Editor’s Note: This is a piece I wrote for a magazine that (I guess) folded. They never ran it. Kate, who accompanied me on this trip to Europe some time ago, was asking me about it recently. Without reading it, she suggested I stick it on the blog. I hope the links still work. Here it is.

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There’s a music show on the flatscreen in the student center coffee shop at the University of Ljubljana. It’s called MCM Top. A dude in the video looks a little like John Mayer and is playing a piano, singing in English while a bald, tough-looking, chain-wearing guy is leaning on the piano and rapping. He looks a little like one of the guys from Onyx. “All men die,” the white guy warbles.

I’m in Slovenia, watching music videos targeted at college students. I understand virtually none of the words (aside from the plaintiff reflections on mortality of Floppy-Haired Piano Guy), but the non-verbal video conventions are universal: the camera angles, the rapping into the microphone hanging from the ceiling in “the studio,” the angst.

I was nearing the end of a trip that began in Amsterdam, had taken me to the highest (geographic) point in Europe, and now to this weird, semi-Russian-seeming country, home of a guy named Jure Kosir — a world class skier who won a bonze medal at the ‘94 Olympics. In addition to specializing in the Slalom and Giant Slalom, he is a rapper. He evidently once told the media that his music is called “slalom beat.” He was the 1994 Sportsman of the Year in Slovenia.

The goal of the Euro Trip was certainly not explicitly to seek out all of the hip-hop I could find as I bounced across a continent. But one of my parameters was to be aware of any detectable iterations of something that started at Sedgwick Avenue house parties hosted by Clive Campbell (DJ Kool Herc) or on Kingston sound systems. I would simply keep my eyes and ears open and document these traces, should they cross my path.

The trip starts on an auspicious note in this regard when, while sitting at the airport in Atlanta waiting for our flight to Germany, we realize that we’ll be sharing a flight with Akon. To our boundless delight, the mothers of a traveling “under 15” soccer team have been informed by their children of Akon’s presence and celebrity status. Though none of them have likely ever heard any of Akon’s music, much less seen this video for “The Ghetto,” there is considerable and prolonged commotion as the (literal) soccer moms gather and fawn and coo and pass around a number of cell phones and cameras as their children pose with Akon. One of them actually makes the “fan yourself with your hand” motion that she had probably seen from some old British Invasion video footage. Unsurprisingly, Akon vanishes — after sheepishly and charmingly agreeing to pose for an incalculable volume of photos, many of which were no doubt posted to Facebook by the time our flight left Atlanta.

Amsterdam – Holland

They say that there’s something special about the light in Amsterdam. To be sure, the colors are damn fine. A kaleidoscope of near-neon street tulips is able to pierce through the most rainy and overcast of days, not to mention the bright, blaring street paintings. But there’s something about the sound in Amsterdam too, particularly when there’s a massive street march coming around the corner, people holding four enormous trash-bag-covered speakers up on poles, blasting “Our House” by Madness.

You see, Amsterdam is undergoing some undulation, some “squatters’ rights” shit that is every bit as much “Fuck Tha’ Police” as 417th “Greatest Song of All Time” according to Rolling Stone. In America, hip-hop activism has taken the form of, um, volunteering for the Obama campaign or something. Puffy’s “Vote or Die” campaign from 2004 has become, “Hey, did anybody happen to watch me in Raisin in the Sun?” Russell Simmons and Benjamin Chavis may throw a mean “red carpet and cocktail hour” before their Fifth Annual Action Awards, but in Amsterdam’s youth politics, there is a serious and quite literal “to the streets” component.

In what we encountered in a random encounter on the streets of Amsterdam, there was a real amount of attention being paid to what constitutes public space and a there was a serious pack of people willing to put their bodies on the asphalt. Sure, so maybe they’re playing British two-tone ska instead of Lyrics Born. But there’s more to revolution than a soundtrack, right? Then again, perhaps it’s not really all that fair to compare an encounter with a protest march in Amsterdam with Step Up 2: The Streets or Dipset.

And as one of my favorite bloggers, Joey, reminds us:

Hip-hop culture is far from monolithic, evidenced by failing record sales and a booming interwebs presence. Individual artists and sub-genres can be closely followed online, with fans cherry-picking songs, entire albums, and blog posts while dispensing with more varied platforms like the old rap video shows that made every Tribe fan a Snoop and Dre fan, as well. Further, the ascension of the largely vapid but nonetheless engaging southern styles from Atlanta and Houston seems to have been facilitated by a prevailing sentiment that if the music just sounds good and gets people dancing, then that’s enough. While megastars like Jay-Z still combine weightier music with pop appeal and a spot within the rap-game zeitgeist, it appears as though music not primarily made for the party set has grown increasingly marginalized in lieu of more generic and easily produced offerings from the Youngs and Lils of the word. And the business models followed, the signals sought when searching for what will become a hit record–those appear to stem in some part from the success that the Dip Set enjoyed.

But, I digress.

Amsterdam has a lot of things that rappers seem to like talking about: prostitutes and high quality weed. However, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of live hip-hop percolating, at least in the more heavily-touristed areas of town. Then again, more than 80 percent of The Netherlands is Dutch, and it appears from even a casual perusal of their television channels and pop culture offerings that these people still get a big kick out of actual, honest-to-God, blackface Al-Jolson-style humor. I can only imagine what they’d think about Tyler Perry or Flavor of Love.

We did get excited when we saw a poster for a party at a club called Club Latido, but when we looked at the list of DJs I can’t say that I was stunned to see that one was called “House Negro.”

In Transit

Our much-regretted departure from Amsterdam is marked by a strange aborted seduction scene on the overnight train to Switzerland. It is a story of young Americans in Europe, drunk German anti-Semitism, Jesus, and, of course, hip-hop.

An attractive young man sits alone in the dining car as the European night train hurtles through the dark. An attractive young woman enters the car. Their eyes meet and, this being a train from Amsterdam, we suspect that we might be about to watch a classic, cinema-style train hookup. Suddenly, another young guy enters the dining car wearing a hilarious knit cap with ear flaps that says “AMSTERDAM” in huge letters. He also sees the woman sitting alone. Who’ll be the one to invite her over? Or maybe she’ll make a play of her own.

The first guy takes the plunge. He nurses his beer and eventually summons the nerve to invite her over to his table. His first words make it clear that he’s an American. Turns out, so is she. He’s from Philly. She’s from Houston. The Knit Cap Guy is uber-pissed that he didn’t have the nerve to talk to her first. He decides to pout.

As Philly Guy and Houston Girl get to know each other, Knit Cap Guy starts pounding truly heroic amounts of booze from the dining car bar. He glares at the Americans chatting happily while he guzzles mini bottle after mini bottle of vodka, later switching to wine.

This goes on for almost an hour before Knit Cap Guy staggers out, presumably to pass out. It is at this point that Houston Girl punches a train-tunnel-sized hole in Philly Guy’s hopes of train sex. She announces that she is a Mormon and begins what is a clearly well-practiced dissertation on her beliefs, sprinkling in a variety of Bible quotations. He tries to banter with her about theology, but he is clearly bummed as he watches his hopes incinerate with every minute that her zealous tirade continues. We’re doing our best not to laugh out loud as she expounds on her various theories about Jesus.

Suddenly, the wasted dude reappears, knit cap now slightly askew. He plops down next to them, clearly drunk enough to attempt to muster the courage he needs to woo this lady back to his sleeper bunk. He slurs badly, announcing that he is from Munich. He didn’t overhear her religious disclosure or any of the subsequent conversation, but even if he had, it isn’t clear that, at least in this state, he’d know what a Mormon was, even if she explained it in mind-melting detail – and it’s quite clear that that’s the only way she knows how to explain it.

So, with palpable desperation to stop talking about The Good Book, the Philly guy asks the wasted German about what kind of music he likes. Of course, the German says he is into hip-hop.

The Philly Guy is delighted. The first name he drops is Grandmaster Flash. He claims to be “old school” and further name drops Tupac, Wyclef and Bone Thugs as among his favorites. He says that hip-hop has gotten “too commercial.” The German chimes in that he likes 50 Cent. The Mormon, realizing that nobody has spoken to her in several minutes, chimes in and says she does too. The Philly guy says without hesitation that 50 and Snoop have “sold out.” The German adds that he likes The Game. The Philly guy considers for a moment and says he likes The Game more than he likes 50 Cent. The German, gripping the table so that he doesn’t slide onto the floor, says he also likes house music.

But the eavesdropping thrill wouldn’t have been complete without the German expounding on his life story as the music conversation stalls out. He explains his appearance on the train as a result of the fact that he was driven out of Amsterdam after having lived there for 14 years. He says he was driven out by “the Jews.” As my eyes widen with that special blend of shock, horror and delight, he says that Germans and Jews “just don’t go together.” I wish I were making this up.

Switzerland

We arrive in Basel, one of the nicest European cities you could conjure. And after three days and multiple cities bouncing around the nation, it’s safe to say that Switzerland isn’t just full of polite white people, it’s also (for various reasons) not the type of nation that brings to mind the words “hip-hop.” As far as that goes, the Swiss make the Dutch look like the backstage scene at an M.O.P. concert.

While one poster promises that DJ Jazzy Jeff and MixMaster Mike are playing at a Basel club, there is simply nothing, no matter how much Gwen Stefani yodels, hip-hop about the Alps.

Sure, sure. I understand that they’re trying. I’d certainly damn sure never say that there is no artistic or cultural value to the blinged-out dairy cow on the cover of Swiss Rap Compilation, Volume 1 by Faya Records. Check out Lyrikal Kartel. Check out Obe from Geneva. They play shows! The Swiss do bring something to the global table – and by table, I mean the metaphorical table that graces the room at the hip-hop version of the Security Council in the Global Village of the Hip-Hop Universe (or is it the Hip-Hop Galaxy or Federation?)

