NOT SUMMERS

Let’s throw out a few names for the Secretary of the Treasury.

LI was startled that Larry Summers is even being considered. Obama owes his election to women, and it is not a good idea to repay this debt by making Summers his first appointment. The other mention is Timothy F. Geithner, who has been the strongman in the current financial crisis. The names floated immediately to the top in the Post – and I think I can be confident that Summer’s friends had something to do with that.

But how about some more unorthodox candidates:

For instance, how about Esther Duflo, MIT prof and head of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab? Admittedly, there might be a nationality problem. I’m not sure if she is still French or not – and she is below forty. However, she was named among the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy mag. Here’s a q and a with her. Now, perhaps she would be better as the head of the World Bank. But I like her expertise in poverty reduction, and her commitment to testing models against applications – which would be common sense anywhere else but in economics.

How about the economist who is supposedly Obama’s advisor on trade issues, Laura D’Andrea Tyson? She is infinitely preferable in terms of her acquaintance with healthcare economics – which is going to be a big issue for the Obama administration. Tyson is actually on the short list, and she seems to be a much more liberal – in the sense of Galbraithian liberal - economist than such as Summers.


How about Teresa Ghilarducci? The New School economist has written a book about what is wrong with 401(k)s that has already driven conservatives insane – her testimony in October spawned an outbreak of ideological rash, for instance, here. They are, of course, right to be worried – the entanglement of the working class with our investor overlords is the very heart of conservative politics. Taking back retirement would revolutionize the politics of this country.

And finally – on this roll call of what you will notice are all progressive women economists and hotshots – Jane D’Arista of the Financial Markets Center and an expert on the regulation of said markets, former chief economists for the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who was recently celebrated here.

I wouldn't stop there...

All the revolutionaries of the 20th century are rusty, and what can we learn from them? Sure, I have a soft spot in my heart for Lenin, who died way too soon, and who, I think, could have led the Soviet Union into the path of being a normal socialist country And Gandhi’s success is undoubted, even if it is picked to pieces, now, by rightwing Hindu nationalists.

Still, we have the longer perspective. We can see their beginnings and their ends. Their time has waned.

Except for one man: Martin Luther King, Jr. Last night I got to bed at three, and I am tired as I write this, having had five hours sleep, so perhaps I am sentimental. Obama’s campaign, either consciously or unconsciously, took its cues from King. The same long patience. The same attention to the goal. The same shaking off of abuse, of the frivolity of hatred, which, even if it kills, can never be anything but frivolous, in bad faith, repulsive to the hater himself.

Last night was a reminder that King changed the U.S. – that you certainly don’t have to be a president to change this country.

If yesterday’s list of Youtube items was a dirge; today’s link is to this. I was ten when MLK was murdered.

I was ten…


"And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.
And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!"

obama day!

For Obama day, some music links:

Invasion so succexy – Metric

Did you ever think about suicide? – Hanin Elias, War

This is a message to persons unknown
Persons in hiding. Persons unknown
Survival in silence
Isn't good enough no more
Keeping your mouth shut head in the sand
Terrorists and saboteurs
Each and every one of us
Hiding in shadows persons unknown – Poison Girls

I got a letter from the government the other day – Tricky, Black Steel

Monsieur le president/ou est mon argent? – Vive la fete,

Je suis un ouvrier/ expulsez moi – Tetes raides

Monsieur le president – il faut que je vous dira - Le deserteur, Joan Baez


We had a communist in the family/ I had to wear a mask – Forest Families, the Knife

I swear to god I want to slit my wrists and end this bullshit – Suicidal Thoughts, Biggie Smalls

Ağladıkça – Ahmet Kaya

Keskin Biçak - Sezen Aksu

News from the Zona

An excellent article in the NYT on the little worldwide web woven within the Greenspan system that is now going down a stitch here, down a stitch there – you in the corner can’t have your retirement, and you in the other corner can’t have your education. The vast game of tag in which you, my friends, my friends, are It – now, try to run for cover!

The article takes up a move by a Wisconsin school district to take advantage of what it was assured was easy money in the highflying world of international finance:

“Mr. Noack told the Whitefish Bay board that investing in the global economy carried few risks, according to the tape.

