LI has been reading about the immigration issue, and looking at the pics of the amazing demonstrations. And it occurred to us that, as a public service, we should pull out the patented LI-THEORY-OF-REGULATION to make sense of it all. (thank you, thank you, people in the back row, but that last tomato you hurled up here is not appreciated!)
If you will remember, regulation is bounded by two ideal poles. One is an ideal of absolute unregulation (an impossibility, by the way, but conceptually necessary) and the other is banning. As the equilibrium of the regulation of a product or a service shifts towards the banning pole, certain questions must be asked – the most important of which is the ‘cost of banning.” A cost is an indicator of possibility – if a product or service costs so much to ban that it successfully would destroy or seriously damage the political system doing the regulating, this should make us re-consider banning. It is for this reason that LI has previously advocated lifting the bans on illegal drugs like marijuana and heroine, and is disapproving of moving from gun licensing to gun bans. I should note, in passing, that regulation is ALWAYS going to impinge on any good or service – the question is going to be, who regulates it. A gang eliminating another gang in order to sell heroin in a certain area is simply regulating action-movie style. That gang will control purity, cost, availability, etc. The public/private divide is secondary, or derivative, to regulation, libertarians to the contrary.
How to analyze those costs? Well, there are a number of factors, here, but major ones have to do with: the capability of producing the product or service (is it an extensive resource or a strictly limited one?); its place in the economy (is it a direct consumer good or service, or is it an industrial good or service?); and, finally, the cost and nature of the regulating of the good or service (is the regulation going to fall on the police, or on a special bureaucracy? is it going to involve extensive searching? are there perverse incentives that encourage police intervention beyond a certain norm?).
Well, putting our little machine to work about immigrant labor is an interesting task. Surveying the fascist suggestions by the Colorado Nazi – uh, oops, that sounds soooo unneutral. Let me start over. Surveying the interestingly authoritarian law advocated by this Tancredo character, one wonders, beyond the moral sickness of outlawing a sterling moral impulse, about its effect. Let’s say we succeed in throwing eleven million Mexican workers back into Mexico, shutting off one of the major, if not the major, cash flows into that country. How long before Mexico explodes? One month? Two? Anyone who thinks that explosion will be seamlessly closed in by a bogus wall along the border, manned by crazy eyed, potbellied white guys with duck hunting gear should… well, should get a job in the Iraq planning room at the Pentagon. One of the numerous idiocies of the NAFTA setup is that, for a short term gain, Mexico essentially allowed itself to be caught at a permanent subaltern level of production on the world market -- instead of leveraging its labor union structure to extract much more from the macquilladora and use it to finance a true social welfare structure. Hence, you get low cost labor reproducing even lower cost labor, instead of low cost labor accumulating the resources to be used by higher quality labor. But I'm this is an aside.
Of course, this assumes that Tancredo's law would really use the police to satisfactorily purge the country of illegal labor. I would put the chances of that happening at around, what, 1 percent? An eleven million person roundup, undertaken by a disparate, less than million member police department, could only succeed if every other policing task is dropped. In fact, the whole point of the legislation is not to succeed – but to make a vicious, pointyheaded moral point. This is the mark of vicious legislation, as any conservative from the era when there were really such things – the 19th century – could tell you. American conservatives are, of course, no such things – they love nothing better than passing symbolic laws, with all the cave man’s belief that the drawing of the bison with the spear in its side means that the next bison will be magically killed at just that spot.
Unfortunately, George Bush is, uh, right about this. Unfortunately, since Bush’s support for a position is usually a sign that something is fucked. But alas, life is full of chances, and one of those chances is that, out of every million neural firings in the Bush brain, one or two of them will be correct. The guest worker idea is probably not going to work – but Bush’s attitude, which is that the free market in labor has helped the U.S., is essentially correct. To descend to the impressionistic, for a second – since the eighties, the roofing trade in Atlanta has been almost exclusively Mexican/Salvadoran. This is something I knew a bit about, having often worked around apartment complexes and condominiums in the Atlanta area for my brothers. The savings from using a vast, cheaper labor force did not accrue exclusively, or even mostly, to the Mexicans/Salavadorans – it went, instead, to the builders and the homeowners. This is no little thing – one of the mysteries of the U.S. economy for the past thirty years is how a middle strata that is essentially dependent, now, on two earner households, remains prosperous. A large part of that is due to efficiencies in the system that the middle capitalizes on – homebuilding being a perfect example.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Sunday, March 26, 2006
whew is that pesky wabbit?
Sometimes, LI has to laugh at the NYT Magazine. We just loved this précis of the main article: “The Hunter-Gatherer: Seeking a better understanding of his place in nature and in the food chain, the author entered the woods of Northern California — with a gun.”
With a gun! Imagine that. And I thought hunting had been extinct for the last four thousand years!
No wonder the editors mistake Bush for a bold cowboy.
But enough of that. The article to go to on this leisurely Sunday is Nancy Scheper-Hughes piece in Nacla on the modern art of body (part) snatching. In anthropological circles, and even a bit outside of them, Scheper-Hughes is famous for her books on violence: Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil and Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland . Her book on the illicit organ trade is coming out from Farrar Strauss – at least according to her site. If I were the editor of the NYT Mag, I would curse the fact that I’d let go the article in NACLA – it is perfect NYT Mag fare.
