Self Bailout (as the rich see it)

If we are to believe a story that Javier Blas filed today for the Financial Times, then the rich may have developed a bailout strategy of their own:

Investors in gold are demanding “unprecedented” physical levels of bullion bars and coins and moving them into their own vaults as fears about the health of the global financial system deepen.

Industry executives and bankers at the London Bullion Market Association annual meeting said the extent of the move into physical gold was unseen and driven by the very rich.

“There is an enormous pick-up in investment demand. I have never seen a market like this in my 33-year career,” said Jeremy Charles, chairman of the LBMA. “The gold refineries cannot produce enough bars.”

The move comes as fears grow among investors over the losses at investment vehicles previously considered almost risk-free, such as money funds.

Philip Clewes-Garner, associate director of precious metals at HSBC, added that investors were not flying into gold simply because they saw it as a haven amid Wall Street’s woes. “It is a flight into gold because it is a physical asset,” he said.

“Vault staff are also doing overtime,” another banker at the LBMA meeting said, adding that investors in some countries were paying premiums of up to $25 an ounce above the London spot price to secure scarce gold bars.

Spot gold prices in London on Tuesday traded at about $900 an ounce, more than 25 per cent above the level before Lehman Brothers’ collapse. Although some traders said the rush into physical gold could boost prices, others cautioned that prices were depressing jewellery demand, capping any price gain. Industry executives said gold refineries and government mints were working at full throttle to keep up with investor demand, but acknowledged they were suffering from shortages, particularly on coins.

So, while we keep hearing our own elected representatives talking at great length about avoiding golden parachutes, it would appear that those with enough money to do so have decided that "bailout" means bailing out of the financial system as it currently stands and trading in the whole farm for gold coins. However, the stakes have gotten so high that we now seem to be facing a situation where the supply cannot keep up with the demand, which is likely to mean that these guys will only be interested in tangible stuff, rather than any flimsy certificates of ownership. We may yet see the outmoded epithet, "Mister Moneybags," recover its original semantics!

Where will that leave the rest of us? I suppose once the seriously rich have all secured their position in specie, none of them will have any qualms about letting the cat out of the bag and revealing that no currency has inherent value but is only worth what people want it to be worth. Put another way, the value of any currency is determined by those with the strongest buying power and their ability to set prices. The rest of us just have to go along for the ride; and, as I have previously suggested, that ride is likely to lead down Friedrich Hayek's "road to serfdom!"

Words to Remember

In his post last night to The Beat on the Web site for The Nation, John Nichols extracted a few remarks from the debate made by those who voted against the bailout. I feel it a good idea to reproduce those remarks; so we can remember them for what they said and who said them:

• Texas Democrat Lloyd Doggett: "Like the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, this bill is fueled by fear and haste."
• Texas Republican John Culberson: "This legislation is giving us a choice between bankrupting our children and bankrupting a few of these big financial institutions on Wall Street that made bad decisions."
• California Democrat Joe Baca, Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus: "There's nothing in here that guarantees new jobs, nothing that guarantees salary increases. And that's a huge problem."

There we have three members of the House, each representing different interests but each trying to serve those who voted him into office and will have to make that decision again in November. If President George W. Bush was not aware of what these three Congressmen said during debate before speaking to the nation this morning, then his staff was negligent if providing him with an account of why his "solution" was voted down yesterday. If he was aware, then it is clear from what he said this morning that he chose to ignore those remarks. I suppose he can. After all, he does not have to worry about keeping his seat in the House of Representatives! Perhaps he does not care how any of the positions up for election in November will be decided. That should be sufficient reason for the Congress to discard all input from the White House, summon their own economic experts, and start from scratch to build a new solution plan that will see to the needs of those most in need, so to speak. Meanwhile, the President can go back to his faith-based convictions that God will take care of those who believe in Him; perhaps he will find out just what God has in mind for him!

The Denial Presidency

President George W. Bush's remarks this morning indicated little more than what we knew all along, which is that denial is still the strong suit in his hand of Presidential strategies. At a time when we are hearing more and more language to the effect that the needs of the many American citizens facing problems of unmanageable debt vastly exceed the needs of those shareholders who would suffer without a bailout, the President continues to believe that easing Wall Street's pain is the only way to go. We know the specious logic. The President's father once tried to play up the flaws of "trickle-down" reasoning, calling it "voodoo economics;" but he stilled his voice of reasonable protest in the interest of political expediency. These were the days when Ronald Reagan was in his ascendancy; and, when wealth was not trickling down from the haves to the have-nots, there was still a rising tide lifting all boats. The elder Bush could have pressed on about how fallacious this reasoning was, but he chose to run as Reagan's Vice President and eventually became part of the problem.

What the younger Bush does not seem to realize in denying such flaws of the past is that (unless the dark materials at his disposal really have locked up the elections regardless of how the public actually votes) every American facing debt problems still has the power of the ballot box at his or her disposal; and every one of them gets to vote for who will stand for them in the House of Representatives. In other words, if the House votes for something that is not acceptable to the general public, whatever the powers of the Executive Branch and the K Street lobbyists may be, then every member will have to explain that vote of approval to a disapproving electorate (and will have only about a month to do it). There was something historic about yesterday's vote. At a time when most of the rhetoric has been about accountability for reckless financial practices, a critical mass of members of the House remembered their own accountability to their constituency; and they placed that accountability over the powers of Wall Street that once dreamed they were "Masters of the Universe." If both houses of the Congress remember their accountability, fairness to the American public may yet prevail.

Is The Sky Falling? (yet?)

Even as the House of Representatives was giving a firm vote of no-confidence to the purported resolution of an economic rescue plan, claimed to be as fair to Main Street as it was palliative to Wall Street, Ann Pettifor, author of The Coming First World Debt Crisis, was putting the finishing touches on a Viewpoint for the BBC NEWS Web site on why the plan would not work. Her argument is based on the premise that, regardless of what Nancy Pelosi may have told us all last night, the only real beneficiaries of this plan would be "a small number of shareholders and creditors with stakes in Wall Street financial institutions - people like investment guru Warren Buffett [one of the plan's champions] - and potentially some foreign banks." More important, however, is that, while Joseph Stiglitz framed his opposition by paying more attention to what problems needed to be solved, Pettifor see those like Stiglitz as proposing "an overhaul of the whole economic system" and has taken the trouble to compile a four-point plan:

1. "That means, first, dumping the orthodox free-market zealots responsible for the policies that got us into this mess. Frederick Hayek's and Milton Friedman's de-regulation policies have already been dis-credited, with Republicans obliged to disown Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's contempt for government."
2. "Second, it will be vital to restore to the Federal Reserve and other central banks the power to set the rate of interest - across the whole spectrum of lending, so that all rates can be lowered on the massive debts incurred across the board in countries that followed the Anglo-American economic model."
3. "Third, we must abandon the policy of holding down wages and other forms of compensation, especially if we want people to repay debts, and help salvage the banks. Jobs will have to be protected, or even created by government, and incomes must rise."
4. "Fourth, we have to simply write off the debts of those poor people who cannot ever repay. Just as we write off the debts of companies or governments that can no longer pay, so we must recognise that many citizens are effectively insolvent. The refusal to acknowledge this truth lies at the heart of Mr Paulson's plan - and that is why his plan will fail."

Note how Pettifor's approach complements Stiglitz' problem analysis by taking a social approach, rather than beginning with technical models of financial behavior. To some extent she is saying, "Markets do what markets do, whether or not there are ideologues trying to control them; so get the ideologues out of the way." Next she tries to fix the problem that lack of regulation has undermined the Federal Reserve's primary instrument of control, taking down Main Street's confidence in the Fed as a stabilizer with it. Most important, however, is that her final two points suppress any interest in Wall Street by seeing to what may be the most urgent needs of Main Street.

Is anyone in Washington paying attention to this woman?

Hyphenated Identity

Having invoked Daniel Mendelsohn's proposition that "Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas" in examining Simon Boccanegra, the first offering in the new San Francisco Opera season, I was reminded of it again while watching the second offering, The Bonesetter's Daughter. Unlikely as it may seem, these two operas share the common theme of reconciliation. However, while the former involves a reconciliation that sustains the strength of the republic of fourteenth-century Genoa, the latter involves the reconciliation of a contemporary "hyphenated American" with her past and, therefore, with her own sense of identity. If today there is no longer any question that the collaboration of Giuseppe Verdi with Arrigo Boito made a good subject for an opera, The Bonesetter's Daughter probably comes closer to the difficulty that Mendelsohn had in mind. One may appreciate reconciliation with one's identity in a novel (and, in the case of The Bonesetter's Daughter, novelist Amy Tan found many readers who did appreciate it); but would that appreciation translate to opera?

As I previously wrote, Mendelsohn based his argument on an Aristotle's approach to the nature of tragedy. Let me reproduce his key premise, as he published it in The New York Review:

Aristotle, in his Poetics, refers to plot as a knot tied by the author (he calls it a dêsis, a "binding up") out of the manifold strands representing competing wills or desires or ideologies; an ugly and worrisome knot that will, in due course, ultimately come undone in a climactic moment of loosening or release of tension (the lysis, or "undoing")—a concept that survives in our term "dénouement."

Mendelsohn invoked this logic in writing about the Philip Glass opera, Satyagraha; and it is actually provides a perfectly reasonable frame for both the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the principle of Satyagraha that played such a strong role in how he lived his life. What distinguishes the conception of the opera by Glass and his librettist Constance DeJong is the dénouement, which has less to do with Gandhi's own life and more to do with the passing of the Satyagraha principle over time down to Martin Luther King.

In Tan's case the "knot" is that of the "hyphenated American;" and, in casting her novel as an opera libretto, Tan made this clear in the Scene 1 of Act I, where we encounter the tension of Chinese-Americans and Jewish-Americans, brought together by the protagonist's marriage, gathered at a Chinese restaurant for a birthday celebration. Can this make a good subject for opera? (George Balanchine is famous for once saying there are no mothers-in-law in ballet. How, I wonder, would he have reacted to an opera that puts two mothers-in-law together on the stage?) Having now seen The Bonesetter's Daughter as an opera, I have no trouble answering my rhetorical question in the affirmative.

I suspect that one of the reasons for the success of this work is that the production itself was highly "hyphenated." Composer Stewart Wallace invested considerable time in exposing himself to traditional Chinese music, not so much for the sake of appropriating it but in order to convey his own experience of what it meant to hear those sounds through Western ears. Thus, the suona, a double-reed instrument with the impact of a trumpet, plays a major role, which is as much dramatic as musical; and Chinese percussion instruments deftly coexist with a Western battery. The character of the bonesetter's daughter was sung by Qian Yi, trained in traditional Chinese opera and bringing that characteristic vocal sound to her performance. However, the hyphenation extends beyond the score. Director Chen Shi-Zheng conceived of a staging that combined the techniques of contemporary theater with the traditional skills of Chinese acrobats. The very experience of watching this production is one of hyphenated identity.

All this might sound like too much; and I have to confess that my first sight of the acrobats during the Prologue took me back to Peter Hall's catastrophic staging of Verdi's Macbeth for the Metropolitan Opera, in which he wanted to "fly" the witches and expected them to sing Verdi's score at the same time! However, Chen did not repeat Hall's blunders: Every performer stuck to what (s)he was trained to do; and everything came together like the tiles of a mosaic from which the narrative then emerged. To say too much about that narrative would be to spoil the critical revelation of the plot. If this opera has the staying power of even one of Verdi's lesser efforts (like Macbeth), that revelation may eventually have less surprise, as the story will have become more familiar; but for now those new to the opera should be allowed to let its impact run its course.

Thus I would prefer to put the narrative aside and make an observation about Wallace's "Western ears." As I have frequently written, the music of the present cannot help but be informed by the music of the past. While listening to Wallace's score, I found myself thinking about how Igor Stravinsky had drawn upon his own exposure to indigenous Russian music and turned it into a voice of his own. There are occasional flashes that would indicate that Stravinsky was very much part of Wallace's own listening experience, as was Ligeti, with his capacity for weaving fine textures from a prodigious number of independent voices. (I have to confess that Ligeti may have been on my mind since, once again, I had an opportunity to hear a contrabass clarinet, such as the one Ligeti had used in "Lontano.") Yet there also seemed to be a clear invocation of Maurice Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye suite in the final scene, almost as if to emphasize that this was a tale more timeless than the Tan novel itself. The score was thus a reflection of Wallace as Western listener as well as a discoverer of traditional Chinese sonorities.

Finally, credit must be given to David Gockley for taking on this project. Since coming to San Francisco, he has added two world premieres to the company's repertoire, Appomattox being the first. He has given us two significantly different operas, each of which is worthy of that aforementioned staying power in a business in which all "product" is highly volatile. We should all be following the San Francisco Opera to see what future seasons will bring.

Better Literature

Yesterday I accused Peggy Noonan of "groping for a way to describe lives of quiet desperation without drawing upon anyone as cerebrally radical as Henry David Thoreau." This morning I realized that the elephantine passage I extracted from her Wall Street Journal piece had once been distilled down to a mere eighteen lines of poetry:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

This is Section I, in its entirety, from "The Hollow Men," by T. S. Eliot. As a matter of record, it was published in 1925, which means that it was probably written when Eliot was working for Lloyds Bank, making it singularly appropriate reading in our current economic situation and a perfect foil with which to parry the "hollow" prose of The Wall Street Journal!

As I suggested yesterday, Noonan was about as far as anyone could get from what Arthur Miller was trying to tell us about Willy Loman. In the text of Death of a Salesman, Willy succumbs to his inability to keep up with the changes in his own world of work (probably because his worldview has distorted his vision). If, as his wife Linda implores of all of us, "attention must be paid," it is to a man who bet all on personality in a world in which business was becoming more and more impersonal. Noonan's vision is not of Willy Loman's but of that new world of impersonal workers. Eliot saw that world in the making and invoked what is now some of his most memorable language to bring our attention to it. Unfortunately, poetry, once a stimulus for our memories, is now easily forgotten and is unlikely to register in those heads "filled with straw," which now do little more than turn the wheels of an economic system no longer understood. Eliot was too optimistic. Those in "death's other Kingdom" will not remember us at all, because there is no longer anything worth remembering.

The Literature Dunces

It has been almost two months since I wrote a post entitled "The History Dunces," inspired by reading posts on Andrew Keen's Great Seduction blog, which seemed to be reflecting on uninformed readings of uninformed columnists, where the primary information gap was in the domain of history. Well, in the classic words of Twin Peaks, "It is happening again;" but this time the discipline seems to have shifted from history to literature. This time the uninformed columnist is Peggy Noonan, one of the more inspired sources for the scripted words that used to emanate from the mouth of President Ronald Reagan, now flogging her new book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now, in the "Life & Style" section of The Wall Street Journal in a piece which the editors describe as being "on heightened anxiety, the rough election and what the country needs now." How could one not be skeptical in approaching such a text?

Whether or not The Great Communicator really ever communicated, he always seemed to be good at invoking memorable images; and there is a good chance that many (if not most) of those images sprang forth from Noonan's ever-fertile imagination. As we read her opening paragraphs, we see that there is still plenty of fertilizer in that imagination:

Where is America?

America is on line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proven innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention.

America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one one-ounce moisturizer too many in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA agent removed its mascara, opened it, put it to her nose, and smelled it. Why don't you put it up your nose and see if it explodes? America thinks, but does not say.

And, as always America thinks: Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and embarrassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would even admit privately that all this harassment is only the government's way of showing that it is "fair," of demonstrating that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? Our politicians congratulate themselves on this as we stand in line.

All the frisking, beeping, and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that politics has lessened everything, including human dignity. Another thing: It reduces the status of that ancestral arbiter and leader of society, the middle-aged woman. In the new fairness, she is treated like everyone else, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the cellphone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate silk blouse beneath the removed jacket, praying that nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look.

America makes it through security, gets to the gate, waits. The TV monitor is on. It is Wolf Blitzer. He is telling us with a voice of urgency about the latest polls. But no one looks up. We are a nation of Willy Lomans, dragging our wheelies through acres of airport, walking through life with a suitcase and a slack jaw, trying to get home after a long day of meetings, of moving product.

No one in crowded Gate 14 looks up to see what happened with the poll. No one. Wolf talks to the air.

Gate 14 is small-town America, a mix, a group of people of all classes and races and ages, brought together and living in close proximity until the plane is called. Our town appears, the plane is boarded, the town disappears. An hour passes, a new town begins. This is the way of modern life. We live in magic and are curiously unillusioned.

Gate 14 doesn't think any of the candidates is going to make their lives better. But Gate 14 will vote anyway, because they know they are the grown-ups of America and must play the role and do the job.

Man, that is some heavy shit (speaking of which, had there been a bit more drug-addled surrealism in the imagery, one might suspect that Noonan is now channeling the spirit of Hunter Thompson)! This is not just imagery. This is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as we might find it in a Las Vegas simulacrum of Vatican City! So what was it from this hypertrophied mural that seized Keen's attention? The answer lies in the title of his latest Great Seduction post, "A Nation of Willy Lomans."

Unfortunately, it does not take much further reading to realize that Noonan neither knows nor cares very much about Arthur Miller's antihero. Willy Loman is a throwaway image, not even a metaphor. Noonan was groping for a way to describe lives of quiet desperation without drawing upon anyone as cerebrally radical as Henry David Thoreau. So she invokes the way anyone who has seen Death of a Salesman (on stage or film) remembers that first impression of Willy Loman. She then throws it away, so she can get on to her real business of Reagan nostalgia. After all, that is what she did best when she wrote Reagan's scripts: conjure up images that would arrest the attention, regardless of whether they were relevant or, for that matter, made any sense! As far as I can tell, the real motive behind this piece was to give Wall Street Journal readers the comfort of blaming someone else for the problems they themselves cultivated; and what better time to run it than while our Congress is working overtime on a plan to bail them out of those problems while leaving those suffering the worst consequences deepest in the lurch?

Missed Opportunity

As I see it, Barack Obama blew two opportunities to revive that audacity that built his base in the first place.

1. The more drastic was the way he fumbled around on the question of where he would cut the budget. He basically rehashed his highest priorities for spending, thereby leaving any assumptions about low-priority stuff getting cut as implicit. Standing in front of John McCain, he had the perfect opportunity to get there first on getting the bloat out of the Defense budget (allowing McCain to play that card) by seeing to the needs of the armed forces and not worrying so much about pie-in-the-sky Beltway-Bandit research ventures or an unmanageable counterproductive system of contractors.
2. He also missed out on a key talking point "hot off the presses" (the "press" in this case being the Web site for The Nation). Joseph Stiglitz (as in The Three Trillion Dollar War) pointed out that there are four major problems in the current economic crisis. Paulson's "solution" only deals with one. This overlooks the question as to whether solving that one problem will make the other three worse. This then leads to an equally important question: If you cannot solve all four at once (which is a realistic assumption), where is the best place to start?

The economic crisis should have given Obama a hand full of trump cards. Instead, all we got was Michael Cohen at The New York Times saying he "acquitted" himself well. Obama has the capacity to go back to Washington, while the deliberations are taking place, and not make a fool of himself the way McCain did. Having blown his opportunity during the debate, he needs to show us his worth in the trenches.

Shame Trumps Contrition

William Greider has argued, in his piece on the Web site for The Nation, that what the American public really wants by way of resolution to the current economic crisis is a "frank and open" (my turn of phrase) display of "Acts of Contrition." Here is the core of his argument:

The spectacle I want to see is powerful and self-important leaders getting down on bended knee and asking the country's forgiveness.

Henry Paulson could offer apologies for Wall Street and also for the Bush administration's lackadaisical response to the spreading financial contagion. He is not alone.

The Republican party owes us an apology but so does the Democratic party, because both are directly implicated in creating the conditions that caused the disaster. So is the august Federal Reserve. It dismissed the early bonfires and actively encouraged the money fever that has led to ruin. So are deep ranks of learned economists. So are the corporate think tanks that blessed and promoted the financial gimmicks that made the country vulnerable to what is now unfolding.

That's before we tick off the names of celebrated billionaires.

I would like to hear someone in authority say they are sorry. Instead, the political dance in both Washington and Wall Street is focused on holding hands in crisis and diverting blame elsewhere. Maybe it was those careless homeowners who didn't read the fine print in their mortgages. Or sleepy regulators and the creepy lobbyists. Maybe it was the Chinese, who lent us too much money for own good. Maybe it was God punishing his most-favored nation for our sins.

I am not so sure that the rest of the country shares this desire. If we look back on past financial catastrophes, such as the Enron scandal, we see that (probably with the assistance of the media) the American public has a much greater blood-lust. They want to see shame, rather than contrition. They remember the "perp walk" from Enron days; and there is nothing they would like more than to see it again. They would like to see those "celebrated billionaires" in handcuffs being escorted by police, having their heads pressed down as they enter the back seat of a police car; and, with the same hunger that fed the French Reign of Terror, they probably want to see Hank Paulson do that same perp walk. Greider's fantasy that all will be healed by some "reconciliation commission" is just that: a fantasy. Even South Africa recognized that reconciliation would not heal all wounds, and this may be a case where contrition may not even begin to cleanse those wounds. Main Street is "mad as hell and not going to take it any more;" and that is not a position from which one can talk about contrition, forgiveness, and healing. Does anyone still want to get on Barack Obama's case for invoking an adjective like "bitter?"

Another Input Source for Congressional Deliberation

In the time since I made my assertion this morning that "the Congress should recognize that there are more voices to hear in addition to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve," The Nation has provided us with one of those voices, Joseph Stiglitz. For those who may have forgotten, Stiglitz is the Nobel laureate in Economics who co-authored, with Linda Blimes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. This provides us with a useful perspective:

• He is not afraid to get down and dirty with his mathematics.
• He is not afraid of large numbers.
• In the tradition of his fellow Nobel laureate, Robert Solow, he knows that talk about "value" is a dangerous proposition; so he keeps his eye on the ball of price.
• He is not afraid to speak truth to power.

If Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd does not invite Stiglitz to appear before his committee, it would not hurt for him to drop whatever else he may be doing and give Stiglitz' Nation piece a serious read. My guess is that he will then make it required reading for everyone else on his Committee and pass it on to the House Financial Services Committee.

Thus far my primary argumentative position has been to question the consequences of adopting the Treasury proposal. Stiglitz takes a different approach: He grants the problem it does solve and then identifies three problems that it ignores. Here is how Stiglitz frames his argument:

There are four fundamental problems with our financial system, and the Paulson proposal addresses only one. The first is that the financial institutions have all these toxic products--which they created--and since no one trusts anyone about their value, no one is willing to lend to anyone else. The Paulson approach solves this by passing the risk to us, the taxpayer--and for no return. The second problem is that there is a big and increasing hole in bank balance sheets--banks lent money to people beyond their ability to repay--and no financial alchemy will fix that. If, as Paulson claims, banks get paid fairly for their lousy mortgages and the complex products in which they are embedded, the hole in their balance sheet will remain. What is needed is a transparent equity injection, not the non-transparent ruse that the administration is proposing.

The third problem is that our economy has been supercharged by a housing bubble which has now burst. The best experts believe that prices still have a way to fall before the return to normal, and that means there will be more foreclosures. No amount of talking up the market is going to change that. The hidden agenda here may be taking large amounts of real estate off the market--and letting it deteriorate at taxpayers' expense.

The fourth problem is a lack of trust, a credibility gap. Regrettably, the way the entire financial crisis has been handled has only made that gap larger.

Paulson and others in Wall Street are claiming that the bailout is necessary and that we are in deep trouble. Not long ago, they were telling us that we had turned a corner. The administration even turned down an effective stimulus package last February--one that would have included increased unemployment benefits and aid to states and localities--and they still say we don't need another stimulus. To be frank, the administration has a credibility and trust gap as big as that of Wall Street. If the crisis was as severe as they claim, why didn't they propose a more credible plan? With lack of oversight and transparency the cause of the current problem, how could they make a proposal so short in both? If a quick consensus is required, why not include provisions to stop the source of bleeding, the millions of Americans that are losing their homes? Why not spend as much on them as on Wall Street? Do they still believe in trickle down economics, when for the past eight years money has been trickling up to the wizards of Wall Street? Why not enact bankruptcy reform, to help Americans write down the value of the mortgage on their overvalued home? No one benefits from these costly foreclosures.

