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Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20111102174235/http://miguelitoh2o.posterous.com:80/
Don't talk to me about the efficiency of the market he cried, as he drew the automatic weapon from his waistband, and advanced on the Customer Service Department.
It is a slow day in a small Irish town. The rain is misting and the streets are deserted.
Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and having a hard time making ends meet, let alone climbing out of debt.
On this particular day a rich German drives into the town, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.
The owner gives him the keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the feed co-op.
The guy at the Farmers’ Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the pub.
The publican slips the money to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has fallen on hard times and had to offer her services on credit.
The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note.
The hotel proprietor puts the €100 note back on the counter.
At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the €100 note, pockets the money, and leaves town.
No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking forward to a brighter future.
And that, gentle reader, is how a successful bailout works.
We've got a minor league version of this technology being exhibited in the plaza of San Miguel de Allende every weekend. It's a bit of a piker show compared to this one:
In looking for analogues to the record of Barack Obama as President, many look to Hoover. But I think Woodrow Wilson offers some interesting comparisons. Here is an exerpt from the collection of Wilson's campaign speeches from the election of 1912 in his book, The New Freedom. Compare this alternative he offers to Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party with his actual performance once in office. "Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him. For if he begins to sell to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will refuse to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new man's wares. And this is the country which has lifted to the admiration of the world its ideals of absolutely free opportunity, where no man is supposed to be under any limitation except the limitations of his character and of his mind; where there is supposed to be no distinction of class, no distinction of blood, no distinction of social status, but where men win or lose on their merits... A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom... Shall we try to get the grip of monopoly away from our lives, or shall we not? Shall we withhold our hand and say monopoly is inevitable, that all that we can do is to regulate it? Shall we say that all that we can do is to put government in competition with monopoly and try its strength against it? Shall we admit that the creature of our own hands is stronger than we are? We have been dreading all along the time when the combined power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government. Have we come to a time when the President of the United States or any man who wishes to be the President must doff his cap in the presence of this high finance, and say, "You are our inevitable master, but we will see how we can make the best of it?" We are at the parting of the ways. We have, not one or two or three, but many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have, not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men. If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don't you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don't you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? Must capture the government? They have already captured it. Are you going to invite those inside to stay inside? They don't have to get there. They are there. Are you going to own your own premises, or are you not? That is your choice. Are you going to say: "You didn't get into the house the right way, but you are in there, God bless you; we will stand out here in the cold and you can hand us out something once in a while?" At the least, under the plan I am opposing, there will be an avowed partnership between the government and the trusts. I take it that the firm will be ostensibly controlled by the senior member. For I take it that the government of the United States is at least the senior member, though the younger member has all along been running the business. But when all the momentum, when all the energy, when a great deal of the genius, as so often happens in partnerships the world over, is with the junior partner, I don't think that the superintendence of the senior partner is going to amount to very much. And I don't believe that benevolence can be read into the hearts of the trusts by the superintendence and suggestions of the federal government; because the government has never within my recollection had its suggestions accepted by the trusts. On the contrary, the suggestions of the trusts have been accepted by the government. There is no hope to be seen for the people of the United States until the partnership is dissolved. And the business of the party now entrusted with power is going to be to dissolve it. Those who supported the third party supported, I believe, a program perfectly agreeable to the monopolies. How those who have been fighting monopoly through all their career can reconcile the continuation of the battle under the banner of the very men they have been fighting, I cannot imagine. I challenge the program in its fundamentals as not a progressive program at all. Why did Mr. Gary suggest this very method when he was at the head of the Steel Trust? Why is this very method commended here, there, and everywhere by the men who are interested in the maintenance of the