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From the New York Times this weekend:

On many budget matters, Mrs. Clinton’s instincts seem similar to her husband’s. Both favor carefully crafted tax credits that can help people who most need it, that come with relatively modest price tags and that seem likely to survive a divided Congress.

Mr. Obama sometimes talks of his vision of an “iPod government,” with simple programs that people can understand. He also talks of persuading voters and members of Congress, including Republicans, to support his plans.

Ah, whether through coyly rendered insight or dumb luck, the reporter here is on to something in the arrangement of these two paragraphs. The policy opposite of an “iPod government,” in the best possible case of what that might mean is in fact the system (a mainstay of neo-liberal regimes of the last decade or so) of shifting from direct social disbursements to the tax credit form of funds delivery. Google around for “unrecovered tax credits” and you’ll see why this might be the case.

You might start with the wikipedia article on the Earned Income Tax Credit, which includes the following paragraphs:

Millions of American families who are eligible for the EITC do not receive it, leaving billions of additional tax credit dollars unclaimed. Research by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Internal Revenue Service indicates that between 15% and 25% of households who are entitled to the EITC do not claim their credit, or between 3.5 million and 7 million households.

The average EITC amount received per family in 2002 was $1,766. Using this figure and a 15% unclaimed rate would mean that low-wage workers and their families lost out on more than $6.5 billion, or more than $12 billion if the unclaimed rate is 25%.

To translate this into UKese, look here. And here’s a graphical representation (what else?) of just why the EITC is a symptom of a politics of neo-liberal complexity, rather than true socialist simplicity:

Easy enough to figure out what’s coming to you, eh? Try it yourself to see. This is the “survival of the fittest” version of the welfare state, designed to fail. Born of actuarial anticipation rather than humane and good faith efforts to help. Perhaps most important of all, even if it does work, it’s designed in such a way that almost no one can understand how it works, or even what it is in the first place. But this too is the point, for if the citizenry was to move about with a sense that they in any sense are thought to be entitled to a living, well…. we simply can’t have that, those are waters that we don’t dare to sail into, etc etc…

Sadly, I’ve not really seen any signs that Obama actually means to take the project of (best case) iPod governmentality up. I suppose there’s more to say - about the difference between best and worst case simplicity, what lies between those poles, and what in the end I think all this might mean… As always more to come…

Beyond even Mr Centerpiece here, just the look at the shot. I remember, back when I was in college and we did the eurail-pass thing, we ponied up for a deluxer room in Roma once because we wanted the air conditioning. Deluxe came with a tv too. The shit on it though - Berlusconi’s channels, I suppose, or maybe RAI too. All guys in chicken-suits surrounded by bimbettinos, all chortling, and a dude in a bad suit serenading a pig with the spotlight on. Forty midgets in a phone booth, my secret secret talent, look at what my neighbors dog or daughter can do.

Felt like the end of everything, watching it. The final lurch back in to the marsh. 

And now that’s home and everywhere. Except, in the US, the president begs onto it rather than simply owning the network. Or I guess it depends what the definition of “own” is.  

From MoDo’s column today: 

Asked about his friendly relationship with the former Weather Underground anarchist William Ayers — an association that The Wall Street Journal suggests could turn into the Swift Boat of 2008 given Ayers’s statement that “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough” — Obama defended him with a line that only the eggheads orbiting his campaign could appreciate. Ayers, he said, is “a professor of English in Chicago.”

And then this via Inside Higher Education:

On Saturday night, Charlie Gibson, the ABC anchor, was introducing a question in the Democratic presidential debate about proposed tax increases for wealthy Americans and his example of those who might be affected: college professors at a liberal arts college.

“If you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on,” Gibson said. (The exchange comes toward the end of the debate, a transcript of which is available from The New York Times.)

The audience at Saint Anselm College laughed, and the three leading candidates for the Democratic nomination suggested that Gibson was off on his estimates, with Sen. Hillary Clinton saying: “That may be NYU, Charlie. I don’t think it’s Saint Anselm.”