Here’s a graf to lure you into the piece:
“The Berkeley Organs Watch project had its origins in bizarre rumors of body snatching and organ theft that circulated wildly in the urban shantytowns of Brazil in the mid-1980s. The residents of Alto do Cruzeiro, site of my long-term anthropological research in Northeast Brazil, reported yellow vans scouring poor neighborhoods looking for street kids and other social marginals whose bodies would not be missed. The drivers were described as U.S. or Japanese medical agents working for large hospitals abroad. The abducted bodies, they said, would appear later on the sides of country roads or in hospital dumpsters missing vital parts, especially eyes, kidneys, hearts and livers. “You may think this is nonsense,” my ordinarily trustworthy field assistant Irene da Silva said, “but we have seen things with our own eyes in public hospitals and in police morgues, and we know better.” Irene’s neighbor, Beatrice, agreed: “In these days, when the rich look at us, they are eyeing us greedily as a reservoir of spare parts.” Edite Cosmos added: “So many of the rich are having transplants and plastic surgeries today we hardly know anymore to whose body we are talking. Where do you think they are getting all those body parts?” “
Come on – you have to admit, that it much catchier than: Elmer Fudd goes huntin’ in Northern California.
The trade Scheper-Hughes’ group uncovered is mostly, as of yet, about yanking the body parts out of the dead and selling them for a profit. But he who says profit says incentive, as anybody who has read those two Scots, Adam Smith and Robert Louis Stevenson would know.
“The director of an experimental research unit of a large public medical school in South Africa showed me official documents allowing the transfer of human heart valves taken without consent from the bodies of poor blacks in the local police mortuary and shipped for “handling costs” to medical centers in Germany and Austria. These allowable “handling” fees helped support the unit’s research program in the face of austerities and the downsizing of advanced medical research facilities in the new South Africa. Although one can understand the frustration of the cash-strapped South African research scientists, the leeway afforded to them contributed to widespread corruption in the country.
In 2002 I contacted the South African Ministry of Health to report a scheme originating at a national tissue bank involving the transfer of hundreds of Achilles tendons that were removed without consent from the bodies of the victims of township violence and shipped by the director of the tissues bank to a corrupt U.S. businessman who paid $200 for each tendon. The tendons, used in sports medicine procedures, were shipped to the United States via South Korea, arriving at the free trade zone of the Tampa international airport where the South African tissues were repackaged as U.S. products. The tendons were then sold internationally and domestically to private medical firms and biotech companies for $1,200 each, generating a tidy profit for every party concerned, except for the poor chaps and their families who were the unsuspecting donors.”
It is interesting that one of the great justifications for colonialist expansion was that the natives were cannibals. I’m reading a history of Texas at the moment that makes this point about various Indian tribes in Texas – supposedly putting a stick in the eye of the Politically correct. I don’t really see the stick in the eye – the Comanches roasted and ate their enemies, the settlers brought black manpower in chain and whipped them into their fields to work, and none of this addresses the fact that expansion was theft, clear and simple. However, LI finds the organ trade rather interesting, insofar as the notion of eating the dead and the notion of just recycling their organs seems to be put in different corners of the mind.
Anyway, so much for our suggestion of the day.
With a gun! Imagine that. And I thought hunting had been extinct for the last four thousand years!
No wonder the editors mistake Bush for a bold cowboy.
But enough of that. The article to go to on this leisurely Sunday is Nancy Scheper-Hughes piece in Nacla on the modern art of body (part) snatching. In anthropological circles, and even a bit outside of them, Scheper-Hughes is famous for her books on violence: Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil and Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland . Her book on the illicit organ trade is coming out from Farrar Strauss – at least according to her site. If I were the editor of the NYT Mag, I would curse the fact that I’d let go the article in NACLA – it is perfect NYT Mag fare.
Here’s a graf to lure you into the piece:
“The Berkeley Organs Watch project had its origins in bizarre rumors of body snatching and organ theft that circulated wildly in the urban shantytowns of Brazil in the mid-1980s. The residents of Alto do Cruzeiro, site of my long-term anthropological research in Northeast Brazil, reported yellow vans scouring poor neighborhoods looking for street kids and other social marginals whose bodies would not be missed. The drivers were described as U.S. or Japanese medical agents working for large hospitals abroad. The abducted bodies, they said, would appear later on the sides of country roads or in hospital dumpsters missing vital parts, especially eyes, kidneys, hearts and livers. “You may think this is nonsense,” my ordinarily trustworthy field assistant Irene da Silva said, “but we have seen things with our own eyes in public hospitals and in police morgues, and we know better.” Irene’s neighbor, Beatrice, agreed: “In these days, when the rich look at us, they are eyeing us greedily as a reservoir of spare parts.” Edite Cosmos added: “So many of the rich are having transplants and plastic surgeries today we hardly know anymore to whose body we are talking. Where do you think they are getting all those body parts?” “
Come on – you have to admit, that it much catchier than: Elmer Fudd goes huntin’ in Northern California.
