As new media-savvy, well-equipped, and omnisciently hip as the new robber-barons may be, apparently none of them are down with the Wu: protect ya neck, for fuck sake. They didn't, and evidently the world as we knew it ended not in September 2001, but in September 2008.Appropriating the words of Eddie Izzard, "It's the cutting edge of politics in a very, extraordinarily boring way." No one I know (or at least care about) changed their plans this week: groceries were bought, laundry was done, Columbo reruns were watched, even as financiers wept on Canary Wharf or quietly shat themselves behind Rockefeller Plaza.
But never has there been as theoretically exciting & confused a time in my life. Suddenly, my bickering over the insignificance of that 3.3% GDP bump is hardly dogmatic contrarianism. Small-gov't enthusiasts, who very recently equated taxation with "confiscation at gunpoint," swiftly adopted an oddly zen-like, self-nullifying stance towards their tax dollars. There's an astounding amount of invigorating chatter about not only the pragmatic positives of public ownership, but also the fundamental inviability of neoliberalism. And as "deregulation" entered the breakfast-talk lexicon of America, Obama jumped back into the lead.
At the very least, America's unimpeachable economic power is a thing of the past. Central banks dumped near-unprecedented sums of cash in a bid to build domestic stability, which may kick-start a feeding frenzy upon the American market by foreign entities. Around Deutsche-way, for example, the chairman of insurance giant Allianz (flush from its recent sale of Dresdner Bank) was quoted last week as saying, "From what I see of some of our competitors in the US, this is not a bad time to look at the US market." With the recent merger of its four biggest banks into a mere two - with assets among them topping €3.3 trillion - the world's No. 3 economy has players positioned to place Germany higher upon the economic podium. European bank champ Alessandro Profumo, for one, welcomed the news: "A market with fewer competitors is more profitable."
Of course, nevermind that Profumo was ignoring the 9,000 pink-slips passed out during the Commerzbank-Dresdner merger, a universally-puffing CPI, and that his fellow Italians pay the steepest bank fees in Europe - he said the above before the financial shitstorm. We've all seen now what happens when all the eggs are in one basket (or, rather, the eggs are on layaway with extortive API and have already been promised to several other baskets at the same time).An ironic postscript to this week's dramatic developments: the most expensive condo in Canada just went on the market, for a handsome $30 million (yes, that's CDN, but if you've checked the exchange rates, the Yankees can't pay that price in pocket change anymore). A common criticism of late-stage capitalism is that it engenders inequity; to be sure, the wealth gap has been growing (an average top 1% household is worth 190 times a median household) as fast as social mobility has been slowing. As the in media explodum bubble swelled over the past decade, the growing number of occupants of said bubble greeted these critiques with a shrug and a wag of the middle finger. Now that their portfolios have been flushed and their penthouse dreams all towering infernos, maybe we can stop pretending poverty is a personal shortcoming, eh?
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I never cease to be amused by your blog. What your blog says to people is "I am openly rooting for the destruction of the United States and I endorse Barack Obama."
Really? Damn, that's way more concise than any mission statement I coulda cooked up.
I'll take that as a compliment.
By the way, further thoughts on "user value" (and why neoliberalism produces shit music) on the way. I wasn't as efficient as I liked this week, and I'm outta town this weekend - so stay tuned!
Okay, I'm back. Given the fervor with which my other readers defended me against your accusation (Judases!) I feel the need to take a moment to respond.
I endorse Barack Obama.
Well, inasmuch as a non-citizen with no right to vote in the US can endorse a particular candidate. That doesn't mean I think the world will magically become a better place if he's elected, though.
I am openly rooting for the destruction of the United States.
How very Rove-ian of you; that's the straw-man Republicans have used to successfully to smear anyone left of Genghis Kahn for the past 15 years. If nothing else, it speaks to a serious lack of imagination in what defines the US of A. Certainly, among the country's defining characteristics are predation upon public resources, jealous protection of private wealth, contempt for social egalitarianism, the defilement abroad of the values & rights enshrined at home, unilateral military incursions, anti-intellectualism, the arrogance of conservative Christians, etc. - and yes, I do actively root against such behaviors & attitudes. But one of Clinton's finer bits of rhetoric was the declaration that "there is nothing wrong with America that can't be solved by what is right with America," and I absolutely applaud the more noble notions embodied by the "great experiment": the Bill of Rights, checks & balances, separation of church & state, polyglot multiculturalism, the protection of the minority against the tyranny of the majority, "soft power," the marketplace of ideas, the creative synergy of disparate cultures, gov't accountability & transparency, personal privacy, religious pluralism, and social liberalism. I'd have to be a dense & dogmatic git to have spent almost a decade in the States and not have gained an appreciation for its virtues, as well as a healthy contempt for its shortcomings.
