Any given country is made up of two components: the nation and the state, state meaning the center of governance and power.
“Nation” is an umbrella term that refers to the groups and subgroups that make up a country’s culture. The diverse values of its citizens are embedded in the nation. The nation is chaotic, disorderly and lacks efficiency, for it requires constant bickering to achieve the compromise and conciliation that are needed for effective action. All too often, the outcome of this bickering is an obsession with the common welfare.
The “state,” on the other hand, seeks power and authority so it may bring order and stability to the nation and impose upon it its own values of conquest and exploitation. Its power tends to puddle in one or more centers. In the case of America, it has puddled around the Beltway and Wall Street.
Traditionally, constitutions and common law are in place to protect the nation from the state.
The state achieves power by co-opting the nation’s values, corrupting them, and using them not as instruments of welfare and peace but as justifications for repression and home and conquest abroad. It recasts these values as absolutes that are propagandized to produce compliance and obedience.
The nation thrives on diversity; the state thrives on conformity.
If the nation represents the chaos of a life force that maintains itself in a constant state of tense equilibrium, then the state ultimately expresses itself as death, through incarceration, execution, and the sacrificing of the flower of its youth to advance its interests. The end is always the same: the enhancement of the state’s power. There is no other rationale for its existence.
To thrive, the state must twist Christianity, with its message of love and universal brotherhood, into a message of God’s wrath and retribution, making of the state a wagon train drawn into a circle and surrounded by a dark, alien force. Church and state work hand in hand to undercut freedom so they might protect “people of faith” from the “evil” forces that would destroy its civilization by strapping a nuke to a camel and sending it for a stroll down Wall Street.
The state achieves its ends with a rhetorical arsenal that includes “inversion of language, verbal inflation, libel, rumor, euphemism and coded phrases, rhetorical wantonness, redundancy, hyperbole, such profusion in speech and sound that comprehension is impaired, nonsense, sophistry, jargon, noise, incoherence, a chaos of voices and tongues, falsehood, blasphemy.”[1]
To succeed, there must be a disconnect between the state and its citizens. These citizens must be reduced to a passive horde so wrapped up in themselves that they could care less about the antics of the state.
A good citizen is one who mistakes the fiery sword of conquest for the shepherds crook.
--Belacqua Jones
[1] Stringfellow, William. An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Happy days seem to kind of be here, again.
The banks are once again profitable and all is well, at least on the surface. But then, the surface is all that matters, because Wall Street's religion is an ideological optimism elevated to the level of a fetish.
Saturday’s Times made note of the sharp pencil used to generate Citigroup’s $1.6 billion net profit. As the paper explained:
Behind that figure was some fuzzy math. Like several other banks that reported surprisingly strong results this week, Citigroup used some creative accounting, all of it legal, to bolster its bottom line at a pivotal moment.
(The law has nothing to do with integrity. It's only concern is, "Whose ox was gored?")
What the Citigroup did was use an arcane devise known as a Credit Value Adjustment (CVA), which is defined, in part, as the difference between a risk-free portfolio and the true market value.”
The value of their bonds has tanked. This has allowed them to claim the difference between the book and market value of its bonds as an asset to reflect the savings it maybe would have realize if it were to purchase its own debt at its depressed value instead of the value at which it was initially issued, thus boosting its bottom line with this phantom asset.
For example, say Citigroup issued a bond with a book value of $25,000 and said bond now has a market value of $5,000. The bank is claiming the $20,000 difference as an asset on the assumption that it could buy back its debt at the reduced price, or something like that...
Understand, Citigroup is not the only sharp pencil on Wall Street. According to Julian Delasantellis:
[A] major factor in Goldman Sachs’ blowout first-quarter earnings of $1.8 billion was that in December the bank took massive writeoffs of bad loans amounting to about $1.3 billion, but in the process of switching from a fiscal accounting year that ends in November to one that follows the calendar year, Goldman did not report the loses in the last quarter of ’08, as it also didn’t do for the first quarter of ’09. Like a ghost ship of the accursed from Pirates of the Caribbean, apparently, the December numbers are damned to be forever lost and forsaken, a legend that the firm would much rather forget and ignore.