The trade Scheper-Hughes’ group uncovered is mostly, as of yet, about yanking the body parts out of the dead and selling them for a profit. But he who says profit says incentive, as anybody who has read those two Scots, Adam Smith and Robert Louis Stevenson would know.
“The director of an experimental research unit of a large public medical school in South Africa showed me official documents allowing the transfer of human heart valves taken without consent from the bodies of poor blacks in the local police mortuary and shipped for “handling costs” to medical centers in Germany and Austria. These allowable “handling” fees helped support the unit’s research program in the face of austerities and the downsizing of advanced medical research facilities in the new South Africa. Although one can understand the frustration of the cash-strapped South African research scientists, the leeway afforded to them contributed to widespread corruption in the country.
In 2002 I contacted the South African Ministry of Health to report a scheme originating at a national tissue bank involving the transfer of hundreds of Achilles tendons that were removed without consent from the bodies of the victims of township violence and shipped by the director of the tissues bank to a corrupt U.S. businessman who paid $200 for each tendon. The tendons, used in sports medicine procedures, were shipped to the United States via South Korea, arriving at the free trade zone of the Tampa international airport where the South African tissues were repackaged as U.S. products. The tendons were then sold internationally and domestically to private medical firms and biotech companies for $1,200 each, generating a tidy profit for every party concerned, except for the poor chaps and their families who were the unsuspecting donors.”
It is interesting that one of the great justifications for colonialist expansion was that the natives were cannibals. I’m reading a history of Texas at the moment that makes this point about various Indian tribes in Texas – supposedly putting a stick in the eye of the Politically correct. I don’t really see the stick in the eye – the Comanches roasted and ate their enemies, the settlers brought black manpower in chain and whipped them into their fields to work, and none of this addresses the fact that expansion was theft, clear and simple. However, LI finds the organ trade rather interesting, insofar as the notion of eating the dead and the notion of just recycling their organs seems to be put in different corners of the mind.
Anyway, so much for our suggestion of the day.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
more on anti-recruitment -- leaflet work
As we have said before, LI is extremely tired of the discussion about what the Democrats could do about the war. Or the Republicans. We could give a fuck. We wanted to know what we could do about the war. Which is the start of this project which I am tentatively calling: killthewarinyourgarage. You get a little taste of the army's plight in this oped at WAPO.
LI has been busily working at the anti-recruitment leaflet we mentioned a couple of posts ago. Mr. VD has sent us a graphic, and we've been assured banner space at one left leaning blog. Actually, as the leaflet idea gets more concrete, it might be the case that the website we get will hold several different leaflets. My friend Dave in the Great Pacific Northwest promised to help me on the graphix too.
The tone of the leaflet is the deflated boner in the mix for LI. We are well aware that our black humored, bile & candy prose is inappropriate here. We don't want to appeal to the 18-25 set that goes to anti-war demos, cause, like, why? -- we want to appeal straightforwardly to those potential recruits who may be Republicans, may be evangelical Christians, may be hardworking 4 H-ers, and most likely come from families that "support our troops." So, there is a no irony rule here.
Anyway, this stuff below is what we are mulling. I'd love to hear suggestions about this. Mail me at rgathman@netzero.net. Evidently, certain parts of this are not satisfactory at the moment. In particular, we want to get across the point that patriots can chose not to fight in a war that they believe is badly led. The quotes from Bush and Cheney are about that. But it is a subtle point, and I don't think I've made it well, yet. There is a part of me that wants to strongly insinuate how evil these people are -- and that is completely stupid and self indulgent. Rather, I need to simply suggest that every generation makes its choices, and that there is no shame in chosing to wait until the army is out of Iraq to enlist.
Before you talk to an army recruiter, there are a few facts you should know:
· 11,852 members of the military had been wounded in explosions - from so-called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, mortars, bombs and grenades as of January, 2006
· American military deaths numbered 2,225 as of Jan. 20; American military wounded: 16,472
· More than half wounded in explosions sustain head injuries
· The Government is looking for ways to cut down on helping the wounded pay for their treatment over the years: the Pentagon’s top personnel officer, David Chu, wrote in January, 2005 in the Wall Street Journal: "The amounts have gotten to the point where they are hurtful," David Chu Pentagon's top personnel official
Your benefits will almost certainly be cut. If you are the victim of an IED (Improvised Explosive Devise), your lifetime care will depend on benefits coming from Washington. And Washington has to cut benefits. Bottom line: you will be out on the street: “At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half if the White House is serious about its proposed budget.
After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.” – ABC, February 27, 2006.
In this part, I am going to put in a description of IEDs and some of the destruction they have wrought.
· Who wants to continue this war? Not the American people. Polls show 56 percent of the American people think the Iraq war was a mistake. And when people don’t support a war, don’t be fooled by “we support the troops” rhetoric. If you join now, you have a higher chance of injury or death and a lower assurance you will get benefits to help you get over it, and an even higher chance that any money they promise you will be inadequate.
· If someone offered you a ten thousand dollar bonus to work in a butcher shop, would you? Would you if you couldn’t get out of the contract? Would you if you had a one in six chance of injury? Would you if 2.5 of your fellow employees died per day? Think about it – why take the risk of chronic pain, death, and possible mental stress for years to come unless there was a larger cause you were fighting for? So, let’s look at that larger cause. First, let’s look at the patriotism of the men who started the war and are continuing it. Then, let’s look at the reasons the war was started and is continuing. Finally, let’s look at the positive side of not feeding the war machine – or, Getting America back to the Constitution.
