I cite

A candidate for environmentalists?

Progressives need to think carefully about the upcoming election. Democrats want us to see Obama as our best hope rather than the unfortunate alternative to the Republican sock puppet. Much has already been written about Obama's long relationship with Illinois coal interests and support for nuclear power. At least he's consistent about something.

Link: t r u t h o u t | Obama Supports Limited Offshore Drilling.

Orlando, Florida - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Friday he would back limited offshore drilling as part of a broader energy package that attempted to bring down gas prices and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

    Obama dropped his blanket opposition to any expansion of offshore drilling and signaled support for a bipartisan compromise in Congress aimed at breaking a deadlock on energy that includes limited drilling.

    "My interest is in making sure we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices," Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post during a tour of Florida.

And maybe, just maybe, even worse: an example of the unbearable double-talk that has been the hallmark of the last eight years and that law professor Cass Sunstein is rapidly turning into his own special patois. Sunstein, who seems to be rapidly shredding any position formerly known as principled in a desperate effort to position himself for a Supreme Court appointment, is an "informal advisor" to Obama. The exchange with Glenn Greenwald below is stunning (if you have time, the discussion thread on the exchange is also interesting):

Cass Sunstein, your response to those who talk about -- particularly
concerned about Barack Obama, for example, shifting on the FISA bill,
saying he would filibuster and now actually voting for the bill that
granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms.

Sunstein: Yes, I think it's -- this is widely misunderstood. What the bill isn't is basically a bill that -- whose fundamental purpose is to give immunity. It's a bill that creates a range of new safeguards to protect privacy, to ensure judicial supervision, to give a role for the inspector general. So it actually gives privacy and civil liberties a big boost over the previous arrangement.

It also does contain an immunity provision, which Senator Obama opposed. He voted for the substitute bill that didn't have that. But he thought that this was a compromise which had safeguards for going forward, which made it worth supporting on balance, compared to the alternative, which was the status quo. So there's been no fundamental switch for him. He's basically concerned with protecting privacy. And this is not his favorite bill, but it's a lot better than what the Bush administration had before, which was close to free reign.

Goodman: Glenn Greenwald, you've written a lot about this, as well.

Greenwald: Well, you know, it's one thing to defend Senator Obama and to support his candidacy, as I do. It's another thing to just make factually false claims in order to justify or rationalize anything that he does.

The idea that this wasn't a reversal is just insultingly false. Back in December, Senator Obama was asked, "What is your position on Senator Dodd's pledge to filibuster a bill that contains retroactive immunity?" And at first, Senator Obama issued an equivocal statement, and there were demands that he issue a clearer statement. His campaign spokesman said -- and I quote -- "Senator Obama will support a filibuster of any bill that contains retroactive immunity" -- "any bill that contains retroactive immunity." The bill before the Senate two weeks ago contained retroactive immunity, by everybody's account, and yet not only did Senator Obama not adhere to his pledge to support a filibuster of that bill, he voted for closure on the bill, which is the opposite of a filibuster. It's what enables a vote to occur. And then he voted for the underlying bill itself. So it's a complete betrayal of the very unequivocal commitment that he made not more than six months ago in response to people who wanted to know his position on this issue in order to decide whether or not to vote for him. That's number one.

Number two, the idea that this bill is an improvement on civil liberties is equally insulting in terms of how false it is. This is a bill demanded by George Bush and Dick Cheney and opposed by civil libertarians across the board. ACLU is suing. The EFF is vigorously opposed. Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd, the civil libertarians in the Senate, are vehemently opposed to it; they say it's an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment. The idea that George Bush and Dick Cheney would demand a bill that's an improvement on civil liberties and judicial oversight is just absurd. This bill vests vast new categories of illegal and/or unconstitutional and warrantless surveillance powers in the President to spy on Americans' communications without warrants. If you want to say that that's necessary for the terrorist threat, one should say that. But to say that it's an improvement on civil liberties is just propaganda.

America's Economic Free Fall

Link (this is an excerpt; read the whole thing): America's Economic Free Fall

In 1980, before Ronald Reagan even came to town, Democrats deregulated the financial system by repealing federal interest-rate ceilings and other regulatory restraints -- a step that doomed the savings and loan industry and eliminated a major competitor for the bankers. Democrats have collaborated with Republicans on behalf of their financial patrons every step of the way.

