Rhizone

Is Adbusters the Grown-Up in the Room?

I notice that, according to news reports, the Occupy Charlotte movement staged a coup against their self-proclaimed leader - you can't have a leader in a leaderless movement, can you?.  In pique, he groused to the local CBS station that they were just a bunch of "rogue kids." 

Apparently, the argument that drove us all insane last summer is starting up again here.  Who is the grown-up in the room?

Adbusters, the Canadian website that claims to have started it all  (and most journalists now agree, especially because they announced everything to the date before it happened), has been sounding a little whiney lately that it's not getting proper credit for everything that's going on.  The growing urban legend from the start has been that the "Occupy" movement was simply a spontaneous, accidentally simultaneous, but unscripted, unco-ordinated mass uprising of les enrages first in America and around the world.   

The claim may or may not be comparable to Al Gore's famous claim that he invented the internet.  But I think Adbusters has more going for them.  At least they can get instant PR now in the mainstream media.

Today they got everyone from Salon.com to the New York Times to herald them for stepping in as the grown-up in the room and formulating for the first time one clear, resonant demand - a 1 percent financial transactions tax.    It will be interesting to see if this demand, which the mainstream media (or at least the mainstream liberal media) seems to like, catches on.  

Now I realize pure participatory democracy doesn't have demands, just like it doesn't have leaders, because demands - well, they can make you sound "political".  It compromises the pure utopian idea of non-judgmental, consensus-based, collective desire without politics.  But, in fact, that's what democracy means - demands.  Demands lead to policy which leads to proposals which leads to legislation and/or elections to elect legislators who will support those policies and demands.  

Adbusters is calling it a "Robin Hood Tax."  Actually, the notion has been circulating in the economic profession for some time under the name of the "Tobin tax" (after the name of the Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin who first proposed it).

The Tobin tax is politically controversial, and it is not just opposed by conservatives but also by many establishment liberals.  It is sort of a global version of the "fair tax."  It's certainly no more squirrely than 9-9-9, which actually makes sense too. The OWS people can call it the "Robin Hood tax" or the "greed tax"; the Tea Party can call it the "let's tax Wall Street and not Main Street tax."  Both versions are equally just. 

BUT, politically, it may be something that would really focus people's attention - just as 9-9-9 does. Personally, I think it's just what the doctor ordered, though I'm not sure 1 percent on every transaction is the proper formula.  

The problem is not really "capitalism".  We haven't had real, good, old-fashioned capitalism in a long while, and if we did even the Tea Party wouldn't like it.  They still like their Social Security checks.

What we have is a kind of make-believe, simulated, funny-numbers-gone-wild form of virtual capitalism that is not merely (in Frederic Jameson's tendentious phrasing) the "logic of late capitalism."  It is post-capitalism.  Capitalism requires the transformation, as Marx understood of labor value into "surplus value."  But post-Microsoft virtual capitalism - i.e., global, computer-dominated, virtual capitalism - has arisen as the transformation of what was left of surplus value into "fantasy capital."

I've got a good economist friend who has been explaining to me that we've seen the ongoing vanishing of capital since the late 1970s, which is why we're in the current cataclysmic debt mess.

What we have is a hyperreal capitalism and hyperreal ongoing protest against capitalism.

Tax the funny money!  That will bring the system down, if you really want to bring it down.  Of course, it will bring the government debt, if not the government itself, down.  

The "it" is problematic.  It doesn't really exist, though corporations who play in this global "casino" (I think the better phrase would be the Great Global Monopoly Game).  It wouldn't really mean a redistribution of wealth, because the wealth is all play money to begin with.

But at least we would know where we stand.

We'll see if OWS listens to their putative "mentors," or they throw Adbusters under the bus too.  After all, the major sin of the guy who got thrown out in Charlotte was that he claimed to have something to do with starting it all - at least in Charlotte. 

Outing the 1 Percent

Okay, CNN today just outed the "1 percent" whom we have to overthrow, because they're sucking us dry.

Extra, read all about it!  It's right here:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/20/news/economy/occupy_wall_street_income/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2

I'll bet all those guys in the black, stove-pipe hats twirling their mustaches now, having cackled with glee for years over our misery, are having serious second thoughts.  Maybe some are even going to imitate Muamar Gaddafi and grab a golden pistol and hide in a manhole under Zucotti Park until someone finds him and shoots him.

