Stop Me Before I Vote Again

(I wrote this piece some time ago and shelved it. Owen's recent post about the odious witch doctor Robert Trivers brought the topic back to mind, so here it is. Warning: It's as long as the Epistle to the Romans, and not nearly as well written.)

I knew a girl, back in my college days – let's call her Diotima. She was a very attractive girl, though I never got anywhere with her, not for lack of trying. In later life, she became what you might call the International Standard Liberal. That is to say, after a feckless and louche baby-boomer youth, she went "back" to law school -- as she oddly put it; had she gone to law school in a previous life? -- and ended up making a nice upper-middle-class living as a bureaucrat in an agency devoted to “Victim Services.”

Some years after our college days, I ran into Diotima again, at a wedding. I was a red-hot Marxist-Leninist in those days, or so I sincerely believed. We argued about politics for quite some time over the downscale champagne, and she finally dismissed me, with a self-assurance you had to admire, by saying that I had found a "substitute for religion."

I chewed on this for a while and finally decided she was right.

Diotima was a hell of an attractive girl – was that already made clear? But even for the sake of her lush poitrine I couldn't live in the whiggish, commonsensical, Benthamite world which is, for her, the only desirable or imaginable world. Diotima correctly saw that my wild dreams of social transformation had no firmer evidentiary basis than the pious Christian's hope of Heaven, and that I was committed to them in the teeth of all the obvious facts.

This memory bubbled back up during a recent weekend spent in an enlightened household with three generations of intelligent and successful Ivy League graduates.

The youngest son – let's call him Strephon – was reading, with great glee, Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, and declaiming aloud passages that he found particularly entertaining. After half an hour of this I was ready to run out and join the Trappists, and sign off gladly on every article of the Catholic faith, the more baroque and improbable the better.

Dawkins is a shallow, monocausal answer-for-everything smart-aleck with a disreputable weakness for sociobiology – a guy so full of sophomoric self-assurance, he thinks that a topic already handled rather well by Gibbon and Voltaire could benefit from his attention. But the fury I was starting to feel, subjected to Dawkins' jejune witticisms at God's expense, was going well beyond irritation or even contempt. I wanted to take up the cudgels on God's behalf. Or, putting it a different way: given a choice between God, with His problematic record, on the one hand, and Dawkins on the other – I'd take God any day.

Not a publication I usually read, but this link crossed my e-desk this morning:

By night Berlin has become a battlefield. Each morning reveals new casualties: burned out cars. There have been over 500 in the past three years. These nocturnal arson attacks are part of a protracted campaign of resistance to the city’s increasing gentrification....

Meanwhile, in my town, from another publication I seldom read:

Psycho cycler's revenge
Attacks limo & driver who clipped him

A raging cyclist fed up with aggressive Manhattan drivers took matters into his own hands yesterday, jumping on the hood of a limo that clipped him and smashing in the windshield with his fists.

Bike messenger-gone-wild Perzeus Forte, 20, also ripped out the front passenger window, tore the shirt of driver Darr Mohammed, 49, and clocked him in the face during the savage road rage attack around 1 p.m., sources said.

"He hit me and kept going," Forte later fumed to The Post. "I'm sick of this."

Forte's rampage began while riding his bike up Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, where Mohammed grazed him around West 19th Street. The limo kept going until he got stopped by a red light at West 20th Street.

That's when Forte flipped out, ditching his wheels and sprinting 100 yards to the car. He leaped onto the hood while screaming, "I'm going to kill you! I'm going to kill you, motherf- - -er!" according to one witness.

Somebody give this guy a movie contract, instantly!

Honest, this was the first image Google served up when I searched for "gremlin". I dunno what their ranking algorithm is, though having known a few computer programmers in my day, I have my suspicions.

Anyway. Comments were weirdly closed out again on a couple of posts -- including, for the first time, one of mine; it's not just you, Owen. Problem fixed now, and we can return to our regularly scheduled program of undermining and demoralization.

Legitimacy of Authority and Hypothetical violence: still not as scary as actual violence cover it well.

There is no legitimacy crisis.

