I cite

I never borrowed their kettle

thanks to Johan

Hitchcock Holiday

merry thanks to Dominic Pettman for the image

Always Controversial Cornel West Disses Obama, Survives Cancer and Almost Spent His Life in Prison | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet

McNally: My fiancee said the saddest moment for her was watching how excited people were the night Barack Obama was elected. Share a little bit about your feelings that night and your feelings today.

West: I was ready because I draw a radical distinction between the symbolic and the substantial. As a critical supporter of Barack Obama, engaged in over 50 events for him from Iowa to Ohio, I knew that at a symbolic level something could happen that was unprecedented. And it did happen. At that symbolic level, I can understand the tears, I can understand the jubilation, I can understand the euphoria. But I always knew there was a sense in which he, now heading the American empire, was tied to the shadow government, tied to CIA, FBI, tied to the establishment waiting to embrace him. It was clear when he chose his economic team, when he chose his foreign policy team, he was choosing, of course, the recycled neo-liberals and recycled neo-Clintonites that substantially you're going to end up with these technocratic policies that consider poor people and working people as afterthoughts. Beginning with bankers, beginning with elites.

Symbolically, black man breaks through makes you want to break dance. So, yes, we have to be able to relate to both of these. So I resonate with your dear fiancee, because the hopes that were generated and the call for change, and then we end up with this recycled neo-liberalism. There's no fundamental change at all.

That's very real, but I think we do have to understand we had to bring the age of Reagan to a close. We had to bring the era of conservatism to a close. And then you try to unleash new possibilities. Of course, the question now is, how do we keep our fellow citizens awakened so it goes beyond the campaign for a candidate and really begin engaging in grassroots organizing and mobilizing.

McNally: I'm more disheartened these days than I was during the eight years of Bush. During those eight years I expected nothing. I was surprised by almost nothing. We fought, we did what we could But I feel a little sadness in my soul as I watch this one. You've said that Obama's looking at the wrong Lincoln and I think of Roosevelt who shows so well in Michael Moore's movie when he declares the New Bill of Rights.

West: The Four Freedoms, yes.

McNally: Roosevelt came to power as a moderate. Lincoln came to power as someone who had worked very comfortably with slavery. And it was the movements, it was the people that challenged and inspired them. How are we doing, and how are we going to do?

West: We are not doing well at all. If you look at the abolitionist movement and its impact on Abraham Lincoln. The Frederick Douglas's, the Harriet Beecher Stowe's, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Wendell Philips, Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman. The powerful abolitionist movement put pressure on Lincoln. Trade union movement put pressure on FDR. What kind of movement do we have? Hardly anything at all.

That's where the analogy breaks down. Barack Obama leans toward Wall Street, mesmerized by the elites, wants to be embraced by the establishment, wants to preserve his legacy as a president, more in the language of the neo-liberal and neo-conservative columnists than in the hearts and minds of everyday people.

McNally: So we both agree, this election does say the age of Reagan is over but it doesn't say what's starting, does it?

West: I think even my dear brother Michael Moore tends to put too much confidence in Barack Obama. In his film you get the sense that here comes Barack Obama speaking the language of deep democracy. No, no, no, he's been a liberal all his life. He uses that language to mobilize, but in the end he's going to capitulate and defer to the neo-liberal establishment, which is what he has done so far. Now gran

via www.alternet.org

Zizek: transforming contingency into fate

Is it not that, here also, one has to do it (offer an apology, choose terror) in order to see how it is superfluous? This paradox is sustained by the distinction between the “constative” and the “performative” dimensions, between “subject of the enunciated” and “subject of the enunciation”: at the level of the enunciated content, the whole operation is meaningless (why do it – offer an apology, go through terror – when it is superfluous?); however, what this common sense insight forgets is that it is only the “wrong” superfluous gesture which creates the subjective conditions which made it possible for the subject to really see why this gesture is superfluous. It only becomes possible to say that my apology is not necessary after I offer it; it only becomes possible to see how Terror is superfluous and destructive after one goes through it. The dialectical process is thus more refined than it may appear; the standard notion is that, in it, one can only arrive at the final truth through the path of errors, so that these errors are not simply discarded, but “sublated” in the final truth, preserved in it as its moments. What this standard notion misses is how the previous moments are preserved precisely as superfluous.