Yes, happy days are here, again, as Wall Street discovers that the quickest way to hide red ink is to slather it with black paint. In the Never-Never Land of Wall Street, zombie banks live and are flush with health; they jog, workout at the gym and gorge themselves on health food. The trick is not to look too closely, because if we do so, that healthy glow will turn out to be grease paint.
Wall Street reminds me of the years I spent trying to live by my wits until Idiscovered I didn't have any.
--Belacqua Jones
Saturday’s Times made note of the sharp pencil used to generate Citigroup’s $1.6 billion net profit. As the paper explained:
Behind that figure was some fuzzy math. Like several other banks that reported surprisingly strong results this week, Citigroup used some creative accounting, all of it legal, to bolster its bottom line at a pivotal moment.
(The law has nothing to do with integrity. It's only concern is, "Whose ox was gored?")
What the Citigroup did was use an arcane devise known as a Credit Value Adjustment (CVA), which is defined, in part, as the difference between a risk-free portfolio and the true market value.”
The value of their bonds has tanked. This has allowed them to claim the difference between the book and market value of its bonds as an asset to reflect the savings it maybe would have realize if it were to purchase its own debt at its depressed value instead of the value at which it was initially issued, thus boosting its bottom line with this phantom asset.
For example, say Citigroup issued a bond with a book value of $25,000 and said bond now has a market value of $5,000. The bank is claiming the $20,000 difference as an asset on the assumption that it could buy back its debt at the reduced price, or something like that...
Understand, Citigroup is not the only sharp pencil on Wall Street. According to Julian Delasantellis:
[A] major factor in Goldman Sachs’ blowout first-quarter earnings of $1.8 billion was that in December the bank took massive writeoffs of bad loans amounting to about $1.3 billion, but in the process of switching from a fiscal accounting year that ends in November to one that follows the calendar year, Goldman did not report the loses in the last quarter of ’08, as it also didn’t do for the first quarter of ’09. Like a ghost ship of the accursed from Pirates of the Caribbean, apparently, the December numbers are damned to be forever lost and forsaken, a legend that the firm would much rather forget and ignore.
Yes, happy days are here, again, as Wall Street discovers that the quickest way to hide red ink is to slather it with black paint. In the Never-Never Land of Wall Street, zombie banks live and are flush with health; they jog, workout at the gym and gorge themselves on health food. The trick is not to look too closely, because if we do so, that healthy glow will turn out to be grease paint.
Wall Street reminds me of the years I spent trying to live by my wits until Idiscovered I didn't have any.
--Belacqua Jones
Friday, April 17, 2009
Protecting our Torturers
I was thrilled to see that Spain and the United States have decriminalize War Crimes.
Spain’s attorney general has decided not to prosecute the “Bush Six” for their roles in authorizing the torture of terrorist suspects, and the Obama administration will not bring charges against the CIA employees who engaged in it.
It’s high time, I say. The entire concept of war crimes is archaic and outmoded in a time when the country threatened by an Islamofascist faux terrorism. There is no doubt that the decision not to prosecute the perpetrators will add even more pissed-off Muslims to their ranks, which will justify even further torture. But, it’s a small price to pay for our security.
The Spanish attorney general said, “If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”
(So much for the Geneva Conventions.)
As ground breaking as the attorney general’s statement was, it still left the perpetrators dangling in the breeze.
Thankfully, the Obama administration came to their rescue when it decided not to prosecute the CIA officials who did the actual torturing.”
He went on to say, “We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying the blame for the past.”
It’s a pity Obama wasn’t the lead defense council at the Nuremberg trials.
Attorney General Eric Holder said, “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.
