Billmon presents the President’s game plan on Social Security and similarities to the game plan of another historic leader.
Back to Main
January 15, 2005
Billmon: Game Plan
Comments
Bernhard, IMHO, the SS plan will never run, this is just a smokescreen for the Iraq debacle, Blair is advising him well.
But, if the Libruls attack the SS plan, Bush will win the SS plan.
You attack your enemy on his weakest issues, ie Iraq.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 15 2005 21:39 utc | 1
Well I do think the SoSec plan is a very week issue. The numbers are just against the whole stuff. But that may change. The -sofar- non panic official numbers from the SoSec administration may change pretty soon according to this NYT piece Billmon cited:
Social Security Enlisted to Push Its Own Revision
Over the objections of many of its own employees, the Social Security Administration is gearing up for a major effort to publicize the financial problems of Social Security and to convince the public that private accounts are needed as part of any solution.
The agency’s plans are set forth in internal documents, including a “tactical plan” for communications and marketing of the idea that Social Security faces dire financial problems requiring immediate action.
Social Security officials say the agency is carrying out its mission to educate the public, including more than 47 million beneficiaries, and to support President Bush’s agenda.
“The system is broken, and promises are being made that Social Security cannot keep,” Mr. Bush said in his Saturday radio address. He is expected to address the issue in his Inaugural Address. [Story, Page 20]
But agency employees have complained to Social Security officials that they are being conscripted into a political battle over the future of the program. They question the accuracy of recent statements by the agency, and they say that money from the Social Security trust fund should not be used for such advocacy.
CP
thinking the same thing yesterday… why so much attention to SS reform that was supposed to be on the back burner and then got moved up. what’s going to fire up the left and make them look the other way. convenient with the faux elections in iraq just around the corner.
Posted by: esme | Jan 15 2005 21:50 utc | 3
Yes b, I agree. But if Bush can keep the Dems focused on the SoSec issue alone, he will win the fundie/opinion poll vote on Murdoch’s driven media machine.
Witness a Labour (supposedly Socialist/Liberal) Government in the UK introducing “University Tuition Fees” while Hutton and Butler were mixing lime and water to make paint.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 15 2005 21:56 utc | 4
Aside from SoSec, Billmon is of course right to point out the book Rove is using to guide Bushs propaganda has been written in Austrian prison.
Corporal Graner or Corporal Hitler?
Wait until Fox detect the rank?
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 15 2005 22:09 utc | 6
b – posted a link at Kos, if they can find time way from the “Amstrong-Kos diversion”
Inersting that you guys see SS “reform” as a diversion. I still see it as a real issue – killing a successful liberal proframme using tenuous links to reality (population is getting older) to get totally crazy and/or false “facts” seep through to joe/Jane Q. Public
Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 15 2005 22:12 utc | 7
Jerome
Armstrong is the internet diversion, SS is the Murdoch diversion.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 15 2005 22:32 utc | 8
I get Armstrong (also linked to the Williams debacle). SS is too big to be just a diversion – although it is certainly an added benefit!
Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 15 2005 22:36 utc | 9
don’t mean to sound glib with my “me too” attitude, but this text from TPM i believe provides a prather just definition of the basic problem with SS.
“… to the extent that we have a problem, it is not a Social Security problem, but an accumulated national debt problem.”
would be King George and his twisted court jesters can’t own up to this truth because of the obscene debt incurred by their Horrific Adventure in Iraq.
that’s why i consider it a diversion, loopty-loop end games, saturday afternoon tag-team gang ups or whatever you want to call it.
Posted by: esme | Jan 15 2005 23:06 utc | 10
Before the US pres. election, I said that the first thing Bush (as he was sure to be the winner) would do was dismantle the SS (social security) system. There was no response.
The SS plan was not on the back burner and then moved up. It has been there all along, and has been carefully managed in its chronology. Absent from the election campaign, of course. It could be brought forward again after the election, was so right after. The gearing up process has begun, it will still take a while.
The SS plan is not a diversion away from Iraq or whatever. It is a key part of the BushCo agenda.
The plan will run, and it will work.
Americans will be deprived of SS, in part only at first. Wait and see. Plan around that.
Why?
Such plans are core for the likes of Bush. One might even argue that they are more important than invading Iraq, although that adventure ensured Bush’s re-election, so it is hard to say.
It is about money. Lots of it. Straight to the scam artists. It is about die off, about eliminating or forgetting those who are not productive, no longer self sufficient members of society. That sounds wild, black and exagerated…is so. Main point: incredible amounts of cash are there for the taking, and the rationale and the strategy are clear.
Sadists just love to beat up old people who don’t work. They are even more of a target than unruly children, who need to be spanked and slapped, have hot sauce poured in their mouths, etc. (The children can serve as cannon fodder so still should be offered some strict education and food…)
The Democrats will not be able to do anything at all. Nor, one guesses, do the elected elite wish to. (See Kerry’s campaign.)
The elections in Iraq are a sham, nobody cares about them at all, except insofar as they might provoke more strife and horror, leading to.. whatever. It is no matter.
Posted by: Blackie | Jan 15 2005 23:29 utc | 11
I’m with Jerome and Blackie.
The Social Security swindle has always been a major plan of this gang. Why do you think they waited until the second term? The amount of money involved — moving it to Wall Street — is too much to even comprehend.
It’s a raid, it’s pirating, it’s getting away with the biggest steal in the history of the world. And it has the added bonus of dismantling the heart and soul of the loathed New Deal.
My best hunch is that it’s being pressed so hard now because so much money — particularly Chinese money — is not looking to invest in Wall Street these days. The shift to privatization, the amount of money that would flood the S&P 500, would serve to mask the true weakness of the market … for a while, at least.
Personally, I think they’ve over-reached. I’ve been reading (mostly on Josh Marshall’s site, which is following this wonderfully) of more and more Republican reps getting nervous about the sweepingness of it — although it’s hard to see exactly how sweeping it will be because Bush stubbornly refuses to lay out specifics.
I think it’s going to crash and burn. And the Dems seem to be uniting around it. If they can’t hold the unanimity on this one, the most popular program in the U.S. for decades, they’re a lost cause.
Posted by: SusanG | Jan 15 2005 23:55 utc | 12
Can Art destroy life?
There is no doubt that one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century was the development of method acting. Actors trained themselves to take on the persona of their subject and once immersed in their character to react to circumstances, rather than recite lines and impose suitable gestures over their own persona. Although the technique was new to actors it had been used since time immemorial by conmen, fraudsters, lawyers, evangelists and all those whose livlihood depended on the deception of people around them.
The method was perfected in the US and quickly became the major means by which stage and screen thespians did their work. The success of the technique is obvious; as even persons with apparently limited ability such as former Mr Universe Swarzenegger were able to perform in movies and make their roles credible (well just credible). In fact the method made actors (eg Olivier) who had once been held by audiences and critics as ‘great’ appear as wooden as Swarzenegger as they declaimed in their received dialects. Of course those actors of the old school who had sufficient talent like Olivier quickly adapted the method techniques and re-assumed their place in the acting pantheon.
