I cite

And people worry about the government getting too big?

The bright side could be that this massive consolidation paves the way to collectivization. Now when the people rise up, they only need to take over a few banks. It really makes the revolution a whole lot easier.

From the Washington Post (an excerpt):

Banks 'Too Big to Fail' Have Grown Even Bigger Behemoths Born of the Bailout Reduce Consumer Choice, Tempt Corporate Moral Hazard

When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation's leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.

Today, the biggest of those banks are even bigger.

The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

Hacktivism, uh, what is it good for, absolutely nothin', uh

I hope all the new media freaks and digital media democrats and netroots fans and participatory bloggers and their ilk are really feeling their democratic engagement, their Twitter revolution etc.

So, how many friends does health care have on Facebook?

Ooh! Move-on--really another great indication of the democratic potential of the internet, isn't it!

I can't count the number of times young Euro-geeks have lectured me on Move-On and meet ups, Obama and Facebook. They always want to convince me that the internet enabled the 'revolution' of 2008 (like it was an amazing feat that the party out of power in a 2 party system won against the party with the most unpopular president ever).

The amazing thing: the damn town halls are good old fashioned opposition, people showing up and making noise. Loud voices in small places. Signs, shout downs, totally outrageous claims--why get stuck on the facts if that's the way you are going to lose? Facts? Facts are for those who can't handle the political.

Getting worse

from a finance article--really bad news:

Both see the national debt -- the accumulation of annual budget deficits -- as nearly doubling over the next day. The total national debt, made up of amounts the government owes to the public, including foreign governments, as well as money it has borrowed from itself, stood Tuesday at a staggering $11.7 trillion

Totally bonkers

From Johann Hart: Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and - at the same time - that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

    These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence - here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper - can pierce this conviction.

    This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed - with a straight face - that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

    You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves - and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" - and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

...

  It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly - while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

    These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

    This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed - as one Republican congressman put it - that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

...

 How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" - which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

    Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

    This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

Anticipation

A couple of years ago, my seminar on fascism read a book by Sebastian Hafner, Defying Hitler. The book is a memoir of the rise of the Third Reich. Particularly noteworthy is Hafner's description of an overall habit of mind or structure of feeling that affected a generation of people. Those who grew up anticipating WW!, anticipating the new post-war government, anticipating the next round of hyper-inflation, became accustomed to an intensity of feeling, one like gambling or betting (which was also part of the overall culture). Hafner suggests that this feeling was nearly addictive and that it was part of what enabled Hitler's rise to power.

Have we been inhabiting a similar affective environment over the past nine years? The election of 2000? The fall of Enron? 9/11 and anthrax, the invasion of Afghanistan, the build up to the war in Iraq (Senate vote, election of 2002), the war, the 2004 election, more war, torture and camps, the long election of 2008, the collapse of the economy? The debate around health care has the same kind of feeling as the build up to the war in Iraq, which is somewhat puzzling but which might account at least in part for the media frenzy around the town hall meetings. How is it that health care becomes death panels? Perhaps the answer is in the affective environment we are so reluctant to leave.

Mob rule

From Steve Benen:

WHEN IN DOUBT, GIVE THE MOB WHAT IT WANTS.... It's easy to mock the insane rhetoric about "death panels," but let's not forget that right-wing activists, by screaming about an imaginary threat, are getting exactly what they want.

Tucked inside a sweeping House bill to overhaul the health system is a provision that would require Medicare to pay physicians to counsel patients once every five years. During those sessions, doctors could discuss how patients can plan for such end-of-life decisions as setting up a living will, obtaining hospice care or establishing a proxy to make their health decisions when they are unable to do so. [...]

[G]rowing complaints over the provision are leading key lawmakers to conclude that the health overhaul should leave out any end-of-life counseling provisions. A group in the Senate Finance Committee that is attempting to craft Congress's only bipartisan health bill has decided to exclude such a measure, Senate aides said this week. [emphasis added]

Up until very recently, this provision was a common-sense idea that enjoyed bipartisan support. It would help seniors and their families plan for end-of-life care; it would help guide physicians and doctors; it would help save taxpayers money; and it would help honor patients' wishes. Even insurance companies are fine with it.

But after a right-wing temper tantrum, based on confusion and lies, lawmakers are prepared to dump the idea altogether.

Who wins? Unhinged activists, who are effectively being told that they'll get their way if they scream loud enough. Who loses? Everyone else.

It reminds me of kids who give the bully their lunch money thinking, "Well, if I give him the lunch money today, maybe he'll leave me alone tomorrow." I don't think that ever works.

And here's the real kicker: it won't make any difference. Lawmakers can take the measure out of the bill, and right-wing critics will continue to equate reform with the Nazi Holocaust, because a) they're unconcerned with reality; and b) they'll assume the measure is still there anyway.

Feeling sick

From the WSWS:

The popular disaffection with the Obama healthcare plan goes much further, however, than the fanatical right-to-life constituency. The Obama administration has based its program for healthcare restructuring entirely on the argument that healthcare costs are bankrupting the US economy and that controlling and reducing these costs is essential.

