Academia or Not Academia

It's a beautiful day today. Students are enjoying the sun. But what about their professors? It is rare to see a professor outside. Academic culture is one in which the modal academic almost never takes a break and, even when they pretend to take a break, they are usually working. Having come to academia from a range of other professions, including working in adult corrections, internal auditing of a mortgage securitization firm, as a partner in a business, a CEO of another business, an editorial director, a computer programmer, and director of the Jefferson High School financial Services Academy, and director of education and chief economist of the Urban League of Greater Portland, I think I can safely say that I've never seen a group of people who take as little genuine leisure time as the modal academic. This modal academic is always fretting that she or he isn't doing enough, should be working harder on that research paper(s), book, or other project, spends inordinate amounts of time in meetings, and still finds time to advise students, revise syllabi and notes, do book reviews, and an endless array of other projects and time eaters. And they still feel they are not doing enough. It isn't quite what I'd expected when I joined the "life of the mind." What happened to the contemplation? For the most part, I haven't seen a lot of contemplative moments. And, at least in this particular region of academic space, I haven't seen a lot of intellectual interchange, either (since I don't count all those endless talks by invited speakers as involving much in the way of intellectual (versus financial) interchange). It's a weird culture. I used to encourage students to become academics (when I was still young and naive) because I could think of nothing more noble than the "life of the mind," but I stopped making that recommendation. I realized the pay is very poor, given the intellectual capital invested, and most of my students who go to Wall Street (and I have a lot of former students on Wall Street) make considerably more than their former professors and work about the same amount, perhaps less (considering that they usually do take real breaks from work, at least a substantial number of them do, rather than pretending to take breaks while still sneaking those books into their luggage and perhaps even that laptop in order to get a few more pages cranked out or at least more notes). I guess the bottom line is that academia is a place that is critical to social transformation because it is where new ideas are most likely to be generated and when generated likely to be made readily available to all who might make use of them, where the pursuit of critique produces intellectual breakthroughs, corrections, rethinkings that can push society in new directions or help us avoid pitfalls or even provide us with new insights into ourselves and life. This is a noble pursuit. But it is also a lot of work and there is also a lot of drudgery and paper pushing and meetings, meetings, meetings. In other words, I'm not about to tell that student with her heart set of Goldman or Morgan or Deutche Bank or Barclays that going for that Ph.D. is a superior choice. It depends. For some, the possibility of the "life of the mind" is enough. For others, since it is no more work, opting for the money may be the optimal choice.

JILL CARROLL RELEASED!!!!!!

Finally!

Disagreeing with Myself

A couple of days ago I used the phrase "theocratic elite" to describe the dominant faction in the G.O.P. Kevin Phillips has an interesting new book discussing the role of religion in contemporary politics and, in particular, the way rightist evangelicals have become a dominant force in the G.O.P. Well, I think you would enjoy reading Phillips book. It is quite an excellent read. However, I disagree with my use of the term "theocratic elite." I'm not sure there is any such thing and, in any event, I feel quite certain that the G.O.P. is far more dominated by narrow economic interests than by the religious right, who are largely tools of the former. Yes, yes, the religious right is thrown a bone here and there, but this in exchange for providing the votes and money that have made the G.O.P. dominant in the South and allowed a few corporations to gain enormously increased economic power and access at the expense of many of the foot soldiers of the religious right itself. Real wages down, lost jobs, diminished prospects for the future, a health care system that continues to deteriorate, a cancer epidemic, global warming and its consequences on the weather, crime on the rise again, a growing national debt for our children to bear --- these are the fruits of the G.O.P. dominance in American political life, in executive offices in state capitals, in legislatures, in the presidency, in the judiciary. Like Phillips, I spent my time in the wilderness, as a member of the Young Americans for Freedom, and I used to think (at least for a brief moment in my youth) that conservatism was based on principles. What can I say? I was young and naive, like a lot of those evangelicals who have been seduced by the possibility of changing America into some idealized vision. But like the young Taliban who were similarly seduced, the reality turns out to be very different. And only the Halliburtons and Bechtels and G.E.s win.

Academic Freedom?

