Monday, July 14, 2014

Insult

I just opened my mail and among the various credit card offers and other solicitations to waste my money there was an offer from some "financial company" I had never heard of. Like most people I get probably a dozen of these phishing expedition kind of scams a week. This one was especially insulting though, and really hurt my feelings. Many moons ago when I had a decent job and accompanying good credit (and before the financial crash when it seemed like these hustlers actually had to try) the offers I received had good terms. So has the world tracked with my personal fortunes so much that now I am being scammed for 29.96% interest? Don't you go to hell for this kind of usury?

Worse, this railroading theft was only for $4,250. How do the grifters come up with these numbers? I mentioned a few days ago how Mr. K and I were discussing Capital in the Twenty-First Century and what possible ways working people could fight back against the financial pirates. AlterNet just ran a story about the next scheme of bundling the revenue streams of renting out the same properties that exploded when wall street bundled them as mortgages. As always, heads they win, tails they get a bailout and we pay for the scheme twice. In any decently run state, where the masters of the universe on wall street actually suffered losses for their failures, I doubt they would be going back to that well a second time so soon, if ever. But since the only bipartisan thing our Federal government can do is bail out the financial casino when ever the gamblers get in trouble, it is no surprise. This is called moral hazard, the only thing that changes is that the opposition party gets to whine and complain about the bail out to their members but the fix is in.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Labor Theory of Value

Greetings Kraken,

I am still practicing making Khan Academy style lectures. These are a little better, let me know what you think.

P.S. I do not know why it flashes at the beginning of some of them.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Hate, Conspicuous Consumption, and the Pathetic Display of Epic Fail that is "rollin' coal."

Are there even words for this (hopefully short-lived) fad? If you asked some regular people at the grocery store, or a coffee shop, even at a ball game to come up with something more ridiculously counterproductive than simply making a bonfire out of dollar bills I doubt they would think of the despicable act of nihilism that is 'rollin' coal.' As many befuddled functioning human beings have pointed out, this is the phenomenon of modifying vehicles to dump lots of diesel into the engine and have it spew out of after-market (and illegal) smoke stacks as black soot. There is cutting off your own nose to spite your face, then there is rolling coal, which spites everything. And unfortunately, when these bastards hit their switches or whatever it is, they are driving forward, out of the carcinogenic cloud and are only as affected by it as people miles away. So they won't be dropping dead of pollution-related causes anytime soon. We have reached a level of hate, conspicuous consumption, and nihilism among the 15k plus members of the rolling coal cult which human stupidity is rarely capable of obtaining.

As the above links indicate, the phenomenon (meme? hobby? collective descent into madness?) definitively entered the zeitgeist over the Fourth of July holiday weekend. I admit to never having heard of it before then. I suspect that while we have lots of rednecks around here who drive pickups and hate the president, people here are just too frugal (or cheap) to waste money by spewing fuel all over the place. In my neck of the woods it is more an aggressive display of indifference as preferred protest. And Harley-Davidsons with loud tailpipes as opposed to dirty, sooty ones tend to be vehicles (no pun intended) of rebellion. And make no mistake, in their own words this is what coal rolling is about; flipping a giant middle finger at the supposed liberal environmentalist scourge that runs our country. And a larger display of misdirection for the sake of profit has not been seen since the gun manufacturers realized the incredible boost in sales possible in reaction to possible public safety legislation. It is as though every snake flag-waving hick suddenly discovered the Dead Kennedy's song California Uber Alles and mistook it for a fox news headline.
"First they came for the coal rollers..."
At the dawn of industrialized consumerism, companies inspired the well-to-do in Europe and America to buy expensive luxury apparel and accessories simply to display them in public. Conspicuous consumption was meant entirely to inspire jealousy in observers, it gave the wearer of expensive furs, jewelry, or custom-tailored suits a sense of superiority. Restaurants built window seating and hotels constructed lavishly decorated lobbies with comfortable chairs all for the benefit of the conspicuous peacocks and their displays of finery. To give this analogy a splendid Buzzfeed/Upworthy twist, YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT! A number of anarchists took issue with rich assholes flaunting useless crap in public simply as a display of status while the majority toiled in poverty and started bombing areas of downtown where the peacocks mingled. While this violence was met with a crackdown on dissent by the ruling classes, conspicuous consumption as a lifestyle faded from public view as well.

