Stop Me Before I Vote Again

It's getting to be less fun trying to discredit the Democratic Party these days; the party is doing such a terrific job of self-discreditation that any additional contribution from this 'umble blog seems, well, supererogatory. So I find myself returning more and more to another unpublishable book(*), this one an attack on the credentialling sector, CS for short.

I personally have a fondness for dead languages, and so I subscribe to an email list for people interested in ancient Greek and Latin. Not surprisingly, a good many fellow-subscribers are either inmates or screws in the CS.

Now every mailing list has its recurring obsessions -- monsoons that blow in every couple of months or so and drench everything in sight with torrents of platitude. For bicyclists, it's helmets. For harpsichordists, it's temperament (the musical kind, not the characterological). For classicists, it's The Usefulness Of The Classics.

This Ixion's wheel of tedium got its latest spin from a ponderous Colonel-Blimpish column in the Telegraph, written by the entertaining Tory buffoon Boris Johnson, shown below after an appearance at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. (He was entered as a Pomeranian, a region from which some of his oddly-assorted ancestors are said to originate.)

Excerpt: "The reason we should boost the study of Latin and Greek is that they are the key to a phenomenal and unsurpassed treasury of literature and history and philosophy, and we cannot possibly understand our modern world unless we understand the ancient world that made us all."

All the various arguments for the utility of classical studies -- understanding the modern world, stretching the mental muscles, etc. -- strike me as both implausible, and unappealing even if they were plausible.

On the other hand, perhaps I'm just a self-indulgent sybarite, but pleasure seems to me like a good reason to do something. To paraphrase Dr Johnson -- a more penetrating Tory Johnson than Boris -- there are only two reasons to study anything: emolument and delight. Classics are not exactly the high road to emolument, but for people wired a certain way, they can be a considerable source of delight.

Delight, however, is the last thing the credentialling sector boffins would think of offering. Perhaps they know their own limitations; but no, I don't think so. What they're articulating here is something that goes deeper.

Somebody once observed of the Puritans that they disliked bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. In this respect the Puritans sounded a motif that the rising petit-bourgeoisie was to make very much its leit-. Even my louche and dissolute generation, who would remember the Sixties with great pleasure if they could remember, have returned to bourgeois form on this point. Pleasure -- idle pleasure -- wasted time -- is deeply suspect; everything has to have some utility -- every investment of time or effort has to show a return. Even vacations get filed under some such rubric as "recharging the batteries", so that the striver can come back with redoubled zeal to his weary corporate climb, and more than make good the time he lost on the ski slopes. And this constituency of instrumental-reasoners is, naturally, the demo that the Unis are marketing to.

But of course, the argument from utility is transparently bogus when it comes to Classics, and that's why academic Classics are doomed.

A good thing, too. My Greek is pathetic and my Latin hardly better, but I really think the old boys in the chitons and togas would be in better hands if they were tended by amateurs -- even amateurs like me. Hell, if present employment trends continue, I'll be in an excellent position soon to improve my Greek.

There's an old humorous verse, which I'm probably misremembering --

The legacies of history
Are left to strange police --
Professors in New England guard
The glory that was Greece.

When the regents finally ax these poor devils and I meet them on the bread line, I'll give 'em a cheerful Ave (or Χαίρε) and propose a reading group, whose only rule will be a firm commitment to unproductive pleasure.

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(*) Working title: The Hell With Merit.

(**) Though seldom so vulgarly phrased. "Boost," forsooth! And what does this great classicist think "phenomenal" means?

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Tuesday March 16 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

I'm almost embarrassed for John Cassidy, but the loathsome spectacle he's joined puts him well past any such concern.

The big banks remain able to open their doors only because Geithner and Bernanke keep them on life support. They are not healthy. They are not solvent. They are utterly dependent on the heroic book fiddling of the Fed's and Treasury's yuppie Stakhanovites. What's more, they're still playing the same games that got them into code orange panic. Only the most severely delusional pretend otherwise. Even the banksters aren't kidding themselves, and that really says something. Cassidy's adulation—oh the sordidness of it all!— Tim Geithner... It might be possible to find someone more loathsome, but I honestly have no idea where to begin looking.

Posted by Al Schumann on Tuesday March 16 01:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Simon Johnson -- shown above, looking a bit like Bob Newhart -- has had his manic anti-Laputa moments lately. But it seems, come the ultimo pinch -- once a guy's spent some quality time trawling the watery byways of the planet for the IMF in full B and D mode... well, you know... ya just can't take the bonecrusher out of 'em.

Here's Simon pressing our brave little grasshoppering Hellenes to morph into fiscal anorexia mode and deal with their "sovereign debt bubble" by... paying it off!

"By the end of 2011 Greece’s debt will reach around 150% of GDP... About 80 percent of this debt is foreign owned, and a large part of this is thought held by residents of France and Germany."

" Every 1 percentage point rise in interest rates means Greece needs to send an additional 1.2 percent of GDP abroad to those bondholders."

