Obama moves on Iran, Putin keeps Syria

A diplomatic pirouette

By M K Bhadrakumar 

The euphoria over the Syrian chemical weapons resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council on Friday is swirling around making the headlines, but a sense of dark foreboding also lurks below the surface threatening to spoil the party. 

True, after an inordinately long interval when nothing seemed to be going well between them, the United States and Russia agree on something. That calls for celebration. But then, details are emerging that there was much wrangling between the two foreign ministers, John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov, including some tense moments. The trust deficit is palpable. 

Potentially significant step 
To be sure, there is testiness in the air. President Barack Obama hasn't spoken a word with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, since their 20-minute chat during the Group of 20 summit in St. Petersburg almost a month ago. 

In his statement on Saturday, Obama was conspicuously modest. The eloquence was lacking. His understanding of the resolution probably needed a clarification by Lavrov on Russian state television the next day. 
Obama viewed the resolution as "legally binding, that would be verifiable and enforceable, where there will be consequences for Syria's failure to meet what has been set forth in the resolution", and to that extent he saw that the resolution "actually goes beyond what could have been accomplished through any military action". 

Obama noted the resolution's "explicit endorsement" of the Geneva process on Syria. He was "very hopeful" about the prospects but immediately voiced concern "whether Syria will follow through on the commitments" and agreed with "legitimate concerns" as to how the implementation of the resolution will be possible in civil war conditions. 

All things concerned, however, Obama cautiously estimated that the Security Council resolution "represents potentially a significant step forward". What probably was not audible was the sigh of relief on his part that a military action against Syria was not necessary - for the present, at least. 

Obama's reticence stands in comparison with the triumphalism with which Lavrov claimed the resolution as a victory of Russian diplomacy, which "did not come easy". Lavrov listed the gains:

Russia made sure the professionals of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will be the main actors in the implementation of the resolution rather than the UN Security Council;

Russia "achieved its goal" of ensuring there are "no pretexts or loopholes" for the use of force, bearing in mind the Libyan experience and "the capabilities of our partners to interpret the UN Security Council resolutions".

Destroying Household Jobs

That Cold, Cruel Monster the State

By Thomas Sowell

This coverage is scheduled to begin in January 2015 — that is, after the 2014 elections and nearly two years before the 2016 elections. Politicians show a lot of cleverness in protecting their own interests, even if they show very little wisdom as far as serving the public interest.

If making household workers subject to the minimum wage law is expected to produce good results, why not let those good results begin early, so that voters will know about them before the next election?

But, if this new extension of the minimum wage law opens a whole new can of worms — as is more likely — politicians who support this extension want to insulate themselves from a voter backlash. Hence artfully choosing January 2015 as the effective date, to minimize the political risks to themselves

The reason this particular extension of the minimum wage law is likely to open a can of worms is that both household workers and those who employ them will face more complications than employers and employees in industry or commerce.

First of all, ill or elderly individuals who need someone to help them from time to time are not like employers who have a business that regularly hires people and may have a personnel department to handle all the paperwork and keep up with all the legal requirements when government bureaucrats are involved.

Often the very reason for hiring part-time household workers is that some ill or elderly individuals have limited energy or capacity for handling things that were easy to handle when they were younger or in better health. Bureaucratic paperwork and legal technicalities are the last thing they need to have to add to their existing problems.

The people being hired to do household chores also have special problems.

Often such people have limited education, and may also have limited knowledge of the English language.

Why make it harder for ill or elderly people to get some much-needed help in their homes, and harder for low-skilled people to get some much-needed jobs?

Despite all the talk about how we need more people with high-tech skills, there is also a need for people who can help clean a home or carry groceries or do other things that need doing, and which do not require years of schooling. As the elderly become an ever growing proportion of the population, there will be a growing demand for such people.

More precisely, there would be more jobs for such people if the government did not step in to complicate the hiring process and price potential workers out of jobs, with minimum wages set by third parties who do not, and cannot, know what the economic realities are for either the ill and the elderly or for those whom the ill and the elderly wish to hire.

