Financial Collapse?

Bear Stearns Cos. reached an agreement to sell itself to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., as worries grew that failing to find a buyer for the beleaguered investment bank could cause the crisis of confidence gripping Wall Street to worsen.

The deal calls for J.P. Morgan to pay $2 a share in a stock-swap transaction, with J.P. Morgan Chase exchanging 0.05473 share of its common stock for each Bear Stearns share. Both companies' boards have approved the transaction, which values Bear Stearns at just $236 million based on the number of shares outstanding as of Feb. 16. At Friday's close, Bear Stearns's stock-market value was about $3.54 billion. It finished at $30 a share in 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange composite trading Friday.

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What will you do about the Chicago Shock Doctrine, Obama?

Welcome to the age of Milton Friedman's ghost, who looks on all suffering with equal opportunism, linking Argentina's junta, terror in Chile, Tiananmen, Boris Yeltsin's tanks, Margaret Thatcher's Falklands, Asia's financial crisis, Africa and Latin America's debt crisis, Canadian David Frum, and Donald Rumsfeld.  I'm only 40 pages in but can safely say that this book blows the lid completely off the modern zeitgeist. This despite its sociological style in which the author manages to state hir core thesis seventy-five times using different words by page 24!  Say what do we do with this work of actual parrhesia that does with detailed scholarship, historical investigation and synthesized compassion what No End in Sight and Sicko did with these things, and images? 

The Bush administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the "War on Terror" but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering U.S. economy. Best understood as a a "disaster capitalism complex," it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with [...] unending mandate.  In only a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters.  The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state–in effect, to privatize the government.

[...] in market terms, it cannot fail.

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Alan Greenspan: Not My Fault, Entire World Simply "Out of Control"

Making the rounds to defend himself this morning, yet again (against what exactly remains ambiguous - certainly any real discussion of his learned unwillingness to state hard truth to power, to admit any responsibility for ideological complicity, not to mention unforgiveable self-contradictions, is not on the table), Alan Greenspan appears on NPR and (again) refrains from the speculative, informed imagining that remains our only chance for survival as a species:  global recession is "much more likely" now, he admits, resorting to the tired and simplistic, not to mention falsely-naturalizing disease metaphor, "just like when the immune system is weak," etc.  (As always, this metaphor demands to be complicated:  our economic "immune system" being in fact at war with itself, as good Derridians everywhere note.)   Long-term interest rates around the world are out of control; nothing he can do, that is ever could do, about it.

As with all fantastical conservative evasions of responsibility (read: fundamentalism), he posits a single, as-if isolated, pure Historical Event - in this case, the end of the Cold War - significantly just so long enough ago, that invariably "changed everything" -  such that any assessment of his actions must of course be weighed on an equally if not more Epic, mythical and distant (hence forgiving) scale.  Needless to say, it's an old rhetorical trick employed by those in power - invoking "History" when there are only ever histories, a "recourse" (as they say) made palatable by the desire and fantasy for a genuine leader on the part of a genuinely unempowered, insecure public.  (Which may be the only desire more powerful than the desire to ritually condemn and profane some falsely inflated idea or image of an individual, as mimetically-charged sacrifice.)  It's all meant to be reassuring:  "You see," our Leader gently condescends, handing us his very own gold-rimmed goggles, "I have always had the Big Picture in mind."  "Therefore, and on my stage, things were simply more complicated and out of my control than you will ever realize; here is an Event in light of which my lobbying for tax cuts for the already criminally wealthy inevitably pales."

Which is not to say there isn't truth to his observation (the end of the Cold War being in many ways worse than the Cold War) , only to note that he is deliberately changing the subject, suggesting another lens for an analysis, and for an infinitely deferred self-placement, which he then neglects to pursue.  At all.  Which is wise, because in the end it would hardly excuse him any further.)

Two months ago, William Greider in The Nation was even less kind, treating these self-contradictions with the contempt for which, some might say, the circumstances practically scream:

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In the shadow of prosperity

As will soon be apparent, I have a new found interest in The Economist.  It started a few weeks back when I posted excerpts from an article on marketing and Post modernism.  Now we turn our attention to what might be called the "inefficient casualties" of globalization: 

NESTLED among the wooded Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia's far south-west, Galax is a town of bluegrass music, barbecue and hardscrabble living. It is home to an annual fiddlers' convention and, less happily, a huddle of textile and furniture factories. Over the past few years, globalization has hit hard.