“What’s the best investment? It’s called a collateralized debt obligation,” or a C.D.O., Mr. Noack said. He described it as a collection of bonds from 105 of the most reputable companies that would pay the school board a small return every quarter.

“We’re being very conservative,” Mr. Noack told the board, composed of lawyers, salesmen and a homemaker who lived in the affluent Milwaukee suburb.

Soon, Whitefish Bay and the four other districts borrowed $165 million from Depfa and contributed $35 million of their own money to purchase three C.D.O.’s sold by the Royal Bank of Canada, which had a relationship with Mr. Noack’s company.
But Mr. Noack’s explanation of a C.D.O. was very wrong. Mr. Noack, who through his lawyer declined to comment, had attended only a two-hour training session on C.D.O.’s, he told a friend.”

It is a lovely story, full of the pathos that will tug at your heartstrings or at least make you violently ill. It is a story that will replace our celebrity breakdown stories in the next year, assuredly. The word, lately – amongst all the financial columnists – has been “bottom”. A Melvillian word, a word from the infantile word, a word from sex games – bottom bottom bottom. Has the stock market bottomed? Is the bottom coming up? It turns out that a little word like that can land like a giant flyswatter in the country that elected the Giant Fly as Pres, oh so many years ago it seems, and much crushing will be involved.
Well, last word I’ll leave to the article:

“In Mrs. Velvikis’s classroom at Grewenow Elementary in Kenosha, students have recently completed a lesson in which each first grader contributed a vegetable to a common vat of “stone soup.” The project — based on a children’s book — teaches the benefits of working together. The schools have learned that when everyone works together, they can also all starve.”

PS - And I should link to myself, right? This is my review of a recent book on Iran. Many will jump down my throat about it.

Writing the Book of Love in Red Ink

“It took the Devil, that ancient ally of woman, her confidant from Paradise, it took the sorceress, this monster who does everything backwards, inversing the sacred world, to be occupied with woman, to crush under her feet their [the church’s] practices, and to care for her in spite of herself. The poor creature thought so little of herself! … She recoiled, blushed, meant to say nothing. The sorceress, adroit and malign, guessed and penetrated. At last she figured out how to make her speak, pulled her little secret out, vanquished her refusal, her hesitations of modesty and humility. Rather than submit to such a thing, she would have liked better almost to die. The barbarous sorceress made her live.”



Marguerite Duras once expressed, in an interview, her admiration for Michelet’s The Sorceress:

“Do you know the thesis by Michelet about witches? It's admirable. (By the way, I think, and many people
think, on the basis of letters and journals, that Michelet did not have a normal sex life-which is certainly in his favor.) He says that in the Middle Ages, when the lords went off to war or on the Crusades, when the women stayed alone for months at a time on the farms, in the middle of the fields, hungry and lonely, then
they simply started talking. To whatever was around them: trees, animals, forests, rivers. . . . Perhaps to break the boredom, to forget the hunger and the loneliness. The men burned them. That's how witches came into being. Men said, "They're in collusion with nature," and they burned them. That's how the reign of
witches began. I add, personally, that what they did, in effect, was punish those women because they turned a little away from them and became less available to them.”

LI is thinking about Michelet today because, as we are about to plunge into the topic of love, Michelet is a name which comes up – after all, Michelet wrote the book of Love (which has never been as popular as Stendhal’s) as part of his vast, Hugolian effort to combine human and natural history. For Michelet, the key link was woman –which, to feminists of another stripe than Duras, might not exactly be a thesis in his favor. Still, as opposed to Goethe’s eternal feminine, Michelet presented an image that was, at the base, quite startling – for Michelet, woman is supremely cyclical, just as history is, and just as nature is. In part, of course, Michelet meant cyclical in an abstract way – but in part, he was referring to menstruation. In a fascinating article, “Blood on: Michelet and Female blood”, Therese Moreau tried to show that there is a thin thread of menstrual blood running all through Michelet’s work. LI will discuss this in the next post.

coming attractions

LI is finished, for the moment, with the Nemesis thread. We are planning on a love and suicide thread next, starting with the Sorrows of Young Werther.

...