Minimum wage laws in general are usually set with no real knowledge of the economic realities and alternatives for either employers or employees. Third parties are simply enabled to indulge themselves by imagining what is “fair” — and pay no price for being wrong about the actual economic consequences.That is why countries with minimum wage laws usually have much higher rates of unemployment than those few places where there have been no minimum wage laws, such as Switzerland or Singapore — or the United States, before the first federal minimum wage law was passed in 1931.

Government interventions in labor markets have already created needless complications, and not just by minimum wage laws. The welfare state has already taken out of the labor market millions of people who could perform work that would be well within the capacity of inexperienced young people or people with limited education.

With welfare, such people can stay home, watch television, do drugs or whatever — or else they can hang out in the streets, often confirming the old adage that the devil finds work for idle hands.

Memory and the Movies

No Memory an Island

By James Bowman

There are at least two good reasons why Hollywood is so fond of movies about memory loss. One is that the movies are always and inevitably tempted by voyeurism, and exotic illnesses or injuries, including psychological ones, promise voyeuristic thrills aplenty. The other reason has to do with visual paradox. The movies are supremely realistic — surrealistic, you might almost say — in their capacity to look more like life than life does. Human life is always writ large on the big screen. But life as most of us experience it depends utterly on knowing who and where we are on earth, on placing ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. The central task of the mise en scèneis to place people in some context. But what if the people themselves don’t recognize their context? This is interesting to moviegoers who know what the characters don’t, which is the case in most such movies, or moviegoers who have to figure out the context just as the characters do, as in Memento or Mulholland Drive.

But memory is also shorthand for identity: we are our memories in a way that everyone instantly understands and that the movies have been happily exploiting at least since the classic 1942 amnesia flick, Random Harvest. We all instinctively feel that to lose our memory is to lose ourselves, a prospect that stirs audiences with mixed feelings. On the one hand, America is the land of second chances. We like to believe that history is bunk because we don’t like being bound by it. Where fresh starts are a kind of national religion, and assuming that our other faculties remain more or less intact, memory-lessness is the ultimate fresh start. To those for whom the past is a burden there is bound to be something attractive about simply shedding it — though ethical questions may also arise, as in the case of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where something like “brain-washing” is going on. On the other hand, we are terrified by the prospect of Alzheimer’s disease or permanent amnesia. It is naturally horrifying to think of ourselves as unable to recognize our loved ones or to remember the things that are most important to us.

Happiness and Revenge

Alzheimer’s itself makes a moving appearance in such films as Iris, about the English novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, the Argentinean film Son of the Bride (El Hijo de la Novia), and the adaptation by Nick Cassavetes of a Nicholas Sparks novel, The Notebook.

But it is hard to do very much with such a theme except to show, with the help of flashbacks to better times, the pathos of what the disease can do to destroy a person with a vibrant presence — especially, as in all three of these cases, a woman — and make her into a hollow shell of a human being. There are also a number of movies that explore the idea of people getting a “do-over” in life, the best of them all being Groundhog Day. A similar idea occurs in Sliding Doors  and Twice Upon a Yesterday (also known as The Man with Rain in His Shoes), both of 1998, and Me Myself I of 1999. Except for Groundhog Day, these all have a certain fanciful and merely speculative quality to them that makes them seem insubstantial. All, however, are more or less alert to the moral implications they raise, linking them to a school of films that explore the ambiguity of our feelings toward our memories by using memory loss as metaphor.

A tectonic shift in the Middle East

US-Iranian rapprochement will hugely impact the geopolitics of the greater Middle East where new permutations and combinations have already started taking shape

By Pervez Bilgrami 

The United States and Iran appear on a path towards resuming diplomatic relations for the first time since the overthrow of the US-backed shah regime in 1979. Since then, the US and Iran had only traded barbs on regional and international issues. 

Iran's controversial nuclear program and its past leader's cutting remarks over the state of Israel have added fuel to the animosity. But, verbal barbs and threats never led to direct US military intervention in Iran. 

Iran's newly elected President Hassan Rouhani, described by many as a moderate, has started a new beginning in the relationship with the West generally and the US in particular. President Barack Obama and Rouhani had a telephone conversation on September 27, the highest-level contact between the two countries in three decades, and reportedly signaled their commitment to reach a pact on Tehran's nuclear program. 

