One Man’s Violent Visions

The Article: The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek by John Grey in the New York Review.

The Text: Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The financial and economic crisis has demonstrated the fragility of the free market system that its defenders believed had triumphed in the cold war; but there is no sign of anything resembling the socialist project that in the past was seen by many as embodying capitalism’s successor. Žižek’s work, which reflects this paradoxical situation in a number of ways, has made him one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.

Born and educated in Ljubljana, the capital of the People’s Republic of Slovenia in the former Yugoslav federation until the federal state began to break up and Slovenia declared independence in 1990, Žižek has held academic positions in Britain, America, and Western Europe as well as in Slovenia. His prodigious output (over sixty volumes since his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, was published in 1989), innumerable articles and interviews, together with films such as Žižek! (2005) and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), have given him a presence that extends far beyond the academy. Well attuned to popular culture, particularly film, he has a following among young people in many countries, including those of post-Communist Europe. He has a journal dedicated to his work—International Journal of Žižek Studies, founded in 2007—whose readership is registered via Facebook, and in October 2011 he addressed members of the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park in New York, an event that was widely reported and can be viewed on YouTube.

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The Bank’s Definition Of A “Bail Out”

Stark contrast in realities, eh?

Wall Street, Meet The Mafia…Really.

The Article: The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia by Matt Taibbi in The Rolling Stone.

The Text: Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government’s massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo.

But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from “virtually every state, district and territory in the United States,” according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.

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The Irrevocable Losses Of The Middle Class

The Article: The Middle Class Loses a Generation’s Worth of Wealth by Theresa Riley in Bill Moyers.com.

The Text: A new survey released Monday by the Federal Reserve shows that middle class American families lost almost 20 years of accumulated wealth from 2007 to 2010. The median American family lost 39 percent of their net worth — from $126,400 to $77,300 — putting them roughly on par with their worth in 1992. The crash of housing prices directly accounted for three-quarters of the loss. The Washington Post reported that “Homeownership, once heralded as a pathway to wealth, became an albatross.”

Additionally, the Federal Reserve reported that median incomes fell across almost all demographic groups during the same period. The only groups to experience a rise in income were nonworking families — namely, retirees and the very poor. Some of that growth was due to an expansion of government aid programs that were part of Obama’s 2009 stimulus package. The decline in median income was most pronounced among more highly educated families and families headed by persons aged less than 55.
As Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, told The Washington Post, “It’s hard to overstate how serious the collapse in the economy was. We were in free fall.”

The Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances is released every three years to provide details on the finances of American families. Although the data is over 18 months old, it provides a snapshot of the staggering impact that the housing crisis and recession had on the middle class. In this morning’s Washington Post, political reporters Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake write that we shouldn’t “underestimate the impact that those numbers could have on the 2012 election… There is lots and lots of other evidence … that suggests that voters are going to head to their polling place this fall with a pessimistic answer to the ‘are you better off’ question.”

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Welcome To Louisiana, The World’s Prison Capital

The Article: Louisiana is the world’s prison capital by Cindy Chang in The Times-Picayune.

The Text: Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.

The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.

Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations.

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