4 Skeletor

“All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”

I was reminded of this great quotation by the appearance of supporters of the “Robin Hood Tax” on the news again today. According to Russia Today, Occupy Wall Street protesters want this tax to be implemented. According to Channel Four News, G20 protesters want the same. And according to the BBC, the Archbishop of Canterbury is also promoting this tax, along with the Pope himself. We might imagine, therefore, a motley gang of real and imagined radicals, priests and police spies (maybe!) gathered to invoke rather than exorcise something most people don’t have the slightest interest in.

The “Robin Hood Tax” is, in my opinion, an extremely bad idea. Could one contrive a better system to effect the following:

1. Incentivise people to trade options on shares, untaxed, rather than shares, taxed

2. Dissociate the number of share options from the number of shares: effectively monetise equity shares

3. Establish economies of scale in the trading of options by large financial institutions, because … if you imagine options sold by an institution are backed to an extent by shares held by the institution, a larger broker can make share purchases based on option sales to a greater extent internally, untaxed

4. Establish a system where equity is legally owned by a few large financial institutions, who then sell options to buy the same equity, which are traded in place of equity shares

5. Concentrate control of the economy in the hands of large financial institutions – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs

This is absolutely not a grass roots initiative. Anarchists are not interested in the tax system. No-one is interested in establishing payroll imputation against output VAT, which is eminently sensible. The government piss away far too much money as it is. It’s like, they expect people to support this because it’s named after Robin Hood and so maybe seems anti-establishment. Anyone convinced by that line of reasoning should perhaps reappraise the proposals, imagining they went under the banner of King Herod, or Skeletor, or some other figure who more closely resembles our intellectual entrepreneurs.

Celebrity groundbait (1) - Katie Price and Alex Reid

Katie Price and her crossdressed cortejo

Generations of theatrical performers have found themselves confronted with the problem of how best to portray the ghost in Hamlet; that is, how best to convey insubstantiality with substantial means. In the absence of a codified symbolism, such as exists in the Chinese Theatre, our actors have to date managed with stiff legged shuffling, talc, woos, etc.

But perhaps Katie Price has further enriched our culture by elegantly solving a similar problem: how to show symbolically that a lover is haunted and rendered insubstantial by the withdrawal of the sunlight of her attention, and she has achieved this by the simple expedient of marrying a transvestite boxer.

a "new" tax meme

A couple of weeks ago this tax theory “meme”, launched by a PR company on behalf of undisclosed corporate interests, was officially a Major News Story:

Twenty of Britain's leading economists have urged the Chancellor to scrap the 50p top rate of income tax – for the sake of the recovery

It’s sort of jarring, but at the same time completely predictable, to see wooden 90s neoliberalism once again paraded as serious scientific work. All these people have is a theological rejection of the acquisition and use of resources by the state in furtherance of a social democratic agenda, arguing:

1. That profit at current rate is really a necessary cost of production

2. That all activity for profit is productive

Both are untrue; but the current economic crisis, brought about by the overdevelopment of clearly unproductive activity in western countries, should surely have made a person interested in describing the real world have second thoughts about this inherited dogma.

Pepe Escobar on Russia Today

One of the ideas appearing on and under the surface of the coverage of the war in Libya concerns "al Qaeda" fighters - this is picked up by Pepe Escober here:



and in the Asia Times:

His name is Abdelhakim Belhaj. Some in the Middle East might have, but few in the West and across the world would have heard of him.

Time to catch up. Because the story of how an al-Qaeda asset turned out to be the top Libyan military commander in still war-torn Tripoli is bound to shatter - once again - that wilderness of mirrors that is the "war on terror", as well as deeply compromising the carefully constructed propaganda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) "humanitarian" intervention in Libya.

(I suppose "Belhaj" was "allegedly" friends with "al-Zarqawi" mkII: it's impossible to pin down any of this)

Also, I can half remember a thing about Benghazi militias being flown from front to front by NATO, like Hollywood extras.

When people were massacred in Tripoli last week, and in some places reportedly only non combatant handcuffed black men, the UK press evidently had to report it; but the same things had been reported months ago in the rebel area, and were excluded from the teevee context of the war in Libya, as if they had ocurred only in "liminal news", and so didn't need to be accounted for.

don't forget ...

