Mysteries of the Market

NYT Feb 9 2010

“Investors and traders find solace in 10,000,” said Jeffrey A. Hirsch, editor of The Stock Trader’s Almanac. “While it may not be important technically, falling below that level indicates that the whole economic picture is not as rosy as everyone had thought.”

Jasper Johns, #2

“You can tell investors there’s no contagion, but it doesn’t matter, because people start to think there’s more than one cockroach,” said Thomas J. Lee, chief United States equity strategist at JPMorgan Chase. “Right now, it’s still a little wait and see.”

“People worry that this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back again,” Mr. Stone said.

So speak our wizards of finance, explicating the mystic qualities of the numbers, the flux of energies which animate that most sacred entity of our time, The Market, that most glorious expression of the most firm belief under our dim firmaments, Capitalism. Like other practices of the same kind, this one comes dressed in its own arcane language, which most of the populace does not and cannot and should not fathom, and hence is required to defer to mandarin experts the better to understand. Rattling off the long list of buzz-words and acronyms – LIBOR, derivatives, leveraged-buy-out, – the eyes glaze over, as if hypnotized, and the congregants move as told, signing up for their 401K’s, assured by the priests of Wall Street and their cohorts that nirvana will be theirs come retirement time, their modest bundle magically expanded by the one fish to millions by the mumbling of certain words better left to the experts of the priesthood. It is an old story, of course, derivative (!) in our culture of the long-ago much fabled Greeks who told of the Golden Fleece. Well, if you were one of those taken in by the smooth talk of Reagan and others who told you that it would be better for you if you put your trust in the market, and… well, you’ve been fleeced. Retirement time is here for many, and the little nest-egg, to stick to the clodded linguistic clichés that seem to govern those of the fiscal inclination, ain’t. Or actually it is, but it was long ago converted into some investment banker’s 3rd home or second yacht, and you can’t have it.

Occasionally I subscribe to things normally out of my interests – economics blogs and letters, right-wing rant screeds, other odds and ends. An effort to keep up with the wider world, whatever my tastes think about it. One newsletter I get is Money Morning, a tip sheet for investors, which reveals all one needs to know about the investor mentality: if it’ll make money, they say BUY! Period. So it recently counseled military-industrial stocks as a good bet. You bet. And likewise they’re game for a profit, whatever the morality, ethics, social consequences. Here’s the lingo:

Welcome to The Syndicate

Play alongside The Syndicate and you are playing with the House. My conservative estimate is that this will increase your money by 62% before the first crack of the bat on Opening Day.

But if you continue to play against The Syndicate, then your odds drop alarmingly. This is because, right now, The Syndicate has a plan. A story.

And this story – a massive short squeeze – will leave you poorer. Very quickly.

What no one is telling you about this NEW STOCK MARKET could make you 62% richer IF you act right now

Think of the market as a story being written by a tight Syndicate of wealthy, smart traders.

Money is essentially a social contract, and like all social contracts it assumes trust between the contracting parties.  When that trust frays or collapses, the agreements made falter and become meaningless.  It would seem that in America the social trust required – that between neighbors, between buyer and seller, between “citizens” – is getting rather ragged.  For me it became tangible some decades ago, when, having in my younger days hitch-hiked from Los Angeles to Montana (a few times) and elsewhere as well, I decided sometime in the late 1970’s,  just for the fun and pleasure of it (you do meet people, find adventures, etc.), to catch a ride from LA to San Francisco.  I didn’t have to, as I had the money to take a train or plane.  So I went to a once-favored spot just out of Santa Monica on Highway 1, the gorgeous Pacific off to the west, the tawny bluffs of Pacific Palisades to the east.  I stood in the California sun, thumb out, happy, periodically receiving the epithets of  kids in sports cars or classy sedans (doubtless bought by their Beverly Hills parents) who shouted “get a job.”   After a few hours of this abuse and the clear understanding that a ride was not in the cards, I packed it in, caught a bus to the airport and flew.

Thanks to myriad things – among them Charles Manson and others of his kind, as well as to the later Reaganite mantras – the social trust had and would evaporate.   It continued to decline rapidly as the social engineering of the late 50’s and 60’s was undone, greed became “good” and community, having too much of a kinship with “communism” became suspect along with its cousin, communication.  Not much later Limbaugh took to the airwaves, to jostle along with the hell-and-damnation preachers, and before you knew it, America was at war with itself, uniting only for trivial matters like Super Bowls and World Series, or by the traumatization of 9/11.  Soon our currency will be worth about as much as these North Korean pieces of paper.

And perhaps we’ll be led by this lady, the present paladin of the tea-party folks, who is clearly gunning for running in 2012, never mind the embarrassment of being caught cribbing on TV this week, reading her talking points off the scribbles on her palm.   And given the state of the nation, and the failure of Obama and his alleged political party to act in any way at all so far – save for pleasing the bankers for a bit (though they are apparently starting to place their future bets elsewhere, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall far earlier than most: they put him in there, they can take him out), it seems quite feasible that a woman considerably dumber than Bush could indeed take the mantle of American leadership, and perhaps drive us further apart and deeper in the hole of our own communal self-willed ignorance.

