The Elite Have Feelings Too: Corey Robin Interview At Naked Capitalism

Recommending a terrific conversation between Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind and Philip Pilkington at the always-great Naked Capitalism.  What ties together the conservatism of Burke, Palin, Thatcher and Goebbels?  What endures in the various and shifting political theories that endorse inequality and suffering? What is shared by the monarchist, the apologist for slavery, the libertarian?

For one thing, it’s loss.  In short, the elite have so much more to lose than you or I, that the tragedy of their loss repeatedly serves as the cautionary narrative broadcast to the very people whose freedom they most restrict. Victimhood is the chip the elite place on the shoulders of their loudest supporters.

Robin: [T]he sensibility you describe – experiencing or identifying oneself as a victim — is a consistent feature of conservative thought. Regardless of whether the ideologue or camp follower of conservatism sees him or herself as a victim, the idea of victimhood plays a critical part in conservatism. Going back to Burke. Marie Antoinette is the first great victim of the conservative canon. The sovereign who Joseph de Maistre recommends be restored to power once the counterrevolution prevails – someone Maistre describes as being schooled in the ways of adversity, who’s been brought low by fortune and thus learned a thing or two – he’s a victim (and Maistre recommends him to power on the basis of that victimhood). William Graham Sumner’s “forgotten man” is another victim. Nietzsche’s master class, in fact, is a victim. So is Nixon’s silent majority. And so on.

Initially, I thought this was all instrumental and cynical: understanding that the lingua franca of democratic thought is the democratic appeal to the masses, the conservative turns the possessor into the dispossessed. But over time I’ve come to think that the victim is a far more fundamental, and sincere, figure in the conservative canon. Because not only does he appeal to us as a figure of compassion or pity, but he’s also someone who has a very particular claim on us: he demands to be made whole. In other words, he’s a rallying figure, someone whose losses – a country house, a plantation, a factory, a white skin – ought to be recompensed.

What’s more, when you turn your privileged class into a group of victims – not just rhetorically but in reality (the French Revolution really did produces losses among the aristocracy; Emancipation really did divest the master class of privilege and property) – they come to possess an attribute that is universally shared: loss. Their loss is quite different from that of the ordinary run of humanity, but loss is loss. I’ve sometimes wondered whether that might not be the right’s singular bid for universalism: it speaks for the loser everywhere.

But as you say, it speaks for the loser not by democratizing society – making things more equal – but by making it more elite, more privilege, more unequal.

Entire post here.

Jack Abramoff: Shut Down The Free Market For Political Results

I bought Lawrence Lessig’s most recent title Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress And How To Stop It more for the “how to stop it” part and less for the extra illustrations of business interests corrupting the lawmaking process.  To be already familiar with that area of corporate management known as “government affairs” and its mission to trade cash for influence on Capitol Hill by way of K Street lobbying firms is to be desperately thirsty for thoughts about relief, for plausible solutions rather than more problem review.

(I haven’t gotten to Lessig’s prescription yet.  I’m still plowing through David Graeber’s hugely important anthropological takedown of mythological economics Debt: The First 5,000 Years as well as Robert Elias’ The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted The American Way Abroad.)

What I didn’t expect to encounter in the interim was this 90 captivating video minutes of Lessig sitting with infamous former DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff. ‘Casino Jack”, a reformed professional destroyer of democracy once so oily and egregious as to have served 3 1/2 years in prison for political corruption, issues a mea culpa I wasn’t expecting, loudly and clearly blowing the whistle on the lobbying industry, its methods, ethos and apologists.

While one might reasonably expect the appearance to be a plug for Abramoff’s new book, the discussion with Lessig is nothing short of amazing and enlightening.  As a first-hand account of how the hidden, excruciatingly free market for political results specifically destroys representative democracy, this is rare, must-see, must-share stuff – particularly for anybody laboring under the delusion that we’re in trouble because markets aren’t free enough.

