Whilst O’Donnell laudably tried to target the audience’s consideration onand hopefully final, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen underneath for decent, I was overtaken, not through the pulling about the thread, in addition to the voracious audience he serves. It did not make me sad, it designed me angry.
When it comes to celebrities, we could be a heartless nation, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Beach. The impulse is understandable, to some degree. It may possibly be grating to listen to complaints from many people who have fun with privileges that most of us cannot even just imagine. If you should can not muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who would make further cash for any day’s perform than many of us will make inside a decade’s time, I guess I can’t blame you.
Together with the quick tempo of occasions on the net as well as the information revolution sparked by the Web-based, it is quite quick for the engineering industry to imagine it’s unique: consistently breaking new ground and performing points that no one has ever achieved in advance of.
But you will discover other kinds of small business that have by now undergone a few of the exact same radical shifts, and also have just as good a stake during the long run.
Consider healthcare, as an illustration.
We normally consider of it like a huge, lumbering beast, but in truth, medication has undergone a series of revolutions inside the previous 200 years that happen to be at the very least equal to individuals we see in engineering and information and facts.
Less understandable, but however in the norms of human nature, will be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and consider the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but on the blithe interviewer Sheen’s daily life as we pass it while in the best suited lane of our every day lives. To become sincere, it may possibly be tough for persons to discern the variation concerning a run-of-the-mill focus whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its own merits, a quote like “I Am On a Drug. It is Referred to as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can’t all be expected to consider the full measure of someone’s life each time we hear a little something humorous.
Extremely fast forward to 2011 and I am trying to look into will mean of staying a bit more business-like about my hobbies (for the most part music). By the conclude of January I had manned up and started out to advertise my weblogs. I had made many totally different blogs, which were contributed to by acquaintances and colleagues. I promoted these activities by Facebook and Twitter.
2nd: the small abomination the Gang of Five on the Supream Court gave us a 12 months or so ago (Citizens Inebriated) essentially features a touch bouncing betty of its individual that could really effectively go off inside the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Since this ruling extended the principle of “personhood” to each businesses and unions, to experiment with to deny them any best to run within the legal framework that they had been organized underneath deprives these “persons” from the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which implies (after again, quoting law school educated friends and family) that both the courts really have to uphold these rights for that unions (as person “persons” as guaranteed from the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they've to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights have to utilize to main corporations, also.
There's been a lot of confusion over the last few days about a possible deal with US banks to settle a fifty-state lawsuit over widespread and massive foreclosure fraud. Attorneys general from all the states have been working together, and the latest word is that the Obama Administration has proposed its own framework for a agreement.
Will that agreement be a fair one for the American people? The signs don't look good. Not that it should be a surprise. Weak and misleading reporting has set the stage for a lousy deal - one that could let bankers off the hook for criminal behavior and even let them to keep their ill-gotten gains.
Time for a quick review of the facts: The banks' mortgage fraud cost the economy many billions of dollars - trillions, if you include their speculation on housing values - and has left millions of homeowners in severe financial distress. This fraud was deliberate, widespread, and systematic, expedited by a program called "MERS" - a combined database and shadow corporation - designed to evade property law,. To date there have been no criminal prosecutions of bank executives for hiring teams of people who knowingly falsified documents and committed perjury on a widespread scale.
It shouldn't be necessary to repeat those facts, since they're so widely documented. But apparently it is necessary, since we're still seeing misleading headlines like this one in last Friday's Los Angeles Times: "Government, banks wrestle over how to settle case over botched foreclosure paperwork."
"Botched foreclosure paperwork"?? There's evidence - overwhelming evidence - that banks hired unqualified people and order them to falsely claim that they possessed property documents they didn't have. "Botched paperwork"? We're talking about a massive crime wave, not a couple of folders that weren't filed alphabetically.
The problem extends to the body of the article too, which uses phrases like "faulty robo-signed documents." Faulty? Robo-signed documents are a form of mass-produced perjury. Each one is a false statement to a court of law. Calling them "faulty" is like calling the money in the back of John Dillinger's getaway car "misallocated." It's like calling the Bonnano crime family's protection racket an "unjust form of taxation."
With journalism like this, it's no wonder that things are playing out as they are, with a Bloomberg News reporting that "the government originally floated a $25 billion penalty, which banks rejected."
"Which banks rejected"? Since when do accused lawbreakers get to accept or reject the terms of their punishment and restitution? Apparently the Administration has been operating under the misapprehension reflected in this sentence from Business Insider: "To get a far-reaching settlement, the White House needs to get the approval of federal regulators, state attorneys general, and of course, the lenders themselves."
Actually they don't need approval from "the lenders themselves." Here's another approach: Have FBI teams descend on every bank headquarters in the country. Subpoena every single email ever sent or received by Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, and all the other bank CEOs to see what they did and didn't know about the illegal activity taking place in their organizations. Or hit them with massive fines and let them settle for a smaller amount. Apparently these approaches haven't been considered.