The call was a result of positive talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif, a day earlier, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. 

The call is also the result of a dramatic shift in tone in Iran and US relations. Obama has said for years he was open to direct contact with Iran, while also stressing that all options - including military strikes - were on the table to prevent Iran building a nuclear bomb. Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group told Reuters, "The biggest taboo in Iranian politics has been broken. This is the beginning of a new era." 

"The phone call was an important milestone - a calculated risk by two cautious leaders mindful of domestic constraints," Yasmin Alem, a senior fellow at Atlantic Council's South Asia Center, told the Tehran Times. "More than anything else it shows the high level of political capital invested in a peaceful resolution of the nuclear crisis." 

The bonhomie between United States and Iran will create a tectonic shift in the region's already settled pro-US and anti-US camps. Moreover, It is being watched keenly by many that in the US who were not in favor of it establishing a congenial relationship with Iran. 

"It is early days and it will require a lot of testing but Mr Rouhani has been more ambitious than I would ever have hoped," says Suzanne Maloney, a former US state department official and now an expert on Iran at the Brookings Institution told the Financial Times. 

The relations between the US and Iran have shifted decisively over the past week, and the million dollar question is what compelled United States to extend a hand of friendship towards Iran? 

Breaking American exceptionalism

We are in the Empire business

By Pepe Escobar

 Never underestimate American soft power. 

What if the US government actually shut down to mourn the passing of Breaking Bad, arguably the most astonishing show in the history of television? It would be nothing short of poetic justice - as Breaking Bad is infinitely more pertinent for the American psyche than predictable cheap shots at Capitol Hill. 

Walter White, aka Heisenberg, may have become the ultimate, larger than life hero of the Google/YouTube/Facebook era. In an arc of tragedy spanning five seasons, Breaking Bad essentially chronicled what it takes for a man to accept who he really is, while in the process ending up paying the unbearable price of losing everything he holds dear and what is assumed to be his ultimate treasure; the love of his wife and son. 

Along the way, Breaking Bad was also an entomologist study on American turbo-capitalism - with the 1% haves depicted as either cheats or gangsters and the almost-haves or have-nots barely surviving, as in public school teachers degraded to second-class citizen status. 

Walter White was dying of cancer at the beginning of Breaking Bad, in 2008. Progressively, he gets rid of Mr Hyde - a placid chemistry teacher - for the benefit of Dr Jekyll - undisputed crystal meth kingpin Heinsenberg. It's not a Faustian pact. It's a descent into the dark night of his own soul. And in the end he even "wins", under his own terms, burning out with a beatific smile.

His secret is that it was never only about the transgressive high of producing the purest crystal meth. It was about the ultimate Outsider act, as in a Dostoevsky or Camus novel; a man confronting his fears, crossing the threshold, taking full control of his life, and finally facing the consequences, with no turning back.

And then, as in all things Breaking Bad, the music told a crucial part of the story. In this case, no less than the closing with Badfinger's My Baby Blue, the bleakest of love songs:

Guess I got what I deserve Kept you waiting there, too long my love All that time, without a word Didn't know you'd think, that I'd forget, or I'd regret The special love I have for you/ My baby blue

So - as Walter White finally admits, fittingly, in the last episode - he did it all, Sinatra's My Way, not for the sake of his family, but for him. And here we have the purest crystal meth as a reflection of this purest revelation in this purest of TV shows, blessed with unmatched writing (you can almost palpably feel the exhilaration in the writers' room), direction, sterling cast, outstanding cinematography quoting everything from Scarface to Taxi Driver via The Godfather, meticulous character development and gobsmacking plot twists.

To the victors belong the spoils

Here Comes the Spoils Society

By Robert Samuelson 

"To the victors belong the spoils"

-- Senator William L. Marcy of New York, 1786-1857, arguing why victorious political parties deserve government jobs.

We are, I fear, slowly moving from "the affluent society" toward a "spoils society." In 1958, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith published his best-seller, "The Affluent Society," which profoundly influenced national thinking for decades. To the Great Depression's survivors, post-World War II prosperity dazzled. Suburbia offered a quiet alternative to crowded and noisy cities. New technologies impressed -- television, frozen foods, automatic washers and dryers. Never, it seemed, had so much been enjoyed by so many.

