Robbery

It feels like we are being threatened. Pay up or else. Or else what? We lose our houses? Our jobs? Our life's savings? Hasn't that already happened to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in this economy? it reminds of what the executives at American Airlines pulled on their pilots: if you don't take a salary cut, the company will go down and you will be out of a job.Then the executives got bonuses. So now Wall Street says: give us more money or you we will all go down. When was the last time Wall Street spoke in terms of "we all"? Probably the Bear Stearns bailout.

It doesn't have to be this way. It's an unpopular, lame duck president. It's a treasury secretary who used to be head of Goldman Sachs. There are millions speaking out against this too quick move.

It's almost as if they want to take the money and run.

No wonder it feels like we're being robbed.

Comments

[Chakira]

Once again we disagree. In fact, this bailout presents the greatest opportunity to the people of this country. While the past decades have seen the growth of neoliberal capitalism at the expense of our political traditions, the bailout allows for a reimagining of that situation. If managed correctly, the bailout could stymie the growth of neoliberal capitalism by demanding huge increases in regulation, as well as punitive and confiscatory taxes to pay for the economic cataclysm that might be happening. The government must use this as a chance to go shopping. Ethics, free trade and regulation can all be brought to civilized standards, and the tax take of the nation can be balanced with that of other comparably industrialized nations. The international aspect of the bailout presents wide ranging opportunities to expand the american sphere of regulation on issues like wages and workers rights into the developing world. Th failure of the bailout is only the failure of imagination. Paulson, Bush and their coterie suffer not only the guilt of mismanagement but the disability of small mindedness. What could be a chance to reimagine a regime which has manifestly failed in increasing human flourishing is instead construed as a complete colonization of the government by companies which are too big to fail. To big, of course, because we cannot fit the idea of their failure into our small imaginations, despite the comparable failures of so many corporate entities. There is no more Dutch East India company, and few tears are being shed. Why is Bear Stearns or Lehman or AIG such a part of someone's mental landscape that they cannot imagine life without it? And if this is the case, perhaps the true poverty is not in the new American tent cities, but in the burrowed out heads of financial professionals.

[Jodi]

If Bush et al suffer from small-mindedness, then why should we expect this bailout to be anything but small-mindedness?

[Chakira]

Jodi, of course you're right. But philosophers have an obligation to reimagine the world, not just describe the current state of things. I am lamenting that this is a moment of incredible potential for destroying a certain historical constellation.

[Jodi]

If philosophers are talking about policy then they have an obligation to understand the place of their words in a certain historical constellation.

[Chakira]

Fine but that means to rigorously reimagine. What I am saying is not fiction either.

[Jodi]

The idea that the Congressional leaders in DC are going to reimagine the economy in a way that benefits the poor and middle class and constrains the greedy and rich is fiction. And, it seems your own words suggest as much insofar as you rely on an imagine of consumerism:

"the government must use this as a chance to go shopping."

Not quite a reimagination.

And you write: "Ethics, free trade and regulation can all be brought to civilized standards, and the tax take of the nation can be balanced with that of other comparably industrialized nations. "

This relies on an opposition between civilized and barbarian that maps onto your division between 'comparably industrialized' and presumbly those who industrialization is beyond compare. Moreover, it proceeds as if regulation were the problem, as if ethics were reducible to an item to be included in a set, and as if ethics and free trade were equal or equalizable terms to be balanced against each other.

Even your own reimagining is trapped in neoliberal thinking.

So, what you are saying is not fiction if your intention is to buttress and support neoliberalism, which is also the intention of Paulson, the Bush administration, and the Congressional Democrats.

[Joe Clement]

You cant forget how any opposition, particularly by those in some sort of power or proximity to the election, is being labeled as "{presidential} partisan politics." Both Obama and McCain, and many other jerks I'm sure, have said "we need to set aside politics" to get this bailout hammered out. The message is terrifying: "oppose the bailout and you are putting politics before - before - we can't exactly say what without engaging in a political debate about our terms and their consequences, but at any rate you're putting politics ahead of what's more important FOR OUR COUNTRY."