So, “I was just following orders,” is a legal defense after all.
The only decent thing for America to do, now, is to pressure the German government to grand post-mortem pardons to all the Nazis wrongfully convicted by the Nuremberg tribunal. It appears they were all innocent.
And to think I was worried that Obama would trash all the gains made by the Bush administration.
Moral relativity rocks!
--Belacqua Jones
Spain’s attorney general has decided not to prosecute the “Bush Six” for their roles in authorizing the torture of terrorist suspects, and the Obama administration will not bring charges against the CIA employees who engaged in it.
It’s high time, I say. The entire concept of war crimes is archaic and outmoded in a time when the country threatened by an Islamofascist faux terrorism. There is no doubt that the decision not to prosecute the perpetrators will add even more pissed-off Muslims to their ranks, which will justify even further torture. But, it’s a small price to pay for our security.
The Spanish attorney general said, “If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”
(So much for the Geneva Conventions.)
As ground breaking as the attorney general’s statement was, it still left the perpetrators dangling in the breeze.
Thankfully, the Obama administration came to their rescue when it decided not to prosecute the CIA officials who did the actual torturing.”
He went on to say, “We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying the blame for the past.”
It’s a pity Obama wasn’t the lead defense council at the Nuremberg trials.
Attorney General Eric Holder said, “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.
So, “I was just following orders,” is a legal defense after all.
The only decent thing for America to do, now, is to pressure the German government to grand post-mortem pardons to all the Nazis wrongfully convicted by the Nuremberg tribunal. It appears they were all innocent.
And to think I was worried that Obama would trash all the gains made by the Bush administration.
Moral relativity rocks!
--Belacqua Jones
Thursday, April 16, 2009
The Eternal Happiness of Unhappiness
I have been smitten with another insite. No, I don’t mean insight. This is much more profound. An insite means that I have placed my head in another ineffable place where demons sing in my ear.
Here it is!
Social control is all a matter of illusion, a legerdemain of such subtly that the proles never notice. It is a multiplicity of commands so muted that they are dutifully internalized to such an extent that the prospect of even questioning them, let along changing or eliminating them are never even considered.
One of the better ones is the pervasive belief that we are entitled to happiness. With this little maxim in tow our anguish increases when things go wrong. This is crucial for the well ordered state because anguish is not anger. Anguish further atomizes an already fragmented community because we hide our anguish from our neighbor and put on a happy face less our neighbor thinks us neurotic.
On the other hand, anger is a danger to the well-ordered state because angry people tend to vent, and this leads to intercourse with their neighbors who may well be an angry as they are. This could lead to the formation of a group that could well lead to the solidarity and cohesion of a movement.
Anguish serves the state; anger threatens it.
Since we believe we are entitled to happiness, we believe that the lack of it is because of something we did or didn’t do. We didn’t work hard enough; we didn’t kiss up to the boss enough. Somewhere, there is an enough that was left undone.
This leads us to entitlement’s corollary: the belief that we can regain happiness by reinventing our self, because in a happy society, suffering is all in our mind since our neighbor is always wearing a happy face. So all we need do is retool our existence.
Little do we realize that “inventing our self” is an ontological fallacy since a subject can’t be its own object. So we make some superficial changes and convince ourselves that our continued misery is only an illusion and that we are really happy in spite of our unhappiness.
There is a subversive Spanish proverb that reads, “There is no happiness; there are only moments of happiness.” Let’s hope the state keeps that one under lock and key.
--Belacqua Jones
Here it is!
Social control is all a matter of illusion, a legerdemain of such subtly that the proles never notice. It is a multiplicity of commands so muted that they are dutifully internalized to such an extent that the prospect of even questioning them, let along changing or eliminating them are never even considered.
One of the better ones is the pervasive belief that we are entitled to happiness. With this little maxim in tow our anguish increases when things go wrong. This is crucial for the well ordered state because anguish is not anger. Anguish further atomizes an already fragmented community because we hide our anguish from our neighbor and put on a happy face less our neighbor thinks us neurotic.