·
· Patriotism
So you want to serve your country? You can serve it in many ways. But you don’t have to go to an unpopular and unwinnable war. History shows us many American patriots that avoided war. Did you know President George Bush avoided going toVietnam? Here is what he said about the topic
“Russert: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?
President Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
Russert: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.
President Bush: No, I didn't. You're right. I served. I flew fighters and enjoyed it, and provided a service to our country. In those days we had what was called "air defense command," and it was a part of the air defense command system.
The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions”
Vice President Cheney avoided going to Vietnam. Why? As he told a newspaper: "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service." While others were going to war, Cheney was getting ahead. That was the smart thing to do.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s top advisor, was draft age during the Vietnam war. He didn’t go. Neither did Vice President Cheney’s top advisor, Scooter Libby.
· These men and others like them were able to use the years that others spent in Vietnam getting ahead. They are now sending other men off to Iraq. Does that sound like a fair deal? It isn’t. If it is right for America’s highest ranking officials to avoid a mismanaged war, if this is patriotism, then it should be all right for you. Having “other priorities” means finding other ways of succeeding in this country. Patriotism is contributing something positive, no matter what.
· Don’t be the last soldier to die, or have a shattered spine, or a torn off limb, in a war with no mission end point. Unless we the people exert ourselves through not volunteering, the war will go simply go on and on, since nobody is willing to stop it. But YOU CAN STOP IT.
LI has been busily working at the anti-recruitment leaflet we mentioned a couple of posts ago. Mr. VD has sent us a graphic, and we've been assured banner space at one left leaning blog. Actually, as the leaflet idea gets more concrete, it might be the case that the website we get will hold several different leaflets. My friend Dave in the Great Pacific Northwest promised to help me on the graphix too.
The tone of the leaflet is the deflated boner in the mix for LI. We are well aware that our black humored, bile & candy prose is inappropriate here. We don't want to appeal to the 18-25 set that goes to anti-war demos, cause, like, why? -- we want to appeal straightforwardly to those potential recruits who may be Republicans, may be evangelical Christians, may be hardworking 4 H-ers, and most likely come from families that "support our troops." So, there is a no irony rule here.
Anyway, this stuff below is what we are mulling. I'd love to hear suggestions about this. Mail me at rgathman@netzero.net. Evidently, certain parts of this are not satisfactory at the moment. In particular, we want to get across the point that patriots can chose not to fight in a war that they believe is badly led. The quotes from Bush and Cheney are about that. But it is a subtle point, and I don't think I've made it well, yet. There is a part of me that wants to strongly insinuate how evil these people are -- and that is completely stupid and self indulgent. Rather, I need to simply suggest that every generation makes its choices, and that there is no shame in chosing to wait until the army is out of Iraq to enlist.
Before you talk to an army recruiter, there are a few facts you should know:
· 11,852 members of the military had been wounded in explosions - from so-called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, mortars, bombs and grenades as of January, 2006
· American military deaths numbered 2,225 as of Jan. 20; American military wounded: 16,472
· More than half wounded in explosions sustain head injuries
· The Government is looking for ways to cut down on helping the wounded pay for their treatment over the years: the Pentagon’s top personnel officer, David Chu, wrote in January, 2005 in the Wall Street Journal: "The amounts have gotten to the point where they are hurtful," David Chu Pentagon's top personnel official
Your benefits will almost certainly be cut. If you are the victim of an IED (Improvised Explosive Devise), your lifetime care will depend on benefits coming from Washington. And Washington has to cut benefits. Bottom line: you will be out on the street: “At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half if the White House is serious about its proposed budget.
After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.” – ABC, February 27, 2006.
In this part, I am going to put in a description of IEDs and some of the destruction they have wrought.
· Who wants to continue this war? Not the American people. Polls show 56 percent of the American people think the Iraq war was a mistake. And when people don’t support a war, don’t be fooled by “we support the troops” rhetoric. If you join now, you have a higher chance of injury or death and a lower assurance you will get benefits to help you get over it, and an even higher chance that any money they promise you will be inadequate.
· If someone offered you a ten thousand dollar bonus to work in a butcher shop, would you? Would you if you couldn’t get out of the contract? Would you if you had a one in six chance of injury? Would you if 2.5 of your fellow employees died per day? Think about it – why take the risk of chronic pain, death, and possible mental stress for years to come unless there was a larger cause you were fighting for? So, let’s look at that larger cause. First, let’s look at the patriotism of the men who started the war and are continuing it. Then, let’s look at the reasons the war was started and is continuing. Finally, let’s look at the positive side of not feeding the war machine – or, Getting America back to the Constitution.
·
· Patriotism
So you want to serve your country? You can serve it in many ways. But you don’t have to go to an unpopular and unwinnable war. History shows us many American patriots that avoided war. Did you know President George Bush avoided going toVietnam? Here is what he said about the topic
“Russert: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?
President Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
Russert: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.