This explosive abundance, Galbraith argued, meant the country could afford both private wants and public needs. It could devote more to schools, roads, parks and pollution control. Economic growth became the holy grail of government policy. Production was paramount. It muted social conflict.

The "spoils society" reverses this logic. It de-emphasizes production and fuels conflict. Here's why.

There are two ways to become richer. One is to provide more goods and services; that's economic growth. The other is to snatch someone else's wealth or income; that's the spoils society. In a spoils society, economic success increasingly depends on who wins countless distributional contests: not who creates wealth but who controls it. But this can be contentious. Winners celebrate; losers fume.

Of course, the two systems have long coexisted -- and always will. All modern societies chase growth; all redistribute income and wealth. Some shuffling is visible and popular. Until now, that's been the case with America's largest transfer, which is from workers to retirees through Social Security and Medicare. In 2012, this exceeded $1 trillion. Still, for the nation, the relevant question is whether productive behavior (generating economic growth) is losing ground to predatory behavior (grabbing existing wealth and income). There are good reasons to think it is.

Since 1950, the U.S. economy has grown slightly more than 3 percent annually. But projections for the future are just above 2 percent. The slowdown mostly reflects an aging population, which translates into less expansion of the workforce. Indeed, overall growth of 2 percent may be unattainable if, as some economists argue, the pace of innovation is slackening. All this suggests diminishing economic gains in the productive sector.

The fewer the gains, the more people will fight over existing income and wealth, because -- as has been said -- that's where the money is. The United States' annual income (gross domestic product) now exceeds $16 trillion; the value of all fixed assets owned by businesses and individuals is roughly $50 trillion. Diverting even a small sliver of these sums can be hugely enriching. Distributional battles involve attacking and defending bastions of wealth and income. Consider three examples:

-- The oil giant BP and plaintiff lawyers are fighting over how it provides compensation for damages from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The process has been so perverted, says BP, that it's paying "hundreds of millions of dollars -- soon likely to be billions -- for fictitious and inflated losses." Naturally, the plaintiffs' lawyers disagree.

-- "Patent trolls" are firms that amass huge patent portfolios and then harass and sue high-tech companies for alleged infringements. Companies often pay up rather than face a threat to their products. Extortion, they say. A legitimate return, retort the patent companies.

-- CEOs are routinely accused of padding their pay by using friendly compensation consultants. Naturally, CEOs contend they're being rewarded for performance, not plundering their own companies.

Larger distributional contests loom. Growing income inequality has intensified pressures to raise taxes on the rich and near-rich, however defined, to support the middle class and poor. The massive transfers from workers to retirees are starting to sow a backlash among the young, who wonder whether all the elderly's benefits are justified.

Most Americans seem indifferent as to how they get ahead, whether by wealth creation or redistribution. The choice seems abstract. Fair enough. But for the country, the choice matters enormously. The appeal of the affluent society was that one group's gains didn't have to come at the expense of others'. The promise of economic growth was oversold, but it had the healthy effect of encouraging an expansive and inclusive vision of America.

What's emerging today is more self-interested and self-destructive. The dilemma of a rich society is that its prospects can be undermined by its very abundance. Countries preoccupied by distributional wars are distracted from production. The ambitions of many of its most talented members can be satisfied not by adding to the total output but simply by subtracting from someone else's. They are merely rearranging economic assets among themselves. If taken too far, this promises more political division and economic decline.  

In Defense of Privacy

Anyone who values freedom must resist the assault on private and family life

By Frank Furedi

In the twenty-first century, the privacy of individuals, groups and institutions is continually being tested, by a variety of forces that seem determined to undermine it. Computer hackers threaten to uncover the most personal details about our lives. Reports of phone-hacking journalists preying on the parents of kidnapped children remind us that not even the right to grieve privately can be taken for granted anymore. Most of us have become so used to being monitored by CCTV cameras and digital technology that even recent revelations about the US National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) activities did not cause much of a stir.

What is most striking about contemporary Western society’s attitude towards privacy is that episodic expressions of outrage about the violation of privacy in some areas of life coexist with a casual acceptance of such violations in other spheres. In fact, there are as many calls to limit or weaken the private realm as there are to defend it. Modern Western culture is deeply ambivalent about the question privacy.

