I dream of another world

Naivete and amazement should always be your guides, your Virgil and Sacajawea, when tracking across the zona.

So, take the issue of the law. It used to be the case, and according to the droning theorists, waving their Rawls around, it still is the case, that a law is passed in order to implement or regulate some practice.

Perhaps I should say retract that “used to be the case”, given the massive fraudulence of the Cold War. But I do find it astonishing that few seem to investigate another function of the law: to seemingly address and issue, and thus give a cover to the government to fundamentally transgress it. In other words, the laws exist much like the declaration of freedoms in the Soviet Constitution of Stalin’s time: as a curtain.

So, in the U.S., laws were passed to prevent government agencies from extending to investment banks the kind of insurance that are extended to other banks. And so in the U.S.. these laws were casually and massively broken, and nobody really cares.

In the UK, which is becoming the black hole of civil rights in the West, Nu Labour came up with an idea that obviously sample surveyed like a cool Net advertisement: Freedom of information. It sounds so good, let’s plaster the name on a bill! No sooner thought of than done. The Guardian editors and CiF can trumpet the progressiveness of it all, and the Government can proceed to ignore it.

So the Heathrow airport protesters are finding out. This is from the Index on Censorship:

“Following Jack Straw’s veto of the release of the pre-Iraq war cabinet minutes, the government’s commitment to freedom of information (FOI) has again been called into question. Campaigners against the third Heathrow runway are finding the Department for Transport (DfT) strangely reluctant to publish the latest versions of documents that have already proved painfully embarrassing for ministers. Both Greenpeace and Tory MP Justine Greening have previously used FOI laws to obtain evidence revealing the relationship between ministers and officials at the DfT and BAA over airport expansion. In this light, it is not surprising that the department is trying every trick in the book — and some that aren’t in the book — to block new requests for similar papers.

Greening famously obtained proof that BAA helped the DfT to ‘reverse-engineer’ its forecasts to show that a new runway would meet ministers’ ‘strict environmental tests’. This evidence came from a request for disclosure of communications between the two organisations. But the DfT has refused two almost identical requests from Greening covering later periods. The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, is expected to rule shortly on her complaints.”
I’m on pins and needles about that ruling! Like the investigation of the BEA, or like, well, almost anything done by that horrendous collection of crooks that took a moribund socialist party to the Thatcherite heights, we already know what happens when the guardians figure out the puzzle of who will guard the guardians: pass fake laws, of course.
The DIT claims that if it publishes earlier studies where the parameters weren’t fixed to make everything look Potemkin village fine, it will lead to ‘ill-informed’ speculation. The rulers, having our interests at heart, have come down hard, throughout the freedom loving nations, on ill informed speculation. That’s why the Fed coolly told the Senate to fuck off when the Senate enquired about AIT counterparties. That is why we watched the SEC pretend that they were so in the midst of investigations, of a very delicate nature, that they could by no means and in good conscience answer questions they were being asked about the nutty, ideologically driven lea-way they gave to any fly by night company to rip off the public. They invoked executive privilege even thought the executive hadn’t been told – why bother? The organs function when the body is dead. Every zek knows this.

Je rêvais d'un autre monde

humpty dumpty in the zona

You'll see him in your head on your screen
hey buddy I'm warning you to turn it off...

I’ve been feverishly editing _ and probably getting editor’s cancer of the brain – lately. Thus, I’v e had no time for limited inc – oh, the thing I was going to do about the labyrinth, the encyclopedia, plots, myth and conspiracy! On the other hand, one of my papers required me to do some research, which is how I came upon “The Study of Islamic Culture and Politics: An Overview and Assessment” by Mansoor Moaddel in the Annual Revie of Sociology – I read these things, reader, so that you don’t have to – and found this terrific quote:

The rentier state model advanced a compelling analysis of this specificity, attempting to supercede that of the Islamicists. Far from being an outcome of Islamic culture or the historical legacy of Islam, this model focuses on the effect of enormous petrodollars on the structure and functions of the state in Islamic coun- tries. First used by Mahdavi (1970, pp. 428-67) in reference to Iran, the concept in reference to Iran, the concept of the rentier state, or the rentier economy, applies to a country's reliance on sub- stantial external rent in the form of the sale of oil, transit charges (Suez Canal), or tourism. This economy is believed to have far-reaching political, social, and cultural consequences. First, only a small fraction of the population is directly involved in the creation of wealth. As a result, modem social organizations asso- ciated with productive activities were developed only to a limited extent. Second, the work-reward nexus is no longer the central feature of economic transactions where wealth is the end result of the individual involvement in a long, risky, and organized production process Wealth is rather accidental, a windfall gain, or situ- ational, where citizenship becomes a source of economic benefit. To acquire wealth requires different types of subjective orientation, which Beblawi (1987, p. 52) called "rentier mentality" and "rentier ethics." Non-economic criteria such as prox- imity to the ruling elite and citizenship became the key determinants of income. Rentierism thus reinforced the state's tribal origins, as it regenerated the tribal hier- archy consisting of varying layers of beneficiaries with the ruling elite on top, in an effective position of buying loyalty through their redistributive power. As the state is not dependent on taxation, there is far less demand for political participation (pp. 53-59). [377]

Terrific not because it is unusual, but because it is the standard developmentalist boilerplate since the great Fall of the Wall (which was prophecized in Finnegan’s Wake, my own Book of Revelations. Soviet Humpty’s great great fall….) For of course, the consensus is that the democratic, developed states were all about the creation of wealth, baby! Imagine, an elite that subsists on windfall gains and situational power! Why, that would never happen to proud Western man!

The arrogance has been grooved into the academic tabula rasa, and so the human rights contingent, dear hearts all, the Rawlsians, the well meaning liberals are still running with this tune in their head. Crooked Timber had a post yesterday couched in the Asiatic Despotism mode that just missed using the word kowtow to describe the Chinese system. And of course, under every sentence is the assumption, the snuggly sleepers assumption, that peasants and despots are far from our modern institutions. Have we no academic conferences? Have we no tenure? Have we not exhaustively and conclusively disproved the anti-democratic menace? Wasn’t that the lesson of the 20th century? So it goes in the Post-Humpty era, but meanwhile another egg has fallen and it can’t get up.

they shoot hedge managers, don't they?

Another manager tells me a story about Morgan Stanley’s annual hedge-fund conference at the Breakers, in Palm Beach, which was held the last week of January. In years past, every hedge-fund manager wanted a plum spot on a panel, so they could present themselves to prospective investors. This year, Morgan had to beg its clients to participate. Managers were reluctant not because they didn’t want—or need—the money, but because “no one wanted to be subject to a Q&A from strangers about why we all suck so bad,” as this manager put it. And those who worried were right to do so. “It was open warfare,” he says. He adds that the attitude from wealthy families was “Who are these bourgeois pigs who ripped us off?”

Another manager describes the mood at the Breakers as “pure, unbridled anger.” A source says one foreign investor at the conference declared, “These hedge-fund managers are like the Somali pirates!”—and he wasn’t kidding.

‘I think I know a few names I’d like to be callin you meself.”

Lady from Shanghai, the most realistic film ever made about the species of hybrid – half hyena, half spider – which composes the upper .01 percent. A zona film for zeks.

‘And you know, there wasn’t one of them sharks in the whole crazy pack that survived.”

‘In a way, hedge funds were eating one another alive. As managers sold their positions, some discovered, as one manager puts it, that “all our names were owned by the same guys. We had become the market. When I ran for the exits, all the buyers who should have been there were doing the same.” During the third quarter, a Goldman Sachs index which tracks stocks that are heavily owned by hedge funds lost 19 percent, more than twice the decline of the S&P 500, while another Goldman Sachs index that tracks stocks which hedge funds were likely to sell short actually gained 2.4 percent, according to a Cambridge Associates LLC report. “Hedge funds were shooting at each other,” says one manager, meaning that some funds would make bets against stocks that were heavily owned by other managers.”

Warning: the VF article has a feel good establishment ending, which rather spoils the course. After all, who respects the rich more than VF? Titus Andronicus knew not to serve optimism at the table when you are going for an all around barbecue, but these people are served up and then all their sins are forgiven. Meritocrats, really. The writer even writes of the 'hard-earned' money that went into the hedgies. Hard earned. Hard earned. The guy up on the corner, sitting there with a sign about his service to the country and all I got was this lousy mental disease that the VHA doesn’t recognize, begging for quarters, is earning his money hard. And it didn’t go to no stinkin’ hedge fund. Meanwhile, the idea that last year was just a bad year, and hedge funds are coming back? A dream that even the VF gated community is beginning to doubt. Oh, honey, it wasn’t all a dream! Welcome to reality.