Are coal rollers the new peacocks and dandies simply displaying conspicuous consumption of diesel as a status symbol? No, of course not. The correlation exists, these rednecks are performing in public and wasting untold amounts of money but the causation is 180 degrees south, as in towards hell. The performances are recorded for display on YouTube basically to show off how badass they are to each other. But they also perceive themselves as rebels, protesting... clean air? Why, please for the love of God, can't these rebels without a cause protest President Obama's clear stand against suicide?

Conversely, and I know this is going to cause a lot of pushback, what is demonstrated here is the futility of individual action. However noble, efforts by conscientious thinking individuals to go green will accomplish little while coal rollers, chick-fil-a patrons, wal-mart shoppers are able to abuse their freedoms by working ever-harder to dirty our nest. This is a subject for another day however.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Defining the Free Market: From Abstract to Concrete,but always a Fallacy

Somewhere along the line, “free market” graduated from the world of abstractions and became an actual thing.  By “thing” I mean an entity, something identifiably self-contained, an object in time-space.   In reality, “free market” is simply a name we gave to an economy characterized by a reliance on market forces to determine value. But for many people, “free market” is more than a label: it is something concrete—at least that is how they talk about it. 

When abstractions are spoken of as real things, we call it reification.  Reification is a semantic fallacy, but its use is sometimes necessary when one wants to communicate complex realities with considerably less words.  However, a semantic fallacy, if not challenged, can go on to support faulty conceptualizations of reality, especially once it seeps into discourse.  The special problem in this case is that the reification complements an ideology, one that rejects the natural and necessary role of the government in the maintenance of the economy.  If expressed as a thing, “free market” can be thought of as being interfered with or kept from its natural activities.  If expressed as an entity, it can be given agency, rationality, and rights.  We often talk about government intrusions in the personal lives of people.  For some, a worse offense is when the government intrudes in the free market. 

But this conveys a faulty conception of reality.  As Robert Reich states: “Government doesn't ‘intrude’ on the free market.  It defines and organizes (and often reorganizes) it.”  In reality, an economy is the product of an infrastructure of law that is created, maintained, and enforced by the government.   It is an extension of the state for the purpose of ordering the complex human interactions that occur with economic activity.  And with the constant growth and complexity of technology, which puts economic relations in flux and opens loop holes for economic actors to exploit, these interactions need to be monitored regularly and the laws adjusted accordingly.  The “free market” is not a thing with a right to existence and freedom from molestation; it is a name for something that does not exist without the state and whose quality is wholly dependent upon the laws that form it.

But we are led to believe that economic regulations are always wrong and lead to a loss of freedom.   This rigidity often pits real people against a reified free market.  How else do we understand how a person who lost their health care through no fault of their own, and who, as a result, has lost their life savings because of an accident, is freer than one who has been helped by an update of the legal infrastructure?  Or, that gross accumulations of wealth at the top demand less taxation for the wealthy and less regulation over the actions of corporations—even when there is no historical evidence that this works?  In both examples, it is the “free market” that has been protected, not people.  And in both cases, rights-bearing people are being sacrificed to an ideology and a faulty conception of reality.

                                                                  ***
If one accepts the idea that it is mostly hard work and sacrifice that determines one’s income and success in present-day America, it is impossible to explain the growing concentrations of wealth at the top.  Clearly other factors are involved.  A more satisfying explanation appears with a proper conceptualization of the economy and its contingent relationship to the government.   The reality is that the rules are out of date, the rich have given themselves an unfair and immoral influence over how things work, and we have the mechanism and the legitimacy to fix it.  Framing things this way makes it easier to get beyond the rhetoric, the confusing accusations of socialism, communism, or fascism, and on to clearer solutions and discourse.  This can be fixed, but not by those who think the “free market” can fix itself.


