I cite

Obama

Cool NYT ticker

another election time-passing delight:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/04/us/politics/20081104_ELECTION_WORDTRAIN.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

ELECTION DAY 08 - What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind? - Interactive Feature -

Les Misbarak

if you haven't seen this Les Misbarak video yet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3ijYVyhnn0&feature=related

Haiku Dave responds to request from human resources

Every two weeks, Human Resources asks Haiku Dave whether he has taken any personal time off. His response this week:

We campaign not for

votes, but for dignity. We

can afford no rest.

How McCain Could Win

Below is an excerpt from Greg Palast. Most of us have probably already come across is nightmarish stolen election scenario. The details are shocking. I find the experience of reading them jarring: I believe they are true (that he is a reliable reporter who checks his facts) yet I can't believe 'the ugly secret.' And I wonder, is this my fetishistic denial, a kind of residual faith in democracy? Or is something else involved, something that has more to do with the position of the story/report? Does the report function as a kind of political pornography, an extreme kind of leftist paranoia that replaces/displaces not just political optimism and possibility but steps toward responsible dismantling of conservative hegemony? Differently put, is the problem with Palast that he fantasizes a nearly omnipotent power behind the scenes? That he may even be too certain in the face of the always messy sausage-factory of US elections?

Link: t r u t h o u t | How McCain Could Win.

Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!

    Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still "disappeared" from the lists this week.

    Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.

    Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).

Obama's grandmother dies a day before election - Yahoo! News

This is particularly sad because he didn't get to see her see him become president. Link: Obama's grandmother dies a day before election - Yahoo! News.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Barack Obama says that his grandmother has died. The Democratic presidential candidate announced the news in a joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. He said his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, had died peacefully after a battle with cancer.

To Whom It May Concern

To Whom It May Concern
Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

a note on a house, vacant and abandoned

Shocked Disbelief

Link: t r u t h o u t | Shocked Disbelief.

Hopefully, the lesson will finally be learned. What former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed at the start of the free market period - that there is no society, there are just individuals - is belied by what we are now witnessing. We are not disconnected individuals whose fate rests solely in our own hands. We are all dependent on one another. We must rebuild our economy on the principle that we are all in this together. If we are to solve the many real economic problems we face, we have to do so by cooperative effort, not by the pursuit of narrow self-interest.

Paulson's Swindle Revealed

Link: t r u t h o u t | Paulson's Swindle Revealed.

The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride - a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.

the morning after

  the morning after 
  Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

This was part of a fabulous lawn display that we discovered as we were going door to door on November 1. The guy also had a great coffin. He said that he would hide in it and open it up and scare the kids. It was kinda sad to learn that he didn't have many trick or treaters. Used to, there were tons of kids. Not so much now.

Database politics lose a lot. The knowledge collected by pollsters and zipcode demographers and their ilk attempts to substitute for the knowledge of the local party faithful. It tries to replace the time and labor intensive work of volunteers with "information." It's like replacing community and friends with social networks and "friends."

The long-term Dem party folks here know the town backwards and forwards. They can look at a ward map (Geneva has six wards) and tell you about each area (I'm proud of being able to do this a little bit)--"the top of that street is pretty intellectual." They know that the presence of a Republican lawn sign doesn't mean that the house is Republican: "it's a mixed marriage" or "they vote Dem; the sign is just because her daughter-in-law is running."

Going door to door, you learn more about folks' lives, what matters to them. Face-to-face matters. Having someone show up and ask directly for support, talk about local issues, listen a bit, all that matters. Seeing the differences in how people live, difference even on the same street, that matters. If people are just entries in a database, they stop mattering as people. But it's the people who are supposed to be governing themselves. They aren't just choosing a can of soup. With database politics, the people have no input. They are inputs.

Haiku Dave on polls

Polls are my smack. Numbed
by the lead, I nod.... Until
tomorrow's numbers.

State phobia

What is state phobia? a sign of the crises of governmentality, a problem of the state, the question of the state.

It is of course necessary to do without a theory of the state because the state does not have an essence:

The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power. The state is nothing but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of a perpetual statification or statifications, in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centers, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on. In short, the state has no heart, as we well know, but not just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it has no interior. The state is nothing but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities. That is why I propose to analyze, or rather to take up and test this anxiety about the state, this state phobia...

There's no need to name the author of this passage. It's obvious from the style and what is an author anyway? the author is dead. But surely we might be surprised by the psychoanalytic terminology--phobia and anxiety--a use of psychoanalytic terms at the juncture of a crisis of governmentality.

In psychoanalysis, the drives are nothing but a particular movement, a movement that is at the same time a kind of fixity and attachment.

The state lacks a heart. It lacks an interior. It's interior is missing, yet there is incessant movement. The movement that produces the state as an effect is a movement of multiplicities.

