50 ways to levy (give Greece a chance)

the problem is your middle class, said the elite
expecting to redeem their pensions, not be thrown out on the street
but with another round of loans and a bit more austerity
there must be 50 ways to levy the euros

we grow quite weary beating on dead Trojan horses
yet your ministers' grexit rhetoric finally forces
us to consider privatizing your public resources
there must be 50 ways to levy the euros
(50 ways to leave the EU)

renege on the loans, homes;
look 2 the BRICs quick;
slip off the leash, Greece,
get yourself free...
you restructure the debt yet?
no need to be coy, polloi
let 'em refinance, France
give Greece a chance.

they said, you show a great deal of temerity

accepting our investments and then threatening to flee

when all we want to do is help you to restore liquidity

there must be 50 ways to levy the euros

get back on rations, Athens
to reopen the banks, thanks
don't gotta be hard, Lagarde
those loans are ill-starred
we've come full circle, Merkel
don't mean to tease ya, Syriza
can't get blood from a husk, Tusk
the vig is too much

it is a shame that you elected all to shirk

your obligations to your creditors now please don't go berserk

just sit quietly and watch the shock doctrine do all the work

there must be 50 ways to levy the euros 

get back on rations, Athens
to reopen the banks, thanks
don't gotta be hard, Lagarde
those loans are ill-starred
we've come full circle, Merkel
don't mean to tease ya, Syriza
can't get blood from a husk, Tusk
the vig is too much

you restructure the debt yet?
no need to be coy, polloi
let 'em refinance, France
give Greece a chance.
renege on the loans homes;
look 2 the BRICs quick;
slip off the leash Greece,
get yourself free..

___
cf. 

information wants to be meaning

just hours after i posted the foregoing rant-cum-list-of-information-wanting-for-more-comprehensive-and-thoughtful-rant, i stumbled onto headlines made from part of an Oxfam report released the same day: "Working for the Few, Political capture and economic inequality" and, by dint of following the footnotes to the trumpeted headline claim, made my way, carefully, past the Forbes list of the world's billionaires, to the Credit Suisse Research Institute's report, "Global Wealth 2013" (... from october).

we've got all our thumbs on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist here at hellmarkpress!

(yes, we perform diagnosis by pulse, here. the cultural zeitgeist is a hungry ghost!)

from the forbes list i learned that no billionaire from the united states in the top one hundred overall was listed as working in government. (some did say "diversified").

and the credit suisse report is just good all-around reading, principally about the personal wealth -- net value (of the assets) -- of natural persons, approached a number of interesting ways. of note, the authors "estimate that there are 31.4 million . . . adults with wealth between" one and fifty million u.s. dollars, worldwide (and 98,700 persons whose net worth exceeds fifty million).

no doubt the further footnotes of the oxfam and credit suisse reports will offer more concerning wealth and income distribution in the u.s. and worldwide, and i will, in future, try to avoid the barrage of advertising over at forbes by not directing my browser to forbes, unless i must. in the meantime, i had wanted to share the serendipity of these timely reports, in case you are curious about the so-called one percent also.

tangentially: i listened to DemocracyNow!'s broadcast of certain poignant and portentous passages from the public statements of Martin Luther King, Jr., the other day, and did not have to go track down the full text, and recording, of his april 1967 address at Riverside Church, excerpts of which Amy Goodman had played on the broadcast, because someone had thoughtfully linked to it in a comment i was to read in an unrelated forum. you can find them here.

dn! also convened a respectful remembrance of Amiri Baraka, who passed away january 9.

the revolution and the 1%: pass the barbecue sauce, biff

since "the 1%" has emerged in our cultural discourse as a clumsy signifier of the elite, the exceptionally-privileged, exceptionally-influential rich, it has come to feature regularly across the spectrum of public discourse, from moderate reformist rhetoric to extremist screed, frequently appearing -- among the works of the blog and bile class -- in proximity to notions of government malfeasance and invocations of "revolution."

i have issues with "the 1%", that i am not, now, prepared to attempt to exhaustively examine, but i think it is imprecise and, usually, does not describe whom we're attempting, by its use, to indicate -- particularly so when we use ranting against the systemic inequities represented by grotesque concentration of the control of value as a springboard for calls for overthrow of the government, which strikes me as akin to using complaints about the carpenter as a springboard for calls to overthrow the hammer.