The same legislation also repealed the federal law prohibiting usury -- the predatory practices that ruin debtors of modest means by lending on terms that ensure borrowers will fail. Usurious lending is now commonplace in America, from credit cards and "payday loans" to the notorious subprime mortgages. The prohibition on usury really involves an ancient moral principle, one common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam: people of great wealth must not be allowed to use it to ruin others who lack the same advantages. A decent society cannot endure it.

The fast-acting politicians may hope to cover over their past mistakes before the public figures out what's happening (that is, who is screwing whom). But the Federal Reserve has a similar reason to move aggressively: the Fed was a central architect and agitator in creating the circumstances that led to the collapse in Wall Street's financial worth. The central bank tipped its monetary policy hard in one direction -- favoring capital over labor, creditors over debtors, finance over the real economy -- and held it there for roughly twenty-five years. On one side, it targeted wages and restrained economic growth to make sure workers could not bargain for higher compensation in slack labor markets. On the other side, it stripped away or refused to enforce prudential regulations that restrained the excesses of banking and finance. In The Nation a few years back, I referred to Alan Greenspan as the "one-eyed chairman" [September 19, 2005] who could see inflation in the real economy -- even when it didn't exist -- but was blind to the roaring inflation in the financial system.

The Fed's lopsided focus on behalf of the monied interests, combined with its refusal to apply regulatory laws with due diligence, eventually destabilized the overall economy. Trying to correct for previous errors, the Fed, with its overzealous free-market ideology, swung monetary policy back and forth to extremes, first tightening credit without good reason, then rapidly cutting interest rates to nearly zero. This erratic behavior encouraged a series of financial bubbles in interest-sensitive assets -- first the stock market, during the late 1990s tech-stock boom, then housing -- but the Fed declined to do anything or even admit the bubbles existed. The nation is now stuck with the consequences of its blindness.

Cheating, evil, rich guys

Link: In a Perfect Storm of Economic Stagflation, the Yachting Set Says: "Let Them Eat Pizza" (this is an excerpt; read the whole thing):

Newsweek tells us that "the situation we're in is nowhere near stagflation." After all, "the Consumer Price Index is rising at a 3 percent annual rate, compared with 13 percent in 1979."

What Newsweek doesn't mention is that the measures of inflation commonly discussed today bear little resemblance to the stats used in the 1970s.

In large part, that's because the Consumer Price Index (CPI) -- the most frequently cited measure of inflation in media reports -- is used to determine government benefits like Social Security, federal and state pensions and Medicare payments. Until the late 1970s, the index was based on a relatively simple formula. Officials took a theoretical "basket of goods" that "typical" consumers required and averaged their current prices. But, as economist John Williams, author of the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter, explains, "miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients," made dramatic changes to the way CPI is calculated in the 1980s and 1990s, resulting in a drop in the official inflation rate made with a stroke of the pen and with little fuss from the public.

To gauge what most of us are really experiencing on a day-to-day basis, one might imagine economic reporters relying on a monthly "pizza index" instead of the Consumer Price Index. According to a February report by Al Olson of MSNBC, "Pizza makers have seen their cheese costs soar this year from $1.30 a pound to $1.76 a pound. Even worse, the flour used to make the dough has gone from $3 to $7 a bushel to $25 a bushel in less than a year." Between the second quarters of 2007 and 2008, even the paperboard used to make pizza boxes increased by 8 percent. (Several years of inflation in tomato prices -- for the sauce -- have been blunted by the recent salmonella scare.)

The same is true for a host of items that working America buys every day. Olson wrote, "If you're looking for a sure sign the U.S. economy is headed in the wrong direction, all you need to do is look at the skyrocketing price of 'recession-proof' foods: pizza, hot dogs, bagels and beer." But those items, and other costs that impact ordinary people significantly, are under-counted in the consumer price index.

