on the emotional frontier

Robert I. Levy, in an essay entitled Emotions, Knowing and Culture [1984], proposed two axes for analyzing emotions on the sense making level – that is, not as private experiences, but as experiences that enter into the public domain. On the one hand, he speaks of hyercognition – “Hypercognition involves a kind of shaping, simplifying, selecting, and standardizing, a familiar function of cultural symbols and forms. It involves a kind of making “ordinary” of private understandings.” In contrast to that stands hypocognition – “Hypocognition forces the (first order) understanding into some private mode.” Citing his own work on “sadness” among Tahitians (Levy claims that, while there are words for severe grief and lamentation, there are “no unambiguous terms that represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness… People would name their condition, where I supposed that [the body signs and] the context called for “sadness” or “depression”, as “feeling troubled” pe’ape’a, the generic term for disturbances, either internal or external;…”) Levy writes that these are some “underschematized emotional domains”, and that these are hypocognized. “One of the consequences of hypocognition is that the felt disturbance, the “troubled feelings,” can be interpreted both by the one who experiences them and by others around him as something other than ‘emotion’. Thus, the troubled feelings that persist too long after the death of a loved one or those that occur after some loss that Tahitian ideology holds to be trivial and easily replaceable are in the village often interpreted as illness or as the harmful effects of a spirit.”

Levy’s idea has not, unfortunately, been taken up by intellectual historians. Perhaps this is because one thinks, still, of emotion as being a very intimate and incommunicable state of feeling, which, though perhaps aroused by an external incident, is wholly enveloped within the individual self, much as a tooth ache is felt by the possessor of the tooth and not by the dentist who pulls it. But the affections are not spontaneously invented within us, even if they are, of course, neurologically guided. In fact, one would expect that the kind of epistemic and social ruptures that are thought to constitute the great transformation within the Occident – defined as capitalism, or the industrial or scientific revolution, or the emergence of new encompassing institutions – should present situations that evoke feelings that are ‘underschematized’.

It is an oddity of the work of Foucault, and of his followers, that though Foucault was very clear about the kind of epistemic rupture that he dates, approximately, to the late 18th and early 19th century, the rupture is not witnessed. On his account, it happens in a sense without any contemporary realizing it. I call this odd in that Foucault thought that he, on the contrary, could very well recognize the ‘end of man’ and the shifts that signaled another epistemic rupture. If we suppose that such things could be witnessed, perhaps the witnesses would struggle with hypo-cognition – perhaps they would not be able to interpret their feelings about what they witnessed, about the new thoughts they thought. Suppose, suppose. We are not, I think, looking for total witnesses, but instead searching for partial testimonies. Testimonies of those who were something like affective pioneers. Among whom I would put Rousseau.

Perhaps the enormous influence of Rousseau in the French revolution and in the late Enlightenment owes something to the obscure sense that Rousseau was not only a 'thinker', but he was a sort of witness to what had grown up within the old order as it began to fail affectually - he articulated a certain collective problematic of articulation, in which a connected system of new ways of living sought a schema in which to feel. The feeling about things is not a given: nor are the people of Europe or the "West" magically equipped with an all embracing set of affective categories that they can wrap around the world. The total social fact of collective feeling is not an unchanging universal, although the form in which it works is to make it feel like a universal. 