Probably not.

Turns out, according to CNN's stats, you only have to earn about $322,000 in gross salary, royalties, bonuses, occasional income, etc. to be statistically the 1 percent we supposedly all who want a revolution are not.

Note that this amount doesn't cover net worth (e.g., the market value of a house one owns, automobile, savings and retirement accounts, etc.), which isn't taxed directly, only when you draw income on it.  If that were the case the 1 percent would be more like 20 percent, and it would be larger if you counted only those over 50.   I know an elderly  lady who told me she lives on about $20,000 a year for the rest of her life on liquid assets worth about $250,000.  

Given her location in New York State, where she has to pay a lot of taxes on that meager $20,000, she technically lives way below the poverty level.  And she'll never be able to work again.   If the stock market tanks, she'll be even more impoverished.  Seems Ben Bernanke, who with the good intentions out of which the road to hell is proverbially paid, kind of screwed her and others like her with QE2 by printing money and pushing interest rates toward almost zero in order to "turn the economy around." 

So we're not talking about little old ladies like her, who don't live in Pasadena anymore because it's too expensive.  Then about WHO are we talking? 

Let's start with my good friend Morris (actually, the only "Morris" I know is the erstwhile cat cartoon character, but I like the name, which is not his real name, though Morris as a human being is most likely real).  

Morris is about 56 years, and has two kids in college, for which he's paying a lot for them to go to my very expensive private university, which pays me as a professor around or a little below the national average for my annual salary in a special field that is routinely below the average of all fields, because it's in something they call "the humanities," in which nobody wants to major because you can't graduate with an entry-level, high paying job having specialized in applied, global, Deleuzian semiotics.  But at least with their major in applied, global, Deleuzian semiotics they can understand better than that self-important finance major why the world is unjust and needs to be transformed.

Morris, as a member of the 1 percent, makes an annual salary of $325,000 from his business as self-employed CEO of Great Expectations, Inc., an interactive software company targeting English majors with specialties in Victorian literature, which he founded.   But his kids, even if they're very bright, can only get a little scholarship, because they - or at least when checking Morris' income - don't qualify for the kind of aid you can get if you parents make $50,000 a year.  So Morris shells out at least $50,000 out of pocket annually so his kids, who are both majoring in applied, global Deleuzian semiotics, can get a bachelor's degree from a good university.

BTW Morris also gives about $32,000 a year to churches, Christian causes, and even the United Way because as a Christian he believes in tithing.  So after all of the above comes off the top, and he pays the mortgage and high real estate taxes (he lives in California) on a house that is now half its original value, his actual salary is reduced to less than $200,000.

Wait, I forgot, he's self-employed, and his family health insurance premium is about $1500 a month, so there goes another 18K.     And since he's a self-employed, small business owner, most of his business expenses pass through the company itself, which is an LLC.  So when all is said and done after federal, state, and local taxes as well - and his take of course varies enormously from month to month, depending on whether anyone wants to buy his software - he has about $1000 a month in money he can now spend on the life of luxury.

Let's string  Morris up! Maybe we'll have to liquidate his kids too.

Now I don't want to mention any names, but I know a lot of college administrators (even deans) who at more prestigious schools are easily in the 1 percent bracket.   And if you total up the very high salaries of a lot of well-known "academic superstars", even in my field, many of whom are out there calling for "communism" while urging on the Zucotti Park protesters and getting national attention, which helps to boost their already very high regular spkeaking fees, consulting fees, book publishing contracts, etc.,  you may even have outed part of the  0.1 percent.

The only difference is that they don't wear black, stove-pipe hats.

After all this tedious analysis, I can proudly tell you that I am NOT part of the 1 percent, even before taxes.  But I have subsidized group health insurance, don't have student loans anymore or kids to put through college, and a mortgage that is getting closer to being paid for.

There IS one stat, however, the article points out.  The percentage differential between the top 1 percent and the bottom 10 percent has been growing significantly in the US over the past quarter century.  That does need to be addressed.  Economists have known for a long time that widening income disparities were the number one cause of the 1929 stock market crash and the great depression. Of course a lot of this disparity has to do with the aging of the population.   But to address that problem, many who think they don't have to give a little will indeed have to give a little - more than the 1 percent.

