“To take a physical object out of someone’s possession is clearly not equivalent to making a copy for oneself while leaving all other copies untouched. If the right of physical property grants the right to control a particular copy of an object — a particular pair of Nike shoes, for example — the right of intellectual property instantiates the far broader power to control all copies of an idea or a software program or a work of art. Whether this extension is valid and justified, and whether it should fall within the same legal and rhetorical purview that addresses physical property, is ultimately a matter of cultural norms and political struggle.” — Peter Frase, “Phantom Tollbooths”
“Beneath its frontier rhetoric of individualism and autonomy, capitalism is founded on the exercise of state power to defend the institution of private property. Its model of generalized commodity exchange presupposes a novel world in which everything is parceled into discrete chunks and tagged with the name of its owner. This way of seeing things does not come automatically to human societies; constructing a world of private property entails both state violence and ideological propagandizing.” — Peter Frase, “Phantom Tollbooths”
“It takes more than full bellies to make fulfilled lives. Without enough to eat, life is nasty; with merely enough to eat, it feels empty. The escape from not-enough can highlight the emptiness of only-enough.” – Adam Gopnik, “Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat”
“No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf nor a tree. There’s many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don’t think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice.” – Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
Ninety-eight years ago on this very day the so-called Great War (aka, the World War, aka the First World War) “broke out,” as wars are said to do. How did this misfortune come about? Through an unstoppable cascade of double-dog dares, to wit:
A Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian (aka, Austro-Hungarian) duke;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) demanded some stuff from the Serbians for reparations;
The Serbians said, No way, man;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) said, You don’t give over, we’re going to attack;
The Serbians said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The Russians said to the Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians), We be friends with the Serbians and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The Germans said to the Russians, We be friends with the Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians, though we prefer the Austrians) and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Russians said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The French said to the Germans, We be friends with the Russians, since their dukes and duchesses and stuff all speak French, and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Germans said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The British, who more or less wanted to stay out of things–or, truth be told, wanted to play all these other folks off against each other so they could scoop up the pieces–said, We don’t really have a dog in this fight, but we do be friends with the Belgians so if anyone (and Germans, we mean you) thinks to march through Belgium to get to, oh, let’s say France, perchance, well, you see, it would be a terrible bother, but we can’t see how we would have any choice other really, than to come to their aid, what with it being impolite to do otherwise;
To which the Germans said, We double-dog dare you, you irrelevant English swine (which was fisticuffs-provoking insult to those British who were not English).
All the double-dog dares being in place and ignored, the attacks and counterattacks and countercounterattacks and countercountercounterattacks ad nauseam began and forty million (40,000,000) dead people later they ended. Along the way, Japan and the United States entered the war, also as part of the double-dog-dare cascade, to wit:
Japan saw an opportunity to pitch in with the what were called Allies and scoop up German territories in the Pacific. They double-dog dared the Germans to try and stop them, to which the Germans muttered, We cannot stop you, all our dogs are in other fights.
The United States just wanted to make money and when the Germans started fucking with the money-maker by sinking United Stateser ships, the United States said, Stop it or we’ll pitch in with the what are called Allies and we will show you a thing or two.
The Germans said, You are degenerate Americans and we double-dog dare you.
So the degenerate Americans from the United States Thereof pitched in and the what were called Allies won and the decline of Western Civilization, which began on this date ninety-eight years ago, continued apace, with the American Empire coming along after yet a second world war (they couldn’t get it right the first time?) to shine and burn brightly as the final efflorescence of what for a half-millennium had been a powerful civilization pretty full of itself but quickly at its end going to the dogs.
“When sophisticated business people begin to adopt the methods of common criminals, we have no choice but to treat them as such.” – Preet Bharara, US Attorney, SDNY
“‘The market’—like ‘dialectical materialism’—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed the pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.” – Tony Judt, “Captive Minds”
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers.” – Tony Judt, “Ill Fares the Land” (emphasis in original)
“Under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual. To pursue the concept of racial entitlement–even for the most admirable and benign of purposes–is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.” — Anthony Scalia, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Mineta, 534 U.S. 103 (1995)
“Our system has relentlessly denied the role of any human practice that cannot be monetized. The capitalist apparatus has worked tirelessly to commercialize everything, to reduce every aspect of human life to currency exchange. In such a context, there is little hope for the survival of the fully realized self.” – Freddie deBoer, “The Resentment Machine”
I gotta get rant-a-rific here for a few. I just got off the phone with a major American airline which I won’t embarrass by naming outright, but if you like, you could say its name rhymes with benighted. I was on the phone with them for a fucking hour trying to correct, or verify the correction of, a $75 mistake they made. And when I say I was on the phone for an hour, that means I was on hold for most of that time, listening to an endless loop of Rhapsody in Blue, except for the two times early on when the menu selections I made failed because those parts of this Dinosaur Corp.’s phone system no longer work, and the few minutes toward the end of this when I finally got to speak to a person (who was actually in the United States, which pleases me, atavistic chauvinist that I sometimes am (an effect of growing older, methinks)).