For a deeper understanding of how and why we got into this mess, and what the government can and should do to fix it, I highly recommend the documentary film by Robert Reich, Inequality for All.  


APPENDIX

While the Founders are quite removed from our world, they did understand that wealth discrepancy does not sit well with democracy.  It is interesting to see what they had to say about this, and the solutions they might have entertained.  While this is certainly not exhaustive or definitive, it does seem to suggest that at least some of them did not think it was unconstitutional or destructive of liberty for the government to take some kind of action on the economy.  According to David Cay Johntson, drawing on recent scholarship from The Citizen's Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy by  Blasi, Kruse, and Freeman, 

The second president, John Adams, feared “monopolies of land” would destroy the nation and that a business aristocracy born of inequality would manipulate voters, creating “a system of subordination to all... The capricious will of one or a very few” dominating the rest. Unless constrained, Adams wrote, “the rich and the proud” would wield economic and political power that “will destroy all the equality and liberty, with the consent and acclamations of the people themselves."

James Madison, the Constitution's main author, described inequality as an evil, saying government should prevent “an immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches.” He favored “the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigents towards a state of comfort."

Late in life, Adams, pessimistic about whether the republic would endure, wrote that the goal of the democratic government was not to help the wealthy and powerful but to achieve “the greatest happiness for the greatest number."

R. Miller



New Wacom Bamboo Sal Khan Piketty

Good Morning Kraken,

I just got a new Wacom Tablet, thought I would try to make a Sal Khan style lecture. I decided to answer Sal Khan's question is inequality bad?

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/macroeconomics/gdp-topic/piketty-capital/v/inequality-good-or-bad

^^^^Sal Khan^^^^^

Saturday, July 5, 2014

The Democratic Party and the Left

We are not even through the mid-terms and the hand wringing over 2016 has already begun. Ted Rall proves that it is not just the psychopathic, knuckle-dragging right who has given up on even the possibility of standing united as Americans. At Some Point, Progressives Need to Break Up With the Democratic Party, a great way of saying "Happy Birthday America!" This almost rote lament that our leadership class is pretty much right wing and extreme right wing is rather trite in this thirty third year of the Reagan Revolution. Money being the only standard of value in American politics, cash is speech, cash is votes, cash buys legal power, cash buys everything and everything is for sale. Usually this lament that Democratic presidents are bought is followed by some variation that "change comes from below" or at least to concentrate on local politics. Not here, Rall implores "Progressives" to dump the only non-insane American political party and become absolute pariahs because Democrats don't listen well enough.

The first fallacy asserted is "[t]raditionally, Democrats were pro-worker... Democrats cared about the poor... Democrats aren't supposed to invade sovereign countries for the hell of it... Democrats want single-payer healthcare" and ticking off reasons Hillary Clinton is not interested in these things. Traditionally? I'm afraid history does not back this up. When exactly does this tradition start? Should we start at the beginning? The Republican Party started by Thomas Jefferson and other slave-owners was pro-worker? Okay, when the Jeffersonians became the Democratic Party did they start to care about the poor? Was Andrew Jackson breaking tradition when he conquered Florida (thanks a lot for that by the way Old Hickory)? How about when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines into Da Nang? Or the Dominican Republic? Or when Woodrow Wilson joined the Allies as an Associate Power during the Great War? I suppose it is true that Truman was shot down by the AMA when he tried to get single payer healthcare, and the Taft-Hartley Act basically destroyed the right to organize over his veto, but Truman also broke up strikes and spied on labor organizers out of fear of communism.

