All a lemming has to do is go over the edge of the cliff. Momentum takes care of the rest. Even if he’s wearing a parachute, he won’t pull the rip cord because habit won’t allow him to do so.
It’s no different with empires. The dynamic that made them powerful fossilizes into the habit that contributes to their downfall. The very dynamic that made success possible becomes an instrument of self destruction when it can no long adapt to changing circumstances.
John Michael Greer explains this fossilized dynamic as follows:
When failure is no longer penalized, and losing strategies are the only options admitted to discussion, changing course becomes the least likely possibility; the tighter the blinkers, the more likely that the horse will keep on galloping straight ahead, even if the road leads straight off a cliff.
You see this at work with Obama’s “change your can believe in” that really isn’t change but looks like change because he says its change. The reason Obama can get away with this is that when you are following Jack the Ripper, even rape seems like a virtue. As Joel S. Hirschhorn puts it, we have a president “with a glib tongue, a terrific smile and a deep commitment to the two-party plutocracy and corporate state.”
Progressives now find themselves in a state of paralysis as they wait to see what the “pragmatist” Obama has up his sleeve as he moves to the right. To them, criticism is heresy so they bite their collective tongues, totally oblivious to the fact that the only thing Obama has up his sleeve is more of the same. To paraphrase a Buddhist maxim, change is change when it’s not change.
We are also seeing the emergence of another of the media’s multiple roles. They do more than propagandize for the state. They also inoculates the state against change that would be both revolutionary and systemic.
For example, the media is full of stories about the “populist rage” that is sweeping the country. By putting the focus on this rage, it is neutralized and reduced to a buzz word that can be easily dismissed by our oligarchy. Meanwhile, the masses are pacified because the media has recognized their rage, and so they go home to their favorite television programs convinced that change will take place because their leaders know they’re really pissed off.
Hirschhorn sums it up nicely: “The saddest thing about Obama winning the presidency was that his change message drained what might have been sufficient national energy for true revolutionary reforms.”
This is why they’re rioting in Paris but not in Peoria.
We’re such a polite people.
--Belacqua Jones
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Save our Toys!
This is getting old. The economy takes a little downturn, and all of a sudden Whiteguys become punching bags.
It all started with Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, blaming “blue-eyed Whitemen” for what is little more than an economic belch. Someone should take him out to the woodshed and explain to him that blue-eyed Whiteguys of northern European descent (Frenchmen excluded, thank you) sit atop the Great Chain of Being, tucked neatly into God’s belly button. It is we who have carried out His cleansing grace through our wars and genocides.
As if that wasn’t enough, we then have Jayati Ghosh, a neoliberal critic, suggesting that we Whiteguys have too much stuff. She claims that:
[T]here is no question that the current “Northern” standards of life cannot be sustained if they were made accessible to everyone on this planet. This means that future economic growth in the developing world has to involve more equitable and sensible patterns of consumption and production.
This is dangerous talk. The implication, here, is that we Whiteguys have to give up some of our toys. She has the gall to suggest that Northern consumption could be reduced with the consequences being, not hardship, but inconvenience.
For example, I know a family of five that owns seven cars: one car for each and a couple for tooling around in. They could get by on one. Sure, it would be a pain in the ass, but it wouldn’t cause them to go hungry or to lose the roof over their heads.
Losing our central air conditioning would be uncomfortable, but we’d still get our three meals a day.
The list goes on and on, and if too many people start asking questions like this, we could lose our $11,300 blue jeans , our $1.8 million Bugatti Veyrons (a car with a thousand-plus horsepower), our Bling H2O, (bottled water at $40 a pop) or our $750 facials.
Where would our economic growth be without overconsumption?
Questions like these encourage real patriotism, by which I mean the willingness to criticize the hell out of your country and to demand the very best of it. This is why the well-ordered state redirects patriotism into a flag fetishism grounded in fairy tales about divine providence and greatness.
The solution to Western over consumption is simple: if the lifeboat is overcrowded, you start jettisoning, and you sure as hell don’t throw the captain overboard, even if he is a drunken sociopath. Which brings us back to God’s cleansing grace…
The Great Chain of Being has served mankind well since medieval times, and it will survive our current cultural collapse only if people like Lula de Silva and Jayati Ghosh keep their mouths shut.
