the sackler watch - V&A museum come on down!

Fans of justice, who’ve been given a battering over the last, say, 30 years, got a small peek into a better world this week when the National Portrait Gallery in London turned down a donation of 1.3 Million dollars from the  Sackler Trust. Britain is saturated in Sackler beneficiaries, from the Serpentine Sackler Gallery (I like to think that the devil crawled into that name, sticking his forked tongue out of Serpentine) to the V&A Museum Sackler entrance, they have slathered their tax deductible trust money on the art world to an incredible extent, creating a huge ethical dump. Up in Scotland, a Labour and a Scottish National politician both urged the Dundee branch of the V&A Museum to return a grant of 650,000 buckos, to which V&A returned the time-honored non-response that they’ve taken Sackler money before, as has everybody. This is known as the junkie defense. Appropriate, eh? In other news, Dame Theresa Sackler (about the Dame, no comment) has been served with a 500 million dollar suit for her “alleged” role in profiting from a company that was in the addict them, blame them, and deny business. I imagine that Sacklers are beginning, even, not to like the newspaper stories about them. So sad.

According to Bloomberg:

More than 500 U.S. cities and counties accused Purdue and eight members of Richard Sackler’s family of racketeering, claiming the company engaged in misleading and illegal marketing of OxyContin. It’s one of a handful of lawsuits to name the Sacklers as individual defendants in the sweeping opioid litigation.” Named in the suit are the following: Beverly Sackler, David Sackler, Ilene Sackler Lefcourt, Jonathan Sackler, Kathe Sackler, Mortimer Sackler and Theresa Sackler.

Art patrons all.

However, if there is one thing fans of justice have learned over the past thirty years, it is that America (and the EU and all the developed countries and every country with billionaires) have created a very deep system of immunity for the wealthy, architected by “de-regulatin’” politicos, in the pocket D.A.s, state legislators and, as a last defense, a solidly pro-plutocratic judiciary. So we don’t think that the Sacklers are shaking yet.

In an interview with the Washington Post last week, Purdue did say, in a totally totally non-menacing way, that bankruptcy was an option. What does that mean? Fuck if Im going to go into all of that. This Stat article covers it pretty well. But the happy news is that the company was pretty much a money pump for the Sacklers, so they have cash to spare, and I don’t see how bankruptcy would help them unless – unlikely event – the suits go to real trial, instead of some negotiated settlement thing.

In the meantime, Tufts, a big recipient of Sackler largesse – to say the least – is starting to find allegations “deeply troubling”. That was what their PR guy said. When asked if the University was still taking Sackler money, the word was: “[Unless] otherwise required by law we do not share data on our donors except for specific reasons as outlined in our policies…” That too was what the P.R. suit said. He didn’t seem to think this policy was deeply troubling.

What's really scary, and what isn't

Adam is learning to read – and, more impressively, reading in English and in French. Because he likes books and comics so much, this is something that is driven forward not so much by school – his mathematics is being driven forward by school – as by his long established desire to read by himself, out of shouting distance from his monitoring parents.

Now, we love this, up to a point. On the other hand, this desire to read and write is also enmeshed in Adam’s Goth side. Adam sometimes makes remarks about horror movies (which he hasn’t seen) in a familiar tone before other adults, and we have to explain that he hasn’t seen these movies – really, are we letting our six year old watch Jason in Halloween? – but that he has caught the drift that these movies are out there. Like other kids, Adam is very obsessed by series, by collections. To have cards for all the players on your favorite football team, or to have all the Goosebumps series of books, or to watch all episodes of the Pink Panther – I remember my own proto-encyclopedic desires. Although I don’t remember them manifesting so early. Like trees which now bloom earlier, due to climate change, children’s media acquaintance now blooms earlier, due to a world full of internet and cell phones. Thus, he wants to see all horror movies.

Being six – or being in primary school – means being stuffed with nominal knowledge: all the state capitals, all the presidents, etc. And children love to clamber over that nominal knowledge, as over monkey bars. Later, adult, we tend to let the nominal knowledge go. The 19th President of the U.S.? Look it up on Wikipedia. The capital of North Dakota? Are we going to North Dakota for some awful reason? All of this kind of thing – including trigonometry and those Latin classes you took in the 8th and 9th grade – go down the chute into the forgettery.