Beginning in the early 1990s, conservative economists were unhappy that high inflation kept increasing entitlement payments to government employees, vets and the elderly -- whiners and greedy gray-hairs -- and, through some impressive intellectual contortionism, began making adjustments to the way the "official" rate of inflation is measured. They began "weighting" items in the basket differently.

Elevators

Dominic links to a You Tube video of Nicholas White's entrapment in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill building for 41 hours in 1999. It's gripping. Below is an excerpt from a New Yorker article on White and elevators, a kind of John McPhee-esque essay on elevator design. The article mentions but doesn't explore the way that the experience of being trapped in an elevator derailed White's life. Why did he react the way he did? Pathology? Context? The whole article is well-worth reading.

Link: Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

America's Middle Class Can't Take Much More Punishment

Read the whole thing. Here's an excerpt: America's Middle Class Can't Take Much More Punishment | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet.

Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers -- that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence -- immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.

What's the matter with tourism?

Among some intellectuals, leftists, and remaining holdouts in the middle class, tourism is nothing to be proud of. We don't want to look like tourists. We want to blend in, to seem like locals. Oddly, we might consult our Rough Guides to know what's off the beaten track, only to find other members of our tribe of tourists similarly off the beaten track. We eschew tourist traps, gift shops with souvenirs, attractions clearly created just for us. We want what's authetic, what's real.

But we should know better. The critique of authenticity has been around a while now. If the authentic weren't constructed as such, how would we recognize it? The very attribution of authenticity is already dependent on a referential structure. Assuming we know, then, that authenticity is a construct, what's the matter with tourism?

Is the problem that we are visitors, those who are not actual participants in a way of life? No. The critique of failures of participation, of disconnection and political alienation, operates just fine without the premise of tourism. We fail as participants before we ever leave home.

Is the problem that of hierarchy, of interacting with others as if they were there to serve us, wait on us, cater to our whims? No. Again, hierarchies and the service sector are already part of local experience, part of everyday suburban life.

Is the problem the consumerism of tourism? No. If consumerism is a problem, we don't have to go out of town to consume. That, too, is part of home life.

Carbon emissions and the environmental impact? Somewhat--particularly with respect to flying and parking lots. But, again, these are also already problems with work and living in contemporary neoliberal capital.

Why, then, do we feel ashamed to be tourists? Why do we feel ashamed for tourists when we see them?

Before answering the question, keep in mind the fact that tourism is a mass phenomenon, although it is rapidly returning to its former status as a practice of the privileged. Tourism is not simply traveling or taking a vacation. We don't consider visiting relatives or camping particularly touristic activities. Nor is lying around at the beach exactly tourism--it's relaxation, a break from work, a replenishing.

I think we are ashamed of tourism because it exposes our relinquishment of our enjoyment to commodification, our naked pursuit of this commodified enjoyment in its impossibility, and our subsequent guilt as we are trapped in the circuits of competitive tourism--did you see? did you eat? did you smoke and dance and have the mystical experience necessarily beyond the grasp of what appears as westernized modernism or the modernized west? We are ashamed of tourism because it is completely detached from our work and provisioning. It appears as dedication to pursuing the unique that is impossible, pathetic in its massness. We see others enjoying our illusion of being on a unique, personal adventure.

And once there is the option of tourism, traveling otherwise is difficult if not impossible. The non-tourist works and stays home. The business traveler is another version of the catered to tourist. The one who stays home is provincial, unworldly.

What are other ways to see the world?

Consumerism is not the problem

Americans are given two messages: go shopping and spend responsibly. Measures of economic well-being include indexes of consumer confidence, consumer spending, housing starts, etc. At the same time, we read reports of out of control spending, outrageous credit card balances, the lowest levels of household saving in a hundred years. The American consumer is out of control and the American consumer is the lynchpin of the global economy.

The political form that these messages typically, but not necessarily, take in the US is that the right places all responsibility for the situation with individuals while the left blames capital. The conflict over the state is a conflict over the ways to direct policy, to regulate the behavior of individuals or to regulate corporations. This summer, beginning, though, in presidential primaries, there has been increasing commentary on the ways that the left and right are blurred, and blurred to favor finance capital: finance is bailed out and taxpayers (not to mention future generations) are posting the bail. Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" seems appropriate: the US as a whole is encountering the shock effects of neoliberalism's transfer of wealth from public funds and the work and savings of people to the pockets of the .001 percent, who continue to get richer and richer. It's what has been going in the former socialist countries, Latin America, and much of Africa. Now it's happening to us.

