Shocking the shock therapists: Zona justice

Bow down before the one you serve...

"Mr. Klau, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, sees a worrying loss of faith in a certain brand of capitalism. “It’s politically dangerous there since they’ve just emerged from an ultraregulated and stifling system, were confronted with shock therapy that created great hardship, and are just beginning to recover and stabilize,” he said. “Now they’re thrown back into an economic and political cauldron.” - NYT

And so it came to pass that a company, AIG, loses 60 billion dollars (for a pretty cool nearly 100 billion dollar year loss) and is comforted by a compassionate government with 30 billion dollars. It is nice to have friends in hard times. I've been thinking about calling up the government and telling them about my own losses, seeing if they could help out.

But I won't, because helping AIG is necessary, but helping me would be welfare.

In a more sensible world, say one ruled by surrealists, watching the boat that the plutocrats are in sink, sink, would only be cause for celebration for those of us on the other shore. After all, the monsters of our kleptocracy are getting their "haircut" - that charming Wall Street term for a beheading. But surrealists did not rule this world - rather, a group of unbelievable pigs did and do. Thus, the celebrated tie of Main Street to Wall street is turning out to be one of those poisoned ties, like the blood that ran through the house of Pelops - from one parricide to another.

I read with some amazement a NYT article in the business section that actually brings in a bit of reality: what if Geithner is using too rosy a scenario? I would laugh, except it hurts. What if? What if the entire premise of the massive outflow of funds to the financial sector since October is wrong? What if the financial sector, which can now be measured in the corny way the movies sometimes measure time - by leaves falling off the calendar - is in the midst of the greatest clawback ever? It is now 1997 time, which was the last time the DJIA was in the 6,000s. And so all the bubble wealth is going. The auctioneer's hand is made of iron, buddy - that ain't no invisible hand no more. The desperate scurrying to and fro of a population that put its democratic instincts to sleep decades ago, and let the worst accrue the most - as long as I get my RV and flat screen tv! - is just beginning.

The guardians thought they would forever apply the shock therapy. They never dreamed it would be applied to them. And they are still having a hard time understanding this.

No you can't take it
No you can't take it
No you can't take it away from me!

zona sunday

Fried my little brains…

A spectre haunts Europe: the spectre of bankruptcy. With Merkel’s rejection of a bailout plan for the Central European states, the stage seems to be set for the hard fall of a number of banks in Austria and Sweden. And who knows where else. I’m no fan of the technical analysis school, which relies on quantifying the same old same old – otherwise known as the beating of a dead horse - but there is something striking about the fact that, just as the failure of Austria’s Credit-Anstalt in 1931 was a sort of threshold in the great slide downard, so, now, Austrian banks have once again invested heavily in Hungary, and Hungarian and Polish homeowners are paying mortgages (the stupidity is awesome) in Swiss francs.

I will not be surprised if there is some default swap on the Gold at the end of the Rainbow – it is just the kind of thing that, in the climate of allowing unrestricted power to the financial system to fictionalize and trade, would happen.

In a much lesser market, the zona art market to be exact, there is a story that would have brought a huge smile to Wyndham Lewis’s mug in the NYT Magazine about the entrance of some textile factory millionaires into the malign, the awful, the soul-destroying art market. Treated solely as things in the warehouse, art, of course, is no different from any other collateralized obligation. Its underlying value lies in the assumption that it can be swapped against other commodities with the latter's underlying values that lie in their exchangeability. It is the ring around the rosy of the automatons. Art as business ceases immediately to be art, and collapses first into the art of the deal and then into a mere swindle. Swindles, of course, can be understood by any swine, which is why the art market became, in the eighties, a swindle attractor.

If I had time, I’d juxtapose the swindling Mugrabis and the rape of Iraq’s archaeological treasures – that rapidfire erasure of the remains of the earliest city civilizations by gangbanger, American soldier, and swine in a harmonic conjunction with the rapidfire seizure of the atmosphere as a sort of vacuum cleaner bag, in which to stuff enough CO2 to make it increasingly unlikely that any of your grandchildren will know what a glacier was. Although they will learn about the population crash in China and India, as the Himalayan packice starts to disappear.