Coincidently this revolution in acting occurred at the same time as an actor of indifferent ability of the old school was playing masterful roles in real life with the method technique. His first major role was that of socially aware trade union organiser then changed to that of patriotic whistleblower as the onset of McCarthyism convinced him that the road to wealth and fame lay in other directions. It was probably during the Mccarthy investigation that Ronald Reagan’s traditional acting training enabled him to see the benefits of good scriptwriters. Up until that point most Real Life (R.L.) method actors had written their own scripts and while that had the advantage of allowing rapid improvisation, the subjective nature of the method frequently meant that R.L. actors would eventually come undone as their egocentricity prevented them from noticing opinion shifts in their audience and hubris led them to pay insufficient attention to critics.
Reagan’s great performance at the hearings attracted the attention of several power brokers one of whom, a Los Angeles plastic surgeon suceeded in merging a relationship between his star patient, his daughter, and Reagan. Despite the weird fascination the public has for plastic surgeons there has to be something incredibly selfish about someone who trains to become a Dr, a profession where the emphasis is meant to be on caring, and uses that skillset to assist narcissists in self mutilation.
Reagan’s limited acting ability was sufficient to portray one of the most credible U.S President roles of the 20th century. The outpouring of genuine grief by his audience on his death shows the power of the R.L. Method technique. If you doubt this watch “Hellcats of the Navy” where Ron and Nancy play the loving couple using traditional acting techniques, with their R.L. Method roles as Prez and First Lady.
Between the two trees (whenever either of them appear on screen it is difficult not to shout “timber!”) of Reagan and Swarzenegger, many actors of considerably greater ability have tried to use R.L. Method as a politician and failed miserably. I suspect it is their ability combined with egoism that has caused the failure. Both Ronnie and Arnie are self aware enough to know their limitations and therefore don’t run back to the scriptwriters with continual changes, or even worse ad-lib. They read the roles as written completely unquestioningly and have reaped their rewards.
The Method has swept all before it when used R.L., the question therefore is will the greatest untrained exponent of the R.L. method, G.W.Bush, make the same mistake that most other non-actors have made and allow his hubris to persuade him to change the script?
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 15 2005 23:56 utc | 13
as susan g says – concurring with jérôme & blackie – this is really the beginning of the end – the tearing apart of america internally – while externally it is being pulled into battles it cannot win
the ss question is central to their looting ways & what they will do will reap a whirlwind of crisis unparalleled since befre fdr
perhaps i am a pessimistic or optimistic depending where you sit – but i cannot believe what i see with bush – capitalism could not have chosen & more inept & brutal practitioner to reveal the fatal flaws of its system
as malcolm x sd – it will be hot time in the old town for many nights to come
still steel
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 16 2005 0:08 utc | 14
There’s never been a gifted banker or broker in the Bush family, and so, to put bread on the table, they’ve had to whore for Wall Street for over a century now (the story’s sad, but true). Now it’s Wall Street in general–and its investment banking community in particular–that’s pushing Bush to “save” our social security. This elementary fact is of real value. It makes us respect the fact that Wall Street has spent, and will continue to spend, tens, even hundreds, of millions of dollars to work its will in this particular enterprise. Bankers who want to be rich like Robert Rubin and Jon Corzine–and doesn’t every investment banker want this?–will spare nothing to succeed. But will their opponents do the same? They’d better do the same if they hope not to lose, for this is a war. We have to penetrate, spy upon, and sabotage the investment banking adventure. We have to flag, flummox, flog and flay their principle players. Boutons en avant, mes amis, for this is not an ordinary dispute on a level playing field!
Posted by: alabama | Jan 16 2005 0:20 utc | 15
Alabama, you’re right. This is it. This is war.
And as rgiap says, this is the beginning of the end if they win.
Perhaps I overestimate, as an American, the influence of the U.S. on the rest of the world — and I hope I’m wrong in this case — but it seems to me that if Bush & Cronies succeed in what is basically a swindle of public funds, moving it into private pockets, the rest of the western world may well follow suit.
If “privatization” works here, are the social safety nets in the EU really “safe” anymore? How could the EU possibly compete if this succeeds, since it seems to me to be a move toward the rawest and most primitive (and unforgiving) form of capitalism imaginable? How could France or Germany or the UK continue to funnel reasonably large amounts of money into their social services if they’re competing with savage Neanderthal capitalism?
Posted by: SusanG | Jan 16 2005 0:47 utc | 16
susan g
yes i think wa are returning in time to the era of the primitive accumulation of capital in every sense of every word
(the post the other day on sweden is very instructive in this sense)
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 16 2005 0:51 utc | 17
& in a sense this brutal & thoughtless form of capitalism has already been introduced creating as slothrop is want to say almost a permanant lumpenproletariat in both england & australia
the several books of john pilger are written precisely on that basis – i would refer them without reservation as the real histories of the modern period
they glory in their few ‘successes’ while the underclass grows & grows & in both these countries their form of social & legal protection have been dismantled completely
thatcher was their white knight
the poor are neither lazy not prone to cowardice – their systems – educative legislative & legislative not only fail them but betray them
in france we have a system of associations which go a long way to defending the natural rights of people at a fundamental & local level but sarkozy & his pals have set their eyes on its demolition
but what they do really is destroy civic responsibility & then we return very quickly to babrabrism & we are not that far from this already
i’d like toi suggest also a danish spy writer – leif davidson – who is no friend of socialism but writes of this collapse using the period of gorbachev as a counterpoint – he’s like a bent john le carré – but if its happening in copenahgen – how far is minnesota
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 16 2005 0:58 utc | 18
@SusanG
UK did introduce private SoSec accounts some 20 years ago (I think it was a Thatcher scheme). As it turned out it was a very bad move and actually the US system is viewed as the best model for now.
Europe has aging societies unlike the US and the problem is much more severe (the US HAS NO REAL PROBLEM in SoSec!!!), but it can be taken up in Europe and will.
The safety net in Europe is based on acknowledgement of solidarity. What are going to do if a quarter of the 70 year old die of hunger? You introduce (some 1870) and pamper SoSec.
@Bama:
Do you remember when the Glass-Steagall banking Act was gutted/repealed? Wasn’t that in the early 80s?
As I remember, I think the “piratization” of SS has been a fringe-issue on the right since then, along with the flat tax and a lot of other crap.
In any event, I’m glad that Billmon dug out those great MK quotes.
That’s the next book on my reading list.
Posted by: FlashHarry | Jan 16 2005 0:59 utc | 20
alabama’s…..
“flag, flummox, flog and flay…”
…would those be the ‘Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse’?