What about this movement gives rise to anxiety? What gives rise to state phobia?

When Consumers Grow Up

Paul Krugman has a different title: When Consumers Capitulate - NYTimes.com.

The long-feared capitulation of American consumers has arrived. According to Thursday’s G.D.P. report, real consumer spending fell at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the third quarter; real spending on durable goods (stuff like cars and TVs) fell at an annual rate of 14 percent.

To appreciate the significance of these numbers, you need to know that American consumers almost never cut spending. Consumer demand kept rising right through the 2001 recession; the last time it fell even for a single quarter was in 1991, and there hasn’t been a decline this steep since 1980, when the economy was suffering from a severe recession combined with double-digit inflation.

Also, these numbers are from the third quarter — the months of July, August, and September. So these data are basically telling us what happened before confidence collapsed after the fall of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, not to mention before the Dow plunged below 10,000. Nor do the data show the full effects of the sharp cutback in the availability of consumer credit, which is still under way.

People have enough and have had enough. Oil prices were sky high this summer. And we knew that the oil companies were making out like bandits. It may also be that we knew that they had us by the short and curlies. As long as we needed their crack, we were their bitches, selling ourselves into debt slavery.

The consumer as producer? Please. The truth behind that Web 2.0 cliche is that the consumer is a producer of debt, massive amounts of circulating, productive debt, debt that is split and bundled, bought and sold, insured and serviced. Entire industries have been based on feeding the debt-machine (I imagine here the patients at the obesity clinic featured somewhere on cable; their families buying them junk food, their friends helping them sneak food in behind their nurses backs; everyone knows its killing them; but they are all caught in the circuits of feeding and feeling).

We can resist their ads and commercials, their fads and fashions. We don't need one in every color. We aren't consumers, not any more. That's not who we are. That's not a name for the people. It's a name for the industries that rely on us, consuming our incomes, desires, and futures, the best of our imaginations and energies. They displace this name from themselves and project it onto us (like so many clumsy moves in the McCain campaign: accuse your opponent of the crimes you've committed).

And maybe for the first time in too long a time we are in the midst of the political process that is uttering another name for the people, the only proper name.

The workers.

 

halloween

Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

Zizek: Through the Glasses Darkly -- In These Times

An excerpt from an article that appeared today. The first part of the article relies on the trope of the glasses that let people see what's really going on from the John Carpenter film, They Live!. After discussing McCain and Palin, Zizek turns to the economy: Through the Glasses Darkly -- In These Times.

But was the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.

Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?

The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.

The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running.

Haiku Dave on the face cutting incident

When a zealot cuts
her face to smear, one trembles
at the depth of hate.

Spread the Wealth

The easiest way to assess McCain's attack on Obama as planning to 'spread the wealth' is to situate it within the history of red-baiting and US-American anti-communism. McCain's desperation smacks of McCarthyism, a last ditch effort to invoke attacks long part of the Republican arsenal. That history is still effective; it still is part of the political setting or constellation conditioning what is possible in US politics.

But since 1989 socialism has not been a threat or a danger. Conservatives have attacked liberalism. Once the Soviet Union fell, liberalism claimed victory and the political field shifted ever rightward. That liberalism was the foe was clear already in the Bush-Dukakis campaign. There was no need to attack socialists; we were a joke, defeated. In fact, the exclusion of socialism was part of the condition for the current political constellation; it was premised on socialism's defeat, we could say foreclosure, but I think repression might actually be more appropriate.

That McCain must attack socialism means socialism lives! It's alive! It's a force to be reckoned with. If Obama is popular and is winning and if Obama is a socialist then that means that socialism is popular and winning. It means the socialist alternative is not dead, but is coming to life in a way that we haven't seen in 20 years.

From within McCainian rhetoric, the fact that Obama is in no way a socialist but a clear capitalist-loving neoliberal is irrelevant. So take the claim at its word. Proceed as if it were absolutely correct. Identify with the claim--yes, socialism is a real possibility for America now. Millions all over the country want it and are expecting it. And socialism means spreading the wealth.

(Aside: the Colbert Report was great on this last night. His guest was the actual socialist candidate for president, Brian Moore. What a cuddle bear. Colbert: what does Marx put on his pasta? Answer: communist mani-pesto. I love this.)

Spread the wealth! Why would McCain presume that the majority of people want wealth concentrated? Is he trying to express a new ideology that makes explicit its claim to power? The privilege of the few, the rich? Reagan era Republicans argued for trickle down economics. The explicit message was not that wealth should be concentrated in the hands of the few but that it would spread itself naturally through the market. The current economic calamity has rendered this lie untenable. Even Greenspan admits he was wrong, wrong, wrong. They all admit that the market failed, that it did not spread the wealth. McCain is responding, then, by bringing out and championing the poorly concealed core of Republican philosophy: concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.

