Denise Dorrance comic

In America we tend to hold on tightly to this myth of a ‘classless society.’ Talk of status and reaching for it is taboo; rarely will an individual list ’signaling status to others’ as motivation for purchasing a luxury good (yeah sure, it’s allll about the quality…). British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson isn’t afraid to broach the class issue, and explains the fashion/status connection pretty clearly in his interview with Brooke Jarvis:

Louis Vuitton, classic status symbol

Status competition causes problems all the way up; we’re all very sensitive to how we’re judged. Think about Robert Frank’s books Luxury Fever or Falling Behind, or the great French sociologist Bourdieu—they show how much of consumption is about status competition. People spend thousands of pounds on a handbag with the right labels to make statements about themselves. In more unequal countries, people are more likely to get into debt. They save less of their income and spend more. They work much longer hours—the most unequal countries work perhaps nine weeks longer in a year.

If you grow up in an unequal society, your actual experience of human relationships is different. Your idea of human nature changes. If you grow up in a consumerist society, you think of human beings as self-interested. In fact, consumerism is so powerful because we’re so highly social. It’s not that we actually have an overwhelming desire to accumulate property, it’s that we’re concerned with how we’re seen all the time. So actually, we’re misunderstanding consumerism. It’s not material self-interest, it’s that we’re so sensitive. We experience ourselves through each other’s eyes—and that’s the reason for the labels and the clothes and the cars.

“We experience ourselves through each other’s eyes.” We are conscious about how others perceive us, especially strangers who have no other point of reference other than our outward appearance.

This is about the psychosocial effects of inequality—the impact of living with anxiety about our feelings of superiority or inferiority. It’s not the inferior housing that gives you heart disease, it’s the stress, the hopelessness, the anxiety, the depression you feel around that. The psychosocial effects of inequality affect the quality of human relationships. Because we are social beings, it’s the social environment and social relationships that are the most important stressors.

Daniela Perdomo neatly sidesteps engaging in the content of the theories themselves, but rather takes a step back and asks what their growing popularity means:

promo ad for Jesse Ventura's tv show

“We have got to get to a point where we have leaders who are there for us instead of representing their manipulative, greedy ways,” he told me.

This insight is one most progressives can identify with, and it drives home the fact that people like Jones and Noory are driven to do what they do because they are distrustful of the powers that be. The fear of a government that ignores your constitutional rights or of too-powerful interests controlling the economy is a perfectly legitimate concern. This manifests itself across the political spectrum in the United States.

…That doubt stems from not knowing what happens behind closed doors in government and in the board rooms of the largest, most powerful companies in the country. What we have little doubt about is that power in the United States — and everywhere, for that matter — is monopolized by small, associated groups that do not represent the interests of the great majority. That’s why there is at least a grain of truth in every bit of conspiracy theory, even the most delusional ones.

The fear of concentrated power is valid and brings up important questions that mainstream culture is often unwilling to ask. Conspiracy theorists ask those questions, though their answers may lead some astray.

This is sort of where I’m at with all of this - can’t say too much about the specifics, aware that anyone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out is still seeing through their own filters, and since I’m still awaiting my invitation to the next Bilderberger event know that I’m so far outside elite power circles of any kind I’ll never have a chance to draw first hand conclusions.

But what I do see is a growing populist discontent with whomever is in power, and as the Supreme Court’s baffling decision to grant giant corporations with multi billion dollar arsenals the same rights of the individual ‘persons’ that have nothing near the means to compete on that playing field shows us, whomever that is sure isn’t governing ‘for the people.’

So the question becomes not ‘is there a shadow elite intricately tangled up in corporate and government trying to manipulate the masses for their own ends using mainstream media bombardment to frame the reality they want everyone to believe?’ (see the film Orwell Rolls in his Grave for an excellent expose on the specifics of that). The question is ‘what are people going to do when the system of consumer supply that keeps us comfortable and compliant begins to falter?’ It’ll be then - and only then - that we’ll start to see any widespread challenges to said structure that go beyond watching tv shows.

As our government continues to enable ‘too big to fail’ rather than address the banking/financial oligarchy, will a grassroots movement gain enough momentum and participation to force the big bank to address the concerns of their ‘little people’ customers? From an editorial that appeared in The Nation:

The cynics either do not understand banking or misunderstand the widespread public anger. Dennis Santiago, IRA’s CEO and managing director, explained that banks compete fiercely for the “core deposits” provided by individual and small business accounts–this stable money is their preferred base for profitable lending. Take away core deposits, and bankers feel immediate balance-sheet stress. Expand the account base for community banks, and they gain greater stability and greater lending power. “Will moving your money have an effect?” Santiago asked. “And by effect, I don’t mean making a momentary political statement. I mean making a structural difference to the country’s financial system. The answer is yes.”

Time will tell…

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Alt press influential Arianna Huffington shines the spotlight on her first book pic of the year:

My first HuffPost Book Club selection of 2010 is Janine Wedel’s Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. It’s a gripping, disquieting book that exposes and explains why it’s been so hard to bring about any real change in our country — why Washington no longer seems capable of addressing the problems our nation faces.