Instead, I will stop here and refer the curious reader to Lewis’ chapter in the Art of Being Ruled entitled Sub Persona Infantis.

the dreadful murk

In Merezhosky’s essay on Gogol and the Devil, he quotes a wonderful fragment from Gogol:

“Life’s dreadful murk passes by, Gogol writes in one of his scattered notes, “and there is still a profound secret hidden here. Is this not a horrible thing. Life, raging and empty – is it not a dreadfully great phenomenon? … life.”

Which gets us to the perhaps less extensive but equally dreadful murk of AIG.

AIG is set to sink the market to another low this week. It is about to declare the greatest loss any company has ever suffered in one quarter: 60 billion dollars. AIG is determined to prove that Gogol is a very 21st century writer, since it was making money hand over fist on the 21st century equivalent of dead souls – credit default swaps. Conveniently unregulated, a legacy of Phil Gramm and Bill Clinton, AIG gouged on an instrument that was premised on … well, on simple insanity. In any book on non-linearity, they will explain linearity by a population example. Say you have two rabbits and every year they have little rabbit babies, that mature in a year and have more rabbit babies. It is easy to show that, theoretically, in a thousand or so years the universe will be full of rabbits. This is a mathematical truth, but the universe is full of things like death and predators, and so we are not, at the moment, being choked to death by copulating rabbits. Missing the entire point of this exercise, AIG staked everything on the idea that the universe would soon be filled with infinite prices on houses. It is to laugh, except of course for the nonfunny part, which is this unbelievable belief enriched a couple hundred AIG employees, and of course is being paid for by the U.S. government. The estimate is that the government will eventually fork out 100 billion dollars to save this innovator in financing, this titan:

‘At the same time A.I.G. reveals its loss, the federal government is also likely to announce — yet again! — a new plan to save A.I.G., the third since September. So far the government has thrown $150 billion at the company, in loans, investments and equity injections, to keep it afloat. It has softened the terms it set for the original $85 billion loan it made back in September. To ease the pressure even more, the Federal Reserve actually runs a facility that buys toxic assets that A.I.G. had insured. A.I.G. effectively has been nationalized, with the government owning a hair under 80 percent of the stock. Not that it’s worth very much; A.I.G. shares closed Friday at 42 cents.

Donn Vickrey, who runs the independent research firm Gradient Analytics, predicts that A.I.G. is going to cost taxpayers at least $100 billion more before it finally stabilizes, by which time the company will almost surely have been broken into pieces, with the government owning large chunks of it. A quarter of a trillion dollars, if it comes to that, is an astounding amount of money to hand over to one company to prevent it from going bust. Yet the government feels it has no choice: because of A.I.G.’s dubious business practices during the housing bubble it pretty much has the world’s financial system by the throat.”

“In this dreadful murk those who have been blinded go wandering about, appearing as phantoms to one another. “I can’t see a thing,” moans the mayor, his mind befogged. “I can see what looks like a pig’s snout instead of faces and nothing else.” In The fears and Terrors of Russia, Gogol explains the Devil’s mirage as follows: Remember the Egyptian darkness. … Pitch-black night suddenly enveloped them amidst broad daylight: dreadful figures glared at them from all sides; hideous decaying specters with melancholy faces rose up before them… they were fettered not by chains of iron but by fear, and robbed of everything…”

At one point – was it only last year? – the chains of iron looked like the Goldilocks economy. But it turns out that Goldilocks ate from the poisoned plate, and before she even got to take her rest, she slumped over and died. Sadly enough, it is my generation – which the newspapers insist on calling Boomers – the people who came of age in the seventies, who are now standing patiently in line, trying to fix the hole that AIG cut from under their feet.