This is why the Balkanization of America is inevitable: how can the world's third most-populous & fifth physically-largest country possibly keep it together? Ask people in Boston, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Seattle, and El Paso what America is and you'll get five totally different answers, yet each will be perfectly valid within its local context. Your conception of an "ideal" US, as different as it may be from mine, is no more or less true according to its constitutive essence. The difference, to quote Tim Krieder, is that "the utopia of the left is pretty much exclusively concerned with material needs and political rights. The liberal paradise is basically Canada," whereas "the conservative paradise, where everyone belongs to one big homogenous group and unanimously reveres and supports the government [big or small] and maintains strict moral purity, is Iran."
No, no, I don't believe you're just rooting for the United States to change. I believe that, at least to some extent, you are actually rooting for the U.S.'s downfall. I think that's pretty clear from sections of your blog. This is distinct from the American left who, I believe, aren't rooting for anything like the same thing.
Tim Kreider's quote is interesting, because it is a genuine challenge to the U.S. When it comes to material needs, Canada is one of the only countries in the world which is even competitive with the U.S. The left frequently talks about Sweden, but the average American black family is better off economically than the average Swedish family is. Canada, however, is different. Last time I checked, the bottom 25% in Canada were, in fact, marginally better off than the bottom 25% in the U.S. This is very rare, but it does exist. (The median income is higher in the U.S. than in Canada and, obviously, the top 25% are much better off in the U.S., but I can certainly sympathize that you wouldn't care about that latter point.)
As far as rights go, I'm not convinced. The protection for freedom of speech is enormously higher in the U.S. than in Canada. The Westboro Baptist Church, for example, led by Fred Phelps, are specifically banned from entering Canada. Both the left and the right absolutely hate the man, but protection for freedom of speech is so strong here that nobody can stop him from demonstrating either thanking God for AIDS or picketing military funerals (with lovely signs such as "Thank God for Dead Soldiers"). Canada also holds hearings determine whether or how to punish magazines that printed the "Mohammed cartoons." Such a thing is unthinkable in the U.S.
We can, of course, argue about whether the U.S.'s influence abroad is laudable or baneful. I think both sides can make strong cases and it really depends on which you want to focus on. (E.g. George W. Bush is enormously popular in Africa, not so much in Europe.)
Certainly, one of the more fascinating things I've learned living abroad is how generally sophisticated and specific people's gripes with the US are. The disparity in G.W. Bush's popularity according to continent is a perfect example of that. Similarly, Bill Clinton is practically a folk hero in Vietnam (having lifted the trade embargo) while Dubya is regarded as a war criminal.
With regards to the Canada/US comparison, I've debated this as far back as high school, when my civil liberties teacher and I sat down with the Bill of Rights and the (CDN) Charter of Rights & Freedoms for a side-by-side comparison. Though each was tailored strikingly well to its respective country, to apply one to its neighbour would be nothing short of disastrous. I'm convinced that the most significant differences (e.g. Canadian "hate speech" laws) stem entirely from the fact that Canada is 10 million square kilometers (US is 9.8) with a mere ninth of the population.
If I one of my "unknown knowns" is a sincere desire to see America toppled as King of the Mountain, it doesn't extend as far as wanting total, apocalyptic pandemonium, bloodshed, strife, and suffering - 'cuz I don't wish that on anybody. But I do find the idea that a single nation can play the global bully repulsive; I resent this (as opposed to envy it, as China does). Obviously, one has to be careful of what one wishes for: there are many far worse nations that could occupy that privileged position. (China, Saudi Arabia, Russia...)
I will take you at your word then. You have to forgive my suspicion of anyone who seriously considers the anniversary of September 11th as an appropriate time to even consider engaging in anti-American propaganda. (E.g. if you are someone who wants to oppose the state of Israel, that is your right. Making a point of doing so on the anniversary of Kristallnacht is going to have connotations you may wish to avoid.)