On the other hand, anger is a danger to the well-ordered state because angry people tend to vent, and this leads to intercourse with their neighbors who may well be an angry as they are. This could lead to the formation of a group that could well lead to the solidarity and cohesion of a movement.
Anguish serves the state; anger threatens it.
Since we believe we are entitled to happiness, we believe that the lack of it is because of something we did or didn’t do. We didn’t work hard enough; we didn’t kiss up to the boss enough. Somewhere, there is an enough that was left undone.
This leads us to entitlement’s corollary: the belief that we can regain happiness by reinventing our self, because in a happy society, suffering is all in our mind since our neighbor is always wearing a happy face. So all we need do is retool our existence.
Little do we realize that “inventing our self” is an ontological fallacy since a subject can’t be its own object. So we make some superficial changes and convince ourselves that our continued misery is only an illusion and that we are really happy in spite of our unhappiness.
There is a subversive Spanish proverb that reads, “There is no happiness; there are only moments of happiness.” Let’s hope the state keeps that one under lock and key.
--Belacqua Jones
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
The Sweetness of Contemporary Corruption
I am getting tired of cynics who tell us that Congress in an open septic tank overflowing with the raw sewage of corruption.
In truth, it’s a bit more sophisticated than that.
Granted, raw sewage is pumped into the Beltway via open trenches. While the widest and deepest trench runs down the East Coast from Wall Street, other trenches snake out from the country’s other power centers. The defense industry is no slouch when it comes to sewage pumping.
However, contemporary corruption is polite and elegant. The bagman is an extinct species, and envelopes crammed with small, unmarked bills are no longer passed under the table.
The raw sewage is never pumped directly into the capitol. Instead, it is pumped, first, into the K Street Sewage Treatment Plant. There it is sanitized, deodorized and packed into innocent looking bales before being trucked over to Congress in the form of “campaign contributions.”
It’s still sewage, but it smells sweeter.
We would do well to think of this corruption as the fertilizer that feeds our greatness. It is the new democracy in which the rights of our corporations are jealously guarded with the assurance that as our corporations prosper, their wealth will trickle down to the poor and the disenfranchised.
It is unfortunate that our current economic meltdown has revealed that the only thing that trickled down was the urine of the rich. This is why our oligarchs need the best PR firms money can buy to convince the masses that the piss is really milk and honey.
Let the rest of the world riot. America takes care of her own by feeding them a steady diet of this milk and honey.
--Belacqua Jones
In truth, it’s a bit more sophisticated than that.
Granted, raw sewage is pumped into the Beltway via open trenches. While the widest and deepest trench runs down the East Coast from Wall Street, other trenches snake out from the country’s other power centers. The defense industry is no slouch when it comes to sewage pumping.
However, contemporary corruption is polite and elegant. The bagman is an extinct species, and envelopes crammed with small, unmarked bills are no longer passed under the table.
The raw sewage is never pumped directly into the capitol. Instead, it is pumped, first, into the K Street Sewage Treatment Plant. There it is sanitized, deodorized and packed into innocent looking bales before being trucked over to Congress in the form of “campaign contributions.”
It’s still sewage, but it smells sweeter.
We would do well to think of this corruption as the fertilizer that feeds our greatness. It is the new democracy in which the rights of our corporations are jealously guarded with the assurance that as our corporations prosper, their wealth will trickle down to the poor and the disenfranchised.
It is unfortunate that our current economic meltdown has revealed that the only thing that trickled down was the urine of the rich. This is why our oligarchs need the best PR firms money can buy to convince the masses that the piss is really milk and honey.
Let the rest of the world riot. America takes care of her own by feeding them a steady diet of this milk and honey.