So the obvious critical approach “But is this idea of retroactively canceling the contingent historical conditions, of transforming contingency into Fate, not ideology at its formally purest, the very form of ideology?” misses the point, which is that this retroactivity is inscribed into reality itself: what is truly “ideology” is the idea that, freed from “ideological illusions,” one can pass from moment A to moment B directly, without retroactivity – say, that, in an ideally-authentic society, I can apologize and the other can say “I was hurt, apology was needed, and I accept it” without breaking any implicit rules; that we could get the modern rational State without having to pass through the “superfluous” detour of Terror. There is a well-known joke about cooking which relies on the same logic: “How anyone can make a good soup in one hour? You prepare all the ingredients, cut the vegetables, etc., boil water, put the ingredients into it, cook it in not too hot water for half an hour, occasionally stirring the water; when, after three quarters of an hour, you discover that the soup is tasteless and unpalatable, you throw it away, open up a good can of soup and quickly warm it up.” This is how we, humans, make soup.

via www.lacan.com

Krugman: It Seems Like Washington Wants Another Financial Disaster | | AlterNet

what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

via www.alternet.org

Let it go, let it go, let it go

Could anyone be surprised that the corporate lackeys parading around as Senators have dropped the public option? Should anyone believe that this is simply because the notorious Joe Lieberman couldn't support the pathetically watered down excuse for a public option, the one held up as both significant reform and meaningful compromise? It's a lie that they have no choice: this is what they choose--a massive give away to the insurance companies that continue to deny coverage and increase premium costs to extort every last cent out of us (my copays and emergency room visits just doubled). The bill reminds me of the food in Brazil, the disgusting mush accompanied by images of delicious dishes. The scandal is that the charade proceeds as if something important were at stake, when that was ditched long ago, by Obama himself when he took single-payer off the table.

Escalating war in Afghanistan (in the name of peace!), failure to prosecute torturers, failure to reign in Wall Street (in the name of helping Main Street!), failure to deliver on climate, support for the worst in Haiti, and failure to deliver adequate health care. And all this with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate.

This means that the Democrats are the bad guys. Why assume that they can't get what they want when they control both Houses? The answer must be that they are getting precisely what they want--money from the insurance sector, the finance sector, the arms and security sector. (In this respect, increases in obesity may be our best current resistance--if people are too fat to serve in the military, the military collapses; if obsesity puts too much stress on hospitals, the health system collapses; on the one hand, this doesn't make life any better for the poor and obese; on the other, at least they aren't reinforcing the system that feeds on their sacrifice and humiliation. So it's like another version of Bartelby and refusal. In the face of an injuction, one says, in a complete non-sequitor, Supersize Me!).

Clinton ushered in the reforms necessary for the intensification of neoliberalism. Obama is enabling neoliberalism to do its worst without repercussion. He is intensifying the authoritarian and militarist elements that attempt to control, that continue to develop strategies and technologies for control, and intensifying the already extreme inequalities that make control necessary. What makes Obama worst than Bush is that Obama leveraged progressive, democratic, youthful, anti-racist, multicultural hope that politics could still work for the people, that government could still restrain the strong and protect the less fortunate. He held out the promise that unbridled self-assertion abroad and at home would end. Neither glutonous banks, mortgage brokers, and credit card companies nor war hungry oil companies, private contractors, and neo-cons would determine our futures.

It's not ironic that Obama gave a highly publicized speech on education at the same time the CA system is crumbling. It's 1984, just like under Bush: anything that is praised is falling apart; anything that is criticized is really supported, endorsed. The same thing occurs with respect to finance. Obama wants to 'shame' Wall Street? Please. We know they have no shame. Who needs shame when you make over a billion a year? 'Shame' is what Obama says when the truth is that he has done nothing but feed the gall and hubris of Wall Street. 

Exploiting people's hope for change is key to the damage Obama has done and continues to do. Destroying any remaining sense of agency is crucial to ensuring total compliance. The thing is, last fall and winter, people were ready to make sacrifices, ready to be responsible, ready to grow up. The mood was almost one of relief that the pressures to enjoy, to consume, were over, that our decade long credit orgy had finally come to an end and that finding another way was possible. Green initiatives were not yet completely coopted. The financial system seemed broken nearly beyond repair, a clear indication of the ultimate failure of market fundamentalism--as even Alan Greenspan acknowledged: his entire world view was wrong. A reformed finance sector, green energy, single-payer health care, renewed public transportation and a shift away from car culture--these key programs for a new beginning seemed--and were--possible. Instead, the US of Goldman Sachs has chosen war and finance.

Maybe this collapse of our hope is the opportunity for its renewal. Maybe this collapse is the liberation from the fantasy that Democrats are democrats.

The newest surge isn't only in Afghanistan. It's here via the financial-military complex. And if Afghanistan will persevere (as we all expect it will, just like it has in the face of every foreign invasion), then we can too.