McCain's redbaiting, his opposition of those who concentrate the wealth v. those who spread the wealth is helping to make the fundamental antagonism, class conflict, class war, visible as such. It's up to us (a broad, amorphous us present in disparate places and primarily as potential) to fan this spark.

Spread the wealth. By any means necessary.

Left isn't meaningless

Recently, I got in an argument with another political theorist. She was incensed by my claim that Obama isn't left. While I pointed out his neoliberalism, she emphasized that he's to the left of Bush and McCain. She didn't think much of my response, "so was Nixon." After a bit of this, she accused me of having an essentialist notion of what's left.

This is absolutely true. Despite the stupidities of American politics and policy, "left" is not a meaningless term. Despite all the damage done to it by well-meaning multiculturalists and feminists, it hasn't floated into the ether. We know full well that there were Nazi feminists and that capitalism is compatible with multiculturalism. Despite the attempt of democrats to hegemonize the term, it still means more than democracy.

To refer to a political issue or position as left is to link it to a Marxist, communist, and socialist tradition. It is to draw a line in the stand regarding capitalism and inequality. It is to say that collective production, distribution, and responsibility trumps the preferences of individuals.

Of course, one can disagree with this position. And this means one isn't left.

Have we figured out what blogging is yet?

The following is from one of my favorite blogs: So What? Kim Dot Dammit Live..

I mean, who are these characters/people/demons we have created out in cyberspace, and when does the division between reality and creative fiction blur and when does it separate? And why is it that this kind of creative identity feels so much more taxing on the internet than it does on paper (say in a newspaper column or a literary series or something like that)? Is it because blogging is still a somewhat “new” medium, and we don’t understand the parameters of it like we do in other forms of writing that have endured the test of time? Are we creating the parameters and dismantling them as we go? Is it because there are no boundaries because of the open space of the medium?

Kim has a more intimate and creative relation to blogging than I do. But her questions haunt me, nonetheless. Maybe it has something to do with the affective structure of blogging as a practice. That is, for those who have blogged a while, who read and write on blogs regularly, who comment, who encounter others in the settings blogging produces, even artificial personae produce feelings. In a way, it doesn't matter if the other person is 'really' or 'authentically' who they present themselves as. The feelings incited are incited, nonetheless. The person's voice and presence on different blogs over time is a recognizable entity, a someone with a life, a someone who exposes herself or himself to others in this medium. For those whose blogging produces something like community, there is no anonymity. Even trolls have distinctive personalities.

In this setting, we have different responses to arguments, conflict, wars. For some, these are just a game; none of us are real. This strikes me as a fundamentally psychotic way to relate to other people, a presumption that emotions incited through typing are not felt and that one then has no responsibility for that incitement. Or maybe the presumption is more properly perverse, an attempt to hurt and harm and in so doing prove how transgressive one really is (and thereby call the law into being).

Conflict and disagreement are difficult face to face. They are also difficult online. It sometimes seems to me that there was, for a while, a fantasy that mediated conflict wasn't really conflictual, that it was one giant wiki of the multitude, filled with productive desire and love. So trolls were an issue, a violation, a shock to newbies easily dismissed by cynical old hands. But the feelings they incited were real, nonetheless.

The production of debt

How did the US become the world's leading producer of debt?

Using techniques that grew more sophisticated over the last decade, businesses comb through an array of sources, including bank and court records, to create detailed profiles of the financial lives of more than 100 million Americans.

They then sell that information as marketing leads to banks, credit card issuers and mortgage brokers, who fiercely compete to find untapped customers -- even those who would normally have trouble qualifying for the credit they were being pitched.

These tailor-made offers land in mailboxes, or are sold over the phone by telemarketers, just ahead of the next big financial step in consumers' lives, creating the appearance of almost irresistible serendipity.

These leads, which typically cost a few cents for each household profile, are often called "trigger lists" in the industry. One company, First American, sells a list of consumers to lenders called a "farming kit."

This marketplace for personal data has been a crucial factor in powering the unrivaled lending machine in the United States. European countries, by contrast, have far stricter laws limiting the sale of personal information. Those countries also have far lower per-capita debt levels.

The companies that sell and use such data say they are simply providing a service to people who are likely to need it. But privacy advocates say that buying data dossiers on consumers gives banks an unfair advantage.

...

The American information economy has been evolving for decades. Equifax, for example, has been compiling financial histories of consumers for more than a century. Since 1970, use of that data has been regulated by the Federal Trade Commission under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. But Equifax and its rivals started offering new sets of unregulated demographic data over the last decade -- not just names, addresses and Social Security numbers of people, but also their marital status, recent births in their family, education history, even the kind of car they own, their television cable service and the magazines they read.