Academia is fairly conservative. Theoretical frameworks (paradigms) are very slow to change. The fact that most academics are (in terms of their personal politics) to the left of what Kevin Phillips has described as the theocratic elite who have taken control of the Republican Party does not contradict this basic underlying conservatism in academia. In fact, the Republican Party itself was far to the left of this theocratic elite not that long ago. In contemporary terms, Richard Nixon would be labelled a far left liberal or something of the sort. However, the theocratic and neoconservative elite have decided to try to take control over academia by attacking an alleged "liberal bias." This is a much better tactic, I must admit, than book burning, but has the same basic purpose. (One should note that in 1930s Germany, the only social arena within which there was even a modicum of opposition to the Nazi regime had been academia, which the Nazis then attacked as a haven for leftists and subsequently quieted). Nevertheless, the argument of the theo-con elite can also be used to promote more anti-establishment left views in academia. For example, the economics profession is the bastion of conservatism in academia, grounded in a theoretical framework that has served the purpose of both promoting the destruction of the social contract forged during the Great Depression, that includes social security and unemployment compensation, arguing that the market is utopian (and, by extension, corporations are the light of civilization), and providing the intellectual excuse for colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation (by omitting these processes from their theoretical framework and substituting a framework within which it is impossible to even ask questions about these processes). Those who would want to normalize Marxian theory, left institutionalism, or even anarchist economic theory could make the same arguments as the theo-cons that economics is suppressing free speech by teaching a singular paradigm in its intro and intermediate courses, as well as many other course offerings, and excluding these alternative paradigms. It would be ironic if the theo-cons opened the door to the demise of the monologue of neoclassical economic theory, which is one of the underpinnings of their own rise to power.