There are, however, a large number of claptrap artists attempting to mold empty formalism into legitimacy. Their focus, as always, is on the corporate performance art of the Tea Baggers.

A few more thoughts.

The choice of empty formalism is a marker of vulgar conservatism. The lower functioning righties are quite hostile to consideration of what is and is not constitutive of substance. They, too, see the ritual aspects of republicanism as more important than the steady delivery of social welfare services. In a pinch, they'll acknowledge a need for actual tangible benefits, but it always come in the form of adulation for violent coercion. The more people are killed or locked up, the more impressed they are.

Who is this ear-ringed Aussie? It's my second-favorite Billy Mitchell. Like my top favorite Billy Mitchell, shown below --

... this Billy Mitchell also lords it over an obscure subculture that has recently caught the attention of the mainstream.

A few months back I noticed that many of the better commenters had disappeared from my favorite economics blogs. Why did my stomping grounds suddenly feel like Studio 54 circa 1985?

As it turns out, everyone was on to the new new thing: Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT for short. MMT is a neo-chartalist economic theory promoted by Bill Mitchell and a few other eccentric characters. The main insight of MMT is that money is a creature of the state and under a fiat, floating exchange rate currency regime, a sovereign government has no nominal spending constraint.

What does this mean in English? Any country that prints its own currency and borrows in its own currency can never go bankrupt against its will. It can always print more currency to pay off its debts. A second key aspect of MMT is an emphasis on full employment as the appropriate goal for monetary and fiscal policy.

Who are its enemies? The deficit terrorists like Pete Peterson, the IMF, the EU leadership and the rest of the neo-liberal establishment.

Sounds good, right? As much as I am with Bill & co. in spirit, I do find his underlying economic arguments a bit off -- but that's a subject for another post. Nonetheless, I have to applaud the success he and his allies have had in popularizing a strong anti-austerity position, despite the prevailing deficit hysteria.

Just a few weeks ago I turned on BNN, my beloved closet-leftist Canadian business network, and saw one of his allies, Marshall Auerback, eloquently bashing the deficit hawks. Music to my ears!

The next step in the MMTers' publicity campaign is being organized by some of our friends over at Corrente: a teach-in and shadow conference taking place on April 28th in Mordor-on-Potomac. The idea is to provide a counter-narrative to Pete Peterson's deficit terrorist conference that is happening at the same time. I encourage everyone to do what they can to help out with this laudable initiative.

Not to prod, but in particular I think they could use a bit of high quality agitprop, *cough* Fluggenock *cough*.

But this is not:

I know, I know, it's hard to get all these towelheads straight. But you can always count on the New York Times to explain -- there are towelheads, and then there are towelheads:

Leaders Gather for Nuclear Talks as New Threat Is Seen

WASHINGTON — Three months ago, American intelligence officials examining satellite photographs of Pakistani nuclear facilities saw the first wisps of steam from the cooling towers of a new nuclear reactor.....

The Pakistanis insist that they have no choice. A nuclear deal that India signed with the United States during the Bush administration ended a long moratorium on providing India with the fuel and technology for desperately needed nuclear power plants.

Now, as critics of the arrangement point out, the agreement frees up older facilities that India can devote to making its own new generation of weapons....

Mr. Obama met with the leaders of India and Pakistan on Sunday, a day ahead of a two-day Washington gathering with 47 nations devoted to the question of how to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists.... this meeting has quite limited goals: seeking ways to better secure existing supplies of bomb-usable plutonium and highly enriched uranium. The problem that India and Pakistan represent... is deliberately not on the agenda.

“President Obama is focusing high-level attention on the threat that already exists out there, and that’s tremendously important,” said Sam Nunn... "the fact is that new production adds greatly to the problem.”

Nowhere is that truer than Pakistan, where two Taliban insurgencies and Al Qaeda coexist with the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. According to a senior American official, Mr. Obama used his private meeting Sunday afternoon with Yousaf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s newly empowered prime minister, to “express disappointment” that Pakistan is blocking the opening of negotiations on a treaty that would halt production of new nuclear material around the world.

