final --30--

This blog is now permanently shuttered. Entries already posted will remain as an on-line archive for now.

I will continue writing at my other blog, Omnem Movere Lapidem, where I plan to post once a week, on Saturday mornings.

--30--

JAUCA

Not since Simon Legree stood over the kneeling and humiliated Uncle Tom has there been an individual model that so perfectly exemplifies the essence of the relationship between the upper and lower classes. The only difference is that Legree and his victim were fictional characters; Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the woman he raped -- and I don't use the word "allegedly" because he's obviously guilty -- are real, flesh-and-blood representatives of their respective social classes.

Strauss-Kahn, a leading French politician and international banking honcho who claims to be a socialist and thus a "man of the people," has shown himself to be JAUCA -- just another upper-class asshole.

In a week during which we also witnessed the revelation of ex-Governor Schwarzenegger's unusually warm relationship with members of his household staff -- body temperature, actually -- and, at Cannes, a rambling, disjointed, but nevertheless highly offensive monologue by Danish film director Lars Van Trier, we find ourselves forced to confront our rulers' true feelings about the rest of us, whom they casually use as their footstools, garbage cans, and seminal receptacles. It's no accident that all three of these men are Europeans, and convey, consciously or unconsciously, the class attitudes and antiquated prejudices of an earlier epoch, when men of the little European peninsula straddled and buggered the rest of the world.

Here in this country, the conversion of all forms of middle- and lower-class income formerly supplied by redistributionist schemes into tax breaks for the upper class, along with the ongoing destruction of labor relationships which used to guarantee a middle-class existence for workers in some occupations, continues relentlessly. Unlike the Guinean widow and single mother raped by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we can't call the police. The only solution is for us to become the police, get up off our knees, and fight back using any weapon that comes to hand.

I'd suggest withholding labor and money in well-organized and carefully-planned strikes and boycotts, engineered to produce maximum damage in the boardrooms and $3000-a-night hotel suites of our lords and masters. One of these days we're going to figure out, just as Nat Turner did, that we ourselves are the source of the wealth from which their illusions of social superiority germinate, and that cooperating with them in any way makes us agents of our own destruction.

--30--

tragedy and farce

Anybody who's ever paid any attention to him, however briefly, can't help noticing that Donald Trump is an extreme "type A" personality. His intelligence may be limited, but his cunning, combined with a sharply-honed killer instinct, render his unlimited ambitions formidable.

According to at least one poll, Trump is now the leading Republican candidate for the presidency, and in an f-word seasoned speech in Vegas last night he showed why. Among the other highlights of his calculated rant, Trump suggested that when negotiating with the Chinese, we should refer to them as "motherfuckers."

His bold and audacious embrace of birtherism, when his party's most overt ovaries-to-the-wall lunatics, Palin and Bachmann, are timidly tiptoeing around the issue, has won him the affections of the tribe's loosest cannons. He might look like Don Quixote, but, like the famous knight-errant, money and power mean nothing to him. It's all about dreaming "The Impossible Dream" and overcoming the challenge to "boldly go where no sociopath (except George W. Bush) has gone before."

Trump is not the first Republican politician to notice that the teabaggers are the ideological engine driving the party right now, but unlike the others he has shrewdly and boldly bet all his chips on winning their enthusiastic allegiance. He's wagering that their devotion is the key to the nomination, and I'll bet he's right.

Of course, after the nomination comes the election, which Trump can't possibly win. Like an earlier demagogue willing to say or do anything to fire up his fanatical and potentially violent base, he will pull about a third of the vote in the presidential balloting, and this country doesn't have a chancellorship or a President Hindenberg to appoint him to it. But if there is any avenue to power available, rest assured that Trump will find it.

What he would actually do with such power were he to achieve it remains a mystery, because I'm sure he hasn't thought about that yet. But a rotten tree never bears good fruit.

Karl Marx, using the career of Napoleon III as his example, declared that "History happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." I can't imagine what the comic version of the political disaster that happened in Germany in 1933 would look like, and I'm afraid to find out.

--30--

hi yo silver (updated)

Word on the street is that tonight, April 25, Japanese bankers and investors are going to take silver down. If so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

What prompted their decision to do it now was the American Precious Metals Exchange (AMPEX), the biggest on-line trader, confirmed that it is offering to buy any amount of silver at $3. over spot price. Demand is overwhelming available supplies, and that hurts Asian economies.