FlashHarry, Senator Gramm did this in 1999, and you’re not wrong to see the connection here…..What a run we’ve had for the past seventy-five years! Wall Street explodes in 1929, and some of its smarter exponents–FDR and his colleagues–set about cleaning up Wall Street’s act, instituting a few insurance plans for a devastated and furious people along the way. These plans are somewhat costly, to be sure, and so when FDR raises taxes to float them, Wall Street spends the next seventy years kicking and screaming about the terrible burden of taxes, even as it prospers with its new-found credibility. Then Wall Street notices that Washington has grown this gigantic trust fund for the average man–history’s largest piñata?–and of course it believes, with all its heart and soul it truly and honestly believes, that every last cent of this trust fund belongs to Wall Street. It believes this! But then, as we know, the Unconscious knows no time, it knows not the meaning of “no”, and it’s driven by the Pleasure Principle. So what have we here? Every last banker a prince of the Medici family? I say they need to be bonked on their heads as posts are bonked by pile-drivers. Let the bonking of bankers commence, say I…..
Posted by: alabama | Jan 16 2005 1:59 utc | 22
I don’t know, SS still could be a smokescreen, if I ‘follow the money’ and look at the lobbying $$ summary…
(see Kevin Drum)
it tells me the real target will be tort ‘reform’.
Posted by: ProverbsForParinoids | Jan 16 2005 2:00 utc | 23
One of the great Bush gems. He’s The Man:
“We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Hahahaha.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 16 2005 4:23 utc | 24
I’m with SusanG and the rest. US ultraconservatives have hated FDR with a multigenerational, inherited, ritual passion for almost a century, and have longed to undo everything he did. Don’t forget their attempt (has it been abandoned yet) to get his head taken off the dime and replaced with Reagan’s. They have believed for almost a century that the New Deal was bold, red communism and daylight robbery, and are itching to destroy the whole system and loot the piggy bank as they have looted the piggy banks of one after another of the more vulnerable economies of the Southern Hemisphere. This is not just a smokescreen for other activities — it’s a core element of their Master Plan for the Master Race. And the fact that all the numbers show clearly what a boondoggle it is, and common sense tells us that all their Chicken Littling is bogus, somehow doesn’t reassure me — after all, the Rovester managed to convince more than half the US public that Saddam personally ordered planes to fly into buildings on 9/11/01.
Americans really don’t give a damn what happens overseas, but messing with SocSec is a possibly fatal mistake by Bush. Privatization won’t work, it will fail. It will make people poorer.
The wiser members of the ruling class know this and are getting wary. It’s hard to make profit when society is disfunctional or in a state of seige. Look at the Russian protests today.
And people are getting pissed. Non-political type, friends of mine at United, are angry at the cutbacks there. And they understand it goes to the top of government.
Posted by: ben | Jan 16 2005 6:16 utc | 27
The Turkeys are voting for Christmas
Agency to plug Bush plan
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 16 2005 8:32 utc | 29
@Susan G.: Precisely so. The SS attack is part of a program of bald kletpocracy and not a sideshow.
@rgiap: It’s true that the poor and working class are not lazy or cowardly; in addition, given half a chance, they’re not stupid. (Chomsky notes the erudition of common folk with respect to sports.) In this regard, their educational, legislative, and mass media systems most grievously fail and betray.
@Susan G: Yes, it’s war, but if our democratic institutions are really worth a damn it’s one that — on our soil, at least — can still be fought and won largely through discourse.
If that seems too optimistic, recall that the Rethugs are still waging the war domestically primarily at the level of propaganda. (Attacks on civil liberties could change this.) If the reality-based community gets serious about the scale, depth, and urgency of the counter-propaganda campaign it must wage, it could still foster a populist anti-Bush backlash.
It’s that or fascism, though I think more in the Latin American than Nazi vein. However, the Nazis were better writers, skewing billmon’s available quotes.
Posted by: ralphbon | Jan 16 2005 13:16 utc | 30
Good idea Ralphbon but you are indeed too optimistic.
To SusanG and to Alabama and to others including me it is war. We are not fighting the war though; we are talking about it while Rove and the rest mount armed campaigns.
We can’t really believe it is happening but it is.
Posted by: rapt | Jan 16 2005 17:03 utc | 31
rapt
About the theory/action (“praxis”) problem I think it is easy to underestimate the effects the most mundane activism can have in the transformation of reality. This blog is one means of developing solidarity and acknowledging the contradictions of power. This knowledge can be used to energize our students, friends, etc. to also acknowledge the contradictions and to aviod misapprehensions of reality. Enlightenment is a virus, and one should never despair the seemingly ineffective work accomplished in each one of our little nodes of experience. We will endure, and vigilance is needed to do whatever can be done by the individual to point out to our fellows where beliefs and reality diverge.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 16 2005 17:30 utc | 32
Oh, also, the other dimension of this despair (about the perceived impossibility of praxis) occurs where the conditions of existence fail to impress those who suffer that beliefs must be changed and action reoriented to a direct confrontation against power. For this to occur, I believe the context of suffering must be intensified. The middleclass especially must learn once and for all the american dream is a fiasco. Removing the New Deal may in the long run contribute to this necessary understanding.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 16 2005 17:37 utc | 33
The welfare state detains practical consciousness about the contradictions of power.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 16 2005 17:45 utc | 34
I see a different problem, slothrop. People who grow up in poverty may have trouble adapting to prosperity. As thus (on the subject of Lula’s dieting): “‘The truth is that Lula’s hunger has not faded away,’ the columnist Arnaldo Bloch speculated recently in the Rio daily O Globo. ‘As much as the president eats and drinks and eats and drinks, the hunger and thirst remain. It is a hunger and thirst that is ancestral, that returns to strike daily’ and which he, like others who were once poor, ‘has never overcome'” (Larry Rohter, “Beaches for the svelte, where the calories are showing,” NYT, 6 Jan). By analogy, perhaps, too many beneficiaries of the New Deal can’t see that things have worked out well for them, and that the institutions promoting that prosperity have a crucial role to play in the lives of the currently poor–lives that should, but apparently do not, matter to the body politic as a whole. Seen in this light, one “fiasco” of the New Deal would be the successes it has achieved….
Posted by: alabama | Jan 16 2005 19:11 utc | 35
The welfare state detains practical consciousness about the contradictions of power — all too true Comrade Slothrop, but is this not another way of saying “alleviates suffering”? Surely the alleviation of suffering is a good thing?
Also I do not want to make the mistake the German CP (KPD were they back then?) made in thinking that the initial abuses of the Hitler regime would serve as a wake-up call to the German bourgeoisie, that the brutal reality would bring a horror and repudiation of fascism — that both bourgeois and proletarians would awake, smell the coffee and throw the rascals out. They were, as they found to their immense cost, quite wrong.
