Category Archives: Culture

The Nation State

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Economists are the near perfect example of the aphorism “a man good with a hammer sees all the world as a nail.” They are convinced that the totality of life on earth can be packed into one of their spreadsheets. The idea that people might not want the most efficient or most cost effective thing is alien to the mind of the economist. Despite mountains of obvious examples in daily life, they insist that people are moist robots, acting out of self-interest. Despite that, this post is worth the read.

Before the late 18th century there were no real nation states. … If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the political entity they lived in. …

Agrarian societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising. Government intervened to take its cut, enforce basic criminal law and keep the peace within its undisputed territories. Otherwise its main role was to fight to keep those territories, or acquire more. … Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the US in the 19th century could say what village they came from, but not what country: it didn’t matter to them. … Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm borders, but they didn’t. Moreover, people and territories often came under different jurisdictions for different purposes.

Such loose control, says Bar-Yam, meant pre-modern political units were only capable of scaling up a few simple actions such as growing food, fighting battles, collecting tribute and keeping order. …

The industrial revolution … demanded a different kind of government. … “In 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did.” … Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialised and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split.

The author is confusing a lot of things here. There were nation states before anyone thought of inventing passports. The British had a clear sense of national identity by the time of the Thirty Years War and most argue that the 100 Years War was the birth of nationalism. Certainly the French and English saw themselves as nations by the the 17th century. When you look at how people identified with the local polity, the Romans clearly had a firm understanding of citizenship.

That said, the idea of nationalism is a recent development. The English and French caught the fever first and then the Spanish and Italians. The Swedes had a national identity in the Thirty Years War. Central and Eastern Europe, however, were late to the game. Outside of China, India and Japan the rest of the world still struggles with the concept. If not for the West forcing these concepts on the people of Africa and the Middle East, tribalism would still be the natural method of self-organization.

Agrarian societies are not in need of a large public works projects, at least not the simple sort of farming in place for thousands of years. Maybe large scale irrigation would have been helpful, but farming adapted to the land. Road maintenance for getting crops to market would have been useful and the Romans did a lot of it, but the European model worked just as well.

As a result, in purely agrarian societies, there was never an economic need for coordinating loads of people into creating publicly held assets. The pillaging of France by the English in the 100 Years War, did change the economy, creating a demand for talent to build and maintain large estates. That probably sowed the seeds for later economic innovation like road building an irrigation projects.

Industrial societies, on the other hand, need large scale public works and that can happen in two ways. One is with the lash in low trust societies. The other is through coordinated cooperation in higher trust societies. A group of people can come together for mutual economic benefit and hire a bunch of men to do the work that the rich guys need done. There is obvious exploitation here, but it is not slavery.

It is important to note that the Industrial Revolution did not start in Africa or the Fertile Crescent. The elements for industrialization were in place in England, which is why it started there first. The combination of demographics, social structure and limited political institutions built on a national identity allowed large scale economic operations to flourish in England before anywhere else.

As industrialization flowed on to the continent, the countries with “far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialized societies” were the last to industrialize. In the case of Russia, industrialization destroyed the “far-reaching bureaucracies” needed to maintain order. The riots and revolts of the 19th century in central Europe were largely due to the collision of these existing “far-reaching bureaucracies” and the changing economics.

These new nation states were justified not merely as economically efficient, but as the fulfilment of their inhabitants’ national destiny. A succession of historians has nonetheless concluded that it was the states that defined their respective nations, and not the other way around. …

“nation building” … required the creation of an ideology of nationalism that emotionally equated the nation with people’s Dunbar circle of family and friends. That in turn relied heavily on mass communication technologies. … Nationalist feelings … arose after mass-market books standardised vernaculars and created linguistic communities. Newspapers allowed people to learn about events of common concern, creating a large “horizontal” community that was previously impossible. National identity was also deliberately fostered by state-funded mass education.

