Links

Why Spy?: Steve Waldman: Interfluidity
Why Fight? Hannah Arendt: NYROB
Secret Law: Jonathan Turley
Deleted...: David Lindorf: WhoWhatWhy
The Criminal NSA: Granick and Sprigman: NYT

Snowden Links

Journalism and Not-journalism In Action: Heather: CrooksAndLiers
Obama Demands End To US Internet Dominance: Pluto: DailyKos
And He's Already Succeeding: Alex Harrowell: AFistFullOf Euros
Why It Matters: Robert Scheer: TruthDig
Gentlemen Don't Read Gentlemen's Mail: John Quiggin: CrookedTimber
About The Prettiest Face You Can Put On It: Steve Waldman: Interfluidity

Aurora of Empire, Part 3

Part 1,  Part 2

Aurora of Empire, The Beekman by Frank Gehry

The buildings that pre-industrial civilizations constructed appeal to us today in part for an aesthetic coherence that is a consequence of technological limitation, a uniformity of form and material that is a direct result of scarcity. But more than that their appeal is for their human expressiveness, the craft, care and imagination embodied in the sculptural forms of their functional and decorative components. These appeal to us instinctively.  They tell us a story not of work, but of craftsmanship, the love of work, the impulse to make well that embeds physically in our creations when we care about them. Work we love inspires works of love.  

As industrialization harnessed fossil fuels to tasks that for thousands of years had worn the bones of man and beast, the productivity of technological ingenuity began to liberate people from the worst economic abuses of their fellows.  But the same labor saving innovations were applied to the world of craftsmanship, the labor that people loved to do and in its artistry had staked their identities. This began to dissociate people from the aesthetic making we are predisposed to love doing. The Fordist and Taylorist revolutions in manufacturing ensured that the greater parts of several generations would never satisfy their innate urge to craftsmanship except in hobbies even as population, and with it the need for material goods, exploded. 

Motovun Croatia: a hand made city

Urbanism was the last great tableau for these displacements of human craft to find expression. Because city and building sites are all unique, against epic struggles of finance to insist they're not, the specific local realities of construction have never entirely lost their footing in the arts. The uniqueness of the real and the specificity of place can never fully be eradicated from built reality: these qualities propagate out into the artifices we project for ourselves through construction never severing the final connections back to the earth, they calibrate our fantasies to the particular and never quite let them dematerialize into our dreams as we would like. 

Links

Tao of Containing China: Pepe Escobar: TomDispatch
Financial Looting and Public Resistance: Alexander Arapoglou: Naked Capitalism
What Is and Isn't a Helicopter Drop: Steve Waldman: Interfluidity
ETFs A Warning: Golem XIV
Tyler Cowen Experiences a Twinge of Identification: Tyler Cowan: Marginal Revolution
Comforting The Comfortable at the ECB (and afflicting the afflicted): Yanis Varoufakis
Unlocking Climate Wealth: James Boyce: TripleCrisis

Links

The War On Reality: Peter Ludlow: NYT
The Rotten Core OF DC: Kristen Powers: The Daily Beast
Prism, Partisanship & Propaganda: Glenn Greenwald: The Guardian
Defending Public Space: Yanis Varoufakis
Taste Of Things To Come: Claude Salhani: OilPrice.Com
Japan Is A Model: Joseph Stiglitz: NYT
Zabu Just Doesn't Give A Fuck: Doug Barry: Jezebel.com

Links

German Savings, Not Thrift Caused The Crisis: Michael Pettis: China Financial Markets
Missing The Point Of Manning: Matt Taibbi: Rolling Stone
Missing Investment, Not Consumption: J. W. Mason: Slackwire
Task Of 1919: John Maynard Keynes: Brad DeLong
Schist Happens: Helen Quinn: BBC

Links

Detropia: Dan Bednarz: Health After Oil
Erdogan Is Toast: Moon of Alabama
Penguins Not Protests: Harvey, Hacaoglu & Bilgic: Bloomberg
Destroying The Future: Noam Chomsky: The Guardian
They're Listening: Glenn Greenwald: The Guardian
Against Tribalism: Golem XIV
The Convenience Of Power: Matthew Holehouse: The Telegraph
Romans, Concrete And Ecology: Phys.Org

Links

Neoliberal Consumption 1: Michael Hoexter: NEP
Neoliberal Consumption 2: Michael Hoexter: NEP
Counter Reformation in Banking: Marshall Auerback: INET
Fuel of Empire: James Stafford: OilPrice.com
Pushing on String, and Pulling a Little: Paul Krugman: NYT

Ontology of Our Kleptocracy

There is a persistent version of how representative government decays that claims electorates elect representatives who best bribe them for their votes. Despite being an even more perfect inversion of the present observable reality, this trope enjoys the same well funded repetition as the barter myth for the origins of money. In fact our representative government has decayed as its entrenched winners discovered the prestige of their wealth allows them to get away with bribing elected officials to eliminate whatever historical laws once constrained them. In this way they further entrench their existing advantages, advantages that yielded up the funds for bribery to begin with. It is a recurring process of decay that ends representative government and, along with it in our case, capitalism. Historically this evolution has lead to popular tyrannies where members of the kleptocratic elite endorse broad populist programs and usurp power from the corrupted institutions of the erstwhile representative system. We may not be so lucky this time as the innovations of modern capitalism have changed the meaning of money and information technology has exponentially increased private control of information flows.