Adventure revisted

A post constructed from two former posts. If you look up the sociological work done on adventure, you will soon find that there is little or none. Astonishingly, it seems to hold no interest, in itself, for the sociologist. With one exception – a classic essay by Simmel. When, otherwise, the subject comes up, the sociologist views adventure in the same spirit as the tourist agency: as a category in the leisure field, requiring a guide, hotel accomodations, showers at the end of it, cameras, and flights to and fro. This is all the more astonishing in that adventurers certainly have existed. Adventurers brought down the Inca empire. Adventurers founded the Jamestown colony. Legitimists called Napoleon an adventurer for good reason – the same thing could be said for Garibaldi. So why the lack of interest? Perhaps it is because adventure, from the serious social science point of view, seems to have the irritating ability to turn the monumental into the ludicrous: it is continually shaking hands with the Commandantore. And, for the social scientist, there is a line: the truth must, in the end, be serious. It simply can’t be ludicrous. That would be an insult to all the founding positivist family. The adventurer, the politician, the artist, the scholar/virtuoso – they are all types that appear in the Renaissance. They are related insofar as they all have complex and conflicting relationships with the system of patronage. Of them all, the adventurer is the hardest, perhaps, to grasp, since it is difficult to say just what his object is. The politician aims at power, the artist at art, the virtuoso at knowledge, and the adventurer at experience – yet that seems much too vast and vague an object (although why it is vaster and vaguer than knowledge or power is a good question). Michael Nerlich, a literary critic, observes in The Ideology of Adventure that adventure is first used as an economic term: "Godfrey's selection of examples of aventure in his Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue francaise is, to be sure, one-sided, but it is of particular interest to us because his examples are almost exclusively of legal or economic meanings, with the first examples going all the way back to the late thirteenth century. Alongside the meaning of “output, earnings, income” ... the word aventure also occurs with the meaning of ‘catch, booty or harvest...” And later ... “Despite all the theories about ‘eventus, etc., I believe that this is the original meaning, sicne it is difficult to see why an ad-ventura would have had to be invented when eventus already covered the meaning.” Nechlin gives us this meaning with the note that it is controversial, and seems to infuriate some medievalists, who do not like the idea that the adventure of the knight on his quest is a thing of booty. In the same way, Kierkegaard strenuously objects to Moliere’s Dom Juan being endebted – dealing with money is, to Kierkegaard, a fall from the infinite adventure of seduction. Simmel’s essay on adventure begins by considering the “double-sidedness” of events in a life. On the one hand, events fall into a pattern in relationship to one another, so that one can talk of a life as a whole and mean a unified thing – on the other hand, events have their own center of gravity, and can be defined in terms of their own potential for pleasure or pain. To use an example not mentioned by Simmel, but getting at what he means: Famously, Kant had a regular habit of taking a certain stroll each day in Königsberg. It was famous as a regular habit – it was an example of some craving for order in Kant’s life, which some have read into his work. Now, one walk was, intentionally, much like the other – and yet, they all formed a distinct sub-system in Kant’s life of Kant’s walks. In ordinary life, we often talk about what we are “like”. If I lose, say, my wallet, I may say, I always leave it on the table. In so saying, I’m observing myself anthropologically – this is what the tribe of me is like. It has these rituals, these obsessions, these returning points. At the same time, there are rituals and obsessions I am not so aware of. Let us say I am a woman who continually falls in love with a certain type of man. He is surly, he has issues with his father, he is emotionally needy. How does her radar pick out these men? Of course, the exterior appearance – I like such and such a feature - is easy to account for, but not the similarity of temperament over lovers. Why does the same process happen over and over? In Hoffmann’s story, The Sandman – the story that Freud used as the template of the unheimlich, the uncanny – this automatism goes so far that the hero actually falls in love with an automaton, as if some interior routine evoked a counterpart in the world itself. Freud speaks of “fate” in the love life. Of course, fates preside over other things beside the destinies of our dicks and pussies. La Bruyere, for instance, outlines the characteristic of a man who is always losing things, bumping into people, misreading signs, mistaking his own house for somebody else's and somebody else's for his own. We might think that this state of confusion, in the extreme, is evidence of some pathological disturbance of the brain. However, there are a number of habits one "falls" into in one's life, resolves not to continue with, and still - falls into again. Simmel speaks of events and their meanings in themselves and in relationship to the whole of life. Which can also move in the other direction: “Events which, regarded in themselves, representing simply their own meaning, may be similar to each other, may be, according to their relationship to the whole of life, extremely divergent.” Simmel’s definition of adventure is on the basis of this relationship of the parts of life to the whole course of life: “When, of two experiences, each of which offer contents that are not so different from one another, one is felt as an adventure, and the other isn’t – so it is that thise difference of relationship to the whole of our live is that by which the one accrues this meaning that is denied to the other. And this is really the form of adventure on the most general level: that it falls out of the connections of life.” That falling out of the Zusammenhange – the “hanging together” of our life isn’t to be confused, according to Simmel, with all unusual events. One shouldn’t confuse the odd moment with the adventure. Rather, adventure stands against the whole grain of our life. There is a thread that spans our lives – Simmel uses a vocabulary that returns us to the “spinning” of the fates – and unifies it. Adventure follows a different course: While it falls out of the connections of our life, it falls – as will be gradually explained – at the same time, with this movement, back inot it, a foreign body [ein Fremdkörper]in our existence, which yet is somehow bound up with the center. The exterior part [Ausserhalb] is, if even on a great and unusual detour, a form of the inner part. [Innerhalb] As always in Simmel, there is a lot of sexy suggestion here, which clouds one’s questions – especially about the latent conflict between a thread spanning a life and a center. One recognizes the logic of the supplement here – an excess in affirming a proposition has the effect of making it less clear, rather than more clear. Simmel’s ‘proof’ of this theory about adventure is that, when we remember these mutations in our life, they seem dreamlike. Why would the memory set up an equivalence, as it were, between a dream and an adventure? Because it is responding to the logic of the exterior/interior binary. Dreams, which are so exterior to our waking life that we cannot see them as playing any causal role in that life, are so interior that we share them with nobody else. Introjected – Melanie Klein’s word – wasn’t available in 1912 for Simmel, but something similar is going on. “The more “adventurous” an adventure is, the more purely it satisfies its concept, the “dreamier” it becomes in our memory. And so far does it often distance itself from the central point of the I and the course of the whole of life consolidated around it, that it is easy to think of an adventure as if somebody else had experienced it.” These traits – which are expressed, Simmel says, in the sharpness of beginning and ending which defines the adventures in our life, as opposed to other episodes – make adventures an “island” in our life. These traits too call up another in the chain of signifiers that are suggested by the dream – that is, the artwork. Adventurers are like artists in that the adventure, like the artwork, lies both outside of and deep within the whole of a life. It lies outside of and deep within from the perspective of memory – while the perspective that unfolds during the course of the adventure is one of presentness – this is why the adventurer is deeply “unhistoric”. That present is neither caused by the past nor oriented towards the future. To illustrate this, Simmel uses the example of Casanova. What he says should be put in relationship to Moliere’s Dom Juan, who, as I have pointed out, was always proposing marriage – to propose marriage was his compulsion, as he explains it to Sganarelle, just as Alexander the Great’s was conquest. A reading of the play, like Kierkegaard’s, that regards the marriage mania as a mask for the real seduction underneath takes the conjunction of marriage and seduction too easily. This is Simmel on Casanova: “An extremely characteristic testimony to this [the lack of a sense of the future] is what Casanova, as can be seen in his memoirs, so oftin in the course of his erotic adventurous life seriously aimed at – to marry the woman of the momen he loved. By his disposition and way of life, there was nothing more contradictory, nothing more innerly and outerly unthinkable for Casanova. Casanova was not only a notable knower of men, but was maifestly a rare knower of himself; and though he was obliged to say that he couldn’t have held out in a marriage more than fourteen days, and that the most miserable consequences would inevitably attend this step – the intoxication of the moment so caught him up (by which I mean to lay more emphasis on the moment than the intoxication) that it swallowed up the future perspective, so to speak, hide and hair.”