The key factor driving this ideological process, Maleševic says, was an underlying structural one: the development of far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialised societies. For example, says Breuilly, in the 1880s Prussia became the first government to pay unemployment benefits. At first they were paid only in a worker’s native village, where identification was not a problem. As people migrated for work, benefits were made available anywhere in Prussia. “It wasn’t until then that they had to establish who a Prussian was,” he says, and they needed bureaucracy to do it. Citizenship papers, censuses and policed borders followed.

Again, national identity came to France in the 15th century. Early in the war, English armies would be stocked with all sorts, as well as English. Similarly, the armies loyal the French King were stocked with Scots, English and French. By the end of the war this was no longer true. The French fought for France and the English fought for England. French national identity is what drove France’s involvement in the Thirty Years War two centuries later. The idea that nationalism was born in the Industrial Revolution is at odds with history.

It is fair to argue that the Industrial Age allowed for the industrialization of the state. The managerial revolution is why we have a managerial class. I suppose one can argue that this then let nationalism sweep the continent. A better answer is that the barbarism of the Thirty Years War ended Christianity as the organizing force on European elites. Nationalism filled the void, eventually giving the people a new foundation myth and a sense of destiny. Still, the Industrial Age certainly helped accelerate the modern bureaucratic state along with the spread of various Rousseau-ist cults as a organizing philosophies.

The Piety of Plutocrats

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Steve Sailer has lately been plucking hilarious examples of self-beclownment from the NYTimes and arguing it is deliberate. I’m not sure if he is right, but it would be nice if it is deliberate. Stories like this suggest otherwise.

John D. Rockefeller built a vast fortune on oil. Now his heirs are abandoning fossil fuels.

The family whose legendary wealth flowed from Standard Oil is planning to announce on Monday that its $860 million philanthropic organization, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is joining the divestment movement that began a couple years ago on college campuses.

The announcement, timed to precede Tuesday’s opening of the United Nations climate change summit meeting in New York City, is part of a broader and accelerating initiative.

The picture above the text is dripping with sanctimonious self-regard. These people arranged for the profile on a left-wing platform so they could advertise their virtue before a major left-wing gathering. The breathless prose in the saccharine you get a cavity reading it. The key bits are right there in the beginning. It is a “movement” and that means it has religious overtones. Religions are just a type of mass movement. The fact that it started on college campuses is a big deal to the Cult. That means it is innocent and pure, according to the mythology of their faith.

In recent years, 180 institutions — including philanthropies, religious organizations, pension funds and local governments — as well as hundreds of wealthy individual investors have pledged to sell assets tied to fossil fuel companies from their portfolios and to invest in cleaner alternatives. In all, the groups have pledged to divest assets worth more than $50 billion from portfolios, and the individuals more than $1 billion, according to Arabella Advisors, a firm that consults with philanthropists and investors to use their resources to achieve social goals.

The people who are selling shares of energy stocks are well aware that their actions are unlikely to have an immediate impact on the companies, given their enormous market capitalizations and cash flow.

The money involved here is not even a rounding error. That’s not the point. They really don’t want to have any impact on these firms. The whole point of this is to bask in the warm glow of the self-satisfaction that comes from a public act of piety. In another age, these idiots would have donated a bull to the festival to be slaughtered at the temple.

The Colonists

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I’m fond of saying that America has been colonized by pod people. Unlike the racists white colonists that oppressed the noble people of places like Africa and the Americas, these colonists sort of look like the people over whom they rule. They even speak the same language, for the most part. Rather than secure their place by force of arms, the new colonial class has convinced the natives they are on their side as protectors. It’s why they invest so much time telling some natives that the other natives are a danger. Divide and conquer.

Maggie’s Farm had a link to this story on Legal Insurrection. She seems to think it is really cool that the ruling class is all-white. She describes herself as “an attorney, writer, and digital strategist from Dallas, Texas.” You can’t help but get a bad vibe from the expression “digital strategist.” It sounds like a fake job for women. Tech firms tend to load up their marketing and human resources departments with women to counter the fact their talent is all white and Asians dudes. They give the ladies of marketing titles like “digital strategist.”