present economic system of the United States? Why do the men who do not wish to be disturbed urge the adoption of this program? The rest of the program is very handsome; there is beating in it a great pulse of sympathy for the human race. But I do not want the sympathy of the trusts for the human race. I do not want their condescending assistance. And I warn every progressive Republican that by lending his assistance to this program he is playing false to the very cause in which he had enlisted. That cause was a battle against monopoly, against control, against the concentration of power in our economic development, against all those things that interfere with absolutely free enterprise. I believe that some day these gentlemen will wake up and realize that they have misplaced their trust, not in an individual, it may be, but in a program which is fatal to the things we hold dearest. If there is any meaning in the things I have been urging, it is this: that the incubus that lies upon this country is the present monopolistic organization of our industrial life. That is the thing which certain Republicans became "insurgents" in order to throw off. And yet some of them allowed themselves to be so misled as to go into the camp of the third party in order to remove what the third party proposed to legalize. My point is that this is a method conceived from the point of view of the very men who are to be controlled, and that this is just the wrong point of view from which to conceive it... One of the wonderful things about America, to my mind, is this: that for more than a generation it has allowed itself to be governed by persons who were not invited to govern it. A singular thing about the people of the United States is their almost infinite patience, their willingness to stand quietly by and see things done which they have voted against and do not want done, and yet never lay the hand of disorder upon any arrangement of government. There is hardly a part of the United States where men are not aware that secret private purposes and interests have been running the government. They have been running it through the agency of those interesting persons whom we call political "bosses." A boss is not so much a politician as the business agent in politics of the special interests. The boss is not a partisan; he is quite above politics! He has an understanding with the boss of the other party, so that, whether it is heads or tails, we lose. The two receive contributions from the same sources, and they spend those contributions for the same purposes... The critical moment in the choosing of officials is that of their nomination more often than that of their election. When two party organizations, nominally opposing each other but actually working in perfect understanding and co-operation, see to it that both tickets have the same kind of men on them, it is Tweedledum or Tweedledee, so far as the people are concerned; the political managers have us coming and going. We may delude ourselves with the pleasing belief that we are electing our own officials, but of course the fact is we are merely making an indifferent and ineffectual choice between two sets of men named by interests which are not ours." Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, 1913
In an ordinary human life span of three score years and ten, a citizen of the republic (a John Adams or a Benjamin Franklin) might be expected to have an intrinsic sense of when the moment arrives for step one—individual accumulation—to cease, or at least slow down, and step two—public service—to commence or accelerate, in the performance of Hyde's "Republican Two-Step." But if a corporate "person" can live forever, with no responsibilities to the public and no social liabilities, and can find no limit to its accumulative capacities and desires, then why should it ever feel the need to move from step one to step two?
By toggling back and forth between the eighteenth century and nowadays, Lewis Hyde's Common as Air skips across the era in which corporate personhood took on its modern form, and thus underplays an essential element of this larger story. To fill in this gap, let me turn to an older work, Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin's classic study, Commonwealth (1947), written in a different era but for purposes strikingly similar to those of Lewis Hyde.
The Handlins, like Hyde, wanted to know how we got here. Their project was sponsored by the Committee on Research in Economic History, a New Deal-era endeavor to explore the historical relationship between government and economy. As the Handlins described it in the preface to their revised edition, "the guiding question when the research began was an assessment of the extent to which laissez faire was important in the American economy before 1860." At the time they began their project, it was widely assumed that prior to the New Deal, government had played little part in the American economy.
What the Handlins found was strikingly different. By studying the role of the state in economic affairs in Massachusetts, they came to the initial conclusion that "laissez faire" was not even a relevant term in the commonwealth's early history. The directing hand of the General Court was so prevalent, and so unquestioned, in countless aspects of economic life as to make "discussion of the development of economic policy in terms of laissez faire hardly meaningful… The hundreds of laws regulating the flow of water to mills, setting the time for the taking of alewives or providing for the inspection of potash were a challenge. What was their meaning? Why did men enact them? What function did they serve?" To answer these questions, the Handlins investigated the history of corporations, the economic institution of the early republic most closely associated with public policy.