President Bush: No, I didn't. You're right. I served. I flew fighters and enjoyed it, and provided a service to our country. In those days we had what was called "air defense command," and it was a part of the air defense command system.
The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions”
Vice President Cheney avoided going to Vietnam. Why? As he told a newspaper: "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service." While others were going to war, Cheney was getting ahead. That was the smart thing to do.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s top advisor, was draft age during the Vietnam war. He didn’t go. Neither did Vice President Cheney’s top advisor, Scooter Libby.
· These men and others like them were able to use the years that others spent in Vietnam getting ahead. They are now sending other men off to Iraq. Does that sound like a fair deal? It isn’t. If it is right for America’s highest ranking officials to avoid a mismanaged war, if this is patriotism, then it should be all right for you. Having “other priorities” means finding other ways of succeeding in this country. Patriotism is contributing something positive, no matter what.
· Don’t be the last soldier to die, or have a shattered spine, or a torn off limb, in a war with no mission end point. Unless we the people exert ourselves through not volunteering, the war will go simply go on and on, since nobody is willing to stop it. But YOU CAN STOP IT.
the two bit underground man
As a small timer, a two-bit underground man, LI has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the rich – envy of all that spread. At the same time, however, there is always the eternal mystery of wealth. Not the mystery of how it is accrued – the mystery of why. A mystery best expressed in the immortal dialogue between J. Gittes and Noah Cross in Chinatown:
“Cross: That's what I am doing. If the bond issue passes Tuesday, there'll be eight million dollars to build an aqueduct and reservoir. I'm doing it.
Gittes: Gonna be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they're paying for water that they're not gonna get.
Cross: Oh, that's all taken care of. You see, Mr. Gits. Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.
Gittes: How you gonna do that?
Cross: By incorporating the valley into the city. Simple as that.
Gittes: How much are you worth?
Cross: I've no idea. How much do you want?
Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?
Cross: Oh my, yes!
Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
Cross: The future, Mr. Gits - the future! Now where's the girl. I want the only daughter I've got left. As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.
Gittes: Who do you blame for that - her?
Cross: I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gits. Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, the right place, they're capable of anything.”
This rather neatly ties together two of the great mysteries of society: the incest prohibition (poor nervous Evelyn) and the desire of certain people to endlessly, endlessly acquire wealth. But let’s not go to Freud just yet. I’ve been, in fact, going to Georg Simmel. The translating job I have has forced me to read a bit of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. Simmel’s complete works are up on the Net, for those who have the German to read it. For pauvre moi, always a week away from having not a pot to piss in, I’ve been extremely interested in Simmel’s notion of a the connection between money and the its degree of separation from labor. The series of ends, as he calls it, that money has to traverse has an unpredictable impact on money. Anybody who has hung around the rich puzzles over how certain petty expenditures can discombobulate them at the same time that large, gaudy, unbelievable expenditures are so very calmly made that there is a greatness in them. It is the latter quality that F. Scott Fitz was talking about.
So here is a bit from Simmel:
“We can’t deny, on a large enough scale … that there is a proportion between the tempo of earnings and that of expenditure.
Thus, nobody expends money more easily and with less prudence than the gambler, the goldminer and the demi-monde; and the ruinous financial policy of the Spanish since Carlos V can be pinned to the relative lack of work with which America’s noble metal fell to the lot of the Spanish.
This as it comes, so it goes (»wie gewonnen, so zerronnen«) refers not only to the objective structure of the economy, that tends to posit the security of the earned only as a price of a certain solidity of the earning: the professions of particularly easy and quick earning already contains in their objective circumstances the little canals, through which the earned has the tendency and chance to once again drain away.”
Now, for an economist, consumption is just consumption and there is no more mystery in it than the Eucharist holds for a Unitarian. But for LI, always wondering where the fuck my pittance goes to, those little canals are like fate, or the unconscious: the objectified unconscious of being broke. And yet, at a certain point, what can you do with that extra money? The objective circumstances of the rich, to correct F. Scott, are different. LI will return in another post to Simmel’s explanation of that.
“Cross: That's what I am doing. If the bond issue passes Tuesday, there'll be eight million dollars to build an aqueduct and reservoir. I'm doing it.
Gittes: Gonna be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they're paying for water that they're not gonna get.
Cross: Oh, that's all taken care of. You see, Mr. Gits. Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.
Gittes: How you gonna do that?
Cross: By incorporating the valley into the city. Simple as that.
Gittes: How much are you worth?
Cross: I've no idea. How much do you want?
Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?
Cross: Oh my, yes!
Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
Cross: The future, Mr. Gits - the future! Now where's the girl. I want the only daughter I've got left. As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.
Gittes: Who do you blame for that - her?
Cross: I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gits. Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, the right place, they're capable of anything.”
This rather neatly ties together two of the great mysteries of society: the incest prohibition (poor nervous Evelyn) and the desire of certain people to endlessly, endlessly acquire wealth. But let’s not go to Freud just yet. I’ve been, in fact, going to Georg Simmel. The translating job I have has forced me to read a bit of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. Simmel’s complete works are up on the Net, for those who have the German to read it. For pauvre moi, always a week away from having not a pot to piss in, I’ve been extremely interested in Simmel’s notion of a the connection between money and the its degree of separation from labor. The series of ends, as he calls it, that money has to traverse has an unpredictable impact on money. Anybody who has hung around the rich puzzles over how certain petty expenditures can discombobulate them at the same time that large, gaudy, unbelievable expenditures are so very calmly made that there is a greatness in them. It is the latter quality that F. Scott Fitz was talking about.