[Chakira]

Jodi, I appreciate your critique of my tropes. At the same time, I think there is a degree to which any reimagination of this neoliberal regime must proceed from the terms set by the neoliberals. I would call this a psuedomorphosis. In other words, the tremendous gaps between Classicism and Renaissance notwithstanding, the Renaissance itself will employ neoclassical terminologies to get its point across. Culianu claims that the most creative ephochs are those which borrow terminology and use it in new ways. So perhaps what we need to do is reimagine "shopping." "Shopping" circa 2007 presents us with many elements which are useful in this reimagination. For instance, the eroticization of shopping and the conflation of the ego with the object of desire, along with the ocular accessibility of said objects, and their readiness to hand. All of these traits can be used in service of a new tropological regime.
From the erotics of shopping we could move towards a romanticism of ethics. Meaning that where the Kantian subject saw ethics as this burdensome duty, which was then dispensed with by his neoliberal children, we can see the restoration of damaged life as joy. Indeed, despite the many critiques of free trade coffee and other such products, are they not pregnant with such possibilities?
The conflation of the ego with the products can also be reimagined in the same direction. Instead of being the person with the biggest SUV, we can brag about how everything in our living room was made by people making fair wages, and not by any corporate entity. Instead of being part of the aesthetics of punk rock or suburban culture we could be part of a new aesthetic regime focusing on the complete life cycle of a given product, a resumption of contact with its producers.
I am trying to give outlines from my own stunted imagination and even as I write this I cringe that it is just another neo Romanticism. Yet I also choose not to be disconsolate. Reading debates on neoliberalism from the 60s which reflect the same despair we see today has given me the slightest bit of optimism that we might be entering the eclipse of this evil regime.

[Jodi]

Beautiful response, certainly more generous than mine.

Seeing a table full of books on green shopping at a Barnes and Nobles does not inspire optimism in me. It seems like more marketing. Many of us in the US have enough stuff.

Aren't there more languages/tropes/rhetorics available than those of consumerism and neoliberalism? And, whose interests does it serve to continue in those terms? Yes, terminologies are borrowed: but which ones and why some terms rather than other ones?

To my mind, the eroticization of shopping captures desire in circuits of capitalism. More precisely, I think we've actually lost desire and entered the domain of drive, endless circling around a gap, a circling that brings with it its own enjoyment.

[Chakira]

Jodi, I am not smart enough to know what balance of tropes will be the propaedeutic to a new way of thinking. All I know is that whatever is really new will look old. If you are asking a question of preference, I do have a few tropes I am rooting for, and they are not "shopping." What I want to point out is the redemptive potential implicit even in such dross and seemingly banal constructions as "shopping" and that even if such muddy ground must provide the foundations for our new theological edifice, this is not a good reason to despair.

[Joe Clement]

Interesting, Chakira. If I get you right, what you're suggesting is taking the "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality and making our conspicuous consumption oriented towards "green" products and the like. The biggest problem I see with this suggestion, which is to say the already quickly growing trend in marketing, is that it only works if you buy stuff. To that end, reducing consumption PERIOD (as opposed to say, just your "carbon foot-print") doesn't really work in this framework.

I still remember my three Rs: REDUCE, reuse and recycle. No one ever told me, but I always thought that was given in order of priority. There is far more to be gained by consuming LESS than by consuming DIFFERENTLY, though they clearly go together. Unfortunately, reduced sales is at odds with the profit-motive.

[Joe Clement]

Another thing, Chakira. If we're to take your example about the Renaissance and Neo-Classicism seriously, which I certainly see as at least potentially useful, we should think of borrowing from a past much more distant than, say, the 1990s. What you suggest would make sense only if the Renaissance happened as a matter of "using the middle-ages to reform the middle-ages."

[Joe Clement]

Actually, if we're going to be mixing metaphors, I should have said, "What you suggest would make sense only if the Renaissance happened as a matter of "re-discovering the hidden potentials of the middle-ages."

[Chakira]

The Renaissance narrative is not monocausal. At the same time there is a strong case to be made for Renaissance as a moving beyond the aporias of the stifling scholasticism of the medieval period.