About 40 percent of silver demand is for industrial purposes, and a lot of that is the amount of silver needed for the circuit boards that go into so many of the electronics products coming from the Far East.

Could be a roller coaster.

UPDATE: If that four-dollar drop last night was it, and I think it was, there's not much to be afraid of. The shiny stuff is holding its own today at about $45. Industrial demand, plus the demand generated by millions of small buyers of bullion now outweighs the power of investors to control prices.

picture this

Tarot de Besançon, France, first half of the 19th century.

a clockwork meltdown

Recently a friend of mine asked me how I'm dealing with "the quickening pace of political-economic-environmental deterioration." Mostly I just try to analyze it and face the truth, as I'm capable of understanding it.

Prior to the mid-18th century there were no efficient means of energy conversion. Production in premodern societies was limited by the available energy sources, primarily the muscle power of humans or domesticated animals. These were augmented after medieval times by inventions such as the horse collar, and wind and water mills, which increased productive capacity, but only arithmetically. So premodern economies were regimes of low productivity. Ninety percent or more of people living in premodern societies were engaged directly in food production, and low productivity generated a small food surplus or none at all, keeping populations small. From the beginning of human history until about 1830 the earth's human population was less than a billion.

Our situation has changed much more in the last two hundred years than it did during the previous five thousand. Not only have our numbers increased to seven billion today due to the quantum leaps in the amounts of energy at our disposal, but our ways of living have been transformed as well. It's no exaggeration to say that the average citizen of today's affluent nations is wealthier than the greatest pharaohs of ancient times. Only in the last 75 years have we become aware of the down side of these developments -- the pollution generated by the burning of fossil fuels now threatens our survival. We're like fish in an aquarium dying from accumulation of their own waste.

Our desire to produce energy sufficient to maintain our modern ways of living and at the same time short-circuit the negative effects of production have led us to adopt desperate measures, such as using controlled nuclear fission to generate electricity, but this experiment has now come to grief. Three nuclear disasters in the past thirty years -- the first two caused by human error and the last by an act of God -- have put an end to this escape strategy.

The crisis is exacerbated by a strain of economically-driven political reaction in those countries producing the most pollution, in which those most responsible for this clockwork meltdown belligerently oppose all remediation measures, and mount an enormous propaganda campaign, encouraging us to deny the even existence of the crisis.

Affluence and its resultant pollution are the horns of the dilemma. And now we see Japan, a severely overpopulated nation with virtually no natural resources, finding that their own dilemma is by definition a problem without a solution. They are the bellwether for the rest of us.

So, how am I dealing with all this emotionally? About the same way I'm dealing with my own old age, a condition no one ever survives.

cerrado

Because I have nothing relevant or interesting to say about current political or economic developments, I'm suspending activity here for the time being.

I'll continue to post as and when the urge strikes, on matters personal, or yogic, or divinatory, or simply weird on my other site.

Portrait

Hosni Mubarak, January 30, 2011.

weekend at porky's

This weekend as the American delegation of the global oligarchy and ruling class returns stateside after a four-day lobster feed and feel-good session in Davos, Switzerland, they'll reconvene for the Koch brothers' annual Warren G. Harding Memorial Barbecue and Festival of Larceny at the Rancho las Palmas resort, near Palm Springs.

Palm Springs' Desert Sun newspaper reports: Previous meetings, held in the desert and elsewhere, have featured two Supreme Court justices (guess which two), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Sens. Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, and conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

As you can see in the Desert Sun article, Greenpeace plans to mount a feeble protest against this convocation of capitalist buccaneers, blue-blooded aristocrats, and their political and media errand boys with a helium balloon bearing an anti-Koch message on its side. And a group of protestors will gather in Rancho Mirage, miles away from the site where our porcine rulers are eating their bacon.

It's really a shame they won't be subjected to a little Egyptian-style democracy. Because after watching al-Jazeera for a while today, I can tell you that's all that's going on in Egypt. It's not about Islamism or any other -ism. The people on the streets over there are the Egyptian people, and they're expressing years of pent-up grievances in the only way available to them.

The world's plutocrats meeting in Davos took little or no notice of the Egyptian eruption of democracy, but they will before long, because it's coming our way. Maybe next year we can have a real people's barbecue at Porky's, and turn up the heat on the revelers inside.

state of the union

Rather than talk about the actual State of the Union the other night, Obama gave the old "The future is rosy and we'll all get pie in the sky (when we die)" pitch. The actual true condition of the country is not so good.