Desiring desire

I've wondered for a while, wondering rather than reading since these days I read only what others want me to read and not what I want to read, if the injunction not to cede one's desire means never to satisfy it or never to give in to the lie of satisfaction. It's likely that this is not a news flash, yet another example of the way what is obvious somehow becomes clear or obvious in a different way, as if one hadn't really known it before.

Holding onto desire would be holding onto a fantasy, letting the fantasy inspire, letting it take one's breath away, provide the incitement to getting out of bed, the last hope before going to sleep. Such a holding on, though, is fragile, always at risk of misplaced attempts at realization, misplaced because they forsake desire by presuming that it can and should be satisfied rather than cherished. Zizek describes the becoming of horrific of realized desire at the end of the The Piano Teacher.

Read in terms of cherishing desire, of taking care not to cede it but to attend to it, nurture it, provoke it, the place of the Party is not to realize communism but a desire for it, to produce and inspire subjects who will seek it, knowing their limitation, their ignorance, but not fetishing this impossibility as either futility or relativism but rather as the necessary condition for their desire. 

The easy part: the desire is already there.

The hard part: people fear the name.

Perhaps trust in the people has to mean trust in the desire, not the fear that leads to its misnaming.

And there may well be good reasons to say yes to sacrifice

Blessed with two days to myself, I've found myself in the annual embrace of paper crafts. This coincides nicely with holiday decorating and not so nicely with end of term grading. I've also accompanied the paper projects with serious attention to a Christmas playlist. In this context, "serious" means combining the likely taste of a 14 year old boy ("Gary," by MC Lars) and 11 year old girl ("All I Want for Christmas is You," Olivia Olson), Paul (selections from "The Reindeer Room") with my own preferences (some are too sappy to mention; I'll leave it at the list would be fine for a "Grey's Anatomy" Christmas special).

At any rate, one of the selections on the list is "Joy to the World" (sung by American Idol runner-up, David Arculeta--folks can guess who that one is for). And, there is the meaningfully, over-wrought, intensely sung, "let earth receive her king." This resonates with a theme in the post-apocalyptic series of novels of the Change (S.M. Sterling), namely, the king is chosen as the sacrifice of those who choose him.

My sense of recent discussions of sovereignty is an emphasis on an other who is sacrificed or an other who can be killed but not sacrified. My recollection is that Zizek generally rejects sacrificial logics, particularly insofar as they are necessary guarantees of the Other constituted through the sacrifice. The Other comes into being through the sacrifices made in its name. Indeed, Zizek tends to praise those feminine figures who sacrifice the sacrifice.

But I worry that this rejection of sacrifice too easily fits in with that constellation of enjoyment and libertarianism characteristic of late neoliberalism. The left fell in with this as it decried any restrictions on freedom as repression--as if all forms of repression were the same, that is, all unjust and never necessary.

The rejection of repression has been an accompaniment of contemporary emphases on democracy. The result is a view of democracy compatible with neoliberalization (that is, communicative capitalism). This is democracy as each getting what he wants, going for what he wants, and viewing any limitation on this self-assertion as an illegitimate over-reaching of government (or its failure).

The problem, then, is that democracy has been morphed into a form of government without sacrifice, as if such a thing were possible at all. Agents, no longer subjects, are essentially objects that perserve (hence again the popularity of political theory for objects; they combine immanently, without sacrifice). Hardt and Negri's multitude, for example, flows and desires, but seems incapable of sacrifice--although the rights asserted at the end of Empire are only possible as statements of those principles for which sacrifice is necessary.

What it looks like on the way down

We have a national social assistance program, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), that’s supposed to be our nation’s last line of defense against falling into the depths of poverty. Yet this program is so deeply inadequate that by 2008, the number of needy children receiving TANF fell to only 22 percent. Under the pre-“welfare reform” system of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1995, 62 percent of poor children were benefiting. Eligibility criteria are set at sub-poverty levels in some states, making poor children ineligible, and barriers such as lack of childcare and lack of access to employment have further kept poor children from receiving desperately needed economic assistance that a system such as TANF should provide.

Most Americans' sense of well-being is tied to their jobs. With unemployment and underemployment at over 17 percent, higher among black, Latino and women-maintained household populations, the fall from middle class to poverty is often quick and painful. America’s children suffer the most. Almost one in five children in the United States lives in poverty; almost one in four suffered from inadequate access to food last year. These numbers are on the rise without an end in sight.