While in a tiny college town called Fribourg, I purchase a copy of Planete Rap, “Le Mag de L’emission Number 1 du Rap et RnB.” On one hand, a Google search turns up such videos as this one. On the other, this is a magazine published in March of ‘08 that claims to be “on the cutting edge of hip-hop” and has devoted nearly 10 pages to Michael Jackson. While I appreciate the 25th anniversary of Thriller as much as anyone and recognize the incredible groundbreaking influence of The King of Pop (not to mention the Quincy Jones production on Thriller), the fact remains that this guy is also Mr. Jefferson, the plastic ghost who lives in Bahrain. Even if he influenced almost everyone who makes hip-hop music, 10 pages seems a little excessive. [Ed Note: Obviously this was written before Michael died, back in a time where we once thought that it was possible to overdo news about him. Oh wait.]

This French language publication also features and interviews with M. Pokora (who evidently collaborates with both Timbaland and Ricky Martin) and Lea Castel, who is 19-years-old and appears to be a blonde, piano-playing, Winona Ryder lookalike. Check out her “I-play-piano-and-sing-while-you-rap” duet here. Evidently, soulful piano rap is a hot song format in Europe.

Usher and Mariah each get a full page and the magazine comes with two massive posters in it, reminding me that there was once a time that people purchased magazines that had posters in them. No matter how many hip-hop Websites there are, it is only the magazine format that can provide me with two massive pieces of paper: one with M. Pakora on one side and Sheryfa Luna on the other, one with Lea Castel one one side and an advertisement for Urban Peace 2 on the other. Urban Peace 2, for those of you who’ll be in the area, will be in October of 2008 at Stade France and will feature Booba and Kenzah Farah, who, according to her Wikipedia page, is a French Algerian R&B singer who is considered to be “the first Internet success story in the history of the French music industry.” Obviously.

Venice

Our goal is to change trains in Venice, hopping immediately onto the train to Ljubljana. Evidently, the train we needed was permanently cancelled, so we have a number of hours to wander around the reeking canals of Venice before it’s time for our newly-booked train (no refund).

We come across a poster for C.S.O. Rivolta. They appear to be a pretty good sized crew who, on their MySpace page at least, pass the mic as they rhyme over a GZA-inspired piano riff. Not too bad, although we didn’t know it at the time. We did notice that the poster advertising their upcoming show features a number of handguns, which, to my understanding, are much harder to get in Europe than they are in the U.S. Inexplicably, the second song on their MySpace page is Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” Not a cover. Just that song, for a total of two songs: one of them rhyming and one from the soundtrack to the movie “Trainspotting.”

Also of note: David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party is giving a talk in Venice. The posters advertising his talk are all around town. They show that classic picture of Huey Newton sitting in that wicker chair, holding a gun and a spear. Good to see that Hilliard is at least still telling the masses about the Panthers, whereas Bobby Seale is selling barbecue sauce.

Slovenia

Finally, we arrive. Slovenia is in the rotating position of being “the president” of the EU this year. More importantly, a couple of NBA players come from Slovenia: Rasho Nesterovic and Primoz Brezec, a 7 footer from Slovenia who plays for the Toronto Raptors. Brezec, in particular, is worth mentioning because is the source of a number of amusing anecdotes, many of them hip-hop themed and collected here. You see, Brezec seems to fancy himself a sort of Eastern European gangsta-type, keeping it real for Postojna.

We encounter this mindset to some degree during our time in Slovenia. Gone are the familiar cognates of Amsterdam and Switzerland, where if you stare at some sentences for long enough, you might be able to pick out a couple of words and figure out what’s going on. This place is Russian-style, with lots of weird punctuation and long words. Correspondingly, the dudes at the night clubs are pretty Eastern Bloc. We’re talking silk shirts open just a button or two too many, gold chains, and, yes, hair gel. As night club scenes go, it’s pretty rough: women in probably-expensive plastic pants and lots of angry staring from the dudes.

The DJs at both levels of the club we went to were playing electronic music, with only hints of hip-hop thrown in. The upper level DJ plays light and airy dance music, while the basement club is for the “serious shit,” where the DJ is playing dark and extremely heavy trance and house. Unfortunately, he is also a show-off in the typical Euro-DJ fashion and constantly makes the crowd stand around and wait while he tries to string songs together in some kind of orgasmic crescendo. The effect is really annoying.

Other than that, not a lot of music crosses our paths on that given night in Ljubljana. In fact, there’s not a ton of hip-hop leaking out into the streets in general, aside from the name of one of the chains of gas stations.

Still, even though we went to some of the whitest nations in Europe, to paraphrase the great George Clinton, we’re all One World Under a Groove. Even if they are expressing it a little differently in some corners of the globe, the influence of hip-hop can’t be denied.

The following is a response by one of our readers to a friend’s question regarding deflation vs. inflation and the impact on the gold price:

Hi Kevin,

Thank you for sending over that report by Nick Guarino. He makes some great points and I believe he is right in many cases although I have some contrary opinions on gold. I have not looked at his oil or stock scenario. I’ve listed his arguments below with my responses to each of them. I also recommend listening to the following audio interview with John Williams of ShadowStats.com where he specifically addresses the inflation/deflation debate:

John Williams Interview
http://wp.me/pHQmz-68

I also recommend listening to the radio interviews with Jim Willie (mentioned below).

1. Nick says: “IMF has plenty of gold to sell into the market.”

Response: This is true. But the real question is will there be sufficient demand to absorb it? I say yes. India bought the 200 tons (which is money they spent on gold instead of U.S. Treasuries). China has continued to buy and plans to continue. This is being referred to as the “Beijing Put” (http://tinyurl.com/n3nvrs). Sri Lanka just recently announced a major purchase of gold and Russia has stated its intention to buy more gold too (http://en.rian.ru/russia/20091119/156903575.html).

2. Nick says: “Prices are in deflation not inflation.”

Response: Yes, prices are down but they are down primarily in financial assets which were previously “inflated” with easy credit. These debt-financed assets will continue to fall in price as defaults rise and lending shrinks. Prices in consumer goods and services will begin to rise as the dollar drops.

It is important to note that the proper definition of inflation is “an increase in the money supply”. Rising prices are only a result of an increase in the money supply and these rising prices may not show up right away or they may show up in specific assets over others (gold and stocks versus houses).

3. Nick says: “Collapsing credit is deflationary”.

Response: Not necessarily. When a debtor defaults on his debt, the money that was lent stays in the financial system. It is not taken out. These debt defaults show up on the financial statements of the banks (more on this later). The pay-down of debt does shrink the money supply but most people can’t pay off their debt because they owe more than the assets securing these debts are worth. This will continue to cause defaults.

4. Nick says: a.) “The dollar and the U.S. Government are too big to fail; b.) If the dollar fails the world will be thrust into an economic Dark Age therefore foreign governments will not let it happen; c.) Foreign governments must buy every dollar of U.S. Government debt otherwise they will be wiped out first; d.) Demand for U.S. Debt is at an all-time high evidenced by low rates.”

Response: I will Respond to these individually:

a.) “The dollar and the U.S. Government are too big to fail” They are not too big to fail. Yes, this would create a lot of pain but at some point foreign lenders will cut off the credit card. There is a point when creditors realize that they will never be repaid and it no longer makes sense to throw good money after bad. Of course, foreign governments can’t do this all at once without hurting themselves so they play a risky game of slowly and quietly diversifying out of dollars hoping not to spook others and create a stampede out of the dollar – hence, the steady dollar decline and relentless gold rise. This is hard to do safely and will likely fail as the dollar flight accelerates. China has been buying every resource company they can get their hands on which is another way of dumping/trading their dollars for these real assets (http://tinyurl.com/y8jby2z).

b.) “If the dollar fails the world will be thrust into an economic Dark Age therefore foreign governments will not let it happen.” In addition to the response in “a.” above, foreign governments must choose between some pain now or more pain later. As they diversify out of dollars and buy gold they hope to be the first ones out of the burning theater. It is their intent to offset dollar losses with gold gains. This will likely turn into a stampede. Yes, a Dark Ages will happen but the longer they wait the worse it will get.

c.) “Foreign governments must buy every dollar of U.S. Government debt otherwise they will be wiped out first.” Same responses as “a” and “b” above.  Also, they are going to be wiped out anyway so they might as well get rid of their dollars as fast as they can while they still can.

d.) “Demand for U.S. Debt is at an all-time high evidenced by low rates.” Yes and no. The demand is high but unsustainable for the reasons stated above. There is also substantial speculation that the Fed is already buying these treasuries (Quantitative Easing) through back door foreign intermediaries (Jim Willie: Systemic Crisis: audio interviews http://tinyurl.com/ydakvlw). Could this be one reason why they don’t want an audit?

5. Nick says: “Foreign Countries are taking coordinated steps to stabilize the dollar. China, Japan, Philippines, Middle East, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea.”

Response: This is mostly all talk. I’ve already shown above how several of these countries are slowly diversifying out of the dollar in favor of gold. What most countries fear is their currency strengthening against the dollar causing their exports to become expensive and “bad for business”. To combat this, they can either buy dollars or devalue their own currency. Many are simply choosing to devalue their currency. This causes their currencies to devalue against the one currency that cannot be devalued: Gold. Gold is resuming its supreme role as a currency (not just a commodity). Gold is the oldest form of currency and has been around since biblical times – longer than any other currency. (see “What is Money?” http://tinyurl.com/y8ay3y4).