Of American workers, 9.4 percent are unemployed, an extremely high figure compared to what it's been over most of the last 100 years, according to the US government's standard measurement, or U-3 measure of unemployment. However, this does not include workers who want or need a job but have grown too discouraged to actively look for work, or those who are underemployed, i.e., working part time but seeking full-time jobs. Adding them in yields the more candid U-6 measure of unemployment of 16.7 percent. This means that 167 of every 1,000 US workers is either without a job or underemployed.

The U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day (25% of the worldwide consumption total of 84 million barrels per day), of which two-thirds is imported and a third produced domestically. Ninety-three percent of the oil we consume is used for transportation, and the typical American household, on average, buys 1,000 gallons a year. Oil is a diminishing resource upon which the world and national economies are totally dependent, and over the last ten years it has more than doubled in price.

Then there's the debt, which has now edged up past 14 trillion dollars, which means Congress will soon be obligated to raise the legally permissible debt limit -- again. How important the debt and debt limit are depends on who you talk to. My own feeling is that we ought to try to cut back spending enough to turn the annual deficit into a small surplus and begin to pay the debt down. But what to cut?

Government expenditures are usually reported dishonestly. For example, Social Security, often listed as 19 percent of the annual federal expenditure, shouldn't be counted because it's entirely funded by its own special trust fund, which is solvent at the moment and could be made so in perpetuity with minor adjustments. Since the U.S. spends nearly as much as the rest of the world combined on weapons, wars, preparations for wars, and defense, that's the natural place to cut.

But here again, determining what we actually spend on "defense" depends on who you talk to. The around-25 percent of the budget usually cited doesn't include the billions we've spent pursuing our various Mideast wars, the costs of veterans' benefits and pensions, interest on the national debt due to war spending (at least half our interest payments), or related defense expenditures such as the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA budget. Add all those things in and you're looking at half the federal budget.

So what's the state of the union? I give it a D or a D-. The main problem is we're not honestly acknowledging our real problems, and if we don't face them we can't deal with them.

armstrong again

I just can't get enough of this guy lately, especially the stuff he recorded during the 10-piece orchestra years around 1930, when he was at the peak of his creative power.

I just stumbled across this gem yesterday, immortalized on wax by Okeh Records in May of 1930: Exactly Like You.

By 1928 Armstrong realized that wherever he played and sang, he was the show, and he didn't really need to mess with running a group because it didn't make much difference who he played with. He decided to devote all his energies to marathon-style playing and singing, undistracted by leadership functions, and in 1928 began fronting Carroll Dickerson's 10-piece dance orchestra, leaving Dickerson in charge as musical director. The arrangement suited him; he made his greatest records with this combination in 1929 through '31.

You have to wonder when he found time to record. Starting in 1929 he worked in the pit Orchestra of the Broadway Show "Hot Chocolates," which he stole nightly with his vocalizing on Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin'." Then, as soon as the show ended, he'd hurry off to Connie's Inn where he starred with Dickerson's orchestra. When Connie's closed for the night Armstrong put in one more shift, a late-night performance at the LaFayette Theatre, right next door at Seventh Avenue at 132nd Street.

His stamina and prolific output left a huge body of work for all to enjoy and some to revere.

sotu4u

It was a great speech, but actions speak louder than words.

For example, on the subject of ending taxpayer subsidies to oil companies, nice thought, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Same for implementing a broad federal policy of replacing coal-burning electrical generating plants with new, cleaner ways of powering them. Was the speech a wish list or a to-do list?

And I'm surprised he had the nerve to even mention his dislike of tax breaks for millionaires after the way he folded like a wet sack when push came to shove on that issue.

Obama's always been an excellent speaker and he talks a great game. But after watching him actually playing the game these past two years, I've concluded he either can't or won't deliver what he says he will. And let's hope it's the former, because if it's the latter that would make him an even bigger fraud than Ronald "Mr. Balanced Budget" Reagan.

I would like nothing more than to find out I'm totally wrong about this guy. But I'm 99 percent sure I'm not, and that this speech, fine as it was, didn't amount to anything more than warm air.

Afterthought: There is no such thing as "clean coal." It only exists in parallel universes where everyone has a job, children never misbehave, and lovely, white unicorns graze in the pristine meadows.

in a mist

During a temporary break in the rain this morning, as I drove south on Meridian near Northgate, I caught a glimpse of the downtown Seattle skyline floating in the semi-sunny mist, framed by the trees lining both sides of the road.