Anyway, the vast chasm between the ruled and the ruler is hardly news. The interesting bit is that the political divide looks a lot like what’s happening in trendy coastal cities. Upper middle-class whites are systematically driving out non-Asian minorities. Washington DC is getting whiter by the day. This old list shows that DC, like other trendy ruling class places is becoming less vibrant. Harlem went white a few years ago and is on its way to looking like Reykjavik. It only makes sense that the governing class would follow the same path, getting whiter, richer and more self-absorbed.

That last bit is not unimportant. I was watching Red Eye the other day and the topic was drugs. Legalization is now cool amongst those living in the bunker communities. The cast of Red Eye is emblematic of the SWPL-types now running the culture. One of the guests was a cute little girl named Katherine Timpf. She said something along the lines of “I live in Harlem and see people selling drugs every day.” They all nodded without the least bit of irony. They are totally unaware of what’s going on around them. Dylan from upstairs who had a heroin problem is a different breed of cat from D’Quan who slings dope on a Camden street corner, but no one in hipsterville knows that.

But, that’s thing with the colonial class. They don’t really know they are a colonial class and they don’t seem to know there’s a world outside of the Potemkin villages they are building for themselves in the coastal cities. There’s a blissful unawareness that most obviously shows up in political attitudes. When you live in a quaint little Victorian on a block filled with sophisticated hipsters like yourself, you trust the system. The cops are your friends and the people with who you work in government are your well-intentioned neighbors. In a world where there are never any layoffs or pay cuts and no such thing as a recession, it easy to be naïve. They are the Eloi and we are the Morlocks, except they live off us, instead of the way Wells imagined it.

The Face of Suicide

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Baltimore is a majority black city with an all black government and bureaucracy. Like Detroit, the government avoids plundering what wealth is left only because they are too incompetent to steal what’s left. There are pockets of rich whites and a small hipsterville, but otherwise it is Lagos on the Chesapeake. But, they can’t help but jump on the latest fads.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake plans to unveil dozens of recommendations Wednesday intended to lure immigrant families to Baltimore and retain them.

The proposals, from increasing the availability of translators at city agencies to making it easier for the undocumented to buy homes, offer insight into the mayor’s pledge to attract 10,000 new families over the next decade — an effort that is focused in part on the city’s burgeoning immigrant neighborhoods.

“I want to make sure that Baltimore isn’t behind the curve on this trend,” said Rawlings-Blake, who will formally announce the recommendations today. “This is about taking advantage of the growth that we’ve already seen.”

The proposals are part of a new report crafted by a city task force and the Abell Foundation.

Census data show that 46,000 people in Baltimore were born in another country, and 40 percent of them are naturalized citizens.

That represents a 55 percent increase in the number of people who identified themselves as immigrants in 2000. Most analysts believe those numbers significantly underrepresent the number of immigrants who entered the country illegally.

The task force suggests the city should approve an ordinance requiring agencies to develop policies that comply with federal regulations on “language access” to ensure that those who don’t speak English can take advantage of city programs.

And noting that potential homebuyers who don’t have Social Security numbers often struggle to obtain mortgages, the panel also recommends creating a committee to study programs that allow immigrants to borrow instead with a Tax ID Number issued by the Internal Revenue Service.

Again, why would any government want more poor people? The reason they can’t get credit is they are not here legally and they have no money. It is a crazy thing, but this is what extreme partisanship is like in a late stage democracy. These people will self-harm just to be on the right side and hold the right opinion.

The Next Turn of the Ratchet

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Creeping up on little cat feet is the war on access to the internet. The rulers don’t like that people can speak to other people freely on-line. They really hate that people can talk about the rulers on-line, without fear of prosecution. So, they want to regulate the Internet, which means shitting down open debate.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wants to give federal regulators sweeping new powers over Internet access.

The move is necessary, she said Monday, to save net neutrality and protect Internet users. But Republicans and business groups warn that applying utility-style regulations to the Internet would strangle economic growth and ultimately mean worse Internet service.

“I oppose special Internet fast lanes, only open to those firms large enough to pay big money or fraught enough to give up big stakes in their company,” the California Democrat wrote in a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, urging him to classify broadband as a “telecommunications service” under Title II of the Communications Act.