The administration is once again holding a gun at our head, saying, "My way or the highway." We have been bamboozled before by this tactic. We should not let it happen to us again. There are alternatives. Warren Buffet showed the way, in providing equity to Goldman Sachs. The Scandinavian countries showed the way, almost two decades ago. By issuing preferred shares with warrants (options), one reduces the public's downside risk and insures that they participate in some of the upside potential. This approach is not only proven, it provides both incentives and wherewithal to resume lending. It furthermore avoids the hopeless task of trying to value millions of complex mortgages and even more complex products in which they are embedded, and it deals with the "lemons" problem--the government getting stuck with the worst or most overpriced assets.

Finally, we need to impose a special financial sector tax to pay for the bailouts conducted so far. We also need to create a reserve fund so that poor taxpayers won't have to be called upon again to finance Wall Street's foolishness.

I am not saying that Main Street will quickly grasp all the twists and turns of Stiglitz' reasoning, but he has expressed himself with a rhetoric that may well be the best retaliation against that "shock doctrine" thinking that has Main Street so convinced that they are about to be "bamboozled" again, this time for an astronomical sum. If Franklin Roosevelt tried to reassure the United States by telling its citizens that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself, today's citizens need to recognize (and may, indeed, have recognized) that what they most need to fear are the very purveyors of fear.

Needless to say, we should not be seduced into trying to find that Holy Grail that will resolve all four problems in one fell swoop. Mencken's precept remains: Complex problems are rarely (if ever) resolved by clear and simple solutions. The Congress should not immediately embrace everything that Stiglitz has to say, just because he has demonstrated that, whatever Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke may tell them, there are alternatives worth considering. A good first step for the Senate Banking Committee would be to decide whether or not they accept Stiglitz' proposition that the current crisis is grounded in more than a single problem. If they can agree on that, then perhaps they can also agree on how many in Stiglitz' list of four need to be addressed, if not in terms of a single solution then by asking if solving the first problem will end up making matters worse for the others (meaning that it will only be a matter of time, more likely sooner than later, that they will be deliberating yet another expensive proposal). For that matter they may even ask if that first problem on the list is really the first one that should be addressed.

The good news is that Dodd has the support he needs to hold to his conviction that doing things right is more important than doing them quickly. Main Street clearly shares that conviction. They also know better than to fall for that "My way or the highway" line. They may not know where the straight path is, but they know when someone is trying to bamboozle them into taking a crooked one.

Bush Keeps Collecting Them!

Leave it to President George W. Bush to turn the economic crisis into an opportunity for winning yet another Chutzpah of the Week award, bumping his count up to eleven. Within this very hour, as reported by Al Jazeera English, our President has offered his wisdom (sic) with all the keen perception of General William Westmoreland's light-and-the-end-of-the-tunnel reasoning:

There is no disagreement that something substantial must be done. We are going to get a package passed.

I am reminded of a former colleague who once asked me (rhetorically) if there was any such thing as "negative information." I suppose we should be grateful that a content-free statement is better than taking an action that would only make matters worse, such as the meeting convened yesterday at the White House, which Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd accurately described as a "photo op and political theatre that had nothing to do with us getting to work." This is nothing less than the chutzpah of trying to "appear Presidential" when the best course of action would be to shut up and let those who know what they are doing "get to work." Fortunately, no taxpayer dollars are spent in financing the Chutzpah of the Week awards; so I have no "economic guilt" in adding this one to the President's collection!

Can the System Take Care of Itself?

As deliberations over the bailout proposition continue to flounder, I found myself thinking back on a question I posed on Wednesday: For all the problems currently besieging it, can this system take care of itself? Put another way, if the Congress decides to take the sky-is-falling rhetoric coming out of the White House as a bluff, rejects the prevailing wisdom that time is of the essence, and schedules a more serious period of deliberation (which would mean staying in session longer than originally planned, to the potential detriment of those members up for election), will the system provide its own corrective actions until the deliberations arrive at a conclusion? Paul Krugman does not seem to think so:

Many people on both the right and the left are outraged at the idea of using taxpayer money to bail out America’s financial system. They’re right to be outraged, but doing nothing isn’t a serious option. Right now, players throughout the system are refusing to lend and hoarding cash — and this collapse of credit reminds many economists of the run on the banks that brought on the Great Depression.

However, is the choice really between doing nothing and swift Government action? As I wrote on Wednesday, the Panic of 1907 was alleviated, at least in part, because J. P. Morgan did not hoard cash and persuaded others as well-endowed as he was to follow his lead. Similar activities were observed on Wednesday, the closest to home being Warren Buffet's injection of $5 billion into Goldman Sachs. Since that announcement I have not heard any news about the Berkshire Hathaway faithful rushing to unload their shares. Now we have a report from Norma Cohen, Economic Correspondent for the Financial Times, that the Bank of England is making a similar move:

The Bank of England said it would extend $30bn in cash for a week against eligible collateral, drawing on currency swap lines put in place earlier this month with the Fed.

”These operations are intended to address funding pressures over quarter-end,” the Bank said.

The Bank will also make $10bn available for overnight borrowing. It had previously agreed to provide $40bn daily in overnight money last week, but so far, there has not been demand for the full amount.

Moreover, the Bank said it will inject longer term money into the sterling markets, as banks had been pressing it to do. It said it will extend its long-term repurchase operations against extended collateral, including mortgages. As of September 29, it will offer £40bn for maturity on January 15, taking banks through the year end when cash is generally hoarded by banks.

I take this as a sign that, even on a global scale, the "high rollers," who can think in terms of actions based on ten or more figures, recognize the growing outrage of "the rest of us." This does not mean that, as Krugman put it, doing nothing is a serious option. Rather, it means that the path to solution involves (and has always involved) players other than elected officials; so, rather than pursuing a rush to action grounded in "shock doctrine" thinking, we need interim measures that will buy time for more serious deliberation. If "the system" is in a position to provide those interim measures, then our Government should accept the time purchased on their behalf and use it wisely.

This amounts to little more than reinforcing Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd's conviction that doing things right is more important than doing them quickly. The only change may be that, in its deliberations, the Congress should recognize that there are more voices to hear in addition to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve (and, oh yes, the President of the United States). When Krugman writes about "players throughout the system," he is writing about (among other things) sources for input for Congressional deliberation, some of which, as we have now seen in the Financial Times are based outside the United States but are still significant "players."

Admittedly, this is not a good time to be a member of Congress. There is growing hostility in just about every Congressional district, and every one of those districts gets to choose who will represent it on Election Day. One third of the Senate seats are in a similar position. However, as an extension of my premise about Barack Obama and John McCain, being a member of Congress takes priority over being a candidate. Every member of Congress up for election has an opportunity to demonstrate that actions taken in office during a time of crisis will always count for more than campaign rhetoric or even "pressing the flesh." Our entire Government is being tested over whether it can still do things right. If it fails that test, then the very foundations of our Constitution run the risk of being undermined; and that threat to the Constitution is even greater than any of those advanced by the Bush Administration!

Is This the Work of a Spoiler?

Another Presidential candidate has weighed in on how we got into the current economic mess and what he thinks of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's proposed solution for getting out of it. His name is Ralph Nader. Is it any surprise that he has put together a statement in clear and cogent language that exposes just how much shallow rhetoric there is in anything Barack Obama or John McCain has tried to say (let alone do) over the last two weeks? The "unreasonable man" has struck again with the conviction that comes from arguing on a turf he knows so well, the protection of ordinary consumers from abusive practices. How long will it be before we hear the first howls of "Spoiler!"?

How You got Maxed Out

Anyone interested in data points to add to those collected by James Scurlock for his documentary, Maxed Out, might be interested in a report prepared for Reuters by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa. Now that credit card company MNBA has been acquired by Bank of America, some of its former employees have decided it is time to blow the whistle:

Cate Colombo, from Maine, said she signed up for a customer service job but was instead instructed to make insistent sales pitches aimed at getting MBNA customers deeper into debt.

"I was hired to sell money," she said on a conference call organized by Americans for Fairness in Lending, an advocacy group. "We had a goal of selling $25,000 an hour, $4 million per month. And I was one employee among hundreds, just at this one site."

To meet these goals, Colombo said she was told to turn every regular call from a customer into a sales call. She would do this by running the customer's name through the computer and finding out every possible line of credit they had ever obtained through MBNA.

She would then total the amount of credit outstanding and offer it to the customer as a blank check. MBNA was a bit lighter on disclosure details, such as telling customers that taking on more debt would reduce the borrower's credit score and thereby boost their outstanding interest rates.

"If we didn't attempt to max out, we were considered insubordinate," said Colombo.

If there was any doubt that debt is basically an addiction, all we have to do is take the word of one of the "pushers!"

That Was the Deal That Was(n't)?

We are now a sufficient distance from the initial "breaking news" of a bailout agreement to have a better sense of where things stand; and Associated Press writers Jennifer Loven and Julie Hirschfeld Davis have done as good a job as any of providing us with an orientation. The first red flag goes up in their second paragraph when the very first sentence of that paragraph refers to the "tentative accord." Of course nothing is final before votes are taken, but it is still worth noting that cautious language early and often is the order of the day in this particular report. It remains unclear just what is in this accord. However, Loven and Davis seem to have tapped into the heart of the Congressional input:

Under the plan agreed to by key lawmakers at the Capitol, the Treasury secretary would get $250 billion immediately and could have an additional $100 billion if he certified it was needed, congressional aides said. The last $350 billion could be blocked by a vote of Congress under the arrangement, designed to give lawmakers a stronger hand in controlling the unprecedented rescue.

Listening to the BBC on the way back to San Francisco from Palo Alto, I got the distinct impression that there was more than this; but I also got the impression that both the Executive and Legislative branches are trying to limit the flow of information to the press until matters are better defined. That would make this day rather a first for trappings of harmony. Not only have those two branches finally agreed on something; but also we had a "seriously bipartisan" meeting at the White House at which both Presidential candidates were present. However, little is known about that meeting either, although Loven and Davis tried hard to mine what they could:

Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, who have both sought to distance themselves from the unpopular Bush, sat down with the president at the White House for an hourlong afternoon session that was striking in this brutally partisan season and apparently without precedent. By also including Congress' Democratic and Republican leaders, the meeting gathered nearly all Washington's political power structure at one long table in a small West Wing room.

"All of us around the table ... know we've got to get something done as quickly as possible," Bush told reporters, brought in for only the start of the meeting. Obama and McCain were at distant ends of the oval table, not even in each other's sight lines. Bush, playing host in the middle, was flanked by Congress' two Democratic leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

No one else spoke before the cameras left.

Unfortunately, none of these intimations of harmony have yet propagated to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue:

There were signs that the conservative-leaning House Republican Caucus was not on board. Both of Congress' Republican leaders, Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, issued statements saying there was not yet an agreement.

This makes for major data in the context of Pelosi's claim that she is not going to move energetically on any plan that does not have solid Republican support. Furthermore, while first word of the "agreement" was delivered by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, his Republican counterpart, Richard Shelby, emerged from that same White House meeting and said, "I don't believe we have an agreement."

Most disappointing is that Dodd seems to have dropped his rhetoric about how doing things right is more important than doing them quickly. As far as the reporters were concerned, time was of the greatest essence, which may be true; but it could be just as true that Bush is still trying to get his way through "shock doctrine" sky-is-falling rhetoric. The problem is that all of the language in the Loven-Davis report was about Wall Street; and I, for one, do not think that Main Street is going to come away with any feeling other than that of being victimized (yet again?). To invoke my favorite metaphor, this opera is far from over; and, from where I am sitting in the auditorium, the fat lady is nowhere in sight.

The Politics of Withholding Information?

This item was released as "BREAKING NEWS" about ten minutes ago (10:24 PM PDT) on the BBC NEWS Web site and, in fairness, should probably be reproduced in its entirety:

US agrees to details of bail-out

Both US parties in Congress have reached agreement on the outline of a $700bn (£380bn) bail-out plan to revive the financial sector.

Leading Democrat Senator Christopher Dodd said they had reached "fundamental agreement" on the package though he did not reveal details.

He said Congress could act in the next few days to pass a bill on the subject.

The plan is aimed at helping finance firms offload their bad debt, which has triggered a global credit crisis.

"We now expect that we will have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate and be signed by the president," Senator Robert Bennett of Utah said after meetings with lawmakers on Thursday.

Details of the package were not immediately available but it is expected to include limits on executives' pay as well as oversight requirements.

The news comes as President George W Bush is set to meet both presidential candidates.

The idea that there is a statement of "fundamental agreement" without the slightest trace of substantiation should send chills down all of our spines. If Main Street has been saying that this is a serious problem that requires serious deliberation rather than a knee-jerk reaction, then the reads a lot like Wall Street trumping Main Street. This will probably not surprise anyone, but that does not mean we can be depressed about it.

From my point of view, I have what ought to be a more relevant question: If details have not yet been polished enough to present to the news media, are they at least in a form that can be presented to President Bush's meeting? If not, then there is no way in which that meeting can address the merits of the case, since all parties will be equally in the dark about what that case is. There is then the related question: Are the details in a form in which all Senators can start reading them in preparation for floor debate? If so, then shouldn't both Barack Obama and John McCain be at their offices reviewing those details, rather than consenting to a ceremonial appearance in the Oval Office? My guess is that we are about to get hoodwinked (by hoods of the highest order, I fear); and it may be that the only question that will have a fighting chance of getting answered will be the one concerned with the extent to which either Obama or McCain was complicit in the hoodwinking!

The Priority of Campaigning

It is interesting to contemplate the extent to which President George W. Bush's address to the nation last night may have amounted to a non-event. It may have been at the top of my Yahoo! home page this morning; but the link was to Yahoo! Finance (rather than Yahoo! News), which reflected an analysis at Forbes.com by Brian Wingfield, whose assessment reflected the sort of position one might expect from a "capitalist tool" like Forbes:

In a way, he's the best pitchman the administration's got. The credit crunch is an extraordinarily complicated issue, and Bush's most popular trait is his homespun way of connecting with people.

Wingfield never got closer to Main Street than that "homespun way of connecting with people" phrase; and, if we are to take the interviews aired this morning on NPR's Morning Edition, then, whatever the "capitalist tool" may have hoped, the pitchman just did not connect.

One reason may have been that Main Street just was not paying attention. The President had been "scooped" by John McCain's announcement that he would leave the campaign trail and return to Washington and work with his fellow Senators on their reaction to the proposal submitted by the Treasury Department. One analyst on NPR described this as yet another example of McCain's willingness to take big risks, seeing it as a parallel to the nomination of Sarah Palin. At the very least, McCain seems to have been just as effective at "scooping" Barack Obama as he was with the President. I have never heard Obama sound quite so tongue-tied as in is attempt to define his response to McCain's actions. Now the confusion is spreading among the Obama supporters, many of whom would like to dismiss McCain's gambit as a cheap political shot.

Well, to be fair, it is hard to imagine any politician doing anything for a motive that was not political; but it may be that the most important consequence for the rest of us is that McCain has reminded us all about priorities. I may be going against the grain on this one, but I continue to hold to the premise that a Senator is a Senator first and a candidate second. Yes, what Lyndon Johnson famously called "pressing the flesh" is important; but (remembering the Olympic "wisdom" of Thomas Bach) let's not kid ourselves: The campaign is a media product. As in a Hollywood film, the "star" does not have to be "on screen" all the time and may even be there "virtually." Hollywood knew about this with stunt men even in the days before CGI. By recognizing this prioritization, McCain has challenged Obama on it; and, whether or not he did this as a baldly political strategy, I have to give him points in my own scorecard.

Back in the days when the business world was sane, a major commitment of funds would never be made without first performing "due diligence" over the nature of the commitment. We are currently seeing this practice in the current efforts to rescue Washington Mutual, which, as a point of personal record, happens the be the bank that holds both my checking account and my (fixed-rate) mortgage. It is the role of Congress to perform such "due diligence" over the bailout proposal; and, Congress being what it is, the machinery of due diligence consists primarily in hearings and debates. This particular commitment of funds is sufficiently serious that, by all rights, the two Senators who are also Presidential candidates should be involved in that Congressional machinery. Furthermore, as I have previously noted, that involvement will be documented in the Congressional Record, providing one of the few sources pertaining to either candidate that is not a skillfully crafted media product. We the people (could not resist the cliché) have the perfect opportunity to observe both candidates in a major decision-making situation; and we should celebrate that opportunity.

Whatever McCain's motives may have been, I applaud the move he has taken. I am disappointed that Obama's response has run the gamut from lame reaction ("I thought of it first") to rejection ("I still plan to be at the debate"). I also agree with Congressional leaders (such as Harry Reid) who are concerned that either candidate could easily turn the Senate floor into the site of a stump speech; but the beauty of the Congressional Record is its objectivity. It documents our representatives' efforts to come up with solutions, and it documents when they make fools of themselves. With a little bit of clever manipulation, McCain has managed to get Obama to look a bit like Achilleus sulking in his tent (not the first time I have invoked this simile); and Obama had better be quick about getting his focus back on that electorate he is supposed to be serving!

McCain's Gauntlet

This seems to be a day for my rhetorical chickens coming to roost. Having already observed that the FBI is following through on my suggestion that the current economic crisis should be examined in terms of fraudulent behavior, I just read an Associated Press account of another suggestion coming up for grabs. This time what is at stake is a conclusion I came to on Monday:

At the same time those of us supporting Barack Obama should inform him of the importance that he let the electorate know that he has given serious consideration to the proposals of both Paulson and Sanders and that he believes that the significance of the crisis at hand demands serious debate of the merits of both proposals. Furthermore, Senator Obama should substantiate his position by participating in that debate in the Senate. If his opponent decides to keep campaigning while he is seeing to the people's business, that could easily trigger a response in Obama's favor.

It is unclear who first picked up on this suggestion; but, at least as far as the Associated Press is concerned, it seems to be John McCain who is getting all the credit. Here is how Beth Fouhy (Is that pronounced the way I think it is?) wrote the story:

Republican John McCain said Wednesday he wants to delay Friday's debate with Democratic rival Barack Obama and temporarily put aside their partisan campaign to resolve the nation's financial crisis.

McCain's announcement came after the two candidates held private talks about joining forces to address the Wall Street meltdown. The Obama campaign said the Democrat initiated the talks, but McCain beat Obama to the punch with the first public statement calling for the two to rise above politics in a time of crisis.

McCain said the Bush administration's plan seemed headed for defeat and a bipartisan solution was urgently needed.

McCain said he would put politics aside and return to Washington Thursday to focus on the nation's financial problems after addressing former President Clinton's Global Initiative session in New York. McCain said he had spoken to President Bush and asked him to convene a leadership meeting in Washington that would include him and Obama.

"It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration's proposal," McCain said. "I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time."

McCain said he has spoken to Obama about his plans and asked the Democratic presidential nominee to join him.

Obama's campaign did not immediate say whether he supported a delay of the debate or would also stop campaigning.

The Obama campaign said in a statement that Obama had called McCain around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to propose that they issue a joint statement in support of a package to help fix the economy as soon as possible. McCain called back six hours later and agreed to the idea of the statement, the Obama campaign said. McCain's statement was issued to the media a few minutes later.

The good news is that both candidates have publicly acknowledge personal commitment to resolving the current economic crisis. The bad news is that we do not know how that commitment will be demonstrated. I continue to hold to my original position: The Treasury Department has submitted a concrete proposal to the Congress for approval. Congress is currently deliberating over that proposal. (As I write this, the House Financial Services Committee should be in session.) Presumably, deliberation will involve more than Committee review; it will probably also require debate on the floor of both the Senate and the House. McCain has "scooped" Obama by announcing his intention to leave the campaign trail and return to Washington. As of the writing of Fouhy's report, Obama has not made any such commitment.

This may be bad news for Obama supporters. Right now the Senate floor may be the ne plus ultra of bully pulpits from which both McCain and Obama can not only state their positions on economic recovery but also have those statements captured in the Congressional Record. If the economy turns out to be the deciding factor in November, both hands of cards will be on the table for observation by every voter and interpretation by every analyst. This could very well be the defining moment when many (most?) voters decide they have seen each candidate for what he really is. I shudder to think what would happen if Obama withdrew from that moment. I have already been on his case for neglecting his "day job;" I am not sure how I would react to his neglecting one particular aspect of that "day job" that is likely to be of importance to every tax-paying American.

The FBI is on the Case!

When I asked yesterday whether or not fines arising from fraud prosecution might contribute to solving financial problems from Main Street's, rather than Wall Street's point of view, my question was not entirely rhetorical. Nevertheless, I did not have high hopes that it would be taken seriously. Well, if I am to believe a report this morning on the BBC NEWS Web site, there is at least one institution (in the Department of Justice, no less) that has decided that fraud investigation is in order:

The FBI has begun an investigation into four major US financial institutions caught up in the current financial crisis, US media say.

Investigators are reportedly examining possible fraud by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed bank Lehman Brothers and insurer AIG.

Top managers at those firms are also being investigated, the reports say.

In the past year, as the US housing market slumped, the FBI began a broad inquiry across the financial sector.

It was prompted by concerns over the way high-risk, "sub-prime" mortgages were being sold.

The FBI has been looking at lenders who sold home loans to buyers on low or unpredictable incomes and also the investment banks that packaged these loans and sold them on.

I find that third paragraph particularly important: This is not a case of trying to pin the crime on an institution that is too bankrupt to pay a fine. The FBI is trying to identify specific individuals who perpetrated fraud and presumably benefitted from it (in which case finding out the extent of that benefit will also be relevant). Now, as we know from history, the Oval Office has a track record in trying to muck with FBI investigations; but the fact that we do know this should make it harder for the current occupant to go down a trail that Richard Nixon once blazed. So strike up the Prokofiev (for anyone with radio nostalgia): The FBI is on the case, and let's all hope that they smoke out the bad guys!

Will the Sky Fall?

This past weekend Book TV devoted a slot to a book about the Panic of 1907. Since they tend to set their schedules at the beginning of the week, they could not have anticipated that viewers would be thinking about Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's bailout proposal during the broadcast, but the timing could not have been better. I turned to Wikipedia for a reasonably succinct summary of the basic story:

The crisis was ignited by an attempt to corner the market in a copper company that had collapsed that October. When the bid failed, banks that had loaned money for the scheme experienced a number of runs which eventually spread to affiliated banks and trusts, leading a week later to the downfall of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, New York's third largest trust company. From Knickerbocker, fear spread throughout the city's trusts and across the country as regional banks pulled deposits from New York, and as nationwide people withdrew deposits from their regional banks.

At the time the United States had no central bank to inject liquidity. The panic may have been worse if not for the intervention of J.P. Morgan, who convinced other bankers in the city to provide a backstop for the crisis. By November the contagion had stopped, and the following year, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich established and chaired a commission to investigate the crisis and propose future solutions, leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

Speaking of the Federal Reserve, there has been an energetic debate over at Truthdig stimulated significantly by Ben Bernanke's testimony yesterday before the Senate Banking Committee. I was reminded of the Panic of 1907 when I read the following brief contribution from reader "troublesum:"

Congress should call their bluff and see if the sky falls in the next few days.

This morning I heard on the radio that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has declared that she is not going to rush into things unless there is solid support for the $700 billion "solution" on the Republican side, knowing full well that those Republicans (all of whose seats are up for grabs in November, most of which will be decided by Main Street, rather than Wall Street) have yet to give any signs of such "solid support." Meanwhile, in the Senate Banking Committee hearing room the skepticism was so thick you could cut it with a knife; and it was being voiced with equal passion by both Committee Chair Christopher Dodd and his Republican counterpart, Richard Shelby (admittedly for different reasons).

So, is the sky going to fall? It seems that one of the most important lessons of the Panic of 1907 is that it was resolved without any Government intervention, for the simple reason that, at that time, the Government did not have any institution that could intervene! The intervention came from J. P. Morgan, who may well have been the fattest of the fat cats at that time, and his combined powers of strategic planning and aggressive persuasion to engage the resources of other fat cats. Like it or not, the system took care of itself!

Can this system take care of itself? One place to start might be with a morning dispatch from Reuters:

U.S. stocks headed for a higher open on Wednesday after Warren Buffett made a $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs Group Inc late on Tuesday, buoying sentiment in the beleaguered financial sector.