These are just a few examples but there are many more. I am not citing them to bash my party, nor to dismiss Rall as a crank but in the real world of American politics there is no purity. Ideology changes over time, tradition is shifting sand for anyone calling themselves "Progressive" to try and anchor an argument in. Tradition is for conservatives, not the idiots and corporate shills who call themselves conservatives, but real ones. We have never really had a conservative tradition here either. The Democratic and Republican parties are shades of liberalism and capitalism. Progressives were urban reformers with technocratic ideas to make elections more democratic, government more professional, the economy more efficient, and the populace more educated... a century ago. The story goes that after decades of right wing demonization of liberals and liberalism, the left re-adopted the identity of progressives to dodge the label.

Should we instead adopt the Chomskian model that there is one business party in America with two wings? Rall seems to think so when he states "Progressives... are like a kid with two rotten parents. The dad drinks and hits him; the mom drinks less and hits him less. The best call is to run away from home -- instead, most children in that situation will draw closer to their mothers." American political mythology holds that like Richard the Lionheart, Good King Kennedy was betrayed by Bad King Johnson and America was betrayed by Evil King Nixon. And this is a story that even many frothing conservatives believe to the point of being quite schizophrenic about Jack Kennedy, waxing nostalgic about when Democrats were the good guys. But as Richard Bradley noted in his book on the subject, the John Birch Society and southern conservatives generally thought Kennedy was a traitor and a wimp.
Posted around Dallas, November 1963
Here's the thing, Democrats try to be the president of the United States. Republicans, at least since Reagan, are only presidents of big business and right wingers. It is nearly impossible to represent all three hundred million Americans coherently. So Democratic presidents listen to the loudest voices. It is not right, or correct, or even good in any definition, but that is what we have. Republicans divide and conquer, then serve their corporate masters openly. Democrats take their friends for granted and then try to appease the special interests. Yeah it sucks for committed liberals, yes we keep getting burned but there is just as little option today as there was when Samuel Gompers first committed labor, i.e. the broad working class, to supporting the Democratic Party over building an actual Labor Party like what exists in many European countries. But even then, does the Labour Party in the UK represent the needs of British workers anymore? As it was in the 1930s, today the right is on the march. If we could somehow unplug the average angry American male from fox news or talk radio it might be possible to reach them on some level, but until those freaky old people die off not much realistically will change. There is no running away, we either get Mom to sober up and leave Dad or he will keep beating us both.

Piketty and the absurdity of limits

The other day, contributor to this page Kewaskumite and I were discussing Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He had already finished it while I am still in the process of reading it, so the discussion was a bit one sided. However, Piketty explains his purpose and states his prescription fairly early in the book so I was aware of where Mr. K was going with his thoughts. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds because Mr. K's mind works about one hundred times faster than mine. Piketty roots much of his analysis in history, so I have a little edge there, and states that much of the problem in economics today is the gross inequality of wealth and income. His prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth because the core of his argument is that even a minute discrepancy in the rate of return on capital over the overall growth rate of the economy brings an ever-increasing growth in inequality.

But what Mr. K wanted to talk about was the future, where some of these trends we see in the news are heading and what can be done about it. Like Piketty I will give away the conclusion up front. On economic terms at least, Mr. K and I are on the same side but he is a math teacher, not a gloomy historian therefore numbers are what he looks at while I look more at (especially the dark side of) human nature. Mr. K's contention is that inequality has gone about as far as it can go in this country, even with the amount of money being dumped into elections, there is just very little left for the plutocrats to take. Also, the plutocrats will be spending an inordinate amount of money hanging on to their ill-gotten gains through bribing politicians, spending on propaganda, and through physical and cyber security. I contend that we have barely scratched the surface of how far down we can go.

Colorado may have struck gold by legalizing marijuana, but nationally the prison-industrial complex is still steaming ahead a ever-increasing speed. Matt Taibbi may have gone around the far-left bend in claiming that the Obama administration is worse than dubya where white-collar crime prosecution, but it is hard to argue with his premises. Or that the rule of law is now a fiction, as he contends in The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap where laws and punishment apply good and hard to poor Americans, while the rich and corporations can pretty much get away with anything. Power is everything, money is numbers on a computer. We have reached a point where no level of depravity is out of bounds. The top story in my circles this week was corruption in the Supreme Court, five of the Justices threw shame and common decency to the wind and decided that a corporation can flaunt the law and scientific reality if it feels so inclined, opening up new vistas for abuse by the powerful.