The logical conclusion of this policy—even if officially denied by the White House—is that somebody’s healthcare is too expensive and must be cut back or eliminated. Millions of people fear that that somebody is likely to be them and their families. One opinion poll published last week showed that 53 percent believed they would be worse off or no better than before under the Obama plan.

People feel that they will be worse off, that something will be taken from them, that they won't be able to care for their families. They feel, in other words, that something will be stolen; they are worried about theft and about the theft of their life and livelihood.

Last night on Maddow, Oberman, and Stewart protesters were featured who were scared--of Obama, of the loss of their rights. They voiced anger and outrage. One of the most pronounced themes: we don't trust you, you are lying; even the smallest bit of respect or decorum (waiting one's turn, listening, raising one's hand) was gone. This strong current of mistrust, and of open statements of it, has less to do with Obama than with the larger collapse in confidence in governance--last year Congress's popularity was lower than Bush's. That collapse in symbolic efficiency is becoming more visible and pronounced.

I wonder if much of this outrage isn't displaced from the last couple of years of the recession as well as the last decade of escalating inequality. Yes, the outrage right now is taking, in some places, a racist form. The Daily Show was good on this point: yes, white people are losing. Admit it and get over it. It's kick off was a clip from the horrible Glen Beck: Obama's basic principle is reparations.

The racial politics at work might account in part for the failed outrage around the bailouts--bailouts meant that white people were still ahead, were winning, were on tops. Same with outrage fail over bonuses and the general Wall Street pillage: done by white people so still part of white hegemony (class struggle has always been ruptured by racism in the US). But, with health care, the basic affective dimension is that the white winners are having to pay for black and immigrant losers. This means that the worried whites are dealing with the barely repressed knowledge of their economic misery--their tax dollars paying out banks--and with seemingly undeserving black people, who are going to get something for nothing.

So from the perspective of middle whites, everyone enjoys--gets something for nothing, sets some kind of excessive jouissance--but them. This links to one of the biggest myths in the US: that people want everyone to succeed; the truth is that people don't want universal health care because they want some people to suffer, they want to have more than others, they are actually ok with folks dying for lack of health care. Positing death panels is a way of displacing the knowledge that we are the death panels.

The extraordinary hubris of the investor class

From an AP business report:

Analysts say investors need to see evidence that consumer spending is picking up before they'll keep the market's summer rally going. Despite signs the recession is easing, investors are still worried that consumers, whose spending accounts for 70 percent of all U.S. economic activity, could hurt the economy's chances for a robust recovery if they continue to limit what they buy.

Who's fault was the economic collapse? Bad consumers: consumers who took on more debt than they could manage by going for easy credit, whether in the form of mortgages or cards. It's their (de)fault.

And, now, it seems, the economy would be on an upswing if it weren't for these same consumers, now who are watching their spending--many because of unemployment and under-employment, not to mention the fact that they didn't get a bailout.

Don't forget that the tech-heads among us think that the new economy means that everything is moving towards Free. An article in today's NYT suggests the next step: paying to work.

Judge

One of the weaknesses of left and liberal political theory over the past decades is the forfeiture of judgment. Politically correct theorists use the term 'judgmental' critically, as if making a judgment were a kind of failing. In fact, in most university environments, judging another person is treated as an ethical weakness, as if the judge had not gotten the memo that equality means that no one has a right to judge.

Judging is a problem for a number of reasons. Here are two. First, it is said to require a set of universal or common terms, a standard of comparison that denies its own specificity, in effect erasing the difference of the other. Second, judgment is presumed to posit an infallibility on the part of the judge, as if the judge had a glimpse into the divine inaccessible to the poor, benighted judged.

Both of these reasons are unconvincing. They proceed from the assumption that judgment depends on certainty. But clearly this is false: we make judgments when we are uncertain, when we lack certainty. If we were certain, our course would be determined; judgment would not be necessary. It's as if political theorists, then, take the point regarding undecideability in precisely the wrong direction: because the world is complicated and impossible to predict we are put into situations that require decisions.

I expect that I've made these and similar points already too frequently. I was pushed to think about them again today because of the connection between the problem of judgment, risk, and Twitter.

Risk: under neoliberalism, we live in a crazily individualistic, high stakes game. There isn't a social welfare net to catch people when they lose, and the whole system requires that some win and some lose. In fact, it's worse than that: the intense reflexivity of complex networks results in winner-take-most/all gambles, that is, in power-law distributions. A very few will do very, very, well. In a situation of high impact low probability outcomes (can anyone tell I read The Black Swan recently), a great deal rides on every judgment. Mistakes cost a lot. So, folks want formula, equations, sure-fire ways to succeed (10 steps to success, 3 rules for winners).

Judgment is way too fluffy, too soft, to unreliable, to unclear. Quantify and simplify. Or quantify and complexify, as long as you have the proper tools...

'Research -driven investing was for people who read"--this from a book on quants and market strategies.

Enter Twitter:  blogging was for people who read; with Twitter, no judgment required. Twitter and extreme finance are part of the same formation--a formation for people who don't really read.

Conservatives: married to the mob

Fascism in the US (by Sara Robinson excerpted from Alternet)

All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.