Cyprus and the Quest for Safe Havens

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.

As the European financial crisis waxes and wanes, one hears a familiar refrain in the business press and on such business-boosting media as CNBC. When the risk of default in Greece or Spain appears imminent, US Treasury bonds increase in value and thereby decline in yield. The popularity of and extraordinarily low yields on such bonds are explained as manifestations of a "flight to safety."

Unfortunately the media seldom ask whether there is any safe haven any more and whether individuals managing their pension accounts can or should be asked to find the havens on their own. The latest twist in the saga of the European union's single currency, the Euro, is anything but reassuring on this score.

Is there any safer haven than money in an insured saving account or certificate of deposit? The decision by the government of Cyprus---albeit later amended---to tax, i.e. partially confiscate, even small deposits exposes one more finger of instability in the world financial structure. Ellen Brown, president of the Public Banking Institute, reminds us that: "Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor's funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank's, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay."

If we do not have an absolute title to the money we deposit in a bank, what happens if the bank experiences a run? In this context it is important to recognize that even prudent, well run banks---and there are many---can experience runs started by false rumors regarding the bank's solvency. The bank may face more demands for deposit redemption than it has in reserves and thus becomes bankrupt, one more ugly manifestation of the self-fulfilling prophecies that can grip social life.

In the process of the bank's efforts to survive it may call in loans and thus endanger the "real" goods and services economy. Thus one of the most important lessons of the 1930's was the need for not only a central bank that could loan money to banks facing temporary liquidity problems but also a well- financed bank insurance program and regular bank inspections by federal regulators. These could guarantee depositors their funds and thus eliminate any need for depositors to worry constantly about the solvency of their banks.

Even if there is no further fall out from Cyprus's hint that it might repudiate its obligations to depositors, the very suggestion that governments and banks might rob ordinary depositors may eventually roil world markets. Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis points out that this episode is one more indicator of the depth of the financial crisis and of how desperate elites have become to retain their power.

It is even more disturbing when we recognize that this incident was hardly an aberration. Brown points out: "Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone "troika" officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making..."

True, central banks in nations that control their own currencies, such as the US or the UK, can print and inflate their way out of such dilemmas, but inflation can damage not only wealthy creditors but also some middle class retirees whose major "safe" investment was in government bonds.

These concerns are music to the ears of the gold bugs, those guys on television urging us to buy gold as a hedge against the collapse of our "fiat money." Presumably we can stash our gold under the mattress rather than in a bank. (Brown warns safe deposit boxes at banks are already subject to search in the event of a national emergency, and a financial panic would surely be deemed one.) We can then use it to purchase necessities when all the banks are closed and depositors are denied their hard earned dollars. But now we must watch our homes like a hawk in the realization that our whole life's earnings may evaporate through theft or fire. All that is solid does melt into thin air. For me, politics and the world seem to have come full circle. During the Great Depression my father went through medical school on $4,000 in gold his grandfather had stuffed under a bed.

There is a deeper lesson here. There probably is no safe haven for the individual retiree or investor. Our safe money in a bank depends on the political decision by bank regulators and ultimately the Federal Reserve and/or the US Congress to adequately fund deposit insurance programs and more generally to issue sufficient funds for the government to pay off its debts. Republicans in Congress have threatened the latter with their absurd and dangerous debt limit blackmail. If the political stink about taxpayer bailout of banks ever became sufficient, banks and their servants might pick on ordinary depositors. As one extraordinarily honest investment banker put it in an e mail exchange with me, "The issue with currency is when the 'full faith' fails. The institution of money is only as sturdy as the institutions that have grown up around it. There is risk in any and all investment be it government securities, corporate bonds, or equities."

The best safe haven remains universal, government financed programs like Social Security. Hence the desperation of the financial community to argue against all logic and evidence that it is becoming insolvent. The existence of this universal, nation-wide program is a major reason the US has weathered the financial crisis far better than the Eurozone, whose nation states have widely disparate social insurance programs. Here in the US Social Security as well as unemployment compensation act as automatic stabilizers, keeping private consumer demand from total collapse.

When I get into a survivalist mode---and all of us must from time to time---I think it best to invest my surplus earnings in tangible energy savings like solar collectors, photovoltaics, insulation etc. Here the returns to the pocket book and environment are tangible and tax- free. But many are not fortunate enough to have the capital for such initial investments and the success of such investment strategies still depends on subsidy levels and the skill sets of others.

My father used to say that stocks and bonds were just paper the value of which could disappear at a moments notice. The only true wealth was one's education. Today stocks and bonds are if anything even more ephemeral, mere keyboard strokes. I would add that our wealth is not only education but also the collaborative relations we can frame today to sustain universal safety nets and a more ecological infrastructure. Retiring to our basement safes, our ethnic enclaves, even our green bungalows won't get that done.

How do we come together to form a collective safety net in this world of rapid population flows, pluralizing modes of dress, family arrangements, styles of music and art? Some hope to restore a notion of idealized communities held together by a set of "core values" that emerge through and are refined by democratic discourse. Paul Krugman appeals to a Rawlsian vision of the social norms we would arguably all choose if we had no foreknowledge of the genetic endowment and family wealth into which we would be born. Both perspectives have their strengths and weaknesses. Debates in which both sides acknowledge the elements of uncertainty in their own positions will need to play a large role in any successful struggle for an effective safety net.