The nominal knowledge Adam has about horror movies – and his plans to see, say, Alien when he is seventeen, cause, Dad, it says on IMDB that I can see it when I’m seventeen – is in contrast with his real threshold of fright, which is pretty standard. Adam found the thuggish General Woundwort in Watership Down almost too scary to watch. He knows that something may be “too bloody and cruel” for him, and he’ll tell me that when talking about scary movies. He has a very strong grip on what’s really scary, as opposed to what is pretend, and I like to think that this knowledge puts him a mile ahead of our adult public opinion, where the arguments are still about whether climate change is real, and what is really scary is actresses (females!) taking all the roles in the remake of Ghostbusters. Adult public opinion at this historical juncture you can simply write off as pitifully cretinous, worldwide, from Brexit to the New York Times Opinion Page, whereas Adam is, hopefully, part of a generation that would recognize what is “too bloody and cruel”, and try to avoid it.

Hooray for those who come after us, and may they forgive us our moral vacuity.

Kojeve - from November Willett's

This spring, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nart, a former officer with the DST, French Counter-intelligence. Commentaire, in the past, had published articles in praise of Kojève and even articles by Kojève. Kojève, after WWII, declared himself a “Sunday philosopher”, and had proceeded to devote most of his time to reconstructing France’s economy as an subminister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this post, Kojève became one of the great behind-the-scenes architects of France’s thirty glorious years, that experiment in dirigiste capitalism under the Bretton Woods system which finally came a header in the period of rampant inflation and the Oil crisis of the seventies. Notably, he helping to lay the foundation of the Common Market. Nart’s article was entitled, ominously, Alexandre Kojevnikov dit Kojève. Scholars of the great Cold War Communist hunts will be delighted to learn that the old rhetorical maneuver of tearing away the legal name to reveal the old, Russian name spying behind it still lives. Nart has nothing new to say about Kojève’s famous Introduction to Reading Hegel, a series of lectures that he gave between 1933-1939 which were  edited and published by Raymond Queneau in 1947. Nart’s attention, instead, is all on the Kojève who was giving the Soviets microfilm and 

packages of documents. What was in those documents, Nart regrets, we can only guess. But they must have been of value! Nart relies for his story on other documents, files that come from now defunct Eastern European and Soviet espionage agencies. Nart has used these sources before, in the 1990s, to claim that Charles Hernu, Mitterand’s first war minister, spied for the Soviets in the fifties. Nart is of the walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, must be a duck school of thought. His conclusion is that the philosopher was a spy. To the broader mind, though, one that has a knowledge of both ducks and other creatures with bills, like platypuses, Nart’s proof is far from convincing. 
See the rest here: Willett's

Blues on W.S. Merwin's obituary day

God will bless the porn stars

And Blake’s chimney sweeps, equally

“all the lonely people”

Crying weep weep even creepily

If we are not loved above

Not even by a fiction

Is there any use in standing straight

Or correcting your diction?

Or should I let the blood flow down

my paddling paws

Smothered in a chimney flue

Or spastic in somebody else’s claws

parables for dummies: recent american history

Everything in the newspapers for the last year, or decade, or two decades, has been like a course in parables for dummies. And the beat goes on. So yesterday, a rich actress gets caught in a scheme to get her daughter into USC not through the old fashioned cheating way – donating to USC massively – but through the cheap way, faking her rowing credentials and bribing rowing coaches there to the tune of 500,000 smackers. Attention turned to the daughter, who is labeled – universally – a teen influencer. She runs an Instagram account among other things where she commoditizes every stubbed toe – bandaids from @amazon! She is outspoken on her account, writing things like:  “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend … I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”

A prize student like that gets the extra treatment. On the day the Feds pulled the plug on her mom, she was off vacationing on the yacht of a billionaire named Rick Caruso – who just happens to be on the USC Board of Trustees.

The parable – about what it is like in Plutocratic America – isn’t finished yet. Because the case has drawn attention to the Tanya McDowell case. Don’t wonder what show she was starring in – she wasn’t! She was homeless, she is African-American, and she had the audacity to lie about her address so her son could attend a good public school in Norwalk. All such things done by the homeless, or by people whose incomes are below the 20,000 level, are a great chance to keep our prison industrial complex going. McDowell was sentenced to five years in prison for “stealing” 15,000 dollars – from the good white people of Norwalk – and because, as a homeless woman, she sold some drugs to an undercover cop, they got her for that too. Cleaning the streets of these people. So in the great hall of justice, they decided, with a mercy that just makes me want to cry American pie, that the five years for defrauding Norwalk would run concurrently with the drug sentence. Here’s a nice tweet summing up the case. https://twitter.com/TalbertSwan/status/1105840732852629505

A parable is supposed to be wrapped around an enigma, and these newspapers ones are, too. The enigma is how did the U.S. get so mean? So meanspirited? So servile? I can’t blame the Tanya McDowells, or really anybody in the lower 80 percent, since that percentage of the population is so beaten by debt and riled up by entertainment news and so discombobulated by a social geography that keeps it on the road for hours per day that I don’t expect a revolution. But is there a moment when the meanness overflows? When it pops? Is there a moment when people remember, distantly, when monetizing your every move as a teen influencer was not something to be proud of, but rather, a shameful matter, classified under the Gospel’s “selling your soul for a piece of gold”?