Totalization and me

There are a number of theories that account for and explain modernization. All tend to isolate modernization in opposition to the pre-modern, traditional or ‘natural’ social arrangements, and one can see why: to understand an object or process, one must isolate it, however artificially, in order to focus upon it and analyze it. However, the work of isolation and focus has often been reified and projected upon modernization itself, as though the old order – however one describes it – is simply swept away, as though the epistemologically clarifying gesture reflects the totalizing character of modernity. This is not to say that modernity doesn’t strive towards being the total social fact that characterizes all societies locked in the universal history of capitalism. The institutional circles of the law, money, and education, which Simmel – to an extent – saw in the Philosophy of money, or – to name three other less institutionally bound signifies - industrialization, politicization and science, which form another total complex, touch everyone – even the lost tribe, the isolato. Above all our heads is the Van Allen belt. Within our bloodstreams there is plentiful testimony to the artificial paradise we have produced. But within our dreams and our gossip there are other murkier currents, there are pre-modern reflexes. Superstition rules the stock market, and favors, turn taking, and oddly earmarked symbols are traded between workers in the most rational of office spaces, where the halogen lighting creates its uniform zones of visibility and computer screens are monitored and monitor all actors. The great and little traditions – to use James C.Scott’s categories – do battle, or uneasily lay down one next to the other, not only in peasant tilled fields, but in the traffic jam and the service economy. .

token time in the moronic inferno

There’s a passage in Control, John A. Mills history of behavioralism in America, that strikes me as a key to American capitalism as it goes through the autoimmune disorder that is so rapidly destroying the middle class.