Pelosi is the latest—and highest-ranking—Democrat to back the controversial regulatory maneuver. Her position puts more political pressure on Wheeler and the other commission Democrats to invoke the powers.

Supporters argue that using Title II is the only way to enact net-neutrality rules that can hold up in court. In January, a federal court struck down the old net-neutrality rules, which were based on weaker authority under Title I of the law.

Net neutrality is the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. Wheeler prompted a major backlash earlier this year by proposing new rules that would allow broadband providers to charge websites for faster service in certain cases.

As soon as you tell providers that they cannot discriminate as to who they allow on their networks, the Feds can start telling them who they can allow on their networks. The Left can hoot and holler all they like about equal access, but what they seek is something like the Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. Regulators can then tax speech they don’t like by telling ISP’s they have too much or too little of certain content.

Virtually all Democrats support net neutrality, but only some of them have explicitly called for the FCC to reclassify Internet providers. So far, 14 senators and 37 House members have backed the controversial option.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has vowed to defend the agency’s rules, but he hasn’t taken a position on which regulatory provision the agency should use. President Obama has said he opposes Internet fast lanes, but has also been silent on Title II.

Republicans and broadband providers, however, have promised to do everything they can to stop the FCC from using its Title II powers on the Internet. In a May letter to the FCC, House GOP leaders warned that applying “antiquated regulation on the Internet” would “needlessly inhibit the creation of American private-sector jobs, limit economic freedom and innovation, and threaten to derail one of our economy’s most vibrant sectors.”

You see the classic recipe for a break of the walls. All of the Democrats are for it and the Republicans are mounting a disorganized defense. That’s probably why the Left is feeling cocky enough to offer up an amendment to the Constitution that repeals the First Amendment.

Section 1. To advance democratic self-government and political
equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral
process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits
on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to
influence elections.

The Citizen’s United case has sent the Left bonkers because it breaks their lock on campaign financing. If you look at the big money operations in politics, they tilt Left. A little math shows they get 72% of the money from the top-10 donors. The Democrats have been the party of plutocrats for decades, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Citizens United lets the GOP target rich individuals and corporations to try and even the playing field, which is why the Left is going crazy trying to repeal the First Amendment.

Section 2. Congress and the States shall have power to implement
and enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and may
distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other
artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such
entities from spending money to influence elections.

The last part, “influence elections” is where the real mischief lies. Limiting how much a candidate can spend or how much someone can give to a candidate is odious, but not lethal. Once you allow the regulation of influence, you have a licensing regime for political participation. Since just about anyone could influence an election, everyone will need permission from the state to participate in politics. This would extend to the media, even though they say it does not.

Section 3. Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant
Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the
press.

News companies are corporations and the people who work there are natural persons. If you can pass a law banning corporations from influencing elections, then you have effectively banned the New York Times from editorializing about campaign or endorsing candidates. Since I’m a human and this blog is written by me, Harry Reid could ban me from blogging about the campaigns. If you don’t think that’s how it works, just consider how the court has pretended the health care mandate is a tax.

Harry Reid will not live to see this pass, but that does not mean it will die with him. This time it will fail but they will come back with something else. They will keep trying until they find some way to get greater control political speech. Today it sounds absurd, but a generation ago it was absurd to think bakers would be forced at gun point to make cakes for homosexuals. Yet, here we are.

Bad Time For Fake Nerds

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Looks like one of their icons is a serial fabulist:

Religious fanatics have an odd habit of overreacting when people have the audacity to question their fanaticism. In Iraq, radical Islamic jihadists are systemically murdering and beheading Christians, Jews, and even Muslims who do not pledge fealty to ISIS’s religious tenets. Hundreds of years ago, church authorities and Aristotelian acolytes imprisoned Galileo for having the audacity to reject geocentrism in favor of heliocentrism. The bible recounts how Christians were persecuted and stoned, and Jesus himself was crucified for contradicting the religious dogma of the day.

You will bow to the religious zealots, or you will pay the price.