Unable to compete with Mexican and then Chinese competition, the town's old industries have withered, taking thousands of jobs with them. Last year brought the biggest single blow. Three big factories closed their doors within months. More than 1,000 people, around one-sixth of the town's workforce, lost their jobs.

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Click here to receive your very own Ph.D. in.....

The New York Times reports that (duh) higher education for profit is falling a bit short of its billing.

PHOENIX — The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.

But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.

According to federal statistics and government audits, the university relies more on part-time instructors than all but a few other postsecondary institutions, and its accelerated academic schedule races students through course work in about half the time of traditional universities. The university says that its graduation rate, using the federal standard, is 16 percent, which is among the nation’s lowest, according to Department of Education data. But the university has dozens of campuses, and at many, the rate is even lower.

One hopes that not only is this sort of report a deathknell for the starry-eyed private-sector utopianism, dreaming of a McCollege serving up Extra Value Meal degrees all over America, that made its presence so strongly felt in the late-1990s, but especially that the administrators of not-for-profit universities heed the warning wrapped in this piece: that the drive for educational "efficiency," at the expense of teaching quality, and for ever cheaper pseudo-faculties, filled almost entirely with adjuncts, eventually leaves you with a lean, mean and ultimately valueless degree-mill where a university used to be.

PoMo Marketing

Via Gary Sauer-Thompson's excellent blog, The Economist offers a provocative (if rather simplistic) treatment of how postmodern theory has been appropriated by mass marketing firms to sell crap.  It starts off with the obligatory Lyotard quote describing "eclecticism" as "the degree zero of contemporary general culture; one listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.”

Despite the fact that most thinkers associated with postmodernism (Lyotard, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida) were leftists, they unwittingly have produced ideas that are compatible and even useful to capitalism.  Of these thinkers, it seems that only Foucault came to recognize, late in his career, the irony of the relationship between the "postmodern condition" and the emergence of a new, more rigorous form of free markets:

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Altruism and Selfishness

In response to Adam's question regarding the significance of the religious right, I thought of a brilliant article in the latest addition of Harper's.  David Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist, provides an insightful analysis of the relationship between economics and "values."  He succinctly argues that the right has been successful at appealing to populist sentiments because they effectively accuse liberals "of cutting ordinary Americans off from the right to do good in the world."

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Guilt History

Sparked or perhaps - since I haven't been following it, I can't be sure - egged on by Newt Gingrich's recent campaign to institute a patriotic teaching of US history from a Christian perspective, parts of the blogsphere have erupted in a stoush over religion.  But, while I haven't really been following the discussion, given some of it has turned around the question of the relation between Christianity, capitalism and the stain, though little as far as I can tell about history (or temporality in this), I thought that I might reprise this piece from Werner Hamacher, "Guilt History - Benjamin's Sketch 'Capitalism as Religion'".

 

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'Harrar': A nice cluster of towns in Ethiopia, now owned by a Starbucks nearer you

Following on from Mark's previous post, it seems the new dictatorship of mega-corporations is finally putting the nation-state, explicitly, in its proper place:

Now, Starbucks has begun to pursue trademark rights for its Ethiopian coffees – Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harrar – despite those names describing geographic regions of Ethiopia that have been producing coffee for hundreds of years.  The Ethiopian government has objected to this...

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Impolitic

Reading back over the previous thread, Applebaum's piece - and wanting to think more about the relation between Jack Straw's remarks about the niqab being a "visible statement of separation and of difference" and the propriety/property nexus - it occurs to me that I've been meaning to post something here about Roberto Esposito's discussion of the impolitical.

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David Held: "Reframing Global Governance"

The other night I attended a lecture given by David Held, who is apparently a rather large figure in something called the "new political economy" or "international political economy."  I'm not a political scientist and I'm a pretty bad sociologist - for a lack of time and interest, I pay little attention to the more "politicy" or "practically" oriented scholarship in either discipline.  This was, quite frankly, my introduction into what passes for liberal or left scholarship in the academy from an empirical perspective or approach.