I love bottoms

I’ve always been an ardent ass man. Georges Bataille, in L’impossible, reflects on the anxiety the thought of his own derriere causes him. Not me. While my face may wither and wizen, my ass, from what I can see of it in my mirror, is still doing well. I well know the Freudian explanation – that imprinting I got as a tyke, looking upwards to Mom. Ah, the joys of those first infantile counter-generalities! As Herrick wrote:

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
Oh how that glittering taketh me!

The brave vibration rocks my fucking world. Thus, having read for the past year so much discussion, every day, of seeking the bottom – the bottom of housing, the bottom of the stock market, the bottom of unemployment, the bottom of energy prices, the bottom of this and the bottom of that – I have thought that perhaps all these bottoms would ramify in the great bourgeois unconsciousness and we would begin to enjoy the bottom seeking. We would become connoisseurs of bottoms, confessors of the fesse. The very word has a brave vibration. On the bottom. The bare bottom. According to the OED, the word seems to go back, all Germanic and with a horned helmet, to boden, to ground, as though this teeming world were one bottom, and we the bottom dwellers upon it.

Unfortunately, the zona is unsexing us all. This orgy, this bonfire of all our fictions, this too too mortal slicing and dicing (and we thought it was all loaves and fishes) has become a downer. Liquidity, it turns out, is liquification, but nobody is getting hot and wet, as per all the girls in all the live cams the world over – rather, they are deflating, parking their bottom lust in anger, and thinking all that glitters is not gold.

Myself, however, I am more… sanguine, I suppose you could say. The last decade has been like breathing in some poisoned gas, day after day. What was coming out of our top seeking, our ascent, on the wings of algorithms, to the Island of LaPuta? Not much. We now call it toxic waste, and we then called it innovation, but it was always a cancer. Living closer, always closer, to the bottom myself, I have, in a sense, shrunk. Where once I looked up Mommy’s skirt, little pervert tyke, I now look up the “metaphorical” skirt of all that traffic, those big bottomed SUVs, all that glitter of equity loan wealth, gorging on overpriced Tex Mex, all the big bottomed McMansions on their miniskirt lawns – and I was not seeing good solid ass. I was not seeing the kind of behind that would make Bataille redden with lust, the voluptuous curve, the good meat. I was seeing the withered shank of the white magic of the Western World, which has clotted the seas with its plastic bags and done its best to harness the imagination to the new species, the human worker ant, chemically neutralized, quanta in search of quanta, unbottomed, tasteless, death in life and life in death. When pleasure becomes the synthetic substitute of pleasure, give me the bottom.

PS - and for those of you who want News from the Zona instead of news from the Sex Zona, go on over and look at this post. Never ever ever underestimate the mendacity and sheer legalistic evil of the kleptocratic system. The Great Fly left his eggs all over the this country. It will be years before we clean it up.

Zona Plutarch

Poor James Glassman. This interview with him tells us a lot, not so much about the reactionary bumbler, but about the impossibility of unseating a right wing propagandist in D.C.

Now, as a matter of fact, I have some stake in Glassman’s career. I was his secretary, once. This was way back when I was a freshman at Tulane. Glassman edited a weekly, then, the Figaro. He was young, he was nice, and he was never particularly bright. That the pup I knew, who was fighting for ad revenue from the booming porno theater scene, went to Reagan’s D.C. and became a mover and a shaker was, well, a big sign for me that the moronic inferno has a great sense of humor. I like the question, But you don't feel the need to apologize to someone that read your book, went in and got creamed? And the answer: Absolutely not. Surely a good interviewer would have probed this marvelous moral insensitivity. Has Glassman ever had thoughts of hurting people? How did these thoughts make him feel? Is he on meds? But no, they go on to another topic in which Glassman, knowing nothing about the field, has made himself a mover and a shaker: Iraq! For a man who, when I knew him, barely knew that King Tut came from Egypt, he has set himself up as quite the whiz. Of course, he was appointed by Bush – one of those small but symbolic appointments, for if anybody is channeling the same country club avatars as Bush, it is James Glassman. Here moral numbness and a subdeb’s ability to manipulate Heritage Foundation boilerplate has put him in good stead. Luckily, the three page article cuts off just about where he is asked about Al Qaeda. I could ask the shoes in my closet about Al Qaeda and get a more informed response.