My wish is for an even more genuinely ecumenical and open ended conversation that moves not only beyond the vision of stable market equilibriums but also the certainties of the Rawslian and communitarian moral perspectives. My suspicion is that these sides share more than either acknowledges and both need some fresh challenges.Rather than seeing ethical awareness as flowing from a fixed teleology or some absolute imperative some contemporary theorists, often mislabeled "postmodern" and characterized as nihilists, present an alternative but clearly affirmative ethical perspective. Thus Jane Bennett, author of Vibrant Matter, suggests: "the starting point of ethics [may be] less the acceptance of [the impossibility of full knowledge and control] and more the recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materiality... The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perpetually open to it." And William Connolly, author of A World of Becoming, sees ethics as "anchored first and foremost in presumptive care for the diversity of life and the fecundity of the earth. ...Our goal is to intensify or amplify a care for this world that already courses through us to some degree...One advantage of an ethic of cultivation in a world of becoming is that it can bring this care to bear on new and unexpected situations."

We need to act in minor and major ways to build a militant assemblage of minorities of multiple types who are dedicated to ecology and equality. My aspiration is to cultivate appreciation for a world of proliferating life style minorities. Such a world would emerge and be sustained by already evolving debates among various theistic and nontheistic ethics. This may seem to be a utopian dream, but it strikes me as a more humane and even more attainable "safe haven" than any offered by the market or the conventional moralists.

Republicans ♥ Hobbes

Steven Johnston

Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan, a controversial work arguing for the creation of a mortal god on earth answerable to no this-worldly power. Only the constitution of such a government could preempt the war, Hobbes’s fearsome state of nature, into which humankind would descend in its absence. Hobbes was not so much making an historical claim about the transition from a prepolitical condition to civil society as he was warning people already living in such a society about their future prospects should they fail to heed his political recommendations. Another way to put the matter: radical demands for untrammeled freedom, if taken seriously, would lead to civil war, each against all. Liberty left unchecked annihilates itself. Hobbes thus tried to shock and awe his readers by depicting an all too possible nightmare centered around the want of absolute government: “In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the Face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Remarkably, the contemporary Republican Party, aided and abetted at key moments by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, has effectively embraced Hobbes’s state of nature as an ideal to be pursued rather than a calamity to be avoided. Republicans are hostile to the very idea of government as a collective and social good. For them government, by definition, imposes illegitimate limits on human conduct. It’s not just that they privilege the workings of a so-called free market, code for letting corporations and other major economic players do as they will in a game neatly rigged to their advantage regardless of consequences; it’s not just that they obstruct, at almost every possible turn and through any means available, the ability of the state to act even in the most rudimentary fashion on behalf of the sovereign people it supposedly represents; it’s that they seek a world in which the people, save for the entitled one percent who receive special treatment, have to fend for themselves and live subject to a host of forces, circumstances, events, and happenings well beyond their control, as if doing so is to live in keeping with the natural order of things. For Republicans this amounts to the good life, though it is not necessarily any kind of recognizable society.

The consequences of Republican depredations and Democratic collaboration are manifest everywhere. Domestically, the country continues to suffer from a self-induced depression, the capricious continuation of which serves Republican values and interests. The GOP refuses to consider stimulus measures that would put people back to work and erase deficits. The success of such measures would defeat Republican ambitions to shrink and eliminate government and redistribute wealth upwards, two projects of great passion. Austerity means destruction and death for countless people, but innumerable personal catastrophes cannot compete with the evil that is government and the joy animating its dissolution. For the GOP it is preferable to ruin and compromise the lives of tens of millions than to have government intervene to assist them. As if prizing a nasty and brutish existence weren’t enough, the GOP doesn’t mind if it’s short either. Thus tens of thousands of people die annually from gun violence, which includes children killing children, as Republicans, at least nationally, refuse to consider the possibility of gun regulation. This also requires that government not be allowed to fund research into the public health consequences of gun violence, what with the danger of potential remedial action. For Republicans ignorance is indeed bliss. The will to ignorance also informs the Florida legislature’s so-called Timely Justice Act, which curtails defense appeals and accelerates the imposition of the death penalty, not despite but precisely because Florida leads the country in both sentencing people to death and subsequently exonerating them. Here Republicans actually prefer to enhance the power of the state when it comes to making war on selected categories of citizens, blacks in particular. It also leads to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voting to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act thirty-seven  times, since it is preferable that people be deprived of insurance coverage and live shorter, less healthy lives rather than have government (further) involved in medical care. Ignorance (not to mention dishonesty and denial) also enables Republicans to dismiss climate change science and the mounting environmental costs to the planet from the civilization of productivity and consumption. It is the American way of life to master the forces of nature and bend them to our every purpose; it is the American right of nature to consume the earth’s resources as called for to sustain a comfortable, pleasurable mode of existence. Republicans affirm, with a kind of bitter glee, legislation and policies that foster American privilege, even if it kills us. And when it does kill us, Republican indifference to the diminution of the central missions of Library of Congress, including digitalization and preservation of the nation’s intellectual record, and corresponding preference for the arbitrary cuts mandated by sequestration, may finally make sense. Globally, the United States reserves to itself the right of nature, to take any action in the name of security, including the assassination of those formally recognized as citizens. Universal war-making can be accomplished through a military that can invade any territory at will or through an armada of drones ready to strike individuals anywhere the president points his trigger finger, recently announced restrictions notwithstanding. The infinite projection of power thrills it proponents.