We’ve been slowly preparing an index of the posts that constitute our Human Limit thematalooza. When I finish it, I think I’ll download it to my geocities site and put a link to it – for those interested in the Great Work. Going back to 2006, I can see how certain threads silently converged, enter into the thing itself, spirits called out to, spirits that came, spirits that didn’t. It is back then that I stumbled upon what is still my methodological principle, my version of dialectical materialism, my very own Wicca Marxism: “Comment y arriva-t-on. Sans doute par l’effet si simple du grand principe satanique que tout doit se faire à rebours, exactement à l’envers de ce que fait le monde sacré.” From Michelet’s mouth to my ear. There are two great elaborations of this principle – one, Jehovah’s version, is that we see now as in a glass, darkly – and we know its avatars, up to Bloy and Kraus; the other is Lucifer’s version, or Little Red Riding Hood’s – for that was the wisdom she collected in the woods, that if you go down the path of pins, you will come back by the path of needles. Negative identity, don’t ya know. The satanic history of happiness begins with the inspiration that back and forth are hints that the path is not the same – and not because it is some fuckin’ river you can’t cross twice, but because twiceness is its disease, its spell. My abracadabra against the irresistible motion of history.

All the money in the world

Bubbles are not, contrary to the new CW in the zona, all bad. Law’s system, some think, actually liquidated the immense debts left by Louis XIV and gave a massive impetus to the restructuring of French agriculture and artisanal industry.

But the Greenspan system seems to have expanded so fast and gotten to such size that it might well engulf all the gains made along the way and then some. A sign of this: the sinking of AIG. Here is a company that is burning its way through 120 billion dollars in 3 weeks time. In three weeks time, he repeated, trying to sound like the George Segal character in To Die For. From today’s story in the NYT:

“These accounting questions [that is, how much of a hole AIG was in because of its position as a counterparty] are of interest not only because taxpayers are footing the bill at A.I.G. but also because the post-mortems may point to a fundamental flaw in the Fed bailout: the money is buoying an insurer — and its trading partners — whose cash needs could easily exceed the existing government backstop if the housing sector continues to deteriorate.

Edward M. Liddy, the insurance executive brought in by the government to restructure A.I.G., has already said that although he does not want to seek more money from the Fed, he may have to do so.”

As I said in my vulture of doom post about the bailout, there is not enough money in all the world to successfully bail out the system. The managers of the great Popping sound (the sound of 100,000 hedge funder penises exploding all at once) have established a nice rhythm for the deathfuck: they come up with a solution and for a month, a relative calm prevails, and then another shoe drops. From last week to this week, the new idea is that the worst is behind us. So the markets go happily upward. But do we have any reason whatsoever to think that counterparties are now protected from the almost sure consequence of housing prices dipping another ten percent? I don’t think so. The write downs have been so many stabs in the dark. Meanwhile, every developed nation has put its government money on the line – a unique event! – to stop the oncoming tide of losing bets. All the money in the world, in other words, is on the line, because more than all the money in the world has been bet. Eventually, many of those bets will simply have to be canceled. Sorry charlie! And as the players don't even know they made the bets - charming megachurch x in San Diego, the school system in Xville, Minnesota, the Icelandic Tuna Fisherman's pension fund, and so on - this will not be happy. As every fan of cheap sadomasochistic entertainment knows, surrender is a long process, but game by game one gets to that final, liquid moment of mutual pain and cumming. It isn’t Wall Street, among the cheesy films of the eighties, that describes the current situation. It is 9 ½ weeks.

“Through spring and summer, the company said it was still gathering information about the swaps and tucked references of widening losses into the footnotes of its financial statements: $11.4 billion at the end of 2007, $20.6 billion at the end of March, $26 billion at the end of June. The company stressed that the losses were theoretical: no cash had actually gone out the door.

“If these aren’t cash losses, why are you having to put up collateral to the counterparties?” Mr. Vickrey asked in a recent interview. The fact that the insurer had to post collateral suggests that the counterparties thought A.I.G.’s swaps losses were greater than disclosed, he said. By midyear, the insurer had been forced to post collateral of $16.5 billion on the swaps.

Though the company has not disclosed how much collateral it has posted since then, its $447 billion portfolio of credit-default swaps could require far more if the economy continues to weaken. More federal assistance would then essentially flow through A.I.G. to counterparties.”