6. Nick says: “M3 money supply is not growing, global liquidity and credit are collapsing…there is no freakin’ money.”

Response: Yes, M3 has slowed but this is only temporary. Here’s why. Banks’ excess reserves have exploded from 2 billion in July, ‘08 to 1.06 trillion today (Money Supply chart: [http://tinyurl.com/yfv54aq] and Dr. Reisman article: http://tinyurl.com/yfnv4rn). These excess reserves are funds that have not been lent out and have not created additional credit expansion. In my opinion, the reason is that the banks are still experiencing (and expecting) horrendous losses and are looking to restore their balance sheets. At some point their insolvency and inability to resume lending will frustrate the government (due to the continued cratering of the economy) and the banks will be nationalized. This will give the government, as the new owners, the ability to begin lending again which has the potential to increase the money supply by an additional $132 trillion! (see Reisman: http://tinyurl.com/yfnv4rn). Of course, the FED can be forced into QE beforehand if foreign governments dramatically slow their treasury purchases.

The lack of cash, or as Nick says “there is no freakin’ money”, is due to the incredible leverage before the crash. Instead of saving more, folks found it more profitable to invest most of their cash and borrow multiples on top of it. When the leveraged investments failed, their equity and cash holdings were wiped out.

Conclusion:

In dollar terms, if someone is short gold it means that they are long the dollar. I see no reason to have any confidence whatsoever in the dollar. I tell people to look at the dollar as the “common stock” of the USA – just like you would look at the stock of a corporation. When valuing a stock you would look at the management and balance sheet of the corporation to determine what you would pay for the the stock. When I apply this same analysis of the USA I conclude that the dollar is not a “stock” that I would want to own. Sure, the government can increase revenue because they have the power to tax but even a 100% tax is not enough to correct the problem (source: ShadowStats.com Hyperinflation Special Report: http://www.shadowstats.com/article/hyperinflation).

If you are still unsure as to which scenario to believe, it might make sense to put half of your assets in cash and the other half in gold.  Any drop in purchasing power in one would likely be offset by the increased purchasing power in the other and your original purchasing power will likely be preserved.

from the Associated Press (this is so important, I am putting up Sue Blevins’ full article):

Washington and New York – “There is no such thing as a little freedom,” said Walter Cronkite. “Either you are all free, or you are not free.”

Whether you’re for or against federal efforts to help people buy health insurance, you should know that the reform bill before the Senate would mandate a healthcare system that is definitely “not free.”

What most of us know about the Democratic bill is that it requires nearly all Americans to have health insurance. What most of us don’t know is that it requires us to buy a minimum level of insurance approved by the federal government, and forces health plans and providers to share our personal health information with the federal government and other entities.

If this bill becomes law, we could each be assigned a national beneficiary ID number or card (possibly an electronic device). And our personal health information will flow electronically to the US secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) – and many others – without our consent.

Sound farfetched? Buried in the Senate bill’s 2,074 pages are provisions that actually permit and foster such things. Freedom and privacy are often lost in the fine print – which is why we’ve been studying the Senate bill since it was released Nov. 19 to help uncover the facts. Here are five highly invasive provisions Americans should know:

1. Mandatory insurance
Bill text: “Sec. 1501. Requirement to Maintain Minimum Essential Coverage…. An applicable individual shall for each month beginning after 2013 ensure that the individual, and any dependent of the individual who is an applicable individual, is covered under minimum essential coverage for such month.”

Translation: Uncle Sam will now serve as your national insurance agent and force you to buy “minimum essential coverage” – or else you’ll have to pay an annual fine.

However, what Congress considers “minimum essential coverage” and “essential health benefits requirements” includes comprehensive coverage that many neither need nor want. Plus, those who prefer to carry catastrophic-only coverage won’t have a free range of options for such coverage.

Bottom line: In a free society, the government should not force citizens to buy any product nor should the government mandate citizens’ level of health-insurance coverage.

Rather than imposing penalties to coerce people into government-sanctioned health insurance, Congress should offer incentives to help those who wish to buy insurance but find it unaffordable.

Congress could allow everyone to deduct the full cost of health insurance (and provide tax credits for those with no tax liability), while offering assistance to those who can’t afford insurance and subsidize high-risk pools for those with preexisting conditions.

Helping those in need is a much better way to reform our nation’s healthcare system than overhauling the entire system and putting Big Brother in charge of deciding what is acceptable coverage for nearly every American.

2. Electronic data exchanges
Bill text: “Sec. 1104. Administrative Simplification…. (h) Compliance. – (1) Health Plan Certification. – (A) Eligibility for a Health Plan, Health Claim Status, Electronic Funds Transfers, Health Care Payment and Remittance Advice. – Not later than December 31, 2013, a health plan shall file a statement with the Secretary, in such form as the Secretary may require, certifying that the data and information systems for such plan are in compliance with any applicable standards (as described under paragraph (7) of section 1171) and associated operating rules (as described under paragraph (9) of such section) for electronic funds transfers, eligibility for a health plan, health claim status, and health care payment and remittance advice, respectively.”

Translation: Requiring everyone to buy federally sanctioned health insurance, and then forcing qualified plans to comply with Administrative Simplification requirements, provides the government and health industry with power they would not be able to exercise in a free market.

Administrative Simplification rules are a product of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. They lay the foundation for a nationally linked database of personal health information. A federal “Nationwide Health Information Network” (NHIN) is well under way in the United States, without assurances that individuals will control their personal health data.

Bottom line: Americans should be able to contract privately with the insurance companies of their choice. Patients should be able to decide whether to have electronic or paper medical records, and not have the government require electronic records, which are then included in a nationally linked database.

3. Real-time health and financial data
Bill text: “Sec. 1104. Administrative Simplification…. (4) Requirements for Financial and Administrative Transactions. – (A) In General. – The standards and associated operating rules adopted by the Secretary shall – (i) to the extent feasible and appropriate, enable determination of an individual’s eligibility and financial responsibility for specific services prior to or at the point of care…. (i) Eligibility for a Health Plan and Health Claims Status. – The set of operating rules for eligibility for a health plan and health claim status transactions shall be adopted not later than July 1, 2011, in a manner ensuring that such operating rules are effective not later than January 1, 2013, and may allow for the use of a machine readable identification card.”

Translation: Administrative Simplification rules are being expanded to gather real-time financial and health data on individuals through a tracking ID, possibly a “machine readable” ID card (electronic device).

Bottom line: Moving forward with real-time data collection without an ethical patient consent provision means everyone loses their health-privacy rights. Congress needs to enact strong patient consent provisions for all health data, especially data collected “real-time.”

4. Health data network
Bill text: “Sec. 6301. Patient-Centered Outcomes Research.… (f) Building Data for Research. – The Secretary shall provide for the coordination of relevant Federal health programs to build data capacity for comparative clinical effectiveness research, including the development and use of clinical registries and health outcomes research data networks, in order to develop and maintain a comprehensive, interoperable data network to collect, link, and analyze data on outcomes and effectiveness from multiple sources, including electronic health records.”

Translation: Your personal health information may soon be studied by government scientists. Washington is creating a new research center that plans to use patients’ electronic health records for conducting research and creating disease registries. The data network is comprehensive and includes use of electronic health records.

Bottom line: Federal funds should not be used to collect data electronically and conduct research on patients’ personal health information without their consent.

5. Personal health information
Bill text: “Sec. 6301. Patient-Centered Outcomes Research…. (B) Use of Data. – The [Patient-Centered Outcomes Research] Institute shall only use data provided to the Institute under subparagraph (A) in accordance with laws and regulations governing the release and use of such data, including applicable confidentiality and privacy standards.”

Translation: Think your health privacy is protected? It’s not. This language refers to “applicable confidentiality and privacy standards,” but HIPAA’s so-called privacy law permits individuals’ personal health information to be exchanged – for many broad purposes – without patients’ consent (See 45 CFR Subtitle A, Subpart E – Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information; section 164.502(a)(1)(ii) “Permitted uses and disclosures”).

Bottom line: Trust is a must for ensuring quality healthcare. Thus, as stated above, Congress needs to pass a strong, ethical patient consent law that ensures patients have control over the flow of their personal health information.

What about the consent of the governed?
All told, the national mandatory health-insurance bill puts the federal government in charge of individuals’ insurance choices and data privacy. This philosophy of governing is the opposite of America’s founding principle: consent of the governed.

Without health freedom and privacy rights, Congress is opening the door for many wrongs to be committed – all in the name of covering the uninsured.

Sue Blevins is president of the Institute for Health Freedom in Washington. Robin Kaigh is an attorney and medical-privacy advocate in New York.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20091123/cm_csm/yblevins

When I started this Blog it was my desire to have a portal where people of similar concerns could share their ideas.  I am pleased that I am receiving more input from readers as the Blog gains traction.

Today I received an entry from someone I know from the other end of the country who I have a great deal of respect for.  The thought-provoking ideas behind this brief essay posted below shows that the West Coast is not entirely the Left-Coast.  As you read this piece, keep in mind that Hitler and Mussolini brought their countries more than the destruction of war.  They also begot an economic system and that is what is being compared below.

Jack, thanks for sharing your ideas.  Your message is clear and concise and requires no comment from me.  Steve

*******

November 23, 2009

Free Markets ― Hitler Style

It is obvious that Barack Obama’s idea of the free market is shockingly close to that of Hitler and Mussolini.  Obama is leading us into the fascist version of socialism with his complex interlocking of government and big business.  He is making one deal after another, backed up with the heavy hammer of government financial subsidy.  This is a dangerous trend especially when linked with the massive takeover of the health insurance industry which is soon to follow.

Obama either has no idea whatsoever of the way capitalism should work, or thinks that capitalism even at its best, is a bad system.  I fear the latter.