And although two safety net programs in particular, food stamps and unemployment insurance, have proven fairly responsive during the recession, what does this mean in practical terms? About 57 percent of unemployed workers currently receive unemployment compensation thanks to the Recovery Act and congressional extensions. But the amounts are typically less than half of the wages they were receiving and many are suffering from the devastating loss of work-related health benefits.

via www.alternet.org

Do bottled messages arrive at their destination?

After my mother died, a large, open-mouthed bottle of messages she had written came to me. It's strange because the bottle wasn't for her. It was a Christmas gift from her to my father. The bottle has a top, like an apothecary jar. Attached to the red ribbon around the top is a handmade tag, something like 'Rx for depression: take one when needed.' Inside, are tiny white scrolls, tied with green ribbons. Each little scroll has a remedy, perhaps a promise.

I haven't read the little scrolls.

But maybe that isn't true because I seem to recall unwinding one and reading my mother's handwriting. I don't know if this is a real memory or my imagination. The jar remains full of little messages that I haven't read, that in fact no one has ever read.

I know or imagine that my mother made this for my father at a difficult time in the marriage. I know or imagine that I know that she was hurt that he never read them, never used them. I think she told me this one time. The jar sat on his dresser for years, filled with the white scrolls and never ran out as the top gathered dust.

I don't know why I have the bottle now, why it came to me. And so I wonder whether to open it and read the messages.

The prospect is overwhelming, a confrontation with the intensity of my mother's love for my father, a love so unselfish as to be infinitely demanding. She often reminded us that my father was first, well, right after God. I'm not sure ranking combines well with love, but she was. I imagine that the scolls prescribe an afternoon walk or a nice dinner, prescribing what would remedy her depression, make her feel loved, rather than cheer up my father. I try not to imagine the possibility that the messages might be sexually explicit--but I don't know whether I fear the confrontation with the reality of parental sex or the possibility of my mother's naivete. She was a staunch, even a professional, Southern Baptist.

If I read the notes, am I violating, intruding into, their relationship? Am I impinging on my father's privacy (he has since remarried)? Or am I somehow taking his place, acting in his stead, taking upon myself an encounter that he avoided or refused? 

The bottle is somewhere in my attic. That doesn't seem to be the messages' proper point of arrival. But where or what is that point? I would hate them to end up in a dump. Or is it possible that their destiny was always not to be read, that my mother wrote them hoping for something she knew would never come?

Robert Reich: structural changes

The basic assumption that jobs will eventually return when the economy recovers is probably wrong. Some jobs will come back, of course. But the reality that no one wants to talk about is a structural change in the economy that's been going on for years but which the Great Recession has dramatically accelerated.

Under the pressure of this awful recession, many companies have found ways to cut their payrolls for good. They’ve discovered that new software and computer technologies have made workers in Asia and Latin America just about as productive as Americans, and that the Internet allows far more work to be efficiently outsourced abroad.

This means many Americans won’t be rehired unless they’re willing to settle for much lower wages and benefits. Today's official unemployment numbers hide the extent to which Americans are already on this path. Among those with jobs, a large and growing number have had to accept lower pay as a condition for keeping them. Or they've lost higher-paying jobs and are now in a new ones that pays less.

Yet reducing unemployment by cutting wages merely exchanges one problem for another. We'll get jobs back but have more people working for pay they consider inadequate, more working families at or near poverty, and widening inequality. The nation will also have a harder time restarting the economy because so many more Americans lack the money they need to buy all the goods and services the economy can produce.

So let's be clear: The goal isn’t just more jobs. It's more jobs with good wages. Which means the fix isn’t just temporary measures to accelerate a jobs recovery, but permanent new investments in the productivity of Americans.

What sort of investments? Big ones that span many years: early childhood education for every young child, excellent K-12, fully-funded public higher education, more generous aid for kids from middle-class and poor families to attend college, good health care, more basic R&D that's done here in the U.S., better and more efficient public transit like light rail, a power grid that's up to the task, and so on.

The problem with education as the solution is the one unfolding in California (and present most everywhere else): neoliberalism's finance capital doesn't need more people. As the plutonomy papers made clear, consumerism under advanced inequality can still thrive: the very rich are the doing most of the buying. Reich's investment model presumes that education is the solution but that only works if the problem is a lack of suitable employees; his own analysis shows that there is a surplus of them. He's taking a short cut, providing a salve in a desperate effort to make the fundamental crisis he's identified look like it's manageable within capitalism's terms.