American Culture = Obfuscation

The secret to contemporary American culture is that it is probably the world's most advanced structure of cultural obfuscation to ever be spontaneously and purposefully created. (This is NOT to say that it is the only culture with such a structural aspect. Indeed, this is probably common to most, if not all, cultures. It is just that the embeddedness and effectiveness of the American structure of cultural obfuscation seems to have set a new standard for humanity.) The machinery of NOT SEEING and NOT HEARING is quite elaborate and powerful. Our every thought is shaped within the structural contours of a system of television, motion pictures, popular mythology, strictly controlled educational curricula, and taboos. We do not see many aspects of our lives because we are taught not to see them. And we are taught to see a great deal that just is not there. It isn't that it is inappropriate to say "The emperor has no clothes, although it probably gets you called lots of nasty names when you do point this out, but that most people are programmed to see clothing where there is nakedness. And then there is the cultivation of ignorance. Where the hell is Iraq anyway? It's someplace else, for sure. But where? Is it near Cuba? People in the United States know more about a cartoon, The Simpsons, than they do about the Bill of Rights, which seems somehow appropriate given the tendency, particularly in the lands where slavery reigned not so long ago, to support politicians who view these rights as a leftwing nuisance. (Gunnar Myrdal long ago noted the tendency of Americans to say contradictory things, like they believed in equality of opportunity, but then in the same conversation argue against allowing "negroes" (or some other term) to go the same schools as "whites." While there are fewer people with such a predilection today, there are no shortage of similar contradictions.) The aforementioned (in an earlier post) ability to promote new definitions of terms, like capitalism, that had served as raw material in conversations about the present, past, and future of this and other societies, is a critical component in this structure of cultural obfuscation. If capitalism is "free markets" then capitalism has always existed and is pervasive in historical and geographic terms. If capitalism is human rights (does anyone actually say that? I seem to recall hearing this somewhere), then who can be against it? What happened to capitalism as a unique wage labor based system of exploitation? What happened to our ability to dream of better social formations? The pharaohs reigned for thousands of years but it was possible to develop a better social formation eventually, no? Isn't it possible that capitalism (the buying and selling of human labor power) might not be the END OF HISTORY. Well, it can't be discussed because we've completely displaced and replaced the definition of capitalism upon which that conversation could be held. Is it unpatriotic to define capitalism as the buying and selling of labor power? Is it unAmerican? It's probably too bad for the slave masters of the old South that they weren't successful enough to make slavery (as a labor system, rather than a gentile way of life) go away as effectively (although we've done a pretty good job of hiding the real atrocities of slavery, the millions who died, those who spent a lifetime being tortured -- it's not a story likely to be on ABC anytime soon). The culture of obfuscation tells us what to NOT SEE more than what to see, although we are presented with lots of fantasy images/imaginary in the movies and television, especially television, which is constructed around the commercial imagery that programs all of us to spend our days in pursuit of shiny objects and sex or sex and shiny objects. History disappears. The present disappears. Was it wrong to go to war in Iraq, despite the virtual certainty that humanity is better off without Saddam Hussein in power? Is this the right question? Why are we still in Iraq, either way? What are we doing there? Why is it right that we should do it, whatever it is? Does might make right? Is Saddam Hussein's crimes against humanity sufficient excuse for our colonial misadventure in Iraq or the way the Bush administration has turned this misadventure into a money-making machine for their cronies (obfuscated by the "Support Our Troops" mentality that seems to translate as "Don't talk about what's going on in Iraq or criticize the administration's corruption). Once it was clear that the invasion was based on lies, shouldn't we have turned the administration and transition to democracy over to the United Nations? Or has the machinery of obfuscation so effectively tainted the image of the U.N. that it is a natural conclusion to say that the U.N. should not ever be put in a position of repairing the damaged nationhood that comes after such a successful blitzkreig? If we had turned over administration of this shattered nation to the U.N. (or even Sweden, for that matter), there would have never been an Abu Ghraib. Speaking of which, we don't really discuss Abu Ghraib. (We don't discuss the reality of slavery, either, but that's another story of torture and humiliation and the occasional murder.) It was a blurb, quickly dispensed with, and given far less air time than Tom Cruise's scientology or his relationship with that woman from Dawson's Creek and a heckofalot less air time than Barry Bonds. We don't discuss the secret but not so secret CIA prison(s) in Eastern Europe (where the prisoners who go there are never seen again). Joseph Stalin now works for us. The secret prison story was a short blurb on the poorly watched evening news and even there not really covered, not really exposed, certainly not properly investigated. We don't discuss the thousands of children burned alive by our military (in our name and with weapons paid for by our tax dollars) or those children who survived with lost limbs, lost skin, lost faces, lost dreams and hope. It wasn't even a blurb (don't mention this stuff --- "Support Our Troops"). It just isn't important enough to be on the television. We don't talk about it around the water cooler, where it is more likely that the sports pools will be the object of concern. In the hands of the carpetbagger cowboys and chickenhawk neocons, America has become something fantastic, more Roman Empire than the Roman Empire ever was. Every city has its colossal venue for games, it's colosseum. We play games and watch television and work (harder than just about any other capitalist country, it would seem, with fewer vacation days and a higher cancer rate). America is about playing games, watching television, working hard, and talking about games and television shows at work or lunch or in the little bit of time we have after work and waving flags at games (how many of those who claim a monopoly on the flag support the Bill of Rights?). We know way too much about sports and so-called celebrities (who are human creations/fantasies of the culture of obfuscation and substitutes for royalty) and far too little about just about everything else, especially what our tax dollars are used for (or who is stealing them). Thousands of American children are disappearing into sexual slavery every year, but we play games and watch television and go to work. Hundreds of thousands of children are homeless, but we play games and watch television and go to work. The America of the television world is not one that suffers from a cancer epidemic or a health care crisis. America seems to be about Desperate Housewives and Lost. It isn't the "liberals" who are taxing the people and running off with the money but the frat boys who have taken over government (I'm for TAX CUTS, damn it, but I also want the money that is raised to be used for the betterment of ordinary Americans, not a bunch of thieves, including some who have so little loyalty for their country and country folk that they would move their corporate headquarters outside of the U.S. to escape taxes). And all those games and television and work (loyalty to the company) are eroding family values. The family is under a slow erosion, unlike the rapid one that slavery wrought (so perhaps that is worth celebrating --- slow pain, rather than fast and deep cuts). And as the culture of obfuscation becomes more advanced every year, the social contract formed during and in the aftermath of the Great Depression, where Americans were guaranteed certain protections from the vicissitudes of social and environmental processes (whether old age or Katrina), is taken apart piece by piece and the dismantlement is described as the pursuit of freedom. Freedom from the freedom from insecurity? Freedom from a state that uses the collective resources that comes from our taxes to help its citizenry, which we used to think was what a democratic state should do. The former Trotskyist neoconservatives (who may have finally found a way to undermine the core values of America) have taught us to think of the government as bad (just as the old conservatives taught us to hate unions) now control the government and use it to channel tax dollars into their own hands and the hands of their pals in favored corporations, who promote hatred of the Bill of Rights, of democracy, of creating a world of peace and cooperation, rather than a world of warlordism and might-makes-right-makes-money-for-one's-pals. Theft has become a sign of conservatism. Well, I suppose theft has been extant within the social fabric of life for most of human history, so perhaps this is what these so-called conservatives and neoconservatives are conserving. Alternatively, government is good if it really is the outcome of a democratic process, if those in the leadership are really the representatives that the people want to represent them and not the outcome of a tainted process whereby money and power and special access determine who sits in the halls of government and control the instruments of governance and military power and judicial power. How can the state/government be bad if this really is a democracy! Perhaps we need to make sure this really is a democracy and if it is not, then perhaps we need to take action to make it one. God know, the social contract is broken. Ask not what your country can do for you . . . because the answer may be not a damn thing. Don't lose your job, because if you do then you have no chance of getting health insurance. If your child gets sick, then . . . What a society. Just watch television. Watch another episode of Lost. Hope it doesn't flood.