A fucking hour. It’s like I was dealing with an obscure bureau in some third-world country, address 1984 Kafka Avenue in Downtown Chaotica. An hour! A major airline! Now, I’m an old but I’m not ancient. I’m well over a decade away from retirement, should I in fact be able to retire. I well remember a time when in this country–in this country, boys and girls–that simply never would have happened. Americans had more pride than to pretend to run a business where people were kept waiting on the phone for an hour. I like to think we still do, but here I am dancing the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to a tune I don’t recall having any part in calling, and it’s a whistling past the graveyard for anyone to think it doesn’t matter that major businesses are run that way. Look around. See all the crumbling? Yeah, we sure as shittin’ all do. Anyone care to dance?
And at the end of it all, the poor soul who tried to help me, bless her heart, couldn’t provide any sort of verification that the problem had actually been solved, even though she said she’s pretty sure it was. But that’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable to run a business like that, or a government like that, or a school like that, where there’s no one on duty, no one who can assist, no one who knows what’s going on, no one to take responsibility, no one who is willing and able to get to the bottom of things, no one to step up and say, We can fix this–we are better than this. It’s time to clear away the rot.
“A color-coded map of American personal indebtedness could be laid on top of the Centers for Disease Control’s color-coded map that illustrates the fantastic rise in rates of obesity across the United States since 1985 without disturbing the general pattern. The boom in trading activity in individual stock portfolios; the spread of legalized gambling; the rise of drug and alcohol addiction; it is all of a piece. Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.” – Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“It isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences.” – Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn’t the actual future so much as some grotesque silicone version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned.” — Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem.” — Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“Through the tax code, there has been class warfare waged, and my class has won. It’s been a rout. You have seen a period where American workers generally have gone no place, and where the really super rich as a group increased their incomes five for one in this rarefied atmosphere.” — Warren Buffet, quoted in “Returns ‘Terrific’ as U.S. Workers Suffer,” Bloomberg News, 11.15.11
“The best way to do good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” — Benjamin Franklin (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXIV, Sec. 3)
“The man who serves is the one who comes to understand other men.” — Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXII, Sec. 9
“Gradually public opinion concerning the scope and purpose of government in its relation to the general welfare underwent a transformation. The view which had long been dominant was that national prosperity depended upon the prosperity of the manufacturing and commercial classes of the country; when they flourished the labourer would enjoy a ‘full dinner pail,’ the shopkeeper a good trade, the farmers high markets, and the professional classes would collect their fees; consequently it was only right that such important matters as the tariff and monetary standards should be determined according to the ideals of the great business interests of the country. The new view was that the object of legislation should be to aid all citizens with no special privilege or regard to any one class. Its birth was in the Granger movement. It was more widely disseminated by Populism, but its ablest presentation was by William Jennings Bryan, notably in his speech before the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1896: ‘You have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. A man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer. The attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as a merchant of New York. The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day—who begins in the spring and toils all summer—and who, by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country, creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs and bring forth from their hiding place the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade, are as much business men as the few financial magnates, who, in a back room, corner the money of the world. We come to speak for this broader class of business men.’” — The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXI, Sec. 36
“So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.” — Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)
“Old men are just as bad as young men when it comes to money. They can’t think. They always try to buy what they should have for free. And what they buy, after they have it, is nothing.” — James Alan McPherson, “A Solo Song: For Doc”
“Out of unrestricted competition arise many wrongs that the State must redress and many abuses which it must check. It may become the duty of the State to reform its taxation, so that its burdens shall rest less heavily upon the lower classes; to repress monopolies of all sorts; to prevent and punish gambling; to regulate or control the railroads and telegraphs; to limit the ownership of land; to modify the laws of inheritance; and possibly to levy a progressive income-tax, so that the enormous fortunes should bear more rather than less than their share of the public burdens.” — Washington Gladden (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XVI, Sec. 12)
“Dishonest men can be bought and ignorant men can be manipulated. This is the kind of government which private capital, invested in public-service industries, naturally feels that it must have.” — Washington Gladden (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XVI, Sec. 12)