Additionally, Japan's No. 3 bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, plans to invest in Goldman Sachs, Japanese media said, in what would be the third big Japanese investment this week on Wall Street.

Before the bell, shares of Goldman Sachs jumped nearly 5 percent to $130.85, while rival Morgan Stanley rose 4.6 percent to $29.30. JPMorgan Chase, the No. 3 U.S. bank, were up 2.3 percent at $41.48.

A rise on Wall Street would help reverse the worst two-day slide in six years.

Who has (as the risk of making Barack Obama's supporters cringe) "power you can believe in," Warren Buffett or any representative of the Bush Administration? Now, to be fair, this same Reuters report does not write off the significance of the current turmoil in our Congress:

But even as the Goldman Sachs news suggested confidence, investors worried congressional wrangling could delay or weaken the proposed $700 billion plan to rescue the financial sector, increasing unease about the struggling U.S. economy.

Nevertheless, Buffett's action is but one of several signs of "movement from within" (most of which have originated in Europe or Asia) to address the problem with resources already available. Additional resources would probably help, but who would know best what to do with them? If Congress is "wrangling" over their confidence in Hank Paulson, perhaps they should consider bringing other people to the table in whom both they and Wall Street have the necessary confidence.

Since this is not 1907, we have to be careful just how far we can reason with this particular analogy. On the other hand, rather than a government that took a detached laissez-faire position, we have one that is not beyond causing the sky to fall by deliberately undermining some of its props! (Think of Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" thesis.) We are so far from being out of the woods that we barely know the extent of the woods! Nevertheless, we are beginning to identify a few cool heads trying to take corrective actions with the resources they have. Will any of them be testifying before the Senate Banking Committee or the House Financial Services Committee?

MAXED OUT

Anyone interested in a relatively straightforward account of how we got into the mess of our current financial crisis may consider taking a look at James Scurlock's documentary, Maxed Out. Indeed, since the film was released in 2006, it makes for an interested bell-wether in its capacity for recognizing how (and why) things would get worse. The film has one fundamental take-away message:

If an ordinary American citizen accumulates an unmanageable debt (which is a lot easier than one might think), that citizen is likely to spend the rest of his/her life paying for it.

However, there is a message that parallels this one that brings us closer to the present:

If the United States government accumulates an unmanageable debt, its ordinary citizens are likely to spend the rest of their lives paying for it.

We can now home in on the message for our current situation:

If a major American financial institution accumulates an unmanageable debt, the United States government will absorb that debt into its own unmanageable debt; and the result is (guess what?) that ordinary citizens are likely to spend the rest of their lives paying for it.

Basically, the whole activity bears a shocking resemblance to any gaming table in Las Vegas, which is intentionally designed to keep the house rich at the expense of its customers. Is it any wonder that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is speaking out so strongly about keeping her country away from such a table?

Further Consequences of Globalization

I sure hope Tom Friedman saw this report on the BBC NEWS Web site:

The Indian head of an Italian auto parts company has been beaten to death in a suburb of Delhi, allegedly by a group of sacked workers.

Lalit Kishore Choudhary, of Graziano Transmissioni India, died at the company factory in Greater Noida.

Police said more than 100 dismissed workers entered the factory vandalised machinery and attacked Mr Choudhary.

The confrontation came after a long industrial dispute. The workers denied killing Mr Choudhary.

Nearly 300 workers at Graziano Transmissioni were dismissed two months ago after they demanded pay rises and allegedly ransacked its offices, the AFP news agency reported.

How does this fit into your utopian vision of globalization, Tom? How much does Graziano Transmissioni know about what happens in India, other than the premise that labor is cheaper there? Some new chickens may be coming home to roost!

How Much IS $700 Billion?

This past Saturday I referred to $700 billion, the amount of money the Bush Administration wishes to allocate to bail out the bad debts of the current financial crisis, as "a quantity that most of us can barely (if at all) comprehend." Just how much is $700 billion? BBC News reporter Steve Schifferes has now provided us with one way to approach the answer to that question. Ironically, it is embedded in his article entitled, "The Politics of the Bail-Out;" but it is presented as the form of a useful comparison. Referring to the campaign promises that both John McCain and Barack Obama have been making about how they will manage the Federal budget, Schifferes wrote:

But with the size of the bail-out now roughly equivalent to annual government spending (excluding social security and Medicare) such claims are less and less credible.

There you have it: Take away Social Security and Medicare, and $700 billion is basically the amount of money our government spends in a single year. This is not to ignore the budgetary impact of either Social Security or Medicare, but it makes for a reminder that the Bush Administration wants to increase the national debt by a quantity that amounts for a major chunk of the amount of money our Government spends in a single year.

Is this realistic? Would you go into debt over the amount of money you spend in the course of a year? Would any sensible institution float you a loan for that amount of money? Isn't this just an exaggerated variation on those predatory lending practices based on convincing unwitting poor families to take out mortgages they could not afford? Is it any wonder that, as Schifferes put it in his report, "the bail-out is not playing as well on Main Street as it is on Wall Street?" On Main Street when you make a mess, you pay for the damage you have caused. (This is, of course, the "Pottery Barn parable" that Colin Powell tried to present to our President and ultimately failed.) Having acknowledged the lack of regulations that could have prevented any of these messes in the first place, does our legal system not have resources for fraud prosecution through which one could impose fines on individually specified defendants on Wall Street and apply the collected funds to solve the problems of the many plaintiffs on Main Street?

After 9/11 Gore Vidal was one of the first (and few) to call out the Bush Administration for misreading reality. He took (and probably still takes) the position that the destruction of an office building is a criminal act and should be investigated and prosecuted as such. Unfortunately, his efforts to expose criminality got blown away by a commitment to a Global War on Terror. Does fraud not provide us with a basis for addressing most (if not all) of the elements contributing to our economic crisis through legal machinery? Shouldn't any "solution" we consider begin by asking simple legal questions about liability, rather than obsessing over proposals for life preservers? (For what it is worth, it appears that Nicolas Sarkozy was asking similar questions last night.) Did I recently hear a pundit ask rhetorically how much more damage the Bush Administration could do before leaving office? Do we really want to know the answer to that question?

Watching the Senate Banking Committee

Clichéd as it may sound, the eyes of the world are likely to be on the Senate Banking Committee today. Both Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are scheduled to testify, and we can already read what they are expected to say on the BBC NEWS Web site. However, this is not where the action will be. The focus of attention will be on the questions that Committee members will pose to both Paulson and Bernanke and the quality of the answers that are delivered. If I was concerned yesterday that Congress would rubber-stamp the Administration's proposed $700 billion "solution" in the same reckless way that they approved the President's ill-conceived plans for deploying our troops, then my fears have been alleviated far more that I could have anticipated. Not only is there skepticism in the Congress; but also that skepticism is bipartisan (even if the reasons for skepticism are not always bipartisan). The whole affair looks more and more as if the only "solution" on the table is tantamount to rewarding those whose bad judgment brought about this mess in the first place, while the needs of the general public are ignored unless they can be hauled out for a specific rhetorical strategy.

Consider, as an example, the following statement that the BBC included from Paulson's anticipated testimony:

When the financial system doesn't work as it should, Americans' personal savings, and the ability of consumers and businesses to finance spending, investment and job creation are threatened.

We have heard this sentence too many times since the beginning of last week. The fact that it has been used so often by not only those who really do not know what they are talking about but also those who, by all rights, should know better, should be enough to arouse our suspicions; and, as soon as we take a closer look, it is easy enough to see why we should be suspicious. In the first place this sentence is little more than a tautology: "When the financial system doesn't work," then the activities of anyone trying to do anything with their money "are threatened." Thus, from a logical point of view, the sentence really does not say anything, which means that, in the realm of argumentation, it does nothing to warrant any claim advocating the proposed solution. On the other hand it is one of those rhetorical moves that will try to convince the Senate Banking Committee that the solution is "good for everyone," not only the high-rollers in the financial sector who have discovered what it feels like to crap out but also all those "ordinary Americans" who work for, or perhaps own, businesses (getting less and less ordinary if we read the unemployment numbers) and who cannot avoid being consumers.

One way to counter such a move is to assume the consequent and start questioning its consequences. For example what will a $700 billion increase in the national debt do to "Americans' personal savings, and the ability of consumers and businesses to finance spending, investment and job creation?" Is there not the threat that those personal savings will be devalued, not only in terms of foreign currency trading but also at the lowest level of domestic buying power; and, if the underlying buying power of the money we have (or think we have) is undermined, what will that do to "spending, investment and job creation" in the business sector? Then there is the question of what will happen to Government spending? Beyond what they have saved for themselves, what will happen to those Americans' Social Security checks? Will they provide adequate support against the hard numbers behind the cost of living? What about the role of longer-term Government spending in areas such as education and health care (both of which have been blithely ignored in just about every other decision the current Administration has made)?

Ultimately, there is really only one question that Paulson and Bernanke need to answer in their testimony today: Cui bono? Who actually benefits? The members of the Senate Banking Committee need to provide an answer to that question to those who elected them as representatives, and that answer should do for the rest of us. (To this end it is important that they consider alternative perspectives, such as, for example, those of leading economic experts in Germany.) If the answer is that the primary benefit will be to maintain the comfort of those who brought about this crisis in the first place (in the interest of increasing their own comforts, otherwise known as greed), then Congress should speak up for the rest of us before we get screwed one more time by an Administration that has never taken the overall quality of life of the electorate to heart. This may well be the day when we see who still has respect for the "job description" specified in our Constitution!

A Tragedy of Republic

Whether or not, as Daniel Mendelsohn has argued, good people (and, as I have extrapolated, good fortune) "make good subjects for operas," there remains Aristotle's precept that tragedy (on the basis of the data available to him) is basically about αγών (antagonism) between two nobles. This should remind us of how detached the subject matter of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was from either Athenian democracy or the concerns of Plato's "Republic." Yet the primary strength of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Simon Boccanegra (at least in the revised 1881 version currently being performed by the San Francisco Opera) resides in its setting in a republic (fourteenth-century Genoa) and the αγών between two men, one of whom (Jacopo Fiesco) is noble by birth, while the other (Boccanegra) is a commoner whose nobility resides in his deeds. Operatic αγών usually tends to bring down both antagonists, along with a generous number of supporters on both sides, often to the extent that no one is left to bring about a reconciliation. In this case, however, the two antagonists are basically "good people;" the αγών is more an opposition of their value systems through which each, respectively, tries to "do the right thing."

The 1881 libretto for Simon Boccanegra is by Arrigo Boito. I find this particularly interesting since Boito tends to be best known for his libretto for Otello, set in fifteenth-century Cyprus, which, at that time, was part of the Venetian republic. However, there is little noble about any of the characters that Shakespeare conceived for this play; and there is no shortage of suggestive vulgar language to play to the baser instincts of the audience. Verdi and Boito smoothed over much of that vulgarity, but neither of them stinted on tapping into J(I)ago's truly vile nature. Furthermore, there is little sense of anyone putting priority on "doing the right thing;" and the αγών between Otello and Jago is about as destructive as things get. On the other hand Otello was first performed in 1887; so it may be that, for all the ways in which Verdi and Boito fixed up the 1857 version, Simon Boccanegra did not attract audiences because it did not have enough blood and guts.

The San Francisco Opera production is an import from the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, originally conceived by Elijah Moshinsky, a director who never seems to be afraid taking a cerebral approach to cerebral subject matter. It is not the easiest opera to stage, particularly because so many of the plot elements are not explicitly enacted and only referred to by the characters. Reading the synopsis is thus a somewhat daunting matter. Not only does one have to sort out past and present into a coherent time line, but one also has to deal with names that are changed for reasons of political intrigue.

Nevertheless, it is ultimately the complexity of the situation that makes the opera so intriguing, particularly when one recognizes how nondestructive the underlying αγών is. Yes, reconciliation with Fiesco only comes when Boccanegra is on the brink of death; but it is a reconciliation that has been taking shape as the plot unfolds. So we as audience desire it as surely as we expect it. Ultimately, there is only one "agent of destruction" in the opera, Paolo Albiani. If we overlook Moshinsky's decision to give us a brief glimpse of Amelia during the orchestral introduction, Albiani is the first character we encounter; and we see him buying votes to assure the election of Boccanegra as Doge of Genoa. In other words we first see him as a destructive force against the integrity of Genoese republican politics; so it is no great surprise when he later turns that force against Boccanegra, first through political machinations and, when those are thwarted, through poisoning.

This brings us to why there is antagonism between Boccanegra and Fiesco in the first place: It is the antagonism of an early manifestation of class warfare triggered by Fiesco's offense at Boccanegra's amorous relationship with his daughter. Boccanegra thinks that his stature in Fiesco's eyes will improve when he is elected Doge. Instead, it aggravates the antagonism and their personal relationship is reflected in an ongoing strain between commoners and nobles in the council chamber and the efforts of those, like Albiani, to rouse the rabble in the streets. Boccanegra is stern enough to recognize his enemies and deal with them, but he also recognizes that class antagonism is Genoa's greatest obstacle to effective government. The republic always seems on the brink of collapse until the personal reconciliation between Boccanegra and Fiesco culminates in Boccanegra's final decree as Doge: the appointment of the noble Gabriele Adorno, Boccanegra's son-in-law and Fiesco's grandson-in-law, as the next Doge. Boccanegra dies, but the republic survives far stronger than it had been under his administration.

The best way to make this work on the stage is to pace the plot slow enough to be absorbed but not so slow as to drag. Moshinsky understood this in terms of the staging demands, and Donald Runnicles took care of the rest in pacing the music. Needless to say, having singers with solid voices and acting skills committed to the strength of the characters being portrayed was also a great benefit. Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Boccanegra) and Vitalij Kowaljow (Fiesco) knew exactly how to deliver the intensity of the underlying αγών, while Barbara Frittoli (Amelia) and Marcus Haddock (Adorno) delivered the kind of romantic couple one always hopes for in an opera. Patrick Carfizzi was also particularly effective as Albiani. While Jago is vile at first sight, Albiani's capacity for malicious destruction is a cumulative one; and Carfizzi was particularly effective in portraying that accumulation from scene to scene.

One can appreciate why Simon Boccanegra is not the sort of opera one expects to find regularly in the repertoire, but productions like this make one wish it were performed more often.

Sanders' Way

The media would like you to believe that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion "solution" to the current financial crisis is the only option. Indeed, they are so convinced of this that they have decided that it is unnecessary to report on the nuts and bolts of the actual legislative proposal that the Treasury Department has submitted to the Congress. Anyone who believes that the Devil is in the details will have to do this by visiting Tim Dickinson's National Affairs blog on the Rolling Stone Web site. Anyone gullible enough to believe that there is as little room for debate over this proposal as there was over the proposals that launched our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq would do well to visit the Web site for The Nation this morning. Senator Bernie Sanders is a member of the Senate Budget Committee and seems to be the sort of guy you can't fool twice (without tying his tongue over the old saying). As a result this morning he submitted a statement of his own position, available for all of us to read on the aforementioned Web site. Here is the core of that position:

Let us be clear. If the economy is on the edge of collapse we need to act. But rescuing the economy does not mean we have to just give away $700 billion of taxpayer money to the banks. (In truth, it could be much more than $700 billion. The bill only says the government is limited to having $700 billion outstanding at any time. By selling the mortgage-backed assets it acquires--even at staggering losses--the government will be able to buy even more resulting is a virtually limitless financial exposure on the part of taxpayers.) Any proposal must protect middle income and working families from bearing the burden of this bailout.

I have proposed a four part plan to accomplish that goal which includes a five-year, 10 percent surtax on the income of individuals above $500,000 a year, and $1 million a year for couples; a requirement that the price the government pays for any mortgage assets are discounted appropriately so that government can recover the amount it paid for them; and, finally, the government should receive equity in the companies it bails out so that when the stock of these companies rises after the bailout, taxpayers also have the opportunity to share in the resulting windfall. Taken together, these measures would provide the best guarantee that at the end of five years, the government will have gotten back the money it put out.

Second, in addition to protecting the average American from being saddled with the cost, any serious proposal has to include reforms so that we end the type of behavior that led to this crisis in the first place. Much of this activity can be traced to specific legislation that broke down regulatory safety walls in the financial sector and allowed banks and others to engage in new types of risky transactions that are at the heart of this crisis. That deregulation needs to be repealed. Wall Street has shown it cannot be trusted to police itself. We need to reinstate a strong regulatory system that protects our economy.

Third, we need to address the needs of working families in this country who are today facing very difficult times. If we can bail out Wall Street, we need to respond with equal vigor to their plight. That means, for example, creating millions of jobs through major investments in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and creating a new renewable energy system. We must also make certain that the most vulnerable Americans don't freeze in the winter or die because they lack access to primary health care.

Finally, we need to protect ourselves from being at the mercy of giant companies that are "too big to fail," that is, companies who are so large that their failure would cause systemic harm to the economy. We need to assess which companies fall into this category and insist they are broken up. Otherwise, the American taxpayer will continue to be on the financial hook for the risky behavior, the mismanagement, and even the illegal conduct of these companies' executives.

As I see it, we have work set out for us on two fronts. Most important is that we all inform our elected representatives, not only in the Senate but also the House (for me, that's Pelosi … whoopee!), that we have read Sanders' proposal and do not want to see it "pass unnoticed." At the same time those of us supporting Barack Obama should inform him of the importance that he let the electorate know that he has given serious consideration to the proposals of both Paulson and Sanders and that he believes that the significance of the crisis at hand demands serious debate of the merits of both proposals. Furthermore, Senator Obama should substantiate his position by participating in that debate in the Senate. If his opponent decides to keep campaigning while he is seeing to the people's business, that could easily trigger a response in Obama's favor.

Dickinson reduced his own interpretation of the Paulson proposal to the simplest of terms:

We. Are. So. Screwed.

The only way Dickinson can be refuted is by the Congress coming up with a better plan and sending it to the White House. Sanders has taken a serious step in that direction. It is up to us to make sure that he does not get swept under the carpet (where all he will find is consolation from Dennis Kucinich, who is used to being there)!

Embracing Regulation

I was wondering when I would first encounter the "end of an era" cliché in the reporting of the ongoing financial crisis. My wondering has now been resolved by Associated Press Economic Writer Martin Crutsinger in this morning's dispatch:

It was the end of an era on Wall Street as the Federal Reserve granted permission for the last two major investment banks — Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to become bank holding companies in order to stay in business.

The Fed announced late Sunday evening that it had approved the request, which will allow Goldman and Morgan Stanley to create commercial banks that can take deposits, bolstering the resources of both institutions.

The passing of the institution of investment banking has less significance to someone like myself, for whom "investment" has never ventured beyond the pale of dealing with a stockbroker, than the primary implication that comes from changing from an investment bank to a bank holding company:

The change of status means both companies will come under the direct regulation of the Fed, which oversees the nation's bank holding companies. The banking subsidiaries of the two institutions will face the stricter regulations that commercial banks are required to meet. Previously, the primary regulator for Goldman and Morgan Stanley was the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It would appear that the primary virtue of what Paul Krugman had called "nondepository" institutions was to get away from the constraints of regulations (most of which had been introduced in response to previous financial crises) in the interests of making more money. However, to ring a change on an old rule of rising through the ranks, financial institutions should be kind to the regulations it encounters while it rises, because it will probably need them when it falls. The passing of the investment bank may well be remembered as yet another attempt to get rich quick that blew up the same way previous get-rich-quick schemes have done. In the language I recently invoked about the Cluetrain Manifesto (ultimately just another way to ring a change on trying to get rich quick), once again we are seeing some "conservative older values" triumph over "shiny new values." Presumably, in due course of time, those conservative older values will be able to undo the damage done by the shiny new ones; but that just reflects President George W. Bush's inclination to fall back on talking about "the long run," which does me little good as a reader of John Maynard Keynes! Nevertheless, there is still some virtue in seeing a pair of banks grasp the value of regulation faster than the workings of our Government!

Filling in Some Background

I realize there may have been an inordinate amount of name-dropping in yesterday's post on the reflective nature of listening to music. However, this is a "rehearsal studio;" and rehearsal is often a matter of identifying all sorts of loose ends that need to be gathered up at a later time. In this case one of those loose ends involved the conjunction of my long-standing interest in Gerald Edelman with a renewed interest in George Herbert Mead. It has been over a year since I last wrote about Mead on this blog. That was a time when I seemed to be preoccupied with beating up "social software" evangelists over their oblivion to both the nature of the social world and the significant body of writing that tried to tease out that nature. One of my bigger sticks was Mead's thesis of "symbolic interactionism;" and since, in many respects, social software is a ne plus ultra of symbolic interactionism, I still find the prevailing neglect of Mead to be downright depressing.

My current interest in Mead, however, has broadened out to what one might call the "umbrella concept" within which symbolic interactionism is situated; and, as I mentioned explicitly yesterday, this is the concept of "social behaviorism." The best introduction to this concept is the book Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. This is actually a compiled collection of Mead's writings edited by Charles W. Morris, who explains in his Introduction that Mead, himself, never actually used the term "social behaviorism." Rather, he takes a critical view of the pioneering work in behaviorism by John B. Watson (such as can be found in Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist) as a point of departure for his own investigation into the fundamental nature of consciousness. Perhaps the best way to approach this side of Mead's work is from the following passage from Morris' Introduction:

Instead of beginning with individual minds and working out to society, Mead starts with an objective social process and works inward through the importation of the social process of communication into the individual by the medium of the vocal gesture. The individual has then taken the social act into himself.

This makes for a striking contrast to Edelman's approach, developed most thoroughly (if hypothetically) in The Remembered Present, which takes perceptual categorization as the primary element of mind and builds a sort of gradus ad Parnassum of recursive applications of categorization to its own results, leading to an initial model of self in the form of "primary consciousness," and then continues into the capacity for language as an agency for what amounts to symbolic interactionism. In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind, however, Edelman is quite clear about his own critical view of Watson and behaviorism, without having anything to say about either Mead or Morris' interpretation of Mead. Edelman is certainly not a behaviorist in that he rejects the one principle that Mead shared with Watson, that the point of departure for the understanding of consciousness must reside in "observed behavior." Edelman takes his point of departure in the brain itself, using observed behavior as a test for models he builds of brain function.

Personally, I continue to be interested in efforts to bring the brain into any story about human behavior, which I suppose is why I was interested in the efforts of Oliver Sacks to include stories about musical behavior in this agenda in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, even if Anthony Gottlieb's review of this book (which I had encountered on the International Herald Tribune Web site) refers to that work as "a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul." On the other hand taking observable behavior as a point of departure is one way to avoid sinking into the philosophical quicksand of questions about the soul; and this can be achieved by, in the words of anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu's criticism of art historian Erwin Panofsky, concentrating on the modus operandi, rather than the opus operatum, regardless of whether or not that modus operandi has been motivated by a "soul." Social behaviorism is all about the modus operandi of the individual in society, the sense of self that emerges from that modus operandi, and, ultimately, the conscious mind that emerges from the sense of self.

Much of what we encounter in the study of music deserves the same criticism that Bourdieu accorded to Panofsky. When those who would understand do not have their heads buried in scores, they are immersed in the overabundance of recordings that technology now makes available. Yet, even in those recordings, the focus on action (and, therefore, reflection-in-action) is easily lost. Whether or not we lose our grip in the soul is academic, but the threat is still there that, by sidelining attention to the making of music, we lose our grip on the music itself. Thus, while social behaviorism may not eventually lead us to the understanding of brain function that occupies Edelman and Sacks, it may provide us with the best way to remember that the opus operatum could not exist at all without the modus operandi; it is the portal through which we pass for a better understanding of how music comes to be in the minds of both performers and listeners.

The Ultimate Shell Game

There is much to be gained from this morning's Financial Times account of the basic nuts and bolts involved in our President's decision to rescue major financial institutions on the brink of collapse:

The Bush administration sought congressional support Saturday for a $700bn bailout for US financial institutions to quell the turmoil in financial markets.

The plan would allow the government to buy the bad debt of any US institution for the next two years, raising the legal ceiling on the national debt from $10.6 trillion to $11.3 trillion.