--Belacqua Jones
It all started with Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, blaming “blue-eyed Whitemen” for what is little more than an economic belch. Someone should take him out to the woodshed and explain to him that blue-eyed Whiteguys of northern European descent (Frenchmen excluded, thank you) sit atop the Great Chain of Being, tucked neatly into God’s belly button. It is we who have carried out His cleansing grace through our wars and genocides.
As if that wasn’t enough, we then have Jayati Ghosh, a neoliberal critic, suggesting that we Whiteguys have too much stuff. She claims that:
[T]here is no question that the current “Northern” standards of life cannot be sustained if they were made accessible to everyone on this planet. This means that future economic growth in the developing world has to involve more equitable and sensible patterns of consumption and production.
This is dangerous talk. The implication, here, is that we Whiteguys have to give up some of our toys. She has the gall to suggest that Northern consumption could be reduced with the consequences being, not hardship, but inconvenience.
For example, I know a family of five that owns seven cars: one car for each and a couple for tooling around in. They could get by on one. Sure, it would be a pain in the ass, but it wouldn’t cause them to go hungry or to lose the roof over their heads.
Losing our central air conditioning would be uncomfortable, but we’d still get our three meals a day.
The list goes on and on, and if too many people start asking questions like this, we could lose our $11,300 blue jeans , our $1.8 million Bugatti Veyrons (a car with a thousand-plus horsepower), our Bling H2O, (bottled water at $40 a pop) or our $750 facials.
Where would our economic growth be without overconsumption?
Questions like these encourage real patriotism, by which I mean the willingness to criticize the hell out of your country and to demand the very best of it. This is why the well-ordered state redirects patriotism into a flag fetishism grounded in fairy tales about divine providence and greatness.
The solution to Western over consumption is simple: if the lifeboat is overcrowded, you start jettisoning, and you sure as hell don’t throw the captain overboard, even if he is a drunken sociopath. Which brings us back to God’s cleansing grace…
The Great Chain of Being has served mankind well since medieval times, and it will survive our current cultural collapse only if people like Lula de Silva and Jayati Ghosh keep their mouths shut.
--Belacqua Jones
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Greek Drama and the Halls of Congress
If nothing else, the Beltway is a real turn-on. Where else can you see American enterprise etched out in such dramatic detail? It is here that egos and ideologies clash in the epic struggles that are hallmarks of a democratic society hard at work.
Tucked inside the cracked cocoon of my neocon ideology run amok, I am given a unique perspective on the epic clashes, confrontations and crusades that rattle the marbled halls of power. And I can tell you this…
It’s all an act; it’s fucking theater played out for the benefit of the masses to give the impression that policies that have already been decided on are still being vigorously debated. (The reason Hamlet didn’t kill his stepfather in Act III had nothing to do with his neurosis or lack of resolve; it had everything to do with the fact that Shakespeare had two more acts to fill.)
I stumbled across a prime example of this in yesterday’s Times. It seems good ol’ Tim is going to shake up financial capitalism with a set of draconian reforms. He wants to regulate derivatives and bring the shadow banking system under SEC control. He wants Treasury to have the power to takeover any institution that threatens our fragile economy.
And the finance industry is rending its garments and rubbing ashes in their hair as they beg Tim to regulate the hell out of them, for they have sinned and must be made whole again.
But…
…and this is one of those big buts that keeps the Beltway from overreacting to a real crisis, the Times reassures us that, “…industry groups are already mobilizing to block restrictions they oppose and win new protections they have wanted for years.”
Yes, it’s another carefully choreographed Greek drama complete with a congressional chorus that will chant its scripted strophes, antistrophes and epodes as it moves across the stage. Even now you can hear the sound of industry lobbyists sharpening their gelding knives as Congress prepares to do the “peoples’” business.
To give you one example of this democracy at work, the Times tells us that one of the “reforms” the American Banking Association is pushing for is to allow banks to mark their toxic assets to book instead of being forced to mark them to market.
Say a bank is holding a piece of toxic paper with a book value of $100. In today’s market it could be worth anything from $10 to $30, and this is how the banks must carry it on their books. The banks complaint is that it weakens their financial position by being forced to value assets for what they are actually worth rather than valuing them as they might be worth someday in Never-Never Land.