Experts say accelerated production in Pakistan translates into much increased risk.

“The challenges are getting greater — the increasing extremism, the increasing instability, the increasing material,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who as a C.I.A. officer and then head of the Energy Department’s intelligence unit ran much of the effort to understand Al Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions.

“That’s going to complicate efforts to make sure nothing leaks,” he said. “The trends mean the Pakistani authorities have a greater challenge.”

Few subjects are more delicate in Washington.

The Times continues:

India... is making new weapons-grade plutonium, in plants exempted under the agreement with the Bush administration from inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. (Neither Pakistan nor India has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.)

The Obama administration has endorsed the Bush-era agreement. Last month, the White House took the next step, approving an accord that allows India to build two new reprocessing plants. While that fuel is for civilian use, critics say it frees older plants to make weapons fuel.

“The Indian relationship is a very important one,” said Mr. Nunn, who influenced Mr. Obama’s decision to endorse a goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. But he said that during the Bush years, “I would have insisted that we negotiate to stop their production of weapons fuel....”

You can't make this stuff up. Allow me to repeat:

“The challenges are getting greater — the increasing extremism, the increasing instability, the increasing material,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who [was] a C.I.A. officer and then head of the Energy Department’s intelligence unit...

Feelin' my age.

The focus is on Democrats, I know, but from time to time I find a wingnut who could easily be a Democrat. This, is one.

If he weren't already merit class perfection, he's employed by Welfare Queen Headquarters.

... Surely? She must be even crazier than Rehnquist, judging -- no pun intended -- by that outfit.

Still, I'm hoping. Anything that tends to make the Supreme Court more ridiculous than it already is has my vote.

I wanted to include a picture of Clarence Thomas, but all the ones I could find were just too cruel.

But the drumbeat seems to be starting again. A couple of weeks ago the following landed in my inbox:

Sudan: On the Path to Peace or Crisis?

A panel discussion featuring:

John Prendergast, Co-Founder, The Enough Project
Dr. J. Peter Pham, Senior Fellow and Africa Project Director, National Committee on American Foreign Policy, and Vice President, Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA)
Ambassador Herman J. Cohen, Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs
Ambassador David Shinn (moderator), Former Ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso

Despite some signs of progress in Sudan, other indications suggest a growing potential for conflict surrounding the elections scheduled for early April. Census and registration issues have not been resolved, raising serious doubts about the legitimacy of the election results...

The panel will address the complicated dynamics at play in Sudan, discuss U.S. policy options, and analyze regional implications as well as the influence of foreign actors, such as Egypt, China, and Iran.

About FPI

FPI seeks to promote an active U.S. foreign policy committed to robust support for democratic allies, human rights, a strong American military equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and strengthening America's global economic competitiveness. The organization is led by Executive Director Jamie Fly. FPI was founded in 2009 by Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Dan Senor. Visit our website at www.foreignpolicyi.org for more information.

Today the useful idiots at Alternet chimed in on cue, following the Kaganite lead. Here's the left shoe dropping, or rather, the left boot hitting the ground:

From: AlterNet
Subject: Tell Obama: Don't Legitimize Sudan's Brutal Dictator
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:34:29 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: alternet@mail.democracyinaction.org

Dear Reader, In the lead up to this week's elections in Sudan, current President Omar al-Bashir has used government troops to attack journalists and activists. Join the Save Darfur Coalition in urging President Obama to not recognize the results of this sham election. [ http://action.savedarfur.org/campaign/sudanelections_an ]

Don Hazen
Executive Editor, AlterNet.org

I have to thank Owen for turning me on to the work of William Vickrey, a Nobel prize-winning Canuck who died just days after receiving his prize, leaving much promising work unfinished. Vickrey's Fifteen Fatal Fallacies of Financial Fundamentalism is a great little document that helped awaken me from my dogmatic slumbers. Since then I've found it useful as a means of disturbing those who are still benighted by the conventional economic wisdom.