It's not.

via robertreich.blogspot.com

The wages of sin are really, really good

   

from here

Zizek: a bit of transgression

What we should always bear in mind is that there is nothing »spontaneous« in such transgressive outbursts. A close look demonstrates that we truly enjoy smoking and drinking only in public, as part of a public “carnival,” the sacred suspension of ordinary rules. The same goes even for swearing and sex: none of them is at its most radical an activity in which we “explode” in spontaneous passion against the stifled public conventions – they are, on the contrary, both practiced “against the pleasure principle,” for the gaze of the Other. (A personal note: I like to swear only in public, never in private, where I find doing it stupid and inappropriate, indecent even.) Violating the public rules is thus not done by the private ego, but is enjoined by the same public rules which are in themselves redoubled, divided. This is what distinguishes such violations from tolerant wisdom: the stance of tolerant wisdom (like the proverbial Catholic attitude of ignoring – suggesting even – occasional infidelities if they help keeping the marriage) allows for private transgressions, for the transgressions outside the public gaze. 

How does one really become adult? By way of knowing when to violate the explicit rule one is committed to. So, with regard to marriage, one can well say that one becomes adult when one is able to commit adultery. The only proof of reason is occasional laps into “irrationality” (as Hegel knew very well). The only proof of taste is that one knows how to occasionally like things which do not meet the criteria of high taste; the one who strictly follows high taste thereby displays his lack of taste. (A person who expresses his admiration for Beethoven’s 9th symphony or other masterpieces of Western civilization immediately bears witness to his tastelessness – a true taste is displayed by praising a minor work by Beethoven as superior to his “greatest hits,” like my friend Mladen Dolar, an absolute Schubert fan who prefers Schubert’s unknown male-chorus peaces (celebrating hunters’ reunions, etc.) to his much better known songs.)

Perhaps, one should turn around the terms of Bertrand Russell’s well-known barber-paradox (does the barber who follows the rule of shaving all the people who do not shave themselves shave himself?) which led him to prohibit self-inclusion, i.e., inconsistent self-redoubling, as the only way to avoid contradiction: what if, on the contrary, the “consistent” sticking to one’s rules which is truly self-contradictory, i.e., which turns into its opposite? (If you want to follow high taste consistently, you display your tastelessness, etc.) And what if the only way to truly be reasonable or to truly display taste is to fully engage in self-redoubling, to self-reflexively violate the rule one follows (to occasionally lap into tastelessness or abandon reason)?

It is as if, in today’s permissive society, transgressive violations are permitted, but in a “privatized” form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of its public-spectacle-ritual dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our private weird practices, but they remain our private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps, one should turn around here the standard formula of fetishist disavowal: “I know very well (to obey the rules), but nonetheless… (I occasionally violate them, since this is part of the rules).” In today’s permissive society, the predominant stance is rather: “I believe (that permanent hedonist transgressions are what makes life worth living), but nonetheless… (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but just a fake coloring which re-asserts the grey social reality.”

via www.lacan.com

Neoliberal arts: 23 Private College Presidents Made More Than $1 Million

The economic situation at private colleges is not quite the same as that in the California system. It's bad and worsening in a rather different way. For some, the crisis was the depletion of endowments. Aggressive investment practices, the same practices of hedge fund managers and currency traders--accessorized with swagger, arrogance, and the elitism of those who think that their ability to take risks with other people's money proves their superiority--has meant multi-million dollar declines in endowments and hence in operating budgets. For colleges and universities that depend on tuition for their operating expenses, the collapse in housing values combined with the rise in unemployment has led to a steep decline in the numbers of students willing or able to pay the high price of private tuition.

The new demand--from boards and administrations: cut, cut, cut.

But not everything:

...23 private college presidents made over $1 million in total compensation, and 110 made more than $500,000. Such large pay packages are still relatively new in higher education: as recently as 2002, there were no million-dollar presidents, only four earning more than $800,000, and 27 earning more than $500,000.

Over all, the Chronicle survey found, the median pay for presidents of the 419 private colleges and universities surveyed was $358,746, a 6.5 percent increase over the previous year. Over the last five years, the median presidential pay, adjusted for inflation, grew by 14 percent.

Why is university presidents’ pay going up so much?

“I think the answer you’d get from the governing boards that set these salaries is that it’s a market and it’s increasingly hard to find these people,” said Jeffrey Selingo, editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has published its compensation survey annually since 1993. “That said, almost every year, presidential salaries have gone up faster than inflation, and faster than tuition, which rankles some people on campus.”

via www.nytimes.com

These numbers were from before last fall's market collapse. What they indicate, however, is the extent to which the boards at private colleges and universities treat and understand higher education in corporate, market, terms. Presidents are CEOs. They are paid and treated like CEOs. The language of markets--how difficult it is to find good people--is telling: what about faculty members, people who have usually dedicated themselves to research, teaching, the production of knowledge for its own sake, what about hiring from within these ranks of those who don't think of their careers in terms of paychecks?

