The Chickenshit Club accepts another member

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

Obama's Justice department swallowed the "chickenshit" method hook, line, and sinker. Take HSBC bank. Investigators found that it helped transfer funds from Saudi Arabia to Al Qaeda, that it laundered billions of dollars for the drug cartels in Mexico, etc, etc. Here's a story about what happened next (from the New Yorker):

"With four thousand offices in seventy countries and some forty million customers, HSBC is a sprawling organization. But, in the judgment of the Senate investigators, all this wrongdoing was too systemic to be a matter of mere negligence. Senator Carl Levin, who headed the investigation, declared, “This is something that people knew was going on at that bank.” Half a dozen HSBC executives were summoned to Capitol Hill for a ritual display of chastisement. Stuart Gulliver, the bank’s C.E.O., said that he was “profoundly sorry.” Another executive, who had been in charge of compliance, announced during his testimony that he would resign. Few observers would have described the banking sector as a hotbed of ethical compunction, but even by the jaundiced standards of the industry HSBC’s transgressions were extreme. Lanny Breuer, a senior official at the Department of Justice, promised that HSBC would be “held accountable.”

What Breuer delivered, however, was the sort of velvet accountability to which large banks have grown accustomed: no criminal charges were filed, and no executives or employees were prosecuted for trafficking in dirty money. Instead, HSBC pledged to clean up its institutional culture, and to pay a fine of nearly two billion dollars: a penalty that sounded hefty but was only the equivalent of four weeks’ profit for the bank. The U.S. criminal-justice system might be famously unyielding in its prosecution of retail drug crimes and terrorism, but a bank that facilitated such activity could get away with a rap on the knuckles. A headline in the Guardian tartly distilled the absurdity: “HSBC ‘Sorry’ for Aiding Mexican Drug Lords, Rogue States and Terrorists.”""

We are now seeing the "too big to jail" philosophy applied to Donald Trump. Nancy Pelosi, who has been very public with her disdain for the very idea of "impeaching" Trump, has explained that "Impeachment is one of the most divisive things that you can do, dividing a country," she said. "Unless you really have your case with great clarity for the American people."

Just as the operation of HSBC is just too vast and awe-inspiring to, like, stop, so, too, the taks of impeaching the president - well, it is divisive,is what it is.

Impunity is in the blood system of the political elite. They are not going back on the chickenshit system. It is their system, and they are proud of it.

A plea for a citizen's tribunal on impunity

In Paris two months ago a feminist group went about and affixed stickers with female names to streets. This was more than about those streets that are named after people, and by people I mean 95 percent male, but also about the claim to the public space and how it has tended to be normatively male.

Are the street names going to change? I don’t know; I do know that this action was taken because they are never going to change – people in established positions, people in power are never going to change them – if there is no activity on the ground, from the ground, and in your face.

The division of political labor has the permanently pernicious effect that there is a political class – a circle which, as it were, runs both the discourse and the institutions of power. This effect is only partly off-set by “representative democracy”, especially when these democracies continue to generate judicial systems that are, basically, non and anti-democratic.

What has happened in the neoliberal era, as democracy from the street has been de-legitimated, is a slow, steady impunity creep that separates the powerful and wealthy from the rest in the sphere of justice. Not just rich crooks, but their minions, their protectors, the whole lot, are now less likely than ever to suffer the lot that is borne by the working class poor. It is from this point of view that I have been watching the discussion in the U.S. about whether or not to impeach Trump, look at his taxes, look at the Mueller report about him, get the Attorney General of the U.S. to testify before a Congressional committee, all that jazz, is being treated as a fun Washington thing. The political reporters will treat it all as a partisan butting head contest, with the main question being which butting head is going to be crowned the winner. In other words, elite shit. The winner doesn’t matter a damn.

Impunity is elite shit. It isn’t just Trump, it is the entire system, groaning under the privileges accorded to the most privileged and the jail sentences allotted to the least. Wachovia bank launders money for the cocaine cartels. Wachovia bank gets a fine, because, as Justice Department officials will tell you, we can’t do anything to disturb the fine economic activity of Wachovia bank. A small time African American dealer sells five caps of crack to an undercover cop. The dealer gets twenty years. The Justice Department doesn’t comment, because this is same old same old in every District Attorney territory in the U.S. And the wheel goes around, crushing us underneath it

So let’s put a stick in the wheel, shall we?