One of the reasons that I found the spread of MMT exciting is that it seemed to be doing a remarkable job of popularizing many of the points made Vickrey in that article. Unfortunately for us, Vickrey didn't leave behind a large-scale macroeconomic model that might challenge the mainstream paradigm and provide a platform for collaborative work amongst left-leaning economists. At first, I thought that the MMTers also lacked anything of the sort. I assumed the lack of solid models to be the reason why Billy Mitchell seemed to commit errors such mischaracterizing the role of chartered banks in a modern economy and misapplying concepts that only work in closed economies to open ones.

When pressed on the economic underpinnings of their economic arguments, the MMTers invoke yet another three-letter acronym: SFC, or Stock-Flow Consistent modeling. The humorous thing about this situation is that I doubt that many of the MMTers have actually read the book on the SFC system invented by one Wynne Godley, shown below:

Godley was at various times in his life a Parisian oboist, a Professor of Economics at Cambridge, an econometrician at the UK Treasury, a legendary bon vivant, ladies' man, and reputedly the inspiration for A.A. Milne's Tigger character. As of 2007, after two decades of quiet monastic toil, he and his Quebecois partner, Marc Lavoie, claim to have discovered, or come close to discovering, the Holy Grail of Post-Keynesian economics. A number of people who have examined their work, including James Galbraith and Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs have found it to be, at least tentatively, very promising.

I was initially turned on to his stuff by discovering a series of economic prognoses which I found quite similar to the arguments made by our own Owen Paine. In particular, I recommend checking out this article from 1999, and this article from 2008.

What is remarkable about Godley, and what separates him from the vulgar leftist economists like Owen's favorite punching bag, Doug Henwood, is that Godley's analysis is actually based on a fully articulated, mathematically rigorous, operational model. His work is an attempt to correct, synthesize, and provide micro foundations for the theories of a number of economic thinkers in the Keynesian vein. Amongst his main sources are Keynes, Kalecki, Sraffa, Lerner, Minsky, Kaldor and Tobin. The system takes the form of a Tobinesque set of interlocking balance sheets and cashflow statements for every entity in a modern economy -- from households right up to the central bank.

Could this be a blueprint for the consolidated balance sheet of a Gosplan 2.0? I don't know, but I'm sure that Owen stands ready to point out exactly where it falls short.

One Andrew Pollack, an extremely militant Fourth Internationalist, wrote, recently, on one of my lefty mailing lists:

In a front-page article in today's Times... Obama echoes recent statements by Gen. Petraeus, VP Biden and others about how Israel's intransigence is threatening "our" interests in the war against Arabs and Muslims.

This is another reason to firmly oppose alliances with right-wingers supposedly against war, who love this "America First" approach.

[After] the announcement by Israel, made during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit, that it would build 1600 new homes for Jewish settlers in Al-Quds(*)... U.S. officials feigned outrage—not because they oppose settlement construction, but because they fear the Zionists aren’t properly acting out the diplomatic charade. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the timing of the announcement was “insulting,” and top aide David Axelrod called it an “affront” that “seemed calculated” to undermine the peace talks.

The U.S. government... needs the Israeli government as an outpost in the Middle East.

Oh, to be sure, Washington would not look with favor on a Palestine in charge of, say, Hamas, which would be a lot like a replay of the Iranian revolution. But there's quite a gap between that and a client state that doesn't know its place; a client state with its own nutty hubristic regional-superpower fantasies; a client state that routinely insults and domineers over the captain and bridge crew of the global hegemon. I mean, really, who needs that?

Comrade Andrew's well-informed but ultimately disappointing treatment of the subject reveals a certain widely-shared schematism in our understanding of empire and, for that matter, of class society. Or so I think. We too often imagine our rulers as a highly organized and self-aware monolith, when in fact they're a loose collection of rival gangs. They share an interest in milking, bilking, and suppressing us, of course, but except for the rather rare periods when that happy state of affairs seems to be in question, they don't all pull in the same direction, always or even most of the time.

Now if that's the case -- what in earth would be wrong in playing one against another, assuming our poor etiolated Left were in any position to do that? Comrade Andrew decries "alliances with right-wingers supposedly against war, who love this 'America First' approach". But if "we" -- the Left, I mean -- were actually able to help stir up or exacerbate any tension between one imperial faction and another, then where's the downside?