“Very humbling,” said Pat Gericke, 61, of Manhattan who has had a successful interior design business for 20 years that suddenly went dead last fall. “I never thought I’d be at one of these.”
“First job fair,” said Joe Palmieri, 54, of East Hanover, N.J., an I.T. supervisor for Novartis pharmaceuticals for 29 years before being laid off recently. “This is all new for me and my family. I have to keep a positive attitude, stand on my own two feet, otherwise you fall to the bottom.”

Greg Kramer, 53, a buyer for Video USA for 15 years before being laid off Nov. 12, woke at 3 a.m. in suburban Massapequa, was on a 5 a.m. train, and at 7:25 was one of the first of the 650 who had paid $20 (the main job fair is free) to attend the early bird seminar, “Coffee With Tory.” “I don’t mind being here so early,” he said from his fourth-row seat. “I’m going through my notes to see who I want to meet with.”

Which reminded me of this:

“The roads to Syria and Jordan, the two most common destinations for Iraqis fleeing the war, are fraught with dangers. Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni Arab headed to Syria, watched dolefully as thieves plucked $11,000 from a hiding place in his car. Assad Bahjat, a Christian, also reported being held up on the road to Syria, after waiting for a gun battle to cease near the volatile city of Ramadi.
''Wherever we are, we thank God for every day,'' Mr. Bahjat said in an e-mail message after reaching the heavily Christian town of Sednaia, ''because we are alive and not dead.''

All the money in the world watch

As I said last October, all the money in the world can be poured into the banks, and it won't matter.

Here's a nice little article on the burndown of the CDO "market". We all like to pretend that there are markets, don't we? Otherwise, how can they be free?

We watch them, we watch us, Suckers of the Western World, losing all our cargo to magic. Magic. Magic.

the rare ava socialistus

The excitement generated by the spotting a ivory billed woodpecker, formerly thought extinct, last year should be as nothing compared to the spotting of a genuine socialist, one of whom appeared last week. Segolene Royale went to Guadaloupe, an island that, by various and sundry sleights of hand going back to the eighteenth century, is a department of France – and attended the funeral of a striker, Jacques Bino, who was assassinated during the ongoing strike for higher wages on the island. She even denounced colonialism – which, of course, in D.C. shows an intolerably soft attitude to the heroic story of the rise of the West and the need to toss 200 billion dollars per year to military contractors.

Having lived as a child in Martinique, Ségolène Royal –who chose as the title of her last book the phrase, «Femme debout», her Antilles name- presented herself “as a friend of the antillese and guyanese people.” She evoked at length the memory of the French revolution, taking a stand against “bosses enriched by the neo-colonial system.”

«If I were responsible, I guarantee you there would be a permanent minister night and day accompanying these negotiations,” between the social partners. And suggesting to François Fillon to assist in the social negotiations in Guadeloupe
In the guise of a response, the prime minister [Fillon] advised her to “keep her sang froid and to let the social parties discuss among themselves.” The patronat – the bosses – discussing, of course, with the police on their side, and the strikers, criminals all, with stones on their side. “

Well well well. The French revolution, eh? We can’t have that.

Of course, the media is now working overtime to denounce Royale for having the temerity to throw “oil on the flames” – as that favorite of the petrified rentier, Le Pen, put it. Live and learn – I thought throwing oil on the flames is when you put a bullet in some striker’s head. Apparently, however, that is business as usual.

zona folklore

Once in a while, once in a while
You have to burn your lips keep your feelings alive


Now I know what it must have been like 125 years ago in Dracula’s castle while the old one, the bastard, suffered hammerblow after hammerblow as the stake went through his heart. The tremors that shot through corridor and cellar, the loosed flocks of squeeling spirits. After hundreds of years of undeath, liberation comes like this. Their first taste of life was terror, the accumulated terror of every victim.

We’ve reached the point where it is lingua franca to talk of zombie banks, but the mote is in your own eye, brother spirit. Who are the real zombies but us, unable to understand what is happening as the sysem shivers apart. We’ve forgotten outside the castle. It has been so long.

