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Showing posts from May 5, 2019

The Chickenshit Club accepts another member

There's a book about the Obama administration's failure to prosecute bankers and other wealthy people for crimes they committed in the runup to 2008 - and even for crimes like laundering money for the cocaine cartels, for which Wachovia bank was given a big fine rather than jailtime for the CEO. Jesse Eisinger wrote a book about it called the Chickenshit Club. Basically, the rationale was that punishing the institutions that committed and profited from crimes to the full extent of the law would threaten the existence of these institutions, which, it was further argued, would spread too much collateral damage. The exemplary instance was the punishment suffered by Arthur Anderson, which put that accounting firm out of business. Many 200 thou plus accountants spent weeks hunting for jobs, and many of them couldn't pay the docking fees at their yacht clubs. Obama's Justice department swallowed the "chickenshit" method hook, line, and sinker. Take HSBC bank. I

A plea for a citizen's tribunal on impunity

In Paris two months ago a feminist group went about and affixed stickers with female names to streets. This was more than about those streets that are named after people, and by people I mean 95 percent male, but also about the claim to the public space and how it has tended to be normatively male. Are the street names going to change? I don’t know; I do know that this action was taken because they are never going to change – people in established positions, people in power are never going to change them – if there is no activity on the ground, from the ground, and in your face. The division of political labor has the permanently pernicious effect that there is a political class – a circle which, as it were, runs both the discourse and the institutions of power. This effect is only partly off-set by “representative democracy”, especially when these democracies continue to generate judicial systems that are, basically, non and anti-democratic. What has happened in

The sprinkler

Another Karen Chamisso poem. The sprinkler "The males stare at each other" she said, disconsolate, holding them in her hands above the yellow hose, all dont-tread-on-me folds, by some hand chopped off; it is in the ragged hole thrust upon that one end that we'd thrust a coupling -male- and now stand clueless before the next step. Is this so emblematic that it must lead to these very lines? God or goddess, do the oracles live? The males stare at each other, the one in the hose, the other in the sprinkler. and not by us will such plumbing ever be joined. "Oh fuck it: I'll water by hand," she says, dropping their brass to the earth. And so we solve for a time the problem: what do boys want? " Il était impossible que ces deux hommes vécussent ensemble  huit jours de suite,    sans  que leur étrange manie les reprît..."