The only problem with our free enterprise system is that it is not free enough.  Free enterprise, combined with the rule of law, has made this country great.  Obama seems intent on taking us into the third world.  I wonder how his supporters on the communist left like the idea of being pushed into the fascist left?  Well, since China and Russia are both going in that direction, maybe our leftists like it just fine!

Jack Bethards

Burqa Barbie

I received this as a chain letter email – Here’s a copy of the recent Pravda article about the disappearance of American capitalism. This is a Russian newspaper writing about what seems obvious to most of the world; yet, this country seems to be blindsided to it. The irony of this article appearing in the English edition of Pravda (Russian State Newspaper) defies description. - Bob Akins

Why so socialist?

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America .

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America ’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama’s command that GM’s (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of “pure” free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a “bold” move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK ’s Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our “wise” Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper…but a “freeman” whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set “fair” maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.
The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Stanislav Mishin© 1999-2009. WWW.PRAVDA.Ru. When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA.Ru should be made.

Snopes says: The item referenced above is indeed taken from the text of an editorial entitled “American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper” by Stanislav Mishin, which was published by the Russian-language news site on 27 April 2009.

To read article from Pravda’s English news site, use this link: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-0/

Here’s a copy of the recent Pravda article about the disappearance of American capitalism. This is a Russian newspaper writing about what seems obvious to most of the world; yet, this country seems to be blindsided to it. The irony of this article appearing in the English edition of Pravda (Russian State Newspaper) defies description.

The NY Times reports on the current global land grab: the buying up of farm land in impoverished nations by wealthy corporations and governments at discount prices. The article correctly focuses on the politics of land and hunger. The problem is, all the examples are of Arab private investors’ and governments’ purchasing land (with the promise of higher-yield technologies and more jobs) in Africa. The only reference to Brazil is contained in the outrageous statements by Paul Collier:

Last fall, Paul Collier of Oxford University, an influential voice on issues of world poverty, published a provocative article in Foreign Affairs in which he argued that a “middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture” has clouded the African development debate with “romanticism.” Approvingly citing the example of Brazil — where masses of indigenous landholders were displaced in favor of large-scale farms — Collier concluded that “to ignore commercial agriculture as a force for rural development and enhanced food supply is surely ideological.”

Equally outrageous are the views expressed by Susan Payne, the chief executive of Emergent Asset Management:

“Africa is the final frontier,” Payne told me after the conference. “It’s the one continent that remains relatively unexploited.” Emergent’s African Agricultural Land Fund, started last year, is investing several hundred million dollars into commercial farms around the continent. Africa may be known for decrepit infrastructure and corrupt governments — problems that are being steadily alleviated, Payne argues — but land and labor come so cheaply there that she calculates the risks are worthwhile.

So, here we have 2 so-called experts, one arguing that the land grab in Brazil has been a positive force for rural development, the other arguing that Africa has not yet been exploited. There’s no mention of the local communities and small landholding peasants that are being expropriated, with the only prospect for displaced peoples to either migrate to cities or stay on as cheap proletarian labor for agroindustrial enterprises. And no mention that this is the second “scramble for Africa,” that colonialism and postcolonialism have had the effect of creating  cheap land and labor.

Last year, Jacques Diouf, the head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, warned

that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of “neo-colonialism”, with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

Websites tracking these land deals include the international land coalition and GRAIN. A good background report, “The Great Land Grab: Rush for World’s Farmland Threatens Food Security for the Poor,” is available from the Oakland Institute.

Never mind, beyond the organized historical joy and happiness, Sustainche by following the news and trying to read newspapers also identifies tremendous problems in the land he arrived now. Just to mention the most obvious problems at the moment: Schweinche flue (the pharmacy industry apparently found a pleasant environment to organize an economically blooming pandemic event), a new Federal Government hasn’t find its compass yet and the state debts have reached the astronomic magnitude of 1.6 Trillion Euro. Just for visualization: Sustainche found a very interesting calculation that 1.6 Trillion Euro composed of 500-€ banknotes form a tower as high as about 320 kilometres. “Unbelievable”, Sustainche is speechless. 

There can be no doubt that money plays a major role in this society. No matter what you are and what you do: money is most important. Concordantly, people work to have money for enjoying a good life … or whatever they understand as to be a good life. To work is most important ! Since in fact quite some time, however, and in particular thanks to dramatically increased efficiency of production, many citizens became unemployed – many of them for years. Unemployment of course is a tragic situation, both economically and socially for any member of a society, which in large defines itself by working. This in particular refers to the génération précaire ? These youngsters even accept a tenth internship without adequate payment, just to have warm meals and being able to declare that they work. Clear: Everything needs to have its order ! Sustainche is puzzled to notice something like this. He, Polar Bear Sustainche himself neither has money nor is he working in the traditional sense of the meaning. And, he has not the impression that it is HIS path just to function like a single ant in an ant colony. Sustainche is a mammal – although not a human mammal – and he is self confident enough to show his big heart. 

It might be that it is because of all these problems that Sustainche feels – although this is only his first impression – that the 82 million people in his now surrounding environment seem to have a problem with real joy of life. Grey weather might create grey souls. “Hmmm … this is really strange”, Sustainche thinks, “Macedonia also has tremendous problems, but since the sun is shining more, people seem to be happier.” Sustainche wants to think more about his observation and perhaps it’s simply to wait until spring time for final conclusions. 

‘Fine Sustainche’, Sustainche hears his blog readers say, ‘but you still haven’t told us where you arrived now’. Well, Sustainche thought that his descriptions were good enough. The country is called Germany … and Sustainche wonders what he should do here in terms of Sustainable Development … . Perhaps it is a good idea to start reading the National Strategy for Sustainable Development

Whilst legislation is vital to achieve meaningful change in society, it is important to not get carried away with legalisation for legislation sake. This is illustrated by the inclusion in the Queen’s speech, of the bill that sets out to eradicate child poverty by 2020. Whilst it would be amazing if the government achieved this, I think it is pretty evident that it would be an almighty task to rid ALL child poverty by 2020. There are several problems that I see that would prevent such a target being fulfilled.

For one, what poverty are you talking about? Well, by this I mean, do you mean absolute poverty? Relative poverty? Lifestyle poverty? You get the point. Everyone has different definitions of poverty, to me, absolute poverty is the most pressing concern, but to working class/middle class aspiring to those above them, they may consider themselves to be in poverty when they can’t afford the same clothe lines as others. Thus, for one, it is important to emphasise the definition of poverty that is being used when discussing poverty legislation.

Even if the poverty definition is firmly stated, another problem with enshrining the commitment into law is that it could take attention away from the actual policy details that will be used to attempt to eradicate poverty. What meaningful policies were discussed in the Queen’s speech that really get to grips with child poverty? There needs to be less talk and more action, the more talk occurs around a law that seems to offer all the answer to solving poverty, the less attention is spent on considering real policy options that will help those in the deepest inequality.

Another inherent problem with the eradication of poverty being a law is that we operate within a system that is inherently unequal. How can we aspire to eradicate poverty by 2020 when the capitalist system feeds off class divisions and the power of  one group over another? I think this is where we have to recognise the importance of Karl Marx as a theorist, he provided powerful insights into the structure of capitalism and helps show how poverty is needed in order for the capitalist system to be maintained.

Another influential theorist who is important to bear in mind when discussing poverty is Max Weber. He did not talk about poverty per se, however, his theory of rationalisation can be clearly related to the legislation of eradicating poverty by 2020. Weber talks about how rationalisation will result in targets becoming ends in themselves, so the actual values, such as tackling poverty itself, are lost in the process of an increased obsession with ends.

So what happens if the government does not fulfil its commitment? Will they be liable to the courts? Of course they wont. This is just a token. It is a distraction from the mass level of poverty in society. What about the poverty all around the world? We can’t just set targets like this and expect it to be work done, there needs to be greater consideration of the wide range and level of poverty. Thus, I feel that whilst aiming to reduce child poverty is a good thing, to say you will eradicate it and then enshrine this belief in law seems to be a little absurd. I would be more than happy to eat my words in 2020 but I very much doubt I will have to, due to the reasons stated above.

In this evening’s seminar on Walter Benjamin, Dr. Tracey Potts led a discussion – in a fittingly fragmentary, Benjaminian way – on the thought, methods, and intentions of the late Frankfurt School thinker. While many things are swirling around in my mind regarding Benjamin’s critique of capitalist modernity, things to which hopefully I can return at some later date, at the moment my thoughts are directed toward educational models and practices in the West – primarily the US and UK.

My girlfriend is doing research at the moment on dyslexia and other related “educational disabilities.” One of the primary areas of concentration in her study has been on the question, “Is dyslexia a myth?” Within this paradigm of thought, the general claim is that dyslexia is not a biological, hereditary disorder of the brain. Rather there are phonological and social factors that have led to the appearance of an educational disconnect that we have subsequently labeled “dyslexia.” Simply stated: there are phonological defects imbedded within the English language itself that have caused the difficulties that we identify as dyslexia. Supporters claim that in non-English speaking countries (even in all non-Latin based linguistic models) there are significantly fewer cases of dyslexia and in many cases dyslexia is completely obsolete.

While her research, and thus my secondary knowledge of her research, is still in its infantile stages the above ideas resonate well with thoughts that I have had regarding the “attention-deficient” West as well as with Benjamin’s work on the effects of capitalist modernity, in particular his work on advertising and technological reproduction, on the “masses.” One of his primary contentions is that because of its emphasis on that which is new and on the importance of shock-value capitalist modernity has created a milieu of attention deficiency, which has consequently ruptured any linear model of thought en toto and – more pertinently for this entry – reading in particular. Thus, because we are able to bring to ourselves any aesthetic object at any given time, which we would otherwise only get to experience on rare occasion, we are a people who are overloaded by aestheticism. One of the resultant outcomes is that we are a people who always need to be shocked by that which is new. This in return creates a pathos of anaesthetisation towards that which is familiar, old hat. Therefore, the cycle of needing more shocking commodities is instigated, to which of course capitalist corporations are willing to cater and our insatiable appetites are ever-ready to consume.