I actually don't wish to criticize Canada which I think is a fabulous country. I do wonder if their record on material success would be so high if they didn't have a friendly United States to the south of them, though. Canada is by far our biggest trade partner. We import only slightly more from China than from Canada ($323 billion to $312 billion) and Canada is the recipient of the lion's share of our exports ($213 billion; Mexico is second at $119 billion).
It is to Canada's credit that they do such a good job of maintaining high living standards and managing inequality. There's no question that inequality is a bug of the U.S. system, not a feature. Perhaps it is a necessary bug (e.g. the U.S. may be the world's indispensable capitalist nation - without the U.S.'s capitalist market for pharmaceuticals, would any research on such drugs be done at all?) and perhaps it isn't necessary. I don't honestly know. I don't sweat it too much since the poor in America are indisputably better off than the poor virtually anywhere else. So I tend to favor things like AIDS prevention, malaria prevention, and combatting malnutrition in Third World countries before I sweat American inequality.
One last quick word in my own defense: I didn't actually post any anti-American propaganda on Sept. 11, though I thought about it. (But again, as far as propaganda goes, it would've been closer to anything you'd hear at a Chomsky lecture than to moronic "great satan" sloganeering.) Gimme some credit: I'm not the kind of sadist who'd propose a game of catch with an amputee.
Glad you like Canada. We try our best! Both countries have indisputably benefited from the proximity & familiar relations: y'all have the goods, we've got the natural resources, etc. This has caused no small degree of confusion in terms of Canadian identity: as recently as twenty years ago, the closest we could come to self-definition was "not quite like the Americans." Trudeau put it best, I think.
And though I do think Canada, as a country, has managed admirably to maintain living standards & equality, I again cite our low population as a key factor. We're ludicrously lucky to have a country so large, resource-rich, yet sparsely populated.
Finally: yes, there are obviously bigger fish to fry than income disparity within the world's wealthiest developed nations. The key difference here is where our sympathy ends: for me, it ends with those who've lost their asses over the past 2 weeks; for you, it would appear to end with those lowest on the American economic ladder.
Love the quote from Trudeau. I'm going to put that one up there with Porfirio Diaz's "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States."
And, yes, I do agree that your actual September 11th post was very tasteful. In a debate on CNN once, William Bennett asked Chomsky why he chose to live in the United States. Chomsky replied, "I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop." If Chomsky said things like that more often, more people would take him seriously.
I'm not sure resources matter as much as you might think. Hong Kong doesn't have any resources and they're rich as Croesus. As for inequality, though, don't forget that homogeneity is a huge advantage. Japan isn't particularly resource-rich and the U.N. gives it the second best figure for the least inequality in the world (after Denmark), measured by the Gini coefficient.
I wouldn't say that I don't have sympathy for America's lower classes; I am, after all, from America's lower classes - the child of a single mother, wrong side of the tracks, poor schools, and all that. (I don't wish to make too much of this. Inner city kids have me beat by a mile in the poverty sweepstakes.) But we have solved most of the easily solved problems for America's poor. (American poor do not die of malaria or malnutrition.) The rest are either insoluble (mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction), soluble only by unacceptably draconian measures (crime), or through massive monetary transfers, whereas we can save many lives very cheaply in the Third World. We have limited resources; we have to prioritize.
The single exception to the above, by the way, is our health care system. I do honestly believe that a free market health care system would work best, but it's highly unlikely we can get there from here, so I'm hardly committed to the idea. Many, many systems would be better than our present 50% employer-provided system and 50% government-paid through Medicare and Medicaid.
By the way, I am curious why you think hate speech laws are more appropriate to Canada than the U.S. It seems like hate speech laws would be more useful here with our more heterogeneous population. Or is it that you think they'd be politically unacceptable here because the group in power would be likely to use them to their own advantage? (Which is a good argument.)
The heterogenous US population is at the crux of why anti-hate speech laws wouldn't work. By outlawing any "inflammatory" speech against whatever minority characteristic those in power may be possessed of (religion, ethnicity, party affiliation), the authorities could effectively censor most legtimiate criticism (as Castro did when he outlawed "anti-revolutionary" political criticism).