When the military junta in Argentina folded in 1983, President Alfonsin came to power, and started proceedings against certain members of the military high command who had participated in the Dirty War, as well as the leaders of the Monteneros (those who survived) for kidnappings and murders. However, the trials affected only a few. In 1986, the full stop law was enacted, the limited suits to those that would be enacted within 60 days of its passage, all others to be rendered null, and the due obedience law, in 1987, which halted the trials that had passed the full stop law. Then, when Menem was elected in 1989, he began issuing mass pardons, mostly for the military but some of them for the Montenero leadership (which, it must be said, has always been suspected of actually being led by agent provacateur, notably in the case of the leader, Mario Firminich – see Martin Edwin Andersen’s Dossier secreto for details).

Collectively, Alfonsin’s decrees were known as the impunity laws. In this way, the State covered up for the almost thirty thousand murders committed by the military junta.

Against this coverup, a civil rights organisation began to hold Tribunals against Impunity in Buenos Aires in 1990, with the aim of revealing as many facts as possible and shaming the state.

I’ve been thinking about this vis-à-vis the United States. It seems to me that we have been living through the era of Impunity, here: from the horrors committed in the name of fighting terror to the invasion of Iraq through the Obama directed drone war; from the unwillingness of the Justice department and the SEC to reign in or jail anyone for the financial meltdown of 2008 to the widespread fraud by the banks in the paperwork they have submitted to courts concerning mortgages; from the abolition of jury trial in the case of suits for damages to corporations to the Supreme Court’s increasing willingness to lend cover to any plutocratic attempt to buy elections and change laws in their favor. From, finally, the massive defiance of the Trump administration to recognize the Legislative branch as a co-equal, while being cheered on by the dysfunctional millionaire’s club known as the Senate.  On the cultural front, there is the impunity enjoyed by those in the media who have cheered along all these things, and who have never lost a dime for being not just wrong, but disastrously wrong; not just mistaken in their reporting or analysis, but being willing conduits of propaganda and lies. From their pumping up of Rogoff/Reinhart nonsense in the most recent Depression to the center-right logic of the editorial war against “entitlements” waged by the supposedly liberal press, we have an elite culture that collaborates with the predatory class because, well, it is owned by it.

Read the rest at Willett's

The sprinkler

Another Karen Chamisso poem.

The sprinkler

"The males stare at each other"
she said, disconsolate,
holding them in her hands
above the yellow hose, all dont-tread-on-me
folds, by some hand chopped off;

it is in the ragged hole
thrust upon that one end
that we'd thrust a coupling
-male-
and now stand clueless before the next step.

Is this so emblematic that it must lead
to these very lines? God or goddess,
do the oracles live?
The males stare at each other,
the one in the hose, the other in the sprinkler.

and not by us will such plumbing ever be joined.
"Oh fuck it: I'll water by hand,"
she says, dropping their brass to the earth.
And so we solve for a time
the problem: what do boys want?

"Il était impossible que ces deux hommes vécussent ensemble huit jours de suite,  sans que leur étrange manie les reprît..."

On poets

Another Karen Chamisso poem

On Poets

They try to make it hard, the poets

With their initiating ha ha ha

And the laws concerning the breath/wind

In and of words, subtracting snorts and swallows

The whole mucousy richness

As the silverware clinks tink tink tink tink

On expensive plates

That one would like to break

          Or

Hurl

They try to make it hard the poets but still

I decided to be one – since

The gate door is unlocked – and it was always only meant

For you

The joke prosody plays on the tongue

goes: knock knock? Who’s there?

And the answer, child, is iamb.

Claire

In the new novel I am writing, much depends on a poet, Karen Chamisso,  I figure my last novel, which I still haven't placed with an agent, was all about the Bush era, and for that I needed a political murder. For the Obama era, I have decided my guttering candle that will light my way through the murk will be a poet who is also the heiress of a fortune made by her father in the bug extermination trade. You'd be surprised. So I've been writing Chamisso poems. This is one.

