Chalmers Johnson, Dennis Kucinich: On Bailing Out Bankers and Butchers

…and continuing from the last two posts for today…

Along with Andrew Bacevich, Howard Zinn, and Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com, Chalmers Johnson is one of my favourite American critics of American empire. In an article that is being reproduced across a range of sites, Johnson argues in “We Have the Bailout Money–We’re Spending It on War” (The Nation, Sep. 29, 2008), that sums just as large have been pumped into the war in Iraq, without as much public protest:

In fact, we dole out similar amounts of money every year in the form of payoffs to the armed services, the military-industrial complex and powerful senators and representatives allied with the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, September 24, right in the middle of the fight over billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all….

Not only was there no significant media coverage of this latest appropriation, there have been no signs of even the slightest urge to inquire into the relationship between our bloated military, our staggering weapons expenditures, our extravagantly expensive failed wars abroad and the financial catastrophe on Wall Street.

Support the troops has of course functioned, as always, as a silencing mechanism — even on this blog some rushed to defend the career choices of impoverished members of the American working class in taking up arms against foreigners who never attacked them, without questioning why they will not just as quickly take up arms against their “fellow citizens” who attack them in myriad ways on a daily basis. They never answered the question of why others who are jobless seem to not consider the option of making a living at the expense of the lives and deaths of Iraqis. But then again, what would I know, I am no patriot, let alone an American patriot.

The only Congressional “commentary” on the size of our military outlay was the usual pompous drivel about how a failure to vote for the defense authorization bill would betray our troops. The aged Senator John Warner of Virginia, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, implored his Republican colleagues to vote for the bill “out of respect for military personnel.” He seems to be unaware that these troops are actually volunteers, not draftees, and that they joined the armed forces as a matter of career choice, rather than because the nation demanded such a sacrifice from them.

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John Nichols writing in “An Appropriately Populist Anti-Bailout Rant” (The Nation, Sep. 28, 2008) tell us: “Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich responded appropriately Sunday, when House and Senate leaders announced early a bipartisan agreement for a variation on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion (plus-plus-plus) bailout plan Wall Street.” This is what Kucinich had to say on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday:

The $700 billion bailout for Wall Street, is driven by fear not fact. This is too much money in too a short a time going to too few people while too many questions remain unanswered. Why aren’t we having hearings on the plan we have just received? Why aren’t we questioning the underlying premise of the need for a bailout with taxpayers’ money? Why have we not considered any alternatives other than to give $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren’t we asking Wall Street to clean up its own mess? Why aren’t we passing new laws to stop the speculation, which triggered this? Why aren’t we putting up new regulatory structures to protect investors? How do we even value the $700 billion in toxic assets?

Why aren’t we helping homeowners directly with their debt burden? Why aren’t we helping American families faced with bankruptcy. Why aren’t we reducing debt for Main Street instead of Wall Street? Isn’t it time for fundamental change in our debt based monetary system, so we can free ourselves from the manipulation of the Federal Reserve and the banks? Is this the United States Congress or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs? Wall Street is a place of bears and bulls. It is not smart to force taxpayers to dance with bears or to follow closely behind the bulls.

Excellent questions. Once again, you know what means: they won’t get answered.

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Speaking of protests on Wall Street, here is a video by Laura Hanna of The Nation, interviewing some protesters:

See more videos at VideoNation

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Slavoj Žižek and Joseph E. Stiglitz: Chickenhawks Coming Home to Roost…in the Tent City

Continuing from my last post…

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning economist at Columbia University, argued in the September 26, 2008, edition of The Nation (“A Better Bailout“), that Wall Street banks would be celebrating today, as the U.S. Congress votes to pass something it would never consider for struggling working class citizens in crisis: a massive handout to the alleged wealth creators:

the banks realized that they were about to get a free ride at taxpayers’ expense. No private firm was willing to buy these toxic mortgages at what the seller thought was a reasonable price; they finally had found a sucker who would take them off their hands–called the American taxpayer….

Paulson and others in Wall Street are claiming that the bailout is necessary and that we are in deep trouble. Not long ago, they were telling us that we had turned a corner. The administration even turned down an effective stimulus package last February–one that would have included increased unemployment benefits and aid to states and localities–and they still say we don’t need another stimulus. To be frank, the administration has a credibility and trust gap as big as that of Wall Street.

If the crisis was as severe as they claim, why didn’t they propose a more credible plan? With lack of oversight and transparency the cause of the current problem, how could they make a proposal so short in both? If a quick consensus is required, why not include provisions to stop the source of bleeding, to aid the millions of Americans that are losing their homes? Why not spend as much on them as on Wall Street? Do they still believe in trickle-down economics, when for the past eight years money has been trickling up to the wizards of Wall Street? Why not enact bankruptcy reform, to help Americans write down the value of the mortgage on their overvalued home? No one benefits from these costly foreclosures.