How many commoners can the powerful throw in prison? Well, privatized prisons have every incentive to push for ever more punitive laws. As do prison guard unions. as do "law and order" politicians. Will we see debtor's prisons for the unfortunates who fall behind on their student loans? If the outpouring of vitriol against mortgage relief by proto-teabaggers after Obama's election detailed in Pity the Billionaire, a better question is how have we lasted this long without them? The private prison industry has adopted the business plan of arms makers by citing operations in rural congressional districts, bringing jobs and diluted popular representation with them. Like the 3/5s clause in the constitution that counted slaves for political representation in congress, prisoners housed in rural districts increase the political power of right-wingers there without any threat to unseat them. Lots of authoritarian states then increase the antidemocratic tide by never allowing felons to vote again.

With the full-court press against women, teachers, non-christians, and anything that even smacks of liberalism succeeding despite a Democratic administration, to say there is a limit to how much harm the children of darkness can do seems almost naïve. I mean there must be a limit somewhere to how much damage can be done, this is just one instance that makes "the land of the free" Newspeak of the vilest order, but I cannot find where those limits could be.

Windy City Sea Monster

I have been blogging from the red depths of Washington County, Wisconsin for just over 8 years now. I will be relocating to Chicago, Illinois at the end of the summer. It is possible that this change of scenery will allow for a change of title. Some have told me that "Gloomy Historian" is off-putting, it does however have the attraction of being original. Googling it brings me up first, then references to other projects I have stuck my nose in, finally famous historians seen as gloomy. So at least I don't have much living competition, but it could be that GH is a stupid title to begin with. I may be gloomy in outlook, but does that accurately describe the other contributors to this blog? Is there a more inclusive way to express the mission?

On to Chicago. Maybe I am just gloomy because I have spent practically my whole life around closed minded, mean spirited rural folk. This will be the first time the Kraken calls a big city home. What will this experience bring? I began this blog in large part out of frustration, I could not find a place to express myself. Civil conversation was just a joke around here, it was "their way or the highway." If you did not agree with the hard right, you kept your mouth shut. It has not improved and now it seems, practically the entire internet is also this way. The only thing worse than one troll showing up to disrupt a conversation and start screeching, is having them actually be the majority.

Hence, when one bible-thumping whale named ginny maziarka and her colleague in self-righteous hatred mary weigand decided they did not like some things in the library that had absolutely nothing to do with them, the librarians basically stood alone. They had no case of course, but that didn't stop this dynamic duo of dipshittery from demanding books be removed, relabeled, sections of the website taken down, etc. Why? Because they were bored apparently, and demanded fame. A diverse metropolis tends to laugh at morons like this, but here? The frenzied teabaggers whipped up enough hatred against the reality-based conservatives running the city to replace them with troglodytes as brain-damaged as they are. Now, we have a library board member who openly wears a pistol on his hip to meetings, and even to preschool Christmas programs. God I wish I had taken pictures of that to post. When the populace is not a sea of stupid, guys like matt stevens do not get near public office.

And "they" say that big cities like Chicago are corrupt? Our Fourth of July parade yesterday featured a slathering, drooling tribute to the dropout in chief running our state. I really hope a picture of that narcissistic monument to failure surfaces. It was pretty sickening to see such shameless self-promotion on the Republic's birthday. So kiss my scaly ass West Bend, I will not miss you in the slightest. Or your concealed carry museum.