"What if Greek interest rates rise to, say, 10% – a modest premium for a country which has the highest external public debt/GDP ratio in the world, which continues (under the so-called “austerity” program) to refinance even the interest on that debt without actually paying a centime out of its own pocket, and which is struggling to establish any sustained backing from the rest of Europe?"

"..Greece would need to send a total of 12% of GDP abroad per year, once they rollover the existing stock of debt to these new rates (nearly half of Greek debt will roll over within 3 years).

This is simply impossible and unheard of for any long period of history. German reparation payments were 2.4 percent of GNP during 1925-32, and in the years immediately after 1982, the net transfer of resources from Latin America was 3.5 percent of GDP (a fifth of its export earnings). Neither of these were good experiences."

"On top of all this Greece’s debt, even under the IMF’s mild assumptions, is on a non-convergent path even with the perceived “austerity” measures."

These "numbers" can get a signifigantly opposite play. Enter St Paul of Nassau: "In the past, some countries have managed levels of debt that high or higher, without default...So how is that possible?

Suppose that Greece had as much credibility as Germany, and could borrow at a real interest rate of 2 percent. Then stabilizing the real value of its debt, even with a debt ratio of 150 percent, would require a primary surplus of only 3 percent of GDP. That’s certainly possible for some countries, although maybe not for Greece... this suggests that optimism or pessimism about future default can, to at least some degree, be a self-fulfilling prophecy." As if to scotch Johnson's own bitter prophecy, the Euro barons are making nice about Athens -- err, not Byronic nice; more like "them's pets of the realm" nice.

In any case these numbers are far from horrorific in absolute terms. Imagine, say, South Carolina in fiscal trouble. Could the rest of the states bail her out through the grand offices of Uncle Sap?

"Soitenly!" as "Curly" Krugman pointed out some time ago: "Overall, the group of stressed economies account for about 20 percent of the eurozone’s GDP", Krug observes -- less of a hard slog than, say, if Uncle were to bail out Dixie (though we have to put Spain aside as TBTF).

Hell, it gets to be a damn fine boat ride. If the Euro central bank can borrow at sub German rates, then...

But alas, mates, a greater fraud is in progress here, perpetrated upon a lesser fraud, and in the end 'twill all prove just another silk-hat squeeze play, a starve-the-little-critters gambit, a nifty iron-law flimflam, a way to crumple the welfare state just a tad more, foul its safety nets and crimp its feckless hu-cap squanderings. "They're in a pickle, boys, so let's squelch 'em and squelch 'em gooood!..."

To paraphrase Andy Mellon: "Starve starve starve! Starve Greece! Starve Portugal! Starve Latvia and Estonia too, and oh yes, of course, begorrah, starve that dirty little figment on the Emerald Isle."

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(*) The rates on Greek sovereign debt -- as a mere fly speck out of the global total -- could be easily kept down by simple purchases on the open market by the European central bank. This fantasy of ballooning rates leading to a cascade of attacks on other weak sister sovereigns is as unnecessary as the fear of, of... the fear of wet hair when you're about to leave a hat shop in a rainstorm.

As to this straight-from-scratch bullshit --

"[10%] is a modest premium for a country which has the highest external public debt/GDP ratio in the world"

And as for Greece the debt king -- why, the chaps have a smaller GDP to debt ratio than Japan, among others.

Check out Japan's borrowing rates.

Posted by Owen Paine on Saturday March 13 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My man Alex Cockburn was in fine form the other day, a propos the Oscar for Hurt Locker:

The film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, said at the end of her acceptance speech, “I'd like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world and may they come home safe.”

...I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker and don’t plan to.... “We had these Blackwater guys that were working with us in the Middle East and they taught us like tactical maneuvers and stuff – how to just basically position yourself and move with a gun,” Hurt Locker actor Anthony Mackie told the New York Times’ Melena Ryzik. “We were shooting in Palestinian refugee camps. We were shooting in some pretty hard places. It wasn't like we were without enemies. There were people there looking at us, 'cuz we were three guys in American military suits runnin' around with guns. It was nothing easy about it. It was always a compromising situation.”

I love Alex for breezily dismissing a movie he hasn't seen. You can tell a book by its cover, I've always said, and all you really need to know about a movie is how people respond to it. I am not being ironical here. Reception is not just the main thing, it's the only thing.

I personally made this discovery years ago, in connection with the movie The Deer Hunter, which I still haven't seen. I found that all I had to do was get people to tell me what they liked about the movie, and I had plenty of grist for my mill. Sentimentality is chief lady-in-waiting to militarism -- sloppily weeping and waving her sodden handkerchief as Moloch marches off to the fields of slaughter.