unless the revolution being called for is the international revolution of the proletariat against the masters of capital, in which case, well, they seem to have left out several steps and, i would hope, will try to be more clear about that. (but from apparent tea-partiers and apparent occupyists alike it sounds like basic antigovernment cant).

one percent of american natural persons would be about 3.13 million individuals (less almost one-quarter, to exclude persons younger than 18 years). i suspect that a vanishing few civil servants number among the top percentile of american natural persons who control wealth.

a little bit of research on the question led me quickly to jon bajika, adam cole and bradley heim's april 2012 "summary statistics on the occupations of taxpayers in the top percentile of the national income distribution," which shows that taxpayers in occupations categorized as "government, teachers, social services" have made up from five- to nine-tenths of a percent of "primary taxpayers" in the "top one percent of the distribution of income (excluding capital gains)", and six-tenths to one percent of top one percent taxpayers including capital gains, over the period from 1979 to 2005.

for the same period, 4 to 5.7% of "tax units" in the top one percent of distribution of income (excluding capital gains) had spouses in occupations categorized as "government, teachers, social services."

(this washingtonpost blog from 2011 calculates the household annual income of "the 1%" as starting at $645,195 in 2010. certainly there is a great deal of thoughtful research available to the person with the time to search and winnow for it, and great deal more underway. )

i believe that this all addresses the income of natural persons in the united states.

among american natural persons, the overthrow of the government -- "the revolution" -- would directly affect from one to six percent of the people making up that terrible percentile, an insignificant minority. "but capital", "but contracts", you may be saying, "we would disrupt all of finance!", and, yes, maybe the overthrow of the government would be inconvenient, messy or expensive for the remaining 95% of that percentile, who were not directly affected by the coup or whatever, but they'd still have the armed private security staff, the walled compounds, the stocked larders, the gold, the gasoline and the levers of productive industry notwithstanding some short term questions about the valuation of one particular national currency and certain loan guarantees.

but it would be more expensive for most of the actual 99% "we," who would starve and turn on one another long before we could sink our teeth into the soft, succulent flesh of the 1% (& of whom, anyway, there would not be enough to actually feed we, the 99%. . .

(also, i wonder about that guy from the second percentile sitting down next to that guy from the ninety-eighth percentile at the communal table and sharing, in victorious camaraderie, the rack of one-percenter ribs, or, more likely, a share of thin broth,

(and: will people from the ninety-third percentile even come to that barbecue? people from the eighty-seventh? the seventy-ninth percentile?

(would you, dear reader, wherever in that scale you would calculate you place, risk going near that barbecue . . . unless you were very, desperately hungry, or, were, yourself, already a warlord?

(i can totally see the people of the 98th percentile sending their private armies out to jack that feast).

anyway, bajika, cole and heim's income figures are interesting.

total wealth, net wealth of natural persons, in the united states and worldwide, would also be interesting. finally: wealth and income of legal persons -- to expand candidates to include the actual super- or para-human institutions with the rights of persons along with natural persons -- in the u.s. and worldwide.

i think that we would rapidly see that government is not the foremost problem.

government inaction, as in apparently electing to not zealously enforce certain laws at certain times for certain parties, has, admittedly, contributed, and government action has, admittedly, appeared at times to make things worse, or at best no better, but government itself, is not really appropriately signified by "the 1%".

the question of legal persons is addressed, to some degree, in vitali, glattfelder and battiston's excellent and provocative "the network of global corporate control", noting, in passing, that "governments and natural persons are only featured further down the list" of economic actors controlling wealth, than the core of transnational corporations incestuously linked by networks of ownership and (corporate) control that their paper addresses. (and see glattfelder ted talk, which, alas, does not really convey the terror of the paper's analysis, but is a good primer on the theory and method).

also interesting would be a dossier of bios of persons who have had seats on the boards or in the executive management of the firms of the vitali core (and two-degree "contact chaining," to include members of the boards of all the other associations, charities and businesses on which those core persons have served, and members of all other boards, associations and charities of those persons), including each person's percentile for income and wealth in their native jurisdictions and worldwide.