The administration is once again holding a gun at our head, saying, “My way or the highway.” We have been bamboozled before by this tactic. We should not let it happen to us again.

Excellent questions, which means they will go unanswered. [Update: the current bailout plan has just been defeated in a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.]

Stiglitz on Democracy Now! — The results of a three trillion dollar war financed by deficits

Stiglitz speaking in April, about Today

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Slavoj Žižek has joined other radical cultural critics and political philosophers in training his sights on this bailout for predatory bankers, and thanks to Open Source Radio we have some of his latest thoughts. He says in his interview (see the audio file below):

Dangerous moments are coming. Dangerous moments are always also a chance to do something. But in such dangerous moments, you have to think, you have to try to understand. And today obviously all the predominant narratives – the old liberal-left welfare state narrative; the post-modern third-way left narrative; the neo-conservative narrative; and of course the old standard Marxist narrative – they don’t work. We don’t have a narrative. Where are we? Where are we going? What to do? You know, we have these stupid elementary questions: Is capitalism here to stay? Are there serious limits to capitalism? Can we imagine a popular mobilization outside democracy? How should we properly react to ecology? What does it mean, all the biogenetic stuff? How to deal with intellectual property today? Things are happening. We don’t have a proper approach. It’s not only that we don’t have the answers. We don’t even have the right question.

Less state spending is “bullshit,” Žižek argues, and Bush with his trillion dollar intervention in the market ought to be nominated an honorary member of the American Communist Party, he jokes. The conversational interview is hard not to listen to right to the end, animated, engaging, and thought provoking, without a hint of pretension.

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And what’s this about “tent cities”? It seems that the world emperor has no clothes after all, and is begging in the street. This is your America, watch it crumble. Just a reminder from the Department of Homeland Security, your alert level is Orange, and your real threat is somewhere in western Pakistan.

Tent City 1

Tent City 2

Tent city in suburbs is cost of home crisis
Reuters, Thurs., Dec. 20, 2007

In hard times, tent cities rise across the country
Associated Press, Thurs., Sep. 18, 2008

Welcome to Tent City, USA!
“Well, thanks to the U.S. mortgage crisis you can now experience the thrill of camping out in the backyard every single night! But this time instead of your backyard it’ll be in a vacant lot. And instead of thrill the only thing you’ll experience is despair and your inevitable suicide…”

Bushvilles? Of Tent Cities and Golden Parachutes
“Today’s Contemporary Americana!
Would we call these “Bushvilles?” I suppose Kevin O’Brien and the rest of the capitalist bootstrap enthusiasts would object. Well, screw them. Hopefully.
I always like to compare and contrast because its fun and ironic in that post-modernistic sense. So compare and contrast the above BBC story to this snippet, also from Schechter’s story:
‘A week earlier, Bear Stearn’s former CEO bought a Manhattan condo for $28 million, no mortgage needed. In December, compromised Wall Streeters walked off with $31 billion in bonuses, just a billion below the record set a year earlier.’
So if they can walk away, why can’t the Skaggs?”

See also the post on Deathpower: “Suddenly everyone on Wall Street is a ‘socialist’”

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The Shadows in the Dark are Blue Devils: Turning the World Upside Down

This is Ataklan again, with more video of Trinidad of a quality and nature that I could only hope to make myself. We have heard from Ataklan before on this blog, with “The Sun Starts to Rise,” which came around the time of the summer solstice, by lucky chance. Now as we enter into a darker fall, today we have “A Shadow in the Dark.” As is often the case with Trinidadian songs and videos that I like to feature here, my comrade Guanaguanare has posted this on her blog a while back, and transcribed it: see her post here.

More in a moment, but first here is the video:

I like the video for its messages of humility, tactical restraint, its suspicion and critique of dominant power, and the daily grind of those placed and held in the gutters of society:

♫
Man, I’d rather be a shadow in the dark,
Than a big fool in spotlight.
I’d rather be a dog without a bark,
Than a loud dog without a bite.
♫

It’s 3 Canal time again, with a video of Blue Devils dancing, classic figures from the pre-dawn J’ouvert of the Trinidadian carnival. There are many reasons why 3 Canal is the featured musical inspiration of this blog, not least of which is their rescuing of the potent political symbolism of carnival-as-resistance, their consistent critiques of capitalism and hegemony, their philosophical dwelling in the working class street, and of course their hybrid musical inventions.