Population size also matters. Again, Canada has 1/9th the people of the US. Fred Phelps may be a singularly loathsome meatsack, but how many silent supporters does he have throughout the country lurking like snakes in the grass? In Canada, it's more feasible to legally stigmatise "haters" (for lack of a better term) because there are sufficiently few that they can all be found & subpoenaed. Good luck doing that with every Holocaust-denying N.O.I.-er in America.
I didn't mean to imply you're devoid of sympathy for everyone below the poverty line in America; again, neither of us are dyed-in-the-wool misanthropes. I put it rather clumsily. Rather, I meant to note that, for each of us, there is a demographic whose problems can be deferred as a matter of global priority; it's just slightly amusing that our respective "they can wait" demographics lie at opposite ends of the ladder.
Certainly resources aren't everything when it comes to economic wealth, and yes, Hong Kong, Japan, even the UK would be perfect examples of that. But their economies were & are built upon the transfer of illiquid assets (finance), manufacturing (before), and services (now). Canada, on the other hand, has never been a leader in any of these fields. Geographically, we're not a convenient hub like Hong Kong or Israel. Our population is too small & diffuse to be a service or manufacturing titan (not to mention our country is huge, and so thusly are shipping costs). But we've got a lot of that natural wealth. Just ask the Chinese. They've been buying up our mining, oil, and timber interests like gangbusters.
I think you may also overestimate the role homogeneity plays in Canada's stability. (Though it certainly figures in Japan - the foreign population there is a piddling 1.6%) After all, non-Hispanic whites still make up more than 2/3s of the American population and constitute a majority in 46 states. That's reading hetero-/homogeneity in a very superficial way, mind you. Canadians are far more culturally homogenous, in the regard that Canadians are more likely to define themselves by their citizenship, as opposed to Americans who cling more tenaciously to their ancestral identites.
Population size also matters. Again, Canada has 1/9th the people of the US. Fred Phelps may be a singularly loathsome meatsack, but how many silent supporters does he have throughout the country lurking like snakes in the grass?
Virtually none. The only people who show up to his protests are members of his church, all of whom are related to him by blood or marriage.
I didn't mean to imply you're devoid of sympathy for everyone below the poverty line in America; again, neither of us are dyed-in-the-wool misanthropes. I put it rather clumsily. Rather, I meant to note that, for each of us, there is a demographic whose problems can be deferred as a matter of global priority; it's just slightly amusing that our respective "they can wait" demographics lie at opposite ends of the ladder.
I think again that you are putting words into my mouth. I have not a lot of sympathy for the American poor, given how rich they are globally. How much sympathy do you honestly think I have for the American rich?
I think you may also overestimate the role homogeneity plays in Canada's stability. (Though it certainly figures in Japan - the foreign population there is a piddling 1.6%) After all, non-Hispanic whites still make up more than 2/3s of the American population and constitute a majority in 46 states. That's reading hetero-/homogeneity in a very superficial way, mind you. Canadians are far more culturally homogenous, in the regard that Canadians are more likely to define themselves by their citizenship, as opposed to Americans who cling more tenaciously to their ancestral identites.
Excepting the Quebecois, of course. If you actually looked at the inequality in U.S. states which are as homogeneous as Canada (say, the Midwest), you'll find that there's very little inequality. All the inequality exists in states like New York and California with very heterogeneous populations. The Canadians self-identify with citizenship because that is their ancestral identity. An extremely large percentage of Canadians are white people of British or Irish descent (probably in excess of 70%). The only other reasonably large groups are French descent (approximately 15%) and German descent (approximately 10%). (Of course, some people are in both groups; I'm not claiming 95% of the population is white.) Of those two, the French are vastly more separate in Canada than in the U.S. (where they are thoroughly assimilated) and the Germans are thoroughly assimilated in both countries. (In fact, Germans are the U.S.'s largest nationality, even beating out the English and Irish.)
About the only population which never really assimilated in the U.S. are the unique case of blacks. Due to slavery and Jim Crow and their high visibility, it was impossible for them to do so. (The Hispanics will assimilate eventually, despite xenophobic paranoia on the part of some in the right.)