just to get a sense of the lay of the landscape.

i will say this: it seems far easier (to my imagination) to topple a government than to wrest control of wealth from the elite; and easier (though not much) to imagine wresting control of the wealth from the elite with use of a government than without the use of a government. of course, that would, first, call for wresting control of government from the elite (where it now comfortably, securely rests), which is marginally less implausible, or creating some other effective organization in its place.

i also suspect that the contemptible elite span a broader range of percentiles than just that one. and, of course, we, their legion underlings of whatever capacity, are spread normatively across the scale, a spray of insignificant stars.

the jewel of the international proletariat revolution resides within

Two interesting articles on the subject of envisioning a postcapitalistic world.

In Occupy Buddhism, or Why the Dalai Lama is a Marxist, over at the Tricycle Magazine website, Stuart Smithers contemplates a confluence of Marxism and Buddhism, encouraging engaged Buddhists to consider becoming conversant with Capital and Finance in theory and practice in order to inform their Buddhism and better engage with "the real."

I think it is important to say that Zizek and cultural critics increasingly see differences between East and West dramatically diminished as Asia has been absorbed by global capitalism.  Asia might be the geographic origin of Buddhism, but the distinction is of little importance as the world becomes modern, Westernized, and the hegemony of global capitalism has become total, worldwide. So it is not surprising that Zizek would maintain that Buddhism globally is becoming Western Buddhism—and increasingly functions as a fetish that ultimately enables the status quo to maintain its continuing control, dominance, and expansion.

If Buddhism is finally about liberation from ignorance and errant views, both individually and collectively, then we might consider studying not only what we are but also the culture that invisibly influences and dominates us. Quite apart from advocating any alternative to the current system, we may discover sources of suffering and new patterns of desire and ignorance that are embedded in our actions. The study of capital would quickly become the study of suffering and false consciousness. The study of capital and the revelation of the conditions for what we might call an “emergent communism” could supplement our contemplative approaches as the movement of the real. 

In The Red and the Black, over at the Jacobin Magazine, Seth Ackerman actually does envision something postcapitalistically transformative: the socialization of finance.

The lesson here is that the transformation to a different system does not have to be catastrophic. Of course, the situation I’m describing would be a revolutionary one — but it wouldn’t have to involve the total collapse of the old society and the Promethean conjuring of something entirely unrecognizable in its place.

At the end of the process, firms no longer have individual owners who seek to maximize profits. Instead, they are owned by society as a whole, along with any surplus (“profits”) they might generate. Since firms still buy and sell in the market, they can still generate a surplus (or deficit) that can be used to judge their efficacy. But no individual owner actually pockets these surpluses, meaning that no one has any particular interest in perpetuating or exploiting the profit-driven mis-valuation of goods that is endemic under capitalism. The “social democratic solution” that was once a contradiction – selectively frustrating the profit motive to uphold the common good, while systematically relying on it as the engine of the system – can now be reconciled.

I find myself arguing with aspects of the former article (and many of the commenters thereon), or with some of the arguments of others which Smithers presents and addresses, and sort of hopefully struggling to actually grasp the structure proposed by Ackerman and its implications. Of course, Dear Reader, I claim no expertise in any of the relevant fields: I certainly am no economist, Marxist theorist, Buddhist hagiographer, radical Occupier, rock-star cultural critic, or significant participant in the American Sangha. Both articles remind me of Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology (more), as many things frequently do.

Meanwhile, I'm reading a biography of Nikolai Bukharin.

burgherdom

dear reader, i bought a house, and will be moving from the fourth floor apartment facing this busy intersection in the city to a detatched home surrounded by a lawn on a quieter street not far from a suburban metro station.

i know. and, yes, that also.

it is true, dear reader that, barely coherent mass of contradictory values and impulses that i am, i have not concerned myself with evaluation along the hip-urban / boring-suburban spectrum in some time, focusing instead on scraping by at something a little nearer the subsistence survival threshhold with respect to indicia of modern capitalistic successful adulthood while trying to aspire to certain likely-unattainable ideals.