I must say, I was rather dismayed.  Admittedly, I was not expecting much from the lecture.  A quick perusal of his publications indicated that his interests largely did not overlap with mine.  He's written on "cosmopolitan democracy," "cosmopolitan law," "governance," "globalization" and "social democracy."  These interests seem comparatively recent as his early work was on critical theory, having written books on "Horkheimer to Habermas" and an introductory text on critical theory in the early eighties.  He also seemed to participate in the late seventies/early eighties renewal of interest in state theory.  Thus, his earlier interests resemble more closely my own, even if, with him being a Habermasian of sorts, I expected significant theoretical differences.

At any rate, the following is a brief summary of his lecture, the text of which is available here.   He opens, "The paradox of our modern times can be stated simply:  the collective issues we must grapple with are of growing extensity and intensity and, yet, the means for addressing these are weak and incomplete."  The rest of the lecture is an attempt, as one might expect, to grapple with, if not resolve, this paradox.  Consequently, he first lays out the "collective issues" before moving on to "the means for addressing these."  Clearly, this is a man pushing a particular political programme.  (I'd point out at this point that my relunctance to accept his position does not require that I advance a better one - no blackmail of the status quo, as it were, will be accepted.)

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Shared Processes

(This is a guest post by Eric Beck, from Recording Surface.]

Seeing as how the contributors so far to the democracy symposium have addressed the current conjuncture, the problems, failures, and relevance of democracy, using more or less contemporary philosophers as their springboards, I feel like a bit of a cornball using a 150-year-old economic text. Anyway, a warning of sorts.

The first dozen pages of the part of Grundrisse now known as the Chapter on Capital--but which Marx himself, significantly or not, called the Chapter on Money as Capital--represent Marx's most extended, albeit obscure, commentary on the relation between capital and democracy that I'm aware of. The long second paragraph of the section begins:

[I]t is in the character of the money relation...that all inherent contradictions of bourgeois society appear extinguished in money relations as conceived in a simple form; and bourgeois democracy even more than the bourgeois economists takes refuge in this aspect (the latter are at least consistent enough to regress to even simpler aspects of exchange value and exchange) in order to construct apologetics for the existing economic relations.

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Schmitt and Mao

Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) derived his initial wealth from collaboration with the Nazis during the war. These tainted beginnings are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.

The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

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Destruction

Spurred in part by a passage from On the Natural History of Destruction posted at The Weblog and a recent re-reading of Arendt's The Human Condition and Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, that latter of which inspired in part by recent discussions of Marx on the occasion of his birthday (Angela, Shaviro, Nate).

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He may as well be talking about weblogs

Despicable socialist fantasies, or dedications to the memory of "political surrealism" in literary rag, n+1 (perhaps even those without subscriptions could, you know, opine about it).  Anyway it reminded me of this.   And there's some Hegel in the monster's tail.   Mark Greif:

One of the lessons of starting a magazine today is that if you pay any attention to politics you will collect a class of detractors, who demand immediately to know What and Wherefore and Whether and How...Is it possible you have not endorsed a candidate, or adopted a party?   Within the party, a position?   If not a position, an issue?   The notion that politics could be served by thinking about problems and principles, rather than rehearsing strategy, leaves them not so much bemused as furious.

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Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

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Naples, or Post Cards from the Edge

Normally I do not use Long Sunday as a site to share my personal travel escapades. They are rather uninteresting and uninspired. But I have recently returned from a week long stay in Florida and I thought some of my experiences well suited for a post or two. I saw and heard a good many things that reflect obscene amounts of real estate development and generally meaningless but profitable hyperactivity. So the following is really more about economic development than my vacation.

You see, we Americans are very industrious. We build and destroy constantly (I think they call it “creative destruction“), Florida being an extreme microcosm of what is generally taking place through out the country.

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The Social

Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher.  (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring -- and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair's ideologue, Anthony Giddens?)  Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death of the social in their aphoristic philosophy. On the one hand, Laclau proudly informs us that "society is impossible" and, on the other hand, Thatcher smugly proclaims "there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families".  While their politics, presumably, do not coincide, the basis of their politics do. According to Laclau, "'Society' is not a valid object of discourse".  This is to say that the referrent of 'society' cannot be 'fixed' and any attempt to 'fix' the meaning of 'society' is an instance of 'hegemony' -- the imposition of a false universal.  For Laclau to claim that society is impossible is to claim that demands cannot be made in the name of society or against society.  Thatcher fully agrees with this analysis.  Asserting that there are, on one hand, individuals and, on the other hand, families, Thatcher is arguing for a stringent division between the public and the private.  Thus, publically, people interact as individuals on the market and, privately, people interact intimately in morality. Morality, 'Victorian values', and 'family values' are equivalent: moral demands can only be made against intimates.  All other demands -- those that occur in public -- take on a market form and are thus most fully resolved through tort law.  Either way, society as a moral domain, one able to make demands on individuals and groups and one subject to demands by individuals and groups does not exist; indeed, it cannot.