A paper that wasn’t up the asshole of the establishment – an anti-Post – would surely have asked some questions about Glassman’s credentials. Does he know anything about anything? Does he speak Arabic? How much of the history of the Middle East can he spout in one setting? Does he know, for instance, about the treaties separating Kuwait from Iraq, and how they were put in place by the British? Can he name three Iraqi rulers before Saddam Hussein? What is a popular Iraqi dessert?
But, just as Glassman’s financial knowhow was on par with that of your average mortgage salesman at Washington Mutual, his ability in foreign policy is unquestioned by the ever asskissing Post, the newspaper that periodically shills for global warming denialism (as well as the Iraq war and bombing Iran – it is a regular circus).

To understand the elite – their gated community smugness, their vulgarity, their incompetence, their backscratching, their pseudo-meritocracy, their confusion, their vanity, their pent up acids and mineral salts, their cancerous talons, their Skeletor evil, their chatter, their poshlost, their pimpleness on the hindquarters of history, their wear and tear on my neck and bones, you have to understand such as Glassman. A Great Moderation careerist. An ignoramus. A moral numbnut. An accessory to mass murder. All grown out of the country club puppy he once was. And to think, he could have gone into something useful, like cocaine smuggling or something.

a Zona joke for the 401(k) zek

A ps to my last post - anyone who had the misfortune of running into a Thomas Friedman bsstseller over the last decade - There's an olive tree in my lexus, the world are flat and it belong to cookie monster, and other assorted fare - should turn to his column this morning for a little zona joke. Turns out he was wrong for twenty years! Although of course he doesn't end his piece by promising to refund the buyers of his books. This isn't Paul on the way to Damascus, this is Paul suddenly writing a guide to Antioch's best bordellos.

Luckily, in this world, you can change on a dime, say the opposite of what you have said for twenty years, and nobody cares. It is a great country! And definitely, contra Yeats and Cormac McCarthy, a country for old men - old wizened country clubbers. Old Madoff madmen. People who write feelingly in comments sections, I've been hardworking my whole life and how could wall street do this to my retirement account, as if that whole hardworking life hadn't been devoted to putting coins in a slot machine.

By the way, in order to resolve all problems, I have just founded the International Anti-Servility League. Please consider joining.

oh, and one last comment about the last post: I've been thinking that Nina Simone's chorus of Power in sinnerman, and Aretha Franklin's chorus of Freedom in Think, might just be the essential American dialectic, the intersybilline interliner notes to the American sound track. I wonder what Amie and North think of this proposition.

o sinnerman where you going to run to

But the rock cried out, I can’t hide you…


The investor class has finally cobbled together its political program lately. The parts come from the dead bodies of far right fantasy going all the way back to Hoover’s day. Martin Hutchinson, to whose country club echolalia the NYT has provided a space and no place to comment, pretty much sums up the whole mindset:

“With the Dow Jones Industrial Average below 7,000 – at 6,763 – the US stock market is well below its early-1995 level, adjusted for changes in nominal GDP. That suggests its cheap – if growth prospects are as good as they were back then. The risk, however, is that too much fiscal and budgetary stimulus will bring on growth stultifying inflation.”

That paragraph is a relic of the true faith of our late Great Moderation: the idea that the economy is equivalent to what is good for the plutocrats, the idea that inflation is solely a product of monetary policy, the inability to understand that the meltdown has undermined every model used by the Reagan-Greenspan-Bush era, and of course, key, the fear that the fiscal and budgetary stimulus is going to lead to higher tax rates for the wealthy. Since the wealthy constitute a narrow and parasitic class, it is going to be hard to get game arguing that we should both supply them with the keys to the Treasury and make sure they pay a minimal amount of their various hordes – hence, the inflation argument – you too, poor schmoo, will be affected if we don’t stop the awful socialist monster!

So sound off, one two. The market isn’t cheap. Cheap would imply that the losses so far are as nothing, and that in reality, the economy is sound. It is far from sound. The stocks are cheap has been a reliable formula to scare up some dough from greedy nimrods, but this time they don’t have the dough. The prospects for growth in 1995 were determined not by the fiscal and budgetary policies of the Clinton administration, but by the last wave of tech innovation that originated in the 30s and 40s – the computer wave. Without another wave of innovation – which, I think, can only be green tech – there’s only the zona winter spreadin’ out so far and wide and cold before the feet of poor and country clubber alike. And finally, there is the tunnel vision, as Tim Duy called it, of thinking that the status quo ante can just be put back together again.