So here is a bit from Simmel:
“We can’t deny, on a large enough scale … that there is a proportion between the tempo of earnings and that of expenditure.
Thus, nobody expends money more easily and with less prudence than the gambler, the goldminer and the demi-monde; and the ruinous financial policy of the Spanish since Carlos V can be pinned to the relative lack of work with which America’s noble metal fell to the lot of the Spanish.
This as it comes, so it goes (»wie gewonnen, so zerronnen«) refers not only to the objective structure of the economy, that tends to posit the security of the earned only as a price of a certain solidity of the earning: the professions of particularly easy and quick earning already contains in their objective circumstances the little canals, through which the earned has the tendency and chance to once again drain away.”
Now, for an economist, consumption is just consumption and there is no more mystery in it than the Eucharist holds for a Unitarian. But for LI, always wondering where the fuck my pittance goes to, those little canals are like fate, or the unconscious: the objectified unconscious of being broke. And yet, at a certain point, what can you do with that extra money? The objective circumstances of the rich, to correct F. Scott, are different. LI will return in another post to Simmel’s explanation of that.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
More on an anti-recruiting pamphlet
I received an email about the anti-recruiting pamphlet idea. And I’ve been spinning around ideas in my head. But LI needs suggestions.
The army is having problems. This is from one of the slew of newstories recently about recruiting
“Blacks make up about 23 percent of today’s active-duty Army, but the share of Blacks in the recruit classes of recent years dropped. From 22.7 percent at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the share slid to 19.9 percent in 2002; 16.4 percent in 2003 and 15.9 percent last year, according to figures provided by Army Recruiting Command and cited in published reports. The slide has continued, dropping to 13.9 percent as of Feb. 9 of this year.”
13.9 is outstanding. I think the African-American community, which has collectively turned its back on this president, has done a good job making joining the army now vaguely shameful. However, this can be accelerated. One of the things that I am always impressed with is how the conservative sphere is continually making good suggestions to the left about this, and how indignant the left gets. For instance, suggesting that the bad news from Iraq is just to demoralize Americans. I think that is an excellent suggestion, and one of the things this pamphlet should do is make going to Iraq seem, a., unsupported by the American population, b., dangerous beyond any risk that you would want to take, and c., futile at that. The extremely high rate of injury, much higher than in Vietnam, will I think give even the most testosteroned up 18 year old pause. The thing is, how to convey this in such a way that, a., it makes not joining up – abstinence - seem patriotic, and b., that it is written in a far less preacherly tone than the pamphlets I have seen. My ideal would be that the pictures would be stark and hard – comparisons of the ideal be all that you can be with pics of wounded men – that the message would be, no, you will not get support after your leg is blown off – the money for V.A. is being cut, and you will have to battle your entire life long against prejudice and the government – that you can actually help bring the war to a close by not signing up, and thus helping others – and that other patriots, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, exercised the option of not going during Vietnam and instead devoted those years to getting ahead – and look where they are now. Nobody calls them unpatriotic for dodging the war in Vietnam. This is a subtle but I think very necessary point – the people who go will fall behind because the people who stay here – even the people who support them, and go yeah, go to Iraq – are really getting ahead in the game of life. It is, in essence, a sucker’s game to go to Iraq. This point has the advantage of being true, and the disadvantage of being one of those points people try to sentimentally ignore.
Since I am not used to writing for 18 year olds, though, I am a little unsure of what kind of thing works. Probably I ought to go out and by teen people and the like. Ultimately, I would like the tone of this to be don't tread on me, with the treading being by the Executive Branch, using the voluteer army as a government funded mercenary corps to do what it likes. I think I'll look up all those Readers Digest attacks on the IRS and apply them to this issue.
Do drop me some suggestions. rgathman@netzero.net
The army is having problems. This is from one of the slew of newstories recently about recruiting
“Blacks make up about 23 percent of today’s active-duty Army, but the share of Blacks in the recruit classes of recent years dropped. From 22.7 percent at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the share slid to 19.9 percent in 2002; 16.4 percent in 2003 and 15.9 percent last year, according to figures provided by Army Recruiting Command and cited in published reports. The slide has continued, dropping to 13.9 percent as of Feb. 9 of this year.”