Claire

Claire taught me the larger gestures

The kabuki theater of entrances and exits

In sky high boots at the Killer club

Sweeping into the backseat of the taxi at 2 a.m.

The seriousness at the center of silliness

A moral position, stoic,

Enduring the battering of ten thousand bragging boys.

Claire taught me the larger gestures but

Claire died. They dragged her body from the river.

She chose the largest exit. And though I see and feel

The moral position, I can only visit, stricken.

They buried her in Alpharetta.

Oh Claire. Honeychild.

Buridan's internet

Buridan’s ass would doubtless have hated the internet. The same old blues, he’d think, multiplied infinitely. Or perhaps, and this is the bet every Internet marketer and Google stockholder makes, he would have loved it, as craving becomes an addiction to choice. We begin by looking for the cheapest price, and we end by spending hours looking at Airbnb pictures and commenting on how they could possibly thought that photographing a corner of the bathroom was of any interest to the curious renter.

This is, at least, my experience. I become more asslike as I realize that possible worlds are unfolding before me in cosmic vistas, that one of my childhood dreams – invisibly entering a house – is being realized on a frightening scale, and I have merely to put the cursor on another link to send another shot to whatever part of my brain that is dedicated to invidious comparisons. However, there’s a point, a sad point, in which the whole expedition upon which I have embarked – to find, say, a cheap Airbnb in X – begins to lose its purpose, in which the best price, or the best looking rental, or the best location, or the best references, loses its practical side, because nothing, it turns out, is exactly, every jot and tittle, what I want, even if, before I began the expedition, my desires were of a vagueness… It becomes, instead, an indicator of more – of the “there must be more” that so often besets the poor commoditized consumer, in fatal foreplay with his own want-y self.

John Buridan, like any medieval worth his tomes, left behind a considerable amount of text. However, there is no textual anchor in that corpus for the ass story, although there are plenty other paradoxes. The story goes like this: an ass is driven to stand between two exactly similar bales of hay. If we suppose that the ass simply acts on a calculation that serves to maximize his desire, he would find no reason to prefer one to the other. Thus, he would continually stand there, calculating, until he starved to death.

Buridan apparently used this parable orally, when teaching his students, and it was passed down after he died so that it was known to Spinoza, who is one of the first to mention the story.

Crucially, the ass is between two parity products. Two bales of hay that are composed of just the kind of saliva inducing stuff that donkey’s crave. The donkey has found a strange spot in the human universe, an equilibrium spot, where there is no more reason to chose bale “a” then to chose “b”. Being a mule calculator, an asinus economicus, the mule has obviously read up on ranked preferences and is way ahead of Kenneth Arrow on the impossibility of the three candidate rank ordering, at least if we are to satisfy certain classical criteria, such as Pareto optimality.

Buridan’s ass has spawned, as such things do, a whole subliterature in philosophy. Many return to Spinoza’s analysis in Ethics II, 49:

“I am quite ready to admit, that a man placed in the equilibrium described (namely, as perceiving nothing but hunger and thirst, a certain food and a certain drink, each equally distant from him) would die of hunger and thirst. If I am asked, whether such an one should not rather be considered an ass than a man; I answer, that I do not know, neither do I know how a man should be considered, who hangs himself, or how we should consider children, fools, madmen, etc.”

Spinoza’s suggestion that the equilibrium state is kin to such extra-rational states as childhood or madness could be seen as a throwing up of his hands – a narrowing of the anthropological interest, of the human all too human. But I take it as something other than a philosophical defeat; to me, this signals a moment in the history of philosophy:  a transformation of what used to the whole goal and morality of the sage’s exercise in refusing to want, in ascesis. See the rest at Willett's!

