Posts Tagged ‘consumer debt’
Saturday Night Links!
* * CFP: The Handmaid’s Tale: Gender, Genre Adaptation – a one-day symposium. Race and The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood Annotates Season 1 of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’
* A Dangerous Business: Being a Female Professor.
* Two Americas: Those Who Leave Home, and Those Who Stay.
* A Brief History of Violence Against Members of Congress. The start of a disturbing new chapter.
* But now we have legislation that will change the lives of millions, and they haven’t even summoned the usual suspects to explain what a great idea it is. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, Republicans have decided that even that’s too much; they’re going to try to pass legislation that takes from the poor and gives to the rich without even trying to offer a justification. More at Vox.
* American Health Care Tragedies Are Taking Over Crowdfunding.
* The Senate health care bill is expected to allow states to relax the Affordable Care Act rules only on benefits, not on pricing as the House bill does. But that change could impact people far beyond those states, according to anew analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress — because it could lead to a return of annual and lifetime benefit limits, and not just in the states with the waivers. Don’t stop working those phones.
* Trump buckles on the Dreamers. But: Border Patrol Arrests Immigrants Seeking Medical Care During Desert Heat Wave. Trump’s move to deport Iraqi Christians stirs outcry. ICE nabs teenager hours before his senior prom, days before his graduation ceremony.
* Trump is likely to get much, much worse. Here are a few big things to watch for. A Very, Very Dangerous Situation. The WaPo Obstruction Blockbuster and the World of Hurt To Come. Robert Mueller chooses his investigatory dream team. Here we go.
* Donald Trump’s Cabinet members, ranked by their over-the-top praise of Trump.
* Now That’s What I Call #TheResistance.
* It’s very slowly happening here.
* That’s part of a far broader story: Republicans have a coherent and awful vision, while Democrats have a better but confused vision. Republicans want to cut taxes all the time; Democrats want to sometimes cut some taxes and certainly aren’t committed to raising taxes on principle. Republicans want to ban all abortions; many Democrats favor certain restrictions on abortion, depending. The ur-Democratic legislation is Obamacare, which undoubtedly improved the status quo but which is a tangled mishmash of public and private and which does not offer anything like a simple and coherent policy like “Medicare for all.” Republicans are the party of small government; Democrats are the party of jury-rigged quasi-entitlements via convoluted tax credits. Is it any wonder conservatives win so often? An evil but directly and unapologetically stated policy platform beats a better but cowardly and convoluted one any day, politically.
* If social compacts without any leeway for idiosyncrasy or dissent tend toward dictatorship, untrammeled individualism tends toward nihilism. The once-again great America Trump envisages is a fusion of the worst of both, and you can’t say our movies didn’t predict him. Wherever America’s right stuff now elusively resides, its wrong stuff in right-stuff disguise is on display for all the world to see—at multiplexes everywhere, not just on Fox News.
* This though I’m not crazy about: Brain-Eating Parasites Thrive As Global Warming Heats Up U.S. Lakes.
* “People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument,” he said. “To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action, when in fact, if it’s actually true we’re in a sixth mass extinction, then there’s no point in conservation biology.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t still get there if we all just chip in.
* Number of people serving life in US prisons is surging, new report says.
* US credit card debt to surpass $1 trillion this year, report says.
* A scholar of the Ku Kux Klan explains how the KKK used the same trolling tactics as the alt-right.
* Five officials will face manslaughter charges for Flint water crisis. PA supreme court: was illegal to steal elderly woman’s home because her son sold $140 of weed. Revealed: reality of life working in an Ivanka Trump clothing factory.
* Robot puts all of humanity to shame by achieving perfect score in Ms. Pac-Man.
* This New Museum Imagines a World Where Capitalism Is Dead.
* If there is no real economic recovery forthcoming—and there is not—and if the university cannot be restored without one, do any possibilities remain? They do. We would have to imagine a world that did not peg public funds to private profits. Our current understanding of “public” presupposes a thoroughgoing privatization of the world that shortly preceded the appearance of the modern university. There is no going back. But if there is to be something ahead, an emancipation of learning, it will not be discovered in the hearts and minds of administrators and legislators persuaded to see the error of their ways, but in a transformation of the society beyond the edges of campus. Who Can Save the University?
* For graduate students fighting to unionize, time is running out.
* Today’s horrific fire in London’s Grenfell Tower is a symbol of a deeply unequal United Kingdom.
* Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize Winner.
* Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cars R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
* Why is TV awash in afterlives, hells, and purgatories?
* There’s just one story, and we tell it over and over.
* Witchcraft and dueling are now legal in Canada.
* Abolish the trucking industry.
* Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s.
* Estimated Number of Injuries and Reported Deaths Associated with Inflatable Amusements, 2003-2013.