Today Washington crooks cook up a transfer of public wealth into the mismanaging hands of the super wealthy, because otherwise the failure of “capitalism that works” (we have been fed a diet of propaganda of how capitalism is the best possible system, the only system that works, no viable alternatives) might have caused some “shock” to people in growing tent cities, in jobless lines, people losing their homes? Those realities of dispossession and loss will continue regardless of Wall Street’s improved health, and indeed, because of it.

This is a “world turned upside down” in another sense than the one intended by 3 canal — this is Americans’ much hated “socialism” (public funds wielded by an interventionist state) coming to the rescue of capitalism. And they will pay for it very dearly. In the meantime, John McCain entertains fantasies of no new spending on social programs, but lots of new spending on national security — an aspiring “war president” of perverse proportions, who thinks you can run an army without an economy, presumably because he is confident that China and the Gulf States will continue lending the U.S. money for its imperial adventurism? McCain looks more like an old guard figure of the declining USSR, a war-a-holic headed for the same exit, coincidentally also stuck up his melanoma in Afghan sand.

• Public financed private wealth
• State bailouts for the “free market”
• A national war economy funded by foreign lenders
• Securing economic health (for the dwellers of the tent cities?)
• An aspiring VP Palin, who thinks the bailout is about health care…

Enjoy it, it’s your state sanctioned madness.

3 CANAL

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Centrism for Dummies, i.e. “Progressive Corporatists”

In response to the column by David Brooks in The New York Times titled, “The Establishment Lives!” (Sept. 22, 2008), the Daily Kos had this sharp response, “Centrism as Mythical Pony.” It has to do with plans for a post-meltdown financial future, and the way some will slavishly adhere to the same old establishment, the same establishment that managed affairs to their personal advantage, and mismanaged the affairs of others in such fantastic measures. Here are some of my favourite passages from the Daily Kos article:

The “establishment figures” and “time-tested advisors” in general (with some ample caveats for people like Buffett) not only didn’t see this coming, or for the most part didn’t care, but had absolutely no qualms in damaging the “health of the markets” in pursuit of those very tenuous paper profits.

In terms of erecting a new establishment of experts and managers, the supposed middle ground of all options (which in American terms almost always means right wing):

These are the very people responsible for the mess. But Brooks thinks of them as Gods of Capitalism, because — well, why? Because somebody’s got to be the Gods of Capitalism, the people who know best. Doesn’t matter if they’ve botched things literally to historic proportions. Doesn’t matter if their “creative” accounting was the source of the problems. Doesn’t matter if the leveraging decisions and “wise” deregulations they have advocated through the Savings and Loan crisis straight onto this one have been proven not just wrong, but catastrophically so. It is important that we have faith in the markets, and having faith in the markets means — and is indistinguishable from — having faith in the very establishment figures that have run those markets into a ditch.

This is classic Brooksism/Broderism — a pronouncement that a “new center” or “new establishment” is ascending — but one that looks exactly like the old center, and contains exactly the members of the old establishment. But it’ll be great!

It’s the same as the Iraq War and everything else: the inevitable assumptions of Broder and other pundits are that:

1. Those in power are our betters, and know what they are doing, despite any and all plain-as-your-face evidence to the contrary, and

2. The “right” approach to any problem can be found by dismissing the most extreme positions on both sides and declaring that something in the middle is, in fact, the only wise course.

What is this “Brooksism”?

I can define Brooksism in a single sentence: it is the belief that partisanship is worse than incompetence, and holding an ideologically-grounded belief is worse than taking an explicitly malevolent action. It is a very Zen approach to politics: nothing peeves Brooks as much as the notion that somebody out there is upsetting the blindly nonpartisan apple cart of establishment figures and establishment ideas that should govern us with the dignity and authority of benevolent kings.

What also stands out is the way the dominant order continually tries to rehabilitate its most discredited sons and daughters:

What will it take for someone in the “establishment”, whether in the field of military operations, foreign policy, fiscal planning or anything else, to be recognized as a dunderhead or as acting against the public interest? How badly do you have to screw up the nation?

Of course it’s great to see American commentators write like this, and clearly this is another member of that small minority of Americans who can think critically, ask questions of their own society, and try to escape the cultural confines of that society. One day, hopefully soon, such individuals will likely make a bigger difference.

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(Surface) Images & Aboriginal Graffiti from Kahnawake: A Mohawk Rez outside Montreal, Canada

A little over a week ago I rented a vehicle to take care of some chores, (the only time I feel pressed to rent; in this instance filling a third of the van’s tank of gas cost $61). My chores took me past Kahnawake (Kahk’nuh’wa’guh), the famous Mohawk First Nation (or reservation) at the western doorway to the island of Montreal. I had little time, little intention to do anything like a photo essay, and the light was fading fast. Here then are some randomly collected surface images.