Which brings us to l’affaire de Tyson. Neil Tyson, a prominent popularizer of science (he even has his own television show) was recently found to have repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years. The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science. Tyson targeted journalists, members of Congress, even former President George W. Bush. And what was their crime? They were guilty of rejecting science, according to Tyson.

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened.

This is a common problem on the Left. No one challenges them so they start making stuff up. Celebrity scientists are a lot like celebrity chefs. They are better at being celebrities than being scientists. They start getting sloppy and before long they are making claims that are ridiculous. It’s why a lot of writers never read the comments of their own stories. They fear they will start writing to please their admirers.

Tyson does not seem like an evil person. He is a bright guy by conventional standards, but one always has to wonder about the elephant in the room. His scientific work is meager and ended more than 20 years ago. He made his name and career as a presenter, PR man and popularizer of science. Nothing wrong with any of it, but he probably should not be passing himself off as a scientist these days.

He is the John Stuart of science. Stuart does comedy, but he is not a comic. He is a preacher, telling the faithful the good news every night. He uses comedy as a tool and a shield. Tyson has the same act, except he uses science instead of comedy. Instead of mocking the benighted with comedy, Tyson tells the chosen that science proves their deepest beliefs. In another age, science would be replaced by the gods and Tyson would be dressed as a shaman.

The Great Divide

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I’ve been reading Steve Sailer for a long time now. I enjoy his writing and usually his choice of topics. I don’t always agree with him, but he makes his case without a bunch of chanting and religious posturing. I think his posts on crime and demographics are some of the best you can find. Unlike anyone in the paid media, he actually supplies data in his posts. That’s also why he is no longer paid media. You’re only permitted to use data in support of the current narrative.

All that said, Steve Sailer is perfectly able to hold some nutty ideas. We all are. His post over at Takimag on Scottish Independence finishes with what I would call a very wrong and very strange opinion.

The Scottish independence movement inevitably inspires the question of secession in America. As John Derbyshire has pointed out, the United States represents a vast expanse of territory, and people from distant regions increasingly get on each other’s nerves. In an era of free trade zones and military alliances, wouldn’t it be simplest for the U.S. to break up like the SNP wants the U.K. to end?

I don’t think so, however. The big difference is that that the U.K. is primarily a north-south country, while the U.S. is an east-west country. Latitude divides people more than longitude. In America, the most important political divide is distance from deep water, such as oceans or the Great Lakes: what I call the Dirt Gap. San Francisco and Manhattan, for example, are 2900 miles apart, but are similarly liberal because family formation is equally unaffordable due to both being similarly constrained from expansion by water. Hence, the “family values” party is less relevant where family formation is prohibitively expensive.

Anyone who has spent time up and down the east coast of America knows this is hilariously wrong. People in Maine have one thing in common with the people of South Carolina. They both speak a version of American English. That’s it. The great divide in America, if one wants to declare one, is north and south as in Blue and Gray as in Roundhead versus Cavalier. It drives our politics and it is what animates the Left. It is the divide John Derbyshire calls the Cold Civil War.

But, he is correct to note there is a divide between the coasts and the interior and the two coasts themselves. I’ve been to the West Coast many times, but I know nothing about it, at least not in the way I know the east coast. The people all seem weird to me, except the Mexicans, who are pretty much like Mexicans everywhere. The whites are all a little odd as I’m sure I would seem odd to them. Even Southerners find the west coast aloofness strange and off-putting. To northeastern types, it’s positively kooky.

Having been around the country quite a bit, I can make the case for all sorts of regional divides. American is a big country with a lot of different types of people. Local weirdness is everywhere. None of it is like the Blue-Gray line. It is what drives the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Their obsession with race, for example, is tied directly to their mythological role in the Civil Rights Movement. The war on Walmart is a war on Southerners. The absurd reaction to Paula Dean was a visceral reaction to her overt “southerness.” The war on Christianity is really a war on Evangelicals. Northern Catholics think the snake handlers make religion look bad.

