Stump Lane
in the dirt since history began

WE POSTED the following list a few years back when FOX News wondered why people weren’t more psyched about the economy in light of news that tax receipts were up and the federal budget deficit projection had declined. Probably mumbled something about the impertinence of the particular economic indicators the media fetishizes that have little to do with everyday folks trying to get along in the world. Here were the economic indicators that were on a younger Montag’s mind:

1. Is my job secure from outsourcing, or an economic downturn?
2. Is my wife’s job secure from municipal budget cuts or fickle public priorities?
3. Can I still sell my house without losing the equity I have invested?
4. In the coming years, will I be able to sell my house for enough to just pay off the mortgage?
5. Holy fuck! It costs over $30 to fill the tank of my compact car.
6. What’s it gonna cost to heat the house this winter?
7. What if work dries up at my second job? Will I still be able to make the monthly nut?
8. Hey, why doesn’t my employer match my 401k contributions anymore?
9. Shit. Will I ever be able to retire?
10. My Grandma is paying how much for medications?
11. The fuckin refrigerator’s broken.
12. Is the check engine light in my car supposed to stay on all the time like that?

And here’s what’s been on our mind lately as with relation to the above:

1. Yes. So far so good. Not counting my eggs until I see the company successfully survive the recession though.
2. Nope! Next school year, goodbye second income.
3. Nope! We had some equity, and we’ve done tens of thousands of dollars worth of work to the house but it don’t matter to the bank. Our end of the investment has vanished with the dropping housing market.
4. Maybe? If we sold today we might be lucky enough to pay the mortgage back. Which would be a bitter pill to take considering the above.
5. LOL. It now costs $40 to $45.
6. We’re in good shape for next winter. There’s 6 cord of firewood laying around the yard where we had to have some unhealthy trees taken down last fall. In 6 foot lengths. With a few hundred hours of labor now, we should be able to survive the next Winter without freezing to death.
7. Work has dried up at my second job. Made 70% less on the side work last year than the year before. Managing to keep up with expenses so far. Item #2 above is going to be the game changer.
8. Still no matching 401K contributions. The employer has also instituted a moratorium on taking paid vacation time. WTF, right? WHAT’S THAT ABOUT? IS the company going to successfully survive the recession?
9. If we can manage to keep the house, and eventually pay off the mortgage, maybe I’ll only have to work part time in my retirement years. I’ve come to terms with the unlikelihood of a leisurely retirement.
10. Both grandmas have passed away and escaped continuing prescription expenses.
11. The ill-advised balances we’re carrying on our credit cards are due in part to our having to have replaced the refrigerator a couple of years ago.
12. The ill-advised balances we’re carrying on our credit cards are due in part to necessary automobile repairs.

Now these still aren’t the worst problems that people dealing with poverty face every day, but we do feel our standard of living slipping. If we fight to stay in the house, and it’s hard to convince even one’s own loves ones to give up that sense of home, if it even proves possible to keep it, we will be “house poor” as they say. These are the things that keep a guy away from regular blogging.

[Cross posted at Reading the Spectacle]

The internet is a medium of the spectacle. When you read Reading the Spectacle you are, in a sense, literally reading the spectacle.

“In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught.”

One might say the internet is a less alienated form of communication, in that amateur creators of free content are afforded the freedom to publish their work in a free to inexpensive forum, relatively free from the constraints of commercial and/or political interests, (though this doesn’t mean entities like Google or deviantART or YouTube won’t exploit the display of such work for spectacular commerce with context-sensitive smart advertising.) Even so, the internet isn’t going to remain as free as it is forever.

THIS ISN’T SO MUCH a blog post as it is a series of block quotes that needed to be collected in one place.

The Wall Street Journal:

As traders and investment bankers near the finish line of what looks like a boom year for pay, some are spending money like the financial crisis never happened. From $15,000-a-week Caribbean getaways to art auctions to $200,000 platinum wristwatches that automatically adjust for leap years, signs of the good life are returning. [WSJ]

Alice Schroeder:

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank. [Schroeder]

LENIN’S TOMB:

… There is a staggering amount of spare capacity in the economy. Existing productive resources lie unused, while social needs are unmet, because there is no profitable means by which such resources might be used. Companies are not investing, and are not hiring. The banks are still not lending, preferring to hoard funds against future shocks, because their managers do not believe there are sufficient profitable investment opportunities in the economy. This situation is actually absurd. We have, collectively, all the means we require to house, feed, educate and employ the population, but we may not dispose of those means because there is no profit in doing so. [LENIN]

Samuel Gompers (circa 1892):

“Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?” [Gompers]

WSJ via ladypoverty, Alice Schroeder via Corrente, LENIN via, well, me, Samuel Gompers via Anakin.