To believe that suffering is educational/transformative requires a couple of rather shaky premises, 1) that the suffering will be correctly attributed to its authors, and 2) that the response to it, if correctly attributed, will be rational. The counterevidence is abundant. First there is the success of many totalitarian/fascist/authoritarian regimes in displacing the responsibility for inflicted suffering onto Others (Foreigners, Jews, Blacks, Commies, Gays, Subversive Elements etc), and thus redirecting — harnessing! — the anger of the suffering public to attack designated targets. [Genuine hostile action from external sources only reinforces this dynamic, i.e. the more the Yanks blockaded and punished Cuba, the more legitimate was the Castro regime’s claim that everything would be OK if it were not for those external enemies; the US/UK Siege of Iraq similarly bolstered, rather than undermined, Saddam’s authority.]
Second piece of counterevidence is Hostage Syndrome, or the perverse ability of the oppressed or bullied human being to make a desperate transference of affection to the oppressor or bully, hoping by placatory behaviour, effusive shows of loyalty and the like to mollify the bully, ameliorate the suffering, and (not least) redefine the relationship, papering over the nasty reality with a fantasy in order to deny or minimise the victim’s own perception of the suffering.
In other words, the ruling class may be able to abuse the American public to an astonishing degree w/o repercussions, if they can just keep up the relentless propaganda campaign against Ay-rabs, Lib-ruls, gays, “welfare bums” and the French (poverty, dislocation, homelessness, disease, hunger will all be the fault of those Evildoers), and if they can keep the momentum going on the Leader Cult they are trying to accrete around that unlikely bit of grit, Dubya Bush.
deanander
You’re right. But, as things get more difficult for our peeps, need to relentlessly, tactfully point put the contradictions. Perhaps a better way to say what I said is to use the adversity in this constructive way–not to desire greater misery for others, which is a kind of evil.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 16 2005 19:43 utc | 38
alabama
I was somewhat careless, as deanander points out to me.
One of the great problems is to demonstrate to persons who benefit by the New Deal the ways in which welare statism was designed by elites to both externalize/socialize costs and to politically pacify the masses. Offe, Habermas, O’Connor, many others explain this “legitimation crisis” the welfare state intends to solve. Controverting this ideology is what politics of the left should do. As your post suggests the task is difficult because so many on the left believe (and I’m not saying you believe this) the New Deal was essentially designed to improve the lives of people. Certainly, this happens for many, but the crucial function of welfare programs is seldom the object of criticism by the ‘left.’
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 16 2005 19:57 utc | 39
Also, sort of amusing the grover norquiust right has forgotten the seminal and enduring function of the New Deal to improve capital accumulation.
Boneheads.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 16 2005 19:58 utc | 40
I still believe the wingers have a more insidious side to this. I believe they want to default on what is owed to SS.
Froma Harrop, a writer for Creators Syndicate had an article in the Detroit News on friday. One paragraph really caught me. “Yet the ideologues say Treasury bonds in the trust fund are worthless pieces of paper. They want the working luggs who have paid extra SS taxes all these to just walk away from the trllion-plus owed them. If they succeed, they will have pulled off a con for the ages.”
That is exactly what this is about. The wing-nuts and Wall Street don’t want income taxes to be raised to pay the money owed SS. You keep hearing about howw SS taxes need raised to pay for future retirees. That is wrong. The income tax side needs raised to pay back that money.
Posted by: jdp | Jan 16 2005 21:22 utc | 41
jdp, I agree. Defaulting is one major plank of the plan.
Posted by: SusanG | Jan 16 2005 21:32 utc | 42
Slothrop,
You too seem to support yourself on optimism – that unless Junior is reelected for another four years of horror, unless the New Deal is junked, unless SS is caused to crumble, the poor shortsighted peeps will have insufficient rallying power to rise up against the oppressors. That is nothing but optimism, erected to ward off the uncomfortable fact that our world is being torn to pieces.
I like De’s reference to the Hostage Syndrome, which is but one of many syndromes, or psychological ploys, being used to destroy the “peeps”. These forces are so insidious that there is no defense against them, as is evident from their success for the last several years. I too was optimistic in the beginning, expecting that such crimes as we have seen could not pass unremarked, un-noticed, unpunished. But they have and they continue to be.
This is not a simple aberration, a chance collection of dumb or incompetent guys who got hold of the govt and are screwing it up. No, it is a revolution designed and executed by some very smart beings who know exactly what they are doing, even to the extent of keeping their own identities secret.
Even if (when) some of the front players are eliminated (say in the manner of Kerik, or perhaps Junior will be shot) these beings remain in place, selecting new actors, refining the criminal techniques. We the peeps are not intended to ever know their identities. So now that their plans are pretty much open, obvious to anyone with an enquiring mind, the #1 job is to expose them to the light of day. Yank open that dark heavy door without getting killed, that is the objective that has not yet been accomplished.
Posted by: rapt | Jan 16 2005 22:02 utc | 43
Here goes: (via Kos) U.S. to default on Treasury Bonds
“I believe we have a problem with Social Security that will emerge in 2018,” he said. “At that point in time, Social Security pay out will be more than what is in the fund put in by working people or employers.”
Allard said there are no reserves in Social Security because what is there is automatically transferred into the general fund, leaving a debt of $28 trillion. But he doesn’t believe the money will ever be repaid to the fund.
“The money is spent,” he said. “I don’t believe in my own opinion we’ll be able to raise the funds to pay it back.”
(Senator Wayne Allard (R-CO))
Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 16 2005 22:05 utc | 44
Jerome,
Perhaps Senator Allard should be reminded of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Section. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
Posted by: SusanG | Jan 16 2005 22:54 utc | 45
rapt: This is not a simple aberration, a chance collection of dumb or incompetent guys who got hold of the govt and are screwing it up. No, it is a revolution designed and executed by some very smart beings who know exactly what they are doing, even to the extent of keeping their own identities secret.
Yup. I read so much to quote in your previous post, but I’m refraining… bandwidth and all that. I think it’s also pertinent to point out that the neandercons (thanks, De) have been planning and spinning and waiting for a long, long time. Putting the dominos in place, one domino at a time. I’m pleased as punch that the tin foil hat discounting has subsided on progressive blogs… “Loose affiliations of millionaires and billionaires” (to grab coinage from Paul Simon) have always been fertile soil for such cabalistic-type conspiracies in my mind. Money=power? Power=money? Only their hairdressers know for sure.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 17 2005 0:37 utc | 46
It may be the case that computable, measurable “value” is the only value that Americans hold in common. The consensus agrees on the value of the dollar–“Dollar Value,” as the fastest growing store chain calls it. This being so, it’s the fate of the American poor to become rich if they’re not to remain poor. There’s only one race course, one race, and one prize (Max Weber would smile at this). And so the experience of poverty is the “backward glance”. No one looks forward to it, no one “elects” it, no one believes in it. At the very most, one worries about it like death itself. Becoming poor in America is like being pitched into a common grave without the benefit of a gravestone, or a funeral, or an obituary…..
Posted by: alabama | Jan 17 2005 0:55 utc | 47
Let’s talk about tin-foil stuff a bit.
I am convinced that these people, with premeditation ,greed, and malice, etc. are trying to turn America into some sort of Blade Runner type bannana republic–for 90% of us.