* Bruce Springsteen is headed to Broadway.
* I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand the objection.
* Presenting the best of Hello from the Magic Tavern.
* What real words are actually valid CSS HEX colors?
* Alarm clock dropped inside wall still going off daily after 13 years.
* Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop.
* “Rakka” is the first sci-fi short film by Oats Studios, directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Chappie), featuring the aftermath of an alien invasion that has enslaved millions of humans. The free 22-minute film, which features the amazing Sigourney Weaver, is available to stream for free on Steam, YouTube and the Oats Studios website.
* And guys, it’s official: I’m a bestseller.
Tuesday Links
* Local police involved in 400 killings per year.
* Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him. But cops agree: cops haven’t used excessive force in Ferguson. 40 FBI agents are in Ferguson to investigate the shooting of Michael Brown, and they already know who did it. ‘Let’s Be Cops,’ cop movies, and the shooting in Ferguson. Reparations for Ferguson. John Oliver: Let’s take their fucking toys back. A movement grows in Ferguson. Ferguson and white unflight. Michael Brown’s autopsy suggests he had his hands up. An upside flag indicates distress. More links from Crooked Timber.
* Man Dies After Bloody, 10-Minute Beating From LAPD Officers. Texas Incarcerates Mentally Disabled Man for 34 Years without Trial.
* Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem. The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson. For blacks, the “war on terror” hasn’t come home. It’s always been here. Mapping the Spread of the Military’s Surplus Gear. A Militarized Police, a Less Violent Public. Even the liberal Kevin Drum agrees: We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake. “By mistake.” So close.
* Meanwhile: Detroit police chief James Craig – nicknamed “Hollywood” for his years spent in the LAPD and his seeming love of being in front of the camera – has repeatedly called on “good” and “law-abiding” Detroiters to arm themselves against criminals in the city.
* Law professor Robert A. Ferguson’s critique of the U.S. prison system misses the point that its purpose is not rehabilitation but civic death.
* Poor, Non-Working Black and Latino Men Are Nearly Non-Existent.
* A quarter century later, the median white wealth had jumped to $265,000, while median black wealth was just $28,500. The racial wealth gap among working-age families, in other words, is a stunning $236,500, and there is every reason to believe that figure has widened in the five years since
* A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by leeching free content from real schools. Sounds legit!
* Change we can believe in? CBS, Produce a new Star Trek Series Featuring Wil Wheaton as the Lead role/Captain of a federation Vessel. Any true fan would know that Wesley quit Starfleet to pursue his destiny with the Traveler, but perhaps I’ve said too much.
* Coming soon to the Smithsonian Galleries: Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910.
* Yahoo really wants you to think Donald Glover is in the next season of Community. That “I am serious. I am Yahoo Serious.” tag is pretty gold, though.
* And while I’m on the subject: I know it’s not for everyone, but if you ask me this may have been the most quintessential Harmontown of all time: melancholy, silly, ranty, with some great improv D&D. Give it a listen if you like Dan Harmon.
* The twenty-first century gold rush: debt collection.
* No Child Left Behind achieves its destiny: virtually every school in the state of Washington is a “failing school.”
* All students at MPS now eligible for free meals.
* New Media: Time, Inc rates writers on how friendly they are to advertisers.
* Technocratic tweaks that will definitely solve everything: what if presidents only had one term? The icing on the cake is that if anything this would probably have the opposite effect.
* The problem with self-driving cars: they’re still cars.
* Paul Campos with the latest on the law school scam.
* This November, the organizing committee of the MLA Subconference comes to Milwaukee.
* The Post-Welfare State University.
* Students who graduated in 2008 earned more credits in the humanities than in STEM, the study found. Humanities credits accounted for 17 percent of total credits earned by the typical graduate. In contrast, STEM credits accounted for 13 percent.
* Not only are men more likely than women to earn tenure, but in computer science and sociology, they are significantly more likely to earn tenure than are women who have the same research productivity. In English men are slightly (but not in a statistically significant way) more likely than women to earn tenure.
* The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List.
* Top Legal Scholars Decry “Chilling” Effect of Salaita Dehiring.
* Huge asteroid set to wipe out life on Earth – in 2880. 865 years, that’s all we’ve got…
* Mining Spill Near U.S. Border Closes 88 Schools, Leaves Thousands Of Mexicans Without Water. Meet The First Pacific Island Town To Relocate Thanks To Climate Change. The Longest River In The U.S. Is Being Altered By Climate Change.
* The venture capitalist are now weaponizing kids. Of course, when you find out how much raising a kid costs, child labor starts to make a lot of sense. Plainly parenting is a market ripe for disruption.
* What is your greatest strength as an employee? Bonus SMBC: on internship as neologism.
* How air conditioning remade modern America.
* How to Hide a Nuclear Missile.