I am four-square behind this reform. As a matter of fact, I’d like to see this reform expanded to cover us all, so that when I am forced back into the job market, exercising my unique skill set of collecting shopping carts from a supermarket parking lot, my salary won’t be marked to market (the minimum wage) but will be marked to my potential earnings (book) once I have my MBA from Harvard and am running my own hedge fund. (What the hell, with the dollar as a fiat currency, prosperity is but an illusion.)
What tickles me is that all of this drama is taking place over a 250-year-old industrial and financial bubble that, on a geological timeline, will barely amount to a cosmic fart.
I suppose its redeeming quality is that it keeps all the nuts holed up in the Beltway. God knows what would happen if they were allowed to run wild.
--Belacqua Jones
Tucked inside the cracked cocoon of my neocon ideology run amok, I am given a unique perspective on the epic clashes, confrontations and crusades that rattle the marbled halls of power. And I can tell you this…
It’s all an act; it’s fucking theater played out for the benefit of the masses to give the impression that policies that have already been decided on are still being vigorously debated. (The reason Hamlet didn’t kill his stepfather in Act III had nothing to do with his neurosis or lack of resolve; it had everything to do with the fact that Shakespeare had two more acts to fill.)
I stumbled across a prime example of this in yesterday’s Times. It seems good ol’ Tim is going to shake up financial capitalism with a set of draconian reforms. He wants to regulate derivatives and bring the shadow banking system under SEC control. He wants Treasury to have the power to takeover any institution that threatens our fragile economy.
And the finance industry is rending its garments and rubbing ashes in their hair as they beg Tim to regulate the hell out of them, for they have sinned and must be made whole again.
But…
…and this is one of those big buts that keeps the Beltway from overreacting to a real crisis, the Times reassures us that, “…industry groups are already mobilizing to block restrictions they oppose and win new protections they have wanted for years.”
Yes, it’s another carefully choreographed Greek drama complete with a congressional chorus that will chant its scripted strophes, antistrophes and epodes as it moves across the stage. Even now you can hear the sound of industry lobbyists sharpening their gelding knives as Congress prepares to do the “peoples’” business.
To give you one example of this democracy at work, the Times tells us that one of the “reforms” the American Banking Association is pushing for is to allow banks to mark their toxic assets to book instead of being forced to mark them to market.
Say a bank is holding a piece of toxic paper with a book value of $100. In today’s market it could be worth anything from $10 to $30, and this is how the banks must carry it on their books. The banks complaint is that it weakens their financial position by being forced to value assets for what they are actually worth rather than valuing them as they might be worth someday in Never-Never Land.
I am four-square behind this reform. As a matter of fact, I’d like to see this reform expanded to cover us all, so that when I am forced back into the job market, exercising my unique skill set of collecting shopping carts from a supermarket parking lot, my salary won’t be marked to market (the minimum wage) but will be marked to my potential earnings (book) once I have my MBA from Harvard and am running my own hedge fund. (What the hell, with the dollar as a fiat currency, prosperity is but an illusion.)
What tickles me is that all of this drama is taking place over a 250-year-old industrial and financial bubble that, on a geological timeline, will barely amount to a cosmic fart.
I suppose its redeeming quality is that it keeps all the nuts holed up in the Beltway. God knows what would happen if they were allowed to run wild.
--Belacqua Jones
Friday, March 27, 2009
It's time to rebrand
As you see, I've changed the format. The letter format was becoming a little stale, especially as our memory of Shrub fades, even though the consequences of his rule remain.
Don't worry. Belacqua is as snarky as ever. The only difference is that he no longer has to kiss up to Shrub.
--cw
Don't worry. Belacqua is as snarky as ever. The only difference is that he no longer has to kiss up to Shrub.
--cw
The soothing touch of Newspeak.
Those who prattle on about Orwellian Newspeak fail to understand its sophistication. Its overriding purpose is to simplify our vocabulary until it is reduced to a handful of buzz words.
It does this by eliminating antonyms from the language. Antonyms are dangerous because they encourage contrast, and contrast too often leads to social destabilizers like thought, discussion and debate. By incorporating a word’s antonym into its meaning, contrast is neutralized and social stability reigns.
Here’s how it works. A word grows and expands, like the Blob in the 1950 movie classic of the same name, until it absorbs its antonym, which becomes it synonym though it is still its antonym even though it now acts like its synonym.