Consequently, making demands in the name of the social; that is, asserting the priority of the social over other forms of organization, especially the economy, is, from this perspective, both the most criminal and the most naive thing one could say.  To assert the social is to destroy neo-liberalism.

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Liberté, Flexibilité, Précarité

On July 22, 1997 Alan Greenspan testified before Congress to give his views on the so-called new economy. Growth was high, unemployment was low, and yet inflation remained perfectly under control. Greenspan had a simple explanation for that. Worker insecurity:

But even if the perceived quicker pace of application of our newer technologies turns out to be mere wheel-spinning rather than true productivity advance, it has brought with it a heightened sense of job insecurity and, as a consequence, subdued wage gains. As I pointed out here last February, polls indicated that despite the significant fall in the unemployment rate, the proportion of workers in larger establishments fearful of being laid off rose from 25 percent in 1991 to 46 percent by 1996. It should not have been surprising then that strike activity in the 1990s has been lower than it has been in decades and that new labor union contracts have been longer and have given greater emphasis to job security. Nor should it have been unexpected that the number of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs to seek other employment has not risen in this period of tight labor markets. To be sure, since last year, surveys have indicated that the proportion of workers fearful of layoff has stabilized and the number of voluntary job leavers has edged up. And, indeed, perhaps as a consequence, wage gains have accelerated some.

As long as people are scared to lose their jobs they don't ask for more money. And that is of course the reason to bring this up today. The CPE. The conventional wisdom is that the mob just doesn't understand that if it's easy to fire people, employers will sooner hire them. Maybe so, though it should perhaps also be pointed out that if it's easy to fire people, it's easy to fire people, and that too has an effect on unemployment figures. But ultimately unemployment is not what laws like the CPE are about. The worker insecurity they create is not some accidental side-effect; it has a very clear function.

Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet

(The following is a guest post by Roger Gathman, author of the weblog Limited, Inc.)

What would one have said, in 1976, about Tronti’s essay and the future it forecast? Here is my tendentious and unfair opinion: one of the things one could have forecast is that, as the privileged site of production became less and less like a nineteenth century factory, the term 'factory' would experience a metaphorical creep. And that this creep would disguise the increasing blurring of the analytic distinction between production and consumption, and thus miss what distinguishes the Keynesian period from its predecessors.

Let’s illustrate this with a little story. When Tonti writes: “… capital reach[ing] a high level of development it no longer limits itself to guaranteeing collaboration of the workers - i.e. the active extraction of living labour within the dead mechanism of its stabilisation - some-thing which it so badly needs. At significant points it now makes a transition, to the point of expressing its objective needs through the subjective demands of the workers, ” I imagine he was not thinking of the embodiment of that demand in union pensions. But, indeed, in the forties, fifties, sixties and the seventies, a lot of money flowed into union pensions (I am talking about the U.S.), and that money did a lot of things. I’m not talking about the most colorful things, like the way Teamster pension funds built Las Vegas. I’m talking about your standard pension investments in equities in general. In the eighties, those funds – to the disappointment of the new breed of body snatching Randians, eager to take down the traditional enterprise structures and replace them with a new structure dedicated to the proposition that an enterprise is an aphid, and the upper management is a super-ant – were mobilized by the traditional managers of capitalist enterprises against the LBO merchants. Schwab and Thomas, in a review of Union pension investment patterns published in Michigan Law Review, Feb 98, were much more prescient about labor and its place in influencing the internal composition of the capitalist enterprise than Tronti was in 1976:

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Disney trades announcer for ... rabbit?

Deal sends Al Michaels to NBC for lost cartoon character

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- A 61-year-old sportscaster for a 79-year-old animated rabbit?