It’s not an altogether new idea, but what’s notable is the divergence from the usual focus on corporate power and towards individual players. It will be interesting to read it and see how much overlap there is with conspiracy theories that target organizations like the Illuminati.

But the mere fact that books like these can still be published and then promoted on a alternative-mainstream site with a large audience gives me a glimmer of hope.

“The shadow elite clearly knew that the months and months of so-called debate over the issue was nothing more than a charade — the ultimate outcome never in doubt. The bill was created in the shadows. The public process since then has essentially been like a Hollywood adaptation — complete with the requisite third act happy ending (or, in the words of our elected officials, a “historic” ending).

“The new breed of players,” writes Wedel, “who operate at the nexus of official and private power, cannot only co-opt public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight.”

This was circulated back in mid-October, but I just now stumbled across it on Portfolio.com. It also sprung up on blogs and articles everywhere, including the LA Times. It’s a farewell letter written by a young, brilliant hedge fund manager, Andrew Lahde, who saw through the housing hype, knew that it was going to crash and made literally 866% returns betting that it would. And then he had the sense to take his millions and split, getting out while the getting was good.

I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

Sounds like Lahde shares the same opinion of the elite university system as Chris Hedges. He continues:

I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to get worse for some time, probably years. I am content sitting on the sidelines and waiting. After all, sitting and waiting is how we made money from the subprime debacle.

Lahde was one of the very few who not only suspected the crash was on the way, but was so sure that he made countless billions investing accordingly. So if this guy says its going to get worse for years, I’m inclined to believe him over the wishful thinkers who just lost a whole lot of money and are crossing their fingers that it will ‘return to normal.’

I now have time to repair my health, which was destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself over the past two years, as well as my entire life — where I had to compete for spaces in universities and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management — with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not. May meritocracy be part of a new form of government, which needs to be established.

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Ji Lee's photoillustration for Michael Lewis' "The End" on Portfolio.com

Michael Lewis’ The End , the behind-the-scenes story declaring how the era of Wall Street is finally over, has been the number one story on Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com for weeks. Back in the 80s Lewis wrote a book about Wall Street called Liar’s Poker.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

At least he knew he didn’t have a clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

Too bad he was wrong about the sooner/later part: (more…)

Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced-placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Mass., Princeton, N.J., and New Haven, Conn., to the financial and political centers of power.

When I read Chris Hedges’ piece for Truthdig, The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff, it struck me on a personal note, as I am still recovering from my own deep disillusionment with the Ivy League.

These elites, and the corporate system they serve, have ruined the country. These elite cannot solve our problems. They have been trained to find “solutions,” such as the trillion-dollar bailout of banks and financial firms, that sustain the system. They will feed the beast until it dies. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how.

…The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive.

It’s such a relief to hear someone else say what I felt all along, but really, really didn’t want to be true. Because intellectual inquiry was exactly the thing that I went straight towards, and while it was rewarding in it’s own right it absolutely infuriated my professors when I challenged fundamental assumptions. I was yelled at on a regular basis.

These institutions, no matter how mediocre you are, feed students with the comforting self-delusion that they are there because they are not only the best but they deserve the best. You can see this attitude on display in every word uttered by George W. Bush. Here is a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral core….Those on the inside are told they are there because they are better than others. Most believe it.

Working as a teaching assistant, I was astounded at the amount of poor quality, ill thought out work that came across my grading path. With all the talk of how extraordinarily difficult and competitive it was to get into these schools, I expected nothing but the best and brightest minds. Not that I didn’t encounter many of those, but they were the minority in a sea of well trained mediocrity.

Is reading and answering multiple-choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over you even an effective measure of intelligence? What about those families that do not have a few thousand dollars to hire a tutor? What chance do they have? These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference.

Most of these students are afraid to take risks. They cower before authority. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead. Challenging authority is not a career advancer.

I learned that the hard way.

By the time they graduate, they are superbly conditioned to work 10 or 12 hours a day, electronically moving large sums of money around.

I have to admit, however, that this superb conditioning has served me well in the corporate/government job market that is my day job. While I, personally, don’t move large sums of money around, I write up the policies for those that do. What I do now, in terms of both workload and politics, is a cake walk by comparison.

“The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name,” Deresiewicz wrote. “It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.”

“Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul,” he went on. “These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions.

To be fair, we did ask the big questions in my department. The problem was, however, that we were rigidly confined to methodologies entirely ill equipped to provide the answers. I had to ‘go rogue’ and cross departmental lines and sign up for visual studies and anthropology classes on the liberal arts quad. I sought, and found, the professors that not only allowed, but encouraged me to dig deep into those big questions. I paid dearly for that insubordination and deviation of intellectual resources from the path expected. I may not have a masters degree, but I have my education and no one can take that away from me.

I watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart for comic relief, but isn’t it funny how satire can be dead on? This was from a segment with Wyatt Cenac:

Volatility frequently occurs when everyone suddenly realizes that the stock market is just a consensual mass delusion based on fictitious valuing of abstract assets.