The Republican Party is a political entity driven by myriad resentments. Though it worships power, it generally despises government, especially insofar as it signals the failures of neoliberal capitalism and worse, a collective project dedicated to equality and fairness. The GOP dreams of a world of boundless private accumulation, whether of wealth, guns, status, or control, which the state must protect but with which it must not interfere. It can’t imagine the self-destruction Hobbes posited insofar as it manages to romanticize life in “the natural condition of mankind” as if it were an epic Hollywood western in which the heroic loner prevails against all odds, insofar, that is, as it believes itself immune—for now, anyway—to the horrors it happily unleashes on others. Why Democrats seem increasingly ready to embrace such an understanding of the good is another matter altogether. Their active, willing, even enthusiastic complicity, however, cannot be in doubt, starting with Barack Obama.

The Keystone XL Pipeline Scenario

Kaushik Rao is a political theory student at Johns Hopkins University working on capitalism and ecology.

Last year, oil companies such as TransCanada, Valero, and others pushed for the completion of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry heavy crude oil from the Alberta tar sands in Canada, through several Midwestern U.S. states, and down into the oil refineries of the Gulf of Mexico. Since the pipeline crosses the U.S.-Canadian border, it is an international project and therefore needs to be approved by the State Department and the White House Administration. A decision on the approval of the permit to build the pipeline is expected by July. The United States government needs to prevent construction of the Keystone pipeline because it would have extremely negative consequences for America on economic and environmental grounds.

One of the main sources of pressure to approve the pipeline is the oil lobby’s marketing campaign that aims to convince Americans that increasing domestic oil production will decrease gas prices here in the U.S. But the fact of the matter is that increasing domestic oil production does not decrease oil prices. Those in the oil lobby that argue for increased oil production in the U.S. conveniently neglect to mention that oil is a globally traded commodity that is highly manipulated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Oil markets do not act in the same way that markets for other commodities do, such as corn and steel. The OPEC cartel controls the supply of oil in the world at any one time by increasing or decreasing its production.

The U.S. is left with two scenarios: 1) America starts to buy less oil from foreign countries, which results in OPEC cutting production to decrease the supply of oil which increases prices. 2) America increases its own domestic production of oil to the point where it no longer needs to import oil. This would also be met with subsequent cuts in production by OPEC which would keep world oil prices high. In both scenarios, Americans will be left paying the higher OPEC price because American oil companies would rather export at the higher OPEC price than to sell the oil domestically at the lower U.S. price.

This brings us back to exactly why the Keystone XL pipeline will not help the U.S. economy. If the pipeline is built, American refineries will be pumping out more refined oil than ever before. But this will not increase the supply of oil because of the anticipated cuts in production by OPEC, and thus will not decrease the price of gas in the U.S. If anything, the pipeline would increase the price of gas in the United States because the Keystone pipeline is first and foremost an export pipeline. It would divert oil from the Midwestern states and send it to the Gulf of Mexico where it will then be sent overseas. Since Midwestern refineries would have less oil to work with, gas prices will be expected to increase in the region if the pipeline is built.

The oil lobby also argues that the Keystone pipeline will bring 20,000 permanent jobs and 118,000 “spinoff” jobs to the United States. But this study was entirely funded by an amalgamation of oil companies and thus cannot be fully without bias. In an audit of the same study by the State Department, it was found that the Keystone pipeline would only create 5,000 temporary jobs for two years and at most 20 permanent jobs. Furthermore, the Keystone pipeline would destroy countless more jobs because of spills and leaks from the pipeline. The portion of the pipeline that has already been built has experienced 14 leaks to date. Each of these leaks destroys farmlands and businesses which are then required to shut down which in turn eliminates jobs. 

Exxon pipeline spill in Arkansas, 2013

The Keystone pipeline will have disastrous effects on the United States and will increase the world wide greenhouse gas effect. The type of oil that would travel through the Keystone pipeline is called bitumen, which is a tar-like type of oil. Since bitumen is extremely viscous and flows slowly, it needs to be diluted with natural gas and other hydrocarbons. This diluted bitumen is highly corrosive to pipelines because of its high sulfur concentration, and its high viscosity which increases the friction and temperature inside pipelines. Thus, Keystone XL will be highly susceptible to oil pipeline ruptures which will cause environmental disasters. Another issue with diluted bitumen is that federal regulations are currently not stringent enough to monitor what types of chemicals are added to the oil during the transportation process. In a traditional oil spill, some of the oil can be skimmed off the top of water. But in a diluted bitumen oil spill, the chemicals make the oil heavier which causes the bitumen to sink to the bottom of rivers as we saw in the Mayflower Exxon Mobil oil spill in Arkansas. 

Exxon pipeline spill in Arkansas, 2013

Current greenhouse gas effects have already been the cause of extreme weather events such as Superstorm Sandy which inflicted nearly $80 billion in damages and cut 86,000 jobs from the United States. Burning the recoverable tar sands in Alberta will increase the Earth’s temperature by a minimum of 2 degrees Celsius. The increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the Keystone pipeline will contribute to climate change and create more severe weather events just like Superstorm Sandy which will ruin our nation’s infrastructure and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs in the future. And this pipeline will lock the United States into an expensive and environmentally harmful form of energy for decades to come.