Because behavioralism did not have a place for the mind, it was very dependent on experiments on animals, where one could supposedly see everything – such as the rats in the maze work that was so popular in American universities from the 30s until the 70s. It is from work with chimpanzees, according to Mills, that token economics developed into the ultimate control:



“Lindsley also conducted a study with Azrin on the effects of reinforcement on cooperation between children.47 They reported that cooperative behavior could be conditioned and extinguished without any verbal instruction regarding the tasks from the experimenters. Thus their study suggested that cooperation could be learned for the sake of reward, without recourse to

more complex explanations of the behavior.



Operant principles found their most ample application in token

economies. Token economies are staff-operated operant systems in

which the delivery of tokens controls the target population’s actions;

these economies are designed for use in institutional settings such as

mental hospitals, institutions for the mentally retarded, and schools.48

Versions of token economies were also used in jails. These systems

broke new ground in that the principles of behavioral science were applied

directly to nonlaboratory situations. As Kazdin commented, “it

is especially important to single out token reinforcement because it

has permitted a larger extension of programs than ordinarily is the

case with type [sic] of reinforcing events.”49 In institutions tokens are

awarded for the performance of basic social tasks, such as getting

dressed or helping to keep the ward tidy. In schools the usual “target behaviors” are the maintenance of an acceptable level of academic

performance or maintaining acceptable social behavior. Tokens can be

used to buy desirable items (e.g., cigarettes in mental hospitals) or to

gain access to social privileges (e.g., going to the cinema or gaining a

day pass in a mental hospital). Token economies provide us with a

paradigm for studying the role of operant reinforcement in the institution

and maintenance of acceptable patterns of social behavior.”



It is instructive to see the parallel between token economics and the Reagonomics/Neo-Keynesian paradigm under which the developed world has learned to accept the most absurd wealth inequalities and a lifestyle of decreasing reward for labor and increasing reward for shopping. In the world in which credit cards replace pay increases and zero down enters the bloodstream like the wickedest bit of cholesterol (was that your mortgage blowing up or a heart attack?), we are their chimps - in this moronic inferno, we have learned to keep the wards sparkly so long as we get a discount on the cell phone, plus some future flyer miles. The prob only really comes to a head when the scientists disband the lab, or the financial welfare queens disband some economy. Then all the tokens are worthless, because all the chimps have been guilty guilty guilty – in the eyes of the bond trader. Who, as is well known, is the only prophet we have left.

Two cheers for industrial policy!

Jon Gertner’s NYT mag piece on Manufacturing and (oh so scary!) industrial policy gets it. And, incidentally, it summarizes the guru of Obamanomics, ‘neo-liberal’ Larry Summers, rather beautifully:

“As the former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers put it, America’s role is to feed a global economy that’s increasingly based on knowledge and services rather than on making stuff.”

Jargon over objects, this is the echt neo-liberal style. Gertner doesn’t reference the source, but I imagine it was the Lizza piece on Summers in the New Yorker that contained all the information you needed to know that Obama’s administration was set on fail, two years ago. The funniest remark of the Obama four year term so far came in this article from Summers:

“Summers was equally doubtful of the idea that fairness required the government to bail out every struggling industry. He said, “The point that some of you made is one that, frankly, a number of the President’s more political advisers make with great frequency: how could you lend money to the big banks in New York and not lend money to regular folk who are employing a hundred people and are losing a hundred jobs?” But, he said, “just like occasionally in war there are unintended benefits, occasionally in bailouts there are unintended beneficiaries.” The bank bailouts, which, he noted several times, began under President Bush, “were directed at preventing a collapse that would have led millions of people to be out of work, not as support for those institutions.”



But to get to crowning Gertner’s article with a few laurel wreaths.

I liked how this article seems to get it. The manufacturing economy isn't "modular", but full of network affects. It is a root system, not a haphazard pile of building blocks. When you ship the manufacturing of an industry to another country, contra Larry Summers, you are shipping knowledge, you are shipping the increasing return on investment that comes with every next step in the industry. Not understanding this one bit, the economists as advisors and the political elite have truly helped bring the U.S. to this point of exhaustion. And they will continue, blindly, to work against the interests of the majority, because it is in the interest of the one sector that does hire economists - the financial sector. Notice that 60 percent of scientists and engineers are employed in the manufacturing sector, and notice that these aren't fake engineers - financial 'engineers". So far, the financial industry has been so successful that the trillions 'loaned' to it hasn't even emerged as an issue in the public space - because newspapers won't report on it (the GAO report on the Fed didn't even break into the back pages of the NYT) and the economists who reporters call up for the 'expert' quote are quite proud of themselves for managing to keep us from a 'depression'.