This is precisely the point where the Handlins' subject coincides with Lewis Hyde's. For, like patent and copyright law, the corporation in the early republic was initially designed to perform an intricate dance, a variation of the Republican Two-Step. If patents and copyrights were meant to benefit individuals immediately and the public in the long run, the case with corporations would be roughly the opposite. The public would immediately benefit from the legislature's creation of corporations, because corporations would take on useful tasks that lay beyond the means of any individual to perform, and which the state lacked the resources to manage on its own.
To offset the risks of such large ventures, the commonwealth could grant special privileges to corporations, such as unlimited duration, monopoly privileges, and the right to sell shares with limited liability to investors. The net result would be a public good—a reliable bridge across the Charles River, for instance—at minimal cost to the citizens at large. Eventually, the corporate undertakers and their investors might profit from the venture, but only if it actually provided the intended public good.
Where does this leave the Andean demonstrators in the face of U.S.-Ecuador trade agreements? Where does it leave us all, in the face of Google and its 17,000 new patents? Might an answer lie in carrying forward the logic of Common as Air and rethinking the Republican Two-Step?
For all those who no longer believe in the ability of the state, the citizens' collective, to identify a public good beyond the interests of any given person, i.e. for "libertarians" (in U.S. terminology) or "liberals" (as the rest of the world uses the term) who see nothing but the market's invisible hand as the only justifiable good, we ask this: if you can see no coherent way for the state to identify and enforce Step Two—service to the public - then why should the state continue to grant Step One—special privileges to "persons" of any kind? The Constitution gives Congress the power to promote science and useful arts through patent and copyright protection, but Congress does not have to exercise that power, which is a vestige of a monarchical world, and can change the terms of those protections. State law creates the privileges that corporations often use in ways that cause demonstrable harm, but state laws can change these institutions as well. However, we suspect that those who clamor for "free markets" do not actually have the courage of their convictions necessary to give up the privileges. Having lost sight of the civic responsibilities of the Republican Two-Step, they have become equally blind to the service that the state now offers them in the extension of copyrights and corporate liability protection. At times it takes the black smoke of a street protest to remind us just how hardened and lopsided government-backed privileges have become in the United States.
For all those who continue to believe in the commonwealth ideal, that our government can identify measures of public well-being beyond the private interests of individuals (the camp in which we place ourselves), we urge that an active case be made to promote a better understanding of this history in the effort to restore Step Two of the Republican Two-Step. Yes, the privileges of corporations, copyright, and patent may be vestiges of an abandoned monarchical world. But they are also deeply entrenched in our world, probably impossible to eradicate entirely. Our only alternative is to fight for what makes the privileges of corporation and copyright worth preserving. We can once again extend the state's power, our collective power as citizens, to insist that private property and public responsibility be inextricably linked, and that privilege always be made to benefit the public, and we can create ways to equalize the power of those, like Andean Indians, overwhelmed by the limitless privileges of others. Otherwise, we as citizens of the republic, who created these privileges through our constitutions and laws for the sake of the public good, will stand impotent in the face of the monsters these creations have become.
I won't copy and paste it all here, but if you haven't read this please do so.