* The winners of the 2014 Hugos.
* The rumor is that Doctor Strange will be part of a new Marvel paradigm that rejects origin stories.
* Twitter’s management is very, very eager to ruin Twitter. Can Facebook catch up in time?
* Primary 2016 watch: Only Al Gore can save us now.
* And they’ve finally gone too far: Edible LEGO. Some lines man was just never meant to cross.
Born Under a Bad Sign
Your chart of the day shows bad economic news is nothing new; it’s been going on more or less my entire life.
Lost Generation
The total balance of all outstanding US student loans (given as $730 billion in DIY U, based on OMB estimates) is now estimated by Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org at more like $830 billion—$605.6 billion in federally guaranteed student loans, which have interest rates fixed and in some cases interest subsidized by the government, and a further $167.8 billion in private student loans, with interest rates that hover around 18-20%. Furthermore, Kantrowitz says, $300 billion in federal student loan debts have been incurred in the last four years.
Up Too Early Central Timezone Blues
* The paper on ecological debt I’m giving at the Debt conference at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies today is pretty indebted to Naomi Klein’s recent work on the subject, which can be found at YouTube, Democracy Now, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. I may try to put this talk up as a podcast at some point.
* The oil spill disaster in the Louisiana has turned out to be much, much worse than originally thought: “a river of oil flowing from the bottom of the Gulf at the rate of 210,000 gallons a day that officials say could be running for two months or more.” The final devastation will likely be worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster. The White House says BP will pay the costs of cleanup. Related: Obama Administration Learns That Oil Leads to Oil Spills. At least they’ve quietly reinstated the federal moratorium on offshore drilling as a result of all this. Hope it stays that way.
* Can reconciliation work for climate like it worked for health care? Ezra Klein says not really.
* Ten states, including my beloved North Carolina!, are now considering Arizona-style document laws.
* Speaking of North Carolina, here’s the Independent Weekly voting guide for Durham County. The primary is Tuesday, May 4.
* It turns out the measurement fallacy Cory Doctorow was speaking about in my class’s interview with him has a name: Goodhart’s Law.
* Grad School Necessary To Maintain U.S.’s Global Position. Take that, The Simpsons.
* Republican consultant on Republican 2012 presidential field: “We Have Real [Expletive] Problems.”
* Calling out the real judicial activists.
* Socialphobes of the world unite! Against the telephone.
The telephone was an aberation in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else’s life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone’s living room and start shouting.
* Books: still greener than e-readers.
* I can’t believe I forgot to celebrate Explicit Legal Pants Day. The rest of the post, on heterosexual privilege in Mississippi, is good too.
* Inevitable District 9 sequel coming in two years.
* I’m so old I can remember when the GOP was against involuntary microchip implantation. It was like a week ago.
* And YouTube has the trailer for the feel-good movie of the year.
This Morning’s Must-Listen Economic Podcasts
…are Frontline‘s “The Warning” and “The Card Game.” Both are from earlier this fall.
Debt Culture
Consumers are increasingly unable to pay off their credit cards, forcing banks to hoard cash to protect against future losses and lend to fewer people, according to reports yesterday from several of the nation’s largest banks.
Hilzoy and Matt Yglesias look at the coming post-post-Fordist debt crunch. It’s a big problem, something I’ve gestured towards before. But Hilzoy’s got the wrong chart: this problem goes back way before Bush took office—he’s just made it that much worse.
And note the trend:
‘Empire of Consumption’
The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.
Retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich talks to Bill Moyers about the consumerist origins of American foreign policy, what Charles Maier called the ’empire of consumption.’ Of course, once again Carter comes up::
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I would be one of the first to confess that – I think that we have misunderstood and underestimated President Carter. He was the one President of our time who recognized, I think, the challenges awaiting us if we refused to get our house in order.
BILL MOYERS: You’re the only author I have read, since I read Jimmy Carter, who gives so much time to the President’s speech on July 15th, 1979. Why does that speech speak to you so strongly?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word “malaise” in the text to the address. It’s a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don’t act now, we’re headed down a path in which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. And what the President was saying at the time was, we need to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom which is anchored in truth, and the way to manifest that choice, is by addressing our energy problem.
He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded.
More immediately important, though, is this about Obama, McCain, and general election 2008:
BILL MOYERS: …Do you expect either John McCain or Barack Obama to rein in the “imperial presidency?”
ANDREW BACEVICH: No. I mean, people run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, the people who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, these are people who yearn to exercise those kind of great powers.
They’re not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller. They’re not. So when I – as a distant observer of politics – one of the things that both puzzles me and I think troubles me is the 24/7 coverage of the campaign.
Parsing every word, every phrase, that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain utters, as if what they say is going to reveal some profound and important change that was going to come about if they happened to be elected. It’s not going to happen.