President George W. Bush said: “We’re going to work with Congress to get a bill done quickly.” Treasury officials and members of Congress were meeting throughout the weekend to secure broad agreement on the package by the time world markets reopen on Monday. Legislation could pass early next week.

Saying the administration was faced with preventing the collapse of a financial “house of cards”, Mr Bush said: “People are beginning to doubt our system, people were losing confidence and I understand it’s important to have confidence in our financial system.” he said.

Consider first those numbers, which offer two radically different points of view:

1. With a "stroke of the pen" (as political writers like to say), the President will have the power to increase the national debt by $700 billion, a quantity that most of us can barely (if at all) comprehend.
2. On the other hand that same "stroke of the pen" would be increasing the national debt by "only" a little more than 6.5%, which is the sort of markup that would not surprise us if it were applied to the groceries we were buying as sales tax.

Put another way, do these numbers have anything to do with "real money" (as Everett Dirksen supposedly put it); and, if so, just what is that reality? Invoking the language of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, what are likely to be the consequences of that "stroke of the pen," not just for those financial institutions being rescued for whom "business as usual" rarely regards money as anything other than a "fiction of convenience," but for those of us for whom money is all-too-real, since without it we most likely will be deprived of food, clothing, and shelter (not to mention health care). Sadly, the Bush Administration (apparently with the McCain campaign conveniently in tow) has revealed, through its track record, how loath it tends to be when it comes to thinking about consequences, let alone deciding upon action based on such thoughts.

The pathos of this negligence is painfully underscored by the use of the word "confidence" twice in the final sentence in the above quotation, a sentence uttered by George W. Bush. The only thing I could think of as that sentence stuck in my craw was a cautionary piece that Rafe Needleman had written for his CNET News.com blog back in August of 2006, where he described the Cluetrain Manifesto in terms of "shiny new values competing with reasonable but conservative older values." The irony of course is that it is through such "shiny new values" that the Bush Administration is now threatening our reality by playing reckless games with fictions of convenience. Indeed, when I wrote my commentary on Needleman's piece, I observed that he had overlooked how the "shiny new value" of confidence was winning out over the "conservative older value" of credibility, which is probably why the blunter description of a "fiction of convenience" is "confidence game."

Of course the very use of the word "value" is so abstract that just about any interpretation amounts to a confidence game. However, pulling a fast one in the philosophy of semantics is one thing; doing it with the working man's wallet is quite another, which is why Robert Solow has felt so strongly about the need for economics to dispense with the notion of "value" and stick to more ordinary observables, like price. That is where hit on the fundamental ugly truth of the chaos of this past week: For most of those large financial institutions, price is as remote an abstraction as value is; and, as we can see from the way of Government talks about the national debt, it is just as abstract in both the Legislative and Executive Branches. I suppose you could say that, contrary to what Solow believed, price is only an "ordinary observable" to those of us who have to pay it!

Reflecting on Listening as Reflection

I just came across an interesting collusion of themes that arose in the course of my being so critical of Isaac Stern's memoir, My First 79 Years. Recall that my motivation for reading this book in the first place had to do with the extent to which my own efforts to be a better listener could be informed by what practicing musicians had to say about listening. After all, this whole "quest" for being a better listener had been triggered by the words of no less than Igor Stravinsky. However, my primary criticism of the book was that Stern, at least when writing through the "ghost" of Chaim Potok, whose own understanding of music probably never rose above the level of the well-intentioned amateur, offered little reflective insight into the nature of his "work." Thus, while the reader gets both a cursory summary of Stern's teachers and the sorts of lessons they provided and an exhausting (if not exhaustive) account of the performances he gave in the course of his life, there is little to read about what goes on prior to and during those performances. Stern wrote nothing about the effort of preparation, whether the composition to be performed is new or familiar and whether the other performers (conductor, orchestra, chamber ensemble) are likewise new or familiar. Presumably, preparation itself is a highly reflective activity, which involves not only taking actions but also detaching oneself from the results of those actions for the sake of evaluating them. Furthermore, as Donald Schön pointed out in his "reflective practitioner" books, that reflective activity continues into the performance itself, what Schön calls "reflection-in-action." This brings us to the punch line, which is that both of these reflective activities must primarily be grounded in that capacity for being a good listener, which was so important to Stravinsky. Presumably, Stravinsky saw fit to write about this less from his position as a composer (although composition students are taught the value of being able to hear anything they commit to notation) and more from his experiences as a conductor, primarily of his own compositions. (I suspect that he was also informed by his experiences with others who had conducted his music, such as Pierre Monteux and Ernest Ansermet.)

This concept of reflection-in-action then invokes another of my favorite themes, which has to do with our own linguistic capacity for description. We usually talk about reflecting "on something," thus presuming that our activity of reflecting or the result of that activity (if it makes sense to talk about such a result) is grounded in an object (some thing). That presumption entails that object being static, meaning that we can "hold it still" while thinking about such matters as how it may be categorized (within the ontology of our life-world) and what attributes distinguish that object as a particular instance of its category. Where listening to music, or any other instance of reflection-in-action, is concerned, nothing can be "held still;" sound itself can only exist over a span of time. One may provide oneself with "static snapshots," whether in the form of music notation or, as Robert Cogan tried to do in some very innovative ways, through images of the very vibrations to which the ear responded, displayed as either time-domain or frequency-domain functions. Such snapshots, however, do not necessarily serve our capacity for "listening in the moment" and may even distract from it. I suspect this is one reason why the sight of a conductor working without a score at the podium is becoming more familiar. As a result, our descriptions must move beyond the noun-based limitations of objects into the verb-based realm of processes.

That last observation about conductors prompts an aside about Stravinsky's own conducting. I am not sure I ever saw him conduct (which would have been on television or in photographs) without his head buried in the score (which was always his own music for the few data points I had)! On the other hand this may be evidence that, for everything he had to say about listening, Stravinsky himself was not the most reflective of performers. It sometimes seemed as if his primary function as conductor was to "proofread" what he was hearing from the orchestra against what he was reading in the score; and I recall at least one account of Stravinsky visiting an orchestra to conduct "Le Sacre du Printemps," where Monteux was present and proved to be the better listener!

Of course the general nature of Schön's reflection-in-action involves far more than listening. In requires a broader capacity of self-monitoring, which entails the perceptual interpretation of what is both externally and internally sensed. Indeed, Gerald Edelman's model of consciousness involves not only our capacity for forming perceptual categories but also the interplay of those categories that arise from "sensation of the world" with categories based on "sensation of self." However, in the way that Edelman's model works, that sense of self not only guides any reflection on our actions but also is shaped by the actions we take, which is a fundamental principle behind what George Herbert Mead called "social behaviorism." Thus, any efforts we may make to unravel the mysteries of what it takes to be a good listener are likely to lead us back to how our listening is informed by our own sense of self and our capacities for interacting in the social world, yet another of my favorite themes!

Still No Agreement

Last June negotiations with Iraq over extending the "agreement that would legally extend the U.S. imperial occupation of Iraq" (as Truthdig puts it so nicely) had hit a major speed bump over the lack of any "clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq" in the words of the Dreyfuss Blog for The Nation. At that time progress with the White House was going so badly that the Iraqi parliament decided to communicate with the Congress directly through a hand-delivered letter; and, as we know, the White House eventually managed to get over the speed bump, perhaps by virtue of having the upper hand in linguistic legerdemain. At that time many of us probably figured that the renewal of our agreement with Iraq was a done deal; but, as Truthdig informed us this morning, that was not the case. As Steven Lee Meyers and Sam Dagher reported for The New York Times, at least one obstacle remains:

The major remaining point of contention involves immunity, with the United States maintaining that American troops and military contractors should have the same protections they have in other countries where they are based and Iraq insisting that they be subject to the country’s criminal justice system for any crime committed outside of a military operation, the officials said.

Given that the Bush Administration is still hanging tough on refusing to recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, this should not surprise anyone.

When we take these two obstacles together we have a narrative about how, as a matter of policy, the current Executive Branch has no respect for any authority other than its own. Indeed, "recognize" may be the mot juste, since it appears that the way in which the Executive Branch deals with any attempted manifestation of authority, whether in the other branches of our Government or in another country, is to let it, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, "pass unnoticed." Thus, whatever Iraq may be doing by way of developing its own a legislative branch composed of duly elected representatives and a responsible judiciary system, the Bush Administration is determined to cloak itself with immunity to anything these arms of government may do that is unpleasant (or worse).

There is obviously a limit to how long the Iraqi government can hang tough on its responsibilities to its population. There is nothing to prevent Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki from informing the United States that there is no further need for an agreement and that it is now time for all Americans in Iraq to leave. My guess is that the White House has any number of representatives willing to state officially to the Prime Minister, "Who's gonna make us leave? You and what army?" I for one would prefer to defer thinking about the consequences, if that is the move our Government chooses to make!

Closing the Barn Door

The word is out on the cause of that railroad disaster in Southern California. Here is the Associated Press report as it appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site:

Train operators in California are now banned from cell phone use while on duty, under a temporary order by state regulators.

The California Public Utilities Commission unanimously passed an emergency order Thursday to ban the use of cell phones and other personal electronic devices while operating a train. It comes less than a week after a Southern California commuter train ran head-on into a freight train, killing 25 people and injuring more than 130 others.

Federal authorities confirmed that the Metrolink train engineer was text-messaging on his cell phone while on duty. Authorities say he ran a red light and slammed into the freight train in Chatsworth on Friday.

Thursday's order temporarily prohibits the use of cell phones by railroad employees on the job until the PUC determines whether the ban should be permanently adopted.

As Voltaire said in his Dictionnaire Philosophique:

Common sense is not so common.

Ironically, that sentence may be found in his dictionary entry for "self-love;" and that may reveal a deeper truth: Nothing obliterates our capacity for common sense as much as our own narcissism. Whether we are speaking or texting, is there any piece of technology that better embodies the extent of our narcissism than the cell phone? We have progressed to a state in which we feel our very identity is at peril without the reassurance that someone somewhere wants to receive what we have to say or text, regardless of whether that someone responds with anything other than the complementary attitude, which is, "It is now my turn to speak or text, so that my own identity will be served." Do we really have to go to such extraordinary lengths to prevent supposedly skilled workers from doing stupid things, or we should own up to the premise that our very population of skilled workers is being deteriorated by our culture of narcissism? I might propose a twelve-step program for narcissism; but first I have to answer this call on my cell phone!

Speaking Truth to the Big Stick

Last week I gave Hillary Clinton a Chutzpah of the Week award for using a Senate committee meeting to suggest that last month's events in Georgia had "less to do with standing up to Russian aggression and more to do with looking for an excuse to heat up the Cold War." In presenting this award, I neglected to mention that I had to find out about her act through the Financial Times, since this particular kind of Legislative oversight seemed to be receiving "radio silence" from the American media. Well, the radio silence may be continuing here in the United States; but Paul Reynolds, World Affairs correspondent for the BBC NEWS Web site, has now reported news of a British think tank than has cast its lot with Clinton. The think tank is the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS); and, given that any confrontation with Russia is likely to have greater impact on European, rather than American, soil, this is not an organization to ignore.

More specifically John Chipman, Director General of IISS, has released a statement regarding the consideration of both Georgia and Ukraine for NATO membership; and the bottom line of that statement is that membership at this time "would be a strategic error." As Reynolds reported, where Georgia is concerned this conclusion has a lot to do with confusion over what actually happened last month:

The IISS is highly critical of Georgian actions - in contrast to the support Georgia has received from the US and some European countries, notably Britain. Naturally, if Georgia is faulted, then less blame can be put on Russia, whatever its reaction or, as some hold, its over-reaction.

Dr Chipman said that the "balance of evidence suggests that Georgia started this war".

Georgia has claimed that Russian forces had already started to enter South Ossetia by the time it acted. Russia has said that it responded to a Georgian attack.

Pressure seems to be growing for an international inquiry into the actual sequence of events.

The IISS position will undermine sympathy for Georgia and its leader President Mikhail Saakashvili.

It is particularly interesting to see that Chipman's own words explicitly addressed the Cold War connotations of last month's events:

There have been major errors of presentation of policy towards Russia. The US and Nato have in the past told Russia to accept whatever was happening. There was no give and take. We are disappointed at the way some Western leaders pushed the Cold War button after Georgia. We should not over-inflate the crisis.

Chipman should be prided on being discreet enough to use the language of "some Western leaders," even if my own temerity led me to suggest that one of those "Western leaders" was Dick Cheney, who did not seem to waste any time heading out to (march through?) Georgia just as the dust was beginning to settle there. Thus, the question at stake is whether NATO will act in the best interest of its European members or whether the collective body will continue to commit itself to Lord Ismay's initial goal of keeping "the Americans in." Here is how Reynolds concluded his report:

The IISS report came on a day when Nato defence ministers were meeting in London. There is some feeling in Nato that its priority should be to do more to reassure its existing members, especially those close to Russia, rather than rushing to bring in new members. And that is a view supported in the IISS report.

A great deal will depend on the views of the next American president. The Bush administration is all for pushing on with membership for Ukraine and Georgia, and the issue will be taken up again at Nato meetings in December.

A British official predicted that there would be no slowing of support for Georgia and no disposition to reward Russia.

But no quick decisions are likely in the current uncertain state of affairs.

At the very least, the decision to avoid any of those "quick decisions" should send a message to the American hawks that this is not a good time for anyone to be rattling sabers; and I hope that this will be sufficient to keep a lid on things over here until we know who the next Commander in Chief is going to be.

Wrong Time for Chutzpah

Was it real chutzpah or just bad timing? To the extent that Forbes probably still prides itself as a "capitalist tool," it was probably a bit of both. Still, one would have thought that editors Matthew Miller and Duncan Greenberg would have known better that to release their list of "The 400 Richest Americans" on the second catastrophic day of what may yet become a catastrophic week. The message is certainly one that is far beyond Schadenfreude. Just how are the rest of us supposed to react to the editors' introductory summary?

The rich haven't gotten richer--or poorer--this year. For the second year in a row, the price of admission to The Forbes 400 is $1.3 billion. In this, the 27th edition of the list, the assembled net worth of America's wealthiest rose by $30 billion--only 2%--to $1.57 trillion.

Perhaps this is a list for the rest of us; so we know whom to ask, "Brother, can you spare a dime?" This is not the rank stupidity of running an airline advertisement on the same page as a report of an airplane crash; so it must be chutzpah (and that "only 2%" is the cherry on top)! Enjoy your Chutzpah of the Week award, guys!

The Credentials Question

Since he entitled his book The Cult of the Amateur, we should not be surprised that Andrew Keen has a thing about qualifications and credentials and that, given his interest in the current Presidential campaign, he should now be casting his jaundiced eye upon candidate Sarah Palin. His latest sources of aggravation appear to be a piece by American Enterprise Institute Fellow Steven Hayward, appearing in the latest issue of The Standard, which suggests that Palin may be the second coming of Harry Truman, and a Wall Street Journal column by Bret Stephens entitled "Palin and the Experience Canard," which also offers Truman as a model for her "small town inexperience" (probably Keen's words). Keen's rant quickly comes to a boil:

Why do well educated people in the most sophisticated and powerful place on earth pine for an inexperienced president? Hayward, for example, seems to think that there's something healthy about the fact that Truman didn't go to college -- even though the very foundations of America's meritocracy is built upon the idea of an openly competitive educational system. While Stephens tells us that "qualifications" don't matter much for a vice president because "the job is political."

What Keen appears to have missed is that those "very foundations of America's meritocracy" were grounded in demonstrated qualifications, rather than any set of approved credentials. Thus, I suspect that Keen would blanch at the suggestion that one could be a Full Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) without a doctoral degree, preferably matched by a significant thesis and a substantial publication record. Yet, during my undergraduate years at MIT, the Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department was Carlton Tucker, who never held a degree higher than Master of Science. On the other hand in his youth Tucker had been responsible for providing the entire state of Vermont with their telephone switching network. (At least that is how I recall the student lore, which probably included the "tall tale" element of his building that network single-handed.) Needless to say, this kind of qualification said nothing about how he would perform in a university classroom; but it was enough to get him into the academic system, after which he could (and did) build up further qualifications. Like Truman, Tucker was a man who rose on the strength of his accomplishments, rather than the framed sheepskin documents he could hang on his wall.

By the way, getting "into the academic system" at MIT was liberal in more ways than one. As I discovered in my freshman year, one did not need a high school diploma to matriculate there. There was actually a high school dropout down the hall in my dorm, who kept getting junk mail for programs offering a Graduate Equivalency Degree. I later discovered that one did not need a Bachelor's degree to enter graduate school, and I had a friend in the lab where I did my doctoral research whose only degree was his doctorate!

I found myself thinking about this matter this morning while reading a piece on the BBC NEWS Web site, which mentioned, in passing, that Tony Blair would be teaching a course on "faith and globalisation" (BBC spelling) at Yale. (What this remark was passing was the "news" that Blair would be appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the day before starting work at Yale.) Remembering Tucker, I decided to consult the Wikipedia entry for Blair to check out his academic qualifications. His academic career was not a particularly distinguished one, and his credentials were not much better. Nevertheless, Yale seems to have decided that his accomplishments were sufficient to justify his being appointed to teach a course there, even if his personal road to New Haven happens to take him through the sound stage for Comedy Central.

This is not to suggest that there is any merit to that argument that Palin could be the next Truman. Like just about everything else the media offers, that argument is a product of selective cherry-picking that does little more than tear the semantics of "experience" to shreds. What bothers me is that precious little time seems to be going into promoting Palin on the basis of those "demonstrated qualifications," which leads me to believe that they are not substantial enough to make for much of a promotion!

It's not about Policies (stupid)!

One of my neighbors, who seems to follow my writings about music and politics with equal interest, recently sent me electronic mail that included the following observation:

The democrats have to learn to present issues to voters not as abstractions, but in terms that most voters can understand.

I found myself thinking about this while reading the print version of a report that Paul Moss prepared for BBC Radio 4 concerned with Sarah Palin's cross-party appeal to white women. Here is how that report basically began:

I had travelled to Barrington, out in Cook County, Illinois, to meet some of America's "football moms" - the army of women who turn out every weekend across America, to cheer on their sporting sons and daughters.

They are loyal, they are dedicated. And now, many of them are also big fans of Sarah Palin.

"She says it like it is," I was told, a common description of the young governor from Alaska. "She's hard-working, and I think she has strong moral values."

Mrs Palin's large family formed the basis of many compliments from the "football moms".

"She's doing great things, supporting her church and supporting her family. Five children is a lot in this day and age."

Here is how it ended:

"What's critical, as far as Democrats are concerned, is that they stay focused on issues," says Lisa Madigan, attorney general for Illinois.

The war in Iraq, energy policy - these are the areas she believes will expose Mrs Palin as lacking sufficient knowledge for the job.

"It is really impossible to believe," Ms Madigan says, "that at the end of the day, Hillary [Clinton] voters or independent voters are going to look to Sarah Palin as somebody they believe in."

But it is not so impossible to believe, if you listen to the football moms of Barrington High. I asked Mrs Palin's supporters there if there were any specific policies of hers they admire. None could name a single one, but that did not seem to dampen their admiration.

"She's interesting, she's hard-working," I was told. "I think she's going to do a great job."

Thus, one way to interpret Moss' conclusion is that Madigan (and other powerful Democrats) need to take my neighbor's observation more seriously.

Think about it. In preparing this report Moss chose (presumably intentionally) to go right into the heart of Obama country, Cook County, Illinois. There he encountered a vox populi, at least among women, supportive of Palin for "doing great things." Unfortunately, those "great things" had nothing to do with leading the United States out of any of its current problems, whether those problems involve the economy (Bill Clinton's old trump card), the war in Iraq, or the energy crisis (not to mention an energy policy that may well be fomenting a hunger crisis). No, the "great things" Palin is doing are "supporting her church and supporting her family;" and that is what matters to those "football moms." Moss stressed this observation in his conclusion: None of those football moms could name a specific Palin policy that they admired. (Tina Fey nailed this point on Saturday Night Live, but making fun of football moms is not a good way to win their votes!) Meanwhile, out on the campaign trail, we have Barack Obama speaking nobly and effectively about failed economic policy; but, even if that failure has a severe impact on the ability to support a family, even when he speaks in the plainest of language, his points just do not register, even in his own state.

Thus, I am not entirely sure that I agree with my neighbor. It is not just a matter of speaking to the electorate in terms they can understand. It may have more to do with speaking to voters in those terms they value the most and wish to hear the most, rather than in terms (no matter how straightforward) of working together to solve serious problems. I have tried to argue that the latter is the Obama strategy; and it may be the most effective strategy for elevating the concept of "change we can believe in" above the level of hollow rhetoric. However, the former is the strategy of Karl Rove, which has now been passed on to a disciple who has been calling the shots (more effectively than many of us would like to believe) for the Republican campaign. This strategy turned out to be very effective in the last two elections, where the polls kept showing that the numbers for the two candidates were very close. Thus, I suspect I have to revise my previous assertion that differentiation would "matter significantly where both political parties are concerned," to the proposition that differentiation will be vital to Obama if he is to recover his standing in the polls by a substantially wide margin and parlay that standing to victory in the Electoral College.

More about SCHADENFREUDE

I was pretty certain that I would not be the only one invoking the noun Schadenfreude while reflecting on the fall of Lehman Brothers, particularly since, as the Associated Press reported yesterday, it was so evident at the man-in-the-street level. However, now that the media has made a spectacle of former Lehman employees engaged in the moral equivalent of the "perp walk," it may be time to ask "Should we feel sorry for bankers?," which happens to be the title of a BBC News Magazine article by Finlo Rohrer released today on the BBC NEWS Web site. To represent the opposition to Schadenfreude, Rohrer selected Allister Heath, editor of the London business newspaper City AM. Here is Heath's position:

A lot of people will think "who cares"? Some people will be privately satisfied but it is short-sighted. Yes, they have made terrible mistakes, but it is just wrong to take pleasure in other people's misfortunes.

Their misfortune will make everyone else worse off. They have powered the UK economy in the last few years.

Clearly, Heath's "they" refers to a body of readers without whom his newspaper would be out of business; but, as a journalist, he should be as sensitive to fine points of semantics as he is to both the needs and opinions of his readers. Had he read Paul Krugman's Sunday op-ed column for The New York Times, he might have been more aware of the extent to which the collective noun "banker" has become too ambiguous to be particularly meaningful:

To understand the problem, you need to know that the old world of banking, in which institutions housed in big marble buildings accepted deposits and lent the money out to long-term clients, has largely vanished, replaced by what is widely called the “shadow banking system.” Depository banks, the guys in the marble buildings, now play only a minor role in channeling funds from savers to borrowers; most of the business of finance is carried out through complex deals arranged by “nondepository” institutions, institutions like the late lamented Bear Stearns — and Lehman.

The new system was supposed to do a better job of spreading and reducing risk. But in the aftermath of the housing bust and the resulting mortgage crisis, it seems apparent that risk wasn’t so much reduced as hidden: all too many investors had no idea how exposed they were.

And as the unknown unknowns have turned into known unknowns, the system has been experiencing postmodern bank runs. These don’t look like the old-fashioned version: with few exceptions, we’re not talking about mobs of distraught depositors pounding on closed bank doors. Instead, we’re talking about frantic phone calls and mouse clicks, as financial players pull credit lines and try to unwind counterparty risk. But the economic effects — a freezing up of credit, a downward spiral in asset values — are the same as those of the great bank runs of the 1930s.

And here’s the thing: The defenses set up to prevent a return of those bank runs, mainly deposit insurance and access to credit lines with the Federal Reserve, only protect the guys in the marble buildings, who aren’t at the heart of the current crisis. That creates the real possibility that 2008 could be 1931 revisited.

In taking as a fundamental premise that need to channel funds from savers to borrowers, Krugman echoes the same perspective on the financial sector that Robert Solow laid out so nicely in his recent review of Kevin Phillips Bad Money for The New Republic:

Every elementary economics textbook explains to the beginning student that a financial system is intended to perform two important functions in a modern economy. Somehow a nation's savings has to finance its investments in housing, industrial and commercial buildings and machinery, computers, inventories, and so on. The saving is done by a very large number of households and institutions, ranging from very small to very big. The investment is done by a smaller--but still huge--number of mostly medium-to-large business firms. The first function of the financial system is to "intermediate" in this process: to collect the savings in many forms--bank accounts, mutual funds, insurance-company reserves, direct purchases of stocks--and to allocate it to the firms and other entities that seem to have the most profitable ways to use it to build real capital. The financial sector, needless to say, collects a fee for this service: it pays savers less than it charges investors. (I omit international flows of saving and investment, as well as the financing of local, state, and national governments. The financial sector intermediates here, too.)