This month, the Observer columnist Henry Porter wrote an article headlined ‘Perhaps I’m out of step and Britons just don’t think privacy is important’. He was addressing what he considered to be the ‘complacency’ over the revelations of mass snooping by the NSA. Yet in the very same issue of the Observer, a report titled ‘Hundreds of thousands of elderly people were abused last year’ claimed to be exposing a ‘hidden national scandal’. That news article’s association of abuse with the spheres of life that are ‘hidden’ from public view - that is, its coupling of abuse and privacy - expressed a view that is widely held in society today. Is it any surprise that when the private sphere is looked upon so ambiguously, as being fraught with dangers, there will be little outrage when it is interfered with by external forces?

Our attitude towards the distinction between private and public life is influenced by what society values. As Jeff Weintraub has pointed out, ‘debates about how to cut up the social world between public and private are rarely innocent exercises, since they often carry powerful normative implications’. For example, the frequently repeated argument that the innocent have nothing to fear from the prying eyes of Big Brother reveals how little value we attach to the idea of having protected private spaces these days. In contrast, the older phrase ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ expressed a contrasting sentiment that idealised private space.

In this essay, I put forward an argument for valuing privacy, and then go on to explore the main forces that threaten it in the contemporary period.

The need for privacy

The ideal of separating social life into distinct public and private spheres is in many ways an historical accomplishment of modernity. However, there is considerable evidence in much earlier eras of an aspiration to be ‘left alone’ and to limit the involvement of the state in people’s private lives. In his famous 431 BC funeral speech, where he celebrated the greatness of Athens, Pericles boasted: ‘The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens.’

No doubt the freedom to do what one liked in ‘ordinary life’ was severely limited by the realities of life in that ancient city-state. However, Pericles’ affirmation of the freedom of the private sphere suggests that privacy was valued by the citizens of Athens.

But it wasn’t until the rise of capitalism and modern society in Europe that arguments for maintaining a dichotomous divide between the public and private spheres were made seriously and rigorously. The advocates of liberalism forcefully promoted the idea of a protected private sphere, insisting that what happened in the household was not a matter for state intervention. Since the sixteenth century, arguments for privacy have been made in a variety of ways. Early claims for privacy tended to couple the private sphere with property and with a defence of individual conscience. Over the past two centuries, the case for the private sphere evolved and started to be justified on moral, psychological and political grounds.

A useful working definition of privacy is provided by Alan Westin in his study, Privacy and Freedom: ‘Privacy is the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how and of what extent information about them is communicated to others.’ This definition focuses on the need of individuals to establish a balance between their aspiration for privacy and their desire for disclosure and communication. Historically, demands for privacy were motivated by a determination to curtail the power of the state to intrude into the private activities of citizens. Today, this concern with restraining state intervention into private life is still around, and important; but in the main, the argument for privacy is increasingly focused on the psychological and moral need for a retreat from the busy public world so that people can insulate themselves from the immediacy of outside pressures.

The Lights Shine Brightly In Poland As A Former Basket Case Morphs Into A European Tiger

Poland Emerges as a Central European Powerhouse

By Alex Storozynski

There’s an old joke about how many Poles it took to screw in a light bulb. But after a Polish electrician named Lech Walesa pulled the plug on Communism and helped bring down the Soviet Union, that joke lost its luster. These days the light bulbs are made in Poland, and over the past two decades, the country’s economy has grown at a record pace compared to its neighbors.

This month marks the 20^th anniversary of Russia withdrawing the Soviet army from Poland. Since then, Poland went from Communist basket case, to what German magazine Der Spiegel dubbed last year as: “The Miracle Next Door: Poland Emerges as a Central European Powerhouse.”

Poland is the only European Union economy to avoid recession since the global financial crisis hit in 2008. Polish workers use to travel abroad to where the factories were. These days, factories move to where the Polish workers are. This summer, Fabrizio Pedroni closed his factory in Italy when his employees went on vacation, and packed up his electric component machinery and shipped it to Poland where workers rank higher on the World Economic Forum’s global pay and productivity table.