Monied lobbying is a market that withers democracy and fecalizes every area of the political spectrum.  The cash-shoveling traditions of Abramoff’s old K Street stomping grounds are why record-low congressional approval rates today reign on the center, right and what passes for a left.  As with all markets, this one’s beneficiaries and owners are few, while the rest of us, left uninvited on the outside, tend to pay lots of its costs.  As profoundly inequitable as this is, it nonetheless comes complete with intellectual blessing; corporate influencers and their hired libertarian think tanks from Cato to Hoover to Mises expressly oppose campaign and lobbying reform.  They forbid limiting the “freedom” of boardroom checkbooks to make a mockery of checks-and-balances government.  Voters get the government that corrupters pay for, and Abramoff, speaking as a former buyer of legislation, reminds everybody that not only does this market exist, it is profoundly free by any definition.

Like Wendell Potter did to the private health insurance industry, or John Perkins did to the neoliberal go-go bankers spreading third world poverty, with his new book, Abramoff just might take his place in the pantheon of Great Whistleblowers Of Late Capitalism.

(Now, to find the time to read the damn thing.)

An Interview With Scratch Acid’s David Yow By Yours Truly

So check it out: The Chicago Reader asked me to interview legendary frontman David Yow (The Jesus Lizard, Scratch Acid) in one of their “Artist on Artist” segments.  See, Scratch Acid is on tour.  And I’m in this band.

Of course pants were removed.  Do you even have to ask?  Shame on you for doubting.

In related news, I’m told that I am a contributing author to the forthcoming in 2012 Akashic Books title Book aka The Jesus Lizard “coffee table” book.

Sure…coffee.  Right.

Lyrics To The Title Theme Of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire

Boardwalk Empire's Michael K. Williams shares home improvement tips

I watch HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.  This show’s major strengths are its art direction and set design, which really are a joy.  Its music direction, faithful to its Jazz Age period runs a close second, and might even have placed first, if not for one inexplicable decision.

In a stark and ugly contrast to the rest of the show’s attention to production standards, Boardwalk Empire‘s title theme music is a disaster.  For some reason, a chunk of sheer hackwork in the form of throwaway bar-band blues-rock culled from the catalog of the resolutely inessential Brian Jonestown Massacre was chosen to usher viewers into each week’s episode.

This isn’t about anachronism.  I’m not saying that a rock song could never work in this role. I’m saying the chosen rock song relates to the show only in one sense:  Each time I hear it, I lament that Atlantic City, endowed today with van-loads of creatively vacant, Stones-tribute bar bands who suck far less than San Francisco’s Brian Jonestown Massacre, couldn’t contribute to its namesake “death and titty” cable drama when the time came to slap a shitty rock song in the theme hole.

One habit I inherited from my father is to give lyrics to annoying tunes.  In that tradition, I offer to all Boardwalk fans a means to put a happier spin on this most bullshit of title themes.  Take these lyrics to Boardwalk Empire in the shared hope that a saddened nation can, as one, polish away this small spot of musical tarnish from our Sunday nights.

Lyrics To The Boardwalk Empire Theme

Boy, this theme sucks
Lemme tell ya 
God, this theme sucks
Like a hoover
Stupid blues riff
What the fuck, man?
Sounds like Oasis
Fuck you 
(repeat 1x)

And it’s cloudy
In the 1920s
And Buscemi
Looks especially worn
Hey, it’s water
What are those, bottles?
Fly away, seagull
Shitty solo ahoy!

Baaaaaw woooo-awooooo oooo-ooo-ooooo

(Singers give tempo ruboto impression of awful guitar solo)

(rest)

Please just start the show
And end this theme
Just start the show
Already please

(repeat after rest)

Lynda J. Barry On Letterman ’88

It’s time to revive the NBC Letterman RW370 category with a nice clip of the great cartoonist Lynda J. Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek). Marvel as she lets slip the early inspiration for her visual style (spoiler alert: Peter Max socks), announces her surprising heritage, and explores the ramifications of smoking backwards.  Nice decision at the end to not go along with the TV-smarm talk show patter rhythm as Dave moves to wrap it up.

Less Is More: The Orwellian Derangement Of Libertarian Economics

LOL

Of all of the huff-puffing attempts by political groups to catch up to and co-opt Occupy Wall Street, none are so awkward and laughable as that of the economic libertarians. At least when establishment Democratic supporters MoveOn or SEIU et al. fire up their mailing lists to say “us too!” weeks after the major cities have been occupied, they can truthfully claim to have been in some way part of the general struggle against the core problem of big business’s capture of our democracy.