America needs to move away from an economy that is so dependent on oil, which is a job-killing course. Alternative energy is the future and the U.S. government needs to invest more in its development of different types of energy sources such as wind and solar power. They will create far more permanent jobs and support the future of an economy built around sustainable energy. The money that we as a country put in to develop alternative energy sources will be paid back many times over in the forms of new jobs that can’t be outsourced and through less frequent extreme weather events which will reduce the damage to our infrastructure. Oil is the past. Blocking the Keystone pipeline is the first step towards preventing damage to our country’s future.

The Austerity Trap

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.

The Eurozone is in a deep recession. Some members even face conditions not seen since the Great Depression. Spanish unemployment tops 27 percent, with half of its youth unemployed. Not to worry, say the elites of the European Central Bank. Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Greece, aptly abbreviated as the PIIGS, are getting what they deserve. They have spent beyond their means. Once they reduce their deficits—preferably by cutting benefits and services—confidence in the markets will increase and investments will flow in. Swallow your medicine, eat your vegetables, and all will be okay. Here in the US, despite persistent unemployment, budget deficits remain an obsession, at least with the elites. This conventional wisdom now has a new name, expansionary austerity. Austerity in its various forms and guises is the subject of a comprehensive and provocative new study, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Brown University political economist Mark Blyth.

Blyth cites the many failings in this diagnosis and prognosis. Some of these will not be unfamiliar to regular readers of Paul Krugman's New York Times column and blog, but Blyth more fully acknowledges the importance of uncertainty in economic life, attributes more significance to the role of investment banking, and develops an interdisciplinary approach to the crisis.

With the exception of Greece, none of the PIIGS had levels of debt that disturbed markets in earlier eras. Ireland and Spain were models of fiscal rectitude. The sovereign debt crisis emerged only after their private sector banks had inflated a massive real estate bubble. This process was driven by a major transformation in the private banking world. In the eighties, as banks lost customers to the corporate short-term capital markets, they needed another business model. That model evolved to include consolidating and offloading mortgage securities. These securities bundled many homes at different levels of borrower economic strength. Risk calculations for each level were based on sophisticated mathematical models. These assumed a normal, bell curve shaped, distribution with Texas housing losses during the 1980s S & L meltdown of 40%, the worst in their sample, as the outer bound, lowest probability event. This market was further pumped up by a new form of security, the Credit Default Swap (CDS). These allowed purchasers of these multilayered securities to obtain insurance against their default.

Assuming a normal distribution, bank economists argued that a 40% decline in value of all mortgages in one of these synthetic securities was a once in a third of the life of the universe event. But as Blyth points out, "if you haven't been around for a third of the life of the universe, then how can you know what is possible over that time period? It is the assumed distribution that tells you what is possible, not your experience." (Emphasis mine) In addition, the providers of the CDS securities were unregulated, allowing them to become enormously overextended. This concoction had an unforeseeable dynamism not reducible to the sum of the parts. Its creators could not imagine that "the meshing of elements that were each intended to make the world safe, such as mortgage bonds, CDSs, and banks' risk models, could make the world astonishingly less safe. "

In Europe, this model had even worse consequences. Its banks were more concentrated and leveraged than even US banks. They soon became insolvent, threatening the complete collapse of national economies. In order to avoid such disaster, the governments of Ireland and Spain absorbed the debt, thus staining their own once pristine balance sheets.

If government deficits did not cause the problem, public sector retrenchment will not end the financial crisis. Households, having lost much of their net worth in the collapse of the real estate bubble, are reluctant to spend. If governments also slash expenditures, from where does the spending upon which the economy depends come? Your spending is my income. Advocates of expansionary austerity argue that confidence will be restored when governments shrink, thus assuring businesses that future profits will not be taxed away. But business is likely to respond only to tangible demand in the market place rather than to uncertain promises.

But the evolution of mainstream economics from the fifties on had left policy makers with few tools to address the uncertainty and unpredictability of markets. These economists, Paul Samuelson most prominent among them, had reduced Keynes to the contention that economies can be fine tuned by interest rate adjustments or at worst by discrete, specifiable in advance, injections of fiscal stimulus. Market economies were thought to display steady and predictable tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment and policy makers could choose the most desirable point. When the stagflation of the seventies came along, with high unemployment accompanied by high rates of inflation, Chicago school economists had an entry to argue that Keynes was wrong and that markets should thus be left to do their own thing.

Chicago had, however, slayed a paper tiger. Keynes was far more than an advocate of "fine tuning" via fiscal stimulus. He emphasized the uncertainty and unpredictable dynamism of markets. Capital, commodity, and even labor markets can be governed by self-reinforcing swings both internally and with each other in a climate where the future is uncertain. No single fiscal injection or interest rate adjustment can be sure to work. Thus post Keynesian economists like Nicholas Kaldor advocated international commodity reserves, especially for oil and wheat, to limit the damage of commodity speculation. In labor markets, governments could make full employment guarantees, using as much spending as it takes and even direct government hires to restore full employment. Such policies would not abolish capitalism but would rather mitigate its self-destructive potential.

The world, however, has moved in the opposite direction. The Eurozone has no central government with the power to tax and spend. When a bubble in Spain collapses, the Spanish government cannot devalue its currency. Nor can it spend more to reflate its economy and recapitalize its banks without seeing interest rates soar to unsustainable levels. And once markets see this process unfolding in one nation, speculators look around for the next most vulnerable. Their actions often provoke the next crisis. This is a true doomsday machine, as Blyth argues.