The modern era, by which I mean the period since the industrial revolution, has seen both explosions in human population and in dependence on monetary economics. Both are huge changes but only the former garners popular attention. By and large, agriculture was the economy until quite recently. Folks who would like to see a hard money system, self proclaimed capitalists tend to be fond of this notion, need to explain how they intend to ensure the distribution of money that makes modern post agrarian life possible for most of humanity. Because we now live in urbanized market based economic systems where the great preponderance of the population has no access to the fruits of the land, this issue of the distribution of money is paramount to the survival of people, almost everyone. Without money the expression of demand in markets is impossible: if money is a finite thing, as it was on the gold standard, and if it is subject to the concentrations and even hoardings capitalism periodically conjures, how does one insure the distribution of money necessary for general survival? Economic or otherwise?

The New Deal was a coordinated infrastructure of political economy built to serve this purpose. Interestingly it functioned equally well both on and off of a gold standard. This is because the system was built around the needs of the real economy by people who understood the deep operations of monetary systems well enough to build real constraints on finance adequate to preventing open and concentrated expressions of money power. In addition, the system focused intensely on the distribution of money. You can not have a capitalist market system in the absence of demand, and in a market economy the only mechanism for the expression of demand is the spending of money to make purchases. The New Deal saw to it that the people who worked and through their increasing productivity increased the standard of living of society at large captured an equitable percentage of what productivity gains they brought to the businesses of their employers, and thus had money to spend to express demand.

Beginning about 40 years ago, our corporate elite, as advised by the Powell Memo embarked on a program to restructure the political economy for the benefit of the owners of capital. The memo outlined a broad program with plans for addressing academia, television, other media, journals, journalism and publishing, advertising, politics, the courts, shareholders and anti labor ideology. The collective action problem the New Deal had after fifty some odd years of progressive politics finally tailored institutions to solve came systematically under fire from the concentrated interests of businessmen who had no particular interest in the collective good, who in fact saw that as a constraint on their own interests. The concentrated interests of the wealthy then took each of the points Powell had struck and built new institutions aimed at attacking each of the New Deal structures built around them. It began as an ideological attack on liberalism and has resulted now in a market based political system where only money can express political demands.

This has not been a process of the masses living irresponsibly and voting for public officials to bail them out: quite the opposite it has been a process of elites living increasingly extravagantly irresponsible lives, both in their finance and politics and then paying for the campaigns of public officials who have  bailed them out equally extravagantly. While we hear political insiders like Michael Kinsley talk of sinners who must suffer, they certainly don't mean the financiers, capitalists and their political and judicial cronies who have caused a return to pre New Deal wealth distributions and the associated overall miserable economic performance. They mean the "masses" who in their minds have somehow earned the poverty to which the irresponsible  behavior of finance has consigned them while their anti labor ideology has deprived these victims of income and even the opportunity for it. It has been a deliberate effort elaborately funded by the likes of Peter Peterson, the Koch brothers and most all of the lords of finance. A narrow and dwindling elite has purchased our political system and destroyed therewith our economy and want us to believe it our own fault and that we, not they, have lived irresponsibly.

They have usurped the public air waves by abolishing the "Fairness Doctrine", they have destroyed bargaining power of workers by destroying organized labor, they have corrupted the courts by packing the bench with their ideological cronies, they have de-criminalized the broadest possible array of financial frauds under the rubric of "de-regulation" as if regulation were something other than law, they have made available the public treasury to the looting of high finance, they have instituted a reign of permanent war in which the dissent of any who may become effective can be construed as treason, they have implemented an "intellectual property" regime where copyright never lapses and common rights have been abolished, they have made bribery the essential qualification for both policy "expertise" and electoral suitability. This is not a popular program to subsidize a popular degeneracy: it is an elite policy program to subsidize in every conceivable way an elite without even the slightest pretense of public interest or concern. In fact it is an elite both openly hostile to and exploitative of everyone not a part of it, and increasingly the margins of the elite itself.

links

More On The Neoliberal Endgame: Joseph Stieglitz: The Guardian
China Attempts Endrun Around Neoliberalism: Golem XIV
Neoliberal Bad Faith Drops Its Mask: Michael Stephens: Multiplier Effect
Mr Indispensable: The Epicurean Dealmaker
The Answer To Everything: John Baez: Azimuth

Links

The Mother of Invention: Steve Waldman: Interfluidity
Gold That Does Not Glitter: Golem XIV
The Problem With Poor People: Michael Smith: Stop Me Before I Vote Again
The Crumbling Case For Austerity: Paul Krugman: NYROB
UDSA s Subsidiary of Monsanto: David Swanson: RSN
The Thomas Friedman Porn Title Contest Winner: Matt Tiabbi: Rolling Stone

Links

Economics Of Status: Kevin Simler: Ribbonfarm
Insufferable Conceit: Sell On News: MacroBusiness
What Privacy Is For: Julie E. Cohen: Social Science Research Network
David Graeber Interview: Lynn Parramore
Hydroptere: Anna Edwards: DailyMail (check out the video embedded)

Financial Repression: Why Daddy Won't Give You A Porsche

A clever term of art, casting conditions in a light flattering only to the hoarders of money like assets, financial repression is said to occur when fiscally sovereign governments hold interest rates below the rate of inflation making such hoarding a money looser.