You go, girl!

DOW(n)

The Labor Department said the number of people filing first-time claims for unemployment increased by 8,000 to 480,000 last week, far above Wall Street’s estimates of 455,000.

And the other news, percolating up from the denser pages of the economics journals announces the imminent default of Greece on its debts, shaking the Euro zone like an earthquake, especially since also in line for defaults are those other places which, exactly as the US did, went in for a debt-fueled building boom in the last 15 or so years: Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and… and even the UK.  All the dominoes lined up to do an American-style swoon, for pretty much the same reasons – greed, fiscal folly, hubris.  And of course our All-American swoon has only just begun, despite the weekly encouragements about recovery emanating from the White House or Wall Street mavens, for whom keeping the shell game going as long as possible is either financially or politically necessary:  Americans are not to be trusted with the god-awful truth, and besides they’re already quite angry now.   Mollify them with happy smile lies while the credit card companies, caught in the liquidity squeeze jack up the interest rates, banks tack on new charges and goose the old ones, loans are on terms too costly for anyone but fools, and the economy – or what’s left of it – congeals and freezes.

Everyone on Wall Street is fixated on The Number.

The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.

So the DOW Jones dipped to 10K almost, having climbed back from 6.6K nadir of a mere 11 months ago.  Aside from the massive infusion of unaccountable TARP slush funds and other interventions to allegedly avert a Depression, nothing really fundamental has changed since then, except of course for more lost jobs, defaulted mortgages, closed businesses, nose-dived retail sales, and other less than happy-face matters.  However, also in the financial pages items is the most important matter of just how much Lloyd Blankfein, of the instantly turned-around profit-making Sachs Goldman, is going to reward himself for the year’s amazing work.  Will it be 100 million, or more or less.  This news is important because his cohorts in the Wall Street game will peg their self-chosen payout to what he does.  No cojones bigger allowed, but can’t be too much smaller or you’ll get notched down on the Big Board Balls game.

Pigs at the trough

Not to be outdone by the honchos of Wall Street, the arts world weighed in with its own bid for out-of-tune-with-the-times award, and at Sotheby’s auction a one-of-six copies sculpture by Alberto Giocometti went down with the gavel at a mere 96 million bucks, plus commission of another 8.6 mil, making for a grand total of 104.6 and the largest single sales figure at auction ever.  The previous record holder, trailing at only $100,000 less, was a Picasso.

The buyer was anonymous, rumored perhaps to be a Russian tycoon.  In a world of fast and loose money all this fits, though the morality of it all eludes some.  To some it seems all a particularly cruel form of, well, bullshit:

UPDATE Feb. 6 2010

Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, was granted a $9 million bonus on Friday, all in deferred stock, ending weeks of speculation about how he would be rewarded for his remarkable — and controversial — success in running the Wall Street giant over the past year.

The award is well below the $68 million bonus Mr. Blankfein received in 2007, even though 2009 was a record year for the Wall Street bank.

Note the phrasing here: “was granted” by – well, who does the granting? Lloyd Blankfein, CEO, who at the board meeting puts his balls on the table and says “kiss” and they do. And note the drastically diminished number, done as a momentary concession to the political moment wherein awarding himself the rumored 100 million would have seemed gauche. I am sure in the tiny print hidden in the paperwork there’s some manner in which the sum he was properly due, in the minds of Wall Street honchos, is accommodated. Appearances are everything, as these financial thugs know well, as do their tailors.

Take the Money and Run

A.I.G. Plan for $100 Million Bonus Payout Draws Fire

So reads the headline today, following the others about Sachs Goldman back in the profit column (in part because they got $1 on the dollar in their dealings with guess who – AIG – when they should have gotten a few pennies), which was issuing itself mere billions in bonuses.  As these things happen we hear the chorus of complaint – how could they do this when millions are losing their mortgages, their jobs, have they no understanding of what is going on.   They just don’t get it ! The answer, though, is yes they know very well what is going on, they “get it,” more than you or I, and they are out to get while the getting is still good.  They know the house of costly cards is already a heap on the ground and they’re extracting every last buck out of it that they can, and J.Q. Public, living down the street under a cardboard box be damned.  Those millions, stashed away out of reach to the tax-man will build a nice house in some warm clime, etc.

Edward Liddy, current CEO of AIG

Robert Benmosche, last year’s CEO of AIG

BofA Approved More Than $4 Billion For 2009 Pay

Brian Moynihan, CEO of BofA at Davos

Now do these guys look like some regular old Joe’s or more like a bunch of nut crushing thugs?  I can guarantee you there’s only one way you get to where they are, and that is by smashing whoever gets in your way.  Pin-stripes are no longer the banker’s uniform.  I once saw Mr Gotti on Elizabeth Street in New York’s Little Italy.  He dressed very classy too.