The response would have to do with fund-raising, no doubt. This is a skill that most faculty have not developed and really don't care to. Yet, this is misleading because private colleges and universities have fund-raising departments and professionals--paid far less than our presidents--who do this work. The president isn't the primary fundraiser; he or she is the face of fund-raising; the groundwork is generally done by others, who keep files and accounts and collect information and develop plans and all the rest.

Additionally, as with other CEOs over the last decade, college presidents' salaries don't seem to have anything to do with actual achievements--increase in ranking, increase in retention, significant increase in fund-raising. Rather, it is just the neoliberal culture, the one that tells boards that they need to pay more to get the right person--just like they do in business and finance.

And, don't forget the perks--golden parachutes protecting the highly paid even as someone who is denied tenure faces destitution. To be clear: a college or university president generally receives a large severance package when leaving. So, if he or she has been at a college for 5 years, living in a house provided by the college and collecting, say, half a million a year, he or she will still pocket a million or so when leaving. A faculty member who is denied tenured, someone who has worked at a school for 5-7 years, teaching a heavy load, trying to publish, often with lingering debt from graduate school, and paid probably around 60K a year, will leave with nothing.

The neoliberalization of colleges and universities separates top administrators from faculty. Faculty produce knowledge and graduates. We are knowledge workers. Top administrators, paid in some institutions more than 20 times what entry-level faculty are paid and 40 times what secretaries are paid, are allied with the CEO class and take on their values.

What do their values reflect? A change from liberal arts education to neoliberal arts education. Here's a list. Feel free to pick and choose--like from a menu of new forms of degradation of intellectual labor:

--research only counts if it leads to profit, security, or control; it is nearly always carried out only at Ivy League and research 1 universities, and then only valuable if connected to or part of large grants; everything else is a waste of time and hence should be squeezed out;

--bookstores are profit-generators; they should be stocked with clothes and gifts;

--libraries are computer-centers; collections and print journals are too expensive, no one needs to visit an archive, research skills are trivial after google; reading takes too long, anyway;

--lectures are boring; only bring in lecturers who are big stars; the rest of the time, forgo lectures and encourage students to talk about how they feel about what they haven't read; 

--teaching is about being well-liked and entertaining; learning should be fun, fun, fun; if it's not fun, why bother?

--students are to be evaluated according to strictly measurable standards; each assessment should provide predictors of the student's potential value at generating profit, security, or control; any student activities or pursuits that detract from these are endeavors must be eliminated (creative writing, alcohol, political protests, MMORPGs);

--insecurity and self-doubt should be encouraged, especially if it can be amplified into paranoia; such insecurity and self-doubt will prevent students and faculty from working together against the neoliberal arts institution;

--begin with bribes so as to generate good will and compliance: generous tuition aid packages that insure constant policing and no-risk course choices (the repercussions of losing financial aid are too great); start-up packages for new faculty that require constant grant-writing for matching funds and discourage long-term, creative, or impractical projects (as well as installing suspicion and competitiveness towards other academics);

--spin new revenue generating ventures: leadership programs (who needs followers, cooperation, or actual skills?), abroad programs (tourism for credit); internship programs (paying someone to work for them);

--faculty and support staff are a dime a dozen; make sure they know this; after all, those who can't do teach and if the egg-heads knew anything they'd be in finance.

An old school approach to liberal arts education (see Michael Berube on this), would emphasize the development of capacities to appreciate different ways of knowing, of asking questions, of thinking about where we are and how we got here. It would tend to view the liberal arts college as a community, a sort of knowledge commons. Neoliberal arts values division, entertainment, and surveillance. It also relies on competition without competition: ranking and evaluating and eliminating even as the propaganda promises that everyone is a winner, a leader, a success-story (it's rough paying 50K a year to end up just a follower or unemployed with a lot of debt and no skills). It wants education without education, that is, people creative enough to think of new ways to extract money and attention but not so creative that they reject the values forced upon them.

And, the thing is, rejecting neoliberal arts, attacking what college and universities have devolved into over the last 30 years, doesn't really matter: neoliberalism doesn't need a large, educated, middle class. It pays the few to exploit the many.

German politicians, media warn about the next global financial crisis

Schäuble compared the present financial crisis with the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years earlier. “The financial crisis will change the world as powerfully as did the fall of the [Berlin] Wall. The balance between America, Asia and Europe is shifting dramatically,” he told Bild am Sonntag. He also appealed to bankers to exercise restraint when it came to their bonus payments.

Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, expressed fears about a social collapse if there is a new round of bank failures. “It is surely too early to say the crisis is over,” he told a European congress of bankers in Frankfurt, adding the warning: “Our democracies will not accept twice giving such extensive support to the financial sector with taxpayers’ money.”

The enormous stock market bubble that has formed over the past eight months is seen as the biggest source of danger of another crash. The most important share indices—the Dow Jones, the Japanese Nikkei and the German DAX—have risen by around 50 to 60 percent since March. The prices of crude oil, copper and other raw materials have also more than doubled. These enormous increases are not based upon any corresponding economic growth. On the contrary, economic activity has fallen in numerous countries and many firms are still posting losses.

The rally in stock prices is due to the enormous liquidity that governments and central banks have pumped into the economy. Financial establishments are able to borrow unlimited sums of money from the central banks at virtually zero interest, and thus make high profits from their speculative deals. The trillions in taxpayers’ money that are being spent to revive the economy do not flow into investments, but into speculative deals, high payouts to shareholders, and exorbitant bonus payments for the bankers.

via www.wsws.org

Comments on the necrosocial

I was re-reading The Necrosocial, an essay or polemic written in connection with the UC strike and occupation last week. I want to think about two aspects of the essay, not quite as a critique but more in an effort to push my own thinking. These two aspects involve shifting the terms from social death to death of the social and drive as a domain between the two deaths. I'll talk about the first aspect here and, I hope, discuss the second in a follow up post.

First, the essay describes the university as

a factory of  meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death.  A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated.

On the one hand, the discussion of social death incorporates Marxist ideas of dead, accumulated labor as well as from New Left critiques of the university's role in support the military-industrial-bureaucratic state machine. On the other, it includes a contemporary critique of identity categories (understood very broadly) as divisions enabling the division and domination of the people:

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us.  Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be.  That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning.  We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot.

This passage suggests a social life folded in on itself and intensified, amplified to the extent that the ever fragmented social dissolves in a multitude of singularities. These singularities are related through the slashes that separate them, as well as through the common acceptance of a dynamic of singularity, a becoming singular, becoming unique, to the point that absorbs and destroys in possibility of social relation, that is, relations that are not already contained in economies of profit and loss, domination and submission. The passage evokes the shift from disciplinary to control societies, suggesting thereby the ways that singularization itself functions as a mechanism of control as well as the ways that the university contributes to the maintenance and extension of control mechanisms as it repeats injunctions to identify and specify.

The death of the social in societies of control thus follows directly from the 'intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices; (Empire 23). Normalizing, though, should be understood in terms of norms of idenfitication and separation, injunctions to become unique.

Under in terms of the normalization of uniqueness in the society of control (a commodified, reified uniqueness that condemns newly formed and fragile individuals to isolation in a multitude of singularities, a kind of isolation radically different from the alienation criticized in the 50s and 60s), the university as a factory of meaning separate from reality makes a kind of sense. But I don't think that the primary problem at stake in the death of social is the production of the illusion that meaning and reality are separated. In fact, this is where the analysis in "The Necrosocial" begins to miss its target (and, in fact, in the later paragraphs of the essay, make this point: "Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning."). The meaning of the university is reality; the values of the machine constitute reality. Reality is the problem--and our failure to remake it into what it could or should mean.

I can put this differently, drawing--to no one's surprise, from Zizek's recent injunctions to think: part of the contemporary challenge is breaking the absorption of meaning into neoliberal capitalist reality, waking up from the dream that low taxes and beanie babies are the road to happiness, disconnecting from the illusion that efficiency measures and competition access the world we want rather than providing the language of our capture. The challenge is separating meaning from this reality in order to make a new one. Some separations are better than others.

Manola Antonioli: Guattari's Relevance

"Crisis" and "Recovery"

Among the recurrent themes in these pages, one finds a critique - more relevant now than ever - of the perpetual "crisis" discourse which has become a tremendous instrument of "governance" and "normalization." Already in the introduction, Guattari reminds us that the "crises" (the multiple crises that capitalist societies unceasingly experience among which the one we are living through today is but the latest) are not inescapable inevitabilities, but the direct consequence of the economic order, supported by capitalist political strategies on a planetary scale. Consequently, we never stop "mistaking the effect for the cause" and justifying political arbitrages by the harsh necessities of an economy that is now escaping all governmental control, by pretending to forget that deregulation of the economy and the financial sector on a global level was made possible only by the prerequisite political choices. In this way, everything is implemented so as to present the crisis to us as an "obvious apodictic Fact:" "Unemployment, poverty rain down on humanity like Biblical plagues. Under these conditions, one can no longer conceive of any but a single - with a few variants - possible economic policy in response to the sole conceivable description of economic policy." (p. 56)