If what I think is the case, do they not realize that they are committing suicide in the long run?
90% with guns and knives beat 10% with coupons and cocktail forks, most any day.
I know capitalists are supposed to be greedy. But completely stupid also?
Posted by: Not Karl | Jan 17 2005 1:44 utc | 48
Not if they can convince the 90% that they, too, are greedy capitalists, as indeed they seem to have done. This may have been the wished-for yield of the “safety net” all along; we are to see the New Deal as a plot by the capitalists to win the workers over to their side (adopting the rhetoric of socialism was a minor price to pay).
Posted by: alabama | Jan 17 2005 1:56 utc | 49
alabama
Not entirely sure what you’re saying, but poverty is only measurable against the growth of material surplus; poverty is relative to the reality of someone else enjoying greater expenditure and appropriation. The computation of values exsists in this relation of poverty and growth.
This is from Bataille, pretty cool:
Doubtless the problem of extreme poverty remains in any case. Moreover, it should be understood that general economy must also, whenever possible and first of all, envisage the development of growth. But if it considers poverty or growth, it takes into account the limits that the one and the other cannot fail to encounter and the dominant (decisive) character of the problems that follow from the existence of surpluses.
Briefly considering an example, the problem of extreme poverty in India cannot immediately be dissociated from the demographic growth of that country, or from the lack of proportion with its industrial development. India’s possibilities of industrial growth cannot themselves be dissociated from the excesses of American resources. A typical problem of general economy emerges from this situation. On the one hand, there appears the need for an exudation; on the other hand, the need for a growth. The present state of the world is defined by the unevenness of the (quantitative or qualitative) pressure exerted by human life. General economy suggests, therefore, as a correct operation, a transfer of American wealth to India without reciprocation. This proposal takes into account the threat to America that would result from the pressure – and the imbalances of pressure – exerted in the world by the developments of Hindu life.
Simple.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 17 2005 2:05 utc | 50
@Alabama:
I can’t quite be that cynical about the 30s and the New deal.
Posted by: Not Karl | Jan 17 2005 2:07 utc | 51
One race, of course there is only one, Alabama, yes. It makes no other sense scientifically, otherwise there would be homo sapiens and “subspecies” … but the governments keep on pushing race to the detriment of everyone on the Happy Planet. I understand this from a power perspective… they must keep people at each other in order to keep what they call “order”. That people keep on buying in to the false borderline called race is a true wonderment to me.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 17 2005 3:06 utc | 52
Kate, if I’d said “one horse race,” as I should have done, then we might imagine that the “false borderline” is also the starting-gate of a race-course.
slothrop, Bataille was trying to sketch out an organic principle of dynamic stability along Hegelian lines, using the Marshall Plan as his point of departure. And “Truman”! “Today, blindly, Truman would prepare for the final, the secret, apotheosis. But this is evidently an illusion….” But Bataille still wanted the “putting into place of a social existence that would be comparable, somewhat, to the passage from animal to human existence (of which it would be, moreover and more precisely, the final stage).” This stage would be the abolition of poverty, wealth, and the value of exchange as value.
Posted by: alabama | Jan 17 2005 4:25 utc | 53
Not if they can convince the 90% that they, too, are greedy capitalists, as indeed they seem to have done.
Yes, it is bloody astonishing, the degree to which this has succeeded — to which every American secretly believes that s/he may, at any moment, become suddenly rich and join the ranks of the upper (or at least upper-middle) class — or is already part of it. Despite an interclass mobility factor which iirc is lower than that of the UK or most of Euroland, Americans continue to believe that there is “no such thing as class in America” and that “any boy can become President,” blah blah.
I often think of a poll — which alas I can no longer source, dammit, if anyone has a lead on this result let me know where I can look it up — conducted sometime in the last decade in the US. Basically the pollsters deliberately included N people from each of many different income levels, from poverty to upper middle class, and asked them various questions, one of which was “would you describe your income as Below Average, Average, Above Average, High” etc. And iirc, damn near everyone polled reported that their income was Above Average, i.e. that they were at least middle class and possibly a bit better. Whereas of course waaaay more than half of Americans have incomes below the national average, because the income gap has become so extreme and CEO-class salaries so obscenely large in the last 2 decades.
So there are, we suppose, millions and millions of ordinary working stiffs out there, earning salaries 10 points or more below the mean, but imagining that their earnings are “above average”. It’s kinda like a Garrison Keillor joke but a lot sadder.
If only Edward Tufte were put in charge of all graphs and charts coming out of gov’t departments, the public might not be so delusional. (I’m a big Tufte fan — his three classic books on the graphical presentation of data are not only full of enlightenment, elegance, and rationality, but bloody good fun as well.)
@DeA:
There was a poll referenced last year on Yahoo.
40% of respondents, randomly selected,in answer to a pollsters question, felt they were in the top 10% of incomes in the US.
Honest to God!
Posted by: Not Karl | Jan 17 2005 5:26 utc | 56
De – on your 11:47 entry, I have to take issue with your apparent criticism of below-average wages. Yeah yr right, a lot of people think they are above-average when they’re not, but so what? Human nature f’gods sake.
I do agree that the standards set by the greedy capitalists are unrealistic. I’d call em totally off-the-wall. A lot (mebbe not most) of people know this and operate accordingly. They make a living, they’re happy.
One of the few hopes we have is that people are not that stupid. I don’t think they are.
Posted by: rapt | Jan 17 2005 5:26 utc | 57
Hmmmm.
I see that no one here received their Cato talking points.
Posted by: Pat | Jan 17 2005 5:41 utc | 58
@rapt sorry, I was not intending to say anything as reductionist as “people who earn below-average wages are all stupid and easily fooled by their Gummint” — hell, my own wage may be below average by now for all I know.
and I know one can live quite well on a below-average wage if one is willing to make certain adjustments of lifestyle (and is not trying to raise kids etc)… no quarrel there. it’s the only hope I have for a decent retirement — a life of “genteel poverty” as they used to say 🙂
it’s just that large numbers of Amurkans seem to identify, emotionally and politically, with the class of the elite (rentiers, finance capitalists, CEOs) rather than the class they are really in — i.e. they may despise inheritance and unearned income taxes even though their own modest estates are exempt and only estates worth more than a million incur taxation, even though 99 percent of their income life-long will be earned by wage labour. that kind of stuff.
I think Thomas Frank may have commented on this more extensively in “Kansas” — he wonders why the voters vote against their own self-interest; I suspect it is because they have been taught that their self interest is exactly the same as the self interest of the ruling class, not in tension with it but identical to it. the proles fantasize that they are princes, and sympathise with the prerogatives of princes, even when those prerogatives rob the proles. or so it seems from where I sit…
The American belief in upward mobility and being in a higher class are left overs from the 90’s. More and more American beliefs are clashing with reality. A never ending war and Wal-Mart jobs.
The Marine after 7 months in Iraq who committed suicide by cop is now been vilified as a cocaine drugged Hispanic Gang Member.