In order for Newspeak to maximize its effectiveness, a semi-literate population is necessary. Understand that semi-literate has nothing to do with reading skills. Rather, it describes a population that is too lazy to read and prefers to be fed images on a screen. Our 24/7 cable news channels have worked wonders in promoting this semi-literacy. This could explain why newspapers across the country are folding. Why waste time reading when the tube explains it all.
Sometimes, rather than shrinking vocabulary, Newspeak effects a semantic reversal. We are all acquainted with the couplet, “Socialism is slavery; capitalism is freedom.” Here, both words remain in the vocabulary, yet each has absorbed its antonym so that Socialism’s slavery is freedom and capitalism’s freedom is slavery. Since nobody wants to be a slave, they abjure socialism’s freedom and embrace capitalism’s slavery.
Shrub made a major contribution to Newspeak when he was in office by expanding the meaning of normal to include sociopathic behavior. He did the same for patriotism and God.
Thanks to Tim Geithner, the phrase “private money” has expanded to incorporate its antonym, “public money”, thus rendering the phrase “public money” redundant.
The same is true of “bureaucrat”. The word use to refer only to a government employee. Thanks to the revolving door that exists between government and industry, the meaning of bureaucrat has grown until is includes corporate bureaucrats as well.
Life is sweet when Newspeak thrives. It is a healing balm that allows the mind to mellow out without being disturbed by doubt and skepticism. With remote in hand, John Q. Public drifts along in a trance, soothed by words that cause nary a ripple in his soul.
--Belacqua Jones
It does this by eliminating antonyms from the language. Antonyms are dangerous because they encourage contrast, and contrast too often leads to social destabilizers like thought, discussion and debate. By incorporating a word’s antonym into its meaning, contrast is neutralized and social stability reigns.
Here’s how it works. A word grows and expands, like the Blob in the 1950 movie classic of the same name, until it absorbs its antonym, which becomes it synonym though it is still its antonym even though it now acts like its synonym.
In order for Newspeak to maximize its effectiveness, a semi-literate population is necessary. Understand that semi-literate has nothing to do with reading skills. Rather, it describes a population that is too lazy to read and prefers to be fed images on a screen. Our 24/7 cable news channels have worked wonders in promoting this semi-literacy. This could explain why newspapers across the country are folding. Why waste time reading when the tube explains it all.
Sometimes, rather than shrinking vocabulary, Newspeak effects a semantic reversal. We are all acquainted with the couplet, “Socialism is slavery; capitalism is freedom.” Here, both words remain in the vocabulary, yet each has absorbed its antonym so that Socialism’s slavery is freedom and capitalism’s freedom is slavery. Since nobody wants to be a slave, they abjure socialism’s freedom and embrace capitalism’s slavery.
Shrub made a major contribution to Newspeak when he was in office by expanding the meaning of normal to include sociopathic behavior. He did the same for patriotism and God.
Thanks to Tim Geithner, the phrase “private money” has expanded to incorporate its antonym, “public money”, thus rendering the phrase “public money” redundant.
The same is true of “bureaucrat”. The word use to refer only to a government employee. Thanks to the revolving door that exists between government and industry, the meaning of bureaucrat has grown until is includes corporate bureaucrats as well.
Life is sweet when Newspeak thrives. It is a healing balm that allows the mind to mellow out without being disturbed by doubt and skepticism. With remote in hand, John Q. Public drifts along in a trance, soothed by words that cause nary a ripple in his soul.
--Belacqua Jones
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Boomers are at the helm, and all is well.
Dear George,
Fear not! Everything is going to be hunky-dory with the economy, not because it is going to recover, but because it is being overseen by a gaggle of baby boomers, and when boomers say everything is going to be just fine, it will be. Optimism is part of their DNA, no matter how grim the picture.
Just looking at their birthdates is enough to give us all the reassurance we need: Bernanke born in 1952, Summers in 1954 and Geithner in 1961.
They are all men who came to age in America’s golden age of self-indulgence when there was nowhere to go except up and our prosperity appeared to be unending.
Only a child raised on television, like Ben, could declare that we had entered the “Great Moderation” in which the evil business cycle of boom and bust had been tamed,
Who needs regulation and nationalization when you treat finance capitalism like a sitcom in which all problems are resolved by the time the credits roll?