BILL MOYERS: It’s not going to happen because?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Not going to happen – it’s not going to happen because the elements of continuity outweigh the elements of change. And it’s not going to happen because, ultimately, we the American people, refuse to look in that mirror. And to see the extent to which the problems that we face really lie within.
We refuse to live within our means. We continue to think that the problems that beset the country are out there beyond our borders. And that if we deploy sufficient amount of American power we can fix those problems, and therefore things back here will continue as they have for decades.
It’s a truly exceptional interview. Read the whole thing. Via MeFi.
David Brooks on the Culture of Debt
The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.
Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.
I don’t usually agree with David Brooks, and like Kevin Drum I think it’s pretty likely that he and I wouldn’t agree at all on the solutions—but I have to say I think he’s mostly right about identifying a huge problem in the culture of debt in post-Fordist America. Still more, and charts!, from Ezra Klein.
Sermon for Capitalmas Eve
On this Christmas Eve, Americans are having trouble paying off their credit cards, with 30-day-late accounts rising 26% to $17.3 billion and defaults rising 18% to nearly a billion. There’s a reason for all this, and you can find it in Bill Moyer’s PBS interview with Benjamin Barber (via MeFi), a Galbraithian analysis of capitalism’s production not of products but of needs themselves:
As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied…. Wants thus come to depend on output. In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than at a lower one. It may be the same. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.
The orgy of Christmas shopping that continues unabated today—to be followed by deep-discount post-Christmas sales on Wednesday, and on and on—is only the clearest proof that this is what capitalism has become in the post-industrial West and, increasingly, elsewhere as well. Barber thinks the productive energies of capitalism might somehow be harnassed, through willpower and ethical living, for better ends, but I’m much more skeptical that capitalism can ever really move in a direction other than the one it has. What we need is a new logic, a new organizing principle. Call it sustainability or call it permaculture, call it environmental Marxism or environmental capitalism if you want, it’s all the same to me—what’s important is that the world figure out some way to stop doing the things capitalism demands it must. We have to stop consuming everything, resources, the future, ourselves.
BILL MOYERS: When politics permeates everything we call it totalitarianism. When religion permeates everything we call it theocracy.
BENJAMIN BARBER: Right.
BILL MOYERS: But when commerce pervades everything, we call it liberty.
Merry Christmas.
(cross-posted to culturemonkey, which returns Jan. 2 with an all-new blogger and an all-new organizing principle of its own)
carpe diem credit-card capitalism
I’ve put up another depressing culturemonkey post that functions as a kind of follow-up to last week’s, thinking about the way 1973 can be seen as the high-water mark for production-oriented capitalism. That year exposed the physical limits to production that our society will someday confront, perhaps best symbolized by the closing of the frontier with the last manned mission to the moon in Dec. 1972. The growth and technological magic of the last thirty years has been fueled by debt as much as by innovation, with the evacuation of futurity and long-term planning replaced by the endless now of the credit card. This is what consumer society is—and like anything else, it can’t last forever.
Consumerism is as American as cherry pie. Plasma TVs, iPods, granite countertops: you name it, we’ll buy it. To finance the national pastime, Americans have been borrowing from abroad on an increasingly stunning scale. In 2006, the infusion of foreign cash required to close the gap between American incomes and consumption reached nearly 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), leaving the United States with a deficit in its current account (an annual measure of capital flows to and from the rest of the world) of more than $850 billion. In other words, the quantity of goods and services that Americans consumed last year in excess of what we produced was close to the entire annual output of Brazil. “Brazil is the tenth largest economy on the planet,” points out Laura Alfaro, an associate professor of business administration who teaches a class on the current account deficit at Harvard Business School (HBS). “That is what the U.S. is eating up every year—a Brazil or a Mexico.”
Whether this practice is sustainable—and if not, how it might end—are questions that divide scholars and investors alike. We have borrowed so much from abroad—between half a trillion and a trillion dollars a year for the past six or seven years—that in 2006, our investment balance with the rest of the world (what we pay foreign investors on their U.S. assets versus their payments to us on our investments abroad, historically nearly equal) tipped to became an outflow for the first time in more than 50 years. We are a debtor nation swiftly heading deeper into debt.
How America’s addiction to consumerism has left us debt-ridden, on the level of both citizen and nation, with all signs pointing to things getting worse.
“Part of the reason people are spending beyond their means,” says Rawi Abdelal, an associate professor of business administration at HBS, “is because they are—in a way—witnessing the end of the American dream.” Between 2000 and 2005, even as the U.S. economy grew 14 percent in real terms, and worker productivity increased a remarkable 16.6 percent, workers’ average hourly wages were stagnant. The median family income fell 2.9 percent.
Gerry Canavan 