i did happen to learn by chance, while looking for houses with a former significant other (and her real-estate-agent friend) within the past year, that, to my amazement, i might be able to buy one myself . . . although i still hear that mortage broker's glowing assessment of our individual and several mortgage-worthiness with a tinge of the same sort marketing tones in which a beautician might tell a plain customer that with a little work she would be beautiful.  anyway, at that time we found a house and then, more or less immediately, more or less amicably, broke up.

simultaneously, indeed perpetually!, there was tenants association business afoot -- properly characterized, lo these many years, tenants association business describes a consistent low-level rear gard action against various landlord and developer volleys and sorties punctuated from time to time by eruptions of all-out, life-or-death struggle, while striving (and mostly failing) to maintain a clear view of the terrain and "battlespace" and bolster morale among a confused and undisciplined company of poorly-equipped and not-entirely-invested irregulars (in two languages). i was something like a colonel: the colonel of truth, although rank didn't mean much among the files. in negotiations with the enemy i was generally bad cop to another colonel's good cop, under the benign and free hand of the general.

these days there is a sort of armistice, but it is fragile and not particularly well understood by the parties below the executive level. the tenenats are on fairly strong ground and surrounded by a palisade of legally-binding agreements, which do, however, stipulate some inconveniences for all involved parties over the course of ensuing years. specifically, the landlord will both renovate the building (relocating every tenant to a comparable dwelling and subsidizing any rent differential during renovations and then moving each back) and then maintain the building in perpetuity as low income rental housing.

i did not want to move twice and end up no better off for it: same location, rent increasing again and earning me nothing, still an officer of the association, and not particularly fond or trusting of the landlord and its minions (or most other association members).

so i started looking for one-bedroom apartments in the neighborhood and quickly learned that a month's rent (per a lease undertaken in 2012) in an apartment in the city would cost more than the monthly payment on the mortgage note contemplated last fall.

i got a referral to Alan Bruzee and Yvette Chisholm at Long and Foster in Rockville (Alan is the son in law of a friend: the nicest, most effusively-appreciative and enthusiastically-engaged little old lady in the world!), and, engaged to go see some listings the next weekend, sent them the following:

My list is kind of long, but mostly out of ignorance. I have been using the RedFin mobile app to search listings for detached houses south of gaithersburg (and White Oak) under $300K (but, $250K would be preferable), and tending toward four digits in the square footage (though I find that number often-misleading and therefore confusing). While there are a lot of listings, a preponderance of them note "pending." Among those remaining are a broad array including estate sales, short sales, public auction, and various references to third-parties, banks, tear-downs, and as-is's and other daunting terms: I'd prefer not to immediately have to replace the fusebox and the roof. 

In general I've focused in Rockville along the train tracks, where several houses along Lewis St., and in the neighborhood beyond, seem modestly plausible, and across the swath from Viers Mill over toward Hyattsville. I like the idea of a couple listings in Takoma Park, or near it; there's what looks like a lovely little house on Sligo Avenue; and one or two extravagant outliers down in Fort Washington which appeal for plausible proximity to the river. 

But I don't have a great sense yet of what my money might get me. In comparing listings, I find some turn-ons, as it were, and turn-offs and several consistent considerations, foremost among which is the commute. For a car, driving into the city is the certain to be dreadful from any entry point, so I have a strong preference for living within a reasonable walking distance of a metro station or high-throughput bus route. 

Turn-ons: AC, W/D, dishwasher, potentially-comfortable sunroom/patio zone, parking, an environment amenable to supporting  a satisfactory illusion of privacy (also, although I can hardly cook, some of those kitchens look magnificent!);
Turn-offs: HOAs, restrictive covenants, neighbors homes looming through windows, used carpet everywhere.

i then appended my top ten listings from the despised redfin app, by listing number and street address.

that weekend Alan walked me though an immense amount of paperwork before taking me to see four houses not among those listings i had provided . . . and, after some deliberation, i made an offer the next day on the second of those four.

which offer was accepted and thereupon began a month of scurrying to gather, scan, print, sign, scan and transmit paperwork, and consulting with inspectors, and scanning and transmitting more paperwork, culminating today over at village settlements where a settlement attorney with the thoroughly entertaining and amazing bedside manner of a vaudvillian comic, walked the parties through signing yet another immense amount of paperwork, so that i hardly even noticed handing over the cashier's check for almost all of my money - the largest single payment i have ever made, the handover of which i would expect to make a great impression but, instead, is lost in the wash of signatures and jokes.