In the classroom, or simply at the educational level as such, this attention problem is also clearly seen. Not only has there been a rise in children labeled as ADD, ADHD, Dyslexic, Dyspraxic, etc., but there has also been an increase in placing said children into “special needs” environments that can better serve their “disabilities.” Something that Kim (better to refer to her by her name than in the possessive form ) has thus been considering in light of her research (on the brain, psychological development, classroom models, and educational theories) is whether our entire educational systems needs massive – and I repeat MASSIVE – reform. If we are to therefore take Benjamin’s critique of capitalist modernity seriously, then perhaps there are some significant descriptive elements in his works that could aid us in such a task.

The main question I’m really driving at is thus: if Benjamin is correct (and of course the lovely Kim) that capitalist modernity has created an attention deficient culture, then what type(s) of educational model(s) will effectively work for persons contained therein? Of corse, there will be some conservatives who will hate the idea of “catering to the masses.” And in one sense, I can sympathize – in a very little sense. However, I also recognize that the existent models of education were developed a posteriori, based on the personae of the people who developed them. Thus, in one sense, our institutions always mimic society. However, is there a sense in which a dialectical model of education could be proposed, one that would both allow the masses to inform its structure and at the same time have a profound respect for the past and its structure, while pursuing a common goal of all educators and thus providing better education for the maximum amount of people? I think it’s possible… now I just have to wait until Kim comes home from class so I can pitch my thoughts to her so SHE can change the world!

It's Crisis Time!

CORPORATE POWER AND OWNERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I would like to announce the recent publication of my new book:

Corporate Power and Ownership in Contemporary Capitalism:
The Politics of Resistance and Domination (London: Routledge, 2009)

For more information see URL: http://www.routledge.com/9780415467889

Blurb:
Despite the influence corporations wield over all aspects of everyday life, there has been a remarkable absence of critical inquiry into the social constitution of this power. In analysing the complex relationship between corporate power and the widespread phenomenon of share ownership, this book seeks to map and define the nature of resistance and domination in contemporary capitalism.

Drawing on a Marxist-informed framework, this book reconnects the social constitution of corporate power and changing forms of shareholder activism. In contrast to other texts that deal with corporate governance, this study examines a diverse and comprehensive set of themes, from socially responsible investing to labour-led shareholder activism and its limitations. Through this ambitious and critical study, author Susanne Soederberg demonstrates how the corporate governance doctrine represents an inherent feature of neoliberal rule, effectively disembedding and depoliticising relations of domination and resistance from the wider power and paradoxes of capitalism.

Examining corporate governance and shareholder activism in a number of different contexts that include the United States and the global South, this important book will be of interest to students and scholars of international political economy, international relations and development studies. It will also be of relevance to a wider range of disciplines including finance, economics, and business and management studies.

“Soederberg should be thanked for revealing the elephant in the room – that corporations, along with their governance, power, ownership and management, are profoundly political, yet undemocratic. Through careful analysis, wide-ranging research and elegant writing she deconstructs comforting myths and shows us the true and unsettling politics and impacts of corporations in the world today. A must read – and also a good read – for anyone seeking true understanding of current economic, social and environmental upheavals.” — Joel Bakan, Professor of Law, University of British Columbia, Canada, and author/filmmaker of The Corporation

“In a capitalism deep into its second major crisis in 75 years, Soederberg’s book is very welcome. It critically examines the real (as opposed to the ideologically glossed) mechanisms enabling the crisis-producing decisions of corporate boards of directors. She performs a valuable deconstruction of the mythologies of mainstream ‘corporate governance’ literature.” — Richard D. Wolff, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts and the New School University, New York

“This book presents a much-needed and powerful critique of the ‘corporate governance doctrine’ that was promoted both by the US state and by dominant capitalist interests in many societies to underpin the priority given to ’shareholder value’, to take advantage of workers’ pension funds, and to direct labour and social movement challenges to corporate decisions into what Soederberg appropriately calls the ‘marketization of resistance’. As empirically rich as it is theoretically strong, this is another important contribution by one of the most creative political economy scholars writing today.’ — Leo Panitch, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science, York University, Toronto

Cheers,
Susanne
Susanne Soederberg, DPhil
Canada Research Chair (Global Political Economy)
Associate Professor in Global Development Studies and Political Studies
Mackintosh-Corry, Room A-406
Queen’s University
Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 Canada
Tel: 613.533.6000 x 78391
Fax: 613.533.2986
Email: soederberg@queensu.ca
Homepage: http://www.queensu.ca/devs/faculty/ProfileSoederberg.html

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

The Business Insider, September 30, 2009

U.S. Income Inequality Is Frightening–And Much Worse Than We Thought

Posted using ShareThis

The newest economic inequality numbers, which ran counter to the expectations of almost all experts, are frightening.

The Associated Press released an article titled, US income gap widens as poor take hit in recession. The opening paragraph of the article, based on recent census data, reads:

The recession has hit middle-income and poor families hardest, widening the economic gap between the richest and poorest Americans as rippling job layoffs ravaged household budgets.

The article, which then discussed the Census statistics that led to this conclusion, failed to mention that the Census Bureau considered the differences between 2007 and 2008, with regard to economic inequality,statistically insignificant.

But, whether the Census Data shows a meaningful increase, or not. is irrelevant. The Census Data reports that, contrary to the almost universal expectations of economists, economic inequality most likely did not decrease in 2008. Experts had anticipated that the declines in income of the rich would lead to a reversal in this groups ever–widening share of our national income. Instead, the Census reported that the 2008 income losses by the top 10% of Americans were offset by larger losses among middle class and poorer Americans.

MIT economist Simon Johnston appears to have been one notable exception to this expectation of a shrinking income gap.

Let’s review what we know about the measurement of income inequality before discussing the disturbing implications of this newest government report.

About two weeks ago, I critiqued a Sept 10, 2009 front page story in the Wall Street Journal titled, Income Gap Shrinks in Slump at the Expense of the Wealthy. My critique had three central points:

First, economists have, with few exceptions, agreed that Census Data is inappropriate for measuring income inequality because it consistently understates the income of the wealthiest families. To protect the privacy of reporting individuals, the Census “top-codes” income, which means that no one is ever recorded as making more than about $1.1 million in a single year. So, oil traders, hedge fund executives and anyone else at the super-high end of the income strata who might earn $100, $50 or $5 million in a single year, always earn $1.1 million or less in this Census Data. In addition, the Census Data does not include capital gains income, which is typically a large source of income for the wealthiest Americans.

Two economists, Professors Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, developed a method for measuring income inequality using IRS data, which avoided the problems inherent in using Census Data. This data was recently updated in response to the IRS release of 2007 information, and found that: Economic inequality in 2006 was, by some measures at the highest levels, ever found in the data available for the past 95 years. In 2007, these same measure showed a further jump further bringing America to it it’s highest levels of economic inequality in recorded history.

As a consequence of Census top-coding and the lack of capital gains data, the Saez-Piketty methodology has consistently shown that the Census substantially understates the extent of economic inequality in the nation. This means that, there is a real possibility that the the new Census Data understated the extent to which income inequality grew in 2008, and that the relative losses of the wealthiest families, versus less fortunate Americans, will be more than statistically insignificant.

It is possible that losses in reported capital income by the wealthiest Americans, if captured by the Saez-Piketty methodology, will be larger than the the incomes above $1.1 million that were not reported and offset the Census findings, leading as economists anticipated to a decline in the share of income going to the rich. However, I view this as unlikely. In considering this possibility, its important to remember that the IRS works on reported income gains, not gains which were never captured as taxable income. For income reporting purposes, the question is not whether the market value of capital assets declined but whether they were sold at an actual loss from their purchase price.

We will not know the answer to this question until July or August 2010, but in weighing the available evidence my working hypothesis is that as demonstrated by this new Census Report, income inequality did not decrease from 2008 to 2007.

Second, the original Journal article expressed a strong expectation that, as a result of the Great Recession, the ongoing growth of income inequality would decline substantially through 201o. My critique indicated that this was “far from clear.” The conventional economic wisdom, based on historical data, is that income inequality decreases, at least temporarily, as the richest Americans lose income faster than less-well-off Americans during a downturn. In contrast, this new data suggests that the dangerous cycle toward increasing income at the top of America has become even more self-reinforcing than previously recognized. We are now at the point where the pure market forces, which many economists told us would eliminate this issue, are no longer effective.

Third, the Journal article implied that the decrease in economic inequality it incorrectly predicted might be the start of a long-term trend. Instead, I demonstrated that, even if income inequality did decline in 2008 and 2009, it would almost certainly be “temporary.” The historical evidence shows that economic inequality frequently declines in a downturn, in the absence of strong government action, but that it will almost inevitably rebound and continue its march forward.

Now, let’s return to our main point:

Early next week, my new book It Could Happen Here will be released by HarperCollins. The book is an in-depth look , based on a historical analysis, of the implications of our historically high levels of economic inequality for the nation’s ultimate, long-term political stability. As economic inequality grows, nations invariably become increasingly politically unstable: Should we complacently believe that America will be different?

A central conclusion of the book is that once economic inequality reaches a self-reinforcing cycle it is halted only by inevitably controversial, hard-fought, bitterly opposed government action. Senator Jim Webb encapsulated this idea, when he wrote in his book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming A Fair and Just America:

“No aristocracy in history has decided to give up any portion of its power willingly.”