Meantime our well-intentioned President has produced the headline below, either showing the he really doesn’t get it, or he’s in for a final round of rope-a-dope before letting the hammer down.   You would think one didn’t really need any more evidence as to what the Republicans want – they want Obama to fail, at whatever cost to the country, and nothing else.  Perhaps he’s merely setting them up in case anyone didn’t get it yet.  Or perhaps he’s just a terminal nice guy.

Obama Acts to Engage G.O.P., Testing Party’s Intentions

Pence and Boehner

Law and Order

James O’Keefe and friends

Fresh from his success with breaking Acorn in his practice of creative journalism, James O’Keefe, along with some other conservative campus activists, perhaps victims of their own hubris, were arrested in Louisiana last week masquerading as telephone repairmen as they entered Senator Mary Landrieu’s office.  Busted, they face an interesting time in the next months explaining how it was just a prank, and that they weren’t really out to tap Landrieu’s phone, or otherwise plant some kind of electronic spying device – all of them, along with the fraudulent means of gaining entry, felony crimes.   O’Keefe and his cohorts are self-proclaimed conservatives, and thanks to the Acorn “prank”  are much adored by Foxy and friends.  What is interesting is that these are supposedly “law and order” types, who are all for draconian punishments for those who break the law, unless it’s one of their own, in which case of course it is the law that is at fault.  Mr. O’Keefe says what he is doing is “to get to the truth and expose corruption,” though we don’t recall him being so active during Bush’s most obviously corrupt turn.  I read that the sentence for the crime which Mr. O’Keefe and his friends were caught at is 10 years.  Hopefully he can do an exposé on Federal Prisons in the near future.

Scott Roeder

Next in the line-up is Scott Roeder, self-admitted killer of George Tiller, doctor in Wichita, Kansas, who did legal abortions.  In his court room defense Roeder explained that he did indeed kill the doctor, on purpose, because the doctor did, well, legal abortions.   Scott Roeder is perceived as a hero by many, if not all, in the anti-abortion crowd, most of whom say they are “Christian.”   Despite his change of costume in court, below, the jury in Kansas deliberated 35 minutes and convicted him for first degree murder.  The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Scott Roeder in court

A meaningful democracy presumes an aware, informed, reasonably educated public of whom its voters is composed.  The voter is asked to make choices on numerous things – things which are often complex, difficult, and against one’s immediate apparent self-interest.  The voter is asked to select someone to “represent” them, a person who is a surrogate for them.  If, owing to the complexity of the real world, they do not themselves know certain things, they presumably select as their representative persons wiser, more informed, more capable to make choices on their behalf. So goes the theory.  In practice, in America, where education has been ravaged both by the effects of corporate media and the internal corrosion of the educational system itself, and where the average person is poorly or often willfully misinformed, the assumptions of a meaningful democracy are at best dubious, and at worst, catastrophic.  De Tocqueville perceived this quite some time ago, predicting that America would end more or less where we are now.   Those on the mandarin Right would opt for rule by experts – their own, naturally.   Those on the populist Right would opt for rule by hook-or-crook – whether it be by elections engineered by a rightist Supreme Court (2000), or by the skulduggery of the likes of James O’Keefe, or the blatant violence of a Scott Roeder.  Might makes right in their book – hence their hankering for guns, for police (so long as they aren’t aimed at them) and “leaders.”

The American left, if one can call it that, is loathe to admit that much of its support is derived from poorly-educated people who do indeed vote that way because they are given some social assistance, though they may not know much else.   Though I think the liberal side is more supportive of efforts to raise the educational level of the general public, and tries – against the odds in the USA – to take steps to do so.   In the scrum between these we’re caught with a contradiction which our system seems unable to sort out, and the consequence is a fraudulent “democracy” in which minorities within the system (Senators from thinly populated rural states) are able to hijack decisions, and in which other minorities are able to tilt the scales despite their mis- and ill-informed understanding of the realities around them.   And all this is deeply muddied by the ill-begotten forces of money – recently underlined and enforced by the Supreme Court – which manipulates the various under-parties at will.   This reality bodes ill for the Union.

Tea-party in Dallas

The administration released its forecast for the coming decade, a grim one of unemployment and a national deficit far beyond what is considered “sustainable.”   Government forecasts are almost always optimistic and wrong, most often – if not always.  So if the government is saying this, you can bet it’s likely to be worse.  For example, the figure for “unemployment” below is 10% when it is much more likely around 20%.   As things squeeze more, we can anticipate more “tea-parties” or other expressions of social discontent.  Meantime a friend in Chicago sent an article about the CIA on campuses.  Same old story.