I’ve been expecting consumer crunch for a while - after all, Americans were spending more than they were making and sooner or later that easy credit was going to run out. I expected a slump, but had no idea I’d be witnessing such a spectacular implosion that spread like wildfire across the globe. Kurt Andersen writes eloquently about the collective experience of this meltdown in his piece for New York Magazine, Whiplash City:

So seldom do we motley millions all think and talk about the same thing at the same time—let alone two great big things, let alone intensely and continually for weeks at a time.

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I was really moved by a piece an article I read over my morning tea (in my nice comfortable apartment before I drove off in my reliable, paid for car to my steady job). So when I heard this afternoon on the drive home that it was Blog Action Day and the topic was poverty, I knew I had to share some excerpts.

John Dolan illustrates the mindset that Dickensonian poverty brings one to and shares the deep humiliation and fear that comes with it. He’s not a drop out, junkie or careless subprime victime, but a graduate educated person who slipped from the middle class into the underclass by a stroke of bad luck. Given the all too eminent prospect of millions of other Americans soon to be in a similar situation, he outlines 5 Pieces of Advice for the New Paupers and let me assure you that it goes beyond the pat social services brochure style advice of most columnists.

All the things we learned are going to seem pretty obvious, but remember that it’s very hard to think clearly when your life has collapsed.

…Antidepressants. Get on them right away, if you’re not already. If you are, up your dose. Because it’s going to hurt. It doesn’t matter how much Marxist theory you’ve absorbed; it doesn’t matter that you can put your fall into global context; it’s happening to you now, and it’s going to hurt like you wouldn’t believe. You’re an American, and you share that culture’s values whether you like it or not. So you define yourself by your job, car and house. When they go, you’re going to hate yourself. Don’t even bother arguing about it. It’s going to happen. Just take the damn Prozac….How do you tell your story? That’s going to matter, because you’ll be brooding about what went wrong 24/7, whether you want to or not. And you’ll find that explaining one’s great fall is a vital skill among the fallen, as well as a deeply satisfying pastime. This raises the issue of denial, a vital and deeply misunderstood mechanism. Denial, like Kurtz said about Terror, is your friend or an enemy to be feared. You need some denial to keep your ego from being crushed completely. Your ego is going to get very sick, now that you’re nobody. It’s easy to be polite and self-deprecating when you’re winning. I used to be like that. You can’t afford that when you’re being crushed. You have to demand respect if you expect to get it. The alternative is to dwindle away and disappear. Those antidepressants will help you deny the facts, but don’t be shy about doing ego-exercises, boasting practice, to reawaken that playground ego that so many of us polite middle-class types allowed to atrophy. You’re going to need it.

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here’s nothing like a massive, history making global economic crisis to bring on the 20/20 hindsight vision. Since I am anything but an expert on economics or political science I won’t attempt to resolve any age old debates, but in keeping with my discourse analysis, I do find it interesting how the tension between the individual versus the collective interest has come more sharply to the forefront of mainstream conversation. Here are a few of the more notable references I’ve seen in the past week or so:

Princeton professor and NY Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman - who won the Nobel prize in economics this morning - was interviewed on NPR this afternoon and asked who should have seen this coming. He first answers ‘myself’ and then goes on to say that while he’s been warning of problems for years and been a long time critic of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, that he really didn’t expect such a sudden, dramatic crash. Krugman wrote last weekend in his pre-Nobel op-ed on the current financial situation, Moment of Truth:

Why do we need international cooperation? Because we have a globalized financial system in which a crisis that began with a bubble in Florida condos and California McMansions has caused monetary catastrophe in Iceland. We’re all in this together, and need a shared solution.

A lot of people have been setting their hindsight vision on Greenspan. A few days ago the NY Times ran a story titledThe Reckoning: Taking a Hard New Look at the Greenspan Legacy:

As the long-serving chairman of the Fed, the nation’s most powerful economic policy maker, Mr. Greenspan preached the transcendent, wealth-creating powers of the market.

A professed libertarian, he counted among his formative influences the novelist Ayn Rand, who portrayed collective power as an evil force set against the enlightened self-interest of individuals. In turn, he showed a resolute faith that those participating in financial markets would act responsibly.

Really? He was counting on the people competing to make billions of dollars to be responsible and honest and that’s why we didn’t need regulation? I haven’t studied Rand since high school, so maybe a libertarian follower of hers will chime in to clarify and defend this position.

Noam Chomsky was interviewed for Alternet this week and he makes a different perspective on regulation:

…So, if you allow unregulated capital, of course you will have corruption and disaster.

Read Adam Smith. He points out if you see two business men talking in the corner, they are probably arranging a conspiracy against the public. That’s their job. It is not that they are bad people. That is just what they are supposed to do. Just like a corporation is not evil to try to maximize profit. If managers are not trying to maximize profit, they are breaking the law. They are not supposed to be ethical institutions; they are supposed to be operating in the interests of their shareholders.

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