Ending the First Decade of the 21rst Century

David Seaton's News Links

Sometimes after writing a long, rather ponderous piece like my last one, I like to follow it with a shorter and lighter version of more or less the same thing. This is some sort of a parallel text that grows out of its predecessor.

We are at the end of the first decade of a new millennia, something that doesn't happen every day. I've chosen two images to describe the decade we are leaving behind us. I imagine most people who wished to portray these years, would use the Twin Towers in flames, the idea being that "everything changed" when Al Qaida busted up New York. I don't think so. I think that "everything changed" when people began to see that even by running faster they weren't getting anywhere.

The first picture at the top of this piece is of Bernie Madoff, disguised as an Obama poster. By this I don't wish to insinuate that Obama is a crook like Madoff, I am more interested in illustrating disillusionment. Those who hoped that Bernie would  make them rich without their doing a lick of work were bitterly disappointed as were those who thought that by simply casting their vote, when Obama arrived in Washington the waters of  the Potomac would part and Pharaoh's hosts would be engulfed: they too have felt similarly short changed. Since Obama chose to take upon himself the mantle or the  brand, of "Hope", he has also been stuck with the dregs of "Hopelessness", when he  turned out to be such a damp squib. With  Madoff as the "Audacity of Hope" poster boy, I wished to create a poetic image of the wise folk saying that, "hope is not a plan".

The decade we leave behind us was the story of the disasters brought on by the money changers in the temples of Wall Street and by the paralysis of the American political system as it is being dragged helplessly toward Grover Norquist's bathtub.

So Bernie symbolizes the malodorous financial sector and President Obama symbolizes the starved and frozen political system and the poster symbolizes the marketing involved in making some  people think that Bernie Madoff possessed the secret of endlessly multiplying wealth,  while other people thought that Barack Obama had the secret of healing all of  America's defects and disasters and making the lion lie down with the lamb,  all the while feeding the multitude on five loaves and two fishes. When the guy who can do that finally shows up, no poster will be needed to illustrate, that as Bob Marley put it, "There ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation"....  We have not gotten that far yet... I hope, I hope, I am still amazed that so many people thought we had.

As far removed as from each other the intentions of both men surely must be, those who gave  Madoff their money and those who gave their votes to Obama, would all probably  rather not be reminded of what a distance there is between what they expected, waited and hoped for and what they finally received.

The next image is simply is graph that illustrates the leitmotif of most working  people's lives today: that even by running faster, they aren't making progress,  that the brass ring is no longer within their grasp no matter how fast the merry-go-round spins. That middle class life is turning out to be  just another Ponzi scheme, like Bernie's.

Hat to: Jon Taplin

There are lot of wonderful graphs around, but I can't think of another that describes the middle class mood so well as this one does. I would like to see some further information to confirm my hunch that, as child labor is still illegal, the slight rise in household median income, while real hourly wages first declined then stagnated, is mostly due to all the housewives and mothers joining the work force.

The next ten years will be colored by the bad taste of so much disillusionment and there will be no lack of demagogues eager to poison the system further. 

Hope? Been there, done that.

Lucidity is the only thing that will save us now. DS

Annus horribilis: I can get it for you wholesale

David Seaton's News Links
Here are the two leading stories in today's "Jewish Daily Forward", which is probably America's oldest and certainly its most prestigious Jewish community newspaper.

Peace Groups Lose First Major Gaza Challenge On Capitol Hill
As Israel’s military campaign in Gaza entered its second week, Capitol Hill became the latest battleground where Jewish hawks and doves are trying to shape the American response to the ongoing violence. Dovish groups bombarded lawmakers with calls and e-mails in an attempt to influence the wording of pro-Israel resolutions being shaped in the House and Senate. The groups’ line in the sand on those resolutions was straightforward: Unless the House and Senate included a call for an immediate cease-fire, the dovish groups would call on their supporters to actively oppose them. For the Jewish peace camp, the first Middle East crisis of the new Congress and administration was an opportunity to flex its muscles and show presence on the national scene. But in the end, they lost.

And

AJCongress Crippled by Madoff Scandal
One of the Jewish community’s most storied national organizations revealed that it has been gutted by the financial collapse of investor Bernard Madoff, losing the vast majority of its endowment. Officials at the 90-year-old American Jewish Congress disclosed that apparent fraud at Madoff’s investment firm had cost the organization roughly $21 million of the $24 million in endowments that supported the AJCongress and its programs.(...) It’s ironic that the Madoff scandal, with its tales of exclusive country club life and high-priced international hedge funds, has been so destructive to an organization that was founded to be the voice of the Jewish masses. The AJCongress was founded in 1918 and became a populist counterbalance to the American Jewish Committee, which was dominated by the wealthy and conservative German-Jewish establishment. Under the leadership of its legendary founder, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the AJCongress was one of the first national organizations to support Zionism and to protest the Nazi regime, and it established a reputation for being politically liberal. After World War II, it made its mark as an active litigant on church-state issues and civil rights.