Can a society that’s going over the edge but drugged by Prozac and Mass Media, isolated in suburbia, organize to fight back?
Posted by: Jim S | Jan 17 2005 6:22 utc | 60
The Rolling Stone:
The Fake Crisis – Economist Paul Krugman explains Bush’s latest con — social security
Posted by: Fran | Jan 17 2005 6:31 utc | 61
There is an interesting side to either human nature or the socially learned skills of capitalism that makes us desire always something that is precisely one notch up from what we can actually get. The poor envy my life and my woman, I envy they guy who owns an Audi that I could almost – almost – afford, he dreams about that island in Angra dos Reis. This precisely measured dream is what makes us tick & keeps us striving.
A side effect is our tendency to make yearly personal balances just like corporations. I feel I’m getting somewhere if I somehow own a bit more now than last year. People who find themselves at some point driving an older car than before, provided that was not done deliberatly, tend to feel obscurely defeated and diminished. If that can happen in a poor proto-capitalist country like Brazil, it assumes absurd proportions in a country like the United States, where apparently there are no limits to what you can consume or the amount of debt you can incur. Eventually the tenuous three-sided balance between what you desire, what you can get and what you actually need becomes broken and you join the obsessive game of having for the sake of it. Even if that requires consuming the whole word, as the US seems bent on doing. Everybody is buying iPods now, why can’t I have one even though I don’t quite know what I would use it for?
It follows, then, that people who have more are necessarily better & wiser and are entitled to rule. Knowing how pathetically limited we are, we don’t want to be ruled by our peers. We want to look up to our leaders. When the metrics is not personal quality but wealth, “up” means “richer”. Privilege breeds merit. Once, responding to criticism about the excessively flamboyant dresses worn by the slum people during the carnival parade, a samba school organizer said, “Only intellectuals love poverty. Poor people love luxury”. He was right, of course. Even if just for one night, we all want to play the royal role. Just try to tell middle America that the upcoming coronation ceremonies should be toned down or called off.
The point? As long as people feel they are inching upward, closer to the iPod or the Audi, they won’t revolt and won’t pause to consider where their best interests really lie. For that you must step out of the counter line, something only a catastrophic personal or collective setback can accomplish. (For the pampered & gasoline-addicted US society, perhaps merely a sharp rise in fuel prices could be that event; hence Iraq.)
Posted by: pedro | Jan 17 2005 7:51 utc | 62
If anyone from the DNC wants an idea on how to stop the looting of Social Security, how about this?
We know for a fact that Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Social Security is broken and needs to be fixed.
Wrong on the first, wrong on the second.
Posted by: dan of steele | Jan 17 2005 9:49 utc | 63
Some 25 years ago I spent the last $125.00 in my pocket on a 19th cent. crazy quilt I saw in an antique store. I had just spent the last 7 years studying art to MFA, and the quilt set me to wonder about it. In all probablility, it was made in a rural pre — electric,– indoor plumbing,– efficient travel,–access to education,–medical care,etc. enviroment by an individual, or a group of women. By todays standards this enviroment would be considered hoplessly backward and impoveraged. So, my question to the quilt was: how could this come from such an enviroment? The “problem” was it was not only remarkably beautiful in color, varient texture, and stiched with no less than 18 different varients — in different colors, all with surgeon -like precision. The composition was also, as balanced and finely tuned as any late modern non-objective work considered avant-garde.
Pedro, in regards to your insightful post, could it be that the the wonderlust for the novel or perhaps it’s the desire to reify ones experience, also be accomplished internally (as a cultural expression)? My guess is that this desire has been ursuped into a dependency in which the individual (and subsequently the collective) is stripped of it’s ability of self definition — and thus identity.
Posted by: anna missed | Jan 17 2005 10:12 utc | 64
Not Karl – I have read, IIRC, that 19% thought they were in the top 1% (not sure if it was by income or by assets, which can also make a big difference)
Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 17 2005 13:49 utc | 66
@Jerome:
My percentages dealt with income.
I saw what you cite out there too, but I can’t remember for sure. I think those percentages relate to income also.
Posted by: Not Karl | Jan 17 2005 14:04 utc | 67
anna missed
The “realm of necessity” and “realm of freedom” are conflated in consumer society as insatiability of consumption=freedom. You’re right, that’s the reification: people are things. That’s our form of life. Maybe it’s true that humans always seek nonproductive expenditures, to consume for no other reason than to consume. As William James said: we need to acquire. If so, capital accumulation speeds the cycle of production/consumption. We see w/ our own eyes where this must lead: the consumption death–the manic destruction of surplases through war. “So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men…”
The solution to such madness lies in the uniform distribution of surpluses for the simple purpose of reconciling life to the limits of nature. I mentioned Bataille earlier as an example of this solution aimed at a better management of the dialectic of needs/freedom in thge larger effort to create a form of life in which values of love, humor, art become the principle values of exchange (“poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines…”). Certainly, variations of such forms of life have existed and can exist again.
But, yeah, Pedro, it’s all tough because humane economies cannot compete w/ the thrills of (im)mediate gratifications.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 17 2005 16:50 utc | 68
I read a paper sometime last year which asserted that compulsive consumerism was not even motivated by the desire to own things, but by the thrill of the moment of acquisition. once the thing (the new expensive pair of shoes, the new hi-fi, the new car) was owned, the thrill wore off it quickly, and a new acquisition was needed to rediscover the “high”. so the truly obsessive consumer, the person whose hobby is shopping, is seeking (so the author said) the thrill of the purchase rather than the thrill of ownership. sometimes these people give away their stuff to charity or friends, not knowing what to do with it… it’s not the having that counts, but the getting.
I suppose this might be a perversion of our old gathering/hunting impulses, the thrill of discovering and acquiring a tasty root, a hive of honey, an unwary ground squirrel, a cache of fruit — and bringing it back to share with the clan. the experience of browsing and acquiring, browsing and acquiring (ingesting) is wired into us pretty deeply. the trick cyclists also think that pack-ratting is inherent in us and I think one team claims they have identified, or are close to identifying, a genetic marker for it. so maybe Imelda had the pack-rat gene.
it’s interesting that in some cultures, like the NW American indigenes, there’s a ritual solution to the accumulation of surplus, the packratting impulse, the acquisitive itch. iirc the Big Men of various NW tribes used to show off their wealth and importance by giving away all their accumulated goods in an orgy of generosity, divvying up their wealth among the tribespeople, in the ceremony known as Potlatch. iirc the Christian missionaries, with their obssessions about the work ethic and separating the Deserving from the Undeserving, attempted to extirpate this custom along with all other aspects of the traditional culture. in some kind of despair over the Anglos’ destruction of their world — rapacious logging, murder of the tribes, land theft, Christian missionising — the potlatch ceremony became more funereal and bizarre post-Conquest, with goods being burnt instead of given away, vast quantities of alcohol being consumed etc., as the tribespeople lost all hope for their future. I’m remembering all this dimly from two or three good books I read about ten years ago, so if anyone has better recall or more recent sources please amplify/correct…
I can’t help contrasting the bloody selfish Pharaohs who tried to take all their worldly goods with them to the tomb, forbidding any person to Touch Their Stuff even after death — and the genial show-offery of the NW chieftains pressing gifts into the hands of all comers, blowing the accumulated wealth of years in one big multi-day party.