Jasper Johns, Target

Same old, same old

12, in which New York druggies…

In the wake of the Sundance festival, where (most important matter) sales were said to be up, Manohla Dargis of the New York Times weighed in with what has become the perennial Independent Film is Dying/Being Reborn item.  The usual villains, the usual saviors – Hollywood of course wears the black hat, and new technology wears the white, and those eager youthful new filmmakers of the season are Twittering their way to new frontiers, etc.  Along the way the usual mainstream tactic of calling tired formulaic old tricks “new” and “independent” gets flogged once again.  See Manohla’s article.  I promptly sent off a missive to the Letters to Editors Dept, and if they are generous they’ll print it in the culture ghetto section, maybe next Sunday.  Or maybe not.  Here’s what I wrote:

Dear people

In her article Talking About a Revolution (Jan 29) writes “The frisson of the live concert experience partly explains why some independent filmmakers now show up at some of their screenings in person.”  Very partly: in-person presentation has been SOP in the independent/avant garde/experimental/etc. world since I began in 1964.  I myself did such a screening not so many years ago at the Nuart.  Not for the “frisson” of anything, but because for so-called “independent” cinema it is essentially the only way to get a showing and an audience, and $200-$500.  Plain and simple.  Slapping new names on the same old thing doesn’t make it new.  Through my career I have experienced the same basic tap dance of expectations with each new technology: videopacks back in the early 70’s, VHS, cable, satellite broadcast – each entered with the promise to revolutionize the media, and we got instead Blockbuster Video, the wrestling channel, and unless one made a basically conventional narrative film of its time (yes, Blair Witch too), you still had to show up at the few in-person sites available to make your $200.  And you still do.

Yes, the net is making a difference: now you can download Hollywood or about any film you might desire, including the wildest weirdest porniest you want, and pay nothing for it.  I sell DVDs via my website, though the same ones show up on BitTorrent as soon as I do.  So yes, it is changing things, but not necessarily for the better.  Amidst the avalanche of DIY film-video making now available most of it is easy conventional stuff like the mumble-core crowd, and most of it is simply bad.  Its independence is purely financial, not psychological or artistic: there is, sorry, very little genuine creativity or independence going on in it.  This has more to do with the stultifying cultural envelope which we live in, as shown in our politics and the idea that a concert with beat-to-death modes of rock and roll offers “frisson.”

We’ll probably exit this cultural cul-de-sac the same time the US Congress behaves like adults.  So I’d guess we have another 30 or 40 years given the current concept of “adulthood” that starts when you move out of your parents house (because you don’t have a job, have $40,000 or more in student loan debt, and are psychologically dependent anyway) sometime around when they drop dead.

Sincerely
Jon Jost

On reading the various newspaper and trade items on the festival the talk is primarily about money, wheeling and dealing, distribution chances, etc.; secondarily we get thumbnail sketches about the story, the theatrics. We get nothing about the art, probably because in most cases there isn’t any. Rather, formulaic cookie-cutter filmmaking that makes no challenge to the viewer outside of evading the boredom of the same old thing the same old way.  I’m rather certain that any such films that would challenge the viewer’s complacency would get kicked around rather badly.

Unfortunately this story is replicated in most festivals, which likewise play it safe, sticking to tried and true conventional films, albeit often ones with a little kinkiness about sex, drugs, exotic murders, gender fun and games, and the usual riot of PC acceptables. However straying from fixed narrative conventions is a no-no, as is something that is visually or temporally very far outside the TV base norm. An over-head shot a la the Coen brothers or Jarmusch is about as risky as allowed – oh so arty! To say a dismal range of stuff well within the norms of Hollywood but made with other money (sometimes).

Likewise this same reality is replicated in our politics where those few who dare to venture outside the rote words and rituals are promptly exiled (or worse). Can you imagine a candidate refusing to wear a stupid flag lapel, not standing in front of an array of American flags, not genuflecting to the mantra that America’s soldiers abroad are our “best,” not asserting we’re number one in myriad aspects? No, you can’t, because it would never be allowed. The confines of permissible discourse in America is as limited on screen as it is on the stump. Small wonder we’re in such a bad place.

William Eggleston

It would be nice to think some day we’ll outgrow this, be it in our cinemas or in Congress, but I wouldn’t make any bets on it happening anytime soon.

J.D.

“I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”

JD Salinger, famed it seems as much for fleeing fame as for his handful of books, withdrew into a fierce reclusion, hiding out in rural New Hampshire half a century and more, declining interviews and all the other stuff of public life.     Doing so perhaps he showed himself merely an obtuse crank, or perhaps instead an prescient critic of the trajectory of America, where nowadays people seek out fame in and for itself, detached from any grounds for its being.   Catcher in the Rye became a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress for some generations of disenchanted youth and remains a good seller today, considered an American classic, up with Mark Twain.

[Assuming what's in the paper is kind of true, for another take on Salinger see this.]