When these two stories are juxtaposed in The Forward, it seems to me that a certain American-Jewish "golden age" is coming to an end, one whose beginning we might put arbitrarily in World War One, when financier Bernard Baruch became an adviser to president Wilson and the chairman of the War Industries Board, or perhaps in 1932 when Herbert Hoover named Benjamin Cardozo to the US Supreme Court... or maybe even a bit earlier in 1924 when composer George Gershwin premiered his "Rhapsody in Blue".

We are talking about a golden age of the Jewish diaspora that compares favorably with those of Babylon, Al-Andalus or Wilhelmine Germany.

More than a golden age, a love affair.

It is impossible to exaggerate the significance and harmful consequences of this disenchantment and the effects it will have on the fabric of American life, cultural, social and political in years to come. DS

Tiptoe on the tightrope

David Seaton's News Links
A couple of days ago I uploaded a post about the idea that the "productivity revolution" was the starting point for today's economic fright. Among several interesting comments, I got these questions from News Links reader, Steve Crawley:

I would like to hear the rest of the story from you about the post-collapse era. Here are a few prompting questions to hopefully get you started. Assuming technology and advanced communications continue be with us, will they contribute to improving our national economic or is something else needed? Do you agree social instability has not yet arrived, but is just around the corner? Or is there another path that is necessary for some sort of economic and possibly social stability to return?

To begin to answer Steve's questions, I would have to start with Yogi Berra's famous caveat, that it is difficult to make predictions... especially about the future. Yuck, yuck.

Talking to people that are supposed to know about this stuff, they seem to agree that the most orthodox way out this mess is to devalue ones currency, up productivity and cut wages...

If my idea is correct that upping productivity has already cut jobs and stagnated or lowered the salaries of many if not most remaining jobs and made it necessary to lend money to people with little hope of paying it back just to keep the whole mishagoss in motion, then you can see that the last two items on the list -- upping productivity and lowering wages -- would eventually only lead to more unhappiness.

This assumes of course that I am right and that the absolutely amazing gains made in productivity since the personal computer and the Internet were wedded to industry are what is behind all of this mess.

As to what the contributions technology and advanced communications might make to improving our national economy. I've just read Fareed Zakaria's recent and quickly outdated book, "The Post American World", where Zakaria writes about advances in nanotechnology:

At some point in the future, or so I'm told, households will construct products out of raw materials, and businesses will simply create the formulas that turn atoms into goods.

The idea is that you put some powder you order on the Internet into a washtub, add water and out walks a TV set, thus putting millions of Chinese people out of work.

Whether this ever happens or not, the fact that somebody might think it was a good idea and that a lot of money was being invested in making it happen would have to put you on your guard a bit: it's the thought that counts.

So as to "social instability" being just around the corner, that all depends where the corner is. Is this crisis the turning of that corner?

I think the real "corner turner" will be the crisis that comes from the remedies that are being applied in this present crisis.

This particular crisis is about a vacuum in credibility. It isn't exactly America's "fall of the wall" moment... yet, but it is moving in that direction. Think what it means when a whole ideology crashes.

When I was a young fellow many people truly believed, and had made huge personal sacrifices all their long lives in the belief that history's inevitable march was toward socialism and that the Soviet Union was the genuine vanguard in that march. Many were still believing it right up till the moment when Gorbachev pulled down the Red Flag on the Kremlin.

It is impossible to exaggerate what an intellectual and political hole that left... a hole big enough for people like Alan Greenspan and George W. Bush to walk through.

The Madoff scandal is the quintessential caricature of the whole moment. The idea that people had around the world had was that American Jewish people were the only people intelligent enough to really understand advanced financial products and it turns out that America's richest, therefore smartest, Jewish people were as stupid as it was possible to be, even Madoff himself to ever think he could get away with it, all this destroying centuries of malignant stereotypes of preternatural craftiness at the worst possible and inopportune moment.

The bottom line is: If America's richest Jews are just as stupid as the rest of the world's goyim, then... who is minding the store?

Substitute "American" for "Jewish" and you've got the whole idea of this crisis's implications.