Even though the downtown skyscrapers are ecologically unfriendly as well as hives of frenetic activity, there was something deeply peaceful about the scene. It felt like looking at something old, classical, and tranquil, like a Chinese scroll painting of those lumpy hills of theirs, shrouded in fog.

what's it worth?

David Korten, a blogger who also writes books, has a cut-to-the-chase analysis of the differences between money, or abstract wealth, and the real deal -- things like "healthful food, fertile land, pure water, clean air, caring relationships and loving parents, education, health care, fulfilling opportunities for service, and time for meditation and spiritual reflection."

"Money," Korten explains, "a number on a piece of paper or created with an accounting enter, has no intrinsic value. Wall Street generates it in astonishing quantities through accounting tricks, financial bubbles, and debt pyramids. It appears from nowhere and can disappear in an instant, as a phantom in the night."

Of course, because it takes money to acquire some of the necessary elements of real value, "It is easy to confuse phantom financial assets with the real wealth for which they can be exchanged."

The essay is an excerpt from the second edition of Korten's book, "Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth."

These are aspects of economics they don't touch on in university classes, but in the changed material landscape that's quickly evolving, we're re-learning the most fundamental economic lesson -- that we can't have a healthy economy unless its primary focus is the production of tangible things of real value. Plus, there are some forms of wealth that are beyond economics. How much is a feeling of satisfaction worth?

my condition

I hope readers can forgive my intermittent recent posting history. The illness I'm dealing with changes constantly, and the very aggressive measures I take to fight it shift along with the condition. Sometimes the results are unpredictable.

The newest weapon in the ongoing battle against my own brain is large amounts of cod liver oil, which tends to produce a kind of manic euphoria followed by a collapse of energy. Too much of it and the tremors return, and then I have to take pharmaceutical levodopa -- something I'd rather not do.

The optimal writing window opens up in that wonderful space between overstimulation and lethargy, and I trust that I'll soon find the balance necessary to write every day again. Over time I find my condition remaining stable as I adjust the many counter-measures I use to address it. My outlook is positive, and my overall physical well-being improving, so I can't really complain.

new new deal

I really like this quote from David Rosenberg, a real economist who works for the investment firm Gluskin Sheff. It's the best short description of the new economic reality in our pilfered and impoverished new republic I've seen yet.

“The economy remains on government-assisted life support, and the government has been very successful in creating the illusion of economic prosperity. It is doing this to buy time and help preserve social stability as the adjustment towards housing deflation, consumer deleveraging, and chronic unemployment takes its toll on the growth rate in organic final demand.”


Translated into laymanese, this means that the "recovery" is a scam, that the housing market is permanently collapsed, and that people from now on will not have as much money to buy stuff as they did in previous times, because not nearly as many of us are going to be working, or at least not working at officially recognized "jobs" for "da man."

It looks bad, but there's a silver lining. It means consumerism is significantly weakened, that we're going to be driving fewer miles in fewer cars, and this will have a positive environmental impact. People will have more free time to raise their kids and live their lives under less pressure from the rat race, which has slowed considerably. The economy won't return to its formerly frenetic level because demand, the one and only driver of modern industrial economies, has departed, and gone to China.

Maybe the Chinese can handle consumerism with a little more grace than we did, but I doubt it.

loudmouth

I don't know how I missed this when news came out a week ago. Probably I was distracted by all the furor about the Arizona massacre.

Apparently back in December, some rich bozo in Palm Springs was arrested for threatening the life of Seattle's Congressman and my district's representative, Jim McDermott.

In the first call, (Charles) Habermann said he’d seen McDermott on television and was enraged by his comments opposing tax cuts for the rich.

“He’s a piece of human filth. He’s a liar, he’s a communist, he’s a piece of [expletive] garbage,” Habermann said in the recorded message, according to the criminal complaint. Habermann said George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other U.S. founding fathers would “blow his [McDermott's] brains out” if they met him.

Habermann then threatened to kill McDermott as well as his friends and family, the complaint says. In a second call, Habermann said he had “a lot of money” and “a lot of friends” and that McDermott was “going down.”