State of the Union

Jasper Johns

Demonstrating, again, that yes, for a politician he can give a good speech, President Obama held his ground in his required State of the Union address this evening.  Acknowledging the hard times from which he was speaking, he rolled out a laundry list of things done, things around the corner to do, and took attention-deficit-disorder-Americans on a brief leap back so they might remember just what a mess he’d inherited on taking office.  Taking a jab at the Republicans, who often seemed to take a deer-in-headlight stance (should I applaud, should I stand, will we all look like the Party of No if we uniformly sit here stolidly looking grumpy?) with which Obama played a bit, he underlined that the cut-taxes mantra had been tried 8 years and landed us in the present.  And tossing a bone to one disgruntled segment of his year-ago base he said he’d get don’t-ask-don’t-tell changed while the cameras showed the military chiefs sitting glumly.

Outlining his long-term economic intentions, he said it was necessary to get health-reform done as one part of it, and listed a range of pleasers for the left: high-speed trains, green industries, solar this; but then he handed out equal opportunity rightwing pleasers too:  nuclear power plants, clean coal, off-shore drilling.  Rattling bills and programs and numbers,  he risked playing the cliché politician/Democrat, handing out bon bons as vote buyers.  And, as an election year rolls in, he chided the assembled politicians for doing precisely what he was doing.

Jasper Johns, Numbers

Unlike his predecessor, who could find no faults in himself or his policies, he acknowledged errors on his part as he closed with an appeal for Americans to quit bickering, stop running Washington as a non-stop electioneering stage, and get down to the job at hand.

Throughout all this Joe Biden sat smiling, nodding, leaping to applaud, and otherwise playing lap-dog.  Ditto Nancy Pelosi.  The Congressmen and Senators on the Democratic side jumped to their feet frequently and shouted, as if the talk were a pep rally, while for the most part – except when Obama said he’d have a tax exemption for small businesses and a few other such things, like the off-shore drilling bit – the Republicans maintained party discipline and glumly sat.

For me this kind of political spectacle all rings phony, not really different than watching the old Soviet Politburo gathering for the obligatory genuflections, hand-waves, hand-shakes and all the other boiler plate of political theater.   Whether at this late date it will play in Peoria or not, I am skeptical.   Too many lost jobs, lost mortgages, too sour a collective atmosphere and too many broken promises.   While exuding his charms and even a touch of wit, and making a case for his programs, he’s probably lost too much of his base in the last months to get them back.   Eighteen months ago he could play the quasi-innocent outsider, which was a major ingredient in his capacity to generate enthusiasm and hope.   Twelve months in office, he’s squandered that energy on many dubious decisions – from keeping those establishment insiders of Wall Street and the Pentagon at his side and acting on their advice, to more or less dismissing the concerns of the latte-liberal sorts, not to mention skewering the delusions of those closet radicals who were actually anticipating Change You Can Believe In. The great balloon of hope that gathered a year ago in Washington for the inauguration is now trampled on the ground of practical realities.   It could have been otherwise, but it would have taken a very different approach, one which perhaps is outside of Mr Obama’s ken.

Through the looking glass

The Republican rejoinder, apparently done in the nearby Virginia State Capitol, was an embarrassment of the first rank, as the carefully choreographed putti angels of the public neatly surrounded the speaker, lower left a Caucasian military man, upper left an hispanic woman, upper right an Asian man, lower right a black man, all of them dutifully nodding assent as Governor Bob McDonald stiffly delivered mind-numbingly empty words.   I suspect the racial tick-tack-toe layout did not play well in Bubbaland, and would have been far too obvious a ploy for any stray independents inclined to drift that way.  The cynicism was overpowering.

Wake Up and Shake Up

President Obama inauguration, Legoland

A year ago Barack Hussein Obama was sworn into the office of President of the United States of America.   In a vast exhalation of euphoria much of the country bid farewell to George Bush and anticipated the fulfilling of the Obama campaign mantra, Change You Can Believe In.  The air was palpably filled with hope, despite the serious circumstance he was inheriting: 2 wars, an economy in a death swoon.    For a brief while the illusion held as a few Executive Orders were made, and Obama, though severely buffeted by Bush’s catastrophic economic leavings, ordered the closing of Guantanamo, the end of  torture as US policy, and so on.   But quickly the bloom was off, as Obama – seemingly to show needed “toughness” to ward off Republican charges of weakness – ordered another 30,000 troops into Afghanistan.  And then surrounded himself with the same suits who had led the country into its fiscal collapse: Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, and then, with just a little less haste than Bush, tossed still more trillions at the bankers.  Foreclosures and unemployment rose, Detroit tottered toward oblivion.  Obama, as he’d said he would, “reached out” to Republicans who were having none of it.  Obama put forward his health reform proposals and now a year later a bloated compromise document of 2000 unreadable pages, offering a bit or a lot to nearly everyone, angers as many as it pleases.  Back room deals, real-politick as played by Rahm, and the whole foul smell of a corrupted culture wafts across the land, heightened by a shrill right-wing media gunning for Obama’s hide, no matter what he does – all this a mere 12 months later.   Obama’s enemies smell blood in the by-election in Massachusetts, and his allies and supporters of a year ago are abandoning him in droves, thoroughly disillusioned with his policies and his failure to lead.   Bitterly, it appears all too likely that the Republicans, having produced the disaster at hand, are likely to benefit from Obama’s incapacity to meaningfully address it.  He appears captive to the financial forces which run Wall Street, and to the military-industrial complex which now looms far larger than Eisenhower cautioned half a century ago.