In 1928, economic inequality was near today’s levels. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in reversing the trend toward the continuing concentration of wealth, but it was a turbulent battle. In 1936, while campaigning for his second term and speaking at Madison Square Garden, FDR told the crowd:

“Never before in all our history have these forces [Organized Money] been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said, wait a minute, I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”

In FDR’s era and in our own, money brings power: both explicitly and implicitly, in hundreds of different ways, both large and small. Today, the wealthiest Americans, together with a number of financial and corporate interests that act on their behalf, protect their ever-increasing influence through activities that include, among others, lobbying, supplying expertise to the councils of government, casual conversation at dinner parties, the potential for jobs after government service, the power to run media advertisements that influence public opinion. Indeed, MIT economist Simon Johnston, writing in The Atlantic asserted that the U.S. is now run by an oligarchy:

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated [ from 1983 to 2007] gave bankers enormous political weight–a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man) … Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

The new inequality data suggests that the potential problems for the nation associated with the concentration of wealth and power are even more severe than previously recognized. Two weeks ago, Iwrote that “Once income concentration becomes a reinforcing cycle of the kind we are witnessing, it is never stopped by pure market forces.” This mechanism is now in full swing. The market forces associated with the Great Recession, which many economist had expected to stem the growing, corrosive gap between the rich and the poor, appear to have become ineffective.

The great strength of American democracy has always been its capacity for self-correction. However, Robert Dahl, the eminent political scientist, recognized that political power fueled by wealth may ultimately neutralize this central aspect of our democracy. In his 2006 book, On Political Equality, Dahl wrote:

As numerous studies have shown, inequalities in income and wealth are likely to produce other inequalities..

The unequal accumulation of political resources points to an ominous possibility: political inequalities may be ratcheted up, so to speak, to a level from which they cannot be ratcheted down. The cumulative advantages in power, influence, and authority of the more privileged strata may become so great that even if less privileged Americans compose a majority of citizens they are simply unable, and perhaps even unwilling, to make the effort it would require to overcome the forces of inequality arrayed against them.

In the chapter following this quote, Dahl notes “that we should not assume this future is inevitable.” He’s right. But, was clearly concerned. Three years late, we should be even more concerned.

Many current Executive Branch initiatives deserve our support and praise: However, nothing proposed to date will effectively halt growing economic inequality, and its corrosive impact on our economy and the long-term future of the nation. (In a future post, I will explicitly discuss the proposed regulatory reform of the financial sector.)

My analysis in It Could Happen Here concludes that without a vibrant middle class, the the American democracy as we know it, is not sustainable. Before the Great Recession, the middle class was in far worse shape than was generally acknowledged. In an economy with a record number of job seekers for every available job, the potential for nearly one-half of all home mortgages to be underwater, and increasing foreclosures, the collapse of the middle class will accelerate. With each job loss and each foreclosure, another family becomes a member of the former middle class.

America has never been a society sharply divided between have’s and have not’s. Unfortunately, this new data says to me we continue to head in that direction. Economists assumed that the Great Recession would be a circuit breaker that would halt this advance, at least temporarily. It did not.

With no new legislation, it appears we are potentially on course for 13 million foreclosures, almost one in every four mortgages in the nation, from the end of 2008 through 2014. Do we really believe that we can turn such huge numbers of Americans out of their homes with no consequences for the health of our system of governance? Could our democracy survive a transformation into a nation composed principally of a privileged upper class and an underclass which struggles from paycheck to paycheck and lacks basic economic security?

We will only stop the growth of economic inequality if the President and the Congress are ready to fight in the style of Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was a divider not a conciliator. Before World War II, he fought an all-out war at home. Today, “There’s class warfare, all right,” as Warren Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

I fervently hoped that we have not passed the point of no return, described by Professor Dahl. The recent news shows we are one step further on this road. If we continue down it, our nation may be on the path to becoming a House divided against itself, which ultimately cannot stand.

Local Government

Spartanburg County to spend more than $80,000 for tourism consultants

http://www.goupstate.com/article/20091123/ARTICLES/911231007/1083/ARTICLES?Title=Spartanburg-County-looks-at-tourism-action-plan

Newspaper demands more fiscal accountability in Oconee County

http://www.upstatetoday.com/news/2009/nov/21/more-fiscal-accountability-needed/?opinion

Many Charleston County students are far behind in reading when they enter high school

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2009/nov/22/some-likely-graduates-lack-reading-skills/

Federal Stimulus Watch

Stimulus funds used to hire reading specialists in Charleston schools

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2009/nov/23/specialists-work-to-raise-reading-skills/

Simpsonville builds new walkway on Main Street with stimulus funds

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20091123/NEWS/911230311/1004/NEWS01/State-expands-Simpsonville-sidewalk-project

Fountain Inn receives $21,000 in stimulus funds to hire traffic officer

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20091123/NEWS/911230312/1004/NEWS01/Grants-promote-traffic-safety-in-Fountain-Inn

Family Health Centers Inc. in Orangeburg will fund new building and equipment with $1.18 million in stimulus funds

http://www.thetandd.com/articles/2009/11/23/news/doc4b073e745fca8388876272.txt

Stimulus money provides key funding for Sandy Island ferry project

http://www.gtowntimes.com/local/Key-funding-approved-for-Sandy-Island-ferry-service

Are We Watching a Failed Presidency?

For the past couple of months I have worried about the risks of a failed presidency. No one should want this, regardless of party affiliation. It is harmful and dangerous to our economy and country. However, it appears obvious to me that the royal regime known as Obama has ended.
 
Seth Leibsohn writing in the National Review summarized it this way:
 
“This is reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter years – the last time the U.S. was seen as weak – unable to move and coax other countries, unable to reassure dependent allies, unable to have the respect of the world and, of course, unable to move the mullocracy of Iran.”
 
Even the liberal media are beginning to question the effectiveness of  the President. The media, in full Camelot mode, are slow to react and often lag what the populace started to recognize months ago.
 
ALSO:
 
Rush Limbaugh: More Obama Fail: Another Week, Another Half a Million Out of Work
 
Angry Congress Lashes Out at Obama
 
Politico: Obama’s Asian Trip Was a Failure
 
Midterms: Obama ‘Beyond Radioactive’

Read The Full Article

I wish the government would stop making feeble attempts to patch up a sick system. Let the old institutions die, and maybe we’ll be forced to come up with creative new ways to live. If technology has made everything faster and easier, I don’t understand why I still have to sit at a desk all day. Unless it’s to let my spine warp, my arteries harden, and my tunnels carpal so that I’m forced to spend money on health care. That must be it. Not everyone dreams of having a marriage, a mortgage, a baby and a car. Some days I want nothing more than fresh air. I want to walk barefoot through a forest and spear a fish for dinner. I want to be so grateful for each new day that I’m up to watch the sun rise. I have civilization sickness.

Sadly, I missed a rare opportunity to slip off the grid. Years ago, I was on Greyhound from San Francisco to Chattanooga and met a Blackfoot Indian chief returning from a ceremony in Utah. He was carrying the skull of a buffalo wrapped in a sheet, and explained that he had just performed a ceremony in which the enormous skull was hooked to his back on chains while he pulled it around in a Utah desert. It was a ritual of sacrifice, an offering of flesh which is the only thing one can really own. He told me about his home in Missouri, where he had several breeder wives working to repopulate his tribe. I told him I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but that I often felt pulled toward Tennessee. He said he knew of some kind of commune there started by a guy named Sun Frog. I never did knock on Sun Frog’s door. I was too shy, and besides, I felt like I had done the communal living thing with my anarchist friends in SF. Group showers aren’t for me.

Two weeks later, I found myself in Alaska, and while I was moved by it’s wild beauty, I still found myself needing the money that came with sitting at a desk for eight hours straight. I’m caught in some hideous limbo between hating the dull routines of society but not being brave enough to be a full-time wild animal. If humans are the bridge between nature and spirit, what is the point of business? Why trade time for imaginary dollars and store the data on a plastic card? How many years before I figure out how to live in this world?

Anyway, if you run into a guy named Yellow Hand and he’s lugging a malodorous skull, tell him to email me.

The deluge of toxic assets that swamped the U. S. economy left in its wake curious memes. As citizens come to grips with “negative equity” and a “jobless recovery,” a new iteration of capitalism is getting under way, one complete with a meme of its own. Welcome to the age of “immaterial labor,” in which unwitting proles do the work of nations simply by updating their Facebook pages.

When the big banks began to fail last fall, we began to hear a lot about “toxic assets” that had “infected” balance sheets, threatening to metastasize throughout the entire body economic at any moment. The main problem with these assets — byzantine derivatives and structured financial products that came in a blizzard of acronyms — was that no one, not even the mathematics whiz kids investment firms lured away from MIT, knew how to value them.

These  “exotic instruments” could be priced theoretically with mathematical models, like the Black Scholes formula, the Value-at-Risk model and the Gaussian copula function (all of which have since come under fire for being fundamentally, catastrophically wrong), but they were only tenuously connected to underlying tangible assets: homes, corporate debt, insurance against such debt. At the time, as long as the shadow banking system was thriving and there appeared to be a functioning market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit-default swaps (not to mention subprime mortgages and oversize real estate properties), one could feel comfortable with pricing them. And though these complicated instruments were diced into tranches and contingent on various credit flows, payment streams, and fees, everyone believed they had reduced the risk (the high level of which was, somewhat contradictorily, the explanation for the lucrative yields that made them so desirable as investments) rather than merely masking it.

But in the fall of 2008, the market in these sorts of securities dried up, and the explanations that once justified being heavily invested in them quickly became unconvincing, as various counterparties began to go bankrupt. Assets that had seemed nebulously but stolidly valuable were suddenly valueless. The financial press was suffused with panicked editorials: Were assets you couldn’t price in fact worthless for all intents and purposes? Had these instruments suddenly become mountains of Monopoly money? Had our economy been suddenly revealed as being based entirely on speculation, that it was as Keynes had feared, nothing more than the “by-product of the activities of a casino.”

