Is the shoe mightier than the pen (or postcolonial theory)?

Bush's image has been associated with shoes throughout the Arabic Middle East (photo: BBC)

There’s been a lot of debate in the blogosphere whether it is “racist,” “anti-Arab,” or “Orientalist” to claim that shoe-throwing is a distinctly Arab way of flipping a person the bird.  Consider the following exchange between readers on the Foreign Policy blog:

TheScudStud88: Er, Orientalist cliches aside, is it not an insult in the West to throw a shoe at someone?

Blake Hounshell: That one’s really not an Orientalist cliche; It really is an insult. Sure, it’s not exactly a friendly thing in the United States, but it’s not the default option.

TheScudStud88: So you agree then that [the characterization] is a taaaaaaad misleading/ wrong categorization? I mean who wouldn’t consider it an insult to have a shoe thrown at them?

kidzib: i don’t think arabs devote nearly as much symbolic value to foot-oriented insults as, say, thais. maybe there was some symbolism to it all, but it was probably the only projectile object available for him to hurl at bush. what else would he have thrown? it’s not like he could’ve smuggled in anything heavier and more dangerous…

then again, a common arabic insult translates as “may a shoe land on your head!” but do you really think the guy thought all that out before he went ballistic (literally!)?

And so on. Part of the problem is that people are confusing their particularist apples with generalist oranges.  Think about it: when was the last time you saw an American, European, African, or Asian lobbing their shoes at a political leader?  Speaking for Americans, we prefer pies.

Funnily enough, a blogger is at the center of the debate:  Asa’ad Abu Khalil, a.k.a., the Angry Arab News Service.  In 2007, Khalil wrote,

Don’t you love it when Western reporters explain to their readers differences between their culture and Arab culture?  I don’t know about you, but I really love it.  Here is from the New York Times:   “During the argument, heated words were exchanged and shoes were thrown, a severe insult in the Arab world.”

So throwing a shoe at somebody is a “severe insult in the Arab world” but not anywhere else?  How exotic.  Tell me more, o culture experts of the New York Times.

The problem is mix-taxation, not over-taxation

Two of my posts, “Can the United States go… bankrupt?” and “If I were running for president,” have generated a pleasant amount of traffic.  Now, I really should be getting to work on my lecture (not to mention fundraising for the World University Project — arrrgg!), but I think the ongoing crisis merits a few more comments.  And in the interest of debate, click on the still from The Grapes of Wrath (1940) to go to an interesting blog post.

Can the United States government go… bankrupt?

Seems like a ludricous idea; after all, how can a government go bankrupt?  Well, according to this powerpoint presentation (which I’ve also provided in video form above), if administrative agencies and municipalities like school boards and entire towns can go belly-up, then so might a national government.  Consider also the recent troubles in Iceland.  Russia has come to their rescue, providing them a €4bn loan from the goodness of their hearts.  Time for a Mr. Rogers moment: “Can you say, ’satelite state’ boys and girls?  How about, ‘return of the Soviet bloc’?”  Of course, one has to wonder whether Russia, with its own earthshattering fiscal crisis, can really afford any financial adventures into the North Atlantic.

What I’m most curious about is what precisely a federal bankruptcy would mean.  Would it be a scenario like that which happens to a company, i.e., it will be restructured and recreated into something signficantly different?  If so, what happens to you and me, J.Q. Public, during the intervening limbo?  What would the new United States government look like, and how would it operate?  (Would it even still be a democratic republic?)

The apocalyptic picture is one painted by Michael Hodges, cumrudgeon author of the Grandfather Report, and John Rubino, the alarmist hack behind DollarCollapse.com, as well as Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It and How to Profit from the Coming Real Estate Bust (very humanitarian titles, wouldn’t you say?)  Two years ago I corresponded with Hodges (Rubino wouldn’t return my e-mails).  We had a bit of an irascible back-and-forth, and I disagreed with much that he said.

Or would federal bankruptcy mean the slashing and burning of government-provided services and programs?  Again, if so, what happens to you and me down here, on the street?  I’m curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.

If I were running for President…

…this would be my platform:

Rescue Main Street if you want to rescue Wall Street

In my last post on the topic of the current fiscal crisis, I wrote,

Our political leadership realizes this, which is why politicians are up in arms about the irresponsibility, gullibility, and sometimes outright cynicism of Wall Street, but dare not breathe a word about the irresponsibility, gullibility, and sometimes outright cynicism of Main Street.  After all, someone had to sign all those subprime mortgages, and let’s face it, he wasn’t a shortsheller and Warren Buffet: he was you and me, J.Q. Public.

This statement in retrospect caused me a lot of ethical concern about myself, for not only is unfair, but also unwise.  You see, like everyone, I’ve been bothered by a double-edged reservation concerning the bail-out which was just rejected.  On the one hand, I am nervous about the direction in which the proposed plan might take our country; my friend Mike Gallen, after the manner of Noam Chomsky, has called it corporate socialism, but I have been arguing that really it’s just the same old crony capitalism utilizing an old Keynsian device (“the lender of last resort”); as such, it does not represent real oversight and regulation.  On the other hand, I am concerned about the effect a lack of a bail-out will have upon our future, as well.  Yet, although the bill had included some basic safeguards, I notice it lacked something critical: help for the home-owners who are being kicked to the curb by bankruptcy.