Philip Guston

It’s a year later now and some Change You Can Believe In did indeed come, just not the kind most of those caught up in the euphoria of a year ago anticipated.  Some millions are out of their once-homes.  More millions are out of their job and there don’t appear to be any jobs out there to replace them.  More millions are about to run out their unemployment benefits, and like 1/4 of the populace, begin living on food-stamps.   And while the media do their best to keep it under wraps there’s probably worse to come.   And politics in America has taken a body blow from which it  is unlikely to recover any time soon.  A generation of young people, drawn to the Obama candidacy, are surely disillusioned and will be more so as life looks likely not to be offering a job while they default on their student loans the bank is shafting them on, and a mess of other assumptions of not long ago have disappeared.  Another generation of older voters is likely to feel utterly betrayed by a system they had gone along with, even after the Supreme Court theft of the 2000 election and the possible electronic theft of the 2004 one.   This time they thought they’d won, even by a good margin, and it turns out their guy was a put-up or a patsy.  We can almost be assured that those stepping into the vacuum thus provided will be the same old well-organized gang that marched in lock-step with GW Bush.   Given the Supreme Court ruling of last week, this is now virtually fore-ordained.  As ever in America:

So what do we make of Mr Obama’s less than thrilling first year in office?   That he was the beneficiary of a vast repulsion to Bush and all things akin, like Mr McCain?   That he was in truth little experienced in the hard-ball world of big league politics and on gaining office he was told in no uncertain terms what was expected of him, by whom and for what – or otherwise he’d be dancing to a magic bullet of some kind?  That in his passage through Columbia, Harvard, certain law offices, and other rites of the game, he’d been set up as the perfect Manchurian Candidate, loved by the liberal left, reviled by the racist right, a shoe-in for a deep Machiavellian bait ‘n switch, and a perfect set-up to assure future Republican victories?  Or simply that he was the sap left to hold Mr Bush’s toxic bag of debt, war, social disarray and the last legs of a staggering empire, a guaranteed losing position, no matter who took it?

Any of these seems a plausible explanation, if all equally tainted with the sour taste of something bitter.

On one hand I see Obama as lacking the taste for real politics, and while his calm and considered manner is suitable for some circumstances – far better than the shoot-from-the-hip cowboyism of his predecessor – it still lacks an essential component of the political arena.   Politics, for better and worse, is not really about what people need and should have; it is about what they want.   In his story of himself he tells of being careful not to come across as an angry black man, of learning how to put white’s at ease so he could move among them.  One wonders if along the way he did not psychologically emasculate himself so much that he know longer knows how and when and where it might be appropriate to be angered?  Or if along the way his desire to put others at ease, step by step in his transit through Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, comfortable law offices, did not mean that he acquired the values and tastes of his fellow academics, lest he disturb them, and that, as a friend of mine who has known him some years in Chicago says, he is really a middle-class centrist from whom anything radical – never mind the stint in community organizing – is not to be expected, whatever our hysterics on the right imagine.   And so, thrust quickly into circumstances which cry out for radical steps to be taken, Obama is simply unmanned and unable to do what the situation calls for.   Elected on a mandate of Change You Can Believe In, he promptly left it in the dust and adopted the least offensive position he could for those around him:  Gates, Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, all of whom are drawn from the same elite realms he knew in Harvard.  That the reality he was confronting was far more disastrous than these parties could imagine – after all it was their doing that had a large hand in making it – and required far more radical surgery than their self-interested minds could imagine, Barack went along to get along.  Again.  A self-protective habit.   And in the process he lost the best political chip he had, the wave of communal enthusiasm which he had ridden into office.   And like clockwork he steadily chipped away at it with one misguided decision after another, doubtless wrapped up in a cocoon of others who in their bubble of institutional limitations could themselves not imagine what really needed to be done or simply did not want what really needs to be done.  And as he did this, the wave of support lapped away into the choppy froth of a windblown lake, no longer a source of energy and direction but instead a seething cauldron of misdirected angers.   To raise hopes, and Obama surely raised and intended to raise hopes, and then to let them down is to court the worst of emotions.   Jilted lovers are not often friends after the fact.

