I am getting more music downloaded than I am getting words typed.
Up around 4:30, trying to stay warm and get motivated to work. The place is a bit of a mess. I went through the tubs looking for my coat's liner. I found it, and a lot of stuff to throw away. My trip to McClure's last night was the only time I went out. Cold, cold, cold.
There are also articles I need to get caught up on.
First, A Crack in the 75-Year-Old Wall of Impunity: South Africa’s Court Challenge of Israeli Genocide (Counterpunch), because it is not ironic that Israel engages in genocide. Okay, maybe not if you have read the Old Testament.
For specific intent, South Africa points to dozens of statements made by Israeli leaders, including the President, Prime Minister, and other cabinet officials, and as well as Knesset members, military commanders, and more.
Accustomed to decades of U.S.-backed impunity, Israeli officials have been emboldened, describing openly their intent to carry out “another Nakba,” to wipe out all of Gaza, to deny any distinction between civilians and combatants, to raze Gaza to the ground, to reduce it to rubble, and to bury Palestinians alive, among many other similar statements.
Their deliberately dehumanizing language includes descriptions of Palestinians as animals, sub-human, Nazis, a cancer, insects, vermin — all language designed to justify wiping out all or part of the group. Prime Minister Netanyahu went so far as to invoke a Biblical verse on the Amalek, commanding that the “entire population be wiped out, that none be spared, men, women, children, suckling babies, and livestock.”
But I see nothing about self-defense in the face of Hamas's attack or even any mention of Hamas' horrors.
But South Africa’s ICJ action has opened a crack in a 75-year-old wall of impunity through which a light of hope has begun to shine. If global protests can seize the moment to turn that crack into a wider portal towards justice, we may just see the beginnings of real accountability for perpetrators, redress for victims, and attention to the long-neglected root causes of violence: settler-colonialism, occupation, inequality, and apartheid.
There can be no Carthigian peace for either the Palestinians or for Israel. Hamas must go; so must Netanyahu.
I have far fewer qualms with The Really Big Lie on Trade Policy (also Counterpunch):
The policy was to deliberately subject manufacturing workers to competition with the low paid workers in the developing world. This had the predicted and actual effect of eliminating millions of manufacturing jobs and lowering the wages of manufacturing workers in the jobs that remained. Furthermore, since manufacturing had historically been a source of high-paid employment for workers without college degrees, this put downward pressure on the pay of less-educated workers more generally.
At the same time that we were using trade policy to depress the wages of less-educated workers, we continued to leave protections in place for more highly educated workers like doctors and dentists. We also increased protections in the form of patent and copyright monopolies, which we made stronger and longer both in domestic policy and internationally through trade agreements. This raised the profits and the wages of those in a position to benefit from these monopolies.
It is a gross misrepresentation to say that the government policy in this period was just leaving things to the market, it was a deliberate policy of upward redistribution. It is also important to recognize that most of the upward redistribution was within the wage distribution, not to profits. The profit share of national income changed little from 1980 to 2000, at which point most of the upward redistribution had already taken place.
The big gainers from the upward redistribution were high-end professionals, well-placed STEM workers, Wall Street types, and high-level corporate executives. We need to recognize this fact if we want to structure the benefits from AI in ways that lead to broadly based gains.
I would say another beneficiary of that economic policy is Donald Trump: he gets to make money and protect his money while posing as the savior of those losing ground economically, which also fattens his bank accounts.
Third, How We Obscure the Common Plight of Workers: Burnout, Emotional Labor, and the Professional Managerial Class (The Hedgehog Review) made me think of the practice of law, and the second Counterpunch article.
Rather than officiate a competition, then, over who is most exploited and therefore most virtuous, scholars, writers, and activists who are sympathetic to labor need to describe precisely people’s experience of exploitation, encourage solidarity on the basis of that widely shared experience, and argue for more universal solutions to the problem of exploitation. It is important to know, for instance, that female doctors in the United States are 27 percent more likely to report burnout symptoms than male doctors. But doctors overall are 41 percent more likely to report burnout than other workers.36 When physicians call upon hospitals to address the gender disparity in workplace stress, then, they ought to insist that the goal is not only to close the gap but to reduce burnout among physicians across the board. Similarly, frontline workers in retail and food service increasingly share status with white-collar workers as “managers”—a designation that allows employers to avoid paying overtime wages to employees whose wages were historically protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act.37 A stricter legal definition of “managerial” employees could benefit workers across classes.
Work is hard in large part because it is a site where people place serious demands on each other. Meeting those demands can be painful. But pain, whether endured at work or elsewhere, “is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige,” writes the philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò in his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics. “It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connected me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.”38 Your potential for burnout and your emotional labor are inevitably tied to those of the workers you encounter every day—and they include your coworkers, your employees, your spouse and neighbors, and everyone from whose labor you derive benefit, including truck drivers, home health aides, restaurant servers, and adjunct lecturers. We, the PMC, need to know their burdens so that we can make common cause with them in lightening the loads we all bear.