The specter of the crisis (the power of which is increased tenfold in the biopolitical domain today by the media one-upsmanship over mutant viruses and pandemics that threaten us from all sides) is associated with the myth of "emergence from the tunnel," of the "great recovery," the precursors of which are unceasingly detected in order to mask the irreversible character of the situation. That's how one aims at obscuring and warding off the necessity for a radical change in economic policy, for an in-depth transformation of social subjectivity that would be in a position to confront the continual acceleration of techno-scientific revolution without leading to ever more mutilating and paralyzing effects. For a long time, according to Guattari, the crisis has no longer been a transitory phase destined to lead to a miraculous "recovery," but the sign of a radical malfunction in the mechanisms managing production and wealth flows: "Even the most narrow-minded economists are discovering with amazement a sort of madness to these systems and feel the urgency of alternative solutions." (p. 131)

via www.truthout.org

the scandal of democracy: no qualifications for rule

a world sceptical of free markets

Survey finds a world sceptical of free markets

By Alan Beattie in London

Published: November 23 2009 02:00 | Last updated: November 23 2009 02:00

The free market economy is flawed but should be addressed by regulation and reform rather than being replaced by a new economic system, according to a poll conducted in 27 countries.

The survey, commissioned by the BBC World Service, found widespread but measured scepticism of the world economic system in light of the financial crisis. Carried out to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the survey suggests hopes held then may since have been dashed. Doug Miller, chairman of Globe-Scan, which conducted the survey, said: "It appears that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 may not have been the crushing victory for free-market capitalism that it seemed at the time - particularly after the events of the last 12 months."

The poll, which surveyed almost 30,000 people, revealed differences between nations, with attitudes largely corresponding to popular perceptions of national cultures. In the US, one in four respondents thought that capitalism was working well. Pakistan was the only other country to get above 20 per cent on that score.

Across the sample, 51 per cent thought that free-market capitalism had problems that could be addressed by regulation and reform, with 23 per cent calling for an entirely new system. In France, 43 per cent wanted radical change, almost as many as wanted only moderate reform at 47 per cent.

In more than half the countries, most wanted their government to be more active in owning or directly controlling major industries, while 67 per cent of the total wanted the state to intervene to distribute wealth more evenly.

Steven Kull of the University of Maryland, which helped with the survey, said: "Some features of socialism . . . continue to appeal to many people."

The poll found a sharp divide over the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989. Large majorities in the rich countries regarded it as a positive development, contrasting with some nostalgia among former Soviet countries and elsewhere in the developing world. A majority of Russians (61 per cent) and Ukrainians (54 per cent) regarded the disintegration of the bloc as mainly a bad thing.

via www.ft.com

If democracy is to come...

If democracy isn't here but is to come, then preparations are in order.

What kind?

First, acknowledgement of non-democracy. It's not here and now, so what is here and now should not be defended as democratic but rejected as non-democratic.

Second, insofar as democracy is not here and now, pretenses to democracy, here and now, are distractions, fantasies, efforts to displace the intrusion of the Real of non-democracy. They are lures into thinking that we are already democrats.

Third, democracy requires the production of democratic subjects. But this isn't a project of democracy (which would presume democracy here and now). It's a project for democracy. Don't pretend there is a 'we' capable of ruling itself (a multitude of singularities might be productive, but it isn't self-governing).

Fourth, the production of democratic subjects is a challenge; if it has been done before, it has only been achieved temporarily. The production is neither certain, secure, nor robust. There are lots of glitches and faux democrats out there on the market.

Fifth, part of the challenge is knowing what is necessary for a project or form of life that doesn't exist and when it has has been fragile. Some possible ways to produce democratic subjects:

--rule and be ruled in turn: being ruled is as important as ruling; in practice, this means frequent changes in position (to enable people to learn new skills in ruling and being ruled as much as to prevent the not yet democratic from doing really major damage);

--censorship: the not-yet-democratic too easily mistake their opinions for opinions that matter; if there are limits on what can be said, the not-yet-democratic have barriers to protest, battles to fight; they can learn from experience what is worth fighting for; they can start to desire something like democracy;

--installation of a lack: the not-yet-democratic will remain not-yet until they desire democracy; this desire has to be cultivated, installed, instigated.