Even me, the crowlike prophet of other people’s doom, have been surprised by the slippage of the credit/speculation system. It is insanely out of control, to quote an excited clerk about the latest in bootware in the NYT – but this is the bootware of putting the boot in and hard. All the talk is of nationalization, but the story has gotten beyond that. In fact, the financial infrastructure is melting, melting, and away goes not only pension and college, but the tied up resources necessary for city, state and government. In percentage terms, the slide in the Stock Market is just tickling the slide in 2001-2003, but percentage don’t tell you relevance. The stock market is making itself irrelevant. For how long?

Who knows. We are suddenly free.

Already we are seeingt an interesting reaction in the bearers of the “little tradition”. This was anthropologist Robert Redfield’s name for the state of the art traditions in peasant communities, dependent as they were, he claimed, on the great tradition – which was the public opinion woven by elites in urban centers. The great traditions penetrate the part-world of the peasant in many ways and guises (school, teacher, church, priest, party, commissar – and now YouTube and talk radio), but invariably they are folded by the part world and reformulated in terms of myths and concrete objects. James C. Scott uses the example of class struggle, which has a certain asceptic, abstract air as it is elaborated in texts by the ciity’s black magicians, but comes into the part world as twenty dollars more per week and torching the local landowner’s woods.

Scott’s examples come from the revolutionary 70s, but the relationship of the part to the greater world does not necessarily have any political coloring.

Redfield did his field work in a Mexican village, and Scott in an Indonesian one. Myself, I just visited Politico. I wanted to read an article in which it was reported that Senator Shelby of Alabama had said that he had not seen Obama’s birth certificate. Shelby claims to be misquoted. I don’t care. I do care about the comments on that article. The Republican base was out in full cry. Slippage, slipping. In a few months, that base has seen its power and its deepest beliefs casually overturned. A Black man is in the White House, all the shadow investment verities have burned to the ground (the stock market always goes up, decade after decade; house prices always go up; diversify your portfolio; entrepreneurs so often start out by using their credit cards, but look at how they become millionaires; follow your dream). The hits to the belief system are so massive that, in a sense, this constituency is staggered. However, it is no surprise that myth and misplaced concreteness have bubbled up to explain this turn of events. I’ll put my little selection of comments at the end of this post, an appendix. The important thing is that the story has assumed a certain narrative form: Obama’s sister’s birth certificate, in the story, was switched for his in Hawaii. He was never born in America. He was born in Kenya.

A marvelous tale – for is not this country the land of the bed trick? Founded on the crudest lines of race – a line that could mean life or death – and riddled with fears of amalgamation, miscegenation, and what only the shadow knows lying in the arms of your homecoming queen. In our dark hearts, we of the white magic, we know the evil slave switched her baby with the master’s. Had to of.

This was Ralph Ellison’s territory: the tangle of black and white in the hinterlands. In the part world, the notion that the city elite has moved on evokes an uncommon but predictable fury. In the heart of the heart of the GOP, there is a violent clinging to those past positions.

And so the zona stories are told, and what comes up like snake-eyes is an archetype poisoned by history in which every mother’s son turns out to be a tarbaby. The confidence man. Puddenhead Wilson. Passing. Tie the rope and lynch your own heart, motherfucker. This tale is told of you.

Of course, Redfield and Scott believed that the peasant and the suburbanite were two different things, and that the latter was the product of modernization.

Once in a while, once in a while
You have to burn down your house keep the dreaming alive


Sen. Shelby is correct ....NO ONE has seen a REAL BIRTH CERT. except what is on the internet..that is NOT CREDIBLE ...barry soetoro aka bo has NEVER SHOWN ANYTHING to prove he was NOT BORN IN KENYA !!! Barry is still NOT A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN --- His father was born in KENYA ---Barry can never be a NATURAL BORN CITIZEN JUST ON THAT FACT THAT HE HIMSELF HAS STATED....