on sebald's vertigo: an article at Willett's Magazine

In 1821, Stendhal was on his downers. He had fled Italy on the advice of certain authorities, who knew he was in line to being scooped up by the cops because of his association with certain  revolutionaries. His hated father had died – on the bright side – but his inheritance was paltry – on the down side. So he was in Paris, making the rounds of the salons of the opposition, and writing journalism for the English papers from the scoops he’d gather. It was in these conditions, between brilliant banter and nostalgia, between personal penury and the hôtels of the bourgeois grandees, that he  sat down and wrote his first book – which was also the first tryout of his pseudonym (his real name was Henri Beyle). On its publication, Love [De l’amour] was received, even among his friends, as a puzzle or a mystification. In an essay on Stendhal in the London Review of Books, Tim Parks noted that Etienne-Jean Delécluze, in whose salon Beyle met the leading lights of the liberal opposition, “wondered whether the pages might have been bound in the wrong order.” Beyle claimed that the book only sold seventeen copies. The feeling of being wrong-footed by this book is often shared by contemporary readers, who find in the book a confusing mixture of aphorisms, anecdotes, and the dry remains of a treatise on passion within the framework of Beyle’s creaky old master, Cabanis, the inheritor of the enlightenment sensualist tradition that reduced all claims, transcendental or aesthetic, to the hedonic facts of human physiology – that is, to pleasure and pain.  This seems a framework ill suited to Beyle’s attempt to show that love of a certain type – passional love, which seems to find pleasure in its pain, and pain in its pleasure – is the true measure of human elevation, but such is the course he lays out for himself. It even becomes his measure for assessing the level of cultural liberty within the different societies of Europe.

One hundred and sixty nine years later, W.G. Sebald published his first “novel”, Vertigo [Schwindel. Gefühle], also a wrong-footing book in as much as its tone and subdued narrative – if narrative there is – seem contrary to the canons of fiction in our time. The first chapter is entitled “Beyle: or love is a madness most discrete.” Sebald, drawing largely from Love  and other autobiographical writings, constructs a portrait of Beyle  that, behind the reader’s back,  employs certain fictional slights of hand, displacements of fact, distortions of context, amalgamation of incidents, to produce a Beyle who corresponds in some larger recognizable sense to the historical figure, but in the narrower sense corresponds to that figure very much caught in the narrator’s filling in, for his own purposes, of the historical lacuna. His very use of “Beyle” instead of “Stendhal” has a de-familiarizing thrust, in as much as it points to the duplicity of “Stendhal”: one of the affects of a pseudonym is the feeling it gives of making the bearer of the real name something of an imposter, a fake, a counterfeit, a parvenu in the domain of his own fame and reputation.  

Sebald wrote his book in the 1980s – which was a time, not unlike the 1820s, when the predominant political tone was one of restoration, with the power in place (Thatcherism, Reaganism) overtly working against the democratic socialist ideals of the period between 1945 and 1980. The latter had legitimated itself, vaguely, with reference to the ideals of the Atlantic revolutions, and not surprisingly the French Revolution was busy being “re-evaluated” by conservative historians during the 80s, and blamed for all the evils of totalitarianism.  Yet Sebald’s work is usually not connected to this background, but rather to World War II. Born in 1944, Sebald carried with him a certain cloud of melancholy that was all about the Nazi era that he never really experienced, but that marked all the adults around him in the Germany in which he grew up. It was like he was born on the exitus of some black hole. There are accidents you keep looking back on all your life, and understandably, for a European, the meat mangle of World War II is one of those kinds.  This motif pervades one of Sebald’s most important essays, History and Natural History, an essay on the literary description of total destruction…, which was published in 1982 and caused a large and continuing controversy in Germany, because of the weight it put upon the air bombardment of Nazi Germany – which struck some people as an apologetic and nationalist move, even though Sebald was neither a nationalist nor particularly into any school that made Germany a “victim”. In that essay, Sebald asks how one can create an “authentic literary reflection” about the “extreme reality of our time”  – which is a question that is partly answered in his series of novels, beginning with Vertigo.

Can one, then, ask about the “extreme reality” of Sebald’s own time? Read the rest (warning: this is a long motherfucka) here: http://willettsmag.net/2019/04/19/on-an-image-in-w-g-sebalds-vertigo-neoliberalism-notes-3/