--Belacqua Jones
Monday, April 13, 2009
Bankers: America's Freedom Fighters
Bankers man the ramparts of our nation’s liberty. They are the point men in the eternal battle against the serfdom of ethics and integrity. This is why they want their handouts of public money with no strings attached.
In the lower echelons of society, this would be called extortion; in polite society, it’s called an economic stimulus plan.
As Wall Street’s cupbearer, Obama should understand this. Yet, he insists on attaching conditions to the bales of taxpayer money being pumped into our dying banks. This is cruel and must stop, and this is why Saturday’s Times tells us that our brave bankers are starting to shove back.
To begin with, they resent being forced to sell their toxic assets at less than the 91 cents on the dollar at which they are valuing them. The fact that a free market is only willing to pay 30 cents on the dollar is irrelevant. A free man deserves top dollar for his screw ups. Only an oppressive and authoritarian government would force him to sell them for what they’re worth.
They are also rebelling against the restrictions on executive pay that was a condition of the bailout. Such a restriction is like telling a mugger that he can only take fifty percent of his victim’s cash instead of all of it. The only way a banker can thrive is if he is allowed to game the system for all it’s worth.
So, some of the healthier banks are trying to give their handouts back, but are shocked and appalled to discover that the government is going to charge them interest. Interest is for suckers, not for freedom fighters!
Reality has no place in the world of finance corporatism. Finance corporatism is like the ads in Architectural Digest: suave, elegant and gaily colored. Such ads never show the termites that are gnawing away at the beams and joists. The last thing we want to do is raise our eyes and look at the destruction towards which we are marching.
Freedom is all about illusion, and Obama has a moral obligation to do all he can to preserve and protect it, and the first thing he must do is get off our bankers’ backs and let them do what they do best—act like Peter Pans who will never grow up!
--Belacqua Jones
In the lower echelons of society, this would be called extortion; in polite society, it’s called an economic stimulus plan.
As Wall Street’s cupbearer, Obama should understand this. Yet, he insists on attaching conditions to the bales of taxpayer money being pumped into our dying banks. This is cruel and must stop, and this is why Saturday’s Times tells us that our brave bankers are starting to shove back.
To begin with, they resent being forced to sell their toxic assets at less than the 91 cents on the dollar at which they are valuing them. The fact that a free market is only willing to pay 30 cents on the dollar is irrelevant. A free man deserves top dollar for his screw ups. Only an oppressive and authoritarian government would force him to sell them for what they’re worth.
They are also rebelling against the restrictions on executive pay that was a condition of the bailout. Such a restriction is like telling a mugger that he can only take fifty percent of his victim’s cash instead of all of it. The only way a banker can thrive is if he is allowed to game the system for all it’s worth.
So, some of the healthier banks are trying to give their handouts back, but are shocked and appalled to discover that the government is going to charge them interest. Interest is for suckers, not for freedom fighters!
Reality has no place in the world of finance corporatism. Finance corporatism is like the ads in Architectural Digest: suave, elegant and gaily colored. Such ads never show the termites that are gnawing away at the beams and joists. The last thing we want to do is raise our eyes and look at the destruction towards which we are marching.
Freedom is all about illusion, and Obama has a moral obligation to do all he can to preserve and protect it, and the first thing he must do is get off our bankers’ backs and let them do what they do best—act like Peter Pans who will never grow up!
--Belacqua Jones
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Canonizing the Lie
Lying is a sin; therefore, the only Christian way to deal with the lie is to declare it true. Lies are too important to consign our corporate plutocrats to Hell for mouthing them. If, however, every lie they utter is true, then their place in Paradise is assured.
The lie has increased in importance as America has transitioned from manufacturing capitalism to finance capitalism. As writer Julian Delasantellis explains it:
[I]f it’s harder to lie with actual product, it’s probably easier to lie with paper…[C]orporate finance has become devilishly complex, with entries for arcane and esoteric corporate practices whose place on the balance sheet sometimes belongs in between, or shift, from the cost to the revenue side of the ledger.
