Andrew Sullivan sees the same thing differently than I do (unsurprisingly). About the sources of the finance crisis, he writes:

The reasons for this are well known. Since the mid1970s, most American incomes - with the marked exception of the very big - have stagnated as even growth in productivity has been swamped by far fiercer global competition and freer trade. Americans, resistant to the idea that their incomes cannot keep growing at the free-lunch pace of the 1940s to the 1970s, decided to get rich the easy way. They borrowed to reflate in the 1980s, played the stock market in the 1990s and gambled on the real-estate boom in the first decade of the 21st century.

The shrewd ones succeeded in gaining and then selling before it came crashing down. Most, as usual, didn’t. The greed that led many ordinary Americans to take out loans they had no way of repaying and the recklessness with which banks and mortgage companies satisfied that hunger are, in retrospect, staggering. Both the banks and the borrowers deserve their comeuppance. And a truly conservative, free-market administration would be happy to let them fail.

Sullivan makes an interesting concession — I suppose it is a concession — that the typical American wage has stagnated since the 1970s; while his attribution of this to the great emancipation of the markets is specious, I do think it is interesting that this is just bandied about as the source of the finace crisis. People, well, working people, received less of the share of total social productivity than they had before; I call this a greater amount of theft, Sullivan calls it a result of greater competition and the free market. Whatever: semantic difference.

But then here comes the thing: Americans, whose wages became stagnant, are made to be the scapegoat for several waves of financialization that were intended to contain growing structural inequalities in the economy? This doesn’t follow. It’s ludicrous — moralistic pap. Oh, the stupid, cretinous, avaricious American public wanted a “free lunch!” Nevermind the fact that their wages depreciated in tandem with a surge in overall social productivity. How else was all the overabundant shit going to be absorbed? Let mealymouthed conservatives curse the loathsome cupidity of the typical American consumer all they like, the financialized credit industry kept the US, and the World, economy afloat for quite some time; now that it is unraveling, we’ll need someone to blame. And there’s no one better to blame than the one most ripped off by the whole affair: those whose wages stagnated as they watched the greater part of social wealth shoot through the roof, who worked for less a share of the collective pie, who paid usurious interest on plastic accounts, who may even have dreamt — callous asshats! — of owning a home! Let them have their comeuppance! All hail the Free Market!

I’m undertaking my taxonomy of lifestyle choices, niche markets, and purchasing patterns, and their various ideologies. Or at least, these things as they are reflected from the glossy paper of magazines and periodicals, and as I am able to infer from the rhetorical turns and aesthetic impulse of copy, ads, and layout. As I am not a demographer, statistician, adman, or publisher, some of these reflections will be rather crude. With luck, though, they will also congeal to be a sort of critically oriented collage. We shall see.

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The notion of improvement became something of a thing for the Anglophone world during the seventeenth century. At that time, landlords and their capitalist tenants were just beginning to come to grips with nascent legal and social structures that severed the rent of a piece of land from a fixed, traditional amount, and allowed it to become fluid, increasing in rate. This meant, as Wood put it, that a ‘market in leases’ was opened up, and landlords could pick and choose amongst a group of tenants, all in economic competition with each other. Naturally, or, that is, accordingly, this meant that the landlord would choose the tenant who would pay the most rent. Through rough and ragged averaging, the ‘going rate’ of a piece of land would equilibriate around whatever the general practice of the tenants could produce.

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The AP has conducted a poll of Americans that shows that 80% believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. You can read a summary of the findings at the HuffPo rag here, but I found this to be rather interesting:

People with lower incomes were more likely to frame the economic situation as their own “cost of living,” while wealthier people listed the economy more abstractly _ a sign that those hurting the most personalize the issue a bit more.

For two reasons this intrigues we — well, for two mostly: First, it seems that if you are actually ‘hurting’ due to an economic downturn, you tie it into your everyday subsistence. Your ‘cost of living’ is a concrete thing. If you are of more substantial means — that is, if you are not worrying about starving or being booted from your home or filling up your gas tank — the economy is something you view ‘abstractly’. Something that doesn’t really affect you, perhaps something you read about in the paper. Ok, clear enough. But the second thing is what is most interesting: those being hurt personalize the issue? As if this were anything other than an assault on their livelihood — don’t take it personally! AP, showing its condescension for those who take these things personally.

ETA: You’ve got to love this as well:

The survey reinforces the notion that consumers are particularly gloomy _ possibly more than economic statistics justify. Despite record energy costs, slumping stock prices and the housing and credit crunch, reports show the economy to be still growing, if slowly. Inflation and interest rates remain at relatively tame levels. And the unemployment rate is lower than it was during the past two recessions, in 1990 and 2001.

