Partial Readings: Problems and Prospects

Partial Readings: Problems and Prospects

Partial Readings: Problems and Prospects

The Iron Dome, the Flotilla, and the Unions
Alan Johnson spoke in March at a security roundtable in Tel Aviv:

Israel is about to deploy the Iron Dome [a missile shield]. The Palestinians are about to deploy another flotilla. Each seems to symbolize something important. The Dome is defensive, reactive, militarised, high-tech, and most likely ruinously expensive. The flotilla is dynamic, offensive, civil, politicised, cheap, and media-friendly. It leverages global network power. The Israeli ?Dome-approach? is tactical and local while the Palestinians? ?Flotilla-approach? is strategic and global.

Meanwhile, British public sector union UNISON has decided to maintain ties with the Histadrut (the Israeli organization of trade unions), at the urging of Palestinian unionists. ?The [Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions] in particular said that UNISON should maintain links with the Histadrut so that we could specifically put pressure on them to take a more vocal public stance against the occupation and the settlements.?

Where Are the White-Collar Criminals?
Yesterday the New York Times issued a lengthy report to answer the question ?why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted??

[S]everal years after the financial crisis, which was caused in large part by reckless lending and excessive risk taking by major financial institutions, no senior executives have been charged or imprisoned, and a collective government effort has not emerged. This stands in stark contrast to the failure of many savings and loan institutions in the late 1980s. In the wake of that debacle, special government task forces referred 1,100 cases to prosecutors, resulting in more than 800 bank officials going to jail….

Former prosecutors, lawyers, bankers and mortgage employees say that investigators and regulators ignored past lessons about how to crack financial fraud….

?When regulators don?t believe in regulation and don?t get what is going on at the companies they oversee, there can be no major white-collar crime prosecutions,? said Henry N. Pontell, professor of criminology, law and society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. ?If they don?t understand what we call collective embezzlement, where people are literally looting their own firms, then it?s impossible to bring cases.?

Meanwhile, Jeff Madrick expresses doubts that last year?s financial reform will prevent future abuses:

[T]he Dodd-Frank Act has largely pushed responsibility for writing and implementing the new rules onto existing regulators…These regulators are by and large the same agencies that tolerated the excessively risky behavior in the first place. Even if they write effective rules they will face pressure from Wall Street lobbyists and mostly Republican legislators to soften restrictions and eliminate some of the critical ones. If the restrictions remain intact, which is likely in view of the Democratic majority in the Senate, the question remains whether the regulators will enforce them vigorously once the economy recovers and the crisis fades in memory. Several agencies have already missed the deadlines to write new rules. Some are worried that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be neutralized by Congress. Wall Street spent $2.7 billion on lobbying between 1999 and 2008 and is lobbying vigorously again.

Information Blindness
From n+1:

Just as this is an age of great wealth inequality, it is also an age of great inequality of knowledge or, more exactly, factual information. For all its democratic potential, the fact-filled internet has only heightened the pre-Google asymmetry between those, on one side, loyal to Baconian methods of patient, inductive gathering of facts ? the ways of the card catalog and the archive, of the analysis and evaluation of empirical data ? and those, on the other side, who didn?t need to read Foucault or the Frankfurt School to nurture a suspicion that positivist orders of knowledge mask a hierarchy of power in which they are meant to occupy the lowest rungs.

It?s the Republican Party?s deliberate disinformation strategy, more than any properties inherent in so-called information technologies, that has created these two parallel Americas….

[E]ven the most explicitly political acts of data gathering and collecting, like WikiLeaks, can succumb to a contemporary ideology of the self-sufficiency of information….But information alone, like technology alone, won?t lead us into a promised postpolitical land of enlightened technocracy. Ideological battles must still be won or lost

Sven Birkerts, in Lapham?s Quarterly:

For all its openness to profundity and creative insight, maybe precisely because of that, idleness is deemed objectionable. Creative insight is so often an implicit questioning of the rationales of the status quo….

New variables have been thrust into our midst?or, more likely, we have evolved our way into them. The old definitions of activity, the sturdy distinctions between work and leisure, have been broken down by the encompassing currents of digitized living. Obviously industry has not vanished, nor industriousness, but it has widened and blurred its spectrum to include the myriad tasks we accomplish with our fingertips. The spaces and the physical movements of work and play are often nearly identical now, and our commerce with the world, our work life, is far more sedentary and cognitive than ever before. Purposeful doing is now shadowed at every step with the possibilities of distraction. How do we conceive of idleness in this new context?…

Who still idles? Sieving with the mind?s own Google I pull up a few names: the late W. G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson in her reverie-paced scenemaking, Nicholson Baker in The Anthologist?But finally there are few exemplars. Most contemporary prose, I find, agitates; it creates a caffeinated vibration that is all about competing stimuli and the many ways that the world overruns us. Idleness needs atmospheres of indolence to survive. It is an endangered condition that asks for a whole different climate of reading, one that is not about information, or self-betterment, or keeping up with the latest book-club flavor, but exists just for itself, idyllic, intransitive.

To End on a Positive Note
David Greenberg explains why practically every ?book aspiring to analyze a social or political problem….finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book.? In part, it?s the ?sheer difficulty of devising answers to complex social problems that are sound, practicable and not blindingly obvious.? Sometimes, it?s that ?editors expect them.? But mostly, it?s the author (and particularly the American author) who is at fault: ?almost all succumb to the hubristic idea that they can find new and unique ideas for solving intractable problems.”