The Future of Austerity

Austerity advocates, who like to deem themselves as orthodox scientists swayed by the data, are unmoved by a totality of evidence that would surely prove persuasive in other contexts. How can a doctrine that has consistently failed in practice survive so many reverses? Perhaps the greatest strength of Blyth's work is his explanation of austerity as a leading example of what John Quiggin calls zombie economics. Despite having been killed repeatedly, it lives among us. There is an intellectual and a moral or even identity component to the survival of this bankrupt idea. Lockean notions of government's limited role as defender of individual property and the right to individual appropriation and accumulation of nature's bounty, made possible by money, is a key and deeply embedded theme in American culture. Adam Smith admits the need for government, if only to protect the rich against the envy and ambitions of the poor. But he worries about how to pay for it and is concerned that debt will lead to default and inflation that will erode the wealth of lenders.

Most telling and enduring in Smith is the morality play that so resonates today: "Saving is a virtue, spending is a vice." According to Blyth, Northern European savers "are juxtaposed with profligate Southern Europeans, despite the fact that it is manifestly impossible to have overborrowing without overlending... The conditions of austerity's appearance, parsimony, frugality, morality, and a pathological fear of the consequences of government debt—lie deep within economic liberalism's fossil record from its very inception."

Austerity will not continue forever. The reason for its demise is not its unfairness, though it is. It simply does not work. Continuing rounds of fiscal cuts depress net wealth faster than debt. Eventually populations revolt, not always in sensible and humane ways, as the experience of the Thirties suggests. Blyth makes a powerful case that austerity was a principal cause of the rise of fascism in Japan and Germany and thus of World War II.

Members of Greece's neo-Fascist party, Golden Dawn 

There are alternatives. Blyth guardedly speculates that the current investment bank business model is on its last legs. There may not be any remaining asset classes for investment bankers to "pump and dump." If that is the case, how sad that we have pursued a long, painful austerity to preserve this parasitical creature. Iceland may have been a better role model. Faced with its own banking crisis, it allowed its banks, with assets equal to ten times the nation's GDP, to fail. It recapitalized its banking system at far less cost than keeping its troubled ones alive. It devalued its currency and imposed capital controls so that speculators could not take their funds out of the country. In addition, it stimulated its economy at least until the worst downturn had been prevented. And once the economy started to right itself, government turned toward taxation of the wealthy. Iceland has far outperformed Ireland, which has followed the orthodox austerity course.

Neither Keynes nor Blyth ever said that debt does not matter. But today's heavy debt load is not a result of an irresponsible democratic government. Nor is a deep recession the time for cuts in an already inadequate welfare state. And once growth resumes, taxes would be appropriate—especially on those who have profited most from the bailout of the banks, tax avoidance, or tax rates lower than those paid by typical working citizens. But taxation alone as a path toward economic justice may be a difficult sell in America, where the prevalent mindset is "I earned it and I should get to keep it." Policy should thus also aim for reforms that foster more justice in labor markets. Over the last forty years workers have seen gains in their productivity unmatched by any increase in their real income. In a full employment economy labor can demand its just rewards. And as Dean Baker has pointed out, intellectual property holders and high income professionals use the law to extract monopoly pricing power even as blue collar workers face the perils of the free market.

Banks also merit special attention. Even if their business model is dying, steps might be taken to hasten this process. Blyth suggests financial repression, forcing them to hold low interest government bonds, thus gradually eroding their assets until total national debt is reduced to tolerable levels. In Debunking Economics, Australian economist Steve Keen presents a related idea. He acknowledges that debt forgiveness can hurt creditors, a class that might include workers' pension funds as well as affluent investors. He advocates instead a simple one-time grant of say $50,000, which can be spent only after it has been used to pay down any personal debt. This proposal has several merits. Because it is universal, it would help the thrifty homeowners sufficiently who have paid off most of their mortgage while also aiding those under water from home or student loans.

Other post Keynesian economists have advocated changes in banking law that would make bank executives doubly liable for losses in investment schemes, a measure that would surely change the whole incentive structure of banking. Banks must be returned to their role as handmaidens of industry rather than as parasitical speculators. With such changes the corrosive inequalities of the last decade can be mitigated.

One final thought I draw from Blyth is that combating the dangers of austerity may require more than economic arguments. It will also need an ethical critique, one that awards consumption its place. Such a message may seem dangerous in an era of environmental limits. Consumption, however, need not be limited to the corporate driven consumerism of our era. We might revisit John Kenneth Galbraith's moral critique of two generations ago, with his contrast of private affluence and public squalor. Especially necessary is public sector spending on a new green infrastructure, on preventive health care, university education. Equally important would be public and private art. The gains from technological progress can also be "spent" on more leisure, with all its possibilities, rather than more goods. Austerity is a passionate opponent and demands a multifaceted response.

The Dilemma of Electoral Politics

William E. Connolly
Connolly's forthcoming book is entitled The Fragility of Things: self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, democratic activism.