I can only think that Comrade Andrew's reason for not wanting to shore up any "right-wingers", of any stripe, is that like many Lefties, he sees the Left's task as primarily one of evangelism and conversion. We Lefties have a certain view of the world, and if only we could persuade enough people to see it our way -- why, then, The Masses would rise up and overthrow The Bosses. Any kind of "alliance" with any "right-wingers" would imply leaving the scales on at least some "right-wing" eyes, and defer the day of general enlightenment.

This view of social transformation and how it works seems awfully idealistic to me. But perhaps I'm just a shameless opportunist. If people want to get mad at the Zionists for threatening "American" interests, that seems not just delightful but even, in some non-trivial sense, perceptive.

Hell, I'm an American, Lefty though I be -- and what am I, chopped liver? The bastards sure aren't doing me any good, or anybody else except themselves, for that matter.

You could turn my argument against me, of course. You could say that if in fact actually-existing and actually-overreaching Zionism is more of a liability to the Empire than an asset, then taking the Zionists down a peg or two would make the Empire more rational, qua empire, and thus better-run and more formidable. So as an anti-imperialist, I ought to be cheering the Zionists on.

The more I think about this argument, the better I like it, and may start to use it myself. Support Israel! Destroy America! Hey, there's a slogan for you!

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(*) In demotic non-militant English, "Jerusalem".

I must have mentioned before how I would really like to say nice things about Michael Meeropol, for the sake of his mom and dad, a couple I admire deeply. But damn, Mike sometimes says the silliest things. Here he is, in another item from my lefty mailing lists:

I sent a letter to the NY Times, asking them to support the RIGHT TO RENT ACT OF 2010.

For those who don't know it's a proposed law that would put into effect the Dean Baker/Mark Weisbrot proposal from at least 2 years ago --- namely that the way to keep people in their homes without subsidizing the bankers who made these ridiculous mortgages is to give them the option of renting at fair market rents (the law says for 5 years).

The bankers can foreclose but they can't kick you out of your home -- and you can stay there for five years paying market rent (which is almost always way below the ridiculous mortgages you owe on the bubble-inflated house prices).

It cures two problems at once ---

1) no one is kicked out of their homes

2) no empty homes to ruin neighborhoods and depress housing prices further.

I think we should begin badgering Congress to do this.

Mike

No empty homes to ruin neighborhoods and depress housing prices further.

What the hell is wrong with "depressing housing prices"? What other commodity necessary to life do we want to see become more expensive? Air? Water? Food? Sunlight? No? Then why shelter? Why isn't it a triumph for humankind when shelter gets cheaper? And as for "ruining neighborhoods" -- if they're the sort of neighborhoods that nobody would live in except on spec, then the sooner they're ruined, the better.

Oh, I know, I know, people's "savings" are tied up in these fetish objects. Actually, that's not quite true. What was supposed to happen was that the speculative gain on the house was going to offset the share of the interest you spent on the mortgage(*) and give you a nice better-than-average return on the principal to boot.

But let's ask ourselves: how do you realize these "savings" -- actually, of course, these speculative gains? By making some younger person buy the house, at its inflated price, when you decide to cash out, that's how. To the extent that this scam can work successfully over any period of time, what is it but an intergenerational transfer of wealth from younger people to older ones?

Fie on it. I want to see house prices in the basement, the subbasement, the catacombs, the chasms, the caverns, the Malebolge. I want to see people being paid to live in these sheetrock monstrosities.

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(*) Of course Uncle Sam paid the rest -- or rather, we renters paid the rest of it, through that iniquitous cross-subsidy for "ownership" known as the mortgage interest deduction. Faugh!

Thanks to the miracle of Facebook, I'm now in touch -- of a sort -- with some former college classmates. One of these recently posted an item on his blog that tickled me:

Renegonomics

Read carefully. The title of this piece is NOT "Reaganomics," but "Renegonomics."