The investment decisions of businesses have uncertain outcomes. The businesses themselves cannot know how their long-lived investments will eventually turn out; and the ultimate savers know even less. And investment decisions generate real risks, as we are all now painfully aware. So do most other transactions intermediated by the financial system, though the risks may be tied only tenuously to the production and the distribution of goods and services. And so the second function of the financial sector is to arrange transactions that shift the bearing of commercial risks from those who are prepared to pay a fee to get rid of them to those who are less averse to risk and are willing to take them on in exchange for a fee. This is a complicated business, more or less by definition. It is full of surprises. Even the basic underlying risks are complicated, and reasonable people--let alone the unreasonable ones--may evaluate them very differently. The risks generated within the financial sector are even more complicated, more psychological, more open to manipulation, and harder to understand and value than those that arise from "real" events.

Solow's first function basically involves the operations that take place in Krugman's "big marble buildings;" and those operations are regulated to provide the defenses cited at the end of the above Krugman quote. By now we all know that those "nondepository" institutions, which are concerned more with Solow's second function, are not subject to the same regulations; and both Solow and Krugman have written about the failure of both the financial sector to regulate itself and the failure of our government to compensate for the financial sector's negligence. We also know the underlying cause of that failure on both fronts: However hard to understand that second function may be, those "nondepository" institutions were just too profitable; so why should members of the financial structure invest major commitments of their precious time to understanding the working of that second function well enough to address how it may best be regulated, particularly when that time could be better spent engaging that second function in the interest of more profits? Within the financial sector it seemed perfectly legitimate to simply accept that high risk should be the price of high profits, and a portion of those profits could be then invested in lobbyists who could easily persuade our representatives in Washington that this precept was more important than defense against financial catastrophe. After all, didn't a rising tide lift all boats?

So, should we feel sorry for bankers, rather than reveling in Schadenfreude? At the very least one might think that we should withhold wrath and/or ridicule from the guys in those "big marble buildings," who continue to try to play by a sound set of rules. Nevertheless, those guys could have had influential voices in talk of the financial sector regulating its second function; but we see no evidence that they did any such thing. Since we are invoking a German noun, one might compare them to those "ordinary German citizens," who could see the smoke coming from the concentration camps and chose not to think about what was causing that smoke. That comparison might be even stronger those first-function bankers were complicit, if not active, in the lobbying activities to keep further Federal regulations out of the whole system. Thus, in this country, there do not appear to be a lot of reasons for us to feel sorry for the bankers as a category, however vague the semantics of that category may now be. Whether or not British citizens should feel the same way is their own affair; and hopefully they will make their decision on the basis of more than the opinion of an "insider" journalist like Heath. Presumably, at the very least, they will be following the new proposals for regulation being introduced by Chancellor Alistair Darling.

Bush-Speak Redux

I suppose it was inevitable that President George W. Bush would address the nation in the wake of the fall of Lehman Brothers. When the BBC NEWS Web site provided an account of his remarks, I realized that it might be interesting to compare them with what he said last March when the Federal Reserve rode in on the white horses to rescue Bear Stearns. Back then it seemed as if his basic message was the following:

One thing is for certain, we're in challenging times. But another thing is for certain: We've taken strong, decisive action.

This time the tone was slightly different:

I know Americans are concerned about the adjustments that are taking place in our financial markets.

In the White House, and throughout my administration, we are focused on them and we are working to reduce disruptions and minimise the impact of these financial market developments on the broader economy.

The difference, of course, is one of tense. When Bush spoke about Bear Stearns, the problem had already been resolved, probably without his having anything to do with the solution. This time, at least from Lehman Brothers' point of view, the problem was not solved; so the present-tense language is all about keeping yet another shoe from dropping. The times are still challenging, but the challenge is more threatening. Indeed, it is challenging enough that he knows better than to raise any false hopes:

In the short run, adjustments in the financial markets can be painful, both for the people concerned about their investments and for the employees of the affected firms.

Unfortunately, he could not resist a long-run observation again:

In the long run I'm confident that our capital markets are flexible and resilient and can deal with these adjustments.

Last March it was:

In the long run, our economy is going to be fine.

At that time I felt it wise to cite someone with more economic credentials than our President, invoking one of the more famous remarks by John Maynard Keynes:

In the long run, we're all dead.

As I pointed out earlier today, whether the White House is talking about deliberations or actions, that talk always seem to have something to do with the poor getting stuck with paying for the problems made by the rich. Did Bush reassure me that current activities will be any different? Of course he didn't. What happened to Lehman Brothers may be seen as a major casualty for the rich in their War Against the Poor, but it is hardly a sign that the tide of the War is turning in favor of the poor.

Will the tide turn when the White House has a new occupant. The BBC report from the campaign trail was not particularly encouraging. Here is the Republican side:

Mr McCain blamed the problems at Lehman Brothers on "ineffective regulation and management".

He said he was "glad to see" that no taxpayer money was being used "to bail out Lehman Brothers".

'Serious crisis'

He called for "major reform" that would "replace the outdated and ineffective patchwork quilt of regulatory oversight in Washington and bring transparency and accountability to Wall Street".

There is nothing particularly wrong with this, but I was glad to see Barack Obama make it sound as if John McCain was closing the barn door after the horse had been stolen (by thieves implicitly, if not explicitly, endorsed by McCain):

Mr Obama implicitly attacked President Bush for the economic situation.

He blamed "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" on "eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans".

"Too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren't minding the store," he said.

This is nice as far as it goes, but I feel a need to say, one more time, that remedial action will not do very much unless it is accompanied by a full-scale rethinking of our economic policy. If that rethinking does not reassess the current dangerous priorities accorded to maintaining wealth vis-à-vis getting out of poverty, then we are going to get four more years of business-as-usual, regardless of who ends up in the White House. This is the perfect opportunity for Barack Obama to demonstrate that his "audacity of hope" is more than shallow rhetoric; and I, for one, believe that ignoring that opportunity will seriously disadvantage him.

Confusion Rules!

I always worry when my day begins with one or more serious questions about truth. Then I remind myself that my mind is freshest in the morning: If I have to deal with such questions, better to do them on the power of a good breakfast, rather than later in the day when I start thinking about when would be a good time for a nap. This was one of those mornings when the questions came at me from several directions, almost all at once. First there was the Truthdig pointer to yesterday's op-ed piece by Donald Luskin in The Washington Post, entitled "Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line" and with the subtitle, "A Nation of Exaggerators." (Considering the events that were to play out within 24 hours of the Sunday Post hitting the stands, the timing could not have been better.) This was followed by my reading Andrew Keen's latest post on his Great Seduction blog, "The Age of Disbelief," which had a really great opening paragraph:

Matthew Dowd, who ran Bush's successful Presidential campaign in 2004, sees the outcome to the election in terms of belief and disbelief. He told the Times' Adam Nagourney about the challenge of breaking through the media fog:

“At this point, the ability to create and drive a message narrative is all but impossible. There’s just so much stuff. The average person has 90 channels. They all get the dot-coms. They all get a newspaper. There is so much flow of information that they just to begin to discount it all.”

They just begin to discount it all. So all this media -- both new and old -- is resulting in nobody believing anyone anymore. And thus we get the spectacle of know-nothing Sarah (brilliantly summarized by Andrew Sullivan in yesterday's London Sunday Times), who appears to Dowd's "average person" as equally (in)credible as anyone else.

This leads Keen to an interesting reading of Dowd:

Dowd suggests that the flow of information is making "average people" into rigorous postmodernists, believing nothing or nobody, discounting all truth. But in all the "stuff" there is truth and there are lies. Sarah really is a know-nothing. She really did take earmarks. She really did increase taxes in Alaska. Read Sullivan, read Rich. These guys are telling the truth rather than just their truth.

Without sounding too much like a defensive apologist for postmodernism, I would suggest that the situation Keen is trying to address has less to do with "the truth" (or, for that matter, "whose truth") and more to do with interpreting data in an appropriate context. This is no easy matter, as any intelligence analyst will probably tell you; and it gets harder as the volume of both data and context increase. There are any number of reasons why the "average person" will cave at the prospect of such a task and basically give in to whoever does the best job of manipulating them (both the data and that "average person").

This brings me to Luskin, who was at least honest enough to disclose his connection to John McCain:

I'm an adviser to John McCain's campaign, though as far as I know, the senator has never taken one word of my advice.

My guess is that there is nothing wrong with any of the data points Luskin offers; but there are plenty of people who would not interpret those data the way he does, based on different premises grounded in different contexts. Who will that "average person" believe? Who should (s)he believe? Presumably any individual should believe an interpretation that is both sound and consistent with that individual's own context. How many "average people" have the time and will for such effort prior to forming a belief, even when a question as important as expected income is concerned? From that point of view, what Keen calls "radical disbelief," cultivating an electorate that discounts all truth, is nothing more (or less) than a point of departure for a manipulation strategy that has been working very well (at least) since the turn of this century. Furthermore, this is a strategy that builds on my previous observations about muddying the waters of history in the interest of propaganda; it is not just a matter of sowing confusion where history is concerned but of creating a "culture of confusion" in the face of just about any source of data. Unless the Democrats recognize this strategy for what it is, they face a serious prospect of being eaten for lunch by the Republicans once again; and this time the meal will take place on the site of new drilling in Alaska!

"Are you enjoying watching this?"

An interesting vignette emerged from the account given by Associated Press Business Writers Joe Bel Bruno, Christopher S. Rugaber and Martin Crutsinger of the fall of Lehman Brothers, definitely more a matter of writing than journalism:

Employees emerging from Lehman's headquarters near the heart of Times Square Sunday night carried boxes, tote bags and duffel bags, rolling suitcases, framed artwork and spare umbrellas. Many were emblazoned with the Lehman Brothers name.

TV trucks lined Seventh Avenue opposite the building, while barricades at the building's main entrance attempted to keep workers and onlookers from gumming up the steady flow of pedestrians flowing in and out of Times Square.

Some workers had moist eyes while a few others wept and shared hugs. Most who left the building quietly declined interviews.

People snapped pictures with cameras and their phones. Observers pressed up against a police barricade drew the ire of one man who emerged from the building and shouted: "Are you enjoying watching this? You think this is funny?"

Well, yes, there was a certain joy in the experience; and one would have expected that those employees were well enough educated to recognize the joy of Schadenfreude even when they were the target. The fact is that only a few voices dared to speak up about the "rescue" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being yet another example of paying more attention to the needs to the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and helpless. Last night was not much of a reversal from Amy Goodman's observation that, at the Democratic National Convention, poverty had once again been forgotten; but even the slightest amount of discomfort to the rich and mighty of Lehman (not to mention the lesser-paid minions to whom discomfort was also alien) must have meant something to those who have to confront really discomforting questions about food, clothing, and shelter every day.

Unfortunately, this particular experience of Schadenfreude will be all too brief. The key message from the Associated Press story is that the rich are, once again, rallying to the support of the rich:

Ten banks -- Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS -- each agreed to provide $7 billion "to help enhance liquidity and mitigate the unprecedented volatility and other challenges affecting global equity and debt markets."

The Federal Reserve also chipped in with more largesse in its emergency lending program for investment banks. The central bank announced late Sunday that it was broadening the types of collateral that financial institutions can use to obtain loans from the Fed.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the discussions had been aimed at identifying "potential market vulnerabilities in the wake of an unwinding of a major financial institution and to consider appropriate official sector and private sector responses."

The idea the getting out of poverty may be more important than maintaining wealth continues to be off the radar for all but a few "minority report" organizations, such as the Growth Commission. When I introduced reader of this blog to this little-known institution, I concluded with the following sentence:

If a candidate like Barack Obama wants to maintain his "audacity" stance, then he may wish to consider the audacity of questioning the conventional economic wisdom that got us into this mess in the first place; and a good place to begin the questions could be with the findings of the Growth Commission.

This would be the perfect time for Obama to make good on this strategy. It is hard to believe that we shall hear anything more than warmed over status quo from John McCain with little regard to how much of that status quo is responsible for the mess in the first place, and I could not think of a better opportunity for the media to wake up and stop spending so much time of Sarah Palin. It is time for this country to rethink its economic priorities; and Obama may well be just the right person to deliver that message, particularly if he can convince us that he is ready to follow through on it if he is given the keys to the White House.

Executive Sour

Jonathan Freedland has written a Viewpoint column for the BBC NEWS Web site, which basically explains why anyone who gets elected President of the United States inevitably disappoint the electorate. While he offers a reasonably good assessment of the assets and liabilities of recent Presidents, his primary argument rests on his introductory premises, which run the gamut from weak to inaccurate:

Barack Obama says the most important quality is vision for the future. No, says John McCain, the key requirement is experience - or at least that's what he said until he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Both want the most powerful job in the world - but neither they, nor anyone else, can agree on what, precisely, are the qualities needed to serve as president of the United States.

Indeed, there is not even a job description - only an oath of office demanding the president defend the US constitution.

What's more, the job keeps changing, evolving constantly in the 230 years since the founding of the republic.

Freedland's biggest flaw resides in his third paragraph. Admittedly, the phrase "job description" was not part of the language of our Founding Fathers; but the fundamental purpose of the United States Constitution was to establish separation of powers by providing clear "job descriptions" for each of those separated powers: the Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch. Thus, it seems fair to ask whether or not Freedland has ever examined this document, with particular attention to Article II, which provides the job description he seems to think is lacking.

Now it is probably also true that most Americans, who will go to the polls in November or to any number of events staged by the candidates between now and then, are no more familiar with Article II of the Constitution than Freedland appears to be, particularly after eight years of an Executive Branch that has all but assumed a divine right to undermine Article II, if not the entire Constitution. Were voters more aware of what the Constitution said, they might be able to disavow themselves of Freedland's second biggest flaw, which is the first clause of his second paragraph (having to do with "the most powerful job in the world"). In a Constitution that is famous for its brevity, Article II itself is remarkably short, only four sections compared with the preceding ten for the Legislative Branch. Of those four sections, the first is concerned with how the President is chosen and states the text of the oath of office; and the fourth complements the first by addressing how a President may be removed from office by impeachment. That leaves only two sections. Section 3 may be regarded as a statement of "housekeeping" requirements:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

That leaves Section 2, the most substantial of the four:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments [the Cabinet], upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

It is interesting to reflect on those who complain about the "activism" of judges (particularly on the Supreme Court) and seem to overlook how little leverage for similar activism is granted to the President by the Constitution. The distribution of text in the Constitution is a clear statement of priorities: The most important concern is that the Legislative Branch provide the country with its foundation of laws in a manner that befits the role of the legislators as representatives of those who elected them to their positions. The President is charged with little more than keeping those operations based on those laws running smoothly. This is not a particularly easy matter, as every President since George Washington has discovered. Perhaps the Founding Fathers required no more from a President than the stipulations of Sections 2 and 3 because they already anticipated that the resulting job would be hard enough without any further requirements.

Imagine, then, what would happen if the authors of the Constitution (the whole contentious lot of them) were to be transported to this very Sunday morning and were presented with Freedland's column. My guess is that, for all of their disagreements, they would react with horror to that "most powerful job in the world" phrase. Having exerted all of their skills in logic and rhetoric to make sure that their United States of America would not immediately lapse into monarchy, they would find themselves in our present reading the language of empire! The rest of Freedland's column would then probably prompt them to consult other sources on the deeds of past Presidents, and some of them might be drawn to Richard Neustadt's Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. How would they react to the changes in the use of that word "power" from the time when they first inscribed it in Section 2 to Neustadt's account of the recent past?

In spite of such a reality check, Freedland's basic thesis is probably correct: We tend to be, by nature, disappointed with the Presidents we elect. However, from a historical point of view, there is nothing new about this. George Washington discovered that not only had the Constitution laid out a really tough piece of work for him (harder than commanding a military force) but also even his best efforts at doing the job would inevitably erode his public standing, due, even in those days and in no small part, to the power of the press to criticize his every move. This is not to imply that the press is solely responsible for making us the culture of malcontents we now are but just to observe that having unrealistic expectations if part of our human nature, as is lashing out when those expectations are thwarted. Thus, little is gained from Freedland pointing out a condition that is not much different from the way things were in (to choose a representative year) 1790. Indeed, I might even be so bold as to suggest that all members of the BBC staff covering our election should treat the HBO John Adams series as prerequisite viewing material. (I would make that suggestion to all other journalists covering the election; but I know that, where most of them are concerned, that would be like talking to the wall!)

What about the electorate? Can we ever be a culture that learns to live with thwarted expectations because that is just the way life is? To some extent I suspect this is a matter of whether or not we can learn to recognize when our expectations are being manipulated. This is not just a matter of recognizing that Variety was just as interested in the performances taking place at our Conventions as political analysts were; it also involves recognizing that we have become a culture of consumerism through the prodigious efforts of business to make us buy more and more stuff that we really do not need. We have all become addicted to the world that businesses have made for us; and, like all addicts, we experience the harsh frustrations of expectations that never seem to be satisfied. Unfortunately, neither Section 2 of Article II nor Neustadt has much to say about pulling an entire country through a process of rehab (particularly when most of us would rather be watching Weeds poke fun at that process)!

Good-Cop and Bad-Cop Violinists

This week I finished reading My First 79 Years, Isaac Stern's memoir written with (by?) Chaim Potok. It is not a book that I would recommend, particularly for anyone interested in accurate details. In the matter of detail, there just is not very much of it; and what there is emerges from a highly selective memory that appears to be very effective at filtering out much (most?) of what is unpleasant. For example the darkest section of the book probably involves the bad reviews of his first recital in New York, while the deterioration of his second marriage only gets mentioned in passing to explain why he is now recalling his divorce. Where accuracy is concerned, much of the problem is that Potok probably does not know much about music (compared, for example, with what he knows about kids' baseball games) or San Francisco (which matters to those of us living there); and neither Stern nor Knopf (who could have taken editorial responsibility) seemed to care very much about any simple fact-checking. The reader thus constantly trips over muddles of names, dates, and geography.

Nevertheless, these matters are secondary in light of why I came to look at this book in the first place. In order to satisfy my own desire to become a better listener, I am always interested in what practicing musicians have to say about listening. This interest emerged after reading David Schneider's memoir of his life in the violin sections (both) of the San Francisco Symphony and his citation of a remark by Igor Stravinsky that has had a lasting effect on my own writing. Since then I have dipped into writings by and about practicing musicians in both the classical and jazz worlds, bearing in mind that there is far more of this literature about soloists and leaders than there is about "worker bees" like Schneider; and just about everything I read in this area leaves me with at least one seriously memorable item.

This was not the case with My First 79 Years, which, alas, comes off like a haphazard collection of memories. Those memories are laid out for enumeration by the reader with little opportunity for reflection. We are thus left with the impression of a busy man always rushing from one performance to the next with little reflective insight into the "work" that goes behind preparing for and delivering those performances. We are treated to a list of new works that were composed for Stern with little to say about what it took to move from initial conception to effective performance. The closest we get to that kind of insight is the "confession" that he was never able to play Arnold Schoenberg's violin concerto, even though Leonard Bernstein encouraged him to work on it. Stern's claim that Bernstein called the concerto "Schumann with wrong notes" ultimately tells us more about listening than the rest of the sentence in which that citation appears: "but there was something in it to which I could not bond."

The fact is that those who perform music often "say what they want to say" through their performances and prefer to avoid getting hung up on words that they cannot command particularly well. (There is a perfect, albeit corny, example of this in the final scene of The Benny Goodman Story.) In Stern's case that performance often involved more than just his communion with his violin. I saw him "live" only once, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia back when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He was playing the violin concerto of Johannes Brahms with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the concert was scheduled on the night of a National Hockey League playoffs game between the Boston Bruins and the Philadelphia Flyers. The concerto was the second half of the program; and, before Ormandy raised his baton to begin, Stern stepped forward to address the audience just to let them know the score of that game. This brought down the house with approving applause.

This is a fair memory of Stern that is consistent with the text of his memoir. He is a man who wanted to be "well liked" (perhaps in the connotation that Arthur Miller intended for that phrase in Death of a Salesman). He always wanted the approval of those around him, whether it involved making music, saving Carnegie Hall, or giving time to work with Wes Craven on Music of the Heart, his film about Roberta Guaspari and her string orchestra of disadvantaged Harlem kids. He probably also wanted the approval of the ghosts of the composers whose music he played; but flesh-and-blood approval was always more reliable and therefore more satisfying. There is thus a way in which the music itself is not necessarily the highest priority in his work, and this may explain why Stern's presence in my own CD collection of the violin repertoire is as sparse as it is.

By way of disclaimer, I should state that I really came to understand and love the violin repertoire when the RCA Heifetz Collection was released on CD. In terms of general relationships in the social world, one could almost view Jascha Heifetz as the "bad cop" beside Stern's "good cop." Where Stern always seemed to be generous and open, particularly with both potential students and general music lovers, Heifetz was austere, if not withdrawn. I never had a chance to seem him "live;" and my first exposure to him came from a joke about his life in Southern California:

A wealthy Beverly Hills matron approached Heifetz to play for an hour at a garden party she was holding. Heifetz quoted her a fee of $50,000. She replied, "Well that is far more money than I had planned on spending, but I hear that you are the best. I shall pay your fee but only on one condition: You are not to mingle with the guests." Heifetz replied, "In that case madam, my fee will be $25,000."

Looking through all the photographs that are included in The Heifetz Collection, it is hard to find one that captures the man smiling. The only one I can immediately recall is one taken with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and this may be an important clue about the Heifetz who "plays well with others." Stern was very much a soloist, a center of attention even when others were performing. I was first really aware of this when I saw the telecast of the "Fiddlers Three" benefit concert by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, when Zubin Mehta conducted Stern along with Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman. Zuckerman played viola to complement Stern's violin in a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 364 sinfonia concertante, and to this day I can still stay that it is the most unbalanced performance of the work I have ever heard. It was as if Stern was determined to one-up every "statement" that Zuckerman made; and the result reflected terribly on both soloists.

There is no doubt that Heifetz was also a commanding soloist; but I shall take the extreme position that every recorded performance of chamber music in The Heifetz Collection can be viewed, within the limitations of recording technology, as an example of what chamber music ought to be. For example, while the C Major string quintet of Franz Schubert (D. 956) can only achieve its true impact in the immediacy of performance, I can think of no better way for a novice listener to prepare for such a performance than by listening to the 1961 recording that Heifetz made with Israel Baker (second violin), William Primrose (viola), and cellists Piatigorsky and Gabor Rejto. Furthermore, those performances had an impact that extended beyond the recording studio: When I moved to Los Angeles in 1985, I discovered (to my surprise, I must admit) that the city had an abundance of opportunities to hear chamber music, supported by a dedicated and enthusiastic audience, which had probably emerged from the concerts that Heifetz and Piatigorsky used to arrange (long before Lincoln Center had formed its own Chamber Music Society, I might add). Heifetz may not have been one for mingling with the guests; but, in the performance of chamber music, he was always "one among equals." As a result, he succeeded in infecting the Los Angeles arts community with a sincere love for the opportunities to experience such "intimate conversations."

Therein may lie the real difference. Amiable and social Stern has almost flooded the concert scene with a new generation of "star power" soloists, many (most?, all?) of whom inevitably make for "good box office" wherever they appear. However, if Stern's legacy has been those new soloists, the legacy of Heifetz could be felt in a city whose audience was as receptive to chamber music as it was to symphony orchestras (if not more so). For all of the stories about his anti-social nature, Heifetz invited all who would listen to share in the intimacy of a chamber music performance; and I expect that this particular legacy has now propagated well beyond the Los Angeles city limits.