[Cross posted at Reading the Spectacle]

“Did you see Idol last night?” … “Can you believe the Pats went for it on 4th and 2?” … “It turns out Lost jumped the shark in season one, but none of us noticed!” … Small talk and Monday morning quaterbacking around the water cooler are hardly human interaction. Although an utterance of, “There was nothing good on TV last night so I read this book in which the author says we no longer directly live, but experience a false representation of life through an endless succession of spectacles,” might be met with a slightly more authentic form of human contact: the blank stare.*

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”

* The Blank Stare, once the weapon of sardons and malcontented comedians, (see: Bill Hicks,) has matriculated into common use and been commodified by the spectacle to punctuate and soften irony. A goofy “just kidding!” sung after every “insult,” (see: Jon Stewart.)

[Cross-posted at Reading the Spectacle]

This child is not making a soccer ball for himself. He is making a commodity of a thousand soccer balls. Somewhere along the line he may have the opportunity to own or play with one of these balls, but he only benefits from a very small portion of the value of his surplus production. Most of these soccer balls will be utilized by the children of other alienated workers in far away lands.

“[A]lienated consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production. The society’s entire sold labor has become a total commodity whose constant turnover must be maintained at all cost. To accomplish this, this total commodity has to be returned in fragmented form to fragmented individuals who are completely cut off from the overall operation of the productive forces.”

CBS NEWS WARNED US on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, about certain costs among the health care costs “that threaten to bankrupt the country”:

Last year, Medicare paid $50 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients’ lives – that’s more than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Education.

And it has been estimated that 20 to 30 percent of these medical expenditures may have had no meaningful impact. Most of the bills are paid for by the federal government with few or no questions asked. [60 Minutes]

We’ve spent $935 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 and they don’t even seem to be on the radar screen in terms of threatening to bankrupt the country.

Some quick math:

• Roughly 2.5 million people die in US in a year. At $50 billion, that’s $20,000 per dead person.
• At least 753,399 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. At $935 billion, that’s $1.2 million per dead person.

Obviously, some methods of ushering folks into the afterlife are more efficient than others.

And the above war spending figures are just the emergency war supplemental funding. Consider:

For the 2009 fiscal year, the base budget of the Department of Defense rose to $518.3 billion. Adding emergency discretionary spending, supplemental spending, and stimulus spending brings the sum to $651.2 billion. Defense-related expenditures outside of the Department of Defense constitute between $274 billion and $493 billion in additional spending, bringing the total for defense spending to between $925 billion and $1.14 trillion in 2009. [Wikipedia]

$1 trillion dollars, a single year of military spending, is enough money to cover US end of life medical treatment for 20 years!

But seriously, this next bit is for the reflexive, small government Republican rank-and-file types. If you simultaneously say, “Rah-rah! Yes, we must go to war to preserve our way of life,” while criticizing Big Government “entitlement” spending on things like health care, housing, and so forth, it seems like you’re saying, “spare no expense to kill foreigners,” while you begrudge lifting a finger to help your own countrymen get along when they fall on bad times, or even to die on their own terms.

Anarchists and small government conservatives should be on the same page, to some extent, with regard to the state, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. The difference is a matter of priorities. That, and somebody’s not being consistent. Somebody’s going to have to give up on their illusions and love of the Daddy State’s massive military/police/prison system, before their general state of panic over entitlement spending can be taken seriously.

Cutting “entitlements” by itself does not move us towards a more perfect society. Though the perfection of society would obviate the need for “entitlements.”

[Cross posted. Check out Reading the Spectacle]

Home buyers expect an updated kitchen with stainless steel appliances and granite counter tops. And a master suite with plenty of space. And a tiled bathroom. And don’t cheap out on the fixtures!

“The spectacle … is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production.”

Books that Changed Me: The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord.