Back in the 1960s our generation was one quarter of the population.  The young now, who ARE getting the raw end of the deal economically, are a much smaller minority, primarily because our generation decided that for a variety of reasons they wanted to have far less children.

Developing world nations are the other way around, which is a big part of the problem with global economic imbalances.

I'll now make my statement.  We're all going to have to figure out how to get along with less, and learn to graciously share better and be far more productive, even if we're old fs, with what we do have.  That takes wisdom, grace, determination, and a willingness to step back from the blame-gaming and finger-pointing.  It also takes a deep, spiritual engagement with divine possibilities we haven't encountered perhaps before.

There's a lot we can do in our own immediate spheres of influence.  And we need to do it with a vision of the future, like the months of the early dark ages who realized before anyone else that their world was dying.  They saved one civilization so it could blossom as another.

I'll start exploring those themes when the time is right.

 

Revolt of the "Resentimados"

I said yesterday I was going to write today about the most common and addivctive intellectual Peter Pan pipe dream when it comes to political economy - a worldwide "Communist" revolution that ushers in a worldwide Communist millenium where everyone will, as Marx only aphoristically envisioned, provide "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."

But the serious upheavals underway in Greece today and some other looming clouds on the global horizon compel me to put that off and offer a little reflection.

What Marx and others captured by this secularist counterpart to the religious anticipation of a future paradise of streets paved with gold really are looking toward is the abolition of the law of exchange, on which all theories of "economy" or "economics" are based.

Notice I did not use the phrase, common to all introductory economic textbooks, "law of supply and demand."  That is deliberate.  Supply and demand is what regulates "markets," or keeps them in balance.  But exchange is what "makes" markets in the first place.

If I grow, gather, or shoot all my own food in sufficient supply to feed myself and my family, and make everything I need from food, shelter, and even "frivolous" stuff like art objects from whatever I easily obtain without relying on somebody else, I don't need a market.

But if I can only grow only pinon, which I use for my housing, and you grow the grain I need to stay alive, but can't get the pinon you need to have a roof over your head, you and I have the making of a market. It all depends on whether you can spare a little grain, and I can spare a little pinon.  Then we come to some "exchange value" (e.g. a bushel of one for a peck of the other) that benefits us both, if not equally.  

It was Rousseau and Marx who first gave currency to the idea that paleolithic hunter gatherer bands didn't exchange anything with other bands, and that market economies - which is what we really mean when we talk about "capitalism" -  only arose when the "state" was created.  Anthropologists have successfully proven that hypothesis historically false, but that kind of  persists, especially as we increasingly don't have to get the leather to make our own shoes or grow our own food.  

What's the difference between Wal-Mart and Mother Nature, except that the former supposedly exploits people to provide us with cheap shoes and food and the latter supposedly beneficently gives us whatever we need?  The former is "capitalism" and the latter is "natural and organic."  

I'm wondering if all the wild animals who died from starvation as a result of drought in the Southwest this summer would have welcomed the opportunity to go to Wal-Mart.  But that's getting off topic.  Back to the real subject at hand - greed, capitalism, and income inequality.

Consider Greece.  The Greeks are striking, and some are burning their country down, today because the "socialist" Greek government is about to pass legislation that would increase "austerity" and cut public-sector jobs to satisfy the international community that they can solve their runaway sovereign debt problem.  The sovereign debt problem, we are told, is caused by too many government sector workers with too high wages and too short working hours who were given that by governments they voted for, because they were tired of all the "austerity" of the past.

That may be too much of a simplification, but it's basically the case, at least from their creditors' perspective.

To appease the Greek street (which the Greek government can't do, even if they wanted to), then, the other less or not indebted EU countries would have to ante up even more than they have, and their wage-earners would have to pay more taxes (which they already pay a lot of anyway).  

The ballooning problem globally, especially for the "developed" countries, is not just a shrinking number of "jobs" relative to our income expectations but runaway debt - whether its personal or collective increasingly matters little.  That runaway debt is the long-term result of a lot of factors, including very bad behavior on the part of the financial industry, which only four years ago more and more American college graduate wanted a high-paying job in.  