I’m not an economics reporter. I don’t write for the AP. But I know this is a load of horseshit. I mean, where do they get these people, and where do they get off giving this pep talk to consumers. Relatively tame levels of inflation! Inflation is rising, whether the AP wants to admit it, and it is rising most in the basic necessities. In fact, so is unemployment! Those two things are old news. And yet we’re being told that, golly gee, it’s not as bad as it was in 1990 and 2001? When the Fed raises interests rates to curb inflation, we’ll see whether it really is!

Fallujah was straw the broke the back of my conformism, actually. If you can call it a straw without being a complete and utter asshole. Masskilling. And it sent me over the edge and I started looking into things. That was enough to send me over to the other side. I mean: it only takes half a twinge of curiosity to look beneath the coverage of Fallujah and see it as the eradication of an entire city. Despicable, disgusting. And if you’re not a monster that is enough to make you start asking some bigger questions. Anyway, Lenin has a post on the city, and its current use as a vindication of the occupation’s violence.

Yours truly is currently mulling about the spreading fascination with information, data, semantic content rendered calculable and quantifiable. The research project that attempts to make this so, to proceed as if if individual facts could be taken as a given: as if Ralph enjoys lemonade could be treated as an isolable unit of sense and cut off from becoming, turned into a quantifiable unit and operated on formally, or as if one could proceed from the factlet men are better at mathematics. This worldview is at base unintelligible, for reasons that Husserl laid out 75 years ago, but I’m not immediately concerned with its conceptual flaws; I first need to get a grasp on its movement through culture, how it is that something that is so utterly ridiculous become taken as the gawdshonest truth. It is a world view that is sold, quite literally, in magazines, during radiobroadcasts, on websites and teevee, by cheap rhetoric and dumb repitiation. It’s enough for it to be made so, almost.

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I’m not really well versed in avant-garde literatures. I’ve read a bit of the OuLiPo writers, one of Christian Bök’s books, &c. Not too much, and I don’t really find much more of it to be that intriguing — though occasionally something strikes my interest, it is a rare occurence. (First aside: I love the technique of using heteronyms, though.) (Second aside: I’ve taken to declaring, when among more civilized company, that I am a philistine.) But back when I thought it incumbent on me, as wouldbe poet, to follow the latest gurgles in literary currents I subscribed to Bookforum; I was still an undergraduate. Since then my subscription lapsed and I’ve lost the urge to be a poetic sensation. Last fall I renewed it inspite of having not read an issue since I left for France. Apparently my post-France self is not as much intune with Bookforum’s editorial style — or perhaps just not as awed by the scholastic tone of the articles. I find myself bored with most of the article topics and disagreeing with many of the reviewers. The editorial focus seems occasionally adolescent (COMIX! SEX! GRAR!) and the reviewers often seem like awestruck fankids. Or hipsters, which is worse. I do of course come across books that I want to read, like the Lazarus Project, but I’d have come across that anyway. I won’t be resubscribing, that is to say.

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Such anger, such vehemence, over determination of party legalese. Where’s the coverage, where’s the frustration, over more pressing issues: the bailout of Bear Stearns, the impending attack on Iran, torture, the works?

There’s got to be something to the frequent coincidence of social darwinist ideology and free market fundamentalism. Some deep, obscure, primal fear that ties the two together. The Escape Artist and I were watching Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room last night, and all the speaches that Skilling and Lay gave could serve as caricatures of the positions they were espousing: business will thrive through open competition; the fittest, most able will float to the top, while the dregs will sink and be culled; state regulation results in increased costs for consumers; etc. All the while, these statements are flatly contradicted by the progression of events: Enron implodes, the only people left working for it are a collection of cutthroat sociopaths gleefully exploiting whatever they can for a few pennies, Californians have to foot the bill for a rigged electrical market. It’s enough to put a smile on your face.

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While I was off doing ecology, Democracy Now! broadcast the other portion of their interview with Zizek. He had some things to say about market based solutions:

I’m well aware that, if anything, state socialism was even worse for ecology. Those countries are countries with the worst ecological record. But nonetheless, there is something interesting. It’s that, of course, at a certain level, the capitalists market ways to deal with ecological problems, no? You include, if you can assess, the ecological damage into the price of the product and all that stuff. It works. But I think it doesn’t work with the threat of really large catastrophes, all this pushing towards Kyoto deal or whatever. [my emphasis]

Zizek is such a good anticapitalist, good radical, good Marxist. He really gets it. We can unproblematically incorporate the costs of ecological damage of production into commodity prices! Wooowooo!

I wonder, though, if the ecological record of socialist states is actually worse than capitalist ones (there’s a research project for some budding ecosocialogist); I’ll perhaps look into that in the fall or shoot an email off to someone with half a concern and a desire for factual data (not a philosopher!).

And it isn’t surprising that Zizek trashes Kyoto. What a tool.