Deanander
I was going to use the potlatch thing in my post but thought it too obscure. Comes from, I think Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, which I haven’t read, and Bataille in Accursed Share and Baudrillard talks about it in Political Economy of the Sign. Lookit all them Frenchmen.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 17 2005 20:01 utc | 70
I’ve been interested since 1999 in the idea of “gift economies”… the several experiments of the idea… that was when I first heard of the Potlatch. Very, very cool.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 17 2005 20:09 utc | 71
@slothrop I think I read about it in 2 or 3 books about the invasion and conquest. might be in Indian Givers, perhaps. might even be mentioned in Lies My Teacher Told Me… probably gets a mention in one or more of Marvin Harris’ very interesting pop anthro books (recommended)… but what stuck with me was the magnificent duplicity of the xtian missionaries, who documented the debased, suicidal, post-Conquest version of the potlatch and claimed that it “proved” how irresponsible the Natives were and how much they needed the whiteboys’ loving guidance.
gawd, what a nasty monkey we are.
@kate there is a very, very funny short story by… Bruce Sterling I think, about a high-tech gift economy of the near-future, coordinated by artificial intelligence and palm-pilot-like wireless technology. I’ll try to track it down for you — it’s a hoot.
Actually, DeAnander, they don’t give stuff away in potlatches so much as they destroy it. When a chief throws a party for another chief, as I understand it, he loads a whole lot of pelts and blankets and things on a raft, sends the raft out into the middle of the lake, then torches the raft, so that everyone watches it go up in smoke and sink below the surface. And when the guest chief provides the hospitality as the return host, he gets to do the very same thing, except that he loses a lot of face unless he burns up still more stuff than his guest had done….who in turn invites him back and burn up even more the next time out, etc. It’s an arms race without the arms or the massacres–a true precursor of WW II, the Cold War, the Korean War, Viet Nam, and who knows what else besides?…College athletics, maybe.
Posted by: alabama | Jan 17 2005 21:15 utc | 75
IMHO, when one equates acquisition by purchase with packratism, one makes a serious interpretational error.
Packratism is about compulsive collection and saving, not necessarily about acquisition by purchase at all. A sufferer is more satisfied by collection of freebies(dumpster-diving, curb-side giveaways), than by purchase, and will often collect almost anything free that could be of future use; I have often , for example, observered sufferers scrounging lumber and scrap metal to build sheds for what they had collected the day before.
My studies have also shown packratism to be a learned behavior. Packratism often correlates closely with impoverished or chaotic surroundings in childhood.
It is no surprise to me that the “Greatest Generation”(think depression, WWII), and the succeeding generation, were the most packrat-prone of the last century.
While most pack rats live relatively normal lives, the condition can occasionally prove fatal.
For further information, feel free to purchase my book, A Theory of the Hoarding Class. It is available, on-line, at abebooks.com.
Posted by: Thorstein V. | Jan 17 2005 21:17 utc | 76
alabama, so politely you “spit in our soup” with a bit more history. ROFLMAO! Thank you.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 17 2005 21:20 utc | 77
One of the fascinating aspects of gift-giving is the very different way that surplases are annihilated. Very different from what we now do in capitalist economies. Bataille:
But he would not be able by himself to acquire a power constituted by a relinquishment of power: If he destroyed the object in solitude, in silence, no sort of power would result from the act; there would not be anything for the subject but a separation from power without any compensation. But if he destroys the object in front of another person or if he gives it away, the one who gives has actually acquired, in the other’s eyes, the power of giving or destroying. He is now rich for having made use of wealth in the manner its essence would require: He is rich for having ostentatiously consumed what is wealth only if it is consumed. But the wealth that is actualized in the potlatch, in consumption for others, has no real existence except insofar as the other is changed by the consumption. In a sense, authentic consumption ought to be solitary, but then it would not have the completion that the action it has on the other confers on it. And this action that is brought to bear on others is precisely what constitutes the gift’s power, which one acquires from the fact of losing.
This is far better way to “exude” the surplus. This form of life existed–a form of life anathema to capital accumulation and in no sense a precursor to consumerism.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 17 2005 21:36 utc | 78
Potlatches are/were specific to some northwestern tribes, but the general concept is of giving away is similar among most of the indigeous cultures that I’ve read of. As De said, the more you give, the greater respect you get. The concept of private property is an invention or illusion. How can one claim to own their Mother? As far as the concept of chiefs is concerned, B.C. (before columbus), generally there was no such heirarchy and only when the white man needed a “leader” to negotiate w/ did they start to appear. those who became chief were not necessarily the wisest or more deserving, merely someone who was willing to talk to the invaders.
Posted by: b real | Jan 17 2005 21:37 utc | 79
From pesbody harvard ed;
What is a Potlatch?
Potlatches were social occasions given by a host to establish or uphold his status position in society. Often they were held to mark a significant event in his family, such as the birth of a child, a daughter’s first menses, or a son’s marriage. Potlatches are to be distinguished from feasts in that guests are invited to a potlatch to share food and receive gifts or payment. Potlatches held by commoners were mainly local, while elites often invited guests from many tribes. Potlatches were also the venue in which ownership to economic and ceremonial privileges was asserted, displayed, and formally transferred to heirs.
Most native cultures on the Northwest Coast had potlatches, including the Nuu-chah-nulth, Coast Salish, Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Haida, Nootka, Tsimshian, and Tlingit. These events were held inside large longhouses.
Posted by: anna missed | Jan 17 2005 21:43 utc | 80
from houghton mifflin
Entries
Publication Data
Advisory Board
Maps
Introduction
Contributors
Credits
U.S. History
Western Civilization
World Civilizations
Encyclopedia of North American Indians
Potlatch
Throughout native North America, gift giving is a central feature of social life. In the Pacific Northwest of the United States and British Columbia in Canada, this tradition is known as the potlatch. Within the tribal groups of these areas, individuals hosting a potlatch give away most, if not all, of their wealth and material goods to show goodwill to the rest of the tribal members and to maintain their social status. Tribes that traditionally practice the potlatch include the Haidas, Kwakiutls, Makahs, Nootkas, Tlingits, and Tsimshians. Gifts often included blankets, pelts, furs, weapons, and slaves during the nineteenth century, and jewelry, money, and appliances in the twentieth.
The potlatch was central to the maintenance of tribal hierarchy, even as it allowed a certain social fluidity for individuals who could amass enough material wealth to take part in the ritual. The potlatch probably originated in marriage gift exchanges, inheritance rites, and death rituals and grew into a system of redistribution that maintained social harmony within and between tribes.