Duy’s piece, quoted over at Economist’s View, indicates that what I have been harping about due to my paranoia seems, actually, to be what the establishment thinks: that somehow we are going back to 1995. That somehow the speculative economy, with the overlarge, overripe financial sector, is coming back. Duy’s piece even contains intimations that he has discovered the Mangle of Inequality! Amazingly, he actually connects household income to household purchases – this is a huge step for an economist:

“Leaving aside the issue of housing prices for a moment, consider the issue of household net worth. I always feel that academics misinterpret balance sheets, particularly household balance sheets. Here Bernanke is saying that debt is not a problem because it is matched by an asset of equal or greater value. Ergo, you have positive net worth, so everything is good. But that debt needs to be supported by a positive cash flow, and the many assets on household balance sheets generally do not generate cash flow, especially owner occupied housing assets. This differs from a corporate balance sheet, where the assets are supposed to be combined in some fashion that generates a positive cash flow.

The cash flow that supports most household debt is independent of assets; it is the result of employment income. To be sure, perhaps some of those assets support the employment, such as a car. But even in this case a Toyota Camry performs the same function as a Lexus. Claiming the latter is necessary for employment is largely a fantasy.

Bernanke praises the power of the household balance sheet, and further supports his contention that households are financially strong by the disposable income growth at the time. What he missed, however, was the importance of declining savings rates, which were quickly converging on zero. When saving rates hit zero, free cash flow for households is gone, and without free cash flow, the ability to increase debt diminishes unless either interest rates fall further or we can divorce credit access from ability to repay. In this speech, Bernanke effectively endorsed the illusion that asset value growth could replace ability to repay for underwriting purposes. Debt accumulation and thus spending can be supported indefinitely as long as asset values increase.”

I’ll quote myself from Feb. 08th – admittedly, my language does have the drypoint hauteur of Duy’s. It is written in dayglo:

“The little thread that ties these things together is the housing market. It is as if the media sphere decided to throw Marx a surprise party: in his honor, they are demonstrating just what commodity fetishism means. The housing market has been curiously disembedded it real location in the world of social labor, and transported into the never land of econospeak and graphs. In the never land, there is never and there will never be any mention of the one overriding fact about the housing market, which is that houses are actually bought by people.

As I have pointed out again and again, like an erotomaniac compulsively returning to the habit of masturbating in public when released from his straight jacket, this is what happens when inequality reaches a tipping point. The half baked neo-liberal theory upon which the American economy has stood for three decades supposes that certain social goods (retirement, healthcare, education, etc.) can be ultimately provided for in the private sphere. How is this accomplished? By making the average household not only a unit of production, but also a source of investment. Thus, X and Y, the double wage-earners in the household, will enjoy a progressively better lifestyle even if their combined earnings stagnate or advance slowly, because they will have socked away money in their 401(k)s and IRAs and they will have invested in an asset, a house, that will bring them a healthy return even as they live in it. It is a bubble gum vision of the good life, worthy less of the American Economic Journal than Teen Beat magazine.

The flaw, of course, is that income counts. It counts so much that if you freeze it or slow down its increase in order to feed the wealthy (who, after all, are investors like all of us! It is the solidarity of capital, here, one for all, or – getting real, heh heh heh – all for one), who, pray tell, are X and Y going to sell their asset to? Another X and Y, in basically the same circumstances? Any child can tell you that no matter how often two poor shits sells a commodity back and forth to each other at higher and higher prices, which they borrow, the end result is not going to be that each gets infocommercial wealthy – it is going to be that each gets financially broken. The commodity didn’t do that. What did that has been doing that for a long time. It is called your Government. Plus your private sector. Check it out. Open your eyes. The Fed has openly tried to batter the bargaining position of labor for years. The commerce department, for decades, has held seminars for businesses about how they can move to labor cheap locales. The industrial policy of the U.S. government – which claims it has no industrial policy – has been directed, for years, at keeping incomes down and credit lines at high interest open.”

And, since I am in a self-quoting mood, I will leave with a link to a piece I wrote for the Austin Chronicle in 2000, all about the neo-liberal theology. Here.