... that this culture's dislike of the middle classes, always for the wrong reasons, ought to be considered alongside its indifference to, and profound estrangement from, unskilled workers considered as human beings

London 2011

From 1780:

“There is about a thousand mad men, armed with clubs, bludgeons, and crows, just now set off for Newgate, to liberate, they say, their honest comrades. - I wish they do not some of them lose their lives of liberty before morning. It is thought by many who discern deeply, that there is more at the bottom of this business than merely the repeal of an act - which has as yet produced no bad consequences, and perhaps never might.”

Unfortunately, it’s rare that anyone ever gets to the bottom of any of this business. On the 4th of August, Mark Duggan was killed by police, following which, according to the Daily Mail:

“the IPCC was forced to deny reports that Mr Duggan was “assassinated” as rumours spread like wildfire on the internet that he was unarmed, having put his gun down on the ground when he was shot.”

Mark Duggan’s friends and family organised a demonstration in Tottenham on the 6th of August, demanding answers from the police as to what had happened. At this protest, it’s reported that a sixteen year old girl was beaten by the police prompting a confrontation with police. Parked police cars were attacked with apparent impunity, and then shops were attacked and robbed, certainly by people with a different agenda from the initial demonstrators. A large carpet shop and the flats above it were set on fire. Over the following few nights, Londoners who were so inclined, discovering that they could apparently steal with impunity, attempted to do so (social policy for thirty years has been to resurrect nineteenth century social relations: it is almost as if they had brought back the classes laborieuses and the classes dangereuses). Overwhelmingly, unemployed Londoners have been charged with crimes relating to the riots.

But was there any more at the bottom of this business: the killing of Mark Duggan, the girl who got beaten, police permissiveness (followed by a police crackdown)? But also the surreal sentences handed out to rioters and the teevee disinformation? They’re probably just aspects of the British system, along with institutional racism, permanent house price inflation, the war in Afghanistan and the 2012 Olympics, but we can’t be entirely sure.

School of Aphex

There is a nightclub in London, ostensibly closed and boarded up, from which the Aphex Twin is directing rioters to attack Halfords or Tesco Metro, using two specially grooved cardboard disks, that have been laid out on his decks

That isn’t true. I think it’s just a normal response to think about what happened in London and try to reconcile it with what’s happened in popular culture, as well as what’s happened socially and politically. There is something about the staged inscrutability and desperation in this advert for microwaveable sausages:



But, if anything, Chris Cunningham/Chris Morris inspired adverts are a consequence of the senselessness of modern life, more than an influence on it; just as the “shock and awe” advertising campaign for NATO’s looting of Iraq eight years ago, or Libya now, was a consequence of the political organisation of the US and its satellites, and may not have influenced at all the decisions of Londoners to rob Halfords.

"incidents of civil disorder"

The Guardian have an incident map up showing incidents of civil disorder in the country over the last week, which I suppose they could eventually turn into a commemorative wallchart.

The media coverage of the riots has focused on events that are understandably upsetting: out of control fires destroying people’s homes, and the destruction of owner-managed businesses. Doing so highlights real incidents of nihilistic criminality: the Guardian today has an article about a woman who works in Poundland who nearly died when her flat was burnt out. If we look at the incident map, it appears that the most common sort of incident is something less shocking: people robbing high street shops.

that "men armed with knives and sticks" meme

Groups of men armed with knives and sticks attacked thousands of protesters trying to march to the headquarters of Egypt's military rulers Saturday

So … you have to remember, this isn’t a description of a gauzy genre painting, like Goya’s Dos de Mayo, but something that is credibly reported to have actually happened … around the same day this was reported, the BBC were saying Norwegians were demanding a secret trial for Anders Breivik

the horrible society - explained

The counter-revolution in economics is almost complete. A flirtation with alternative thinking lasted for the six months between the near collapse of the banking system in late 2008 and the London G20 summit in April 2009. Since then, the forces of economic orthodoxy have regrouped and fought back

This was from an article in the Guardian by Larry Elliott which intelligently argues that higher interest rates can hardly make oil or corn relatively cheaper …

… but there’s something horrible about this Keynes meme. It’s another one of those things in modern society that when viewed objectively, and dissociated from the social intercourse in which it sits, has something of the panicked serenity of the train of thought of someone in the middle of a drug overdose.