We eat it and we eat it and we eat it and there won’t be any left, you know. The day is coming and it won’t be long. And this is how we live.

on the character's resistance to her author

I was talking with a friend the other day and she told me that she couldn’t stand Zola. Zola, she said, is boring.

I’m not a young pup. I’m not wet behind the ears, at least in the Zola department. I’ve heard the boring accusation before. I, on the other hand, find Zola amazingly not boring. For one thing, his scenes are developed in an amazing prehension of an art and technique that haven’t been invented yet: film. In the nineteenth century, the novel is close to theater – just as the novel is close to film in the twentieth century – because, for one thing, theater is where the writer could grow rich. Just as with film. We have forgotten the theater scene of the 19^th century because we don’t, in the Anglophone world, retain much from it, until its end, with Wilde and Shaw. But that was the world in which the demimonde and the monde overlapped. It was from theater and opera, as well as from serialized novels, that popular culture absorbed, into its folklore, the “higher” culture.

There’s a long story about Zola. I think my friend is echoing Oscar Wilde – whose own ideas about Zola were unfolded in The Decay of Lying, from 1889, which consisted of a dialogue between Cyril and Vivian. Cyril is given the earnest lines, like the cutout in a Socratic dialogue, and Vivian is given the witty and visionary ones. The theme of the dialogue attaches, at points, to the very old theme of mimesis in art. Is an art to be judged on how well it copies reality? And what would it mean for a fiction to copy reality? Vivian explores the problems of mimesis from an angle taken from everyday life: the lie. The lie, after all, is a lie insofar as it doesn’t copy reality. However, it works as a lie insofar as it seems to copy reality. Thus, in the successful lie there must reside some special genius, and for that genius to work, we must look at another standard than that of truth or falsity. We must shift to the field defined by intensity:

“One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modem novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”

There is one modern novelist whose dull facts particularly get under Vivian’s skin: Zola. At first glance, one would have thought that Zola would be on Vivian’s side, or at least on Wilde’s side. Zola was, after all, a scandal and a stumbling block to Victorian proprieties. Since Wilde aspired to be a scandal himself, one looks for some solidarity. Instead, Vivian remarks:

“M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, “L’homme de genie n’a jamais d’esprit,” is determined to show that, if he has
not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed at times, as in Germinal, there is something almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, but on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint it is just what it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of the author of L’Assommoir, Nana and Pot-Bouille? Nothing. Mr. Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola’s characters are much worse. They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest.”

This rings changes on an old trick in the game of scandal – one trumps the shock of scandal by being resolutely unshocked. In this way, one denies the initial, visceral moment that scandal depends on. The double movement of Vivian’s rhetoric conforms to an old routine: first comes the denigration of the shocked. Thus Zola’s work exposes the Tartuffe, and by implication the Tartuffe are the shocked. Second comes the denigration of the shock. Zola’s characters are dreary in their vices and their virtues. It is dreariness, not purity, that we must judge by. Wrenching the standard by which the copy is judged from the frame defined by veracity to the frame defined by intensity, Vivian finds a new angle from which to disarm Zola’s shock. Since one end of the mimetic spectrum is about sexual arousal, a continually deferred moment that defines art against its erotic use, its pornographic potential, this is a particularly good routine to top Zola. And once Zola is separated from his shock, we see — or Vivian sees — that he is without interest. 

Read the rest at Willett's

Many ways to skin a plutocrat

The billionaires convoked their version of a kangaroo court – call it the country club court – and pronounced sentence upon Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal: unconstitutional! Well known legal scholar Michael Bloomberg, atop his pile of 3 billion dollars, was particularly scornful of such doings by the plebes far down below.

And so the word went forth. But the word is, to say the least, a bit confused. For why, one might ask, is a federal tax on the wealth of the living unconstitutional, but an estate tax on the wealth of the dead constitutional?

Here we have a truly marvelous structure founded on split hairs.