I liked the fact that the NYT mag piece didn't spend much time quoting any economists. In Lizza’s piece on Obama’s economic team in 2009, you could almost hear the disdain in Summers’ voice for the phrase “industrial policy.” How Un-Hayekian! How cruel to put impediments in the way of creative destruction!
Economists have the same view of the people who make ‘stuff’ as bug spray manufacturers have of bugs. They know enough about the way the bug’s nervous system works to get rid of em. But if you want to know how bugs really evolve, live, and reproduce, go to an entomologist. Obama hired Raid, when he shoulda been hiring Edward O. Wilson.

A Better novel than Anna Karenina

From LI, 2004




We would never have read La Regenta or heard of it if we didn’t have a habit of trolling the aisles of libraries, our shoulders hunched up like that of an old crow, dreamily pulling tomes off the shelf and looking at first paragraphs, blurbs, pictures of authors, etc. etc. Years ago, when we came upon La Regenta, we were in the mood for a long 19th century novel. At that time, believe it or not, we were living in utter poverty (gasp!), renting a room for a pittance from our friend H. That La Regenta was a long novel was all the reason we needed to check it out and take it home. We have a lovely memory of reading the book in great big gulps: a reel of reading, a continuum, a glide down a slide. We immediately grouped the heroine, Ana Ozores, with Nana in terms of overpowering sexiness. But Clarin, unlike Zola, was not in the habit of drooling over his heroine. In fact, Anna is quite intelligent; Nana merely has the intelligence God would have given to any more than usually shrewd member of the 19th century demi-monde. Purge the odor of sex around Nana, and you have an operator, a nineteenth century capitalist of her own extraordinary pussy, whose vital instincts have merged with the utilitarian calculus preferred by the laissez faire economists of the time in much the way any captain of industry’s did. Her industry was orgasm, Carnegie’s was steel. Same diff.



We recently decided to treat ourselves to the novel once again.



The edition we are reading was put out by University of Georgia Press. Warning: it carries a completely bogus introduction by the translator, John Rutherford. The innocent reader, stumbling into the intro, might flee from the book entirely to escape the babbitry in which Rutherford so abounds. After congratulating Leopoldo Alas, aka Clarin, for having anticipated Freud (it was the fashion, back in the sixties and seventies, to take anything anyone said about sex before Freud to be valuable insofar as it anticipated Freud, or quaint insofar as it disagreed with him – Freud being to sex what Edison was to illumination), Rutherford reaches the very zenith of platitudes with the following sentence: ‘But thanks to its universal themes, psychological insight and technical boldness, it [the novel] has proved itself to be worthy of the attention of modern men and women.’



Oh, what bliss, to be worthy of the attention of modern men and women! The heart sings like a robin… A poisoned robin.



Too much of that kind of thing makes one wonder if the translation is going to be any good. Ignorant of Spanish, we can’t vouch for its accuracy – but it achieves a consistent tone well above the introduction’s heady sampling of Rutherfordism. And there aren’t big mistakes in the English – a state of affairs that is rare, nowadays. It is amazing, the carelessness of publishers who publish translations. This is a subject we have had plenty of reviewing experience of. Ça suffit…



We are happy to note that we still hold to our original judgment, when we finished the novel way back in the dreamtime: La Regenta kicks Anna Karenina’s ass.



The only way to justify this would be to go through the novel at much greater length than we have time for. Instead, let’s excerpt a paragraph.