Last month, Arvato, which supplies financial and consulting services to Google and Microsoft , moved 140 jobs from Ireland to Poland. Dell Computer moved its factory from Ireland to Poland in 2009, while Esplex, a subsidiary of PC manufacturer Acerclosed logistics centers in France and England and moved those jobs to Poland. Cadbury Schweppes, the tea giant Twinnings, and Electrolux have all moved jobs to Poland. Last year Credit Suisse moved IT jobs to Poland.

Freedom, Not Fertility, Is The Key To A Thriving Economy

It is a profoundly personal decision that only parents can make based on their particular preferences and circumstances

By Paul Hsieh,

Is America’s declining fertility rate “the root cause of most of our problems”? This was the bold claim made recently by conservative writer Jonathan Last in the Wall Street Journal. Other conservative pundits have echoed this theme. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently pleaded for, “More Babies, Please” to maintain our economic growth. In the Weekly Standard, Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel warned of “soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor” if America remains a “low fertility society.” All of these conservatives have identified genuine economic challenges facing America. But if we wish America to thrive economically, the government’s job should be to protect freedom, not promote fertility.

There’s no doubt that fertility rates and population growth (or decline) can affect a country’s economy. As Megan McArdle notes, “economic growth equals the growth in the workforce plus the growth in productivity of that workforce.” And many industrialized countries with declining birthrates have also experienced economic stagnation as the population ages. Jonathan Last cited the example of Japan, where fewer people are getting married and having children. The average Japanese woman now has only 1.3 children over her lifetime (2.1 is considered the “replacement rate” necessary to maintain a stable population). As a result, Last argues, the Japanese economy has suffered.

Kotkin and Siegel also note that there will be fewer productive Japanese workers to pay for government retirement and health care benefits for their elderly. With an average fertility rate of 1.5, Western European countries are experiencing similar problems. The U.S. has a slightly higher fertility rate of 1.93, but still below the replacement rate of 2.1.

So what role, if any, should the U.S. government play in raising the national fertility rate? Douthat notes that “America has no family policy to speak of” as opposed to countries like Sweden and France. Kotkin and Siegel support reforming the U.S. tax code “to encourage marriage and children.” But it’s unclear that such direct policies will work. Last notes that the French fertility rate is still below 2.1 despite aggressive pro-childbirth programs such as state-run daycare.

More fundamentally, it’s not the government’s job to promote any particular lifestyle — e.g., single vs. married or childless vs. multiple child families. The government should not attempt to tilt the playing field to favor a specific “ideal” family size of 2.1+ children. Rather, the government’s job should be to protect the freedom of parents to have zero, one, two, or five children — provided the parents can properly nurture and care for them all. How many children to have is a profoundly personal decision that only parents themselves can make based on their particular preferences and circumstances.

Criminal Elements

A Few Critical Points of Inflection

By James Bowman

Let’s break it down.” A man and a woman in a darkened classroom, flirting, are taking an elemental inventory of the human body. Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon alone come to 98 percent, nitrogen and calcium tick up to 99.5, and half a dozen more trace elements only bring them to 99.888042 — where is the other 0.111958? Supposedly that’s everything, the woman insists, but the man is sure there must be something missing. “There’s got to be more to a human being than that.” What about the soul, the woman suggests? “Ha, there’s no soul. There’s just chemistry here.”

This calculation is overcut with a montage of the same man, twenty-odd years later, cleaning up after the “chemical disincorporation” of his inaugural murder victim (the first of a long line). The victim’s soul, if there ever was one, is long since departed, leaving gallons of bloody slosh behind, while the killer’s soul, if he ever had one, has just crossed a threshold of its own.

Thus begins the third episode of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, which debuted on AMC in 2008 and is this summer heading into the second half of its fifth and final season. Walter White, the antihero played by Bryan Cranston, is a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who receives an unexpected diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer the day after his fiftieth birthday. With his corpus of 99.888042 percent traceable elements breaking down, he breaks bad — applying his scientific expertise to the manufacture of methamphetamine so he can make enough money to provide for his pregnant wife and disabled son after his impending death. Guided by his ne’er-do-well former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), Walt plunges into a criminal underworld of ruthless rival drug kingpins governed by little more than Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes. While fighting to survive in this crowd he must also stay out of sight of what remains of the law, as near to him as his own drug enforcement agent brother-in-law, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), as, with dread turning to relish, Walt contributes to the disincorporation of civil society.