Absence of Judgment

There is a lot to be learned from Elinor Mills' account the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into how United Airlines stock took a 75 percent drop in reaction to the online release of a six-year-old news story. The primary concern of the SEC is whether this is yet another case of improper (or, as I would prefer to call it, pathological) conduct facilitated by technology (such as that circulation of an unfounded rumor about Apple, whose primary consequences also involved stock price) or whether this is the latest instance of what I have called "the usual 'nobody's fault' syndrome," arising from deploying a technology whose undesirable consequences had not been adequately anticipated. The virtue of Mills' report is that she focused to laying out the basic evidence that the SEC will have to interpret as part of their analysis:

The SEC has opened a "preliminary inquiry" into the online distribution of a Chicago Tribune article from 2002 about United Airlines' bankruptcy filing, people familiar with the matter said.

The Tribune Co. said in a statement on Wednesday that it believes a single visit to the archived story on the site of its South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper during a low-traffic time period resulted in the computer system displaying it under a tab titled "Popular Stories Business: Most Viewed."

The article was then picked up by Google News and displayed with no indicate of the original date of publishing. It was later distributed by Bloomberg.

Google's automated search agent "Googlebot" misclassified the article because it is unable to differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the newspaper Web sites, the Tribune said, adding that it had asked Google to stop crawling its sites month ago, but the process had continued.

Asked for comment, Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said: "The claim that the Tribune Company asked Google to stop crawling its newspaper Web sites is untrue."

Google's crawler had no reason to suspect that the article was old, according to a Google News blog that was first posted on Monday and updated on Wednesday. "The article failed to include a standard newspaper article dateline, but the Sun-Sentinel page had a fresh date above the article on the top of the page of "September 7, 2008" (Eastern)," it said.

Resolving the conflicting claims between the Tribune Company and Google will not be an easy matter, but addressing the content of that Google News blog post may be more relevant to how the SEC decides to rule. Therefore, I would like to flesh out the context from which Mills extracted her quote:

On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36 PM Pacific Daylight Time (or Sunday, September 7th at 1:36 AM Eastern Daylight Time), the Google crawler detected a new link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel's website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled "Popular Stories: Business." The link had newly appeared in that section since the last time Google News' Googlebot webcrawler had visited the page (nineteen minutes earlier), so the crawler followed the link and found an article titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy." The article failed to include a standard newspaper article dateline, but the Sun-Sentinel page had a fresh date above the article on the top of the page of "September 7, 2008" (Eastern).

Because the Sun-Sentinel included a link to the story in its "Popular Stories" section, and provided a date on the article page of September 7, 2008, the Google News algorithm indexed it as a new story. We removed this story as soon as we were notified that it was posted in error.

While we don't know why the Sun-Sentinel's website included the link in its "Popular Stories" section, our timestamps show that Google News first crawled the UAL story after following the link from the Sun-Sentinel's "Popular Stories" box:

• At 10:17:35 PM/PDT, our crawler retrieved a copy of the Sun-Sentinel business section page. [Confirming page image] As you can see, no UAL story appears at this time.
  
• At 10:36:38 PM/PDT, our crawler retrieved an updated copy of the same section. This updated version included a new link in the "Popular Stories: Business" section to a story titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy." [Confirming page image]
  
• At 10:36:57 PM/PDT, our crawler followed the new link and fetched this copy of the UAL story. [Confirming page image] At that point, our index was updated to include the article with the date that the story was crawled, and the story became searchable on Google News.
  
• At 10:39:57 PM/PDT, the Sun-Sentinel received its first referral to the UAL story from Google News, with a user clicking on a Google News link to the Sun-Sentinel's UAL story.

The Tribune Co. (owner of the Sun-Sentinel) has confirmed in its September 9, 2008 press release that the first referral from Google News to the article came after the UAL story appeared in the "Popular Stories" section.

Thus, the real conflict may be between the Sun-Sentinel software (which may or may not have been provided to the newspaper by the Tribune Company) and Google's crawler, which is why this may be a "nobody's fault" problem. The Tribune statement that Mills cites indicates a defect in how "Popular Stories" are detected, resulting in an error that could have been avoided had there been a human editor monitoring the process. (Note that one can imagine situations in which a six-year old article would again become popular; but, by Tribune's own admission, this was not one of those situations.)

On the other hand human intervention could also have caught the detection of an article that lacked a byline: While, in the first two page images from the Google News blog, all of the Heroux columns (present and past) are dated, no dates are provided in the "Popular Stories" window, reflecting the above problem with the Sun-Sentinel software. More interesting, however, is that the retrieved "Popular Story" itself has no date, stating only that the original source was the Chicago Tribune and naming the staff reporters. The only date on this page is the one on the generic SunSentinel.com header, which (clearly?) has nothing to do with any of the non-generic content on that page. Thus, the Google crawler results needed monitoring by a human editor as much as the "Popular Stories" detector did; and, since Google is not, itself, a newspaper, the SEC may wish to raise the question of whether or not a business that is providing a news service needs to have that service monitored by a professionally qualified news editor. We can probably guess how Google (probably reinforced with Web 2.0 ideology) would answer that question; but I doubt whether their answer would make much difference. After all, it is one thing for the SEC to rule against the moral equivalent of an individual shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded auditorium; but I cannot imagine that they have ever had to rule on a piece of unmonitored software doing the shouting. Lawrence Lessig would probably say that this is precisely the sort of problem that needs to be resolved through "code;" but that code can only arise from the kind of "self-conscious control" he envisages in his Code book. Can we really expect to see the necessary "self-conscious control" arise in Google in response to this unfortunate incident?

Institutionalized Mourning

Watching today's memorial ceremonies, particularly those in New York and Washington, reminded me of an incident last April that prompted me to rail against the politicization of tragedy. The event was the gathering in Oklahoma City on the occasion of the 12th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, and the incident was the presence of Rudy Giuliani at the event. Here is what I wrote at that time:

I was struck by one particular sentence quoted by Associated Press Writer Tim Talley:

We mourn and hurt and will never forget, but we don't live under fear.

Because it is hard for me to view Giuliani as anything but a politician (and one trying to become the Republican candidate for the next presidential election at that), his use of the first person plural just stuck in my craw. It was as if he wanted to gather the Oklahoma City bombing under the same tent as 9/11 in the formation of a "brotherhood" of mourning and personal pain, then alluding to Virginia Tech for adding new members to this brotherhood. I am really chilled by this kind of political maneuver, possibly because I fear that it may actually work. Sartre had conceived of such a "brotherhood of mourning" in The Flies. This was his version of Aeschylus' Oresteia; and the brotherhood concept was invented by Aegisthus in memory of Agamemnon, who had been murdered by his wife Clytemnestra with the assistance of, you guessed it, Aegisthus. Sartre saw this as manipulation of the worst kind; and, for better or worse, my own world-view was informed by seeing a performance of this play back in my student days.

I suppose my memory was tweaked by seeing Giuliani yet another time and feeling almost as if his very presence leaves a bad taste in my mouth, regardless of whether or not he even says anything. Much of The Flies addresses the bonding-through-familiarity that emerges between Aegisthus and Zeus, each of whom, after all, assumed monarchy by overthrowing an existing monarch (Agamemnon and Cronus, respectively). Zeus seals the bond with Aegisthus when he informs the latter that "Gods need men to believe in them;" and, while he does not say so explicitly, a ruler can only rule if his subjects believe in him.

Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980, at a time when it seemed as if fundamentalism was the least of the world's problems; yet it is hard to read The Flies today without thinking of Aegisthus in terms of faith-based government. For that matter, it is hard to read it without thinking of the fact that, even after the two terms of the current Administration, it seems as if the government we get is the government that men (and women) want to "believe in," whether it involves the "Christian virtues," ostensibly embraced by John McCain and Sarah Palin, or the "change we can believe in" that has attracted so many to Barack Obama. However, if we cannot transcend our dependence on belief, The Flies still teaches us that our beliefs can be manipulated and that the institutionalization of mourning is one of the more effective ways to achieve that manipulation.

NOW She Discovers Positive Chutzpah!

According to my records, Hillary Clinton has received only one Chutzpah of the Week award; and she shared that one with Joe Biden of Delaware, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Barack Obama of Illinois for letting campaigning take priority over doing the people's business when the appointment of Judge Michael Mukasey as Attorney General was up for vote in the Senate last November. Well, it may be that, after several effective demonstrations from Dennis Kucinich that there can be a positive side to chutzpah, Clinton may have learned the lesson; and she could not have picked a better setting to do so. As I have persisted in suggesting for some time, last month's events in Georgia may have less to do with standing up to Russian aggression and more to do with looking for an excuse to heat up the Cold War. After all, what other explanation could there have been for the neoconservatives to dispatch their "ultimate weapon of mass destruction" (known to his friends, if he has any, as Dick Cheney) to Georgia during the Republican Convention? This is the sort of situation that triggers all of the oversight instincts of a Representative like Kucinich, but it is also a situation in which Senate oversight tends to carry more weight than activities in the House. To my pleasant surprise Clinton seems to have been the Senator to pick up this particular gauntlet, at least according to a report from Washington by Daniel Dombey for the Financial Times:

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic former presidential candidate, said it was not "smart" to isolate Russia over the conflict and cast doubt on the administration's decision this week to withdraw a nuclear co-operation agreement with Moscow from Congress.

In a move that could embarrass both Washington and Tbilisi, she asked for a commission to look into the origins of the conflict echoing a similar call from Germany.

The issue is particularly sensitive because of the insistence by Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgian president, that his forces went into South Ossetia only in response to the movement of Russian troops into the area.

Russia argues that Georgia provoked the conflict.

To even hint that the Russians may have had a point in their actions last month at a time when the most rabid of the Cold Warriors are trying to reclaim the hearts and minds of the American electorate before Election Day (what better way to distract voters from the pathological condition of the economy?) is chutzpah indeed. Doing it in a Senate committee meeting makes it chutzpah with a sharp edge, which is probably the only way to get our Legislative Branch to stop rattling sabers (one more time) and take a more dispassionate approach to analyzing just what happened a month ago. Meanwhile, Dombey also reported that Representative Ed Royce (who happens to be a Californian Republican) is doing similar heavy lifting, perhaps to let Kucinich know that other Representatives can take this kind of oversight seriously. Nevertheless, Clinton has the bully pulpit for this one (on the "Eve of 9/11" of all times); so she really deserves the Chutzpah of the Week award to herself.

Back when Clinton was fighting tooth and nail for the nomination, I remember at least one of the pundits commenting that she could probably serve her country better in the Senate than in the White House. Perhaps it takes Clinton to expose this particular neoconservative sideshow (remember the book by William Shawcross about our destructive adventures in Cambodia?) for what it is. If so, then she may yet be instrumental in the Democratic Party recovering the White House and stronger control of the Congress as well. If she does this through chutzpah, I shall be only too happy to grant her further awards!

Polling our Security

Since today is the seventh anniversary of 9/11, AT&T Yahoo! decided to run another of their pseudo-scientific polls, this time asking if we "feel safer since 9/11." However distorted the results may be, they can still make for some interesting (if disheartening) reading:

Given that I have responded to each of these polls at approximately the same time of day, I was struck by how few bothered to respond (although this may have something to do with what appears to be a serious degradation of service at AT&T Yahoo! sites, if not at Yahoo! in general). Basically, the "turnout" for this poll is about 27% that of those who voted in the McCain poll, which, as readers may recall, was the weakest of the three Convention polls I reviewed. This could well be a sign that the memory of 9/11 is not as strong as many (such as Presidential candidates) would like it to be. It leads me to wonder how strongly the American population felt about Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1948. My guess is that those who survived the Second World War still felt pretty strongly about it; and that feeling was shared by, at the very least, those closest to them (as well as those closest to the ones who did not survive). On the other hand, as I have previously argued, ours is a culture that practically revels in its ignorance of history, which is why we can be so easily manipulated by propagandists who, as I suggested yesterday, know how to "muddy the waters" of history. This combination of ignorance and confusion may also explain the almost perfectly flat distribution of responses to the AT&T Yahoo! poll: It is practically the logical equivalent of flipping a three-sided coin, the most mindless approach to making a decision. Thus, while there was a decided prevalence of strong feeling in the Convention polls, it would seem as if the participation in this poll was not only weak but also virtually thoughtless, driven, as it were, by neither logic nor emotion. I could not think of better conditions under which neoconservative ideologues could try to revive the Cold War, for which, as I have suggested, recent activities in Georgia may have been a first step. These are men (primarily, I suspect) trying to "make their own history" while blithely ignoring the qualifications on such efforts set forth by Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Meanwhile, history will proceed at our own pace, dishing out, as Marx suggested, both tragedy and farce, except that we shall have become too ignorant to tell the difference!

The Epitome of Understatement

Forget about Chuck Shepherd's NEWS of the WEIRD or even the Odd News category for Yahoo! News aggregation. If your tastes run to the off-beat, then click your heels three times and say, "There's no place like the BBC!" After all, this is news from the country of William ("Lord, what fools these mortals be!") Shakespeare (even if he cribbed that line from Seneca). Last night's dispatch, however, was not a matter of British whimsy coming from some remote corner of the "sceptered isle" but a rather curious account of the justice system in the Democratic Republic of Congo:

A minister in the Democratic Republic of Congo has ordered a Kinshasa jail to release a dozen goats, which he said were being held there illegally.

Deputy Justice Minister Claude Nyamugabo said he found the goats just in time during a routine jail visit.

The beasts were due to appear in court, charged with being sold illegally by the roadside.

The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining.

Perhaps Nyamugabo felt that understatement would be the best way to emphasize the absurdity of this situation without having to face up to the problems faced by humans unfortunate to find themselves in the DRC prison system or addressing the question of whether "blame the evidence" is standard operating procedure in the Ministry of Justice. After all, the blindfold that Justice wears probably does not affect her sense of smell!

Coming to a Movie Theater Near You: Electoral Propaganda

What's up with the Yari Film Group? Chances are most of us have never heard of them. I had to do a bit of homework to discover that they were behind one of the more fascinating movies I have seen recently, The Illusionist. However as Anthony D'Alessandro pointed out in his recent analysis of the production company for Variety, that was back in 2006, which in the entertainment business is ancient history. Here is D'Alessandro's summary (in unadulterated Variety-speak):

Unlike 2006, when Yari Film Group saw plenty of B.O. action from critical fave "The Illusionist" ($34 million), the distrib's 2007-'08 slate of five films fell short. The biggest title for YFG, which has a distribution partnership with Freestyle Releasing, was the urban laffer "The Perfect Holiday" ($5.8 million). That pic's performance was arguably stunted by another yuletide urban hit in the market, "This Christmas" ($49 million), which bowed three weeks earlier. Topper Bob Yari says he's excited about his upcoming lineup and the indie biz in general. "We're going through a cycle where new technology is maturing," Yari says. "The way people choose their films is changing."

However, on the basis of a review by Todd McCarthy posted yesterday to the Variety Web site, Yari may have hit on a new source of revenue for his shop: propaganda. The film under review is called Nothing but the Truth (which should be a red flag for anyone with a literary frame of mind); and it was released as a Battleplan production (which should be a red flag for everyone else). Consider McCarthy's synopsis of the plot:

Opening startlingly with an assassination attempt on the U.S. president, pic proposes a scenario in which the government launches a military attack on Venezuela, based on evidence that its unnamed leader was behind the plot. In a blockbuster story that puts the administration on the defensive, ace Capitol Sun-Times political reporter Rachel Armstrong ([Kate] Beckinsale) outs Erica Van Doren ([Vera] Farmiga) as a covert CIA op who went to Venezuela and reported back that the South American country did not instigate the attempt on the president's life.

Erica, whose husband just happens to have been ambassador to Venezuela but who resigned in disagreement with the administration, is furious about her cover having been blown, but not as much as the government, which assigns a special prosecutor, Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon), to convince Rachel to name her source. But nothing will make her budge and she eventually lands in jail for contempt of court.

The days she spends behind bars -- in a brightly lit common room with dozens of other women -- are counted off by onscreen titles, as the government waits for Rachel to cave. With the might of the government on one side and Rachel backed by her newspaper and high-toned attorney Albert Burnside (Alan Alda), the case comes down to differing views of what's at stake: Is it a First Ammendment issue, as Rachel maintains, or a matter in which national security takes precedence?

It is hard not to be suspicious of a narrative that confounds two of the more depressing stories of the current Administration. The resemblance of the Van Dorens to Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame is too close to be dismissed as coincidence, even if the scene has changed significantly. However, the core of the plot revolves around the extent to which we shall connect Rachel Armstrong not with Bob Novak but with Judith Miller, whose own jail time built up her character as an intrepid journalist before the extent of her thoroughly unprofessional complicity with the Bush Administration over claims of weapons of mass destruction was revealed.

Now, when two stories that do not really fit very well together get squeezed into the same film, the result is usually attributed to some committee mucking with the production process (as in the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee). However, at the risk of sounding too much like a conspiracy theorist, what if the intent of this project was a deliberate effort to muddy the waters of the history of the last eight years. After all, it is not that unreasonable to assume that most moviegoers did not follow either the Plame case or the Miller affair particularly closely (particularly due to all the twists and turns in the details); and there is also a tendency to take a film that has even a vague "ring of truth" to it as if it were truth. If we grant these two premises, then, while McCarthy saw the result as "unquestionably part of the zeitgeist as an anti-Bush administration film by virtue of its highlighting of the threats to civil liberties in the name of national security," he may have missed out on the extent to which, for all of its surface appearances, the work is actually an insidious piece of propaganda, which will ultimately serve neoconservative ends by appealing to and then hopelessly confusing those who would might oppose those ends (say, by how they vote in November).

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Bill Boyarsky's Truthdig column, which appeared this morning, may be one of the most readable accounts of not only our government's decision to take over Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac but also the "deafening radio silence" concerned with the impact of this action on the campaigns of our two Presidential candidates. This is, after all, a decision that is likely to affect all of us, even if, on the basis of the man-in-the-street interviewed conducted yesterday by the BBC, most of "us" have absolutely no idea how we shall be affected. Indeed, analysts seem to be putting far more effort into trying to tease out the consequences for the global economy than in worrying about the pocketbook of the "average American" (if it even makes sense to talk about such an individual). This gets to the heart of what I felt was the most interesting comment in Boyarsky's report:

But a decision to take over Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac—whether it’s right or wrong—shouldn’t be made in a Treasury Department conference room in secrecy on a Saturday by a group described by The Wall Street Journal as dressed mostly in business casual khakis and shirts."

This is a worthy observation. To what extent does our future depend on a cabal of "economic experts" whose very identities are probably unknown to us. This reminds me of the words of Juvenal's reflection on Plato's "Republic," "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (often translated, as in the Wikipedia entry, as "Who will guard the guards?"). Who should make the decisions that guard the soundness of our national economy, whose fate, for better or worse, now resonates throughout the global economy? It is interesting to see how Plato took on this question, as related in that same Wikipedia entry:

Plato's answer to this is that they will guard themselves against themselves. We must tell the guardians a "noble lie." The noble lie will inform them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege; they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it.

This is, indeed, a clever strategy; and that concept of the "noble lie" appears frequently as a plot device in literature. However, just about every plot based on the "noble lie" has to do with how everything unravels when the lie is revealed, after which resolution can come from a tragic end to all those involved, the decision to establish a "new order," or the imposition of that "new order" by some deus ex machina (which, in other cultures, may be read as "messiah").

Yesterday I suggested that, rather than relying on our own "expertise" that has led us into this mess, we might do better to look at what is happening in Brazil. Brazil has just been visited by an interesting deus ex machina in the form of the discovery of potentially vast deepwater resources of hydrocarbons. Blessed with what is likely to be a new source of wealth, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has begun to rethink the very nature of governance, particularly in terms of the relationship between the government and the governed. What has interested me most about the reports from Brazil is that Lula seems more interested in resolving existing problems of education and poverty than he is in turning his country into the next "engine of economic growth." If Boyarsky is depressed that the media are not addressing what our Presidential candidates have to say about a major economic decision being made by a closed council of high priests, he should worry just as much that those media seem to be living in a self-imposed oblivion of what is emerging in Brazil. Lula may be the first major leader with both the will and the power to do something about the War Against the Poor; but we can probably count on the media to ignore him (at least until the CIA tries to overthrow him).

The bottom line is that the "noble lie" will almost always trump what, in his final paragraph, Boyarsky calls "the real action" (i.e. those matters that actually factor how each of us will live from day to day). This may be because those decisions that advance that "real action" are actually grounded in a "noble lie;" and it is not really in anyone's interests (probably even that of the American electorate) for the lie to be revealed. After all, if you have no idea how you are going to pay the mortgage, put food on the table, and take care of your health, you are not in the best of positions to question the morality of consenting to live under what amounts to a "fiction of convenience!"

Reagan's Ghost

Sarah Palin should have paid more attention to her Bible studies. I am thinking about the part where the Israelites had the chutzpah to carry the Ark of the Covenant into battle. God punished them for trying to invoke the vessel of his sacred text as if it were some kind of "weapon of mass destruction" by subjecting them to a punishing defeat in which the Ark itself was lost (at least until Indiana Jones came along). While the analogy is not a very strict one, I pointed out in my analysis of Palin's Convention speech that she tried to present herself as the "vessel" of a sacred text of Ronald Reagan: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" As I wrote, this was just not the time for the Republicans to invite anyone to look back on the last eight years of Presidential Administration:

Would any Republican run seriously today on the proposition that things are better now than they were in November of 2000? How would those who are still victims of 9/11 answer? What about those who suffered consequences of the more inept decisions arising from our adventurism in the name of the Global War on Terror? What about those who will not even vote, those in countries on every continent who used to view the United States as a governmental model?

According to Associated Press Writers Brett J. Blackledge and Eileen Sullivan, there are now two reports that are trying to confront at least some of these issues, one from the bipartisan Partnership for a Secure America and the other by the staffs of Democrats on the House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees. Here is their summary of the bipartisan report:

The independent report focuses narrowly on weapons of mass destruction.

The report and supporting studies describe the failure of international cooperation to prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, which they call a major problem. Many countries continue to ignore a United Nations mandate to prevent the spread of weapons; the ability of many countries to monitor potential bioterrorism is "essentially nonexistent," and dangerous chemical weapons stockpiles remain in some countries, including Russia and Libya, the report said.

Russia has been a significant player in U.S. efforts to secure nuclear weapons and to eliminate inventories of chemical weapons in the former Soviet region. That cooperation could be jeopardized as the two countries face off over the Russian invasion of Georgia and concerns about a U.S. missile defense base in Poland, [9/11 Commission leader Lee] Hamilton said.

Bush on Monday Bush on [sic] canceled a civilian nuclear cooperation deal with Russia.

"The things we do to penalize Russia will make it more difficult for us to deal with Russia on other matters," Hamilton said.

The Democrats' report covers more ground but also deals with specifics:

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, had harsher criticism of the Bush administration's efforts. Their report, written by the staffs of the House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees, found little or no progress across the board on national security initiatives.

"The Bush administration has not delivered on a myriad of critical homeland and national security mandates," the Democrats' report states. That report was being released Tuesday.

"The administration has just failed to act in so many ways," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. "Let's say that we've been fortunate that we have not been attacked" since 2001, said Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.

…

House Democrats also blasted Bush policy in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia as damaging to national security. U.S. efforts to combat terrorists in Pakistan have suffered because of "unyielding support for a military dictator"; Iraq has drained resources from the fight in Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia continues to serve "as a major source of terrorist activity," the Democrats' report states.

Blackledge and Sullivan also covered the White House reaction to this material. If their coverage is representative, then the language of that reaction is depressingly vague, almost as if we are still living in that world of faith-based reasoning that stakes everything on the confrontation of evil by good. While the Bible may tell our would-be leaders all they need to know about how to prevail in such a confrontation, a more dispassionate sense of reality requires a less simplistic view of the world, which, as I suggested yesterday, would be better informed by the proper study of history than by the invocation of sacred texts!

Recognizing the "B" in "BRIC"

One of James Thurber's better one-liners (probably a caption for a New Yorker cartoon) was:

She heard Brazil was bigger than the United States; so she called the FBI!