Articulate President --- Link to Speeches

President Bush Speech Compilation

Charlie Sheen and the Drift Towards Fascism

Are people finally getting fed up with this waltz toward fascism in America? Torture, colonial adventurism, lies, war profiteering, internal polarization and hate mongering, rigged elections, . . . I think the Charlie Sheen comments struck a cord among a lot of people who are fed up. For some time now we've had a barrage of propaganda coming from people like Rush Limbaugh and other millionaire professional "conservatives" (I put that in quotes because I'm not willing to accept the validity of that label, given these folks propensity toward rightwing radicalism, dishonesty, and taking positions that are contradictory in order to remain in step with their "leaders.") In any event, I think what we really need (and seem unlikely to get) is a genuinely independent mass media. The story is not Charlie Sheen's suspicions about his government being engaged in a cover-up but the fact that the media has been so docile on 9/11, the Iraq war profiteering, and a number of other very critical national issues. Where's the media beef, so to speak? Someone needs to do some serious investigating of corruption, lies, and malfeasance at the highest levels of state-corporate structures in this society. But I'm not going to hold my breath for that. More likely we'll just keep hearing the Showbiz Tonight type stories about Charlie Sheen (or whoever can provide the sexy copy that substitutes for real news/real investigative journalism).

Go to Prison Planet for more info on Charlie Sheen's comments re: 9/11

Withdrawing from the Stock Market

I've decided to reduce my stock holdings to about 1%, which basically means I'm out of the market. This market has moved out of alignment with the signals coming from the bond markets and do not seem to be factoring the potential negative consequences of the twin deficits that have ballooned under current macroeconomic and war policies of the Bush administration. I believe we are poised for a sharp downward valuation in securities and a negative growth environment in the "real economy," as well. In other words, I'm predicting a stock market crash and, at the minimum, a recession. I can't time these things, but I'm also not willing to stand around waiting to see if it is a longer versus a near-term phenomenon. But before you follow my drastic measures, you should consider the counter case, which would include pointing out that the flood of new oil money being accumulated, in U.S. dollars, in the oil producing countries has resulted in a increased demand for U.S. assets, including stocks and long term bonds. China continues to be a major purchaser of U.S. treasuries and has done more to prop up bond prices, keep the U.S. housing market afloat, and make it possible for U.S. consumers to continue building up household debt than probably any other player in the financial markets. There is every reason to believe that the Chinese government will continue to subsidize our profligacy, including financing the occupation of Iraq. These factors may mitigate any negatives and allow the market to hold up, if not move higher. Nevertheless, I just think it is time to pull out and reevaluate. I'm quite risk averse, as you may have gathered from this strategy.