What Mr Elliot's thing is about: Keynes’ General Theory was a part of a real intervention in British society in the 30s. Keynes developed some new theoretical concepts which lead him to seek to push monetary expansion as a solution to Britain’s economic problems. He articulated his case for this in the context of the deliberately reactionary economics of his time. The general Theory slyly advocates monetary expansion while attempting to reconcile this view with established neoclassical economics. The overall result is a muddled book that contradicts itself and is predicated on a demonstrably false theory of money.

Keynes’ book was successful because, errors and all, it suited a historical context in which socialism was a real threat, in which the British establishment were willing to make concessions to British workers to defend Britain’s imperial role, and in which authoritarian state capitalism was widely admired by this same establishment. These social conditions are not replicated today. It’s hard to judge whether the stupidity and cynicism of neoclassical economists was worse then or now, but their discourse and institutional arrangements were certainly different.

Bringing Keynesianism back now as an establishment practice is not plausible, because the establishment neither want nor need it. Outside of this establishment, one can only hope for a decent analytical tool. The fact that Keynesianism was part of a somewhat progressive rearrangement of society in the past, leads people into adopting a really poor analytical tool, when there’s no good reason to do this.

Really, now, the banking apparatus is cannibalising the entire economy and only nationalisation of banking can prevent this. This idea can have no purchase on established politics: the politics of the bancocratic establishment, but it’s the only realistic analysis of the situation.

(I wrote some proper notes for this piece, with grand 18th century phrases, but then wrote the whole thing from memory in about 20 minutes. The main thing was the distinction between the general interest and the special interests of the possessers of political power, changing historical cirumstances, and Keynes' unreliability - the history of monetary economics that doesn't mention Proudhon, or his critics, for instance.)

Eastenders 1987

I guess this is around Christmas 1987. The soap opera Eastenders had a story where Arthur stole money from the Christmas club he ran, and this transgression, and its associated guilt and shame precipitated a nervous breakdown. It was something like a Greek tragedy translated into the simple language of teevee drama. And for this kind of thing it was probably pretty good. But could you imagine television being able to articulate this kind of moral delicacy now? How can you demonstrate social horror attending a minor theft, in a society where the establishment steal with impunity every day, and everyone knows it?

If anything pleases me about the current Tory government, and the same goes for New Labour, it’s that it’s only necessary to recall David Cameron’s Mr Punch wickedness, that appalling creep Philip Hammond, or the wretched Gove, for one's own indiscretions to pale into insignificance.

protest in Winchester

I went to this protest in Winchester at the weekend, which was better attended, from what I saw, than the Echo credits; but even so, considering the thousands of people who work for the Council in the South, it was hardly a mass mobilisation. Maybe most people can’t afford to park in Winchester. The speeches made were extremely lucid, and really deserved a bigger audience.

don't take the blue acid

Top Tory found dead in Glastonbury toilet

Was Duke of Edinburgh behind black op?

President Barack Obama and White House staff were today debating the release of a video showing Osama bin Laden being buried at sea.

The dead terror chief was given an Islamic burial in the North Arabian Sea in a bid to stop his fanatical followers turning his final resting place into a shrine.

a what? a sea burial?

are people mad?

From a survey of support for the alternative vote system:

"The survey predicts a 68% no vote against just 32% for yes and, in line with other recent polls, suggests support for electoral change has slumped further since a Guardian/ICM poll last month revealed the growing size of the no lead. The lead then was 16 points, compared with 36 now.

That suggests the campaign has been overwhelmingly lost by the Yes to AV alliance, which began the year with an apparent lead in the polls. In February, a Guardian/ICM poll put the yes camp ahead by two points"

Are people mad? The only reasons not to vote for alternative vote are 1. possibility of electoral fraud from the introduction of voting machines, 2. the hegemonic role of political parties is seen as beneficial.