Sentimentality also gets to have it both ways. IMDB has an unsourced quote supposedly from director Kathryn Bigelow:

I'm thinking of the war and I think it's a deplorable situation. [Movies are] a great medium in which to speak about that. This is a war [i.e. Afghanistan] that cannot be won, why are we sending troops over there? Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Saturday March 13 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

There is something all too twisted in me. Take my new heartthrob, the rather aquiline Catherine Rampell. I find her as entrancing as a glass case full of birthday cakes, and she works for Father Smiff's NYT, no less -- in fact, she edits their online econ-con efforts, and writes stuff too, like this, f'rinstance:

"Rather than obsessing over Washington’s rubbery backbones, perhaps we should find ways to align the interests of the country with those of the politicians who are guiding it. Put another way, how can we get politicians elected on a short-term basis to think about the long-term good of the country?...

Historically, fiscal crises have followed financial crises [yup, like the one we just had], so now is probably the time to start planning.... It has been difficult to spook Americans too much because it has been so blissfully long since we had a budget crisis; the last time the government technically defaulted on its debt was during the Great Depression.

Alas, we don’t have a color-coded alert system to warn us about our fiscal condition.

We do, however, have credit rating agencies. Moody’s recently warned that it might downgrade America’s top-notch sovereign credit rating, which could alarm the markets and eventually make it harder for the government to borrow. Once upon a time it seemed we needed the government to save the financial markets; perhaps now it is the financial markets that will keep the government in line."

Now here's one for my darker side:

"The question of why so many Jews have been so good at making money is a touchy one...From Aristotle through the Renaissance (and then again in the 19th century, thanks to that Jew-baiting former Jew Karl Marx), thinkers believed that money should be considered sterile, a mere means of exchange incapable of producing additional value. Only labor could be truly productive, it was thought, and anyone who extracted money from money alone — that is, through interest — must surely be a parasite, or at the very least a fraud...

Lending at interest was thus forbidden across Christian Europe — for Christians. Jews, however, were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church to charge interest; since they were going to hell anyway, why not let them help growing economies function more efficiently? (According to Halakha, or Jewish law, Jews were not allowed to charge interest to one another, just to gentiles.)...

The exorbitant interest rates they charged — sometimes as high as 60 percent — only fed the fury. But considering the economic climate, such rates probably made good business sense: capital was scarce, and lenders frequently risked having their debtors’ obligations canceled or their own assets arbitrarily seized by the crown...

This early, semi-exclusive exposure to finance, coupled with a culture that valued literacy, abstract thinking, trade and specialization (the Babylonian Talmud amazingly presaged Adam Smith’s paradigmatic pin factory), gave Jews the human capital necessary to succeed in modern capitalism. It also helped that Judaism, unlike many strains of Christianity, did not consider poverty particularly ennobling...

For centuries, poverty, paranoia and financial illiteracy have combined into a dangerous brew — one that has made economic virtuosity look suspiciously like social vice, [inspiring] resentment among history’s economic also-rans."

I may die with her image swimming past my unshut eyes.

Posted by Owen Paine on Thursday March 11 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Welcome the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

The advisory board is worth a look: what a criminal-looking bunch, every man jack of 'em wearing an expression that's either brittlely brazen or shifty-eyed and hang-dog. These are the motley Merlins that George Attaturk Soros has assembled to redesign the global economic system; and here is a quote from his highness, lord Soros, that serves as well as any might to seed the ground with dragon's teeth:

"The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm to rebuild from the ground up."

Posted by Owen Paine on Thursday March 11 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

March is Independent Fed month!

This month back in '51, the blatantly bright-eyed anal-looking briefcase thief pictured above freed our Fed from the Truman treasury department, after 9 harrowing years of institutional captivity, just as many of our brave boys in Korea were entering Chicom captivity.

Clio takes with one hand as she gives with the other, no?

At any rate, brainwashing seems to work in both directions. Here's one way -- the classical way, the Red Menace way. Before washing:

After washing:

And here's another way -- the Fed's freedom-to-turkeyrope way. Before washing:

After washing:

To read about this glorious silk-hat liberation struggle, maybe start here. In brief: the Fed had its policy rate ceilinged, for nearly a decade, at a level often well below inflation. The clamp was placed originally in 42-43 just as Uncle, resorting to extraordinary measures, exploded his deficits to win the war.

The same clamp -- prolonged by diabolical Treasury forces -- helped win the postwar peace too, as the economy barreled ahead in unprecedentedly broad and bottom-elevating strike-infested fashion.

With help like this pinned rate, obviously the size of our war-induced federal paper debt mountain shrank nicely, as the postwar years of stiff -- in part, wage-driven -- price level updrafts roared away.

March, '51 -- like mighty badger Milhous closing the gold window in August '71

-- one of the really big invisible ink landmarks in the great American class struggle.

Posted by Owen Paine on Thursday March 11 08:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Congressman Eric Massa is not going quietly, is he? He's been a favorite here since my visit to the Daily Kos convention back in '06.

His supposed "inappropriate" behavior -- don't you hate that term? -- doesn't seem to have amounted to much, unless there's juicier stuff to come. But all right-minded people are agreed that it's a lunatic "conspiracy theory" -- don't you hate that term? -- to imagine that the Dems might have greased the skids for him.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Wednesday March 10 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)