It's probably not the first time he's received such threats, since McDermott is one of the few members of Congress who possesses a heart, a brain, and a spine, as his public condemnation of Obama's extension of tax cuts for billionaires clearly shows. This particular case consisted of a lot more smoke than fire, though, as a lot of them do.

For one thing, the would-be assassin called McDermott from Palm Springs, 1200 miles from McDermott's district here in Seattle and over 3000 miles from D.C. Great strategy, Charlie, letting them know way in advance you're coming for them.

Secondly, he vented his intentions all over McDermott's voice mail recording. So we're not dealing with the sharpest tool in the shed here. He also bragged about how much money he's got, a universal trait of rich people who are also stupid.

Everybody on God's green earth is assigned a role to play. Jesus said, "I am the door," and this fellow Mr. Charles Turner Habermann could with justification say, "I am the door-stop," which would be fine if he wasn't so noisy about it.

digging the roots

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is changing his tactics. Over the past few years he has concentrated his efforts on revealing U.S. government, and especially the Pentagons' and Security Agencies' documented abuses of power. All indications are that in 2011 he is planning to attack the powers behind the government, the plutocrat puppeteers who use their fortunes to pull the strings of our elected and appointed officials.

Even while he was fighting to get out of jail in England at the end of 2010, Assange announced he was preparing a major dump of documents drawn from the hard drive of a top executive in "one of the largest U.S. banks." While he hasn't named the institution, most informed observers believe it's Bank of America, and that we can expect to see hard evidence of massive illegalities perpetrated by B of A and other institutions prior to and during the mortgage-and-derivatives meltdown of 2007-08 and beyond. We might even get a look at the kinds of shennanigans and pressures the banks brought to bear on the government when they were shaking us down for the TARP heists, as well as the details of other, more secret payouts.

In addition, Assange recently was publicly given documents by a disgruntled former Swiss bank employee which contain detailed information about offshore bank accounts owned by superrich individuals and corporations. Most of these accounts are set up for tax avoidance. Rudolf Elmer, according to the Reuters coverage, "headed the office of Julius Baer in the Cayman Islands until he was fired by the bank in 2002. He is scheduled to go on trial in Switzerland on Wednesday for breaching bank secrecy."

"Swiss national Elmer handed Assange the data at a news conference at a media club in London. The two yellow and blue discs contain information on around 2,000 banking clients, both individuals and companies, he said, declining to reveal further details on the data," the Reuters coverage said.

Assange's new emphasis on revealing the secrets of the international ruling class is the next logical step in the ongoing awakening of the working and impoverished classes in America and elsewhere. My gut feeling is that once they learn how blatantly they've been robbed and abused, people will demand changes, and will refuse to be stalled or put off with panaceas, lame answers, or the usual Fox News and CNN lies and evasions.

season finalé

What exactly is a sea hawk? Wikipedia tells me that the osprey, or fish eagle is sometimes so called.

The Seahawks brand resulted from a popular contest in which over 20,000 fans participated and over 5,000 suggestions were offered. The name "Seattle Fisheagles" was duly rejected, and since 1976 the hawks have been our beloved NFL gladitorial franchise.

Yes, Seattle DOES have professional sports teams, although I pay them little attention. I don't like the ritualized warfare of foop-ball, am bored speechless by baseball's narcoleptic "action," and while basketball has its moments, our pro team decamped a few years back for (of all places) Oklahoma City. Plus, Seattle's teams are generally hapless.

I suppose I could generate or fake an interest in the Seahawks, however. Until 2000 they played in the Kingdome, a dreadful, cold, leaky concrete shell that was equally unsuitable for watching athletic contests or listening to concerts. It was mercifully imploded, and since 2001 the hawks have been at Qwest field, where the game is played outdoors, as God intended.

And they did have what has to be counted as a successful season this year. After compiling their usually mediocre 6-9 record going into the final "must-win" game of the season, they pulled out a victory against St. Louis, then won a first-round playoff game against New Orleans.

You have to know a little about Seahawks history to realize that any year in which they win even a single playoff game is lavishly successful by local standards. So the fact that they're losing badly in Chicago even as I type this is of little consequence. It simply means the world has returned to its regular axial rotation.

And considering that kind of success, maybe next year I'll buy me a blue jersey, ante up, and join the salivating and beslobbered fanatics at Qwest Field, cheering on our dear old Fisheagles.

unrelated

I know for sure that one is actually a lot older than the other, so they're really NOT identical twins.

In fact, they're not similar at all. It's just a pigment of your imagination.