Instead the Wall Street Journal told us that "The Obama administration is trying to push through a settlement over mortgage-servicing breakdowns." ("Mortgage servicing breakdowns"? I'm out of metaphors for the crimes that journalists persist in describing as errors - from now on you'll have to make up your own.) The Journal reported that the Administration wanted banks to set aside $20 billion to reduce the loan balances on underwater mortgages, or else be fined the same amount.
The Journal report described its sources only as "people familiar with the matter." People? Who are famiiar with the matter? They don't even say which part of the "matter" these "people are familiar with. They didn't just grant these sources anonymity - they obscured all details of their existence. Were they regulators? Administration officials? Bankers? Robot emissaries from the future sent to to find the mother of some future Wall Street prosecutor? We don't know, and that makes it impossible to decode the possible motivations for this story. (The Society of Professional Journalists has published excellent guidelines regarding sources an anonymity, which include: "Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources' reliability Always question sources' motives before granting anonymity.")
Within 24 hours of the Wall Street Journal story about the settlement, the Huffington Post's Zach Carter was reporting that there never was a deal, and that the $20 billion settlement number used in that report came from ... well, nowhere. Adding to the confusion, the original Wall Street Journal story said that the Administration had a "proposal" for a deal, and not an actual deal.
We can assume that the $20 billion proposed figure is accurate, given the number of stories that have used it without a public denial. As far as the details are concerned, however, we're now officially becalmed in fog-shrouded waters somewhere between Plausible Denial, Absolute Confusion, and WTF, with no idea which way the currents are drifting. As the outlines of the Administration's proposal begin to coalesce (our response to it will is coming shortly),the media's failure to educate the public has left the public unable to judge it fairly.
When it comes to Wall Street, first the politicians failed. Then the regulators failed. Then the ratings agencies failed. Now apparently it's the media's turn. American journalism has really let us down this time ...
... according to people familiar with the matter.
Re: “A Microcosm of the Market Manipulation in the US and the Repeated Failure of Ideology” Jesse
Jesse said:
And when the next financial crisis comes along, perhaps the people will not be so complacent and gullible, and see the real culprits behind the ideological scapegoats and fog of talk show hosts. But I’m not betting on it.
This raises an important question, for it’s always seemed to me like the “ideological scapegoats and fog” emanate from both ends of the political spectrum.
I’ve often said that the New Left and neoliberals are partners in crime.
Nancy Fraser, in an article that JT Faraday cited from the New Left Review the other day, which can be found here, certainly does nothing to disabuse me of this notion. On the contrary, Fraser only serves to reinforce this view.
Anyone who would make the following statement as late as March 2009, as Fraser did, after Obama’s performance on TARP and his appointment of Geithner and Summers to the top economic slots in his regime, is not terribly perceptive:
Certainly, the global financial crisis and the decidedly post-neoliberal response to it by leading states…mark the beginning of neoliberalism’s end as an economic regime. The election of Barak Obama may signal the decisive repudiation, even in the belly of the beast, of neoliberalism as a political project.
But that’s just a start, because it gets worse. Much worse.
The intent of Fraser’s pieces seems to be two-fold:
1) To make sure that feminists play no active role in ending neoliberalism, in the belief that neoliberaism will somehow just go away by itself, and
2) To discredit the feminist consensus that emerged out of 1960s activism.
Fraser accurately sums up the later as follows:
All told, second-wave feminism espoused a transformative political project, premised on an expanded understanding of injustice and a systemic critique of capitalistic society. The movement’s most advanced currents saw their struggles as multi-dimensional aimed simultaneously against economic exploitation, status hierarchy and political subjection. To them, moreover, feminism appeared as part of a broader emancipatory project, in which struggles against gender injustices were necessarily linked to struggles against racism, imperialism, homophobia and class domination, all of which required transformation of the deep structures of capitalist society.
To which Fraser immediately goes on to say:
As it turned out, that project remained largely stillborn, a casualty of deeper historical forces, which were not well understood at the time.
Of course this last statement is not true at all. The reason the project was “largely stillborn” was not because of “deeper historical forces,” but because it was subverted and co-opted by the New Left and denizens of the ivory tower like Fraser.
Here’s Robert Hughes’ scathing critique of the New Left in Culture of Complaint:
Hence, in the universities, what matters is the politics of culture, not the politics of the distribution of wealth and of real events in the social sphere, like poverty, drug addiction and the rise of crime. The academic left is much more interested in race and gender than in class. And it is very much more interested in theorizing about gender and race than actually reporting on them. This enables its savants to feel they are on the cutting edge of social change, without doing legwork outside of academe; the “traditional left” has been left far behind, stuck with all that unglamorous and twice-told stuff about the workers. It is better to rummage around in pop culture, showing how oppressive structures are “inscribed” in some of its forms and “questioned” by others—-a process inseparable, of course, from the protean energies of capitalism, seeking to re-invent its oppressive self every day through popular culture in order to find new and better ways of turning us into docile consumers.