13.9 is outstanding. I think the African-American community, which has collectively turned its back on this president, has done a good job making joining the army now vaguely shameful. However, this can be accelerated. One of the things that I am always impressed with is how the conservative sphere is continually making good suggestions to the left about this, and how indignant the left gets. For instance, suggesting that the bad news from Iraq is just to demoralize Americans. I think that is an excellent suggestion, and one of the things this pamphlet should do is make going to Iraq seem, a., unsupported by the American population, b., dangerous beyond any risk that you would want to take, and c., futile at that. The extremely high rate of injury, much higher than in Vietnam, will I think give even the most testosteroned up 18 year old pause. The thing is, how to convey this in such a way that, a., it makes not joining up – abstinence - seem patriotic, and b., that it is written in a far less preacherly tone than the pamphlets I have seen. My ideal would be that the pictures would be stark and hard – comparisons of the ideal be all that you can be with pics of wounded men – that the message would be, no, you will not get support after your leg is blown off – the money for V.A. is being cut, and you will have to battle your entire life long against prejudice and the government – that you can actually help bring the war to a close by not signing up, and thus helping others – and that other patriots, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, exercised the option of not going during Vietnam and instead devoted those years to getting ahead – and look where they are now. Nobody calls them unpatriotic for dodging the war in Vietnam. This is a subtle but I think very necessary point – the people who go will fall behind because the people who stay here – even the people who support them, and go yeah, go to Iraq – are really getting ahead in the game of life. It is, in essence, a sucker’s game to go to Iraq. This point has the advantage of being true, and the disadvantage of being one of those points people try to sentimentally ignore.
Since I am not used to writing for 18 year olds, though, I am a little unsure of what kind of thing works. Probably I ought to go out and by teen people and the like. Ultimately, I would like the tone of this to be don't tread on me, with the treading being by the Executive Branch, using the voluteer army as a government funded mercenary corps to do what it likes. I think I'll look up all those Readers Digest attacks on the IRS and apply them to this issue.
Do drop me some suggestions. rgathman@netzero.net
an amphibian on dry land
The London Times did a nice thing a week ago that I missed – they published several articles to celebrate Beckett, on his centenary. LI particularly liked Roy Foster’s appreciation, which ends with a very nice anecdote:
“Reading or listening to Beckett, it is the beauty and eloquence of the language that conquers, as much as the radically melancholic vision, shot with humour though it is. In 1978 my father-in-law, a doctor from much the same sort of comfortable Dublin background as Beckett's, but far from a playgoer or novel reader, noticed me reading Deirdre Bair's biography. Noting the Dublin name ("Beckett with two t's is always Irish"), he mentioned that Frank Beckett, who ran the family business, had been a close friend through the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and that "his brother, the playwright, now very well known" always came over for the summer championships. "We used to have dinner together every year."
My jaw dropping at this unexpected side of his social life, I asked what he was like. "The brother?" asked my father-in-law, surprised. "Well, to tell you the truth, he never had much to say for himself." Beckett would have liked the story; but it could not have been further from the truth.”
What LI loves about Beckett is the way he pushes the rule: the bleaker, the funnier. One of our own obsessions since dear old college days is the way that one rule in life never seems to be questioned: that the serious and the non-serious are completely separate categories. Or as Mark Twain said, in his rules for funerals: “don’t laugh.” This is common sense, but LI… always laughs. Our taste tends towards the lurid and the bitter because we think of art as seriousness taken non-seriously. (and aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, is non-seriousness taken seriously -- remember, it all starts with that prating pietist, Kant, trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle). Our own little aesthetic hierarchy starts with the fact that Lear, in the end, remembers “my poor fool is hang’d.” The fool – which could be Cordelia as well – was both lucky and unlucky in that last act – for after all, one of the bits in his repertoire was to make sexual puns out of legal punishments, and a hanging fool was, of course, the kind of thing he'd zip up. Beckett's work shows just how funny this is, or could be made to be from the fool’s point of view, if he were still around, like Molloy, to enjoy his own hanging.
We liked this graf from Foster’s piece too:
“Nor was he ever anything but highly sociable. Old Irish friends continually descended on him in Paris, and he was endlessly ready to accommodate them, lend or give them money, and go drinking with them (though Brendan Behan presented too much of a challenge).
This made his genuinely reclusive French wife, Suzanne, despair: "Sam makes friends like a dog makes turds." And though visits to Dublin made him feel, he said, like an amphibian on dry land, nonetheless he returned -for sporting fixtures, or to see his family. As with Joyce, there were aspects of Irishness that never left him. The famously cutting response to an interviewer should be remembered. "Vous etes anglais, M. Beckett" -"Au contraire."”
“Reading or listening to Beckett, it is the beauty and eloquence of the language that conquers, as much as the radically melancholic vision, shot with humour though it is. In 1978 my father-in-law, a doctor from much the same sort of comfortable Dublin background as Beckett's, but far from a playgoer or novel reader, noticed me reading Deirdre Bair's biography. Noting the Dublin name ("Beckett with two t's is always Irish"), he mentioned that Frank Beckett, who ran the family business, had been a close friend through the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and that "his brother, the playwright, now very well known" always came over for the summer championships. "We used to have dinner together every year."
My jaw dropping at this unexpected side of his social life, I asked what he was like. "The brother?" asked my father-in-law, surprised. "Well, to tell you the truth, he never had much to say for himself." Beckett would have liked the story; but it could not have been further from the truth.”