Wealth destruction found wide birth for its peculiar creativity; credit all but dried up as banks refused to lend to one another. Trading partners wanted only collateral they could trust — cash on the barrel head — which the Fed’s bailouts eventually had to provide. So banks were clearly in crisis, but what sort of crisis was this? Was it a liquidity crisis, in which assets had “real” value that was merely frozen by market inactivity, or was it a solvency crisis, in which the assets banks were counting on to meet their obligations turned out to be worthless?

But once we start asking what financial assets are “really” worth, it’s hard to know when to stop. When asset values seem to have become completely unmoored from what were assumed to be underlying fundamentals, the whole idea of “fundamentals” starts to be meaningless and ceases to give comfort. Maybe nothing is fundamental, fixed. Given the fluctuation of currencies, is money “really” worth anything? And when buffeted by threats of inflation and deflation and volatile market swings, how can anyone feel secure about their savings? Should we be laying in gold bars beneath our floorboards if we truly want to preserve our precious capital?

Consider the liquidity–solvency question further: the logic behind the competing explanations seems incompatible. Solvency presumes a fixed value that has ontological stability; liquidity presumes assets are valuable only when circulating. This calls to mind Chuck Prince’s immortal statement while CEO of Citibank in June 2007: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” The “music” was the tune of the real estate bubble inflating; the “dance” was reckless participation in the affected markets, and we’re still sorting out the “things” that have indeed become “complicated.”

If financial assets have value only when they are circulating, can we ever really possess value, or is it an abstraction, an illusion we chase? Value itself begins to seem like a metaphor, impossible to pin down. In The Limits to Capital David Harvey extrapolates from Marx to argue that value is not “a fixed metric for describing an unstable world, but an unstable, uncertain and ambivalent measure that reflects the inherent contradictions of capitalism.” Liquidity and solvency is one of those contradictions, pointing to the fundamental insecurity of capital, which must be able to move in order to retain the same value on a balance sheet. That is to say, capital cannot remain idle; it begins to depreciate if it can’t attach itself to a profitable investment opportunity.

In Capital Marx linked this to the capitalists’ compulsion, under the pressures of competition, to accumulate! accumulate!

The development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by individual capitalists as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot except by means of progressive accumulation.

As Harvey points out, Marx believed this would lead to “production for production’s sake,” as investment opportunities began to address more and more specious social needs. Eventually there is more capital than profitable places to invest it, prompting the dilemma of, as Marx puts it in the third volume of Capital, “unemployed capital at one pole and unemployed worker population at the other.” This evokes our current situation: unemployment continues to grow despite interest rates set at the zero bound.

Harvey argues that this failure betokens a crisis in the concept of value: “An analysis of the internal contradictions of capitalism shows a perpetual tendency to produce ‘nonvalues,’ to waste labor power by either not employing it or by using it to embody labor in commodities that cannot fulfill social wants and needs as these are structured under the social relations of capitalism.” The economy produces unwanted goods or capacity begins to go idle as entrepreneurs struggle to identify profitable pursuits. Capital must channeled elsewhere to keep moving.

Hustle and flow: bankers promote healthy circulation.

Thus it begins to collect in the financial sector, where it can chase after itself in the form of fictitious capital — the credit system and its paper claims to profits from future investments. The ideological justification for financial intermediaries like banks is that they assist in the allocation of scarce resources to where they are most needed, presumably serves a socially beneficial purpose. But banks are prone to take tautological refuge in the idea that escalating asset values proves that socially beneficial purposes are being served. The values are mistaken for fundamentals instead of flows.

As Harvey notes, credit serves a stopgap, seeming to buy time as the crisis of overaccumulation approaches:

The money capitalist is indifferent (presumably) to the ultimate source of revenue and invests in government debt, mortgages, stocks, and shares, commodity futures or whatever, according to the rate of return, the security of the investment, its liquidity and so on.

He goes on to cite Marx: “All connection with the actual expansion process of capital is thus completely lost, and the conception of capital as something with automatic self-expansion properties is thereby strengthened.” In the past decade, we’ve seen this process play out. After the tech boom fizzled, capital languished, with nowhere to valorize itself until financial “innovations” spurred a massive expansion of available credit, which poured into housing, whose boom in value was made plausible by the pretense that “they’re not making any more land.” (This despite a steady climbing vacancy rate in the U. S.) Traders — routinely lauded as “wizards” — would deploy their black-box strategies and money would simply make itself. Thus the American economy seemingly continued to grow, but an unprecedented portion of the profits were being realized by the financial sector, as more and more capital was going into the “insane forms” of fictitious capital. In an article for the Atlantic, former IMF economist Simon Johnson pointed this out:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The crisis of value had been under way long before the housing bubble came, the current recession an overdue reckoning. Our experience has reminded us that credit expansion ultimately leads to unsustainable asset-value bubbles, which magnify the crisis in value when it comes but amplifying the destruction into unfathomable figures — billions, perhaps trillions lost. As Adam Arvidsson argues in “After Capitalism Ethics?” once value gets detached from “real needs,” the conditions are ripe for a structural transformation of the economy:

The prevailing techno-political paradigm is unable to open up the markets by means of which capital could be productively deployed in meeting such needs. Although there are a number of attempts in this direction, like venture capital investing in alternative energy systems, or companies cultivating the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, the market of the global poor, these are the isolated results of mostly private enterprise, and not the coordinated outcome of systemic initiatives. Such a co-existence of unmet needs and excess capital, and the financial expansion that results from this combination is a classic symptom of the immanent transition form one system to another.

Arvidsson locates the emerging system in what Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks (pdf) calls the networked information economy, or what Maurizio Lazzarato calls immaterial labor — the everyday acts of identity-building consumption and friendship that the increasing mediatization of society now make available for capture. This seems a good candidate because this sort of labor has precipitated a value crisis of its own, in the form of work that can’t be valued in wages, as capitalism has always required. What is that work really worth? Why are we even bothering? What price tag can we put on the effort it takes to make life livable, to make ourselves known to ourselves, to secure social recognition?

If capital has run out of productive investments for making goods and services, and the cycle of expanding fictitious capital has played itself out for the time being, it may retrench by financing a manufacturing project that never ends — the production of the self, as carried out in the “social factory.” The postwar transition to consumerism initiated this transvaluation of value  in the realm of consumption. Rather than imagining ourselves valuable for the traditional role we assume in our community, we instead try to discover and enlarge our subjectivity through publicized acts of consumption — be they conspicuous luxuries or altruistic acts or clever, innovative re-uses of goods, or what have you. We consume to create cool, which in turn reflects the glories of  its creator. But from the point of view of capital, our acts of everyday self-realization are perceived as knowledge production for the information economy, elaborating the intricately woven code (as Jean Baudrillard calls it) that constitutes the symbolic value of brands and goods.

The recent bubble affords an example of how these different ideas of value were in flux: Investment bankers may have enriched themselves in nominal terms, but efforts to substantiate their gains with luxury items draws them into a spending arms race for positional goods. Playing the scoreboard game over ultimately intangible, arbitrary status does little to preserve capital; instead it fuels value’s elusiveness, with the tokens that best represent it changing at the pace of fashion. If the basis for what serves as value is always in the process of being negotiated socially, value is nothing more than the assertion of control over flows, conceived in the broadest sense as any sort of traceable social change. The most important flow may not be a financial one but an ideological one — the ebbs and swells of trends and memes, the shifting language of the symbols of status.

Arvidsson argues that the socialization of value means “ethical” pursuits can be embedded in the concept, with a new kind of measurable value indicating the density of ethically binding relations — the kind of tribal bonds that mediated exchange before capitalist markets brought on anonymity, and the enabling pretense of trust between strangers. But the era when everyone’s money was equally green is ending; technology has made it increasingly possible to guarantee that no consumer transaction go unrecorded. The terms of  consumption, the contexts, trump sheer possession; and those terms and contexts are controlled by meaning makers. The positional spenders find themselves at the mercy of those who manage the procedures of luxury trend evolution — the art auctioneers, couturiers, galleristas, critics, and even hipsters in their midst.

Status production and symbol elaboration are theoretically limitless — the desire for distinction can always function as a “real” need toward which  economic resources can be directed, provided certain ethical battles and debates are lost in the sociopolitical sphere. This is increasingly the dimension in which firms compete:  as goods become more easily copied, they can no longer compete on tangible product quality. Instead, they must compete on the symbolic level of the brand, fostering the illusion of exclusive experiences that our immaterial labor helps elaborate. Because this new level embraces the subjectivity of individual consumers, it can productively absorb untold amounts of surplus capital.

Marginal futility: consumerism's treadmill and fungible subjectivity.

In “The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy,” Arvidsson lists a few examples of how this free labor factors into existing capitalist schemes:

the pharmaceutical company that constructs an online forum for health practitioners in order to siphon off their knowledge and innovations; the market research company that mines the data consumers freely supply in their online movement for marketable patterns; the advertising agency that lives off its ability to read new trends and forms of cool, or even the struggling ‘creative’ that acquires market value by capitalizing on her personality and network in an effort to ‘self-brand’.

Arvidsson optimistically argues that since immaterial labor is often voluntary, the companies that rely upon it will have to win our support and woo us, convince us to love them, to friend them. His notion of “ethical capital” amounts to a firm’s ability to compel emotion and encourage immaterial labor without controlling it hierarchically.

Value is primarily produced by the ability to construct affectively significant ties: ties that bind a brand or a company to its consumers, employees or other stake-holders in ways that go beyond contractual obligations. You cannot order an employee to be creative or a consumer to share his or her ideas about product improvements. Such offers need to be voluntary; they need to be motivated by some form of affective affiliation. Such relations are not free, they require time and energy to build…. Ethical capital stands precisely for investments in such relation building.