Sherman Dorn wasn’t laughing — because two full professors at Saint Anselm, not to mention most academics — don’t earn enough to be a decent example for the impact of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Dorn is a blogger about education policy and is president of the University of South Florida’s faculty union (affiliated with both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association).

Dorn checked the annual data compiled by the American Association of University Professors and found that the average salary for a full professor at Saint Anselm is just over $77,000 while the average for assistant professors is under $50,000. Dorn said in an e-mail that the question showed “astounding ignorance” of faculty salaries.

(via voyou desoeuvre)

you need a close up don’t you?

“Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!”

You can get the link, if you’d like to see more, at VD’s site, linked above…

Fascinating little graph there, mostly telling us the obvious. But the 9/11 happyfeeling spike is interesting, isn’t it? What happens when it hits zero?

…. IT is capitioning amurika. For instance, this:

Go look… it’s funny…

I’ve read an astounding amount of Don DeLillo in the last two weeks - more than is healthy. White Noise, Mao II, Libra, and I’m just this short of finishing Underworld. My first time through for many of these, somehow. I’ve loved all of it except for White Noise, which I’ve read many times before. In fact, I sort of detest White Noise, and while it’s clear why, I’ve been trying to come up with a concise term to explain my antipathy.

Came this morning. There is nothing that I hate more in American fiction than the zany. OK - that’s a bit too much. But do you know what I mean when I say that? Underworld is not zany; Libra isn’t either; White Noise is nothing but. Almost nothing but - there are a few good spots - but even these are tinged with it.

Pynchon is zany through and through, and that’s why I don’t like him. Most of the obsolescent “postmodern” novelists are zany.

David Foster Wallace is very, very zany - zany to the max - but for some reason I can tolerate him at times. Not Infinite Jest - whose very title proclaims the zane right from the book shelf - but Oblivion was quite good. I’ll have to think about why this is so…

This is zany too, and it goes down a bit easier than the print equivalent.

But I’d be probably pretty gaggy were I to get the same in a film about the current or recent police actions. This, for instance, bothers. Not just this scene in particular, but the whole of the film.

The word zany comes from the Italian for, what is it, zanni or zanno, the servant character in commedia dell’arte. And there is something servile about it, something no man’s a hero to their valet, and everyone’s a valet, so throw the Beach Boys on the car radio and roll with it. But there aren’t servants in America, right? So…

Oof. Sorry about that picture. Scares me too. It’s a zanni, or a christmas-treasure statuette of one, available at the website that kindly stamped their image with their addy.

Anyway, sorry, free-associating away, priming the pumps toward full on blog return. But perhaps these are initial notes toward a project on the politico-aesthetics of the turn to and away from the zany. Featured topics will include psychedelia, pranksterism, Kurt Vonnegut (not that I’ll read it or anything, but I’m sure it’ll come up, and the hickup or hangup or tic that makes a candycolored mash (or M.A.S.H.) of grave things like war. Oh, and said project will also take up whatever has replaced the zany here and now, which is the unnamable thing that informs sentences like the following:

Barring a nuclear war or a full-scale economic collapse due to climate change, robot sex is very likely in the cards. (Flak Magazine)

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Big business wants out of the business of providing health care to the American workforce. Fine. There’s an obvious answer out there - check every other developed economy - regarding who should take up this responsibility.

But the right has other ideas. Here’s David Brooks from today’s NYT:

Few have thought about these matters as long or as well as Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. Butler grew up in Shrewsbury, England, got a doctorate in American economic history in Scotland and became a U.S. citizen in 1996. As a result, he’s acutely aware of what makes American civilization unique, and which policies fit the national character.

{snip}

Butler’s specific health care plan is well-summarized at the Web site of the Hamilton Project. First, he would create tax-exempt “insurance exchanges.” These would be sponsored by trusted agents — unions, churches and other social groups. Organized like the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, they would offer menus of coverage choices and create diverse risk pools.