When Canadian law prohibited the potlatch in 1884, tribes in British Columbia lost a central and unifying ceremony. Their despair was mirrored by the tribes of the Pacific Northwest when the U.S. government outlawed the potlatch in the early part of the twentieth century. With the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 in the United States and the Canadian Indian Act of 1951, the potlatch was resumed legally. It remains a central feature of Pacific Northwest Indian life today.
Site Map I Partners I Press Releases I Company Home I Contact Us
Copyright Houghton Mifflin Company. All Rights Reserved.
Terms and Conditions of Use, Privacy Statement, and Trademark Information
Posted by: anna missed | Jan 17 2005 21:48 utc | 81
hmmm…..Where did I get that idea about the burning of the rafts?…Crossed wires, most probably, but I’ll look around all the same.
Posted by: alabama | Jan 17 2005 21:53 utc | 83
I think alabama’s recollection of the potlatch is from the early 20th century period where the greatest pressure was exerted upon the tribes, when many of the traditions were in a state of degeneration — if my recollection is accurate. But, no doubt these rituals were practiced with many variations among the many tribes and along the temporal line. At any rate the potlatch is a cornerstone of PNW tribal life to this day.
Posted by: anna missed | Jan 17 2005 22:04 utc | 84
On packratism. Is it learned behavior or inborn?
At age six I passed through a packrat’s back lot on the way to and from school. Often I would pick up one of his treasures, bits of hardware that he had no use for, and carry it home to establish my own stash. Did I have a use for it? Of course not. The packrat’s brother had a tin shed in which he stored his own treasures, as he couldn’t get away with storing junk openly in his yard.
Years later I established the habit of keeping a pickup truck and a shed of some kind or other so that I could collect stuff for future use. It was emotionally difficult to dump any of the stuff, which had to occur every few years when I moved. Those dumping occasions, although hard to execute, are a nice relief as soon as I am over the threshold.
I could/can usually justify collecting, calling myself an inventor who always has a use for odd pieces, but in the end, it is the collecting that gives satisfaction to one with this affliction. Not altogether harmful or useless, such a habit can be controlled and used for profit. I am right proud of some of the things I have created out of junk.
Eventually I had to face the fact that to make things for sale (which is what I do) it works much better to set up a system of suppliers who will provide exactly what one needs (no junk) on time and at a predictable price.
Posted by: rapt | Jan 17 2005 22:20 utc | 85
@Rapt:
I don’t collect much–just what I think I might need for upcoming projects.
I have a friend-metal caster, wood-worker, building renovator who is an ISPR(Industrial Strength Pack Rat).Has 4 very large sheds-20×50 2 story. Walking through those sheds is amazing. It’s all useful stuff for the right person, and most of it was free.
Posted by: Thorstein V. | Jan 17 2005 22:42 utc | 86
Note to Billmon (if he ever gets down this far):
Hitler did not propose the Big Lie as his own “game plan” for persuading the Germans of any particular proposition. The Big Lie refers to a specific contention: that the Germans lost the First War War on the battlefield. According to Hitler, this Big Lie was propagated by the Jews and the Communists, who, he claims, engineered the defeat by their traitorous activities.
Posted by: jr | Jan 17 2005 23:34 utc | 87
Mauss on a “certain kind of potlatch”: “one must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back. It is a competition to see who is the richest and also the most madly extravagant…..everything is conceived as a ‘struggle of wealth’…. In a certain number of cases, it is not even a question of giving and returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gitt to be reciprocated. Whole boxes of olachen (candlefish) oil or whale oil are burnt, as are houses and thousands of blankets. The most valuable copper objects are broken and thrown into the water, in order to put down and to ‘flatten one’s rival'” (The Gift, p. 37). But the burning of the rafts….did I make that up?
Posted by: alabama | Jan 18 2005 0:19 utc | 88
I think ‘bama that the destructive potlatch ceremony you describe dates from after the Anglo invasion and was infected with despair (as mentioned earlier). One should check the dates on these things… an interesting project if I didn’t have too many other projects right now… but I am pretty sure about the transition from a positive communitarian ritual to a destructive, defiant, suicidal ritual post-Conquest.
Actually the destructive potlatch sounds like the funerary rites in some patriarchal/kleptocrat cultures, where enormous amounts of goods are burnt, slaves are killed, etc. “to send them into the afterlife with their owner.” The pinnacle of ugly selfishness, the ultimate in “if I can’t have it then nobody can.” And if this is a response to despair, then the ugliness of our own culture of acquisition, deprivation, and massive orgies of destruction (modern warfare) is presumably rooted also in despair…
Bataille links it to angoisse, DeAnander–as he finds it in Camus…who took it from Heidegger and Kierkegaard….and so here we are in our class (of family?) reunion with those dear old kinfolk, Angst, Furcht and Grauen….How time does fly!
Posted by: alabama | Jan 18 2005 1:55 utc | 91
Just a family tree, slothrop–as of Kierkegaard’s “The Concept of Dread,” “Fear and Trembling,” “The Sickness Unto Death,” etc.–anthropologized by Heidegger, then adopted by Sartre, Camus, and Bataille for their politico-existential ruminations (among other things)….I hadn’t thought about them for a good long while…. Overcome, therefore–or enraptured?–by a sudden flood of la nausée….We’re talking about the intellectual highs of the ’50’s here, and I’m feeling seriously, seriously dated….Do you remember my saying on an earlier thread that the elders and the boomers can hardly speak the same language? This may be an instance of that strange “language barrier”….
Posted by: alabama | Jan 18 2005 2:24 utc | 93
alabama, I have no references but I have a completely different knowledge/experience with the potlatch.
My experience involved a good friend of mine, deceased, who was about one quarter
Abenaki. He introduced myself and our family to his potlatch ceremony. It became a yearly celebration/ritual and the tradition still continues through his wife and still young son. We all bring a gift to place in a circle of gifts which we all eventually circumscribe. When all were present, their gifts would be chosen one by one, in sequence from the eldest down to the youngest.
The gifts are conscious choices of things that are of value to us, and hopefully others, but that we are ready to “let go of”. The choices have always been difficult as we prepared for the yearly event. It might be a sterling silver napkin ring that was my childhood napkin holder when my parents had a formal dinners, but that I never use anymore, or maybe an old guitar that I never play but that I have never let go of. You get the idea.
It is a very moving and enjoyable ceremony. It encourages one, or at least me and my wife, to look more clearly at our more primitive programming toward acquisition and accumulation.
Whatever the histories there are of the potlatch, one segment seems to have filtered through a lineage of north eastern Native Americans that invites psychological and spiritual evaluation of our pack rat tendencies.
I have been honored to partake of that tradition.
Posted by: Juannie | Jan 18 2005 2:29 utc | 94
From Canadain Indian Affairs, legislation banning potlatch -the reasoning. Scroll down just past Challenging the Change, interesting:
http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg17_e.html
Posted by: anna missed | Jan 18 2005 4:02 utc | 96