But when the libertarian Cato Institute does the same thing, it’s comical, tantamount to an arsonist showing up to his own handiwork wearing a homemade fireman’s hat holding a dixie cup full of water.

Look at this Venn diagram published by Cato this week .  It’s nothing short of a masterpiece of self-satire.

In it, we are told that the Tea Party and OWS are appreciably similar things.  Yes, the Tea Party, that designed, funded, guided expression of the will of big business, astroturfed by corporate uber-lobbyist Dick Armey.  Cato expects us to believe that the Tea Party movement (characterized by civics illiteracy, mau-mau images, guns and anger at taxation) and OWS, (characterized by civil disobedience, class consciousness, smart phones and anger at corrupted institutions) share a core premise.

The premise?  It’s written in the Venn overlap region in the center: that “large corporations lobby for the government to have more power”.

Wait.  What?  More power?  In what world is that true, and what color is the sky there?

Because in this world, what big business does is the precise opposite.

1) The fact is, big business feverishly lobbies for government to impose deregulation.  That’s deregulation, meaning removing government power to regulate big business and markets.  Big business wants government to have zero say in financial markets, and gets what it wants want at a frightening clip.  For example, in 1999 when Glass-Steagall was repealed.  GS had, since the 1930s, imposed market safety regulation, but its removal greenlit the multitrillion monster market in mortgage-backed securities that caused the meltdown of 2008.

The leader of the effort to wipe out GS was Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas.  And who waved the pom-pons for this disaster while Phil took the ball across the goal line?

A chorus of anti-regulation libertarian think tanks, of course.  Such as Cato’s ideological twin the Mercatus Center.  Enjoy browsing the work of Senator Phil Gramm’s wife Wendy, Mercatus’s senior scholar.  Take in the deregulation-paean video “The Cost Of Workplace Regulations”. Keep a tissue handy as Mrs. Gramm shows us the pain of oil companies in her article “EPA Speeds Ahead With Ill-Conceived Vehicle And Gasoline Standards”.

Yes, people such as this not only carry water for big business and lead the charge to beat back regulation and taxes, they produce Venn diagrams claiming big business wants the government to have more power.

Less is more.  Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

2) The next of Cato’s Orwellian perversions: big business lobbies against campaign finance reform.  Campaign financing as it stands is the mechanism of normalized corruption of electoral politics and representative government.  It is the implementation of the free market for political results – the only free market libertarians are uncomfortable acknowledging.  Without its corruption of our representative democracy, big business has to face paying its taxes, reducing its pollution, economically developing instead of savaging the United States.  As such, campaign finance reform is the last thing big business wants touched. Which is why Cato and libertarians are 110% against campaign finance reform.

3) Big business lobbies to obtain tax cuts and loopholes that reduce their obligation to fund the society they inhabit.  To be fair, in this area, libertarian economics does not provide the majority of cover to big business, conservative think tanks such as Heritage do. But this is only because Cato never found a tax it found necessary.  The power of the government to tax is anathema to Cato – and it’s no coincidence that the plummeting effective corporate tax rates in the US (in the case of General Electric in 2010, 0%) is an idea that Cato, to say the least, endorses.  That is to say, again, less power for the government and more for big business.

So we’re supposed to believe, as we take to the streets to take back our democracy from big business, that Cato and the Tea Party are our pals?

Hey chief, there’s something funny about that firefighter over there.  He smells like gasoline and there’s matches falling out of his pockets.

Proof That Tax Holidays For Big Business Destroy, Not Create, Jobs

I can’t put my life on hold today to work more on Occupy Wall Street stuff, but I can pass this along quickly.

We hear a repeated call on the part of big business and its chorus of free-market think tank shills for a “one time” tax holiday on profits US corporations have stashed overseas.  The line is the usual one: you can’t tax us, otherwise we can’t create any jobs such as those we didn’t create over the past ten years even though you cut our taxes exactly like we demanded.

To the surprise of nobody, this notion is completely disproved by a 2004 study showing the effects of the last “tax holiday” granted to big business. They took the tax break, then fired tens of thousands of people immediately following.

As Stewart Lee once said:  ”Well.  You can prove anything with facts, can’t you?”

How To Fix The Messaging For Occupy Wall Street

I love the #OccupyWallStreet protests.