Second, employers who did not offer their own coverage would oversee payroll deductions and tax withholdings, but they would no longer have to sponsor programs or make choices for employees. Third, Congress would offer a health care tax credit to families making up to 200 percent of the poverty level, and would tighten benefits for the affluent. Fourth, states could come up with their own ways to regulate this system.

This isn’t the laissez-faire social contract of the 19th century. But neither is it the centralized, big bureaucracy contract of the 20th century. It’s a contract that envisions society as a dense but flexible web of social networks, the perfect vision for 21st-century America.

Hmmm… Church-based health insurance… That’s a new one… And if I were to obtain my benefits from my union, seems like a slightly different sourcing of the funds in question (me, in the former case and my employer, in the latter…) And who are the “other social groups” he’s thinking of? Can’t wait to get my Cat Fancier’s Pooled Funds Medical Card in the mail…

The title of Brooks’s article is “The New Social Contact.” The terms of said contract seem to be “figure it out for yourself, or ask your priest, but leave your government the fuck out of it, kay?”

It is worth remembering that, however things look on the surface, we Americans will always be the insurgents, never the occupiers. The IEDs will always be ours, the sniping - we invented that.

Whatever it looks like on the screen, we will always be irregulars, we will always land on the asymmetrical side of things. Our torture rooms are never those of the prison-bricked Central Intelligence office or the PVC camp - they are always in the back room, upstairs and to the back, with the rough hewn chair and the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

We will always be “just kids,” and the wars will always be fought between one backyard and the drainage pond at the corner. Someone’s golden retriever will always run across the field of battle at the critical moment. We will lock and load and empty our magazines before our mothers call us in for microwaved dinners.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud fabulates the origination of the incest taboo in a story that is also (of course) a story of the origins of civilization and the social contract that initiates it. There is a big bad father, and then there are sons. The sons - they can’t get what they want sexually or in any other way - dad has a monopoly over the women. So the sons kill dad (Freud wonders if it was “some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon,” that allowed the sons to win - I think we can all agree that it wasn’t so much a “weapon” as a set of tactics, namely guerrilla warfare, the sort of thing that would later manifest itself, as we all learn in school, at Lexington and Concord against the Redcoats…) But once dad is dead, there is a problem - a problem whose solution takes the shape of the incest prohibition and, well, civilization itself:

[T]he incest prohibition had [...] a strong practical foundation. Sexual need does not unite men; it separates them. Though the brothers had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father, and in the fight of each against the other the new organization would have perished. For there was no longer any one stronger than all the rest who could have successfully assumed the role of the father. Thus there was nothing left for the brothers, if they wanted to live together, but to erect the incest prohibition – perhaps after many difficult experiences – through which they all equally renounced the women whom they desired, and on account of whom they had removed the father in the first place. Thus they saved the organization which had made them strong and which could be based upon the homo-sexual feelings and activities which probably manifested themselves among them during the time of their banishment.

What can we say? If only this were true when it comes to us. The happy - if only ever moderately happy - structuralization of dad’s brutality, the construction upon the solid foundation of a repressed but ever present fraterphilia as well as the (sure!) very dark joke that deaddad gets to play on them in the end as far as access to women goes (”You thought you’d have all, but instead you’ll have none, because you are too many…”) The revolution ends in a socialism of castration - the only consolation arrives via the fact that it you (pl.) that deny yourself the women, rather than that fat bastard of a father, in our case, King George III, later aka LeninoStalin, et al.

