, for a lot of people, the promise of American life is over. It’s gone.
And this is only going to get worse under a Hillary Clinton presidency. And, well, it would get much, much worse under a Donald Trump presidency. But what I’m getting at here is that this phenomenon, inequality, is going to get worse. All the problems that we’re looking at today, our economic problems, are going to—are going to get worse. And four years from now, you’re going to have another Trump.
Owen Jones, at the end of Chavs, writes (remember, this is 2012):
It would be tempting to make all sorts of doom-laden, apocalyptic predictions about what will happen if such a [global labor movement] fails to get off the ground, and warn darkly of riots and revolutions. The reality is just downright depressing. The working class will remain weak and voice-less. They will still be the butt of jokes at middle-class dinner parties, detested in angry right-wing newspaper columns, and ridiculed in TV sitcoms. Entire communities will remain without secure, well-paid work, and the people that comprise them will continue to be demonized for it. Living standards will go on stagnating and declining, even while the richest rake it in like never before. Ever fewer working-class people will bother to vote. Right-wing populism will tap into growing disillusionment and fury at the manner in which working-class people have become so despised. Mainstream politicians will continue to focus their energies on satisfying the demands of a small, wealthy elite, while growing ever more indifferent to the needs of an increasingly apathetic working class…
At its heart, the demonization of the working class is the flagrant triumphal ism of the rich who, no longer challenged by those below them, instead point and laugh at them.
Join any conversation with members of the Democratic Party and nine times out of ten, right now you’ll hear the same mockery and total dismissal of those supporting Donald Trump.
Much of the HRC campaign will be devoted to eye-rolling at the demagogue and his followers. The message, plain as the nose on your face: Look how pathetic and unfit for anything they are.
06.15.16
A gigantic jar of pickles
I recommend to you Yanis Varoufakis’ “The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and The Future of the World Economy.” Not because I think you’ll rush out and buy it. It’s not an obvious “must have.” But if you’re clever, you might have the know-how to steal an ebook copy.
Varoufakis is a Greek economist, Syriza’s former Minister of Finance, who quit in protest of the austerity imposed on his country, an austerity that has blighted his nation. For that, he deserves a salute.
But his book is often also hysterically funny, mordantly, about American-style predatory business.
On Walmart, of which he has much to say, most notably the tale of the gigantic jar of pickles:
“Take for example, Vlasic pickles, a well-known everyday brand. Walmart’s ‘innovation’ was to sell these pickles in one gallon jars for $2.97. Was this a shrewd retailer’s response to market demand? Few family refrigerators had room for such an item.
“So what was the selling point?
“It was the idea of a huge quantity at ultra-low price. Walmart’s customers, in this sense, were not buying pickles as such. They were buying into the symbolic value of cheapness; into the notion of having appropriated so many pickles for so little money. Indeed, it made them feel as if they were Walmart accomplices — in association with an icon of American corporate might, they had forced producers to make so much available for so little!
“The gigantic jar of pickles thus ended up denoting a small victory at a time of wholesale defeat. Whose defeat? That of the American worker, whose wages had never really recovered since 1973. Moreover their working conditions deteriorated as employers everywhere faithfully copied the Walmart model…
“The situation in the workshops and the fields of the Third World, where goods are grown or made on behalf of Walmart, is, as one might imagine, bordering on the criminal.”
If you ever run across Yanis Varoufakis and what he has to say or write, I guarantee you’ll be purged of whatever holy crap you’ve been pumped full of on the American economy.
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