RE: Phelps
When I say "silent supporters," I mean "silent." Obviously, the knuckle-scraping bigots who join his rallies wouldn't qualify as such. I'm talking about people who dare not speak publicly (or even privately) in support of Phelps (or Falwell or whoever) but honestly think, "Yeah, Katrina, 9/11, casualties of the Iraq war - this is God's divine wrath for being lenient on homos, darkies, pinkos, etc."
RE: Assumed sympathy
Okay, didn't mean to ventriloquise you there. Unless stated otherwise, from here on out the assumed regard towards others is "whatever."
RE: Canadian homogeneity
"Except the Quebecois" - actually, no. They've got no love for their ancestry. Possibly the only people the Quebecois consider with more contempt than Anglophones (especially us Albertans) are the French. Call it sibling rivalry, call it an insecurity of authenticity, call it totally misplaced arrogance born on the wings of the ugliest accent outside of Baltimore - but I ain't lying.
Also, given that the French successfully established colonies in Canada before the English (and that 8 of 22 prime ministers have hailed from Quebec), the Quebecois often consider themselves somehow more quintessentially Canadian than anyone else.
There are also plenty of counterexamples to the idea that homogeneity brings prosperity throughout Canada. Nova Scotia, for example, has more crackers than Nabisco (roughly 93% of UK/French/German ancestry) but boasts a larger income gap than any province except Alberta (average income in the top 20% is 8.5 times that of the bottom 20%), and the lowest average income within that bottom 20% of any province. Alberta, on the other hand, is the second most ethnically-diverse province (after BC) and, despite the largest wealth gap, has the second-lowest child poverty rate in the country (behind PEI) of only 12.2% - a full 4.6% less than the national average.
When I say "silent supporters," I mean "silent." Obviously, the knuckle-scraping bigots who join his rallies wouldn't qualify as such. I'm talking about people who dare not speak publicly (or even privately) in support of Phelps (or Falwell or whoever) but honestly think, "Yeah, Katrina, 9/11, casualties of the Iraq war - this is God's divine wrath for being lenient on homos, darkies, pinkos, etc."
I doubt there are many even silent supporters. 1) Phelps's resolution of the Problem of Evil is, shall we say, not very popular. (If I read it right, his resolution is "there is no evil; everything bad that happens to people happens because they deserve it.") 2) Even if we assume that there are people who agree with this theory, so what? That's not what makes Phelps a bad person. What makes him a bad person is that he shows up to people's funerals, waving his placards saying "they deserved what they got." Phelps isn't evil because he believes evil things (there isn't anything particularly evil about his philosophy that I can see), but because the man has the most appalling manners in the civilized world.
By the way, Falwell wasn't that bad. He wasn't a terribly bright man and put his foot in his mouth pretty much continuously, but he always apologized afterward for the stupid things he said. Quoting from Wikipedia, "Falwell told MSNBC's Tucker Carlson that if he were a lawyer, he too would argue for civil rights for gays. 'I may not agree with the lifestyle, but that has nothing to do with the civil rights of that part of our constituency,' Falwell said. When Carlson countered that conservatives 'are always arguing against "special rights" for gays,' Falwell said that equal access to housing, civil marriage, and employment are basic rights, not special rights. 'Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or conservative value. It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on.'"
If you wish to use Pat Robertson as your example though, I have no objection. Robertson is a mean-spirited bigot; Falwell was not.
Good points about Canada; I didn't know half that stuff. I'm much better at American migrations and attitudes, for obvious reasons.
But if we look at U.S. states, we find that the top two states are border states (lots of illegal immigration), those being Arizona and Texas. (Arizona, of course, also has wealthy retirees and many American Indians, whose lack of economic success remains a great stain on our country.) Those are followed by New York and New Jersey, ethnically diverse urban populations (and firmly ruled by the political left). Meanwhile, the least inequality is found in Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Alaska, North Dakota, Idaho, and Montana. It isn't until tenth with Delaware when we find a state which isn't dominated by homogeneity. (Delaware has 69.0% non-Hispanic whites compared to 66.4% for the U.S. as a whole, though, so it's still slightly less diverse than the nation as a whole.) My only real point is that if we compare Canada to the ethnically comparable U.S. Midwest, I'd guess that the U.S. actually has more equality. (In Wyoming, the top 5% have incomes only 8 times as great as the bottom 20%.)
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