But it's also the result of what I would call the "revolution of unrealistic expectations" on the part of a consumption-sated, virtual-world-addicted, emptily idealistic, slogan-addicted Western-cultural elite (hell, we "developed-world" people are the "1 percent" if you compare us Asia, Africa, much of the Middle East, and of course Latin America).  

They've ALWAYS thought we were too greedy and capitalistic, and now they've started to play the game finally.  It's interesting to me that THEY are not in debt these days - it's us.  I won't throw in here the famous line years ago from Pogo (who was that, you say) about meeting the "enemy", which is someone we didn't expect.

History has shown us there are two ways to avoid getting into debt - both "personal" or "sovereign." Live off the land, or live within your means.

Okay, you say, but if only those "millionaires" would pay their fair share.  Pay for what?  

I'm reminded of something that actually happened to me when I visited Greece in the mid-1970s, when the country was in one of its cylical bouts of "austerity" imposed at that time by a fascist, military dictatorship that had staged a coup about four years earlier.   I was invited by a shopkeeper into the back of his modest shop, who recognized me as an American, to drink ouzo with him, because "I love Americans so much" (or so he said).

As we were seated in private he pulled out a long knife, put it to my throat, and said, "ah, you rich American, now give me every dollar you've got."

It turns out he was pulling a prank, for which I then forgave him, but until he let on to his real intentions, the dialogue went something like this.

"But I'm not a rich American.  I'm a poor, American student" (I was then just out of grad school with large student loans and no job yet).

"Ah, but all you Americans are millionaires,as far as we Greeks are concerned" he cackled, "so give me all your money - now!"

If you look at who a lot of those "millionaires" we are talking about are, they are often Indians, Chinese, Africans, and perhaps even a Greek here and there.  

This morning in Dallas I was listening to FM 104.9 in Dallas, which is part of an Indian-owned media company that caters to the swelling Indian population of North Texas.  There were more cheesy buy-buy-buy commercials than you have on AM radio.  And, of course, there was the movie "Slumdog Millionaire."

My point is that the quest for global economic justice built around anger, resentment, and "class warfare" (actually, in the global sense it's just as much a "war of the worlds" (as in developed and developing) is self-defeating, if it's simply a comparison of who's got and who thinks they don't got what they deserve because somebody else somehow got more.  

We Americans should look at ourselves less as indignatos and more as resentemados, especially if you following Nietzsche's diagnosis of the universal, modern, Western pathology of resenntiment. 

I don't care if you're a blue-collar worker who resents all those "illegals" who worked at all those less-than-minimum wage jobs while you were out refusing to pay your taxes while getting high on meth, or a "millennial" with a high-powered grad degree who resents small business owners, the remaining backbone of the American economy, because they don't get all the jokes on "The Big Bang Theory."

We're all in this deep you-know-what as Americans, and I'd like to sit down together to start working together to do what we can to turn this ship around, even if we have to throw all the crystal chandeliers overboard to reduce the weight.

If you were on the Titanic, it was easy to blame to captain (actually, historians say it was a silly screw-up on the part of the first or second mater) for hitting the iceberg.  But they were still all going down together. 

 

The world is "blat"...or let's stop blaming and start naming

There is an interesting, provocative, and disturbing article by a staff editorial writer in The Washington Post this morning entitled "What the Occupy protests tell us about the limits of democracy."  

Anne Applebaum, the staff writer, hits the nail on the head in a lot of ways.  Her thesis is quite similar to what I've been saying recently, and she needs to be heard.  Let's call it a "reality check."  

She says that the reason there "understandably" is no coherent set of policy objectives for what is now a worldwide Occupy Movement (let's not call it OWS, but OM, which sounds more sixtiesh anyway) is that democracies, which since the time of Pericles in ancient Athens have been local, are paradoxically not equipped to deal with global challenges. 

Remember the old Eighties slogan popularized by John Naisbitt, which embodied the second wave - we're now in the third - of "participatory democracy", a phrase coined by the New Left of the 1960s.  "Think globally, act locally!"

We need to act globally now too, Applebaum says, but we can't really do that effectively because democracy wasn't designed to act globally.  Acting globally requires a unified, global, democratic political order, which we don't have.  If Europe can't get its act together together even in the midst of a crisis potentially far worse than in the US,  how can you expect the world to do so?  And to do so right now?