Labor Laws in China

The National People's Congress has begun delibaration on a new labor law, an important next step in the development of capitalist labor (power) markets. By the way, a lot of the definitions of capitalism on the web are unadulterated b.s. (Google and other search engines promote these obfuscating definitions by ranking them high in searches on the term.) The term was coined by Marx to describe a specific social arrangement within which workers were employed to create new social value. It has nothing to do with human rights or individual freedom or even private property (in general) or markets (in general). This is precisely why populists at the turn of the last century, including William Jennings Bryan, were understood as anti-capitalist populists (fighting against the growth of big corporations that hired armies of laborers versus the self-employed farmer or artisan or the family business). Capitalism is defined by the development of markets in labor power. And this is an important point for understanding the transformations taking place in the Chinese economy. Before the pro-capitalist reforms, there was no labor power market in China. Workers were assigned to a specific work unit or commune. And the first step in the reforms was not, in fact, towards the creation of capitalism (capitalist labor markets) but was, rather, allowing productive self-employment. Productive self-employment has always been an alternative to capitalism and has generally been the victim of capitalist development. The same is happening in China. Just as self-employed doctors have become rare in the U.S. as capitalist medicine has come to dominate medical care, the same is happening throughout rural China as self-employed farmers (who had gained this right with the earliest reforms) are increasingly finding themselves pushed out of business and into capitalist labor power markets. The problem has been that these new labor power markets are poorly regulated and provide ample opportunities for the employers to abuse their employees. That is why new labor laws in China are needed (just as they were needed in the early period of capitalist development in the West). Among the problems that are being addressed in this new legislation: employers have been able to withhold or reduce wages for just about any reason they can make up for doing so, employees can be terminated without notice, and the terms of labor contract have been, in general, too ambiguous and open to interpretation. Why the new attempt to reform the labor law (the first labor law was passed in 1994)? It is, in part, a response to growing dissatisfaction with the Party among workers and also the outcome of growing internal debates between the Party's minority leftists and the ruling modernist Marxists. President Hu Jintao likes to see himself as a moderating force in these debates and wants to use his tenure as president to make Chinese capitalism a bit less harsh (with the hopes that this will moderate the protests and keep the leftwing of the Party quiet). We'll see.

U.S. Border Chaos

What is happening on the U.S.-Mexico border? Has the U.S. government given the green light to vigilantes and what are these vigilantes doing to Mexican immigrants? Why is Vicente Fox silent?

Long and Winding War on Terror

Past attempts to win the War on Terror do not bode well for the current one.

The British have had several failures. One of the most prominent sort of set the tone for British defeats in the War on Terror over the past two centuries plus was their loss in the American colonies in the 18th century. They really blew that one. Maybe they needed a Patriot Act.

The British went on to lose the War on Terror in places like India and Pakistan (the conquest over terror in India was particularly long and difficult and ultimately lost), Burma, Palestine and Israel (where Menachem Begin, a former terrorist, would lead the rise to power of Likud), Cyprus, Iraq, Ghana, Kenya, Afghanistan (where the British lost several battles with terrorists but continue to hope to bring this territory back into the civilized world, perhaps now with the help of the new supreme terror fighter and former home of anti-British terrorists) and many other political/geographic spaces within which British sovereignty had been established and then undermined/destroyed by terrorist movements. The British have a good deal of experience to share with their erstwhile allies in the War on Terror, early 21st century edition.

Ironically, the Britons had themselves been terrorists during the Roman attempt to expand the civilized world. The Romans had fought against one of history's most legendary terrorist leaders, Boedica, and eventually won this war on terror. One of the oldest Wars on Terror was the Roman struggle against the Christians, who were particularly pesky terrorists, said to have hid out underground and even burned a few buildings down in an effort to destroy or, at the least, undermine the nation. The Romans were also appalled that many of these terrorists wanted to be martyrs, seemed to seek out self-destruction. It was difficult to fight an opponent who did not fear death. Nevertheless, as might be expected, the patriotic Roman population rallied behind their government and the heroic troops and government agents who fought to defeat, round up, and punish the terrorists (Emperor bashers and appeasers were relatively few). Nevertheless, in the end the Romans failed and the Roman Empire is no more.

Perhaps we can learn from these past Wars on Terror. Was the problem that the national governments that fought those wars were too liberal, too wimpy, too prone to protecting civil liberties, or just too reticent to apply torture to get better intelligence in the fight against the terrorists who would, and in many cases successfully did, undermine society?

How many dimensions are there? (link)

New Dimensions