As we enter the third week of the movement opposing big business’s overwhelming civic power, we find that the protest’s messaging — that incredibly important appeal to those tens of millions of Wall Street’s victims on the protest sidelines, victims who are desperately needed to join the activists — is still a serious mess.

Yesterday saw the release of an official OWS statement that was so long, so diffuse, so riddled with eye-glaze moments that only a committee could have written it. Indeed, that is how the OWS communications are being built.

I respectfully submit that this process is completely inadequate and displays a basic misunderstanding about the role of public communications in OWS. I again submit my draft declaration of 9/26 for use as a standard to improve upon without exceeding its word budget.

I’ve been in discussions with numerous activists over the past four days.  Below are what I think are the four key takeaways and flaws in the current process.

1) THE NUMBER ONE GOAL OF OWS COMMUNICATIONS IS TO GET MORE PEOPLE TO JOIN OWS

The ultimate standard of success for OWS public communications is found in the count of how many people on the sidelines – non-activst, middle class people – are reached and compelled to show up at the doorstep of the parties responsible for the economic devastation they face. No communication that drifts from that goal is worth releasing. As with every previous social movement from women’s suffrage to civil rights to the labor movement, OWS absolutely depends on growth for success.

2) OWS HAS SPECIAL MESSAGING NEEDS

Speaking purely in terms of messaging, OWS faces extremely difficult challenges that previous progressive movements did not face. The civil rights movement, for example, engaged evidently violent racists in great numbers and in places all over the country. But our target is comparatively far less visible. Economic crime and political corruption bought by big business, having been normalized, is very difficult to see. Our bad guys are not spraying water cannons at us or wearing klan hoods. Instead they are lobbying for pro-business changes to the tax code, spreading pain around the middle class, and pumping billions of private dollars into the electoral process to promote low-tax policies instead of using that capital for domestic economic development.

Because what we oppose is systematic and not self-evident, we can’t publish messages that depend upon a consensus view of the problem.  We can’t expect everybody to see what we see.  We have to instead explain – very briefly and concretely – why we are standing in front of Wall Street. While I hate to sound like a skipping CD,  the draft declaration I wrote on 9/26 does the best job I have so far seen in combining the appeals, drawing the lines of responsibility and providing concrete, digestible and achievable demands to change the priorities of the society.

3) OWS IS NOT A CATCH-ALL

OWS’s overwhelming messaging goal is to attract more allies.  It is specifically not to enunciate a list of desired policies, nor to be comprehensive in listing grievances. This is not an opportunity to get everything off of your chest.

After two generations’ history of more or less free reign over our society and democracy by big business interests, it is natural that we have a very a wide range of policies upon which all left activists can agree.

But that is not a reason to shove them all together in OWS messaging. Unfortunately, that is what continues to happen as OWS enters its third week. Grievances about defense spending. About morality deficits. Term limits. The electoral college. Educational policy. I have seen in “official” OWS communications references to all of these and much, much more. Hundreds and hundreds of words.

None of them belong.

Just to pull one example at random out of the pile, let’s look at defense spending as a grievance. I want to show why talking about it in this context not only gains nothing, it harms OWS.

It is a fact that Wall Street’s political and economic power is closely related to the terrible problem of chronically excessive defense spending. It is a fact that opening overseas markets for Wall Street / big business has historically been one role of the US military. Wall Street’s political and economic power expresses itself in many ways, including through the defense establishment. But it does so indirectly and institutionally. The critical fact is that to most of the tens of millions of people on the sidelines of this protest, it does so invisibly.

When we are anxious to get a kick into the military-industrial complex, we should notice that OWS is not standing outside the Pentagon. It is standing on Wall Street (and financial districts around the country). This means OWS should be talking more or less exclusively about banking and big business. Why? Because a huge problem with complaining about defense spending when you are standing in front of a bank is that nearly nobody on the sidelines will understand why you have chosen to stand where you are standing.

A thought experiment at a smaller scale shows us that if we gather in front of a restaurant, but the object of our protest is a gas station, we should expect that to be confusing to people. Even if both the gas station and the restaurant have the same owner.

And if we confuse people, we can’t expect them to join us. So much for converting non-activists into activists.