Our current Administration being what it is, we have to wonder whether or not the full force of the Department of Homeland Security may be directed at Brazil, now that they have discovered deepwater hydrocarbon fields that could make them, as reported by BBC NEWS, "one of the biggest producers in the world" of both oil and gas. After all, as a result of its discovery, Brazil was invited to join OPEC by Iran; and it is hard to imagine Homeland Security sitting on their hands when that news hit the wires. Ironically, it did not take Brazil long to decline the invitation; but the country's "other priorities" (as energy minister Edison Lobao put it) may concern Homeland Security as much as the prospect of Brazil sitting next to Iran during Cartel meetings that determine the price of oil.

The real concern may well be that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has a plan for rethinking the very nature of governance, particularly in terms of the relationship between the government and the governed, in a new context of economic wealth at a time when most of the economies of the developed world are hemorrhaging. Here is how the BBC reported his recent television address to his country:

"Brazil does not wish to be a mere exporter of crude. On the contrary, we want to add value to our oil by exporting derivatives which are worth more," he said.

Brazil aimed to have a sophisticated oil industry and in the coming years would build five new refineries, dozens of drilling rigs and platforms, as well as hundreds of ships, Lula said.

"We won't allow ourselves to be dazzled and go spending money that we still don't have on silly things," he added.

"(The reserves) are a passport for the future. Their main destination, I repeat, must be for the education of new generations and combating poverty."

In other words Lula wants to take a country that has suffered some of the worst kinds of poverty, often as a result of some of the worst forms of exploitation, and create an effective base of national wealth that can then be applied to the overall national good. This used to be enough to send any "red-blooded patriotic American" running into the streets screaming "Socialism!" and then trying to place a direct telephone call to J. Edgar Hoover. I would like to think such days have long passed; but, after John McCain invoked that "any willing patriot" phrase in his acceptance speech, I know better than to make such assumptions.

There is at least one interesting irony in this potential change in Brazil's fortunes. According to its Wikipedia entry, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) concept was first introduced in 2001 by Goldman Sachs:

The acronym was first coined in 2001 and prominently used in a thesis of the Goldman Sachs investment bank.^[1][2] The main point of these papers was to argue that the economies of the BRICs are rapidly developing and by 2050 will eclipse most of the current richest countries of the world. The Goldman Sachs thesis proposed something like an economic bloc, or a formal trading association, like the European Union.^[3]

These days you cannot throw a cat in a newsroom (at least in the ones that remain) without hitting some journalist working up the latest story on economic growth in Russia, India, or China; but Brazil has received relatively little attention. Part of this may be due to Lula himself, whose personal sense of pragmatism eschews the sort of flamboyant behavior associated with the likes of his (also oil-rich) neighbor, Hugo Chávez. Lula may actually be that rare bird, the founder of a "Workers' Party" (the Partido dos Trabalhadores) who actually cares about the quality of life for the workers in his country. Of course one need only visit Lula's own Wikipedia entry to see that things are not quite that simple:

From the beginning of his political career to the current days, Lula has changed some of his original ideals and moderated his positions. Instead of deep social changes as proposed in the past, his government chose a reformist line, passing new retirement, tax, labor and judicial laws, and discussing a university reform. Some wings of the Worker's Party disagreed with these changes in focus and have left the party to form dissidences like the Workers' Cause Party, the United Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialism and Freedom Party.

Nevertheless, he continues to pursue visions of an across-the-board improvement in the economic and social well-being of his entire (not to mention diverse) population; and it is, at the very least, interesting that his first public reaction to his country's new source of wealth should be framed in terms of those visions. He at least gives the appearance that these visions are more important than whether Goldman Sachs wants to keep the "B" in "BRIC," particularly at a time when they should be worrying about more serious matters.

One of the many interesting insights in Arthur Schlesinger's biography of Robert Kennedy is the suggestion that John Kennedy had a lot to learn from Jawaharlal Nehru, whom he first met when he was still a Congressman, but that he failed to grasp what Nehru was trying to tell him about such sensitive issues as the colonial present of the West in Vietnam. As we consider who our next President will be, Schlesinger's lesson should remind us that a candidate's capacity and willingness to learn is usually more important than his portfolio of what he already knows. Goldman Sachs could not look at Brazil and see beyond the balance sheets that calculate return on investment. Will our next President look at Brazil and see lessons in governance, rather than just a new trading partner for energy resources? On the basis of what I saw at the Republican National Convention, I find it hard to think about John McCain in terms of such a capacity and willingness to learn. I would certainly like to think about Barack Obama in those terms, and I shall be watching his performance closely between now and November to decide whether such a desire is well-grounded or misplaced!

From Java to Bali

There is an interesting distinction between the respective approaches to the performance of music, particularly where gamelan is concerned, in Java and Bali; and, to a great extent, that distinction has to do with the very notion of performance itself. In Bali there is a very clear sense of when the music begins (usually with a strongly pronounced opening gesture, often involving most of the ensemble) and when it ends. That clear sense is not there in Java. During my visit to Yogyakarta, whether in a restaurant or in an outdoor theater for the Ramayana Dance Troupe, musicians almost always seemed to be present; but I never had a clear sense of when they started to play. I would see them setting up when I arrived and, at some later time, I was aware that music was now part of my auditory environment, without ever being aware of when it started. The music was like the atmosphere itself, essential to your very state of being without demanding that you be explicitly aware of it.

I use that noun "atmosphere" in recognition of what (thanks to Stanley Kubrick) may be the best known composition of György Ligeti, "Atmosphères." Composed in 1961, this work for full orchestra with 55 distinct string parts did not necessarily challenge our awareness the way Javanese gamelan does; but it certainly challenged any sense of awareness based on "musical objects," so to speak. In place of the usual perceptual categories of themes, harmonic progressions, or voices in contrapuntal interplay, there was only a tightly (but intricately) woven texture, from which the mind behind the ear was at liberty to form its own perceptual categories.

Six years later Ligeti made his own individual move closer to the spirit of the Javanese aesthetic. The result was "Lontano;" and Michael Tilson Thomas chose this work to open this season's subscription concerts by the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall. The title of the work means "distant;" and the experience of listening to it is rather like trying to hear sounds from a distance very close to the threshold of your perceptions. Thus, any sense of beginning or ending comes not from the music but from the inferences we draw by observing Thomas at the podium. (Ligeti was apparently well aware of this, particularly since I was left wondering if the last few measures that Thomas led with a light pulse from his baton were actually a tacet for the entire orchestra. Was this actually the case, or had the sounds finally diminished beyond my own threshold of perception? My guess is that Ligeti wanted me to think about this question, without necessarily arriving conclusively at an answer.)

Thomas prefaced his performance with a few remarks to prepare us for the experience. This was probably a good thing. In the past his audiences have had problems with what I have called "the unbearable being of silence," particularly when he has programmed the six short orchestral pieces of Anton Webern. However, last night's audience was as silent as I have ever heard them (so to speak) and did not appear to be uncomfortable with being subjected to sounds that could barely be heard. The result was sublime, almost in the physical sense of the word denoting the direct transition from solid to gaseous state, in this case applied to the "sublimation" of those usually anticipated "musical objects." When you think about it, Thomas' decision to launch his new season with a work so subtle (and, in many respects, still experimental forty years after its completion) was a bold move; and the enthusiasm with which his audience embraced this move once he set down his baton (and we could all assume the performance had concluded) is a sign that San Francisco remains a good city in which to hone one's craft at being a better listener.

"Lontano" was followed by a performance of Francis Poulenc's D minor concerto for two pianos; and my application of the adjective "sublime" to Ligeti might be seen as an invitation to apply the adjective "ridiculous" to Poulenc. My guess is that Poulenc would not be offended by that invitation. After all he was one of the more prominent members of "Les Six," a group of six French composers whose "patron saint" was Erik Satie, much of whose own compositional work seemed calculated to draw our attention to the ridiculous. Thus, in many respects Poulenc's concerto can be seen as an effort to take all prevailing expectations of a concerto for piano (or pianos) and orchestra and stomp all over them with barely (if at all) repressed glee. Consequently, while Felix Mendelssohn had undertaken two such "double piano" concertos, the composer most associated with such an ensemble was still Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; and Mozart is very much present in the three movements (particularly the second) of Poulenc's concerto. Furthermore, it is not the apotheosized Mozart of the academic specialists; rather, it is the unabashedly bratty Mozart who so enjoyed writing all those scatological letters to his sister (and setting similar texts to music).

To make matters even more interesting in light of my introductory paragraph, this is also the Poulenc who heard a Balinese gamelan at the Colonial Exposition of Paris roughly a year before he began work on this concerto; and, whatever his understanding may have been of what he heard, this is very much a work in the spirit of Balinese, rather than Javanese, aesthetic. We are shocked to attention by the very first gesture, and the music never releases its grip on that attention until the final chord. The sounds are anything but Balinese, even when Poulenc is confining himself to the pentatonic scale of Balinese metallophones. Rather, probably as an offering to "saint" Satie, both melodic lines and harmonic support are infused with the grammar and rhetoric (if not logic) of music for popular entertainment; so both the ancient traditions of Bali and the more familiar traditions of Mozart are swallowed up by the spirit of the music hall, digested by Poulenc's own compositional logic, and transformed into his unique form of energy.

Needless to say, that kind of energy only works when it is properly honored by the performers. We know we can expect such treatment from Thomas; and his soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, were unabashedly within the spirit of the moment. They must be reading some of the remarks in the popular press, which have noted that they are turning 50 in the same year as Madonna, since it was clear that their matching purple and green outfits had as much to do with the spirit of the music as their keyboard technique did. The "bratty" adjective again comes to mind, but again with the same positive connotation that can be applied to Mozart. Also, for all the furious energy with which they attacked their respective keyboards, they never overplayed any of Poulenc's "jokes of appropriation," whether he was deliberately warping favorite passages from Mozart, the keyboard virtuosity of Sergei Rachmaninoff, or a revised take on a passage from his own sextet for piano and wind quintet, which he had completed shortly before beginning this concerto. These were all throw-away gags, designed not to take over the attention, lest our listening experience miss out on the next one that unfolds.

After the intermission, Thomas concluded his program with Sergei Prokofiev's fifth symphony in B-flat major (Opus 100). This is the symphony that the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic performed in Davies almost a year ago under the baton of Yuri Temirkanov in a performance that, when it was given in Carnegie Hall, led New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini to invoke the spirit of Looney Tunes. Such a perspective made it an excellent companion to the Poulenc concerto; and, while the symphony was not completed until January of 1945, it is worth observing that Prokofiev was in Paris when the Poulenc concerto was first performed and, given his artistic connections, was probably well aware of the work. This does not mean that he was channeling Poulenc while working on this symphony; but, for all the dues that Prokofiev had to pay to being a proper Soviet composer, the work reveals any number of intimations of irreverence.

Since there was no way I could ignore my past listening experience, I feel it would be fair to address last night's in terms of what I wrote after hearing Temirkanov:

Regular readers know that I am not one to place Prokofiev in the same company with Mozart and Beethoven. I have called him a "burned-out firebrand" and celebrated his raucous qualities. His fifth symphony gives us more of the raucous, but without the cinematic backup of his Alexander Nevsky music. The Andante and Adagio movements are meditative, but the seem to be meditating more on big sounds than anything else. The scherzo between them seems to have picked up a pop-style cadence and keeps tossing it around the way a dog would a stuffed toy. As is the case with the dog, the novelty wears off before the enthusiasm. The final movement pulls out all the stops for both energy and sound, somewhat like a locomotive pulling a train too fast to control. Needless to say, this was where one could appreciate all the machinery behind Temirkanov's technique as a conductor and the fearlessness of his musicians to follow him anywhere. Tommasini invoked the spirit of Looney Tunes, but there was too much seriousness of purpose for that metaphor to stick. I prefer the locomotive metaphor, because one listens in the fear that the entire ensemble will derail; but Temirkanov's hand is too steady to allow that to happen.

In listening to Thomas' own stamp on this music, I was probably most drawn to the way in which he took an almost lyrical approach to the scherzo, thus relying less on that sense of novelty. If the basic ideas of this movement run the risk of recurring too many times, Thomas found a way to bring uniqueness to each recurrence. The result was that, as was the case with the Poulenc concerto, that "pop-style" wit spoke for itself without sounding too forced. I had never heard the scherzo played quite this way in any of my previous experiences with the symphony, and it was refreshing. Similarly, Thomas knew how to bring just the right level of urgency to the rising energy levels of the Andante and Adagio movements, which may actually be why he let go of that urgency in his approach to the scherzo; and the final movement was, once again, a case of over-the-top fearless abandon. The locomotive was still the dominant metaphor; but, particularly in the context that the Poulenc concerto had set, the Looney Tunes spirit was more evident in Thomas' reading than it had been in Temirkanov's.

From that point of view, I rather hope that this is the program that the San Francisco Symphony will be taking to opening night at Carnegie Hall. I have great admiration of Tommasini as one of the more perceptive writers about both music and how it is performed, and my decision to buy tickets at the last minute to hear Temirkanov was motivated by my reading his review. So I would be very much interested in reading what he would have to say about Thomas' approach to Prokofiev, both on its own merits and in terms of the context set by this particular program.

Demagoguery 101

Kudos to Ari Melber for his latest post to The Notion, a blog maintained at the Web site for The Nation. This is the one about the strategic decision by John McCain's campaign planners to ban any semblance of engagement between the press and Sarah Palin:

The McCain campaign has admitted to a ban on most press interviews for its largely unknown but popular running mate. McCain's aides are selling this highly unusual approach with rank contempt for the public. "Who cares?" laughed Nicolle Wallace, when pressed on why Palin won't take questions by Time's Jay Carney, on MSNBC. "But I mean, like, from who, from you?" she added, incredulous at the very idea of Palin taking questions from Time's Washington bureau chief. "Who cares? No offense," she added, "who cares if she can talk to Time magazine?" (Of course, it was Time's Jay Carney who had that "prickly" interview with McCain last week, which enraged his aides.)

Nevertheless, I must take issue with Melber over whether or not this constitutes "rank contempt for the public." The point that Wallace seems to have been making on the video clip attached to the MSNBC hyperlink is that Palin has no need to talk to the press when she can talk directly to the public so effectively (as was demonstrated last Wednesday night). This is not "rank contempt for the public;" it is rank contempt for the press. Melber should know better to recognize when a harpy is despoiling his own feast!

Even with this interpretation corrected, the McCain team strategy is still cause for alarm. It defies Mr. Dooley's time-honored precept, "Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us," not to mention his common sense judgment, which knew better than to put his trust in a single news source. In the spirit of the fundamentalism that seems to support her value system, the assumption seems to be that the truths that come from Palin's mouth are so self-evident that they do not need to be subjected to the interpretive analysis of mere reporters and that the act of questioning any of these truths would be nothing short of heresy. Such an approach has a tradition going all the way back to ancient Greece, which embodies a specific approach to governance; that approach is called "demagoguery."

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers "rabble-rouser" as a synonym for "demagogue." This implies that demagoguery can only take place when there is a rabble to be roused; and Palin's greatest asset (particularly in light of her Convention performance) may be her ability to rouse several rabbles with a single rhetorical stroke. Think of all the ways in which the Republican National Convention supported interest groups whose interests were defined by exclusion, whether on the basis of economic class, religious conviction, scientific perspectives on life (both where it came from and when it begins), elitism, sexual preference, gender, and probably the criterion that dare not speak its name, race. I continue to subscribe to the hypothesis that Karl Rove was able to get George W. Bush elected twice on the basis of being able to convince each of these exclusionary interests that Bush shared the same interest, without worrying about any messy contradictions across the interest groups. While Rove worked his magic through intermediation, Palin's gift for direct speech may well be on the path towards achieving a similar goal for McCain.

However, this raises a question. Rove was good enough at his work that he never had to worry very much about whether or not the press could expose the duplicity of his works. In the words of Wallace, he could believe "Who cares?" without exposing the hubris ("chutzpah" is too polite for this one) of saying it directly. Of course any classicist can tell you that hubris frequently lies at the heart of a tragic flaw, so it will be interesting to see if Wallace's babble turns into a tragic flaw for the McCain campaign. Ultimately it will depend on whether or not her words are generally recognized as a flaw. However much MSNBC may take pride in providing Countdown as a bully pulpit for Keith Olbermann, the fact that no one spoke up to challenge Wallace's "Who cares?" question amounts to an act of legitimizing her demagogic principles. If MSNBC cannot make a difference in how Wallace's actions are perceived, can we realistically expect more from The Nation? I suspect that we cannot, which means that we probably need to concede this particular game to Wallace and the McCain team. Now, is anyone keeping score on the current set?

Linguistic Spirit Matters

Back when I was living in Southern California, I remember once going to a rather nice review of the music of George Gershwin that was seasoned with just the right amount of background narrative. Part of that narrative had to do with how quickly songs from Gershwin musicals caught on in Europe. This was demonstrated by having a young tenor, looking for all the world like a member of the Hitler Youth, standing at rigid attention singing, "Dame, sei gut!" in the strictest time imaginable.

This memory was revived this morning as I near the completion of my ascent of Mount Beethoven with over six (count them!) discs of folksong settings. Given that I am not particularly fond of the settings I have previously heard, this is without a doubt the hardest part of the journey and is really quite slog.

It is a bit like the mule train that takes you to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. When you finally get to the bank of the Colorado River and the afternoon sun is beating down on you with full force (having long since gotten away from any sources of shade), you discover you still have to ride for another hour to get to the bridge that crosses the river to the ranch where you will spend the night. That last hour is one of the longest I ever endured!

Part of the problem, as I previously observed, is that, at least according to Eric Bromberger, Ludwig van Beethoven never saw the texts he was setting, at least for his sources in English. Still, whatever the weaknesses of these settings may be, it helps to have these songs sung by someone with a command of the language. Thus, while Eberhard Büchner has a wonderful tenor voice, his delivery of "Sally in our Alley" (the last of the 25 Scottish songs that constitute Beethoven's Opus 108 (the only one of this collections that seems to have an opus number) is no less ludicrous than the cheap gag in that Gershwin revue I saw decades ago. Alas, with all due respect to Beethoven's memory (which I have exhibited in this blog many times over), I have to say that there is more substance in Gershwin's original conception of "Oh, Lady be Good!" than I have encountered in any of the folksong settings Beethoven prepared on commission from George Thompson!

Talk and Action

I may be sounding like a broken record (a now-anachronistic turn of phrase) when I keep coming back to Barack Obama's conviction that our country will only get out of the mess it is now in by all of us working together to extricate ourselves. The obvious retaliation to this position is to ask whether, based on experience (to invoke that word that has been over-used to death this week), Obama knows what he is talking about or whether he is exercising nothing more than a rhetorical strategy. Peter Dreier and John Atlas now have an extended analysis piece on the Web site for The Nation, whose thesis is that Obama's argument is, indeed, grounded in experience and that his experience was turned into a target of extended mockery during the Republican National Convention. That experience, of course, was Obama's first introduction to politics through grassroots organizing:

… in 1985, 23-year old Barack Obama moved to Chicago to work for the Developing Communities Project, a coalition of churches on the city's South Side. His job was to help empower residents to win improved playgrounds, after-school programs, job training, housing, and other concerns affecting a neighborhood hurt by large-scale layoffs from the nearby steel mills and neglect by banks, retail stores, and the local government. He knocked on doors and talked to people in their kitchens, living rooms, and churches about the problems they faced and why they needed to get involved to improve their communities.

Obama often refers to the valuable lessons he learned working "in the streets" of Chicago. "I've won some good fights and I've also lost some fights," he said in a speech during the primary season, "because good intentions are not enough, when not fortified with political will and political power."

This is what the word "experience" means to Barack Obama; and it is why experience has taught him that people can, indeed, work together to improve their lot. Indeed, his experience has much to do with turning the "theory" of working together into practice that yields significant and beneficial results.

Meanwhile, the Republicans want us to believe that Sara Palin's lack of experience is nothing compared to Obama's. To get across that message they have summoned some pretty big guns:

Speaking Wednesday at the Republican National Convention, former New York Governor George Pataki sneered, "[Barack Obama] was a community organizer. What in God's name is a community organizer? I don't even know if that's a job."

Then former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered his own snickering hit job. "He worked as a community organizer. What? Maybe this is the first problem on the resumé," mocked Giuliani." Then he said, "This is not a personal attack. It's a statement of fact. Barack Obama has never led anything. Nothing. Nada."

A few minutes later, in her acceptance speech for the GOP vice presidential nomination, Sarah Palin declared, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."

The party of Ronald Reagan was touting government experience over civic engagement.

At a convention whose theme was "service," GOP leaders ridiculed organizing, a vital kind of public service that involves leadership, tough decisions, and taking responsibility for the well-being of people often ignored by government.

I might consider reassigning this week's Chutzpah of the Week award. However, this is not chutzpah: It is flat-out insult. Furthermore, it insults not only Obama but also those with whom he worked back in the Chicago of the late Eighties, not to mention anyone who has ever worked at the grassroots level, whether in the nineteenth-century America that so fascinated Alexis de Tocqueville or in the "connected grassroots" world of Web 2.0. If the Republicans wanted to advertise, as aggressively as possible, how out of touch they are with the people whose votes they will need, they could not have picked a better way to do so!

A Second Chutzpah Award for Michael Moore

It has been almost a year since I gave Michael Moore his first Chutzpah of the Week award. Like Dennis Kucinich Moore understands the value of the positive connotation of chutzpah; and he knows how to invoke it in the spirit of well-needed activism. If this achieves the side-effect of bringing attention to his films, so much the better.

The first time around the film was Sicko, and the activism involved seeking health care in Cuba for patients being neglected in the United States. He is now ready for his second award, and this time the film is Slacker Uprising. Perhaps the best way to view this film is as an effort to succeed where Fahrenheit 9/11 failed, in the mobilization of a critical number of votes to remove Republicans from positions of power in both the White House and the Congress. Slacker Uprising may then be viewed as an attempt to test a hypothesis, which is that, ultimately, Fahrenheit 9/11 did little more than preach to the choir. For the most part the people who saw it were convinced by its thesis before seeing it!

To test this hypothesis, according to a CNET News report by Steven Musil, Moore will circumvent the distribution of Slacker Uprising through movie theaters:

Filmmaker Michael Moore plans to premiere his latest documentary exclusively on the Internet for free, forgoing the traditional theatrical release.

Slacker Uprising , which documents Moore's 62-city tour through swing states during the 2004 U.S. presidential election to rally young voters, will be available for download for three weeks, beginning September 23. A DVD of the 97-minute film will be released on October 7 through Amazon.com and Netflix.

"This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans," Moore said in a statement Thursday. "The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November. I think Slacker Uprising will inspire (millions) to get off the couch and give voting a chance."

This amounts to double-barreled chutzpah, taking aim at a broken political process that Moore continues to labor mightily to repair while also trying to do something about the sorry state of the movie business, particularly where distribution and promotion are concerned. He is betting that, by letting the Internet "do its thing," his primary audience will "do their thing" through active participation on Election Day (if not in activism during the campaign leading up to that day). More power to Moore, even if his Chutzpah of the Week awards are relatively modest compared to the other awards he has received!

The Economy: Promises and Data

Did John McCain know that the Labor Department would release their unemployment statistics the morning after (how appropriate) his Convention speech? If so, then that may have explained why he tried to put at bit more substance into at least two of his paragraphs:

I know some of you have been left behind in the changing economy and it often seems your government hasn't even noticed. Government assistance for unemployed workers was designed for the economy of the 1950s. That's going to change on my watch. My opponent promises to bring back old jobs by wishing away the global economy. We're going to help workers who've lost a job that won't come back, find a new one that won't go away.

We will prepare them for the jobs of today. We will use our community colleges to help train people for new opportunities in their communities. For workers in industries that have been hard hit, we'll help make up part of the difference in wages between their old job and a temporary, lower paid one while they receive retraining that will help them find secure new employment at a decent wage.

Notwithstanding the debate over his proposed solution (retraining only works when there are slots for the retrained to fill, which is not necessarily the case, particularly when those slots cost less by being outsourced overseas), "left behind" hardly does justice to the Labor Department numbers. Glenn Somerville's report for Reuters provided us with a graphic that speaks far more forcefully than any of McCain's rhetoric:

This leaves us with Somerville's words, which simply underscore how bad things are:

The U.S. unemployment rate unexpectedly shot up to 6.1 percent in August, the highest in nearly five years, as employers cut payrolls for an eighth straight month and a decline in labor markets accelerated.