For those who desire to create a society based on the principle of human freedom, direct action is simply the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free. - David Graeber
I figure, when it started, they said, "Well, we're gonna have to have some rules" -- that's how the law starts, out of that fact. "Let's see. I tell you what we'll do. We'll have a vote. We'll sleep in Area A. Is that cool?" "OK, good." "We'll eat in Area B. Good?" "Good." "We'll throw a crap in area C. Good?" "Good." Simple rules. So, everything went along pretty cool, you know, everybody's very happy. One night everybody was sleeping, one guy woke up, Pow! He got a faceful of crap, and he said: "Hey, what's the deal here, I thought we had a rule: Eat, Sleep, and Crap, and I was sleeping and I got a faceful of crap." So they said, "Well, ah, the rule was substantive --" See, that's what the Fourteenth Amendment is. It regulates the rights but it doesn't do anuthing about it. It just says, That's where it's at. "We'll have to do something to enforce the provisions, to give it some teeth. Here's the deal: If everybody throws any crap on us while we're sleeping, they get thrown in the craphouse. Agreed?" "Well, everybody?" "Yeah." "But what if it's my mother?" "You don't understand. Your mother would be the fact. That doesn't have anything to do with it. It's just the rule, Eat, Sleep and Crap. Anybody throws any crap on us they get thrown in the craphouse. Your mother doesn't enter into it at all. Everybody gets thrown in the craphouse -- priests, rabbis, they'll all go. Agreed?" "OK, agreed." OK. Now, it's going along very cool, guy's sleeping. Pow! Gets a faceful of crap. Now he wakes up and sees he's all alone, and he looks, and everyone's giving a big party. He says, "Hey, what's the deal? I thought we had a rule, Eat, Sleep, and Crap, and you just threw a faceful of crap on me." They said, "Oh, this is a religious holiday, and we told you many times that if you're going to live your indecent life and sleep all day, you deserve to have crap thrown on you while you're sleeping." And the guy says, "Bullshit, the rule's the rule." And this guy started to separate the church and the state, right down the middle, Pow! Here's the church rule, and here's the federal rule. OK, everything's going along cool, one guy says, "Hey, wait a minute. Though we made the rule, how're we going to get somebody to throw somebody in the craphouse? We need somebody to enforce it -- law enforcement." Now they put up this sign on the wall, "WANTED, LAW ENFORCEMENT." Guys applied for the job: "Look. Here's our problem, see, we're trying to get some sleep and people keep throwing crap on us. Now we want somebody to throw them right in the craphouse. And I'm delegated to do the hiring here, and, ah, here's what the job is. "You see, they won't go in the craphouse by themselves. And we all agreed on the rule, now, and we firmed it up, so there's nobody gets out of it, everybody's vulnerable, we're gonna throw them right in the craphouse. "But ya see, I can't do it cause I do business with these assholes, and it looks bad for me, you know, ah . . . so I want somebody to do it for me, you know? So I tell you what: Here's a stick and a gun and you do it -- but wait till I'm out of the room. And, wherever it happens, see, I'll wait back here and I'll watch, you know, and you make sure you kick 'em in the ass and throw 'em in there. "Now you'll hear me say alotta times that it takes a certain kind of mentality to do that work, you know, and all that bullshit, you know, but you understand, it's all horseshit and you just kick em in the ass and make sure it's done." So what happens? Now comes the riot, or the marches -- everybody's wailing, screaming. And you got a guy there, who's standing with a short-sleeved shirt on and a stick in his hand, and the people are yelling, "Gestapo! Gestapo!" at him: "Gestapo? You asshole, I'm the mailman!" That's another big problem. People can't separate the authority and the people who have the authority vested in them. I think you see that a lot in the demonstrations. Cause actually the people are demonstrating not against Vietnam -- they're demonstrating against the police department. Actually, against policemen. Because they have that concept -- that the law and the law enforcement are one.
I'm one of those people who are participants in the Gallup Poll. The most recent one concerns social issues, and the third question asked me whether I approve or disapprove of the way the Prez is handling these different issues: the economy, job creation, the environment, social security, fuel/energy, education policy, healthcare reform, immigration, terrorism. the federal deficit, Iraq, Afghanistan, and foreign affairs.I found I'd answered "disapprove" in every category with the exception of 'education', which I checked "Don't know". So this is his rating he gets from someone who donated to, and volunteered for his 2008 campaign. He'd better hope the Republicans put up a total Gumby to oppose him in 2012. From what I can see of the Republican field of candidates, he might just get his wish.
