The Blinded Eye

I just listened to Sarah Palin delivering her energy policy speech in Toledo, OH. Although she mentioned briefly alternative sources of energy, sun, wind, geothermal, in the same weak litany that McCain is accustomed to repeating, her real focus, not surprisingly, was on drilling here in the U.S. and on developing “clean coal” technologies. She asked the audience to take up the mission of developing the technologies to make mining and burning coal “clean” as a lofty and ambitious generational challenge, like the Space Race, or eradicating world poverty, or defeating communism.

“We can do it, America!” she says in essence, “we can make coal clean!”

I’m just not sure this is the generational challenge the world wants or needs

, not now, not ever….

Burning coal and hydrocarbons for nearly 200 years has gotten us into this mess. Continuing the dirty industrial revolution, only “cleaner,” is not going to lead to anything but more warming, more environmental degradation, more species extinctions, not to mention more jobs in one of the dirtiest, most hazardous industries there is, coal mining.

“We can do it, America! More blacklung for everybody! Leveling our beautiful mountains and destroying our lovely rivers is a sacrifice we can and should be willing to make!”

It’s nuts, just nuts.

Here’s how I’ve been (wishfully) thinking about the election the last couple days. In 2004 the electoral map looked like this:

Kerry won 252 electoral votes. Obama needs 270 to win.

It’s hardly a stretch to suppose Obama will carry all the states Kerry did. Of these, New Hampshire is the “swing state,” and it’s been polling ~6+ points ahead for Obama. (McCain is currently throwing himself into the long-shot Pennsylvania. But his strategy will probably fail; Obama’s polling as much as 10 pts ahead there.)

Forget these “battleground” states for a moment: OH, FL, CO, NM, NC. Look just at two states that Bush won:

Iowa: 7 electoral votes

Virginia: 13 electoral votes

In Iowa, Obama is polling around ~12+ pts ahead. That’s ahead even of NH, and everyone is calling it for Obama. That gives him 259 EVs.

In Virginia, Obama is polling ~6-10 pts ahead. A tighter race, certainly. But McCain has been steadily losing ground there, and many in the media are about ready to call it for Obama.

At the very least, right now I am predicting that this election is won in Virginia. Obama will still likely win one or several or all of OH, FL, CO, NM, NC, even MO. But all he has to do is take Iowa (a relative gimme), and VA, totally within reach.

Another way of putting this is that Obama can fairly easily win 259. All he needs is 11 more from somewhere. And there are a lot of very good chance possibilities for this: VA, CO, NM in the top, then FL, OH, NC, MO down the list. Those are pretty good odds.

That’s my current psychological consolation.

If the last 15 years have been marked by an increasing showdown between state sovereignty and paranational capital-market leveraging, to the consistent detriment and erosion of state power/effectiveness, will states now have the wherewithal to stave off disaster now that the confidence-game of the global market has shown its empty hand?

And where is all this promised capital from the nation-states coming from anyway? As always, the future. Our children will save everything….

Let me try to break this all down in absurdly simple terms: John Q works 40+ hrs/wk making widgets (corn, drywall, house paint, houses etc.) for Mr. Bossman, who profits from this basic created value by markup and resale. John Q then buys his own product from Mr. Bossman, at a price so high that he must borrow the total price from Mr. Bossman and his banking associates and pay him back over many years at compounding annual interest. This interest Mr. Bossman and his global banking associates then divvy out amongst eachother, “leveraging” John Q’s debt into profit streams that theoretically pay off ad infinitum.

Meanwhile John Q Citizen also pays taxes into his nation’s public treasury, putatively to secure his own and his neighbors’ collective interests. When Mr. Bossman’s global Ponzi Scheme is revealed for what it always was, and the whole ill-built edifice tumbles, Mr. Bossman and his banking associates appeal to the public treasury to pay out on their inflated promises of profit returns. John Q’s public representatives tell him that this is necessary to “avert calamity,” and go ahead and conscript John Q’s grandchildren’s tax payments to keep the whole cycle turning.

John Q is not supposed to question the premises. The “Free Market” won the Cold War, so what alternative is there? So keep going to work and paying your taxes. If you still have a job….