Federal, as opposed to state, inheritance taxes have a long history. They were first implemented in the Civil War. Even then there were voices raised – voices rich with port, steak, and oysters, voices that were filtered through cigar smoke – that such a tax was a direct tax, and thus unconstitutional, under the provision of the tax and spend provision of the Constitution in Article one, section 8, which reads that Congress has to the power : “to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defence^{[note 1]} and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”

The rub, here, is twofold. On the one hand, are there taxes that discriminate against certain states – that violate the uniformity condition? And are the taxes indirect – for instance, duties, imposts and excises – or direct? Direct taxes seem to be limited by section 9, which reads: ” no capitation or other direct tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration hereinbefore directed to be taken.” And so we have some rather abstruse questions to deal with in this matter of direct vs. indirect – or as one scholar has put it, taxing a measure as opposed to taxing a substance. This question is as delightful to tax lawyers as the old question about the heads of pins and angels was to your medieval theologian. It is through the notion of excise – which has been taken to mean any tax that can be construed as indirect, such as corporate income tax – that much of our modern system was driven. Historically, the Court has sided as much as it dares with the country club – in the gilded age and down through the thirties, the Court hated to see Mr. Moneybags burdened with pesky national taxes. This is, in fact, why income tax had to come into our world through a constitutional amendment.

The Supreme Court of the thirties, as is well known, viewed New Deal legislation with horror, and sought to limit Congress’s power to impose regulatory taxes – for instance, on child labor, or as part of a scheme to pay farmers to produce less. Though Roosevelt never succeeded in creating more members of the Supreme Court – which, in spite of the term “packing”, was a common occurrence, as the Supreme Court originally started out with six members. The number nine has no mystical signification. In any case, the SCOTUS has never set itself athwart the current of history and yelled stop – for too long. Thus, in the wake of the New Deal, the Court grudgingly allowed Congress to increase the scope and intention of taxes. In fact, even back in the days of the progressive movement, a famous case, McCray vs. U.S. (1904) endorsed a principle that rules most legal decisions about taxes today:

“The judiciary is without authority to avoid an act of Congress lawfully exerting the taxing power, even in a case where, to the judicial mind, it seems that Congress had, in putting such power in motion, abused its lawful authority by levying a tax which was unwise or oppressive, or the result of the enforcement of which might be to indirectly affect subjects not within the powers delegated to Congress; nor can the judiciary inquire into the motive or purpose of Congress in adopting a statute levying an excise tax within its constitutional power.”

Every major national tax has, it should be noted, been greeted by a chorus of apologists for the wealthy, claiming that it isn’t constitutional. For instance, national corporate taxes, which were enacted as an “excise”, were called no such thing by various distinguished writers in the press back in the 1900-1909. The question for Warren’s tax on the wealth proposal is where it falls in the meshes of previous tax legislation. This is a question that should make us think back – in an extended flashback, a very exciting sequence! – to the Estate Tax of 1916, and its successors.

There is an excellent article by our foremost tax historian, W. Eliot Brownlee ( The proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1985) on the forces that came together to push through the tax on estates in the 1916 Congress. Among those forces were the progressives and the single-taxers – the latter being convinced that a single land tax, as advocated by Henry George, should produce a leveling affect that would cripple monopoly power. It was towards the question of monopoly power and its attendant ills – most notably, a widening gap between the wealth of the wealthiest and that of the working man – which powered the reforming tax legislation in that session of Congress. On the other hand, there was Wilson’s attempt to prepare for war, with massive new military expenditures. Meanwhile, the Republicans were pitching for a decreased income tax, increased sales taxes, and raising the tariff. If we look back from our own kaleidoscope of ideological preferences and blindly match them to these actors in the past, we will get the general pattern wrong. Remember, the Republicans of that time were split between the Western wing, which was progressive, Rooseveltian, and ardently opposed to war, and the Eastern wing, which was pro-big business. On the Democratic side, many were as opposed to war. However, they blamed the conflict on monopoly capitalism. Progressive taxes, for this sector, seemed to work not only against monopoly, but ultimately for peace.  John Dewey, Amos Pichot, and some other created a group called Association for an Equitable Income Tax that proposed 50 percent taxes for all income in excess of one million dollars. This is a higher marginal rate than we have today.

All of this came together in the estate tax bill of 1916, which maintained its status as an excise by emphasizing wealth transfer. And so, too, in some way, Warren’s surtax on wealth will surely be presented, if it ever succeeds in passing Congress, in such a way that it taxes the measure of wealth. This could be done in a number of ways – in particular, by taking apart the tax exemptions that usually make family trusts so sweet.

There are many ways to skin a plutocrat. That is the lesson of tax history.

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