I don't know of much theory on the left that is helpful here. Think, for a start, of the messages of consumerism: go shopping and spend responsibly. Are these messages simple reflections of the contradictions of capital? Ideology's distorted image of a fundamental incompatibility? And, is a better approach one that emphasizes abundance, infinite productivity, the productive desire of the multitude (even considered in terms of the symbolic labor of hackers as a class ala Wark)? For me, these approaches are ever less convincing.

Americans produce debt. The capitalization of debt has been at the core of the economy for over 20 years. It is parasitic on consumerism, but requires much more than that. An article in the NYT today describes the ways that credit today is no longer based on the assumption that loans will be repaid. Rather, loans pay. From the fees for administering them, the penalties attached to them, the costs in refinancing them, to their repackaging in complex debt structures, debt is the primary US asset. It's what "foreigners" buy, what we export and they invest in. It's not an economy of abundance but an economy based on a hole or absence. It circulates around this absence and is premised on buying it, selling it, betting on it--or against it (selling short).

Some have seen this consuming for a long time: corporate "mergers" and the buying of companies only to strip them of their assets, fire their workers, take on their debt, and sell that as well. Commentators have been telling us for a long time that manufacturing has declined. There have been major layoffs in white collar idea-based industries (advertising, dot coms) as well. The economy runs on debt. That's what we make now.

So the idea of the consumer as producer so prominent in net critique isn't wrong. It just hasn't named what consumers produce. Consumers produce debt.

Broken

Paul's flight was supposed to arrive here in San Antonio at 11:05. It was delayed, though, three hours out of Rochester and now at least three more hours out of Atlanta. The current expected arrival time is 3:28 am. The reason for the delay, or so it seems from various flight delay websites, is primarily thunderstorms around Atlanta and secondarily traffic volume. Paul says that the airport is worst than third world. All the trash cans are overflowing. The crowds are jamming the terminal corridors so that it's difficult to get through. The arrival and departure screens are completely inaccurate. Families are sleeping on floors. People are sharing rumors and information. At one point, a harried gate attendant clicked all over her computer terminal muttering under her breath "what happened to San Antonio? it was here and now it's vanished."

I've flown pretty often in Europe. And I've noticed, rain doesn't shut down the transportation system. Flights still arrive and depart. Sure, the trains in the UK are a royal mess (get it?). But the flights work pretty well. They fly.

Admittedly, Atlanta has long been a mess of an airport. But why hasn't it gotten better? Why can't anyone fix it? Several airlines have announced personnel cuts this week. I'm no MBA, but it seems to me that these cuts are liable to make things worse.

Does it seem like someone doesn't want us to go anywhere, wants us all just to stay put? Gas is over 4 dollars a gallon (but not in Texas!), public transportation is minimal to nonexistent, and air travel is the worst its ever been

"The years around 1968, for all their zealotry, spelt the end of revolutionary commitment"

Link: 1968: the global legacy | openDemocracy.

It is clear in retrospect that 1968 did not bury European capitalist democracy or American imperialism. It did, however, set in train the death and burial of the Russian and Chinese revolutions and of communism in western Europe. A fine example, indeed, of the cunning of history.

Robbers, bandits, and blood-sucking vampires

Link: US: CEO pay sets new record as economy tanks.

Average CEO compensation grew by 3.5 percent last year despite slowing economic growth, falling profits and mass layoffs, according to an Associated Press review published Monday. The review found that the S&P 500 CEO received an average yearly compensation of $8.4 million, up $280,000 (an average raise that is the equivalent of six times the US median household income) during 2006.

The data render ridiculous those apologies for social inequality resting on the idea that CEO pay is linked to ‘performance’ in some meaningful way. The Associated Press review found that “CEO pay rose or fell regardless of the direction of a company’s stock price or profits.” The report also notes that half of the 10 best paid CEOs—who collectively hauled in half a billion dollars last year—presided over companies whose profits shrank “dramatically.”