Here’s the context. Ana Ozores is the daughter of an Italian dressmaker and a petty liberal aristocrat. The seamstress dies, the petty liberal aristocrat gives himself over to the struggle to remake Spain, and then retires in disgust in a small bungalow, having shot his inherited wad. On his death, Ana, who is a scrawny teen in the throes of her first menses, is taken in by her two spinster aunts in Vetusta, a backwards cathedral town. Her aunts intentionally “plump” Anna up – and she cooperates, realizing that her aunts want to make her “eligible.” Since she doesn’t have money, her ‘eligibility’ will have to consist of her blue blood – mention of the dressmaker is under strict rature – and her beauty, which in due time blossoms. Anna is one of those 19th century beauties – poitrine a la Nana, haunches like J-Lo. That Ana has a knack for writing is discovered by the aunts, and firmly suppressed as a vice. And so the aunts put her on the market, so to speak. They catch a millionaire, an ‘American’ who has returned to Vetusta and wants to buy the biggest house and the town beauty. Ana refuses. She is being courted, at this time, by an older man, Don Victor Quintanas. This is the description of her aunt Anuncia’s receiving Ana’s refusal of the millionaire. The scene is set in the dining room. There’s a fire in the fire place – otherwise, the room, one presumes, is not illuminated. The aunts have their little ways to save money:



“But Dona Anuncia needed no more to let loose the basilisk of fury which she carried in her bowels. Her shadow, amidst all the other shadows on the wall, at times resembled that of a gigantic witch; at other times, multiplied by the flickering flames and the old woman’s jerks and contortions, it represented all hell let loose. There were moments when Dona Anuncia’s shadow had three heads on the wall and three or four others on the ceiling, and it seemed that screams and shrieks were coming from all of them, so strident were her vociferations.”



Obviously, Alas is fusing, here, a memory of Goya’s Caprichios and a motif out of European folklore to create this scene – but how brilliantly it succeeds! LI has found that arguments are extremely hard to depict in fiction. As any rookie knows, modifications of “said’ are always rather iffy – yelled, vociferated, sarcastically observed, shrieked, cried – the lexicon is there, but the effects fall short of the intensity one wishes to convey, as though one were playing the keys of a piano in which the wires had been cut. The shadow play, here, supplies a context that does everything: merges the economics of marriage to a primal scene of cannibalism; caps the whole extended metaphor of plumping Ana up – a metaphor that creates, on one end, sympathy for a woman who is, after all, simply eating, and on the other end, transforms the cooks into monsters; and finally, it gives us a sense of just how close Anna is to that soap bubble film separating perception from hallucination. This quality is at the heart of her poetic talent. It is also at the heart of her downfall.



We could go on…



Just one other thing. We’ve mentioned this before – in fact, one of our first posts, back in 01, was about this. The relation between time and suspense in novels has never really been spelled out to our satisfaction. A novel in which a man is depicted borrowing money has installed a timer in its code – the timer is the debt. Time will be measured by the debt coming due. Time spatializes itself in the actions of the indebted man – the axe he finds to get rid of the pawnbroker from whom he has borrowed sums, the marriage he intends with the rich merchant’s daughter, etc., etc. There are all sorts of timers in the novel’s code. Here we see metaphor acting as a timer – the plumping out process has to end, for one thing – Anna can’t become too fat. She has to achieve a healthy avoidupois. For another, since this is a plumping up, the timer is running on the aunts. Eventually, they have to make good on their side of the metaphor – they have to become the monsters that plump up humans, that feed on human flesh. It is an agricultural metaphor, indicating an agricultural original sin – the slaughtering of the fed beast. Since feeding is, after all, a gift, one of the great founding gifts of society, to feed and then to slaughter is a contradiction that sets in motion a whole exculpatory ethic.



We could go on…

harvey golub, welfare queen

On 10 November, 2008, American Express suddenly filed the papers to become a bank holding company. Why? Well, American Express was feeling – as corporations sometimes feel - a bit down. A bit like it was going to collapse. A bit like enjoying extraordinary loans from the American government.

The Fed obliged. The Fed’s rules about loans were a bit different from American Express’s. American Express’s Daily Periodic Rate can be up to 15.9 percent. The Fed’s for its Commercial Paper Funding Facility and its Term Asset Backed Funding Facility was 1 percent or below. The FDIC did its part and extended something called the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. American Express generously decided to save itself; whereas its customers, in the situation that American Express found itself in, would have their cards yanked or its interest rates adjusted upwards, these are evidently the rules in the microsphere for micropeople. The rules in the stratosphere for stratopeople are different. It is thus that AXP became a big welfare entity overnment that it had helped stock, over the years, with bribed and venal officeholders – like the rest of corporate America. AXP weathered the storm triumphantly, with the help of little over 10 to 15 billion dollars from Uncle Sam.

Are we happy about this or what?