The dangers posed by climate change and potential shifts in the ocean conveyor system; the extensive suffering generated by the heightening of economic inequality; the need to restructure the state supported infrastructure of consumption so that all residents can participate in the housing, travel, health care, retirement and educational institutions it makes available; the need to support the pluralization of gender practices, religious membership, and ethnic identifications; the desperate needs of our cities and the ugly politics of apartheid designed to isolate them---these interlocking issues constitute commanding problems of our time. The fact is, however, that they are not addressed within the established terms of the electoral system.  Does that mean that we should withdraw from electoral politics? Or wait for a revolution that eschews “reformist” politics until capitalism is liquidated, as some critics of the Occupy movement have asserted? I know too many people suffering in the working class to sanction either response. I read about too many others under duress as well.

There is, nonetheless, a dilemma of electoral politics confronting the Left: 1) It is tempting to forgo electoral politics because it is so dysfunctional. But to do so cedes even more power both to independent corporate action and to the radical right within the state. The right loves to make electoral politics dysfunctional so that people lose confidence in it and transfer confidence to the private sector. (2) Nonetheless, the logic of the media-electoral-corporate system does spawn a restrictive grid of power and electoral intelligibility that makes it difficult to think, experiment, and organize outside its parameters. Think of how corporations and financial institutions initiate actions in the private sector and then use intensive lobbying to veto efforts to reverse those initiatives in Congress or the courts, just as financial elites invented derivatives and then lobbied intensively to stop their regulation; think of how media talking heads concentrate on candidates rather than fundamental issues; recall the central role of scandal in the media and electoral politics; consider the decisive electoral position of inattentive “undecided voters”; note how states under Republican rule work relentlessly to reduce the minority and poor vote; recall those billionaire super pacs; and so on. The electoral grid cannot be ignored or ceded to the right, but it also sucks experimental pursuits and bold ventures out of politics. Can we renegotiate the dilemma of electoral politics? That is the problematic within which I am working. I do not have a perfect response to it. Perfect answers are suspect.

Perhaps it is wise to forge multimodal strategies that start outside the electoral grid and then return to it as one venue among others. Strategic role experimentations at multiple sites joined to the activation of new social movements provide possibilities. Indeed, these two modes are related. Consider merely a few examples of role experimentation tied to climate change and consumption available to many people in the shrinking middle class. We may support the farm-to-table movement in the restaurants we visit; we may participate in the slow food movement; we may frequent stores that offer food based on sustainable processes; we may buy hybrid cars, or, if feasible, join an urban zip-car collective, explaining to friends, family, and neighbors the effects such choices could have on late modern ecology if a majority of the populace did so; we may press our workplace to install solar panels and consider them ourselves if we can afford to do so; we may use writing and media skills to write graffiti, or produce provocative artistic installations, or write for a blog; we may shift a large portion of our retirement accounts into investments that support sustainable energy, withdrawing from aggressive investments that presuppose unsustainable growth or threaten economic collapse; we may bring new issues and visitors to our churches, temples, or mosques to support rethinking interdenominational issues and the contemporary fragility of things; we may found, join, or frequent repair clubs, at which volunteers collect and repair old appliances, furniture, and bikes to cut back on urban waste, to make them available to low income people and to increase the longevity of the items; we may probe and publicize the multimodal tactics by which twenty-four-hour news stations work on the visceral register of viewers, as we explain on blogs how to counter those techniques; we may travel to places where unconscious American assumptions about world entitlement are challenged on a regular basis; we may augment the pattern of films and artistic exhibits we visit to stretch our habitual powers of perception and to challenge some affect-imbued prejudgments embedded in them. A series of intercalated role experiments, often pursued by clusters of participants together.

But don’t such activities merely make the participants “feel better”?  Well, many who pursue such experiments do feel good about them, particularly those who accept a tragic image of possibility in which there is no inevitability that either large scale politics, God, or nature will come to our rescue. Also, could such role experiments ever make a sufficient difference on their own? No. These, however, may be the wrong questions to pose. What such experiments can do as they expand is to crack the ice in and around us. First, we may now find ourselves a bit less implicated in the practices and policies that are sources of the problems. Second, the shaky perceptions, feelings, and beliefs that authorized them may thus now become more entrenched as we act upon them. Third, we now find ourselves in more favorable positions to forge connections with larger constituencies pursuing similar experiments. Fourth, we may thus become more inspired to seed and join macropolitical movements that speak to these issues. Fifth, as we now participate in protests, slowdowns, work “according to rule” and more confrontational meetings with corporate managers, church leaders, union officials, university officers, and neighborhood leaders, we may become even more alert to the creeds, institutional pressures and options that propel these constituencies too. They, too, are both enmeshed in a web of roles and more than mere role bearers. Many will maintain an intransigence of viewpoint and insistence of interpretation that we may now be in a better position to counter by words and deeds with those outside or at the edge of the intransigent community.

One advantage of forging links between role experimentations and social movements is that both speak to a time in which the drive to significant change must be pursued by a large, pluralist assemblage rather than by any single class or other core constituency. Such an assemblage must today be primed and loaded by several constituencies in diverse ways at numerous sites. 