I can go issue by issue and tease out a Blue-Gray explanation. You can’t do that with the other ways to divide the country. The Blue-Gray line is not tied to geography. It is a culture line that has jumped its natural boundaries. Look at Texas. Austin is the Progressive enclave in an otherwise populist-conservative region. I know lots of NYC and DC based Progressives who regularly go to Austin. They mock the rest of the state as Red Neck Land. On the other hand, the people in Red Neck Land call Austin the People’s Republic.

That’s why John Derbyshire’s argument does not work. The Blue-Gray line is not based in geography. There’s some of it, but every Gray area has pockets of Blue. On the other side, the Deepest Blue region, which is New England, has a lot of Gray. New Hampshire holds a very popular NASCAR race and Maine is full of white trash Acadians. There’s simply no way to divide up the turf without localized blood baths as one tribe purges the other. Maybe that’s the future, but in a feminized and timid culture, it is not the way to bet. Instead, everyone will voluntarily submit to an increasingly authoritarian custodial state.

A Pathetic Waste of a Country

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Multiculturalism is a suicide cult. The whole point of it is to destroy the native culture but disguise it as an upgrade. The evidence is all around us. Everything they touch is made worse or destroyed. The Brits are a generation ahead of us, give or take, in setting fire to their country and culture. Here’s what is coming to America.

A victim of Rotherham’s child sex abuse scandal confronted a man she says groomed her – but was left shocked when she was the one arrested.

The woman was shocked when she saw the man walking through the town’s centre on Friday and decided to challenge him over the allegations.

But she was tackled by two police officers and pushed up against a wall during her ‘thuggish’ arrest, a witness has said.

A damning report released last month detailed how 1,400 children were sexually exploited in the area over a 16-year period.

The Times reported that a woman whose case is being investigated by authorities – but has not yet been interviewed – was arrested after tackling a man she says groomed her when she was 15.

A witness accused the police of ‘acting like insensitive thugs’, telling the paper: ‘A police van came and six male officers piled out.

‘Two of them dragged her away, handcuffed her, put her against a wall and then shoved her into the back of the van.’

South Yorkshire Police told today how they had been hoping to interview the woman in the weeks before the arrest, after they were told of the historic allegations by another organisation.

But they only realised that she was the woman they had been trying to speak to after her arrest, and have now released her on bail.

After her treatment at the hands of officers, the woman has been reluctant to talk to police and her complaint against the man is therefore yet to be officially recorded.

The police force, which has come under fire in the wake of the recent scandal, insists it does take sexual violence seriously and will continue attempts to investigate the woman’s claims.

A spokesman said: ‘Specialist officers from South Yorkshire Police had been making efforts to trace a 28-year-old woman who had made allegations to a partner agency.

‘The allegations related to child sexual exploitation. Efforts to trace the woman were unsuccessful.

‘Later that day, officers from a neighbouring force who were providing support to South Yorkshire Police, were approached by a passerby who made complaints about the behaviour of a woman who they believed had been drinking.

‘The woman was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated public order offences.

It is not enough to flood the country with barbarians from Pakistan. Letting them rape the young English girls is not enough. Nope. The fanatics are actively trying to silence the victims on behalf of the barbarians.  At this point, a group of Pakistani men could be sodomizing the Queen on the grounds of Buckingham Palace and the Brits would look away, blaming it on bigots or the far right.

It is pathetic and disgusting. It will also be coming to American. The suicidal lunatics in charge of America look at Europe as a model. It’s not the architecture they admire or the high culture. Our lunatics hate that as much as European lunatics. What our lunatics admire is the ruthlessness of the European lunatics.

The sad truth is, the Brits would be better off importing millions more from Pakistan and handing them all the weapons they need to finish off the locals. Death is probably too good for the English, but at least it would be over. Look at this pathetic nonsense from what passes for conservative in Britain these days. “Please stay with us”??? A country with any self-respect would be building a wall right now to shut the Scots out.

Liberals Smell Like Poop

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So says this story from The Week;

A new study from the American Journal of Political Science indicates that different political affiliations may actually correspond with different body odors.

The researchers, led by Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott, found that conservatives and liberals smell dissimilar. While the difference is small, it is apparently significant enough that we subconsciously prefer the scent of those who vote like we do. “It appears nature stacks the deck to make politically similar partners more attractive to each other in unconscious ways,” the researchers wrote. “Conservatives smell like flowers and sunshine, while Liberals smell faintly of raw sewage and rotten eggs.”