MURALIA INDIGENA

Resurgence
Kahnawake has a history of militant self-defense. It was one of the prime loci of resistance in the Oka uprising of 1990. Above, in blue and white, is the flag of the Six Nations Confederacy. The Six Nations include the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga, and Tuscarora. This is the symbol of the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the League of Peace and Power, and the People of the Longhouse.

Iron Workers
Bound to stereotypical visions of indigenous history, some might not know that Mohawks have long been preferred workers for the construction of the steel towers of Canada and the U.S., especially in New York City. These people know all about “progress,” as insiders, outsiders, and downsiders. The image above features a Mohawk quasi-robo man, with the flag of the Six Nations on the left, and the militant flag of the Mohawk Warriors Society on the right.

Warz
I cannot say if this is the name of a Mohawk hip hop band, the name of a DJ, or just a plain reference to war. “FTW” is not known to me, although it might as well be “fuck the whiteman.”

No war on an empty stomach?
In a departure from images of pride and resistance, an advertisement for a bakery on the Mohawk reserve, bringing to life the everydayness of all the images combined. Like most signs in Kahnawake, they defy the Quebec state’s French language sign rules. Not only is French not prominent on signs, it often is not present at all. Stop signs read in two languages, English and Mohawk, the words being “Stop” and underneath “Testan.”

“IN THE WAY OF PROGRESS” OR OUT OF THE WAY?

“Building Bridges”
Mohawk iron workers participated in building the bridges that soar above their land. Rail bridges, automobile bridges, and various on- and off-ramps cross the sky overhead. “Living under the bridge” and “across the rail tracks” usually carry negative connotations in North America. One never sees such structures above any of Montreal’s golf courses, not even the ones that were to be expanded into Mohawk burial grounds.

“We’ll just build on your land…and you can help”
From Wikipedia (Sept. 21, 2008): The federal and Quebec governments have historically located large civil engineering projects benefiting the southern Quebec economy through Kahnawake lands. Criss-crossed by power lines from hydroelectric plants, rail and vehicle highways and bridges, the decision to pass the Saint Lawrence Seaway canal cut through its village permanently separated it from its natural river shore.

One of the first of these projects was the fledgling Canadian Pacific Railway’s Saint Lawrence Bridge. The masonry work was done by Reid & Fleming, and the steel superstructure was built by the Dominion Bridge Company. In 1886 and 1887, the new bridge was built across the broad river from Kahnawake to Montreal Island, and gave Kahnawake working men an opportunity to perform as fearless bridgemen and ironworkers. This was the result of a perception by construction companies that the Mohawk men had no fear of heights when given the chance to climb hundreds of feet above the water and ground. Here started the legendary stereotype that has now labelled all Native Americans as having no fear of heights.

“London” Bridges Falling Down?
This is the famous Mercier Bridge, barricaded by Mohawks during the 1990 Oka Uprising, and combined with other bridge blockades, the island of Montreal was effectively closed off from the mainland. This is where burning White anger against any instance of three Natives standing in a street really got an airing, and today even the smallest blockage is referred to by hysterically racist complainers in the mass media as examples of “Native terrorism,” often followed by full throated cries to “call in the army.” Since White counter-protesters used these bridges to pelt rocks at Mohawk women and children, I think a “real terrorist,” someone with access to materials in the construction industry, and technical know-how derived from working on the same bridges, would have strapped some belts of TNT to the support pillars above and brought this sucker crashing down.

TOBACCO FOR THE WHITE MAN’S FRAYED NERVES

White and Brown Natives?
Interesting idea (on the small sign at the right), but almost anything goes when it comes to cigarette advertising. Side note: the architecture of homes and shops in Kahnawake is very varied, but also strikingly different from the rest of Montreal. Not only does it look more like a small town in America, some residents also fly the American flag.

The All Natural Native…
…is a cigarette brand. The packet features the same symbol of the Six Nations Confederacy we saw at the very start. Outside of the shop hangs the flag of the Mohawk Warriors Society. The Native cigarette industry is a thriving and lucrative source of income, and probably one of the main reasons that non-Natives enter the Reserve to begin with (where they can purchase them tax free). Native tobacco for the White Man…some things never change.

DISTORTED INDIGENOUS PATTERNS

This is just plain idleness. I took the first four photos from above, and distorted them using my photo editor. The result superficially appears to be an indigenous pattern, although it really is based on images produced by aboriginals (the murals), they bear accidental resemblance to patterns that might be popularly associated with indigenous textile designs. As I said, idleness, but pretty idleness I think.