after the title attorney indicated the deal had been consummated, the seller said something about a ghost, then stopped short, turned to his real estate agent, and asked, "Is that a statement-against-interest?", to which the agent replied with a grin, "It's too late, the deal's done." Thereupon the seller told an unsatisfying (after that introduction!) anecdote about a supernatural solution to some plumbing problem, that devolved into some practical discussion of certain idiosyncrasies to the property.

i came away with keys to a house still containing all the staging furniture (and an appointment for that furniture to be removed by the stager, and a hastily-executed agreement concerning liability in the event the people removing the staging should be injured during that appointment). i went to that house and sat there for a while before returning to my apartment to get on with the packing.

and then this infamous storm came through.

stiglitz on the austere rerecession, and percussion

from Democracy Now, June 6, 2012, in two parts:

1.

endgame

is it "oncocapitalism" or just "oncapitalism"?*

It increasingly appears as though Edward Abbey had it right about "growth for the sake of growth." And, of course, it makes sense economically also, for where can the so-called externalities efficiently be disregarded within a system that encompasses all?

The big battle that we have in this world is not between Germany and the other Europeans, is not between South and North, China and Germany, or so. The big battle is still, believe it or not, the battle between labor and capital. This is still the big battle.

. . . I tell you, what happens in this world is class warfare.

For the first time . . . in modern history since the second world war . . . we are two years in a recovery and in the United States the . . . nominal wages are rising by absolutely zero. They're not rising at all. We have . . . not only a job-less recovery -- that's a normal thing -- for the first time we have in the United States a wage-less recovery. Wage-less recovery.

. . . It will end in disaster because, if you do not have a regime that allows the systematic participation of workers in the productivity increase . . . capitalism hits dramatically a wall, because no economy can grow successfully if the people only have to rely on bubbles -- that sooner or later burst -- to consume, and if they do not, cannot expect that they will participate in the success of all.

-- recent remarks of UNCTAD, Director of Globalization and Development Policy, Dr. Heiner Flassbeck (at about 15:44), via The Real News:

xmas.sux.vol.6: i want my tuppence back!

xmas sux vi: i want my tuppence back!

1. santa - lightning hopkins
2. three wise men wise men three - jim neighbors
3. fidelity fiduciary bank - cast of mary poppins
4. march of the kings - robert merrill
5. sanctus: to be a european christian - dj pebkac
6. ring those christmas bells - fred waring & the pennsylvanians
7. christmas morning blues - sonny boy williamson
8. the gun and the bible - negativland
9. the christmas song - jimmy mcgriff
10. b.i.b.l.e. - genius/gza
11. the advertising song - pearl boys
12. cintec de managers of money - dj pebkac
13. it’s a marshmallow world - oscar peterson
14. step right up - tom waits
15. cigars i have to smoke - da whole thing
16. no xmas for jon quays - the fall
17. the animals were gone - damien rice
18. all i want for christmas is you - carla thomas
19. holly jolly christmas - kise
20. christmas with fat aunt bette - andrea perry
21. auld lang syne - the cucumbers
22. the secret of christmas - shirley horn

pay to play from your dumb terminal

i wander (market-rationalized as information stored on theCloud) and wonder how they did it:

used to be, a user bought a thing and a thing was a discrete tangible item which, at the moment of the transaction, passed physically from the seller to the user and remained within the user's physical control whether idle or in use.

i am thinking of my (encoded and compressed audio recordings of musicians using musical instruments alone or with other users to perform specific sequences of sounds within the convention of) music.

used to be the listener bought an object encoding such recordings (i think one can actually still do this in some cases) and, when combined with the appropriate actuating instrument, reproducing them audibly on command, which, at the moment of the transaction, passed physically from the seller to the user and remained within the user's physical control whether idle or actuated by the appropriate instrument. (the listener bought an actuating instrument separately, which, likewise, remained in the user's physical control).

then recording and encoding and actuating technology developed, growing together according to the law of the superposition of the computer, which turns out to describe a sort of universal actuating instrument.

oh, it does not actuate the grooves in wax or magnetic signatures of a ribbon of cassette tape, although those objects -- and a great variety of their actuating instruments -- remain. it actuates a digitally encoded information object that exists as a sequence of digits abstracted within the physical structure of some object: it could be such physical object as a compact disc, but finds frequent expression as part of the physical memory structure of the same universal actuating instrument that will actuate it, when called to do so, or of another universal actuating instrument connected to that one in a network of such instruments.

ignorance is strength

Have you also seen the "Recession 101" series of propaganda in advertising space?