Such are the deals being made these days in Hollywood as new Walt Disney Co. (DIS : 26.68, -0.04, -0.1%) Chief Executive Robert Iger indicated that his company would be extending another olive branch within the entertainment community.  This time, Iger is trading "Monday Night Football" sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC Universal (GE :General Electric GE33.25, +0.33, +1.0%) for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character that was the predecessor to Mickey Mouse.  It doesn't stop there, though, as Disney's ESPN gets the rights to broadcast Ryder Cup golf, extended Olympics highlights and various cross-promotion deals. 

necro-economics

Craig already mentioned Warren Montag’s piece, “Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal”, in the latest Radical Philosophy. Here, Montag begins by proposing a reading of Adam Smith, in the manner of Althusser’s reading of Capital - and those familiar with Althusser will quickly make out Montag’s powerfully conjunctural reading of Smith’s universality, of economic theodicy and consciousness, and the distribution of life (and death).

The piece begins with Smith and Hegel, with the question of universality and its - Montag’s choice of words is particularly astute - rationing and distribution. It then touches on Foucault and Arendt, but is more specifically working with the writings of Agamben, Mbembe (whose work deserves to be read more widely) and, of course Marx.

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The Punchline

Cross-posted from my Live Journal.

An old joke about academia:

Q: “Why are battles in academia so fierce?”
A: “Because the rewards are so small.”

At first it seems like a non-sequitur, which means it's not so much funny as silly. But if you think about it, the punchline is true by itself: rewards in academia are quite small.  The salaries are lower than they are in industry; the apprenticeship period (not only the tortures of graduate school, but the poorly paid non-tenured posts that follow) is especially long and difficult; the list goes on and on.  Then the real humor of the joke hits.  It expresses a bitter truth in a terse, relevatory way.  Imagine you've gotten lost in the woods in the prime of your life and you've gotten stuck in a fetid swamp or bog along with other similar unfortunates: after years of struggling against them just to keep from being drowned, you manage to find some tiny patch of land on which you might actually sit and rest.  Think you can take it without a bloody struggle?  Of course not.  Think you can keep it without resorting to dreadful violence?  By this time, your sensibilities will be so coarsened that you probably look forward to such battles.

Believe it or not, I'm not trying to impugn the academic enterprise as a whole (although I probably should) or the young people who want to join its ranks.  The earnest supplicants often don't know what they're getting into (see Dorothea Salo's ‘Straight Talk about Graduate School’ and her harrowing ‘A Tale of Graduate School Burnout’ for details) and every sufficiently advanced society needs intellectuals, and academia is the institution entrusted with producing them, although it generally turns out blinkered, socially inept specialists in micro-disciplines.  Society needs those people too, but the two types shouldn't be confused.  Instead, I want to raise the question: why are the rewards so small?  I don't have an answer, and taking on the question seriously could be a lifetime's work.  But now that I've got the question in your mind, here's a variation on the first joke:

Q: “Why are battles on what passes for the opposition in America so fierce?”
A: “Because the rewards are so small.”

And the question again: why are the rewards so small?  My suspicion: the major organ of oppositional politics in America, the Democratic party, is absolutely committed to being the minority party.

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Robinson Crusoe Stories

It has been said that the much of the truth or falsehood of a political theory lies in its axioms. Think of Hobbes’ brutish ‘naturall condition of mankind’ as the axiom from which follows the corollary of a strong sovereign power to secure human contracts. Think (at another extreme) of the New Right libertarianism of Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, a perfectly consistent treatise, but one which perhaps stands or falls with the validity of its very first sentence, “People have rights and there is nothing anyone can do to violate them.”

Something of this dependence of political theory upon axioms struck me recently when reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, not strictly speaking a work of political theory, but one of political science which rests on a certain political theory. Key to the argument Putnam sets out about the waning of political participation in America and his proposals for its revival is the concept of ‘social capital’. Herein, I believe, lies an axiom, and a revealing one at that. ‘Social capital’ is, according to Putnam, that which has been lost over the past half century of US history, it is the real civic substance that has withered with the decline in American political participation.

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$4 a gallon

Like a cartoon character still running windmills, oblivious on air, suspended before the fall, “America...is over,” or so claims a recent article penned by Michael Ventura (via).  I suggest you read the entire thing, but here are some of the meatiest parts:

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