No. What happened here is something entirely other. We killed dad, yes, but rather than simply constructing a totem and going on our self-chastening way, we decided (is that the word?) to reenact differently, more viscerally - for real. With our own sons, or especially the sons of others - even as we strike them down, we imagine, time and again, that it is the hand of filial revolt that we raise when we raise to strike. We will always be the bad son, the prodigal returned to fuck dad up right good when we asks what we’ve done with the money, even if there is no beard on those we strike, even if they still are on mom’s tit as we decapitate and worse, in our eyes, fucked up with the drug of repetition without difference, they are bearded and old, they have stolen our mom-sisters from the tent bed, they are sandy with their mature denial of our rights even as infants. We are Issac as Abraham striking down Issac - the call to hold off never comes, because you need a father’s ear to hear it, and we are only sons…

The Child is the father of the Man. Yes, but the natural piety in question, the binding of now to back then, incessantly takes the shape of sprinting in surplus stuff across the backyard, carrying the guns borrowed from our fathers’ (father’s) collection, a children’s crusade, an insurgency of kids, shooting blanks, catching ourselves on film, all in the end for AP credit.

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From the New York Times daily breakdown of the breakdown of the markets:

Richard F. Syron, chief executive of Freddie Mac, the large buyer of mortgages created by Congress in the 1970s, said yesterday that the speed and severity of the tighter credit terms are surprising, but perhaps necessary given the excesses in the market in recent years.

In a telephone interview from Washington, he was wary of the calls by some mortgage industry officials that Freddie Mac and its cousin, Fannie Mae, step in to buy loans and securities that private investors will no longer purchase. Mr. Syron noted that his company was operating under an agreement with its regulator that limited the size of its portfolio.

“There are some loans that are in difficulty” because credit pools are drying up, Mr. Syron said. “There are other loans that probably should never have been made and providing more liquidity will make that situation worse in the long term.”

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are complicated affairs, shareholder-owned, publically-traded companies that operate under a Federal charter that requires them to stabilize the mortgage markets. We don’t have to get all bogged down in the details of this to note something interesting (and obvious - a story that you already know). That is the fact that corporations and the governmentals who do their bidding have no problem calling for mommastate intervention when these guys are knee-deep in their own waste (Do something, government-sponsored enterprise!), but when it comes to protecting the rights to bankruptcy protection for the lowly citizen, or the weaving of any other safety net for the person rather than the spectral limitedliability semipersons, noxious federalization of risk and American self-sufficiency. Remember the discourse that broke down the levees of decency when we all got to watch this on tv together:

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Krugman today in the NY Times:

Mr. Schumer, who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, insists that the large financial contributions that hedge funds make to his party aren’t influencing him. Well, I can’t read his mind, but from the outside his position looks remarkably like money-driven politics as usual. And that’s not acceptable. 

Look, the worst thing that could happen to Democrats is for voters to conclude that there’s no real difference between the parties, that when you replace Republicans with Democrats, all you do is replace sweet deals for Halliburton with sweet deals for hedge funds. The hedge fund loophole is a test — and it’s one that Mr. Schumer is failing.

Yep. But it’s not just hedge funds. How about this cheery exchange between the frontrunners of the peace party:

Senator Barack Obama found himself on the defensive again yesterday about his views on foreign policy, this time over a comment he made about the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

During an interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Obama, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, initially ruled out using nuclear weapons in the region as part of the effort to defeat terrorism and root out Osama bin Laden.

“I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” he said, pausing before he added, “involving civilians.”

But then he quickly said: “Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”

Later in an interview on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, sought to clarify the remark about nuclear weapons, saying he was asked whether he would “use nuclear weapons to pursue Al Qaeda.”

“I said no one is talking about nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama said. “I found it was a little bit of an off-the-wall question.”

His remarks about removing nuclear weapons as an option in the region drew fresh attacks from Democratic rivals who had already questioned his foreign policy experience.

American officials have generally been deliberately ambiguous about their nuclear strike policies.

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, declined to say whether she agreed with Mr. Obama’s initial statement.

“I’m not going to answer hypotheticals,” Mrs. Clinton said.

She added: “I think that presidents should be very careful at all times in discussing the use or non-use of nuclear weapons. Presidents, since the Cold War, have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. And I don’t believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons.”