I’ve been following the election polls closely (like a junkie) as well as the “wisdom of the market” over at Intrade, where people bet on all sorts of things happening. Obama’s lead there has been growing steadily lately, but I was surprised to see today, the night after the second debate, that the market betters are edging into certainty about Obama. Still a month out, but here’s how the wisdom of I’m-putting-my-cash-on-this-horse is looking right now:

As this housing bubble has burst and the financial crisis played out over the last weeks and, really, year, my wife and I have regularly discussed the affair. It is now a hackneyed dialogue, because we are in fundamental agreement and we both have been seeing it coming for many years. Those who claim that this crisis was unexpected, or unforeseen–like McCain who a couple months ago, I think, said that this meltdown took him by surprise–were either willfully ignorant or are lying to the public.

Over the last ten years my wife and I would take our annual or biannual pilgrimages to the homeland of southern Idaho for holidays, and watch how the valley, which when we were growing up was mostly farmland and sparsely populated, was being devoured by rampant over-development. The new signs of sprawl were always eye-popping, first the malls and box stores and then more recently the overbuilding of houses, most of them oversized even in the low price end. It was clear to us for years, just looking at it, that this was unsustainable. It was clear from speaking with friends and family that 1) housing virtually WAS the economy from the top down, and 2) people, including people we knew and loved, were getting in over their head. For example, buying or building 3000+ sq.ft. houses with ARM mortgages with the intent to flip them in two or three years. It was sheer nuts and we knew it. Since our career paths had forced us to remain transient during these years, we were never able to settle down as we would have liked, instead having to rent throughout this time (as we stil are, alas). But neither did we get sucked into the madness maelstrom. For that I guess we’re lucky.

I wrote and recorded a song as far back as early 2004, called “Before the Fall,” in which one verse reflected on this trend:

“I see revolutionaries everywhere / in business coats

Turning farmland into feudal states / surrounding them with moats

To keep some out / keep others in

So much debt they’ll never pay it / or even know where to begin

And it’s the wave of the future / Stand up proud and tall

Things are better than they’ve ever been

Even better than before the fall.

Apparently the revolution is now being televised, and the future is now. And we can stand up proud and tall, say America First!, and sign up the line of out-of-work Wall Street accountants to oversee and distribute amongst themselves the $700+ billion in bailout cash.

A good report from Missouri by the Fivethirtyeight team, on what the McCain campaign looks like on the ground, gives some insight into either A) the GOP’s state of disarray and demoralization, B) McCain’s inability to run an effective campaign, or find/buy people who can, C)the sheer lack of interest in McCain among voters, or all of the above.

This from the man who swears he’s the best commander-in-chief, that he “knows how to win wars.” But politics is, proverbially, war by other means. I guess he’d rather lose an election than win an election.

MFox

Just watched the VP debate. Biden clearly won on every point of substance. But Palin held up, didn’t fall apart, so I guess lived up to that lowest-bar expectation she’d been handed. Her talking points were canned, and the policies they’re offering are hollow, contradictory, or totally unclear. So the GOP platform of McCain is in shambles. But she put the lipstick on it.

MFox

While we await the VP debate and thus the House’s hiatus from considering the big, big bill that the Senate has sent its way, under orders to play ball or else, here’s a post to begin clarifying and focusing the orientation and purposes of this my public journal.

First the title: “The Blinded Eye.” It contains of course the aura of “blind eye” (which was already taken by more than one WordPress blog, but no matter). I first thought of the phrase in response to the frantic focus on our market these days, and its supposed benign “invisible hand.” I thought, the blind eye of the market might better describe our system, where the fundamentalism is no governance, deregulation, in essence, look the other way and let the narrow and blind profit motive decide, and adjudicate, everything.

So first, explorations of and thoughts about our blindness. Moral blindness, social blindness, political blindness, environmental blindness. The phrase the “blind eye,” in other words, relates directly to the common and to my mind persuasive critique of laissez-faire capitalism that focuses on “externalities,” all those real effects, from pollution to social degradation, that come as a result of individual and collective market forces but which are systematically excluded from the “balance sheet” and not paid for by those who cause them. The “invisible hand” folks are really also turning a “blind eye” to the effects of the market, and calling the sanitized and censored results that they choose to look at as good, benign, beneficial, “economic progress.”