Perhaps you have felt comforted -- or, maybe, discomfited -- by their anonymous sponsorship, or their chillingly condescending messaging and brusque, move along, citizen tone.


Theinspirationroom.com calls the propaganda "an inspirational advertising campaign providing an optimistic take on the global financial crisis," overseen by the outdoor advertising association of america on behalf of an anonymous sponsor described as an "East Coast donor who was depressed about how the country was reacting to the economy’s tailspin" (and developed by Charchin Creative). Designer Charlie Robb is reported to have said that the sponsor, "wants to remain anonymous out of a belief that you don’t do public service for recognition."

They have irritated me and I have wanted to doodle in the margins and variously argue with the proponents on the rest of that mock page it pretends to offer me, but that illustration of a page of good, old-fashioned school paper with its grotesque, 'nuff said, simplistic, misleading and dismissive text remains hermetically sealed up in the side of the fancy new bus shelter.

So, from the roving lens who brought you McDonald's fantastically-successful Anusburger promotion, the featured photos of another critical viewer's response to the campaign, rendered in marker on paper. The home-made sign reads:

"We all have the fortitude to endure the suffering of other people." - La Rochefoucauld

- U.S. Unemployment Rate [Ave. 2011] approx 9.0%,

- Black and Latino Unemployment Rate approx 14% - 16%

(or higher; check the Labor Dep't for details)

I suppose it would be easy for one who can afford to buy up advertising space to be hopeful. Nous avons tous assez de force en nous pour supporter le malheur des autres, indeed!

You go on, unknown critic - this instance of the target demographic digs what you are doing.

on control, abstract and personal

A few interesting things:

1. New Scientist article, "Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world," provides a synopsis of Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston's forthcoming article, "The network of global corporate control," (to be published in PLoS ONE) presenting their rigorous economics-and-systems'-theory analysis of the structure of the ownership and control network existing among 43,060 incestuously-related trasnsnational corporations.

I'm reading the paper itself, but it is dense and filled with befuddling algorithms, abbreviations, tables and footnotes optimized for bound print publication but difficult to cross-reference in the hand-held .pdf app through which I'm reading, so I am not finished and unready, Dear Reader, and anyway probably wouldn't dare try, to summarize it or pick out pithy passages: Struggle with the algorithms yourself -- goggle at the figures; slog through the prose -- like I am, and make up your own mind. From New Scientist:

From . . . a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled . . . 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them[,] [t]hen . . . constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work . . . revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each . . . had ties to two or more other companies, and on average . . . were connected to 20. [A]lthough they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own . . . the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing . . . 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions.

From the study itself:

This is the first time a ranking of economic actors by global control is presented. Notice that many actors belong to the financial sector . . . and many . . . are well-known global players. [T]his ranking . . . shows that many of the top actors belong to the core. This means that they do not carry out their business in isolation but . . . are tied together in an extremely entangled web of control. This finding is extremely important since there was no prior economic theory or empirical evidence regarding whether and how top players are connected. Finally, it should be noted that governments and natural persons are only featured further down in the list.

2. Susie Madrak's recent blog post over at "Crooks and Liars," Who Really Owns the NYPD? Turns Out It's Not Such A Rhetorical Question, highlights Pam Martens' October 10 piece in Counterpunch about whose interests the New York Metropolitan Police actually "protect and serve": Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll

[T]he Paid Detail Unit . . . allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye . . . pay[ing] an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master.

3. Pamela Meyer's recent TED talk: "How to spot a liar":

bounty

hellmark welcomes guest author, Badgun

The S&P Downgrade?