OK, I made that last part up. My point is if it did say that, people would buy it. Social science is not science and nonsense like this is the reason.

Previous research has found a number of other political view correlations with unknown degrees of biological and cultural influences. From eating preferences (the left likes strawberry jelly, while the right favors grape) to alcohol choices (Republicans like brown liquors; Democrats drink the clear stuff), conservatives and liberals live as distinctly as they vote.

Other differences are more psychological: Conservatives will look at an unpleasant image 15 percent longer than liberals, and they’re also more likely to keep an organized dorm room in college. In fact, one study showed that conservatives are more generally conscientious and liberals are more open to new experiences. Libertarians display some psychological aspects of both groups, albeit with a far lighter helping of respect for authority.

I’m fond of pointing out that the hive minded obsess over boundaries. You see it in these crackpot studies. The Right, or what pass for the Right these days, cares not a wit about this stuff. In fact, the Right has taken to heart the baloney sold by the Cult regarding human biodiversity. They really think we’re all the same. The Left is under no such illusion. They know damn well there is a difference between those inside the walls and those outside the walls. Hence this obsession for these types of studies.

Banksters

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The beginning of the end of the Roman Republic was when the ruling class loss respect for and the willingness to abide by their own rules. Scholars don’t frame it like that because it’s hard and boring. Instead they focus on economic changes like the flood of slave labor after the defeat of Carthage and Corinth. Alternatively, the political changes make for nice stories because the characters are interesting. The road off the cliff, however, started with the loss of respect for the spirit of the laws and customs.

The point when our politicians stopped punishing criminal financiers will similarly be looked at as an inflection point. There was a time when politicians and wealthy members of the ruling elite faced criminal punishment for breaking the law. Nixon was run out of DC for talking about what Obama boasts of doing. Michael Milken went to jail for two years for what is common today on Wall Street. A great trivia question is how many bankers went to jail for the sub prime mortgage scandal. The answer is zero.

This article on Bloomberg points this out.

Yesterday, we looked at why bankers weren’t busted for crimes committed during the financial crisis. Political corruption, prosecutorial malfeasance, rewritten legislation and cowardice on the part of government officials were among the many reasons.

But I saved the biggest reason so many financial felons escaped justice for today: They dumped the cost of their criminal activities on you, the shareholder (never mind the taxpayer).

Corporate executives theoretically work for the owners of the company, namely, the shareholders. But there is an agency problem in that owners can’t closely manage and object to the actions of these executives. Collective owners, such as mutual funds, seem to have no interest in doing so. What we end up with is a management class that works for itself instead of on behalf of the owners of the publicly traded banks. Many of these executives committed crimes; got big bonuses for doing so; and paid huge fines using shareholder assets (i.e., company cash), helping them avoid prosecution.

As for claims like those of white-collar crime defense attorney Mark F. Pomerantz, that “the executives running companies like Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan were not committing criminal acts,” they simply are implausible if not laughable. Consider a brief survey of some of the more egregious acts of wrongdoing:

Foreclosure fraud: Of all the crimes committed during the financial crisis and in its aftermath, this is one that should have been the easiest to identify and prosecute.

Any bank that owns a mortgage with the debtor in default must follow a simple set of legal steps in order to foreclose. The procedure is time consuming, specific to each state’s laws and involves lawyers, so foreclosures are expensive. Hey, it is the cost of issuing credit, and a simple reality of the rule of law. There are no shortcuts.

Except the banks took many short cuts and did so on purpose and with the goal of improperly expediting the process. They failed to review the documents of the mortgages they were foreclosing on, then told courts they had. They didn’t verify information, but claimed to have done so in sworn affidavits. They hired $8 an hour burger-flippers to “robosign” these documents, pretending the underlying legal work had been done. They knowingly used falsified records, some of which they bought en masse. They were aided by a company called DocX, which had a price list of fabricated documents for use in court. (DocX, by the way, was eventually indicted on charges of mortgage fraud).