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Thoughts on Uninformed Arrogance and Political Health

Sometimes it pays to have expert acquaintances. A very insightful Doctoral Candidate from UWM whom I know through Facebook recently published this excellent analysis of Uninformed Arrogance in the contemporary United States drawing on his extensive research of the French Revolution of 1789. I was familiar with a few historical understandings of this phenomenon, notably Isaac Asimov's oft-repeated quotation that: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” [emphasis in the original] Anyway, I hope this post helps further our understanding of why it is so hard to discuss anything of importance with some people.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, French historian, Hippolyte Taine, published a three-volume work on the French Revolution.  One of the questions he explored was why the Revolution had descended into chaos and violence.   A large part of his answer centered on the way in which the Enlightenment manifested itself in French culture.  According to Taine, throughout the seventeenth century France had developed what he called a “classical spirit.”  Taine defined this “classical spirit” as the belief that an “honest man,” without the need of specialists, had an “inner light” that could lead to sound conclusions in the search for truth. Moving into the eighteenth century, this intellectual populism coupled itself with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on metaphysics and abstraction. Taine suggested that this coupling formed a new kind of epistemology, one he called la raison raisonnante.  With the language of metaphysics and abstraction, its pretenses were lofty, but in reality it ignored complexity and lacked vigorousness.  Indeed, it was “powerless,” he said, “to fully portray or to record the infinite and varied details of experience.”  Yet the popular Enlightenment championed it.  The result was that influence shifted in a strange way.  Instead of a lifetime of study, and the respect and deference one earns from it, all one now needed was a salon or a pen to pontificate legitimately and be taken seriously on the most lofty of topics, including and especially politics.  Non-experts quickly became the experts, and those who chose to follow them did so with confidence and enthusiasm.  The political world fell under the jurisdiction of the arrogantly uninformed, according to Taine, and France marched inexorably toward chaos.       Taine’s scholarship has always challenged me to consider whether contemporary America has been infected by a form of la raison raisonnante.  Consider the following:
  • A minor celebrity with no training in medicine is certain that her views about inoculation are superior to the medical community’s conclusions. Result: helps popularize a fairly successful movement against vaccination, which threatens the return of formerly eradicated diseases.
  • Countless individuals with no training in science are adamant that evolution has no evidence and the scientific community is too brainwashed to know it. Result: science has to fight to stay in public school classrooms.
  • Many with no knowledge of science refuse to accept the scientific consensus on global warming, thus placing their opinions above those of the scientific community.  Result: strong presence in congress of those who deny the science and slow governmental response to the problem.
  • Many who have never closely studied history confidently assert interpretations at complete odds with expert consensus.  A result: Christian nation movement and its denial of church/state separation.
     Following Taine’s critical lead, perhaps American populism coupled with the spirit of radical Protestantism has developed and distributed a form of la raison raisonnante.  American Protestant values, which hold that any individual can interpret divine revelation for themselves and then are free to act confidently and authoritatively on it, certainly have had an effect historically on how Americans see the world and their place in it.  In some cases, however, there is an element that takes it to a different level.  Hovering in several places around this nexus of populism and radical Protestantism is fundamentalism, the kind that sees every problem as fundamentally solvable by the Bible. In this world, sociology, political science, economics, foreign policy, and every other area of knowledge that we draw on to help guide the nation therefore become an extension of theology--not the deep theology of dedicated and life-long scholars who draw on the wisdom of the ages; rather, the shallow, “proof-texting” theology of certain “honest men” who simply possess an unverifiable “inner light” and who are therefore, it is believed, without the need of special training or education. The result is that in certain circles, many very important areas of knowledge are under the jurisdiction of non-experts, ones that oftentimes believe their opinions to have divine sanction.  And those who choose to adopt the opinions of these non-experts do so with confidence and enthusiasm.
       This phenomenon cannot help but have a negative effect on the maintenance of a democratic society.  While most of the above nonsense has made it into politics or even legislative discourse, perhaps a greater threat is longer term.  When important historical knowledge has been modified, when the meaning of the Constitution and of the Country has been distorted, when pseudoscience has affected education, and when economic and foreign policies have been guided by a type of thinking that “ignores complexity” and “lacks vigorousness,” a rational and free society, one guided by law and pushing towards justice, can not be maintained. 
    
In my opinion, a form of la raison raisonnante plagues contemporary America.  Not sure?  Read the bumper stickers on the car in front of you.  

R. Miller

Appendix