Tomorrow Obama will give his first State of the Union address.  The nation is a worse mess now than a year ago, in part owing to the playing out of events beyond Obama’s control.  But it is in part worse because the great energy in the nation which he unlocked as a candidate he has frittered away and trashed as a President.  His urge to go along to get along, learned in the hard psychological times of his youth, have served him poorly now, guiding him to a moderation that the urgencies of the time find thoroughly improper.   Mr Obama is missing an essential component of a true politician, and that is the capacity to seize the moment and drive it home.  Instead, in his instinct to please all, to “reach across the aisle” and live out the Rodney King mantra of “why can’t we all just get along” he’s relegated himself to the back of the bus.   And his large army of supporters is very unhappy.

Arms production expenditures

Aged 54 and 56, Tampa

Aged 18, homeless

Pittsburgh

In the three years prior to this year, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Sachs Goldman made $410,000,000 for his services.

Tectonic Shifts

Before we start, just a note that there’s a new posting up on www.jonjost.wordpress.com.  It has some beautiful images from my friend William Farley.

A few days ago I finished reading John McPhee’s massive 700+ page work, Annals of the Former World.  Once you get into the swing of its tsunami of geological terminology, which is layered over poetically in an echoing of the layering of geological history, it takes on a giddy power, thrusting the reader directly into the deep physical history it describes.  Naturally that physical history rings with psychic powers and spiritual qualities: you don’t think 4 billion years without a little buzz in your soul.  At least I don’t.

It wasn’t for me something new, only this was a far more expansive and informative look than I’d had back in 1969 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I did some research for one of the Hollywood blacklist folks – I think it was Lester Cole – a fellow who’d married a very rich socialite sort, and used the circumstances to further his notion of socialism.  In this case it was a film on the dubious real estate development of the area, with its earthquake realities, and so in my research I learned a bit about what at that time was just bursting onto the geological field, the theory of plate tectonics.   He was showing in his documentary how the cut and fill of the hillside terracing, as well as the Bay fill in places like Redwood City, would shake like a terraced pile of sand or liquify in the coming “big one.”   Houses in Redwood City were already the subject of suits as their concrete floors were cracking as they settled into the rushed landfill the developers had used.   So I’d had a taste, and then I lived in California a fair while more and had experienced a number of quakes (my girlfriend of the time had a family house which quite literally straddled the San Andreas fault in Woodside).   In McPhee’s book he takes a vast cross country roam with various geologists, from the aged and many times bent mountains of the east, across the Great Plains to the still rising Rockies and on to the seeming emptiness of Nevada into the Sierra and the fractured tectonic zones of California.   His is an exhilarating journey, not only laterally, but deep into the lithosphere, miles below the ground at your feet.  And he leaps far afield, to other active and inactive zones of geological upheaval around the world, and backwards and forwards in time.  If you have a taste for such things, I highly recommend (along with many before me).  Having myself traversed the USA many times, East to West, West to East, zig-zagging from the Canadian border down to Mexico, sticking to back roads (and sometimes much less than a backroad), I was familiar with many of the places McPhee describes, though should life allow – as is in our more distant plans – a long slow cross-country farewell trip, I will certainly see the landscape with far wiser eyes.

In the lower map the trace of red marks indicates where the tectonic plates which float on top of the earth’s magma meet up, latching, slipping by laterally, or subducting, digging trenches miles deep or tossing up mountains miles high, all in deep geological time.   What’s here now once wasn’t and will in future times no longer be.  The Great Plains were once seabed, the stuff in your gas tank was folded over, plunged into the earth, cooked, refined, and is now your fuel.  The dazzling beauty of a cut of marble on an altar-piece in Rome tells a billions of years old story of violence.

The lines above if you look closely go right by the island of Haiti, where the recent earthquake struck, announced as a tragedy, though from the larger cosmic viewpoint it was just a normal physical event, having nothing to do with people.  The tragedy is instead geo-political:  the collapsed ramshackle housing of Port-au-Prince is the by-product of deep poverty, and that poverty is the result of political-economic machinations, much of it emanating from the rich country to the North, the United States of America and its corporations, which have contrived to intervene when political events there took turns undesired for their interests.  It is an old story, the consequences of which are now written in the vast catastrophe which has taken 200,000 lives or probably many more when all is said and done.   Not to say that had the sordid US history in relation to Haiti and other Caribbean places not been so everything would be wonderful, there would be less dead, etc. but perhaps.  Under the thumb of a grinding poverty in part imposed from without, it was natural that buildings are flimsily made, and duly collapse.  They will collapse as well in San Francisco and Oakland and Los Angeles one of these days to come, as they have before – but not quite so easily and with such fearful cumulative consequences.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti – devastation, desperation, moving out