What LI loves about Beckett is the way he pushes the rule: the bleaker, the funnier. One of our own obsessions since dear old college days is the way that one rule in life never seems to be questioned: that the serious and the non-serious are completely separate categories. Or as Mark Twain said, in his rules for funerals: “don’t laugh.” This is common sense, but LI… always laughs. Our taste tends towards the lurid and the bitter because we think of art as seriousness taken non-seriously. (and aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, is non-seriousness taken seriously -- remember, it all starts with that prating pietist, Kant, trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle). Our own little aesthetic hierarchy starts with the fact that Lear, in the end, remembers “my poor fool is hang’d.” The fool – which could be Cordelia as well – was both lucky and unlucky in that last act – for after all, one of the bits in his repertoire was to make sexual puns out of legal punishments, and a hanging fool was, of course, the kind of thing he'd zip up. Beckett's work shows just how funny this is, or could be made to be from the fool’s point of view, if he were still around, like Molloy, to enjoy his own hanging.
We liked this graf from Foster’s piece too:
“Nor was he ever anything but highly sociable. Old Irish friends continually descended on him in Paris, and he was endlessly ready to accommodate them, lend or give them money, and go drinking with them (though Brendan Behan presented too much of a challenge).
This made his genuinely reclusive French wife, Suzanne, despair: "Sam makes friends like a dog makes turds." And though visits to Dublin made him feel, he said, like an amphibian on dry land, nonetheless he returned -for sporting fixtures, or to see his family. As with Joyce, there were aspects of Irishness that never left him. The famously cutting response to an interviewer should be remembered. "Vous etes anglais, M. Beckett" -"Au contraire."”
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
squeeze the army to death
Bush’s press conference made clear what was clear to any thinking person: there will be no pullout of Iraq via establishment politics:
“President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the war in Iraq is dominating nearly every aspect of his presidency, and he served notice for the first time that he expects the decision on when all U.S. troops come home to fall on his successors.”
Periodically, LI comes back to the subject of non-recruitment. Squeezing the volunteer army until there’s no toothpaste left in the tube is the right thing to do. Not all functions in this society have to be triangulated through a politician. The easiest and most effective thing to do is to talk to seventeen and eighteen year olds and keep them from signing up. You don’t have to attack the army. It is a matter of committing later, when the army is engaged in doing something other than a vanity project. Again, one must respectfully quote the Vice President himself about Vietnam: “I had other priorities,” he said, making it clear that the patriotic thing to do is to avoid getting into pointless wars.
We don’t need politicians to take us out of Iraq – they need us to stay in it.
The American Friends Service committee has a downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet here.
Looking through that pamphlet, LI is thinking that it is organized along lines that are too general. We are thinking of writing our own downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet, focusing much more strictly on staying out of the Iraq war. We are going to try to do that and put it up in the bar next to these posts. A simply worded, Tom Paine like pamphlet laying out reasons not to join the military, in any branch, during the current crisis. We don’t have time for it at the moment, but in the next month.
The one thing the Dems could do – although they won’t – is push for a law putting a divide between the National Guard and the regular army. The National Guard is going to be needed at home more than ever this hurricane season. Unfortunately, the military has been kidnapping the Guard for Bush’s project.
In the long run, the obvious problem with having a volunteer army is that the executive branch increasingly uses it as a private army – a mercenary army, at the beck and call of the White House, paid for by the taxpayer, plaguing the planet. Ultimately, squeezing that army isn’t enough – the army has to be taken back from the Executive branch. We cannot afford to allow the president to mount private wars corresponding more to the currents of his psychopathology than to the dictates of national interest.
“President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the war in Iraq is dominating nearly every aspect of his presidency, and he served notice for the first time that he expects the decision on when all U.S. troops come home to fall on his successors.”
Periodically, LI comes back to the subject of non-recruitment. Squeezing the volunteer army until there’s no toothpaste left in the tube is the right thing to do. Not all functions in this society have to be triangulated through a politician. The easiest and most effective thing to do is to talk to seventeen and eighteen year olds and keep them from signing up. You don’t have to attack the army. It is a matter of committing later, when the army is engaged in doing something other than a vanity project. Again, one must respectfully quote the Vice President himself about Vietnam: “I had other priorities,” he said, making it clear that the patriotic thing to do is to avoid getting into pointless wars.
We don’t need politicians to take us out of Iraq – they need us to stay in it.
The American Friends Service committee has a downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet here.
Looking through that pamphlet, LI is thinking that it is organized along lines that are too general. We are thinking of writing our own downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet, focusing much more strictly on staying out of the Iraq war. We are going to try to do that and put it up in the bar next to these posts. A simply worded, Tom Paine like pamphlet laying out reasons not to join the military, in any branch, during the current crisis. We don’t have time for it at the moment, but in the next month.
The one thing the Dems could do – although they won’t – is push for a law putting a divide between the National Guard and the regular army. The National Guard is going to be needed at home more than ever this hurricane season. Unfortunately, the military has been kidnapping the Guard for Bush’s project.
In the long run, the obvious problem with having a volunteer army is that the executive branch increasingly uses it as a private army – a mercenary army, at the beck and call of the White House, paid for by the taxpayer, plaguing the planet. Ultimately, squeezing that army isn’t enough – the army has to be taken back from the Executive branch. We cannot afford to allow the president to mount private wars corresponding more to the currents of his psychopathology than to the dictates of national interest.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Anti-modernity
1. Anti-modern. This is the term Jacques Le Rider turns to repeatedly in his biography of Karl Kraus. Which is entitled, somewhat contra...
.jpg)
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...