In other words, since it’s all smoke and mirrors, anyway, who can tell the difference between a lie and a truth.
Now that we understand that, we understand the cause of our current economic collapse. It's all the fault of a simple accounting rule, FAS 157, which insists that financial institutions tell the truth about their assets by valuing them at what they would actually fetch in a free and open marketplace.
The rule simply reeks of free enterprise, which is anathema to finance capitalism. As Delasantellis explains it, the problem is that:
[T]he value of everything is not determined, or at least should not be determined, by what the owner thinks they are worth, but by what competitive bidders in an informed free market are willing to put up in cold hard cash. Anything else is just some manner of fantasy.
This is bad news for an industry based on fantasy.
Well, our Masters of the Universe couldn’t allow this sorry state of affairs to continue. Especially since our zombie banks had become warehouses for toxic toilet paper nobody wanted. Since they were forced to value this paper to what it would fetch in the market (damn little) they appeared to be insolvent, and you can’t run a Ponzi scheme with insolvent banks.
So, our oligarchs prevailed on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to tweak FAS 157, and in doing so, they canonized the lie and raised it to sainthood. Instead of marking to market, our financial institutions will now be allowed to mark their toilet paper to “model”. Delasantellis explains it:
Market to model implies the replacement of mark-to-market prices with valuations derived from proprietary mathematical models used by the company.
The key word, here, is “proprietary”. This means that not only will these mathematical models be the creations of the company using them, but being proprietary, they will not be subject to peer review.
There you are! With a stroke of the pen, our financial crisis is over, and the lie that once hugged the back alleys of Wall Street has been cleaned up and now sits upon our financial kingdom’s paper throne.
This is why America is an economic powerhouse!
--Belacqua Jones
The lie has increased in importance as America has transitioned from manufacturing capitalism to finance capitalism. As writer Julian Delasantellis explains it:
[I]f it’s harder to lie with actual product, it’s probably easier to lie with paper…[C]orporate finance has become devilishly complex, with entries for arcane and esoteric corporate practices whose place on the balance sheet sometimes belongs in between, or shift, from the cost to the revenue side of the ledger.
In other words, since it’s all smoke and mirrors, anyway, who can tell the difference between a lie and a truth.
Now that we understand that, we understand the cause of our current economic collapse. It's all the fault of a simple accounting rule, FAS 157, which insists that financial institutions tell the truth about their assets by valuing them at what they would actually fetch in a free and open marketplace.
The rule simply reeks of free enterprise, which is anathema to finance capitalism. As Delasantellis explains it, the problem is that:
[T]he value of everything is not determined, or at least should not be determined, by what the owner thinks they are worth, but by what competitive bidders in an informed free market are willing to put up in cold hard cash. Anything else is just some manner of fantasy.
This is bad news for an industry based on fantasy.
Well, our Masters of the Universe couldn’t allow this sorry state of affairs to continue. Especially since our zombie banks had become warehouses for toxic toilet paper nobody wanted. Since they were forced to value this paper to what it would fetch in the market (damn little) they appeared to be insolvent, and you can’t run a Ponzi scheme with insolvent banks.
So, our oligarchs prevailed on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to tweak FAS 157, and in doing so, they canonized the lie and raised it to sainthood. Instead of marking to market, our financial institutions will now be allowed to mark their toilet paper to “model”. Delasantellis explains it:
Market to model implies the replacement of mark-to-market prices with valuations derived from proprietary mathematical models used by the company.
The key word, here, is “proprietary”. This means that not only will these mathematical models be the creations of the company using them, but being proprietary, they will not be subject to peer review.
There you are! With a stroke of the pen, our financial crisis is over, and the lie that once hugged the back alleys of Wall Street has been cleaned up and now sits upon our financial kingdom’s paper throne.
This is why America is an economic powerhouse!
--Belacqua Jones
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