The Labor Department said on Friday 84,000 jobs were lost in August, significantly more than the 75,000 that economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast. In addition, July's job losses were revised up to 60,000 and June's to 100,000 from a previously reported 51,000 in each month.

Analysts said the bleak hiring data showed a weakening economy that likely will oblige the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low for an extended period.

"The economy is clearly deteriorating," said Gary Thayer, senior economist for Wachovia Securities in St. Louis. "We're also seeing weakness around the globe so there's less reason for the Fed to focus on inflation and more reason to focus on getting the economy back on its feet."

Stock indexes futures extended losses but U.S. Treasury debt prices rose as investors bet it meant interest rates will remain in hold. The dollar dipped in value against other major currencies and short-term interest rate futures began to signal that the Fed could cut interest rates by year-end.

Labor department officials said the August jobless rate was the highest since September 2003. Analysts had expected the rate to remain steady at July's 5.7 percent rate rather than to jump.

"We're running job losses that are typically seen in the early stages of an economic recession," said David Resler, chief economist for Nomura Securities in New York, adding, "we're probably in one."

There were steep cuts in hiring in nearly every major category of employment. Some 61,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in August, the most for any month since mid 2003, and 8,000 more construction jobs were cut. There were 53,000 jobs eliminated in professional and business services and 4,000 in leisure and hospitality industries.

At least McCain knew that he had to invoke the economy for more than a stick for cudgeling the opposition (as his running mate had done the previous evening); but is he ready to admit that he is up to his arm pits in alligators? If Pit Bull Palin is attacking Barack Obama by distorting his tax plan, Obama is at least recognizing that the status quo will no longer serve us and that McCain's departure from that status quo is more rhetorical than substantive. The thing about those alligators, though, is that you need more than a plan for draining the swamp. You need to capability to implement that plan; and, like it or not, the status quo of our whole political system could well bring down either approach. This is why Obama keeps stressing the theme that we all have to work together to make things better; otherwise, we shall all end up as alligator food.

Partisan Bipartisanship

There is much in the text of John McCain's speech last night at the Republican National Convention to persuade us that "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is far more important than political parties or perhaps even what Isaiah Berlin has called "political judgement." In many ways I agree with him. If we look back at the worst examples of political judgment (to dispense with Berlin's British spelling) over the last eight years, we see far more depersonalization than the likes of an Abraham Lincoln would have found tolerable, usually because those judgments were products of the mentalities of chief executive officers and chief financial officers, rather than the sort of executives that our Constitution had in mind. As to political parties, one of the most important lessons we learned from watching John Adams was the intensity of our second President's aversion to the very concept when it emerged in full force in 1800 (although Adams' ghost probably winced when Edward Larson chose to title his book about that election A Magnificent Catastrophe).

It is, however, one thing to embrace the letter of a text and quite another to embrace the spirit of the narrator of that text. After all the text is just a text, a string of words that only comes to life when subject to interpretation, an interpretation that may not be a reflection of the intentions of the author. A narrator, on the other hand, is a human agent carrying a full portfolio of motives. The vote each of us casts in November will be for some motive-driven agent, rather than any text invoked by that agent on his behalf. Thus, while McCain's text may have invoked the spirit of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, when we think about motives, it is hard to escape the memory of our current President, who entered the White House with words of "being a uniter, not a divider" and then subjected us to eight years of those "divisive, partisan attacks," which Associated Press writers Tom Raum and Liz Sidoti attributed to the text that Matthew Scully had prepared for Sarah Palin.

Thus, as Captain Edward Fairfax Vere sings in the Prologue to Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd, whatever manifestation of goodness confronts us, "There is always some flaw in it;" and, as both Herman Melville and Britten demonstrated, each in his own way, that flaw usually leads to destruction. So we need to look for such flaws, however insignificant they may initially seem, lest they become triggers for larger consequences. In McCain's case these are the words that set my "flaw feelers" twitching:

Finally, a word to Senator Obama and his supporters. We'll go at it over the next two months. That's the nature of these contests, and there are big differences between us. But you have my respect and admiration. Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, an association that means more to me than any other. We're dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. No country ever had a greater cause than that. And I wouldn't be an American worthy of the name if I didn't honor Senator Obama and his supporters for their achievement.

But let there be no doubt, my friends, we're going to win this election. And after we've won, we're going to reach out our hand to any willing patriot, make this government start working for you again, and get this country back on the road to prosperity and peace.

Clearly that juxtaposition of "unites" and "divides" was the first alerting signal: Whether or not George W. Bush was only present at this Convention as a video image, he was clearly present in the subtext of McCain's words. This particular gesture, however, was only a storm cloud forming. The lightning bolt struck in the following paragraph with that "any willing patriot" phrase. This was pure Bush at his most those-not-for-us-are-against-us aggressive: One hand welcomes while the other is raised in a defiant fist. The welcoming hand is for the willing patriots, and the fist is for everyone else.

Who, then, decides who are the "willing patriots." Ambrose Bierce would have us believe that this is the domain of scoundrels; and, almost a year ago, we saw such a scoundrel in the person of House Minority Leader John Boehner in words that are presumably now documented in the Congressional Record. Presumably Boehner was there in the audience last night, relishing McCain's decision to invoke this particular phrase; and, for all we know, he will be out there on McCain's campaign trail, continuing to warp the semantics of love of country (or, if you prefer, "Country First") to the benefit of his senatorial colleague. McCain may have tried to assume the mantle of the "good cop," particularly in contrast with his running mate's decision to present herself as the pit bull of the team (the basis for an impromptu, and successful, joke that was not in the initially prepared text). However, he does not want us to forget that he still knows how to make a fist and deliver a wallop with it.

This brings us, once again, to the pseudo-science of the AT&T Yahoo! poll.

I have to say that, for all of my own observations about differentiation (not to mention McCain's affirmation of those observations), my own "vote" for this speech was a "solid so-so," a rather middling affair, particularly in the context of all the other performances being polled. I was thus not surprised to see that the McCain poll had attracted over 8000 votes fewer than the Palin poll received at the time that I case my own vote (and, for that matter, over 1000 votes fewer than the Obama poll had attracted). I was also interested to see that the distribution of the votes was closer to that of Obama, as opposed to the sharper differentiation that Palin had aroused. Bearing in mind how risky it is to read anything into these numbers, they may be a sign of an electorate that is close to as evenly divided as it had been in 2000 and 2004. If this is, indeed, the case, then we shall experience another election being fought over electoral votes rather than the vox of the popular vote; and such a fight may well leave the entire country with the same sense of malaise over detachment, if not alienation, that has been growing for eight years. In other words we may discover on Election Day that vox populi can say little more than, "Who cares?" That would be the strongest sign that the damage wrought by the current Administration has been done so well that the next Administration will not have much hope of undoing it.

Not Everyone will be at Tonight's Party

My guess is that we shall not see any shots of Jack Abramoff enjoying John McCain's speech tonight, although, if we are to believe recent material gathered together on the Suzie-Q blog, there are likely to be some (many?) on McCain's team who will miss him.

Is It the Economy (again)?

Whether or not the numbers coming out of the American and European stock exchanges can be read as a "review" of Sarah Palin's address to the Republican National Convention last night, BBC NEWS did not waste any time in letting us know how little confidence those numbers seemed to be indicating:

European and US shares have fallen sharply on further fears over the state of the US economy and the prospect of slower growth in the Eurozone.

London's FTSE 100 index closed 2.5% down while German and French markets each lost about 3% and key US markets were trading 2% lower.

The slides came after US data showed sluggish shop sales and mounting unemployment claims.

The European Central Bank also cut its 2009 growth forecast from 1.5% to 1.2%.

'Little confidence'

The jitters in the US prompted by rising jobless benefit claims were added to by an ADP Employer Services report showing US private employers cut 33,000 jobs in August.

And weak sales in the closely-watched back-to-school period also caused anxiety.

"It's definitely fear of an economic downturn that's hurting us today," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago.

"The economic data and the downbeat forecasts from management don't lend a lot of confidence to the economic revival outlook."

This prompted me to revisit Palin's text to see just what she had to say about economic matters. It turns out that she did not say very much and that what little she did say amounted to beating Barack Obama over the head with the usual Republican shtick about raising taxes:

Taxes are too high ... he wants to raise them. His tax increases are the fine print in his economic plan, and let me be specific.

The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes ... raise payroll taxes ... raise investment income taxes ... raise the death tax ... raise business taxes ... and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars. My sister Heather and her husband have just built a service station that's now opened for business - like millions of others who run small businesses.

How are they going to be any better off if taxes go up? Or maybe you're trying to keep your job at a plant in Michigan or Ohio ... or create jobs with clean coal from Pennsylvania or West Virginia ... or keep a small farm in the family right here in Minnesota.

How are you going to be better off if our opponent adds a massive tax burden to the American economy? Here's how I look at the choice Americans face in this election.

After that last sentence she departs entirely from anything even remotely related to the economy.

Did she know she was peddling a myth? Had she actually read Obama's words from last week? The words I have in mind are the following:

Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.

I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.

Once again we have the speaker who does not bother to read the text she is supposed to be refuting. Let us hope that Obama has the gumption to call her out on the inaccuracies of her claims and the motives behind them!

AT&T Yahoo! Polls Palin

Watching the BBC World Service television news yesterday afternoon gave the impression that the delegates at the Republican National Convention were far more interested in hearing from their nominee for Vice President than they were in hearing their "official" standard bearer. This made for an interesting contrast with the Democratic National Convention, where, for quite some time, it seemed as if the most important speech would be the one delivered by Hillary Clinton (followed, in importance, by the speech given by her husband). This should be a lesson in premature judgment. Even the preparations for Barack Obama's acceptance speech turned out to be grounds for criticism. However, once he started to speak, there was no doubt about who was leading the fight to reclaim the White House; and there was a performance whose merits were acknowledged even by his opponent. So, as I have tried to argue in evaluating the situation in Iraq, pundits would do well to refrain from reviewing the opera before the fat lady has even come on the stage!

Nevertheless, now that the text of Sarah Palin's speech is a matter of public record, it is probably worth asking whether it was worth the fuss, both in terms of content and in terms of that excuse for a "poll" that AT&T Yahoo! has decided to conduct again. What the "official story" does not provide, however, is an account of who actually authored that content. Speechwriters are rarely called out by name. We know they are there. West Wing junkies probably even think they have some idea of how they work. However, in this case Associated Press writers Tom Raum and Liz Sidoti saw fit to credit the source of the text, because they felt it was relevant to their account of how the Democrats reacted to it:

The Obama campaign had less than a warm greeting, saying Palin's speech was "written by George Bush's speechwriter and sounds exactly like the same divisive, partisan attacks we've heard from George Bush for the last eight years." The speech was written by Matthew Scully, who met Palin for the first time last week.

For all my carping about whether Associated Press has decided to substitute "writing" for "reporting," I think that Raum and Sidoti were justified in including this paragraph in their story. As I tried to argue previously, the most important thing about Hillary's Convention speech was how personal it was; and, if that personalization was a product of a skilled delivery of the well-honed craft of one or more crack speechwriters, then that "question of attribution" is still secondary. Whether or not this was a case of George Burns' "faked sincerity" was less important than how well that speech "played from the heart," so to speak. One could almost say that Hillary set the bar for Obama's own speech; and Obama demonstrated that he could play from the heart just as powerfully, even when digging into the nuts and bolts of the agenda he wanted to bring to the White House. Alas, the same cannot be said of Palin's performance.

The problem, which goes back to the Democrats' reaction, is that there was more of a sense of evident manipulation, rather than sincerity (real or fake). It was all about pushing the right buttons at the right time. To judge from the Raum-Sidoti account, all the buttons were pushed at the right time; and they all delivered the appropriate responses. In other words it was pretty much a run-of-the-mill convention speech, which is actually saying something for the content. After all, those buttons were basically rhetorical frosting on a cake that was little more than a resume delivered as a personal recitation. This is not to disapprove of the cake: It was probably as good a way as any to establish Palin, once and for all, as an accredited "known commodity;" it was just not the stuff of what many of us are thinking as we stare into the abyss of an uncertain future (while, I might add, Dick Cheney is busy digging away at that abyss to make it even deeper).

Indeed, notwithstanding what the Vice President may have been doing while Palin was delivering her address, Scully made at least one move that tipped the Republican hand in a way that reminded us of that abyss:

Politics isn't just a game of clashing parties and competing interests.

The right reason is to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it.

This was nostalgia at its most counterproductive, looking back at when Ronald Reagan stood beside Jimmy Carter and asked the American electorate, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Reagan and his team knew the answer, and they knew they could win an election based on that answer. Would any Republican run seriously today on the proposition that things are better now than they were in November of 2000? How would those who are still victims of 9/11 answer? What about those who suffered consequences of the more inept decisions arising from our adventurism in the name of the Global War on Terror? What about those who will not even vote, those in countries on every continent who used to view the United States as a governmental model? That second quoted sentence is a time bomb, and it can only blow up in the face of the party whose Administration got us into the mess in which we are now mired.

Nevertheless, there remains the question of whether or not at AT&T Yahoo! poll has anything useful to say.

The first thing I noticed in the above snapshot, which I took immediately after casting my (negative) vote), is that far more people responded. My guess is that this had to do with how little was known about Palin. The number give no indication of audience size; but it may suggest that more people were prompted to form and voice an opinion on the basis of this one speech (as opposed to the extensive coverage given to previous Obama speeches). Again, there was very little middle ground; and this is probably a good thing, since I continue to feel that differentiation is going to matter significantly where both political parties are concerned. If Palin's difference is currently larger than Obama's was, then that may have more to do with novelty than with content (or it may be a sign that, as BBC News has suggested, the Democrats have more work set out for them than they had anticipated). How important will this speech be in the longer run of the entire campaign? At the very least we should put that question aside until the final scene of this week's opera!

From Beethoven to Verdi?

In preparing my listening skills for the opening of Giuseppe Verdi's Simon Boccanegra to launch the new San Francisco Opera season, I stumbled across a "family resemblance" that struck me as too good to be accidental. In the second scene of the first act, a crowd of angry protesters gathered in the street outside the Ducal palace bursts into the council chamber; and, for the life of me, I could swear they were singing Beethoven! Admittedly, Beethoven has been heavily on my mind lately; but, as Johannes Brahms once observed, it is very hard to listen to anything without thinking of Beethoven in one way or another. Nevertheless, this struck me as an outright case of appropriation, the source being the Presto movement of the Opus 130 B-flat major string quartet; and, while Verdi did not carry the initial motif in the same direction that Beethoven did, it is hard to dismiss this conformity as accidental.

This set me to checking some dates. Verdi wrote only one string quartet, which is actually the only piece of chamber music in the catalog of his works. He wrote it in 1873, which is interesting in light of the chronology of Simon Boccanegra. This opera was first performed in 1857, but it was revised in 1881. The Wikipedia entry describes the revision in terms of "text changes by Arrigo Boito" but says nothing about any revision of the music (or, for that matter, the extent of the text changes). Having never heard Verdi's string quartet, I have no idea whether or not Beethoven casts a shadow over its score; but it is hard to imagine Verdi having written it in total ignorance of at least some of the Beethoven quartets. Ultimately, I do not think this is a particularly big deal. (How does one say "Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel" in Italian?) Still, it may be a nice bit of insight about Verdi the listener that could inform our own listening practices.

The Most Difficult Base Camp on Mount Beethoven

It is often difficult to confront the almost self-evident proposition that not every composition by a "great master" is de facto a "masterpiece" (using scare quotes to acknowledge that the very use of this word is questionable). In the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, I have addressed the issue that not everything he committed to musical notation was necessarily intended for musical performance. This is less of a question where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is concerned, but we still labor under the assumption that exhaustive cataloging motivates exhaustive listening, even when that listening extends to the juvenile expression of scatological texts set to perfectly acceptable vocal writing. More interesting, perhaps, is the case of Johannes Brahms, for whom diachronic listening provides us with insights as to how he "found his voice" as a result of a variety of attempts in a variety of performance media, some of which worked out better than others.

Finding myself now working through the Brilliant Classics Gesamtwerk collection of Ludwig van Beethoven, I am reminded of the number of times I have returned to the observation that Beethoven's writing for the human voice leaves much to be desired. This is best captured in a highly-opinionated observation I made last March:

As far as I am concerned, he hit the top of his game with the first act quartet in Fidelio, "Mir is so wunderbar;" and the down-slope on either side of that stunning moment is pretty steep!

Note that, for better or worse, I include that "ultimate warhorse," his ninth symphony, on that down-slope! Thus, the prospect of "covering" the last 25 discs in the collection has been a bit disconcerting, far more than my traversal of 26 discs of vocal music in the Brahms collection. The problem may be that much of the vocal writing might be described as "day job" work, which was just not as absorbing as other projects; and this can probably be said just as easily for Bach, Mozart, and Brahms as it can be said for Beethoven. In Beethoven's case, however, we have works such as his settings of Scottish and Irish folksongs (a performance of which had provoked the above contentious observation), where the documented evidence is pretty clear that his heart just was not in his work. Furthermore, even if that one quartet from Fidelio is his best effort, the path to the opera itself was an arduous one of try after try to "get it right" (although one interesting thing about the Brilliant collection is that it includes the first of those attempts, the 1805 Leonore, which includes the "first draft" of that quartet). Needless to say, I shall persist through the Brilliant collection. (I am not yet half-way through those 25 discs.) Hopefully, I shall encounter at least a few pleasant surprises along the way, perhaps among the songs that were not based on folk material from a country thoroughly alien to Beethoven's own culture!

God the Ironist

If ever there were a working definition of Schadenfreude, it would have to be associated with reading Max Blumenthal's latest post to the Campaign '08 blog being maintained at the Web site for The Nation. If am referring, of course, to his particularly analysis of the motivational logic behind the naming of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate:

Last week, while the media focused almost obsessively on the DNC's spectacle in Denver, the country's most influential conservatives met quietly at a hotel in downtown Minneapolis to get to know Sarah Palin. The assembled were members of the Council for National Policy, an ultra-secretive cabal that networks wealthy right-wing donors together with top conservative operatives to plan long-term movement strategy.

CNP members have included Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Grover Norquist, Tim LaHaye and Paul Weyrich. At a secret 2000 meeting of the CNP, George W. Bush promised to nominate only pro-life judges; in 2004, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told the group, "The destiny of the nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement." This year, thanks to Sarah Palin's selection, the movement may have finally aligned itself behind the campaign of John McCain.

Though Dobson and Perkins reportedly attended the recent CNP meeting in Minneapolis, a full roster of guests would be nearly impossible to require. The CNP deliberately operates below the radar, going to excessive lengths to obscure its activities. According to official CNP policy, "The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs before or after a meeting." Thus the CNP's Minneapolis gathering was free of reporters.

I learned of the get-together only through an online commentary by one of its attendees, top Dobson/Focus on the Family flack Tom Minnery. (Watch it here) Minnery described the mood as CNP members watched Palin accept her selection as John McCain's Vice Presidential pick. "I was standing in the back of a ballroom filled with largely Republicans who were hoping against hope that something would put excitement back into this campaign," Minnery said. "And I have to tell you, that speech by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin -- people were on their seats applauding, cheering, yelling... That room in Minneapolis watching on the television screen was electrified. I have not seen anything like it in a long time."

Under the reasonable assumption that "family values" plays a major role in the CNP worldview (along with a natural proclivity for judging others before judging themselves), we have to believe that all of that "applauding, cheering, yelling" came to abrupt end once it was confirmed that Palin's (unmarried) seventeen-year old daughter is pregnant. Many have argued over whether or not God has a sense of humor; but, were I not serious in my atheist convictions, I would be only too happy to acknowledge God as the Supreme Ironist. Considerations about God aside, though, I suspect that I am one among many experiencing Schadenfreude at this particular conjunction of events!

Two Views of Labor Day

Reading John Nichols' post to The Beat blog this morning on the Web site for The Nation, I realized that, if we wish to seek out differentiation between the Democratic and Republic parties in this election year, we need look no further than their respective plans for today. For the Democrats Labor Day offers the opportunity to return to a long-standing base in organized labor, which has fallen into a state of neglect that began in the days of Jimmy Carter's Presidential campaign:

Barack Obama will return to the traditional heartlands of the American trade union movement on this Labor Day, marching in and speaking at the close of the annual Labor Day Parade in Detroit and then flying later to a huge LaborFest celebration in Milwaukee.

The Detroit appearance brings the Democratic nominee back to the spot where the party's presidential candidates historically began their fall campaigns.

It was in Detroit in 1960 that a young John Kennedy, who had defeated labor-favorite Hubert Humphrey in that year's Democratic primaries, won over union members with a speech that embraced the union movement with a passion and a precision that helped him to win the confidence of working-class voters.

"I welcome the support of working men and women everywhere and I am proud of the endorsement of the AFL-CIO," JFK told a crowd of 100,000 in the city's Cadillac Square. "For the labor movement is people. The goals of the labor movement are the goals for all Americans and their enemies are the enemies of progress."

Kennedy followed in the footsteps of Democratic nominees Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson in choosing to open his campaign in Detroit with a warm embrace of the labor movement.

As the years passed, however, Democratic nominees sought to distance themselves from unions.

Nichols' account of Barack Obama's own words shows us a man determined to close that distance and honor the labor movement once again:

The 2008 Democratic nominee says in his Labor Day message that, "It's time you had a president who honors organized labor, who has walked on picket lines, who doesn't choke on the word ‘union,' who let's our unions do what they do best and organize our workers and who will finally make the Employee Free Choice Act (legislation that would remove barriers to organizing) the law of the land."

He also says, "America was built by its laborers, but today our workers are struggling just to get by in an economy thatno longer works for them. That's why we cannot afford four more years of the failed George Bush economic policies – policies that Senator McCain has proudly embraced and promises to continue."

The statements echo Obama's newly-populist message – debuted in his acceptance speech at last week's Democratic National Convention. "The struggles facing working families working families can't be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs," says Obama, who will be promising policies that eschew tax breaks for companies that move jobs out of the U.S. and promises to redirect them to companies that create jobs in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.

The Republicans, on the other hand, decided to begin their own Convention on Labor Day. This leads me to shift my attention from the politicians themselves towards all those workers responsible for the infrastructure without which the Convention could not take place. The obvious question to raise is: Is the Convention venue in St. Paul a union shop? If it is not a union shop, then, whether or not it was intentional, the Republican Party has sent a loud and clear message to organized labor; and that message is as far from Obama's as one could hope to get. If it is a union shop, the message is not much better and may even be a bit worse. In this latter case the message is, "We do not care if this is a holiday created in your honor. 'The business of America is business;' and we need you to work today, even if we have to pay more for your efforts." This may be the ultimate refutation of that precept of Pierre Bourdieu, which I have recently become fond of citing: There is something worse than passing noticed; it is being noticed and then summarily dismissed!

Now, to be fair, John McCain himself seems to know better than to let workers pass unnoticed:

For his part, John McCain will won't [sic] be speaking at Labor Day events. Instead, he'll be taking a bus tour through Toledo, a community devastated by manufacturing job cuts since the enactment of trade policies that favor the outsourcing of factory work.

Furthermore, the determination of the Republicans to make sure that Hurricane Gustav does not tar them, one more time, with the brush of Hurricane Katrina has reduced Convention activities to a bare minimum of procedural work and a blatantly overt absence of festivities. As Jonathan Beale put it in his dispatch last night from St. Paul to BBC News:

In short, the order has gone out - there will be no fiddling while Rome burns.

So, no razzmatazz on the opening day. On Monday there will be no political speeches, just procedural activities that will allow the convention to officially get under way.

In the words of Rick Davis, the chairman of the McCain campaign "we want to be respectful of the situation".

This may free up many of the infrastructure workers to celebrate Labor Day after all. As Nichols pointed out, they will be in the perfect place to celebrate:

The biggest event in the Twin Cities this Labor Day will not be the Republican convention, however.

It will be a "Take Back Labor Day" festival at Harriet Island in St. Paul, featuring Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Mos Def, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and other musicians as well as speeches by Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern and other top labor leaders who are ardent Obama backers.

With all due respect to those musicians who have given their time for this event, I just hope that someone remembers to lead a rousing chorus of "Solidarity Forever!"