Voices From The Grave! Guy Debord changed my life. Well, he at least provided a framework and language to think about certain truths I’d had some nagging sense of, yet until now, would have struggled to express. Though the edition pictured above is the book I read, for cutting and pasting purposes, the excerpts in the article below come from a different translation that I found online.

WHAT IS the spectacle? Debord puts forth the proposition that we people of the modern age do not directly live, but rather experience a representation of life through an endless succession of spectacles.

In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. [Debord, #6]

That sense of dissonance we experience, in quiet moments of clarity, between the world we plainly perceive, and the world as it is presented to us, is born of our alienation from an unreal version of ourselves which is a construct of our all-too-real societal (spectacular) institutions.

Spectacular society is uncompromisingly divided into a small elite ruling class and everybody else, whose value stems from their productivity. The spectacle’s greatest strength is in it’s ability to create and perpetuate an image, an alternate version, representing the “truth” of these opposing classes.

Wait, when the fuck did all of this happen?

The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class. [Debord, #100]

This representation of the working class is still at work today. It could be witnessed recently, when we saw the vilification of autoworkers as they made efforts to ensure the pensions and retirement health benefits owed them as a term of their employment would continue to be honored, even as the auto companies were facing bankruptcy. It can be seen in the vilification of migrant workers, even as they harvest our food! It cannot be said that that work isn’t valuable to society, but these are some of the most hated people in this country.

This sort of domination through false representation and alienation isn’t limited to workers. The portrayal of women, minorities, young people, the handicapped, in no way reflects the true nature of particular individuals or their aspirations. The spectacle thrives by creating these groups and categorizing people by association, and then championing or dispatching whatever group’s concerns as determined by political utility.

The spectacle is a potent servant of power.

Debord’s chapter 6, Spectacular Time is one that really sings. Especially to one experiencing the constant sense of loss brought on by an obsessive preoccupation with the inexorable passage of time. (more…)

Taxpayers may get unwanted surprise — The [tax] credit has increased weekly paychecks for 95 percent of working families, giving them cash to help boost consumer spending during the worst economic recession in decades. … But for 15.4 million taxpayers, the new tax tables will mean an unexpected tax bill. — How the fuck is this supposed to help, exactly? Fuckers tricked us, again, with the dumbest fucking trick in the playbook. Good thing the IRS accepts payment by credit card, huh? —

IN BANKING THERE’S SOMETHING called the “Texas Ratio.” It is essentially the number you come up with when you divide a bank’s bad assets by the stuff it has that is actually worth something. The higher the Texas Ratio is the worse the situation the bank is in, the more likely the bank will fail.

The hilarious aspect of Texas Ratios is that the top number, the bad stuff, “is subjective.” After all, you only have the bank’s word on what number to plug in up there.

…it is possible for a bank to be too honest. If they report tons of bad loans and rack up a high score, their Texas Ratio could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. [Marketplace]

Because if a bank is “too honest,” customers and investors might be hesitant to put their money on the line with them.

Our financial system might be a precarious house of cards, but positive thinking surely counts for something, right?

[Prologue edited for clarity.] Years ago, before my ideas went out of fashion, I went around calling myself a Liberal. I also frequently submitted posts for the Carnival of the Liberals, and still do occasionally. Sometimes I manage to sneak one in there. The Carnival was the driving force behind my beginning a series of long form posts (one and two) in which I began to sketch out my political thoughts in an attempt to figure out what it all meant. Enough time has passed since the second of those posts, that I feel rather radically removed from the younger me that wrote them. This post serves as a continuation of that project, yet picks up not where that different me left off, but instead from where I find myself now.

I AM NOT A LIBERAL. Certainly not in the postmodern United States where words have no meaning beyond their commercial utility, where “Liberal” means “Progressive” means centrist corporate imperialism with a friendly face, and the “center” is nowhere near the middle of the full range of political possibilities.

I’m a Recovering Progressive

Classical Liberalism, if that term can still be used meaningfully, may be onto something in emphasizing individual liberty, but loses the thread in its devotion to free market, laissez-faire economics. A condition which may very well work on a much smaller scale, yet does not obtain in a society such as ours, large enough to necessitate the establishment of a ruling class, which in turn manipulates market conditions to enrich a powerful elite, and then globalizes that influence through military force.

My Liberal/Progressive friends acknowledge this on some level. They are concerned that the system is broken and they want to fix it. But it’s worse than broken: it works perfectly; in accordance with the demands of the powerful. The People have been rendered utterly powerless. It cannot be stated in any plainer or more direct terms. We. Have. No. Power. In directing the governing forces of our political-social-economic system.