All you gotta do is believe.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
Fear not! Everything is going to be hunky-dory with the economy, not because it is going to recover, but because it is being overseen by a gaggle of baby boomers, and when boomers say everything is going to be just fine, it will be. Optimism is part of their DNA, no matter how grim the picture.
Just looking at their birthdates is enough to give us all the reassurance we need: Bernanke born in 1952, Summers in 1954 and Geithner in 1961.
They are all men who came to age in America’s golden age of self-indulgence when there was nowhere to go except up and our prosperity appeared to be unending.
Only a child raised on television, like Ben, could declare that we had entered the “Great Moderation” in which the evil business cycle of boom and bust had been tamed,
Who needs regulation and nationalization when you treat finance capitalism like a sitcom in which all problems are resolved by the time the credits roll?
All you gotta do is believe.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Key to Prosperity
Dear George,
The key to prosperity is simple—cook the books.
Wealth no longer bears any relationship to how much gold you have in the vault. Instead, wealth has been reduced to the figures on a spreadsheet. If the figures look good, and if they fool everyone, you are prospering.
Book cooking has a long and honorable tradition. The mining industry pioneered the practice when the owners’ built company towns that featured company stores where miners could buy food and clothing on credit.
Creative bookkeeping insured that the miners were perpetually in debt. This indebtedness was an efficient management tool. If a miner became fed up with working sixteen hours a day, six days a week and decided to leave, the owners simply got the sheriff after him for skipping out on his debt.
In the years following the Civil War, the practice found its way into the sharecropping that replaced, but didn’t change, slavery. In the “forward”, the landowner would advance the sharecropper seed and other supplies. When the crops were in, there was the “settle” in which, in theory, the sharecropper kept the profits from his endeavors. Again, the landowner employed some creative figure juggling, and the poor sharecropper never produced enough to pay off the “forward”.
The practice is still with us, but now instead of a forward and a settle, we have the usurious interest charged on credit cards. Debt remains an effective form of enslavement.
Of course, the irony of book cooking is that our capitalists have built a similar trap for themselves through their credit-default swaps. By entering into counterparty agreements, the banks preserved the illusion that they were solvent. Because these swaps were unregulated, those issuing them didn’t have to have the assets to cover their butts in case the economy went bust.
The economy went bust, the issuers of CDSs didn’t have the assets to cover their butts, and wholesale credit froze.
It’s the stupid trapper who becomes trapped in his own trap.
But, that’s expertise for you. Fortunately, all we have to do to get out of this crisis is to cook some more books.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
The key to prosperity is simple—cook the books.
Wealth no longer bears any relationship to how much gold you have in the vault. Instead, wealth has been reduced to the figures on a spreadsheet. If the figures look good, and if they fool everyone, you are prospering.
Book cooking has a long and honorable tradition. The mining industry pioneered the practice when the owners’ built company towns that featured company stores where miners could buy food and clothing on credit.
Creative bookkeeping insured that the miners were perpetually in debt. This indebtedness was an efficient management tool. If a miner became fed up with working sixteen hours a day, six days a week and decided to leave, the owners simply got the sheriff after him for skipping out on his debt.
In the years following the Civil War, the practice found its way into the sharecropping that replaced, but didn’t change, slavery. In the “forward”, the landowner would advance the sharecropper seed and other supplies. When the crops were in, there was the “settle” in which, in theory, the sharecropper kept the profits from his endeavors. Again, the landowner employed some creative figure juggling, and the poor sharecropper never produced enough to pay off the “forward”.
The practice is still with us, but now instead of a forward and a settle, we have the usurious interest charged on credit cards. Debt remains an effective form of enslavement.
Of course, the irony of book cooking is that our capitalists have built a similar trap for themselves through their credit-default swaps. By entering into counterparty agreements, the banks preserved the illusion that they were solvent. Because these swaps were unregulated, those issuing them didn’t have to have the assets to cover their butts in case the economy went bust.
The economy went bust, the issuers of CDSs didn’t have the assets to cover their butts, and wholesale credit froze.
It’s the stupid trapper who becomes trapped in his own trap.
But, that’s expertise for you. Fortunately, all we have to do to get out of this crisis is to cook some more books.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
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