After creating phony dossiers on borrowers, the banks signed and notarized affidavits stating they had taken all of the legal steps. In many cases, even the notarizations were fakes. Submitting a falsified notarized affidavit to a court is perjury and fraud.

Of course, the burger-flippers who did the paperwork didn’t think up the whole scheme — someone much higher did. Somewhere between these low-level workers and the chief executive officer were managers who masterminded robosigning. So far, just one midlevel executive has been convicted at Bank of America, while scores of others have gone untouched.

Mortgage underwriting: Then there are the crimes committed in mortgage underwriting, where defects were knowingly ignored. The FBI investigated these cases early on, but investigators never moved forward with prosecutions.

Maybe the scale of the financial penalties bank agreed to pay had something to do with this inaction. Bank of America, for instance, using shareholder money, paid $16.65 billion to settle allegations of fraudulent mortgage originations, securitizations and servicing. One can’t help think that this money bought immunity from prosecution for executives.

Money Laundering: Banks have been laundering staggering sums of money for drug dealers and terrorists. Hey, there are big bucks in high net worth narco-terrorists. Awash in cash, drug cartels relied on big banks to launder their ill-gotten money. Apparently, it was just good business to grab a slice of that pie. However, these are deeply offensive, very illegal activities, and deserve not just penalties, but jail time.

How much of this dirty money made its way through the banks? One analysis estimates that $1.6 trillion of tainted proceeds has been laundered through major money-center banks around the world.

A U.S. Senate report linked HSBC to drug lords and terrorists, leading to a record $1.9 billion fine. The Federal Reserve faulted Citigroup over its controls, allowing money laundering to go on. And Wells Fargo admitted to laundering money for Mexican drug gangs.

• Market manipulation: We haven’t even gotten to the manipulation of markets in violation of U.S and international law. Whether it was aluminum or Libor rates, prices were either improperly manipulated or illegally rigged, with knowledge of the bank executives and the traders they employed and supervised. Let’s not forget manipulating the multitrillion dollar derivatives market.

• Fraud, skimming and bid-rigging: Then there is just good old-fashioned fraud and bid-rigging: State Street Bank was accused of skimming money off of the pension transactions it handled while BNY Mellon was accused of skimming money for “fictitious” foreign-currency costs for pension funds.

• Accounting fraud: We could spend months discussing how some executives at banks cooked their books, but really, this is so well known that it hardly merits mention.

So next time you hear the claim that “there were no crimes committed by bankers,” just remember that this may be the biggest lie of the 21st century.
That’s a strong and accurate indictment. When you add in the multiple LIBOR scandals and the ISDAfix scandal, the image we get is of a rapacious bandit class rampaging through the world financial system like pirates. Theft, graft and corruption will always be a part of the financial class. Banks attract bank robbers and the banking system will always attract grifters and confidence men. It is the duty of the civil authorities to police the financial system and punish the people who commit crimes.
If there’s going to be a reform of the ruling class, it has to start with the bandit problem on Wall Street. The reforms following the Great Depression ended for a generation the type of spiritual corruption we see today. Those reforms were not perfect, but they gave an advantage to the type of men who put their reputation and their firms reputation ahead of quick profits. Top to bottom the modern financial firm is filled with men who would gladly murder their mother for a bigger bonus check.
The answer lies in those reforms a century ago. Separating commercial banking from investment banking is where it must start. The former is vital to a strong economy, while the latter is just gambling and popular only in good times. Similarly, retail banking should be separate from commercial banking. A firm offering boat loans and second mortgages should not be financing factory expansion and land acquisition. They have different regulatory needs and different degrees of transparency.
For any of this to happen, the ruling class has to abandon the idea that you can have a civil society based on purely transactional relationships. When all relationships are measured purely on monetary terms in the moment, there’s no reason to be honest in your dealings with others. Completely bankrupting the other guy is fine because you win the deal. Squeezing your vendors into poverty is acceptable, even if it destroys your ability to do business down the road. All that matter is the here and now. That’s a recipe for a low-trust society, not western civilization.