The natives are restless. We used to get to come into the castle when the marauders and pillagers arrived at the city’s walls in exchange for our support and defense of the realm. Not any longer. This war is being fought in the realm of ideas and promulgated by the plutocracy through their public relation branches, aka the MSM. The people have taken to the streets with amorphous discontent and amorphous demands. The only given is that they’re not going to go away. They’ve spied the little man behind the green curtain, dispensing aphorisms, misinformation, and advice, and have decided to call him out. It’s become clear that no one in a position of power or wealth gives a fig for them. The best plan the owners of the world can come up with is to discredit them, or failing that co-opt them and their movement. With luck de-fuse the smoldering keg on the doorsteps of our moneyed class. With more luck, that moneyed class will recoup all or most of the debt owed them from the 99% who don’t enjoy the economic clout to cause the renegotiation of their debt. The most the 99% can count on is to have legislation introduced to forgive penalties on early withdrawals from their IRA accounts so they might pay back the bankers while risking their personal safety net.
It becomes harder to dismantle this social bomb as the people get closer to the edge of economic survival, but these are some committed flaks we’re up against. As each day passes it becomes clear that any sense of noblesse oblige that may have once existed in the upper echelons of society has devolved into a cynical PR operation designed to sway public opinion toward the belief that someone, anyone still cares about those 99% of Americans who don’t belong to the club. And to instill fear of changing the status quo. Still, as resources dwindle and personal debt accumulates while the middle class strives to maintain a lifestyle before it diminishes to mere economic survival; it becomes harder to distract the unwashed masses from the underlying truths. As a Buddhist might say: Painted cakes don’t satisfy hunger. And no matter how hard the economic elite spin this, the underlying reality that is sparking the public’s discontent remains the same. I take heart in the way the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its’ failed ideas and implementations, for the same thing can happen here in the West. All the PR in the political universe can’t spin away the level of unemployment and debt slavery that is the apparent goal of the plutocracy.
Eventually the oligopoly will call out the police in an effort to maintain order. They’re all ready there with swinging batons and pepper spray here in the early skirmishes of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is just the beginning. It will get worse, and maybe we’ll have our own “uniquely American” version of tanks entering Tienamen Square, and a few martyrs to rally around, but probably not. The oligarchy learned that lesson pretty well at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. More likely the movement will be baited, provoked into doing something that could ostensibly justify quick and decisive police action to shut it down, while a parallel slam by the MSM press discredits the movement. As leaders emerge, there will be attempts to expose any flaws in their personal histories, and otherwise discredit any movement mouthpieces that emerge. In the meantime they’ll be trying to trip the rabble up in beltway debates in which most sane non-policy wonks will end up in verbal quicksand sooner or later. If not, they’ll seek a way to co-opt the movement, then sucker those who fall for it in the standard bait-and-switch following the election.
Still, I don’t see this going the way the oligopoly might want it to. We’ve reached a kind of saturation point at which there is no turning back. We’re arriving at the point at which the spell has been broken in a sufficient number of American minds to carry the seminal desire for reform forward. There’ a growing communal knowledge that no one in power is listening anymore, and that no one will do anything to stem the tide that is washing our citizenry out to sea, to sink to oblivion off the front pages of the remaining news outlets that would bother printing the demise of Joe Everyman. There’s no telling where that will end, but I think the pre-manufactured ideas of the Kochs of the world will carry little weight when it’s you, your family, and your friends on the bread lines. So in some ways the form of our discontent should stay just as amorphous and unfocused as it has been. It makes it harder for the political and moneyed class to pin down and subsequently disown based on some manufactured intellectual abstraction. Eventually they’ll snap to the fact that telling the people to eat those painted cakes isn’t gonna cut it. Eventually they'll realize that they aren't the only ones who can break the social contract that has existed between the rich and the poor for most of human history, when we are at their gates.
This movement is something I regret not being able to participate directly in. I've signed a few petitions, and am gladdened by the general change toward positive press coverage the OWS movement is now receiving. Here's a link I've had on this afternoon, which live-streams the action at Zuccotti Park in NYC for anyone who feels like they'd like to get a little closer to the action:
