Kevin Baker - author of Barack 'Hoover' Obama on Colbert

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Article here.

Toon

From Harpers. 

Friday Miscellany

There are several varieties of the mango, but the most delicious is the "mango d'or," originally imported into the island from Cayenne, and greatly improved by generous cultivation. The fruit weighs from twelve to sixteen ounces; the seed is thin, small, and corrugated, without the stringy threads which mar the pleasure of eating some varieties of the mango; the pulp is deep yellow in color, of the consistency of ice-cream and a delicious aroma exhales from it. To partake of the mango in full perfection is one of the indescribable luxuries of tropical life. ..Look at the large tree opposite, its spreading branches bending down under the weight of its delicious burden. What a lovely contrast of the golden globes with the dark green foliage! The gardener, who comes to bring us some of the fruit, says that a tree of this size bears from two thousand to three thousand mangoes. Ah, here is the fruit! If you have never eaten a mango, you must be instructed in the art. Roll up your sleeves, pin a napkin under your chin, and have a basin of water close at hand; strip the peel from the mango, revealing the delicious, golden-hued, creamy pulp; seize the fruit by the ends with both hands, and bite tenderly into it. Be as careful as you will, the abundant juice will overflow from your lips and run over your hands and wrists. But you rinse face and hands in the water beside you, and repeat the operation until the appetite is sated. Excerpted from 'Rambles in Martinique' published in Harpers (January 1874)...

Just smile and wave, boys - cause we are sinking...

The relationship between the relaxing of usury laws (laws that prohibit the charging of unreasonable or relatively high rates of interest) in the United States and the loss of our manufacturing base is explored well in a recent article in Harpers by Thomas Geoghegan. Read and weep.

It may be hard to grasp how the dismantling of usury laws might lead to the loss of our industrial base. But it's true: it led to the loss of our best middle class jobs. Here's a little primer on how it happened. First, thanks to the uncapping of interest rates, we shifted capital into the financial sector, with its relatively high returns. Second, as we shifted capital out of globally competitive manufacturing, we ran bigger trade deficits. Third, as we ran bigger trade deficits, we required bigger inflows of foreign capital. We had 'cheap money' flooding in from China, Saudi Arabia and even the Fourth World. May God forgive us - we even had capital coming in from Honduras. Fourth, the banks got even more money, and they didn't even consider putting it back to manufacturing. They stuffed it into derivatives and other forms of gambling, because that's the kind of thing that got the 'normal' big return; i.e., not 5 percent but 35 percent or even more. Go back to the top and repeat the sequence. It was what scientists call an autocatalytic reaction. It just kept going. All that cheap money would have been a good thing if it had gone into manufacturing. But it didn't. The capital inflows from big trade deficits couldn't go into manufacturing because the returns in banking were just too high. And because this autocatalytic reaction just kept going - as long as there was imbalance between finance and industry - the system could not readjust or stabilize. The bigger the deficit, the bigger the capital inflow; and the bigger the capital inflow, the bigger the financial sector became; and the bigger the financial sector became (relative to manufacturing), the bigger the trade deficit became.

And what did we as a nation gamble and bet on?

I don’t mind futures on the weather, or futures on interest rates, or even futures on the fluctuations of the price of bleacher seats for Cubs games, but I really have trouble with futures on futures, bets on the outcomes of all bets. … By 2007, the ‘notional’ values of all these bets came to $516 trillion – a number that even theoretically is hard to ponder. And that is all the capital that could have gone into real things we could have sold abroad. The money we bet in Chicago is the money we should have been investing in Detroit. And I know they’re lunkheads in Detroit, but the lunkheads ended up running the auto industry because the smart people, the Harvard dropouts and the autodidacts from Texas Tech, decided that the real money wasn’t in starting software companies or running telcos but in derivatives.

Hilarious repartee dept.

From the world of sub-editors - that oft maligned species in the publishing industry:

Two emails. Priceless.

Neo-con history lesson

The July issue of Harpers has a superb take on the relatively recent rise of modified neo-conservative sensibilities and its history chronicled from the 1970's to present. It also includes an interesting (and surprising) account of the link between the conservatism, Abramoff brand lobbyists, the erstwhile apartheid government of South Africa and Angolan guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Kept me awake during my ride home.

Mashup

Lewis Lapham mashes up Gitmo, Milton, Iraq and Sean Bell in a three page broadside against erosion of individual rights in the July issue of Harpers.