To state a basic position, I’m for an economics that internalizes all externalities. Costs need to be real costs, not market-monetized costs. In a nutshell, our very money and its basis of value needs to be revaluated.

I’m also for freedom or liberty. But freedom’s an open-ended, fundamentally polyvalent concept. A consciously internalizing economics is one that brings wisdom to bear against the blindness of profit motives. Wisdom is, etymologically, related to vision, Latin video, as well as the Greek verb “to know” (oida). Wisdom brings sight and light to the blindnesses of narrow market-driven economics.

But my interests in current political economy are only as an amateur and private citizen. My profession (teaching in higher education) often requires that I ignore what’s going on in the world right now in order to focus on teaching classes and contributing to scholarship in my field (ancient studies, or as we say “classics”). I study old poetry and literature, from round the world, and I also write poetry, and am very interested in music. (In my research I study oral poetics, performance, and musical cultures, especially in the ancient world.) Since I believe that psychic integration, bringing all the pieces of one’s mind and heart into some sort of workable and symbiotic synthesis, is the ultimate goal of ongoing self-education and maturity, I want to bring all these interests and passions together in this blog in some creative synthesis. I’ll be posting my poetry on other pages (and tinkering with creative hyper-texting), and sometimes discussing my scholarship, intellectual, and artistic interests here as well.

As I see it, the internet is an excellent tool for fusing the old genres of the private journal/diary/notebook and published (=public) genres from journalism to high literary (and multimedia) art. One can simultaneously engage in the therapeutic self-dialogue of writing, communing with one’s thoughts via the written word, and in real time publish these thoughts for the benefit, amusement, curiosity, even education/help of others. The worlds of private thinking and public thinking have come together in an unprecedented way. This too is one way out of the cave(s) of modernity. (Just consider the massive resurgence of grassroots activism since the age of the internet began. People can connect, for meaningful collective action, in ways not even dreamed possible a generation or two ago.)

My goal here then, too, is to bring my psychic/creative life into an ever more meaningful fusion, while at the same time contributing thought-work when and where I can to the collective mind-cloud of the internet, for the amusement and nourishment of others and their thoughts.

I study mythology (professionally and casually). The myth of Odysseus in the cave of the Cyclops is one of my all-time favorites. In fact I am writing (slowly) a book about this myth (which is much more complex and historically fascinating than it might seem at first read)….

More on this. I got sidetracked with dinner time and now, Palin v. Biden is coming on soon. I can’t wait….

So now this bailout bill has gone through the legislative sausage-grinder and has come out looking like–surprise surprise–the typical 11th-hour omnibus spending bill loaded with all sorts of goodies, concessions, and hidden interests.

The question regarding McCain becomes, will he now oppose this bill and be consistent with his own statements that any bailout should not include “any earmarks,” which he has said numerous times now, including during the debate. But what else is all this deal-greasing pork but the same kind of thing labeled as earmarks?

We’ll see what he does. Given his disconnect from the reality of even his own statements minute to minute over the last week or so, I suspect he’ll continue to stay onboard with it. Unless someone reminds him that it’s inconsistent, and that there may be some political advantage to be gained by opposing this new, “improved” bill too. (Or did he support the last one? I can’t quite tell anymore….)

(Update: Here’s the bill draft. It’s a doozy.)

MFox

My take on what has happened so far, and is now happening, in the financial crisis and its accompanying political stasis: we are seeing Washington operating as it was supposed to, the checks and balances forcing (or trying to force) real substantive debate out in the open. Most liberal responses that I’ve been following seem to have missed this in their consensus support for the Senate’s modified Paulson plan. But the House–BOTH SIDES–resisted the Senate’s coalition with the Administration, and are being drubbed as the spoilers. But if you listen to the opposition left and right, there is a lot of principled and sensible dislike for this fish-paper of a bailout.

The Paulson plan was rightly rejected by everybody, from New Gingrich on the right to everybody on the left. I wrote letters-to-Senators against it immediately. It was a disastrous and revolutionary coup d’etat in 3 easy pages (which, still, McCain apparently couldn’t manage to read for several days. But no matter.) The Senate quickly decided to do what they could to try and “save the state” from financial ruin. Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Dodd worked night and day, it would seem, to get the Paulson plan into some kind of acceptable shape. And as the details and drafts came out, and the conviction that quick action was desperately needed filtered out into common public opinion, the idea that this retooled plan was workable, acceptable, worth trying, took hold and now still holds.