Two problems with Fraser’s framing of the issues jump out at us. One, New Left feminism, despite what Fraser would lead one to believe, does not constitute the depth and breadth of feminism. While I’m no student of feminism, I’m quite sure that lurking around out there somewhere are still some who cling to traditional feminism, even though Fraser may choose to ignore them. After all, some feminists, unlike Fraser and her New Left cohorts, have to live in the real world and do not enjoy the luxury of being walled off in their academic cocoons. And two, Hughes published Culture of Complaint back in 1993, and it has taken Fraser until 2009 to wake up to the fact that the New Left was off on some mindless bunny trail. It has taken the New Left almost two decades to become aware of, as she puts it, “a capitalism so indiscriminate that it would instrumentalize any perspective whatever,” something that Hughes was fully cognizant of and warned of 16 years before.
Fraser’s lack of perspicacity is certainly bad enough, but her mindless repetition of neoliberal shibboleths, coming this late in the game, places her way beyond the pale. Instead of critiquing what neoliberals do, she uncritically accepts what they say. And by doing this, and by mindlessly repeating neoliberal myths, she further propagandizes and perpetuates neoliberalism’s “capitalism and freedom” canard. Thus Fraser’s role seems to be that of a neoliberal Trojan horse deep within the feminist fortress. Take this from Fraser, for instance:
In place of dirigisme, they [neoliberals] promoted privatization and deregulation; in place of public provision and social citizenship, ‘trickle-down’ and ‘personal responsibility’; in place of the welfare and developmental states, the lean, mean ‘competition state’.
Where has Fraser been for the last 34 years? She has swallowed the libertarian fiction of “capitalism and freedom” hook, line and sinker. Didn’t neoliberalism’s true agenda become brilliantly clear in 1975 when Milton Friedman and Frederick von Hayek traipsed down to Chile to throw their unbridled and enthusiastic support behind the murdering military dictator Augusto Pinochet?
Neoliberalism’s agenda has never been “capitalism and freedom,” but the imposition of a grotesque double standard. Neoliberals never “promoted” the things Fraser says they did, but instead promoted “deregulation” for the neoliberal over-class, and an authoritarian police state for everyone else; “personal responsibility” for the poor, working- and middle-class and abrogation of any and all accountability for the neoliberal overlords; “welfare” for well-connected corporations and austerity for the masses; a “lean, mean, ‘competition state’” for the hoi polloi and a nanny state for the corporate wards of the government.
Fraser further reaffirms neoliberalsim’s Big Lie in her conclusion when she ruminates:
To that end, let us return to the question: what, if anything, explains our ‘dangerous liaison’ with neoliberalism?….[I]s there, as I suggested earlier, some subterranean elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism? If any such affinity does exist, it lies in the critique of traditional authority…. In the current moment, these two critiques of traditional authority, the one feminist, the other neoliberal, appear to converge.
But Fraser gets it all wrong. New Left feminism is not mistaken in its “critique of traditional authority,” but in it’s unbelievable naïveté. Neoliberalism was never a legitimate “critique of traditional authority,” but an orgy of what Orwell called “Newspeak,” “doublethink” and “reality control.” New Left feminism failed to see through this ruse and the emergence of a new authority that was even more authoritarian and oppressive than the one it replaced. And perhaps this is so because the New Left was not just gullible, but complicit in this deception. It’s never easy to tell the difference between incompetence and malice, but maybe the New Left is complicit in neoliberalism’s bait and switch because its own motives are not so pure.
Martin Luther King, wedged between democracy and Black Nationalism, warned of this eloquently when he wrote in “Facing the Challenge of a New Age”:
There is the danger that those of us who have lived so long under the yoke of oppression, those of us who have been exploited and trampled over, those of us who have had to stand amid the tragic midnight of injustice and indignities will enter the new age with hate and bitterness. But if we retaliate with hate and bitterness, the new age will be nothing but a duplication of the old age. We must blot out the hate and injustice of the old age with the love and justice of the new.
King reiterated this warning years later in a commencement address he delivered to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania:
As I have said on so many instances, it is not enough to struggle for the new society. We must make sure that we make the psychological adjustment required to live in that new society. This is true of white people, and it is true of Negro people. Psychological adjustment will save white people from going into the new age with old vestiges of prejudice and attitudes of white supremacy. It will save the Negro from seeking to substitute one tyranny for another.
I know sometimes we get discouraged and sometimes disappointed with the slow pace of things. At times we begin to talk about racial separation instead of racial integration, feeling that there is no other way out. My only answer is that the problem never will be solved by substituting one tyranny for another. Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and in the creation of a society where all men can live together as brothers, where every man will respect the dignity and the worth of human personality.
There will be no economic justice in the world until, as King put it, we “rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns for all humanity.” This philosophy stands at the heart of the feminist consensus that emerged out of the 1960s, the same consensus that Fraser and the New Left now find so woefully inadequate.
Fraser does conclude her piece with some good advice:
I am suggesting, then, that this is a moment in which feminists should think big.
I agree. Feminists should “think big” by giving Fraser and her New Left cohort, which in practice is little more than a rearguard for neoliberalism, a swift kick in the ass. They need to be told, in no uncertain terms, to go sow their moral and intellectual confusion somewhere else. The feminist consensus that emerged during the 1960s is still valid. What are lacking are the moral conviction and the clarity and nimbleness of thought to see it through.
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