(Beyond this potential for spreading confusion, there is the potential for spreading disdain. Tens of millions of people look at the military as their protector. Talking smack about their protector will turn them off. And people who are turned off will not join you – meaning doing so is self-defeating.)

4) OWS IS NOT ABOUT OWS, IT IS ABOUT THE VANISHING MIDDLE CLASS

The audience for OWS communications is the people on the sidelines, not for its own activists. Like so many of us, people on the sidelines are out of a job, they’ve been kicked out of their house, their pensions have been looted, their wages are at 1973 levels. Wall Street and big business did that to them – and did so in a very visible way.  Probably the most visible of all the ways we have been abused by the intrusions into our civics of concentrated money.    Key upon that because, unlike most other aspects of the culture of normalized economic crime, these realities are much easier for the victims to see.

Point these people exclusively, specifically to Wall Street and OWS will get lots of new friends.

Or, talk about oil and wars and watch their eyes glaze over.

UPDATE: I have been working with some good folks on a Google Doc that now contains my draft declaration at

I invite any and all to join in.

Submitted to #OccupyWallStreet For Consideration: New And Improved Messaging

I love the #occupywallstreet protests. You’re on the right side of a historic moment.

But because it’s early in the movement, the protest’s messaging is a mess right now. As a group, your dedication and resolve are so great, I realize it’s a challenge to produce focused communications to match.

I can’t be there with you to participate in a General Assembly. So I tried to help refine, sharpen and prioritize protest appeals from here in Chicago.

The following is my draft declaration for #occupywallstreet. It was built to be short, sharp, focused, repeatable, and of most importance, unassailable. I submit it in solidarity for consideration by the group. Use any of it, or none of it, whatever.

No matter the outcome, I urge that we work on refining the protest’s messaging, because last week’s media blackout is coming to an end. Even Megyn Kelly, Fox News’s perkiest cheerleader for poverty, couldn’t pass up running the NYPD-macing-protesters video this afternoon.

It’s time.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
WHY ARE WE HERE?

WE WANT OUR ECONOMY BACK

The bloated and reckless financial sector harms the real economy. 40 years ago, the financial sector commanded 2% of all the economy’s profits. Today, it commands over 40%. We, in the real economy, demand a 1% tax on all securities transactions. We call for the nationalization and breakup of all “too big to fail” financial institutions. We call for the nationalization and de-privatization of the Federal Reserve Bank. WE WANT OUR ECONOMY BACK.

WE WANT OUR DEMOCRACY BACK

We will no longer pretend we are well-represented by a government corrupted by runaway financial and commercial interests. We demand public service. We demand an end to the normalized corruption of our democracy by 1) instituting public financing of elections, 2) ending all lobbying for changes to the tax code, 3) the end of audit-less electronic balloting systems. WE WANT OUR DEMOCRACY BACK.

WE WANT OUR JOBS BACK

Wall Street’s political power has far exceeded Washington’s. The economy’s biggest players have the biggest say in its outcomes. Now, we want our say. Corporate profits and cash reserves are near all-time highs. Yet, unemployment is effectively well over 15% while “job creators” create only excuses. WE WANT OUR JOBS BACK.

WE WANT OUR HOMES BACK We signed on the dotted line. But Wall Street banks didn’t. We didn’t want a housing bubble. Wall Street’s banks and derivatives traders created one. We are not in default, we are victims of massive financial fraud. We demand an immediate cessation of foreclosures. WE WANT OUR HOMES BACK.

WE WANT ARRESTS AND PROSECUTION OF FINANCIAL TERRORISTS

Too big to fail is too big to jail. We demand immediate indictments on charges of securities fraud for Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), Vikram Pandit (Citi), John Stumpf (Wells Fargo). Jamie Dimon (JPM/Chase), Ken Lewis (BoA), Martin J. Sullivan (AIG). WE WANT ARRESTS AND PROSECUTIONS OF FINANCIAL TERRORISTS.

WE WILL NOT LEAVE UNTIL WE REGAIN OUR ECONOMIC CIVIL RIGHTS.
—————————————————————————————————————-

Elizabeth Warren: Patiently Explaining Civics And Capitalism To Free-Market Fundamentalist Morons Since 1999

Elizabeth Warren for Senate. Because the “free market” was always a fantasy.