Chanting "democracy now", as we did in the Sixites, is fine if you're directing it at the present occupant of the White House (which we probably don't need to do).  But try doing that right now in Beijing, the erstwhile "Communist" Versailles palace of the current global capitalism.    See my point?

What Appelbaum notes is obvious.  But rather than merely acquiesce to the obvious, which will ensue in instant despair,  we need to do more than simply be "aware," which is what OM has already done for us.

Awareness is a good thing, not a bad thing.  But awareness is like taking only a few days of your antibiotic to combat a life-threatening strep infection when the prescription calls for two weeks.  If you don't go all the way with the prescription, the infection seems to abate for a while, but then comes back with a vengeance.

As speaker after speaker at our conference last spring in Denver on the global plague of human trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable people from Benin to Belarus emphasized, too much "awareness" without a careful analysis and a realistic follow-up for mobilization of people and resources can have the opposite effect in the long run.  It can get hopes up with a passion to "do something," only to realize the impossibility of the task, ending in apathy and long-term loss of motivation. 

In order to immunize ourselves against long-term despair, we need to do something first (and I realize, it's not immediately gratifying or glamorous), which is to do our own kind of "consciousness raising" - see, I threw in another generationally unfamiliar Movement term which Marx actually invented.  To raise our own consciousness about the real reality - not the "hyperreality", the pure Truman Showish, totally virtual, Baudrillardian, "more real than real" reality of our slogans and significations -  of our plight, we need to do something different than we are thoroughly addicted to doing, which is either one of the following:

• Blame some vague, generic, Other (i.e, "the rich" or "the government") or some vague, generic form of emotionally-laden Otherness (i.e., "capitalism" or "the liberals" qua "socialists")
• Once we realize the impossibility of solving anything by doing that, or after we have done just-enough-to-be-dangerous "consciousness raising" on ourselves, start blaming  ourselves for our consumerism, our complicity in the "system", our laziness, our inaction, all our misguided choices since we first put our baby fingers on that hard stove, etc., etc. 

The blame game, as we've had psychologists tell us for a long time but not of course politicians who we both blame and vote for simultaneously, is just a sophisticated form of denial.  

What we need in this new era of or conscousness raisining, or CR (fashioning acronyms is not sixtiesh but au courant, ),  is what I would call a new, more sophisticated, self-organizing method of the name game.  Psychologists tell us that if we can name it, we can really deal with it.  That's probably, anthropologists tell us, human beings most likely invented language in the first place.

Naming involves also the development of definitions, synonyms and their definitions, a new grammar of discourse, etc.  It does not involve using what the psychologists call "thought-stopping cliches," which satisfy emotionally (like crack) but leave us ultimately worse off, and which is what we're all, on the right and on the left, doing.

You know, "back then" before we mobilized we had something called "teach-ins."  They weren't just for the academe crowd, they were theoretically for everybody.  

Teach-ins are about the substance of what is going on.  The "why are we in this flix?" question ultimately flows into the "what ought we to do?" question.

Hopefully, this blog is the beginning of a serious teach-in about the global crisis we're all caught up in.  

I know, I know, we're all afraid that we'll just end up "talking", not doing. But if you have a severe and baffling disease, would you just treat it yourself without first at least coming up with a tentative diagnosis, having a physician do that perhaps just to confirm or disconfirm what you already thought, then reading everything you can about it, then joining or creating a "support group", etc., etc?  Of course you wouldn't.

But with social media we're talking all the time.  We now live in the digitally networked age of instant and complex information.

We didn't have any of that in the Sixties.

Tomorrow I will write about why we shouldn't listen to the false prophets who tell us "all you need is communism (whatever that means), da, da, da, da, tum."

The Return of the Sixties? - Uhhhhh....huhhhhhhhhh?

It all started when a 14-year-old daughter of a pastor of mine came up two weeks ago and gushed, "I'm really into the Sixties now."  I smiled.  I wasn't sure why, but I went through the Sixties (actually what we mean by the "Sixties" were really the years 1967-1973) in all its headiness, hopefulness, giddy idealism, muddiness, dashed hopes, and personal dysfunctions that affected an entire generation.