And here is the crux of the matter: while it is true that the world is suffering for the short-sighted decisions of a few million CEOs, accountants, and homeowners, can we really blame the latter?  Surely the CEOs and accountants knew what they were getting our economy into; in a sense, they were behaving like drug pushers, preying upon the hopes and gullibility of everyday joes who wanted a piece of the American dream pie (which raises the other question, namely, that ultimately what is really the cause of our woes is the particularly materialistic way in which what it means to be American has been construed since the Reagan era).  From a moral perspective, the bail-out plan is very disgusting, for essentially we’re rescuing the drug dealers and leaving the junkies out on Skid Row.

Here’s my logic: the recession is originating from foreclosures; therefore, bail-out homeowners, not (just) their banks.  The two bail-out plans provided for no assistance to J.Q. Public, and for this reason, I’m leaning
toward the “no bail-out” side.  Perhaps the firms do need to be saved for macroeconomic liquidity, but without addressing the fundamental systemic problem — the epidemic of foreclosures — saving Wall Street from its excesses may only delay the inevitable.

Re: “The Power of Money”

My friend Mike Gallen has written a strong response to my post from yesterday. He raises an excellent point: fundamentally, in any borrowing situation, the power in the relationship really resides with the lender.  After all, they are the ones putting up the cash; to paraphrase the Bible, he that giveth may also taketh away.  However, my sense is that lending grants leverage only when there is also a will to back it up.

Historically-speaking, lenders have always been in a peculiar position in that they need a strong state apparatus, replete with police and military forces, to recoup the money owed to them.  In other words, they must have the support of a currency-producing government that enjoys sufficient legitimacy and hard power to compel obedience from populations within (and frequently without) its borders. The great myopia of the laissez faire economics espoused by the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations thus becomes clear: governments do not “get in the way” of markets, they provide the legal space and the physical means by which markets can even exist.  To the extent that the myth and dogma of deregulation can be said to be true, it is only in so far as we see a government restraining itself.  Erasing its influence altogether is an impossibility, and even if the government could accomplish such a feat, the market would be quickly replaced by low-level non-monetary bartering, as we have seen in Somalia.

At root is the issue of political will: the government has to be prepared to back up the lender, and until a few months ago, the United States government was indeed ready to do so.  But now consider the staggering rate at which middle-class Americans are simply walking away from their mortgages — and the total lack of repercussions for their action.  The scale of per capita debt in our country is so immense that were this the 18th Century the entire population would be sentenced to debtor’s prison.  Our political leadership realizes this, which is why politicians are up in arms about the irresponsibility, gullibility, and sometimes outright cynicism of Wall Street, but dare not breathe a word about the irresponsibility, gullibility, and sometimes outright cynicism of Main Street.  After all, someone had to sign all those subprime mortgages, and let’s face it, he wasn’t a shortsheller and Warren Buffet: he was you and me, J.Q. Public.

But just because the politicians are willing to offer up a fex execs to the guillotine doesn’t mean that in the long-run they are actually prepared to exert real regulatory muscle upon the market.  This is where my disagreement lies with Mike: they’ll give us blood, but in the end, that’s all we’ll get; real reform is radically unlikely.  All you need to do is look at the Treasury’s proposed plan to see that the Bush administration is not serious about reigning in Wall Street:

Re: “We are all socialists now”

In response to Mike Gallen’s post, “We are all socialists now,” here are some of my own thoughts.

The first is to question whether we are actually dealing with, as it were, “semi-socialism [i.e., for the rich]“: since its creation during the FDR administration, the Fed has always had the responsibility of being what’s called the “lender of last resort,” and it has performed this function several times, most notably during the savings and loans crisis twenty years ago. Theoretically at least, the Fed’s action is a capitalistic solution to a capitalistic problem, i.e., the boom-bust cycle and the Darwinian weeding out of faulty sectors of the market. Therefore, this is not even regulation per se, much less (semi-)socialism.

The only difference between the current action and its precedents is the sheer awesome scale of the lending — leading me to the second thought. At $700 billion, the bail-out equals the budget for the on-going Iraq War (cf. here and here as well).  That’s no small potatoes.  Can the American taxpayer really shoulder the looming multi-trillion dollar deficit?  Whoever becomes president of dire necessity will have to balance the budget and tackle the deficit, which probably means slashing social programs and raising taxes on all classes of society.  This isn’t an easy sell with the electorate, nor is it just or imaginative (do we really need more neoliberalism to fix what is essentially a neoliberal bungle?), but at least with Obama we can expect the rich to shell out this time, too.

In summary, then, Bush hasn’t gone socialist, just more capitalist.  Nevertheless, Noam Chomsky makes a very good point when he remarks that what we’ve been seeing since the Reagan administration has been a process of socializing cost and risk and privatizing profit (click on the image above).   The difference, however, lies in the fact that whereas in a socialist system the society shelled out via taxes, in a capitalist system it is shelled out via debt and taxes.