Wow. Glad I don’t have to be ambivalent about casting my vote demward this time around. Back in 2000, it was welfare reform at the like that pushed me over the line. But now that we’re only talking about the use of nuclear weapons in response to, what, a car bomb in Times Square, I feel much more comfortable.

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I’m a regular reader of Jim Kunstler’s site where every Monday he unleashes a new blast about America’s rush towards towards a disastrous collision of peak oil, poor urban planning, and corporate and governmental malfeasance. The posts are stirring reads, really great rhetorically and in the details… but they are often enough marked by insanely bad “big picture” moments, where Kunstler hauls the load of shit he has collected up to an entirely unlikely and unhelpful location. For instance, while I’m not going to go into detail, but in the earlier days of the Iraq War he was particularly bad in spots, playing out a counter-productive “sure, the republicans are nuts, but those pansy liberals want to drive their big cars and not fuck with Iraq!” - as if it were ever possible to believe that bringing cheap oil to the homeland was ever the point of this adventure. But since I don’t have time to link you to his posts from this period, I’ll just leave it at the level of a brief mention… It is as if there is something (the professional freelancer’s need to make hay? plain old political perversity?) that makes him skew his otherwise decent stuff in unreasonable directions.

Today’s post is emblematic of Kunstler’s problem, albeit in a less offensive way than usual. Here’s a paragraph from the middle of the piece:

By the way, I believe the stunning failure of responsibility actually can be accounted for, though my theory may not be to everyone’s taste (especially the science hard-asses out there). In a word: entropy. The US has enjoyed unprecedented energy inputs and the result is unprecedented entropy outputs. The protean force of entropy then manifests as degradation in just about everything around us from the immersive ugliness of a landscape overbuilt with WalMarts, Pizza Huts, and vinyl houses, to the sexual perversion available on the Internet, to the surrender of standards and norms by executives in the financial sector. It’s as simple as that. Entropy rules.

“Entropy,” is it, or a very specific and describable, if complex, brand of political economy? What does it mean to blur the finance sector presentism that comes of deregulation and a crisis in profits, the inefficient and corrupt distribution of energy resources, housing speculation and the long history of American resistance to urban planning and transit investment, and (ugh) “sexual perversion” under the sign of “entropy” rather than, say, laissez faire deregulatory capitalism? Even if there is something “entropic” about all that it is going on, Kunstler needs to go a few more steps to tell us how it is so in solid terms. Throwing the metaphor out as if it itself is an argument just turns everything pointless, leads you to flip the page and move on to the next thing.

Further, Kunstler’s tic is such a vividly American gesture - perhaps the most American gesture there is - to construct a thorough and largely accurate representation of all that is wrong with everything everywhere and then to caption this representation with a phrase drawn from the metaphysical (or pseudo-scientifical-metaphysical) rather than the blander, though more operable, phrasebook of political economy? Think of “the war on terror,” just to start. And to take it to a more personal place, think, if you’re ready to squirm a bit, about the form that American academic engagement generally takes, filling the hole where the argument needs to be with decorative, metaphorical stuffing - engaging in a general critique of everything that is always automatically defanged and rendered comfortable inhabitable by a lapse into poor poetry when self-aware purposefulness is the order of the day.

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A very clear rendition of the story of the privatization of US financial aid for college….

Personally, I think a topic-appropriate variation on the following paragraph, which ends the piece, could (should?) come at the end of every single piece that the NYT publishes, even though I’d change "mostly" to "sometimes" or "occasionally."

It’s a sobering lesson in the limits of capitalism. As a culture, we
praise the ability of the market to create the proper incentives and do
more good than not. And mostly that’s true. But there are some things
that are too important to entrust to the profit motive. Shouldn’t
paying for a college education be one of them?

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I think this is actually a good sign. Someone feels that the “threat” of universal health care is worth spending money to combat…

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