I came across this interesting snippet from Bill Fleckenstein today, who refers to "the hidden benefits of debt repudiation and forbearance by the banking system, all of which have been created by the government's easy money and bank bailouts.... People who aren't making home payments; or those who are participating in short sales on homes they can actually afford -- in other words, the folks who in essence reneged on mortgages that were under water and did so because they could -- have extra money to spend that they wouldn't have if they'd been making payments."

The 'do-over' that the world was given during the financial crisis, courtesy of the printing press (read: government bailouts), will be 'paid for' with higher inflation....

Exchange your currencies for gold as a store of value in inflationary times.

Oh, So The "Recovery" Is About Delinquency?

I've said for a long time that one of the reasons our consumer spending numbers have been "reasonably good" the last six months or so - and have been improving - is that people haven't been paying their mortgages.

Now comes Bank of America about to tell Congress the same thing:

Bank of America's top mortgage executive, testifying today before Congress, will release sobering details of home-loan delinquencies, including that "hundreds of thousands of customers" haven't made a payment in more than a year.... Almost 500,000 struggling loan customers have not supplied information or taken other basic steps to qualify for mortgage help. About half of them have not made a payment for more than a year, or owe more than 50 percent of the value of their homes.

That's because those 500,000 lied about their income, assets or both when they applied for the loan originally, and that deception would be discovered.

But this also means that some 250,000 of those customers have not made a payment in a year.

If we presume that these people have average mortgage payments of $1,000 a month (and this number is probably low), this amounts to $250 million monthly that is being spent in the economy but would otherwise go to mortgage payments.

Anecdotes bear these sorts of numbers out - so-called "struggling" homeowners who, despite being delinquent on their mortgage and in fact not having paid in over a year, are spending upwards of $1,500 monthly in places like Best Buy, hairdressers and tony clothing stores.

The essential conundrum is this: Eventually, one way or another, these families will have to start making payments toward housing again. They may make those payments via their mortgage or they may be evicted and become renters but the money currently being blown on frivolities that is "propping up the economy" and leading to "strong consumer sales" is showing up there only because people are literally getting a free ride on their shelter costs.

The perversions at play here are outrageous - not only are these "homeowners" living effectively for free (and since most mortgages have escrow accounts for property taxes, those aren't being paid either!)

Anything to all this, O econ-meisters? I don't mean the "inflation", which I couldn't care less about, but the idea that the "recovery" -- such as it is -- is fuelled to some important degree by people stiffing their mortgage lenders. Is that really happening? If so, it's the second most wonderful thing to happen in my lifetime.

The first most wonderful thing is shown below. Landlubbers beware: the newsreader, droll though he is, doesn't know how to pronounce the word "leeward".

The Obama regime is proud to continue the tradition established by the Bush regime, in many ways, and when it comes to the Global War on Evil they're not afraid to put their best foot forward. They're also keen on recycling.

Via Flagrancy To Reason, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a much killed man, has been killed again. This time with a difference, which unfortunately must be left as an exercise for the discerning reader.

Thanks to Charles Davis, I've found the ideal congressman for our times, Mr. Harley D. Brown.

In addition to being the “intake manifold to the Kingdom of God”, Mr. Brown has,

an intense burning desire to destroy all the works of those Progressive Liberal Politicians in Washington D.C. whom I brand as vile domestic enemies to the country and Constitution we’re SWORN TO DEFEND.

I endorse this man without reservation.

I'm finding it difficult to come up with anything interesting to write about. Is it just me?

Melissa Bletherskite-Bungstopper down at the Nation only deserves so much attention, and may have already gotten more than her share from us. Daily Kos is too tedious for words.

Somebody suggest a new topic to take a contrarian view on, or a new fool to make fun of. I'm dyin' up here.

From our photoshopping friends at Area 51, that splendid satire. Perhaps there's an alternate reality where convicted arsonists are given weighty responsibilities. Here on planet sanity, they're currently in a humane work-release program. Mr. Summers—the most difficult to reform—is tending ducks in upstate New York, right outside Syracuse. Mr. Rubin and Mr. Greenspan run a popular laundromat in Albany. Their debt to society is almost paid and I, for one, find this cause to celebrate.