Within the edifice of our current economic ideology where acquiring money is prima facie evidence of righteousness, that the avatars who've succeeded in this sacred quest should loose a nickel while they wallow in their hoards is a crime against the arch-virtue of avarice. Not satisfied with wealth as its own reward, these Mammonites want it working for them even when they want no one else to. In fact they currently whine about the iniquity of a government that refuses them rents on their hoards even as they themselves attempt to both steal the last nickel from and dis employ everyone who does not rely on rents for income. It is the plutocracy that claims to be repressed by their inability to extract what little wealth remains outside their present spoils and that there exists, at least for the moment, one channel through which the government will not guarantee them money.

This kind of abuse was instrumental to the communistic growth endured by the United States and the Western world from 1946 to around 1980, in the wake of World War II, when frothing New Dealers cheated the wealthy by insisting their assets be productive in the real economy to preserve what value they could for their legacy of financial claims. In that dystopian past, where spalpeens with grease stained cuticles skimmed half all earnings through the indignities of diaphoresis, repression leached what reservoirs remained from that eclipsed gilded age traduced at its apotheosis by the class traitor Roosevelt. At just the moment when the Righteous finally grasped the financial power to liquidate a seditious rabble who's inattention to the virtues of lucre had manifest as their own debasement, this usurper clove finance from the sinews of the state and set back his class four generations empowering the poltroons, miscreants and dastards of Main Street.

On the other hand, if we grant the incentives on Wall Street might be more attractive to poltroons, miscreants, dastards and spalpeens, this begins to suggests perhaps the sweat and dirty fingernails on Main Street may actually be where real wealth is being created. From this we might suppose that the elevated levels of unemployment Wall Street has relished these past four decades may account for some significant proportion of the dysfunction in our economics. In fact from a purely real point of view the repression inherent in unemployment for those who seek work is a great deal more constraining and actually threatening to physical well being than the financial variety ever is, affecting as it does only the accounts of paper wealth. Not to suggest that paper wealth is without worth, but it only has worth to the extent it is deployed in the real world to engage real resources in productive manipulation or exchange.

This is the crux of the matter: money is a social contract and nothing more; it has value to the extent it serves social purposes by making the society that uses it stronger in some way; the primary purpose of state issued money is to pull forth the productive use of real resources within that part of global exchange system from which that government commands real resources; to the extent that private money is allowed through the creation of private debts this is to encourage productive behaviors better performed by markets than government. At present, however, the vast preponderance of private money/debt is not being deployed toward socially useful production, it has been re-deployed as a paper wealth extraction machine. The decriminalization of all manner of fraud under the banner of deregulation has perverted the incentive structure inherent in markets to reward fraud above everything else. What honest business can sustain itself in the face of competition from frauds who benefit from decriminalization? Where indirect theft is a legal business, it is only a matter of time before it is the only business.

Once in a largely decriminalized economy of frauds, what stake does any fraud have in real production and real wealth creation? The fraud business model of the deregulated economy gravitates to pure extraction as that is where it finds the least risk: simply taking previously created wealth through fraud, now legal, is much less risky than actually investing in the uncertain business of trying to make real things better with and for real people in the real world. Having recognized that fraud is now a dominant business model in the American corporate economy, particularly in finance, and that it will not be prosecuted and that as a political issue this is beyond the usufruct of the Fed, the Fed has at the very least said it will not reward the looters at the top of the food chain of fraud to sit upon idle piles of money and receive rents for it from the government.

So daddy is old and feeble now at the Fed. He won't scold you for stealing and he won't ground you for cheating your family and friends. He won't take anything away from you that you already have, but as tired and weak as he is, he bloody well won't give you a Porsche either. So quit your insipid whining about financial repression and get back to the bald face theft your are best at.

Links

There Is No Alternative: Henry Farrell: Aeon
On Being A Banana Republic: Steve Waldman: Interfluidity
Greece Trap: Niamh: Crooked Timber
Can We Face Success?: Stephanie Kelton: NEP
Barking Economists At IMF: Erinc Yelden: TripleCrisis

Links

Money In Africa: Bernhard Warner: BloombergBusinessweek
Give That Cop A Donut: Clark: Popehat
What You Can VS What You Should Extract: Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd
The Hijacking Of Human Rights: Chris Hedges: Truthdig
What Rights, And Why?: Glen Greenwald: The Guardian
Banksters In Action: Yanis Baroufakis