The country was a-shock, aghast, and agog this month, with the S&P “downgrade” of the US and its capability to discharge its debts – i.e., pay its creditors.

WOW! First time in history!

How could they do that??? It’s unconscionable! It’s un-American! And it’s untrue that there is any probability that the U.S. can’t honor (pay) its debts.

S&P is supposed to be looking at risk – risk of non–payment - so how could they possibly have reached the conclusion that there is any risk of non-payment of U. S. Government-owed debt? Did they make a multi-billion dollar error in their computations, as the White House and the Treasury Dept. hastily (and loudly) trumpeted?[1] There is little risk that we might ever be unable to pay our debts was the message. And that may well be (probably is, at least forseeably) true.

So! How could S&P possibly reach its conclusion?

Could it be because we told them so?

giggin'

voicemail haiku

as you can no doubt tell, dear reader, i have been occupied lately with a couple new items of significant interest, which have absorbed a good deal of my attention &/or have a bit of a learning curve, with the upshot that i haven't had much time or inclination to post anything here. well, inclination, perhaps, but not for the leg work of developing a plan for said posting (and developing excuses and rationalizations for slacking on some of those partially-accomplished projects).

one of the attention absorbing items is a new portable communication device, with many advantages over my quaint old-fashioned "1.5-G" handset, foremost among which is that when i miss a call and wind up with a pending voicemail, i am informed of those facts in a prompt and reliable fashion.

which is why, in lieu of focusing sufficiently to craft a fresh post, or polish content for same, i've been thinking about voicemail haiku, some of which you may have failed to see previously because i didn't publish them into the past until just now (or, if you access through a reader, dear reader, you have probably just seen).

here's one that's pretty straightforward:

please leave your number
and identify yourself
after this brief tone.

and another

i’m in the office
now, so can’t talk but will call
back if they let me.

also:

no reasonable
privacy expectation
in voicemail: talk clear.

completing the series, haiku-ishly:

the consumer at this ex-
tension is out discharging
his obligation to gen-
erate and distribute wealth
so leave a message.

of course, voicemail itself these days may be an archaic and unnecessary convention. nevertheless, i sure do like answering machines, the hardware and set of matched language acts alike!

voicemail

don’t leave a message
about the contest i or
a loved one entered.

don’t leave a message
about cable tv or
refinancing debt.

all automated
solicitations will be
billed for processing.

my hero

i wanted to post a contextually relevant link to Da Whole Thing's prescient masterpiece ska-noir punk anthem "Banker" from the album Tooth, but cannot find a hosted version anywhere, just now. (Da Whole Thing's song Banker can be heard about 16 minutes into xmas sux iii, here, -ed.)

distinguishing the TKA

I think that it is not entirely accurate to characterize my work as corporate law, because my work partakes much more of temporary clerical work than it does practicing in the field of corporate law.

A corporate lawyer, as I imagine, has associates, infrastructure, an office, clients and cases. Cases, in this case, would be individual actions for individual clients in specific courts (or sets thereof) that occur in phases, through meetings, and negotiations, and pleadings and motions, and the winnowing of unimaginably vast swathes of information for relevant data, then wielding of same (in more motions and pleadings), to eventually lead to a real courtroom or settlement meetings and negotiations and agreements, over spans of years.

In contrast, I am hired as an independent contractor by a temp agency on a per-project basis and paid an hourly wage to be a flexibly programmable (and putatively professionally liable) pattern recognition system on a small sliver of the aforementioned winnowing phase ("Discovery"), in some cavernous converted storage space in a sick building cheek-by-jowl with up to 400 other professional colleagues (though you'd rarely guess it) at rented PCs two-to-a-pot-luck-supper-table, with only so much context as my handlers (generally not corporate lawyers, but clerical lackeys of same) provide (viz., no sense of venue, procedure, the claims or defenses contemplated by corporate lawyers, etc., to wit: no opportunity for investment in the grand pageant of modern commercial litigation), a set of information generally limited to a list of patterns to identify, some training on the software used these days for these kinds of projects, and the required hours.

graeber on debt, the history of

"...a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call 'the economy'. What's more, origins matter...."

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-08-20-graeber-en.html