It is necessary here to condense linkages that may unfold. But perhaps movement back and forth between role experiments, social movements, occasional shifts in the priorities of some strategic institutions, and a discernible shift in the contours of electoral politics will promote the emergence of a new, more activist pluralist assemblage. Now, say, a new, surprising event occurs. Some such event or crisis is surely bound to erupt: an urban uprising, a destructive storm, a wild executive overreach, a wide spread interruption in electrical service, a bank melt down, a crisis in oil supply, etc. Perhaps the conjunction of this new event with the preparatory actions that preceded it will prime a large constellation to resist the protofascist responses the intransigent Right will pursue at that very moment.  Perhaps the event will now become an occasion to mobilize large scale, intensive support for progressive change on some of the fronts noted at the start of this piece. It is important to remember that the advent of a crisis does not alone determine the response to it. So waiting for the next one to occur is not enough. The Great Depression was followed by the intensification of fascist movements in several countries. Those with strong labor movements and progressive elected leaders proved best at resisting them. The most recent economic melt-down was met in many places by the self-defeating response of austerity, and worse. That is why the quality and depth of the political ethos preceding such events is important.

The use of the “perhaps” in the above formulations suggests that there are no guarantees at any of these junctures. Uncertainties abound. These points, however, also apply to any radical perspective that counsels waiting for the revolution, as it surrounds its critiques of militant reform with an aura of certainty. Today the need is to curtail the aura of certainty of all perspectives on the Left. The examples posed here, of course, are focused on primarily one constituency. But others could be invoked. The larger idea is to draw energy from multiple sources and constituencies.  The formula is to move back and forth between the proliferation of role experiments, forging social movements on several fronts, helping to shift the constituency weight of the heavy electoral machinery now in place, and participating in cross-country citizen movements that put pressure on states, corporations, churches, universities and unions from inside and outside simultaneously. Indeed, perhaps the severity of the issues facing us means that we should prepare for the day when we are strong enough in several countries to launch a cross-country general strike.   

The proliferating approach adopted here, again, is replete with uncertain connections. That’s politics. The point is to resist falling into the familiar game of optimism vs. pessimism and to minimize that tempting blame-game within the Left, folding more attraction and inspiration into our activities. The point is to appraise the severity of the needs of the day and to attract people to join in different ways and degrees a multifaceted movement to respond to them. 

On the Use and Misuse of Zero Dark Thirty

Steven Johnston
Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

Everybody, it seems, wants a piece of Zero Dark Thirty. Not, perhaps, since Oliver Stone’s JFK has an American film generated such widespread censure. Hollywood insiders, seeking adherents, waged a public relations campaign to deny the film a possible Oscar for best picture. From The New York Review of Books to Rolling Stone, the Atlantic to The New Yorker, the Huffington Post and beyond, Zero Dark Thirty has been maligned, denounced, and dismissed. Jane Mayer concludes a moralizing assessment by declaring: “Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ should care a little bit more.” Matt Taibbi finds the storytelling problematic and asks “all the people defending the movie, what do you think Dick Cheney’s review is going to be?” As if that rhetorical question weren’t enough, Taibbi adds, redundantly: “Isn’t it just a crazy coincidence that he’s probably going to love it?” Alex Gibney, literally unable to control his indignation, adopts a similar moralizing posture: “I feel I must say something. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have been irresponsible…” As for their film, “it is fundamentally reckless.” Politicians have also gotten into the act. Senators Feinstein, Levin, and McCain have ripped the film for its factual inaccuracies and demanded the studio make changes to it. Why these extreme reactions? Zero Dark Thirty, in short, supports or endorses torture. It’s as simple as that. Or is it?

Many of Zero Dark Thirty’s critics condemn the film for blurring the putative line between fact and fiction, history and creative storytelling, for invoking the verisimilitude and authenticity the one provides and the artistic license the other affords. Gibney, representing many, is succinct: “You can’t have it both ways.” This is a peculiar position to take not just because some combination of fact and fiction composes all of our lives, but because in this film the indecipherable combination mimics beautifully the post-September 11 understanding of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and those doing their dirty work. Nevertheless, with this unexamined interpretive first principle securely in place, Mayer proceeds to criticize the film for being consistently wrong, comparing its account of events to “reality,” with reality always winning. Not only is the depiction of torture and the results it produces false, Mayer also rebukes the film for failing to convey the actual character of the torture debate within the Bush Administration, where the FBI, among other institutional players, rejected the CIA’s brutality and refused to participate in its interrogation program. This is just one example Mayer cites of dissent within the Administration. The lack of dissenting voices to American torture further incenses critics. It, too, is tantamount to endorsement. What’s worse, according to Mayer, the film offers a scene in which President Obama, in the background, denounces torture on “60 Minutes.” Given the success that torture has (allegedly) already enjoyed in the film, Mayer insists this opposition comes across as “wrongheaded and prissy.”

These criticisms suffer from a number of shortcomings, as do their critics, who, apparently, don’t want the assassination of Osama bin Laden needlessly spoiled by torture’s taint (might that make it more difficult to dance and cheer in front of the White House?). Principal among them, I would like to suggest, is genre confusion. Mayer calls Zero Dark Thirty a “police procedural.”  Taibbi thinks it’s a “detective story” with an “action-movie plot.” Gibney and Steve Coll think of it, with prodding from the filmmakers, in journalistic and historical terms. It’s not that these categories might not offer productive interpretive lenses, but they not only seem designed to set up the angry criticisms that follow, they also miss important opportunities for a more dialectical engagement with the film.