Essentially, the outcome of alternative vote ought to be fairly close to having a duopolistic election and an open primary at the same time. It would provide an opportunity to end the situation where people feel obliged to vote for hideous new labour warmongers in order to retard NHS privatisation for a couple more years. It frustrates me when people talk about these things in completely abstract terms, forgetting the forces really in play. This is an opportunity to take out egregiously bad politicians - the people who really voted for bombing Libya last month - I really don't understand why people would want to vote against that.

antfarm

My colleague E is more senior than I am, and actually important enough for my employer to send her for psychometric profiling. She was genuinely excited by what she picked up on the course she attended. I like and respect my colleague, who is an intelligent and capable woman - probably more capable than I am, and I was genuinely surprised by how impressed she was with the course's teaching - a sort of shoddy totemism with a vaguely Myers-Briggs flavour. You expect individuals to have unusual enthusiasms, but this whole thing is part of the management culture of my company. The whole management thing, apparently, is that a person does not have a proprietorial sense of self, but imagines their world as a kind of antfarm, subject to inspection by improbable experts, who can tell you what you're about.

Maybe the content of the experts' teaching is ultimately reconcileable with management goals. On the other hand, when I get home and think about this, it seems like the way the profiling course was set up would have allowed the wildest extravagances from the experts conducting it. And my colleague would've been calmly writing down the instructions of a wild eyed maniac, frantically chewing betal:

"you are a Beano double page spread - of the floorboards of a Victorian house - and in the maze of floorboards is a cartoon mouse - cowering - and the mouse is your soul"

Inquiry into certain faculties (1)

Didn't it come out that Egyptian security services had been behind the bombing of a Christian Church at New Year? I'm fairly sure this was on the news, at least reported as an allegation - then nothing. It would be good with these stories to simply collate what's reported in the press at the time. This site features a number a press sources, as well as commentary.

crisis memo (4) - this cat's thesis

A colleague of mine at work recently graduated, and was telling me about his thesis, which touched on the banking crisis of a couple of years ago. Apparently a credible explanation of this crisis, among economists, and the one my colleague was taught, was that the problems originated with the extension of the right of home ownership to low wage workers. The whole thing was presented as if it was a transgression against nature for workers to own property, which inevitably called down vengeance from heaven.

The crisis certainly followed on from a great period for the issuing of bad mortgages, but both these circumstances were results of the maturation of the underlying asset market. Without bad mortgages the market would have levelled off five or ten years sooner, money would have become tighter, market interest rates would have risen, banks would have become insolvent, (as they periodically do).



tightening of money follows from the maturation of asset markets

ambiguities (3): ressentiment

What does it mean when intellectuals talk about ressentiment? For instance, when one talks of ressentiment about Dr Slavoj Zizek's marriage to an Argentinian model?

Clearly, we're meant to take ressentiment to convey more than mere resentment. If people resent bankers' bonuses, for instance, this might be upsetting for the bankers; ultimately it could be seen as being not very nice. On the other hand, the resentment could be justified by the bankers' bonuses being wholly undeserved, simply the distribution of an arbitrary levy on the productive economy. The argument either way is entirely prosaic.

When one talks of ressentiment, one attempts to make the condemnation of common or garden resentment absolute and unarguable, by alluding to the unchallangeable authority of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose texts are supposed to permanently avant-garde expressions of unassimilated genius. But if we're to cultivate a sacred awe of unassimilated genius, it remains to be established why one genius ought to be preferred to others. William Blake holds an opinion entirely contrary to Nietzsche's, telling us that the Tygers of Wrath are wiser than the Horses of Instruction. If genius is to be deferred to, there is no way of settling which opinion is correct.

And if we look at the arguments themselves, we might find Blake's argument at least the equal of Nietzsche's, both for cogency and for orthographic invention.

What we need (3) - moralising sermons on the folly of smoking cannabis, and other modern ills

Often, what ought to have been obvious from the start, only appears so when it is illustrated by personal experience. For instance, that getting along in a society based on unarticulated - unconscious, irrational - norms, is incompatible with the use of a drug which tends to erode the ability to comply with these norms. I remember my colleague X, in all seriousness, asking another colleague, who had attended drama school, whether academic drama didn't tend to include "impressions" of Woody Woodpecker, and Porky Pig, fixed into the text as "radiating singularities":

the-uh uh-uh-the-uh uh-the-uh th-that's all folks,

such extravagencies being undoubtedly authorised by the currently fashionable texts of Deleuze and Guattari, if these texts were taken completely seriously; that is, if the spirit of modern philosophy were allowed to become unmoored from its bureaucratic civil structure, like a tarpaulin torn from its fixtures by a gust of wind, or a stray binliner, suddenly rearing up to its full height.