But the voices of opposition still kept shouting out to Congressional leaders. I’d bet their inboxes were so stuffed with hate mail this week that most of them had severe qualms about backing ANYTHING that bailed Wall Street out of its own stinky toxic mess of pseudo-securitied debt instruments. That’s what this boiled down to for many, and in fact still boils down to, IMHO: as Dennis Kucinich said on Rachel Maddow last night, this deal borrows money from banks to give to banks, at the expense of the taxpayer (probably something like $6900 per citizen). The Senate plan proponents are claiming that the bailout will not cost taxpayers in the end. That’s conceivable. But the plan language does not seem designed to require Wall Street to foot the bill. It’s debatable, and many are, quite reasonably, not biting on that claim. (See video.)

And on the right, Congressional Republicans are opposed to the plan on free market principles: this plan, in their view is nationalization and socialistic. And their constituents, I’d guess, are fuming and they’d like to get reelected. (Listening to them it’s also clear that they are bound and determined to turn this crisis into an opportunity to ram through some tax and spending cuts, and if possible maybe some spending re-alignments. This is of course in bad faith, since the crisis has nothing, in the short term, to do with government spending, so they should not be muddying the waters with their usual ideological priorities. Now it seems they’ve won something on this in the new bill, which apparently includes all sorts of tax cuts and other expedient deal-sweeteners to coax resisters onboard. The details remain to be seen. At least what I’ve read so far does not seem to reveal the extent or true nature of these additions.)

So the first bailout vote failed, to the shock and awe of everyone. But here is a case where fiscal conservatism and principled progressivism, both responsive to the electorate, produced a check on legislative haste that then provided the opportunity for real debate to emerge. What they blocked was a status quo economic elite idea: the Admin-and-Treasury had coopted the support of the Senate into believing that bailing out Wall Street was required to save global capitalism from a disaster of its own making.

But the outlines of a substantive debate emerges in the House dynamics. The right says, government shouldn’t intrude on the “free” market (and, as always, “cut taxes, and maybe food stamps!”). The left says, in essence, maybe Wall Street deserves its fate. Maybe the world economic system needs a collapse to snap it to its senses and allow some revolutionary energies to percolate up from the ashes. Maybe, just maybe, if Wall Street crumbles there might be some redistribution of wealth, some movements toward a greener civilization, at least some questioning of our market fundamentalism that everybody in the status quo accepts (cf. Admin-cum-Senate position) as the only rational way to organize human lifeways.

So now the Left in the House have, it seems, had a chance to put together some sort of progressive counter-proposal. And the Right had a chance to say what they wanted (capital gains tax cuts, their insurance scheme, maybe cut Medicare…predictable non-starter nonsense, mostly). It seems that the crisis nature of this thing is in the end not going to lead to any substantive epoch-changing legislation. But the debate has begun. And if I read Obama rightly, if he’s in office he is just liberal and intelligent enough to know the real stakes: energy independence, greening, economic justice, healthcare reform, rebuilding our tattered infrastructure, and education as a true national (security) priority. (I caught his Pueblo, CO speech on 9/29 on CSpan, can’t find the whole thing now, but here’s a snippet.)

Another way of putting the divide is expedient realism on the one side (attempting to maintain the status quo and save it from its logical and inevitable conclusion: global ruination), and ideological and idealistic debate on the other side, which is in normal circumstances occluded by business-as-usual and obfuscated by partisan rancor.

The last is still very much in place, and has taken hold on the mainstream soundbite culture with, for example, the presidential politicization of the bailout, the House Repub. initial knee-jerk blaming of Pelosi’s speech for their failure to vote on the bailout, John McCain’s continuing behind-the-eight-ball farce of taking credit for everything and nothing, etc. etc. All of this nonsense will of course play into the status quo’s hands, and we’ll probably get a retinkered Paulson plan, now bloated with ideological Trojan horses, any day now. The stock market will rebound, everybody will say the world has been saved, and our overheated false-credit-addicted consumer culture will continue unabated. Yeeha.

So there’s my take. We’ll see what happens….