What if we read Zero Dark Thirty as a revenge tragedy? What if we read the film as revealing a country informed by a sense of rightness and victimization hell-bent on retaliating for wrongs done to it and thus blind to any possible consequences for itself, let alone the world? These imperial presumptions animate Zero Dark Thirty’s two main characters, Dan and Maya. They practice torture as a matter of course, living in a culture of torture: publicly speaking, results alone matter. Following the September 11 attacks, they presume its necessity as well as its efficacy. The film also displays torture as a reassertion of American power and mastery. We are entitled to the world; we will take it (back) on our terms and enjoy doing so. Dan, for one, revels in the power torture expresses. It feels right, even good following 9/11. Still does the film itself endorse any of this? Characters in a film may believe something to be true and act accordingly with conviction—that, however, doesn’t make it true. Nor does it mean that this is the film’s perspective. Gibney insists that “Maya is a glamorous heroine [and] we identify with her.” Do we? This is not clear to me, but it isn’t necessarily problematic, especially given the film’s conclusion, as long as the identification is weak and temporary, since she is a criminal awaiting her day in court, whether it ever comes or not.

Torture, then, plays a prominent (visual) role in the film, but what does it mean to say that Zero Dark Thirty supports or justifies torture? This (alleged) aspect of the film is particularly galling, so the argument goes, because torture played no role in locating or eliminating bin Laden. It is thus historically inaccurate, morally repellent, and politically dangerous. Whether the film effectively advocates the use of torture is not only a question difficult to answer, it may actually miss the point.

The case for torture tends to rely, ultimately, on the coercive power of a ticking time bomb scenario. “Who would not agree to torture as long as it would save (an untold number of) innocent lives,” advocates demand to know? Once such agreement is exacted, it (supposedly) opens the floodgates to an otherwise forbidden practice. Torture, then, justifies itself along narrow instrumental lines. We need to know something now to stop an unspeakable atrocity from happening and torture alone can produce the necessary knowledge. Proponents of torture, that is, do not justify it by claiming that if enough people are captured and subjected to criminal treatment, sooner or later a piece of information might be generated that, in turn, might prove useful at a later date, even ten years later, for another purpose altogether. Yet is that not roughly the brutal, ugly scenario depicted in Zero Dark Thirty? Doesn’t the torture depicted feature a man, Ammar, who may or may not be a Saudi, being questioned on a matter having nothing whatsoever to do with Osama bin Laden or his location? What’s more, torture does not actually get Ammar to talk. Two C.I.A. agents trick Ammar into believing he has talked (but has no memory of it), thus leading him actually to talk. True, they are clever enough to take advantage of torture’s manifest failure, but it did fail. They seem surprised by this realization, but they do—because they must—adjust to it. The film thus depicts the corruption of two C.I.A. case officers, standing in for America, who cannot see how far they have fallen as they can just as easily waterboard or feed another human being (Ammar) under their control. What’s more, throughout the film terrorists implement one successful terrorist attack after another (in London, Saudi Arabia, Islamabad, an American military facility) despite the widespread torture being practiced to prevent it. Still, the torture continues.

At the close of the film, following bin Laden’s execution, Maya is seen sitting alone in a C-130, weeping. This follows a scene in which she confirms it is bin Laden who has been killed, a moment that brings her no apparent satisfaction, let alone joy, which is remarkable since a great enemy has been defeated. What might the tears mean? Does she finally appreciate the cost of the ten-year mission-cum-obsession she pursued? The very moral and political values she swore to uphold were repeatedly violated, even destroyed. She has become, at best, not at all dissimilar from the enemy she hates. Does she sense that this convergence was too high a price to pay, that she cannot justify what she condoned and committed? In the wake of bin Laden’s death, she might be remembering the ugly confrontation she initiated with Joseph Bradley, C.I.A. station chief in Istanbul, who told her that bin Laden was an irrelevancy, old news, no longer a prominent player in the new al-Qaeda. Bradley was focused on defending the country against real, active threats, not old ghosts. Maya was only able to see her grand obsession to its conclusion by effectively threatening Bradley with public career suicide. Bradley, recognizing a deranged fanatic when confronted and assaulted by one, relents. This did not make what he said wrong—anything but, since Maya barely makes a case for her obsession. Bradley recognizes that she cannot hear what he is saying and merely chooses a pragmatic course of action when giving her the resources she demands to (possibly) consummate her hunt. Maya does succeed; bin Laden is assassinated. 

Yet as an act of revenge it is unsatisfying, impotent even: it can’t undo bin Laden’s 9/11 triumph. Nor can it be said convincingly to enhance America’s security. He can and will be replaced. Moreover, as Taibbi notes, bin Laden succeeded along another, more insidious dimension than the attacks themselves. He wanted to provoke the United States into a barbaric response, committing deeds that revealed its true character. Taibbi concludes (and this accounts for his outrage) that Zero Dark Thirty celebrates this response; I would argue it exposes it.

As the film concludes, the futility, perhaps absurdity of Maya’s actions may suddenly be dawning on her, at least at a visceral level. The somber mood of the film peaks and exudes a feeling of cold emptiness. Taibbi rejects this reading (of regret) of the film and does so, oddly enough, because it is a “reading in,” as if he is not also interpreting the film as he condemns it. Critics like Mayer and Taibbi want to be able to moralize; they want a film like Zero Dark Thirty to rebuke and castigate torture in no uncertain terms; they don’t want (or trust) the audience to do any difficult, critical interpretive work, to discern the tragedy (the self-destruction) unfolding before them and their own implication in it. But isn’t that the only way to prevent future self-inflicted disasters, to come to a realization on our own rather than through another’s hectoring?