Which is the background against which to read the plutocrat’s lament by former American Express CEO Harvey Golub, whose protest against the idea of raising tax rates on the successful – and who can argue with success when it diverts such large sums of money from the Government for the purposes of peculation and hypertrophied CEO compensation packages? – has received much play among the peculators and exploiters

Golub is rather an expert in the field of hypertrophied compensation packages – appointed CEO of AIG after it had become another welfare queen, he left in a huff because the Government in a cosmetic move to assure the micropeople that it was democratic and populist to save a fancypants bucket shop from extinction put a limit on said compensations. This contrasts with how he left American Express in 2000. Having presided over the company during the fat nineties, when every CEO was king (while, surprisingly, every king CEO was raking in bucks from companies that were simply averaging what other companies in their sector earned – almost as if their own personal god-king decisions were not the deciding factor in the prosperity of the enterprises they were picking the fat bits from), Golub left in 2000 with this:

“The American Express Company gave Harvey Golub, its chairman and chief executive, options on 750,000 shares of stock last March, according to a proxy statement filed last week that valued the ''special award'' at $30.9 million. The options raised Mr. Golub's total pay to about $52 million. He got an additional $38 million from exercising other options the company had granted.
A company spokesman said the options rewarded Mr. Golub for a job well done and gave him ''an incentive to stay during the transition.'' Mr. Golub, 60, will give up his job as chief executive to Kenneth I. Chenault, the president, in April 2001, and his chairman's post a year later. Mr. Chenault, 48, received options worth $16.5 million plus stock worth $4.9 million, raising his 1999 pay to about $32 million.

Then, inevitably, this happened in 2001:

“American Express surprised investors yesterday by saying that it would eliminate as many as 5,000 jobs and take more than $1 billion in charges against its earnings by the end of this quarter.

The job cuts would be the biggest that American Express has taken in about a decade and would come on top of the 1,600 jobs American Express has already eliminated this year. They are part of a reorganization of the company's various financial services businesses and will help offset the heavy losses the company sustained from its aggressive investing in junk bonds.

In announcing the changes several days before the company is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings, the chief executive, Kenneth I. Chenault, admitted that the company had misjudged the risks in its $3.5 billion portfolio of junk bonds. He repeatedly told analysts and investors yesterday that the company would take a more conservative approach to investing the money it takes in from selling insurance and investment products.

Mr. Chenault, who succeeded Harvey Golub as chief executive in January, said the costs of the changes it is making would reduce pretax earnings for the quarter that ended in June by $826 million. In addition, the cost of cutting about 5 percent of its jobs will reduce this quarter's pretax profit $310 million to $370 million, he said.

The losses are far larger than analysts had expected. They follow two earlier write-downs of the company's investment portfolio in the last year and some investors sounded angry about the latest disappointment. All told, the company has marked down the value of its junk bonds and some other bonds that it cannot resell by more than $1.1 billion, or about one-fourth of their original value.” NYT 7/19/2001

Evidently, Mr. Golub has that sixth sense that tells him when to head for the door with the family silver. On Wall Street, this makes you a sage. So of course, his screed on the taxes he pays was full of the kind of thing that passes for Conventional Wisdom among the plutocrats and the political elite. Read the tidbits!

“Governments have an obligation to spend our tax money on programs that work. They fail at this fundamental task. Do we really need dozens of retraining programs with no measure of performance or results? Do we really need to spend money on solar panels, windmills and battery-operated cars when we have ample energy supplies in this country? Do we really need all the regulations that put an estimated $2 trillion burden on our economy by raising the price of things we buy? Do we really need subsidies for domestic sugar farmers and ethanol producers?
Why do we require that public projects pay above-market labor costs? Why do we spend billions on trains that no one will ride? Why do we keep post offices open in places no one lives? Why do we subsidize small airports in communities close to larger ones? Why do we pay government workers above-market rates and outlandish benefits? Do we really need an energy department or an education department at all?”

Good questions! I especially like the one about the overcompensated laborers on public projects. From the junk bond king, this was the kind of gall that is almost sweet - it shows not so much hubris as a deepfried stupidity, a selfishness that builds a monument in the soul like a giant pearl, except made out of the material you find in your lower gut.

But I notice that he did not ask: do we really need a Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, a Commercial Paper Funding Facility, or a Term Asset Backed Funding Facility at all? Because after all, a man doesn’t question the things that saved his ass. They simply recede into the background of the gated community, to be used next time the predators lose massive amounts of money.