So, with the deflation of Real-Existing Socialism and now Pensée Unique we are now going to have to fake it.

Digging through the ruins of Marxism, we can probably find some useful and recyclable refuse. One idea that people are going to be rolling around again is that capitalism is a historical "phase" like feudalism with a beginning, middle and end.

I don't think it is ending now or anything like it, but people are now going to take seriously the idea that it will end at some point and if nothing else table talk is going to be more interesting. DS

A world gone Madoff

Now thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of investors confront losses that range from serious to devastating. Some families said on Friday that they believed they had lost all their savings. A charity in Massachusetts said it had lost essentially its entire endowment and would have to close. According to an affidavit sworn out by federal agents, Mr. Madoff himself said the fraud had totaled approximately $50 billion, a figure that would dwarf any previous financial fraud. At first, the figure seemed impossibly large. But as the reports of losses mounted on Friday, the $50 billion figure looked increasingly plausible. One hedge fund advisory firm alone, Fairfield Greenwich Group, said on Friday that its clients had invested $7.5 billion with Mr. Madoff. The collapse of Mr. Madoff’s firm is yet another blow in a devastating year for Wall Street and investors.(...) Investigators have not explained when they believe the fraud began, how much money was ultimately lost and whether Mr. Madoff lost investors’ money in the markets, spent it, or both. It is not even clear whether Mr. Madoff actually made any of the trades he reported to investors. New York Times

On Friday, rumours were rife that well-known European families had put large amounts of money with Madoff, and could be facing huge losses – although those contacted all declined to comment. Financial Times

David Seaton's News Links
It is all getting so wearily familiar: Iraq, Enron, the bubble, Blago... What they add up to is an ocean of fraud where some fish swim and all others have drowned, are drowning, will drown.

History is full of swindlers and swindles, but they seem to be coming thicker and faster now and they all seem to center around things that are supposed to exist but don't, be they financial assets, weapons of mass destruction or the honor of high office.

Most of us like to make fun of the "End of Days" and "Rapture" crowd, but I think that there is something healthy in their rebelliousness, in their desire to infuse meaning and transcendence into something we all know stinks. At least they give the garbage we are forced to feed on its proper importance.

The apocalyptics at least have the need to wrap this Stygian mess in the breathtakingly noble language of King James' Hebrew poetry or the lurid magnificence of John of Patmos, because neither the newspapers and certainly not today's Hollywood have the chops to do justice, much less deal with, what we are experiencing.

Lacking any contemporary scientific mind with the powers of Marx, who would be able to dissect our fetid reality with a view to changing it, at least we could find some poetic way of speaking about it or some ritual way of dealing with it.

Looking outside our immediate traditions: a Hindu would long for a new incarnation of Rama, the god of righteousness, to restore Dharma and slay the demon rakshasas that infest us. Here is Wikipedia's description of rakshasas which will ring a bell with many readers:

Rakshasas are notorious for disturbing sacrifices, desecrating graves, harassing priests, possessing human beings, and so on. Their fingernails are venomous, and they feed on human flesh and spoiled food. They are shapechangers, illusionists, and magicians.

According to the Hindu traditions we are living now in an epoch called the Kali Yuga, which the Vishnu Purana describes thus:

"In the Kali Yuga, there will be numerous rulers vying with each other. They will have no character. Violence, falsehood and wickedness will be the order of the day. Piety and good nature will dwindle slowly... Passion and lust will be the only attraction between the sexes. Women will be the objects of sensual pleasure. Dishonest will be the bottom line of subsistence. Learned people will be ridiculed and put to shame; the word of the wealthy person will be the only law."

That sounds like a perfect fit, but I'm afraid that Sri Rama's dealing with the rakshasas' collective ass looks like it might have to wait till another yuga.

Switching traditions for a moment, many today might seriously contemplate outsourcing American justice to Iran's Ayatollahs and then spending many a pleasant family evening around the TV watching deserving heads and hands being lopped off and even a few selected stonings: the bit where they hang miscreants from towering construction cranes looks especially satisfying in present circumstances.

What is indisputable is that we live in a period where it distinctly feels like something very dark and nasty is coming to a head. So, I would say that we should try to listen to our Bible thumping brethren with the sympathy of Carl Jung. These people are at least attempting to find fitting language to describe what is literally destroying society and perhaps the planet, while the rest of us just stand around and quibble.

Beside the Bible and Shakespeare we also have Judge Roy Bean, in our traditions, perhaps the answer to all this lies with him. DS