Perhaps if Obama spent $800k not on keeping his records out of site this "rumor would have gone away. As it stands, he has not produced any school records from Occidental college, a long form birth certificate that states hospital or physician present. The man traveled to Pakistan in 1981 which was it was illegal to go their with US passport, however, with an Indonesian passport it would have been easy. Anyway we could go on and on about his non proof of qualification but until he produces proof, Mr. Sortero a.k.a. Obama is just a usurper.

While Obama has a Hawaii birth certificate, there is no birth record from any hospital in Hawaii, and no birth listing in any Hawaii newspaper. His mom moved from Africa to Singapore, and later to Hawaii. Obama attended school in both Singapore and Hawaii. If he was born in Singapore, his mom actually didn't meet the legal requirements for his citizenship. His grandmother was a VP of the largest bank in Hawaii, and may have arranged the certificate after she got custody from mom.

Probably the most widely e-mailed Obama "tip" at the moment alleges that he isn't a natural-born American citizen and thus isn't eligible to run for president. This began in the die-hard pro-Hillary section of the blogosphere, which spent part of the summer discussing laws that deal with the citizenship of a child with one American parent born abroad. When it emerged that this challenge wouldn't hold water if Obama had been born in the United States, the focus shifted to the allegation that he had been born outside the United States. In August, a Pennsylvania lawyer, Philip Berg, filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia. Berg, who also has been active in arguing that there was "government complicity" in the attack on the World Trade Center, demanded that the court force Obama to produce his original birth certificate. The court dismissed the lawsuit. So why isn't this getting wide coverage? Well, first, there's lots of evidence that Obama was born in the United States, and none that he wasn't. The campaign handed over an official copy of his short-form birth certificate ? the standard document produced by the Hawaii Department of Health ? to Factcheck.org. And Poliltico has confirmed the authenticity of a contemporaneous announcement of his birth in the Honolulu Advertiser. Berg fights on, though, on a website with supporters known as ChileMan, ChileWoman and MommaERadioRebels. He recently told conservative talk radio host Michael Savage that he has an audiotape of Obama's Kenyan grandmother recalling the candidate's birth in a Kenyan hospital. "l'll release it in a day or two," he said six days ago. A spokeswoman for the Hawaii Department of Health, Janice Okubo, said she's forbidden by state law from releasing birth certificates, but directed a reporter to the FactCheck.org item dismissing the rumors.

Where's Ysa?

I can’t say I’m too interested in the Oscars this year. Which is the first year in a long time that I have seen none of the best pic nominees.

On the other hand, I am interested in Les Victoires de la Musique. I’m pissed off, in fact. Where is Ysa?

Okay, Camille is cuteness personified. Catherine Ringer does a passable Edith Piaf. Anais does the kind of sad reject me love song that always goes over big. But these singers shrink when compared to Ysa Ferrer. Unfortunately, I think that is why she is not among the elect. A woman who has a tendency to wear pom poms in her hair and loves nothing more than to serpentine around her background dancers might not seem like she has the, well, gravitas of an Alain Bashung. In fact, her whole act is a slap in the face of gravitas. Ysa doesn’t do the traditional love song, a la Anais, but a sort of manga variant. Admitting the corniness of Faire l’amour, when you plunge into an Ysa Ferrer love song, you don’t find a heart on a sleeve, but a cartoon vision of the cosmos. Ysa makes bi manga love, a variant of love that hasn’t yet caught on on this planet. It involves costume changes and ecstatic animation. To bi or not to bi shouldn't be taken in the sense of homo sapien sex - bi here is human or extraterrestrial.

I’m not quite sure why Ysa Ferrer is treated as such an outsider by the French music business –Even The Do is nominated, a French group that sings entirely in English – but it makes me sad. Luckily, Ysa Ferrer seems unpeterturbed. And has made another very silly video of herself in a blonde wig, fighting to the sounds of Sens interdit.
Well, at least they love her in Russia.

ps - I should point out that Ysa does represent France at the International Song Festival in Berlin this year, and seems to be easily winning each round.