Fourth, Hamilton’s System: Who is the father of American capitalism? (also The Hedgehog Review) knocks hard on Adam Smith and neo-liberal economics as much as The Really Big Lie on Trade Policy.
Smith called merchants, manufacturers, and artisans an “unproductive class,” as “no equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction [as agriculture].” Agriculture was the true and most moral source of wealth because nature literally helped it produce. Manufacturing, on the other hand, was not helped by nature and was spurred by human greed: “No equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction. In them nature does nothing; man does all.”6 In other words, because Smith believed that nature helped farming, it was both more productive and morally grounded than commerce.
The person who embodied Smith’s ideal of virtue was neither the merchant nor the entrepreneur, but the country gentleman or landlord who “cultivate[s] the ground” that supports “this order of things [which] is favoured by the natural preference of man for agriculture.”7 From this perspective, the landlord could never properly be characterized as greedy because all his capital investments made to improve the land advanced the public good and created essential wealth.
As for Hamilton:
Following Washington’s address, the House of Representatives asked Hamilton for a plan to grow American manufacturing and counter possible resultant security risks. In December 1791, the treasury secretary presented a program to Congress in the form of a short book titled Report on the Subject of Manufactures to Congress. In it, Hamilton pointedly rebutted the free-trade claims made in The Wealth of Nations and, as part of the argument that wealth did not simply grow from nature and free exchange, set about dismantling Smith’s theory that agriculture was more productive than manufacturing.
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Even after America developed an industrial base, economic nationalism and industrialism remained the hallmark of US economic policy. Although many Americans like to think of theirs as a free-trade country, from the mid-nineteenth century until 1933 the United States imposed some of the highest industrial tariffs in the world. In the end, the country became quite the opposite of what Smith envisioned. For the most part, its economy has operated on and succeeded with a pointed and most often nationalistic industrial policy in which government and industry work together. Mankiw’s claim that Smith was the visionary of unbridled free markets and America’s path to wealth is simply untrue. Hamilton, not Smith, is the father of American capitalism.
This sounds a lot like Joe Biden's trade policy which seems to me to be in reaction to the neo-liberal idea that we can off-shore jobs and still function as a nation.
I got into the deep end of the pool with Tradition and the Individual Christian Talent: The prospects for Catholic fiction in the twenty-first century. It has me gob-smacked. I will need to come back to it.
From that article, I went on the hunt and came back with American Contrapasso: A Review of Dante’s Indiana by Randy Boyagoda
Randy Boyagoda’s Dante’s Indiana is many things – knee-slapping satire, social commentary, spiritual pilgrimage. But above all, it is an attempt to bring contrapasso to bear on contemporary American life, both implicitly and explicitly. The novel, a sequel to Original Prin (2018), begins in the midst of spiritual crisis. Prin, who, like Boyagoda himself, is a Canadian of Sri Lankan descent and a professor of English, suffers PTSD from a terrorist attack, which cripples his ability to be present with his family. Husband and wife have effectively separated and she has taken their children to live with relatives. His small Catholic college, now comically transformed into an assisted-living facility, has little to offer him in the way of meaningful employment. Desperate for money and a purpose, he stumbles into a job as an academic advisor to a retired businessman and Dante devotee who plans to build a Divine Comedy-themed amusement park in Terre Haute, Indiana.
***
Overall, though, the novel clearly succeeds, due in large part to its warm-hearted embrace of the here and now. For Boyagoda, faith is not an escape from the problems of the world but rather a way to live more deeply in their midst. The first two books of the Prin series (it is a planned trilogy) make this abundantly clear. Contrapasso, after all, should train us to recognize ourselves in those around us – especially in those who are estranged from us or whom we consider to be enemies. Boyagoda’s book closes with a meditation on this imperative to move beyond ourselves: “Great souls, lost souls, stuck souls. Struck souls. / Where are they? / Find them / … Where are you? / Find them. / Find them and be found.”
From the excerpts, it sounds like the author was in Terre Haute. I have been leaving off discussion of my own Orthodox Christianity in my fiction. Too many people I know are secular, even anti-religious, and if I am to portray reality then I need to be true to these characters.
The cat has been gone for almost five hours. He has me worried. Even more worrying is that I need to take out the trash and go to McClure's. I went through the cola way too fast. I do not think I will go elsewhere today. Too bloody cold. Lunch is in the slow cooker.
Oh, yeah, I heard from the management company regarding the duplex I saw on Thursday. No questions about the felony conviction. Maybe she did not get that far, but I will try to be optimistic.
Oh, to be heading downstream
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