Then Occupy Wall Street started a week later, and to cite the now trite Yogi Berra remark, it was deja vu all over again.  The only difference was that it came on with full fury much more quickly (that's accelerating "change" timeline Alvin Toffler in Future Shock wrote about forty years ago), it "went viral" (a phrase we didn't have then) much more quickly thanks to social media, and it was about something far more complex than it was at the time (the Vietnam war and the repression of civil rights had been concrete things that could be addressed by simple policy options, whereas the slow global economical unravelling we are now experiencing is transnational and impossible to turn around with straightforward, national political initiatives). 

I still fondly remember the Sixites now, because what happened then brought about real and important changes (if only sometimes indirectly and through the long haul), although with serious, long-term collateral social and cultural damage that in retrospect could have been avoided.    At the time everyone exulted in what the French called "the events", while no one anticipated the collateral damage.  How can you when you're intoxicated with promise?  

To say you're wiser now, of course, doesn't help or do anything at all for the younger generation.  But you can offer advice, even if it's bound to be disregarded.  

In the Sixties the slogan was "you can't trust anyone over thirty."  The sentiment behind that slogan was based on the supposition that no over thirty would understand the way we did what was actually going on, and if you took their advice you would end up being compromised or manipulated.  Since our elders at the time had created the mess we were all protesting against, why were they worth listening to?  Will anyone today listen to a banker about how to solve the global problems of banking?  You've gotta be kiddin'?

But I didn't really anticipate the fierce pushback from the twenty-somethings that are on my Facebook page as well as in personal discussions when I dared to suggest that maybe they ought to step back and twice twice a little bit about "the events" that started in Manhattan and now are happening most places around the world.  I cited numerous somewhat ambivalent or even skeptical articles from my older contemporaries, but the general response I received was - as in the Sixites - if you're not with us, you're against us!

I avoided talking about the Tea Party while it was receiving all the media attention, because it obviously had a different genesis, and in the academic world no one wants, or still wants, to understand the Tea Party because it is considered merely to be part of what H.L. Mencken disparaging referred to as the latest incarnation of America's "boobocracy" - small-town, small-minded, narrowly focused people who just work, go to church, hate diversity, hate ideas, and of course hate change.  

In retrospect I realize the difference between the Tea Party and the fledgling OWS movement parallels the difference between the "cultural revolutionaries" of the Sixties and the George Wallace for President movement about the same period.   If George Wallace, who was clearly more "reactionary" than the TPers are today, had not been brought down by an attempted assassin and, although he didn't actually die, rendered politically ineffective for the rest of his life, the 1970s might have turned out quite differently.

But then what if John or Bobby Kennedy hadn't been shot either?

What I myself learned in the 1960s is that history matters.  I didn't learn it after the fact.  I saw history in the making (I did get an MA in "historical studies" at Berkeley, and almost went on to get a history rather than a philosophy of religion PhD) , and I learned the lessons at that time, which quickly changed my attitude about what was then happening.  Most of my contemporaries then, as well as my younger contemporaries now, still believe history sucks.  Or if it doesn't, it's because at least for ideological reasons you can use your own, carefully selected metaphors to justify what you already wanted to believe anyway.

No, this is not the Sixties redux - actually!  How do I know?  I lived through it, I analyzed it through education at the time, and I've continued to do so ever since.  I'm doing it right now.

Nor is it a "new civil rights movement."  Nor is it The Revolution finally and decisively on a global scale - finally and decisively - as people who read Zizek all the time might want to believe.  Nor is it HOPE!  Remember, we voted someone into office decisively only three years ago, and now we've supposedly lost hope.  Go figure.

I'll spend time in this slot explaining what not only is happening.  I will also explain, not with the meaning of Lenin's phrasing early in the last century that had more than a whiff of menacing subtext for which we now know the horrible implicatons, but with a certain tentative irony, the following: "what is to be done."   

What is to be done?  Don't get ahead of me.  

I'm going to write this regular blog even if you are sure, as we did, you know what is happening and what needs to be done.  

Except we got a lot of it wrong, and I'm not convinced you're going to get any more right.

But what do I know?  I passed the thirty mark years ago.