But “ethical capital” seems a misnomer. There’s nothing particularly “ethical” about corporations’ effort to flatter and seduce us; it seems more an ideologically oriented abuse of power. The existing capitalist institutions use their heft to legitimate certain modes of subjectivity that favor the survival of the inherited underlying power structure, and discourage other forms that might otherwise emerge from technological changes in production. Consumerism has always functioned to circumscribe the concept of freedom to buying power, to a subjectivity that realizes itself only through consumption — it has always been ethical in Arvidsson’s sense, in that it produces affect in the consumer that appears to be voluntaristic. It encourages the idea that the goods and services we purchase make emotionality available to us and shapes social relations to reinforce that condition, denying avenues to unmediated emotional expression. Firms thus encourage immaterial production for their benefit by working to control the outlets for individuals’ “creative expression” — now by seizing the social networks that have become the forum for self-development. The ongoing effort to corral social being into prefabricated pens online is most salient part of this campaign currently.

Immaterial labor appears to the laborer as self-fashioning, but the self produced by it is the consumerist self required by existing social relations — only such a self can harvest the “benefits” of identity in the social sphere circa 2009: The superficial recognition in social networks; the reified, measurable influence it allows us to track and measure our personal brand’s impact, the mastery of cultural trivia as a status marker, “reputational capital,” and so on. Arvidsson thinks the quantification can somehow work to the consumer’s benefit — reorienting the balance of power between capital and labor by investing consumers with capital and making us all entrepreneurs of the self. But this doesn’t change the corrosive psychology of capital; it merely extends its reach deeper into society. “Insofar as individuals adopt the role of the capitalist, “Harvey writes, “they are forced to internalize the profit-seeking motive as part of their subjective being. Avarice and greed, and the predilections of the miser, find scope for expression in such a context, but capitalism is not founded on such character traits — competition imposes them willy-nilly on the unfortunate participants.”  This is what happens to us when Web 2.0 applications draw us into a competition for social influence, and offers a scoreboard for who can develop the richest personal identity according to “ethical capital” metrics.

The production of the self now occurs in a globalized media setting with a much richer set of culture-industry product to serve as resources for it. The use of that product for self-fashioning enhances its value for its owners to the rest of the selves in the process of making themselves. Piracy and intellectual property devaluation hits at capital here; the real problem, though, is the self-fashioning out of that stuff (what Arvidsson unironically equates with Marx’s “General Intellect” — a debasement, as it limits intellect mostly to the facility to embrace and manipulate popular culture). That reproduces the consumerist self, not a possibly better alternative.

Immaterial labor seems to promise a new paradigm of value, but it’s limited in our current set of relations to self-fashioning, the reproduction of the consumerist self, not the smashing of capitalist relations. We produce ourselves as consumers, earn our recognition in terms set by consumerism on platforms controlled by capitalist firms, with every move we make under surveillance and every gesture we enact recorded and processed for its possible marketing usefulness, and then we declare ourselves free.

Lazzarato had predicted that capital would begin to “involve even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value.” And so it has come to pass, with Web 2.0 applications becoming the new nexus of investment, fueled by boundless optimism about the limitless potential of our own creativity. Only our self-regard may prove to be a bubble that is unburstable.

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Is Another Crisis!

BEYOND THE CRISIS

http://www.iippe.org

INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVE FOR PROMOTING POLITICAL ECONOMY (IIPPE)

and

GREEK SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN POLITICAL ECONOMY

RETHYMNON, CRETE, SEPTEMBER 10-12, 2010

“BEYOND THE CRISIS”

Pre-amble: Following its three previous highly successful international research workshops for students in Crete, Naples and Ankara, the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE) is now holding its FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, co-organised with the Greek Scientific Association of Political Economy, and open to application from all engaged in political economy. Summaries of papers for consideration for inclusion (maximum 1000 words) should be submitted by 31st of March 2010 to iippe@soas.ac.uk with subject heading IIPPE CONFERENCE 2010. Full papers are required to be made available by 30 June 2010 for pre-circulation to Conference participants. It will be possible to attend the Conference without submitting a paper but numbers will be limited. There will be some funding available for those who are unable to rely upon institutional support for participation, with special provision for research students.

Themes: Following the global crisis, the prospects of, and need for, progressive political economy are stronger than for many decades. Orthodox economics is in disarray, but with only a smattering of its own practitioners accepting this, generally by demanding more realism and the incorporation of a few more or less arbitrary behavioural principles. After the collapse of the post-war boom, the recession and slowdown that followed gave birth to extreme forms of monetarism followed by a mild reaction in terms of reliance upon market and institutional imperfections and weakened Keynesianism. The prospects for a radical rethink within orthodoxy and of tolerance to heterodoxy remain bleak. But it is still crucial to sustain critical commentary on orthodoxy’s continuing principles and innovations as a new generation of students and researchers are caught between conforming to its reduced and flawed content and the economic realities of the world around them. Political economy has begun to prosper in the wake of the crisis, not least with the rising popularity of Minsky for example. It is imperative that the strengths and weaknesses of the diverse, often insightful, analyses of the nature, causes and consequences of the financial crisis be debated and fully engaged across competing paradigms and emphases. Nor is the crisis confined to economic effects and causes alone. Interdisciplinary approaches are essential to address the nature of, and prospects for, neo-liberalism, the shifting character of the “new world order”, US hegemony and the rise of China, and the economic and the social and cultural restructuring that have both preceded and will follow upon the crisis. This offers opportunities to engage with activists in understanding the impact and incidence of the crisis and in formulating alternatives and strategies in response to it.

The Conference welcomes proposals for papers that address one or more of these issues or any other issue within political economy. IIPPE working groups are entitled to organise a panel. But we also welcome proposals for panels independently of working groups on well-defined themes, with three or four contributions and contributors specified in advance. These must be submitted, ideally with paper summaries by March 31st, 2010, although earlier submissions have greater chance of acceptance as the Conference programme is filled out.

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Given the myriad benefits of capitalism – modern medicine, the automobile and personal computers to name just three – one wonders why representatives of big business continually downplay its significance.

This is particularly evident when one watches Corporate America swoon over the “green movement.”

Around the world, major corporations, particularly those in so-called dirty industries such as oil exploration and power production, are practically falling all over one another in an effort to tout their environmentally friendly activities.

Unfortunately, though, instead of being honest and admitting that profit played a role in their decision – whether through improving their bottom line or their public perception – they choose to cloak themselves in the amorphous aura of social consciousness.

Take Santee Cooper, the state-owned utility that is offering a program that allows customers to pay a small surcharge to boost renewable energy production.

According to the utility’s Web site, Santee Cooper offers “green power” to residential customers in 100 kilowatt-hour blocks, with each block costing customers an extra $3 a month.

“We do it because it’s the right thing for the environment,” Santee Cooper spokeswoman Laura Varn told The State newspaper. “The more we can use our natural resources the better for the state and the environment.”

Of course, this is the same company that spent $242 million in recent years on a proposed coal-fired plant in the Pee Dee before pulling the plug on the project in August.

One could argue that if Santee Cooper really wanted to do “the right thing for the environment” it would shut down all its coal-fired plants and rely exclusively on renewable energy. That’s not economically feasible, of course, but neither is the premise that any corporation’s actions are motivated solely by the idea that “it’s the right thing for the environment.”

If Santee Cooper is interested in benefitting Mother Nature perhaps it could offer its green power to customers at no extra cost. That’s not as fiscally impractical as shuttering coal plants, but the company has obviously decided that the surcharge is needed to remain financially healthy.

What the utility either can’t or won’t admit is that there’s nothing wrong with this strategy.

Making money by honest means isn’t a crime. Turning a profit is the reason companies such as Santee Cooper are able to employ many hundreds in high-paying jobs and provide power directly and indirectly to millions of South Carolinians. It’s also why the utility can offer renewable energy through green power programs.

Capitalism enables people to lead healthier, longer lives. It provides for increased family stability, safer neighborhoods and a better-educated populace, as the Policy Council pointed out in its recently released book Unleashing Capitalism.

The reality is bankrupt companies not only can’t offer lucrative jobs or needed services, they also can’t put forward innovative programs and technologies.

It’s just too bad so many businesses can’t own up to the fact that making money is good for all of society.

Via Indybay

A Pro-Free-Market Program for Economic Recovery

by George Reisman, Ph.D.

[This talk was given at Economic Downturn: Cause and Cure (Mises Circle, Sponsored by Louis E. Carabini) Newport Beach, California, November 14, 2009.]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen:

As you all know, we are in a severe economic downturn. The official unemployment rate now exceeds 10 percent and according to many observers is actually substantially higher. Within the last year or so, our financial system has been rocked to its foundations. The collapse of the housing bubble and the numerous defaults and bankruptcies connected with it brought down major financial institutions, such as Bear-Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. It also brought down numerous small and medium-sized banks and threatened to bring down even such banking giants as Citigroup and Bank of America. The Dow Jones stock average fell from a high of 14,000 to about 6,500. Important retailers such as CompUSA, Circuit City, Mervyns, and Linens ‘N Things went under, as did countless small businesses throughout the country. Practically every shopping mall gives testimony to the severity of the downturn in the form of vacant stores.

The collapse of the housing bubble and the massive losses and mounting unemployment that have resulted from it have unleashed a veritable firestorm of hostility against capitalism, in the conviction that it is capitalism and its economic freedom that are responsible. It is now generally taken for granted that any solution for the downturn requires massive new government intervention, to curb, control, or abolish this or that aspect of capitalism and its alleged evil.

Continue reading…