Add to this competition over the dwindling, soon to be scarce resources necessary for human subsistence, and the problem comes into clear resolution. Our current situation is untenable. This fucker is too big. Not “too big to fail,” but “so big it must fail.”

One cannot rely on Big Coercion* to insure (sic) healthcare for all. (Or low oil prices, or safety, or whathaveyou.) It is worth examining whether it is right to even request such provisions, when by doing so one legitimizes an institution that directly expends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on military supremacy and conquest. The American Way of Life had a a good run there, but really, to quote myself, “Is it even right to ask for a bigger slice of the pie, when the pie is imperial plunder, taken through violence and exploitation?”

* It is appropriate to call it Big Coercion, when “big” has come to mean “evil” in the parlance of the postmodern commercial utility of vocabulary. Think “Big Oil,” “Big Insurance,” “Big Government,” and so on.

(more…)

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

THIS ISN’T THAT SCENE from The Matrix where Laurence Fishburne says, “we know it was us that scorched the sky,” as he shows Neo for the first time what the “real” world looks like. No, this is our present.

China Hush posts a whole series of disturbing photos depicting industrial pollution in China.

What was it Owen Paine said the other day about simple import substitution?

WAR, AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY, is hell. J.R. Boyd reports that behind the subscription wall at the online Wall Street Journal, economic adviser to the president, Lawrence Summers has things to say about Wall Street profits and executive bonuses (bonii?)

Is this your homework, Larry?

“Just as in war, there are unintended victims so, too, in economic rescues, there are unintended beneficiaries.” [Summers]

What an apt that metaphor that turns out to be! Let’s break it down.

In war “unintended victims” are called collateral damage. However there is always some question over whether this is “unintentional” at all, as un-forthcoming our rulers can be with the true reasons they do anything.

The “unintended” aspect of collateral damage only relates to the stated purpose, (ie: intention,) of the aggression.

With the economic rescues, the stated purpose put forth by the president is “to keep on going until we make sure that every single American in this country who’s looking for work is going to be able to get the kind of well-paying job that supports their families.” (As un-forthcoming as ever, if not a bald lie. As our economy seems to always, even in the best of times, maintain some level of unemployment.)

Nonetheless there it is. If “beneficiaries” are equivalent to “victims” in the war comparison, then, yeah, Summers’ metaphor is dead on, (pun intended.) If the intention were truly to put people back to work, then the bank executives’ whose incomes are shored-up through profits and bonuses would be “unintended” beneficiaries. Would this be called collateral repair, perhaps?

Indeed, in keeping with Boyd’s conclusion at ladypoverty, the problem is most definitely not with Summers’ metaphor, but with the underlying fiction of the economic rescues.

Presidents, even the heroic liberal ones, always lie.

IT TURNS OUT that even in these unforgiving economic times, cuts in executive pay still aren’t as bad as outright unemployment, (and let’s not ignore the downward pressure on wages that comes with high unemployment rates.) This fact is illustrated by the still increasing disparity in earnings between the richest and poorest Americans:

“No one should be surprised at the increased disparity,” said Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University. “Unemployment hurts normal workers who do not have the golden parachutes the folks at the top have.” [Associated Press]

I doubt anyone is particularly surprised by this.

Theoretically, these golden parachute guys shouldn’t be able to tune people out the way the G20 leaders do. Their companies would be nothing without normal workers engaged in the day-to-day. That they can and do belies the perverted essence of our economy America.

Perhaps there will be time to elaborate later (but don’t count on it.) For now, here is some stuff from the past:

• Disestablishmentarian Economics (Rejecting state established religion.)
• A Capitalist, Consumer Based Economy: to Build, Market and Sell Commodities We Don’t Need (Questioning America’s business plan.)
• The Nihilists are Revolting (Vs. Bobo.)
• The Middle Class of Whatever (My “contribution to the conversation” during election season.)
• Craven Spelt Backwards is Maverick (Yes, that Maverick.)
• I’m the King of the World! (For the illustration.)
• And this one written by a younger me, who was of a differnt mind about a lot of things but was nonetheless onto something with the parts about “invented needs.”

Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance — A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases — leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet. — Talk about the perversity of the profit motive! —