All of us are uneasily aware that beneath the good civilizational order in which most readers of these pages and viewers of the show continue to live their lives there is a dark alternative where old rules dominate, the Enlightenment’s recurring bad dream just waiting for the opportunity to reassert itself. Ironically, it is Walt’s Enlightenment credentials as a man of science that are his entrance ticket to this new state of nature. Chemistry, as Walt rapturously tells his less-than-rapt students, is a cycle of “growth, then decay, then transformation”; and while Enlightenment notions of moral progress are implicitly connected to material progress in the advance of science and rationality, the lesson of the science itself is that moral and social transformation is as likely to be cyclical as it is progressive.

Students of history or anthropology are more likely to see the alternative to Western civilization and the rule of law not as the twilight struggle of individual savagery but as the tribal, family-oriented society and the honor culture that actually did precede the Enlightenment’s commitment to universal values and that is still predominant in most parts of the world where those liberal and progressive standards have a more precarious hold.

Some of the best television of the last decade or so has explored the tension between Enlightenment liberal modernity and pre-Enlightenment honor culture. The Sopranos treated it playfully, imagining the criminal classes as aspiring to suburban respectability while still hoping to inhabit, out of sight of their New Jersey neighbors, the same Sicilian underworld where their fathers and grandfathers had lived. The sense of the threat posed by that underworld to the dominant culture was less in mind than the threat — or promise — that the dominant culture, with its therapeutic and liberal standards, would swamp the already evanescent honor culture of the Mafia. In The Wire, the state of nature was also circumscribed and limited to the streets of Baltimore where the dominant culture with sometimes greater and sometimes less success has managed to contain it by its own legally dubious methods. But in Breaking Bad, the state of pre-Enlightenment nature is seen as thrusting its way up from its subterranean hiding places and reasserting itself anew.

It's Not an Accident ... It's Policy

Government Is Largely Responsible for Soaring Inequality

by George Washington

America is experiencing unprecedented inequality. And a who's who of prominent economists (and investors) say that inequality is hurting the economy.

Defenders of the status quo pretend that this inequality is something outside of our control ... like a force of nature. They argue that it's due to globalization, technological innovation or something else outside of policy-makers' control.

In reality, inequality is rising due to the government policy.

The chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University says that it is inaccurate to call politicians prostitutes. Specifically, he says that they are more correct to call them “pimps”, since they are pimping out the American people to the financial giants.

The government has saved the big banks at taxpayer expense, chosen the banks over the little guy, and said no to helping Main Street ... while continuing to throw trillions at the giant banks.

Crony capitalism has gotten even worse under Obama than under Bush.

Obama is prosecuting fewer financial crimes than Bush, or his father, or Ronald Reagan.

Moreover, not only is the cop not cracking down on crime ... he's on the take, and helping carry out and cover up the crimes.

No wonder:

All of the monetary and economic policy of the last 3 years has helped the wealthiest and penalized everyone else. See this, this and this.

***

Economist Steve Keen says:

“This is the biggest transfer of wealth in history”, as the giant banks have handed their toxic debts from fraudulent activities to the countries and their people.

Stiglitz said in 2009 that Geithner’s toxic asset plan “amounts to robbery of the American people”.

And economist Dean Baker said in 2009 that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is “a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives”.

Without the government’s creation of the too big to fail banks (they’ve gotten much bigger under Obama), the Fed’s intervention in interest rates and the markets (most of the quantitative easinghas occurred under Obama), and government-created moral hazard emboldening casino-style speculation (there’s now more moral hazard than ever before) … things wouldn’t have gotten nearly as bad.

As I noted in March 2009:

The bailout money is just going to line the pockets of the wealthy, instead of helping to stabilize the economy or even the companies receiving the bailouts:

·         Bailout money is being used to subsidize companies run by horrible business men, allowing the bankers to receive fat bonuses, to redecorate their offices, and to buy gold toilets and prostitutes

·         A lot of the bailout money is going to the failing companies’ shareholders