For its “work” of the last year, as measured in profits, Wall Street is planning on rewarding itself with some 75 billion bonus bucks.  I think that’s on top of whatever their doubtless sizable “normal” pay is.  Imagine what just, say, 1/75th,  of that would do if well administered in Haiti.  Decent infra-structure, earthquake resistant buildings, some hospitals, housing – maybe an earthquake-surviving intelligent form of tent suitable to tropic climes, cheap but durable and able to withstand large movements; water and sewage treatment of some kind.  You know, basic things for life.  And imagine a slightly greater generosity!  Well, imagine away.  As John Lennon sang,

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

America will no doubt send in Marines, some water, food, tents and the usual rescue mission stuff, and it will duly pat itself on the back for its gesture of solidarity, humanity, and all.   And it will continue to do its best to erase its own sordid story in Haiti and elsewhere.  The duly and democratically elected President, Aristide, was toppled by US agencies because he had the audacity to think Haitians deserved a minimum wage.  Horrors!  That’s a tiny sliver of our real story.

Kabul, Afghanistan Jan 18 2010

In downtown Kabul, where the US is now invested in “nation building” (with drones, Marines, the CIA doing a lot of unbuilding as step one), verily on the steps of the Presidential Palace, as a follow-up to their penetration and bombing a few weeks ago of a major CIA operating base, in which 8 of America’s finest specialists in counterinsurgency were killed, the Taliban executed another major attack which apparently brought Kabul to a standstill as bombings and gunfights lasted a day.  Obama in the last days just asked for another 33 billion dollars to pursue this adventure, that on top of the 708 billion dollars for the “normal” military budget – a figure in excess of the combined military spending of the rest of the world, and a record for the United States.  Change you can believe in. This is the kind of tectonic political plate shifting that occurs as hyper-powers fall.   The external stresses have been quite readable in Iraq, in Afghanistan; the internal stresses will be read by tomorrow’s insta-pundits with the tea leaves of the Massachusetts special election, which, no matter which way it goes, will be interpreted with dire notions in every direction.

The world doesn’t feel topsy-turvy; it is topsy-turvy.

Winter Break

Jan 15 2010, near Kwangju (not the big one down south), S Korea

Two weeks ago I casually commented to Marcella that I hoped we’d have a real winter this year, and not the inch or two of snow here and there we’d had the last two years here in Seoul.  And I gestured with my hand, indicating a foot or so.  Ask and you shall receive, and a few days later came a storm which dropped 6 inches overnight, greeting us as we peeked out the window with a quiet soft cover over everything.  As the day went on another 6 or more inches fell, bringing the city to a halt.  See here for some pics.  Later on saw in the news that this was a record for Seoul since they started keeping records.  And since, it’s been very cold, freezing over the vast width of the Han river, and breaking more records.  It’ll keep the LPG gas guy running too.  Second day of this, Marcella slipped on some side-walk ice, and banged her butt good, and after a check indicated no fracture she’s been hobbled and taking it easy on doc’s orders.   For me – except for yesterday when I went skiing for the first time in 17 years (minor falls twice in 4 hours) – it kept my nose to the computer screen, finalizing Swimming in Nebraska, which in turn begot a “nein, danke” from the Berlin Forum, to which I’d sent a not-too-rough edit.   Another film for no one?  On the other hand Parable, having gone begging the last 18 months of rejection notices, finally got asked to one (well, it did go to the Split, Croatia one), the San Jose Maverick festival.  I was the focus of their first one, 20 years ago.  Now banged up by 2 decades of mostly off-the-radar filmic existence, they invited me back.  If they pop for a ticket, we’ll go and see some friends in Bay Area.  If not, perhaps a trip to Philippines.

Other news includes that Yonsei has made clear they want me back another academic year, so we’re signed on to July 2011.  Given the increasingly grim economic news from US and Europe, I guess it’s a good thing to have a job.

Lloyd Blankfein, Jimmie Dimon, John Mack, Brian Moynihan

Appearing before the US Congress were the above, alleged Masters of their various Universes – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America – and said almost nothing of import, intelligence or interest.  Each of them having participated in the vast fiscal rip-off of the last decade and more, and its subsequent collapsing of the US economy (don’t worry, there’s lots more collapsing coming) are to waltz off in the coming month with massive bonuses from their corporate fiefdoms, all of which magically are surging in profits while America lays on its back from the knock-out punches delivered by globalization, Reaganite economics, Bush tax-cuts, and all the rest of the hocus pocus that has funneled the wealth of America into the select hands of still fewer persons and stripped the majority of Americans of their jobs, 401-K’s, wealth, homes and perhaps self-respect.

Goldman Sachs is expected to pay its employees an average of about $595,000 apiece for 2009, one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history. Workers in the investment bank of JPMorgan Chase stand to collect about $463,000 on average.

For a little scoop on how these folks live – though the half mil apiece is chump change compared to the 70+ million Blankfein will get in bonuses this year for himself, and the 40+ million for the next down the totem pole -  see this. For all their “work.”

Ah, but it’s an old story in America, and as Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”   America is full of them, and as is said, “they’re laughing all the way to the bank.”