The Ground of Existence – 1: Introduction

A few weeks ago I read a noteworthy article, noteworthy not because of what it said but because of how its author reacted to what he was describing.

He had been watching a ‘news analysis’ program where the guests were “discussing” the Iranian “nuclear bomb.” It was the usual obscene show of a pack of baying dogs delivering a pack of lies about the existential threat of Iran to this and that and the need for more sanctions and military options. Then one of the regulars, Patrick Buchanan, had pointed out that Iran had consistently denied developing nuclear weapons; the country’s supreme leader has declared more than once that building nuclear weapons is against Islam. Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies concur: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. The IAEA, too, which is closely monitoring Iranian nuclear facilities, found no evidence of nuclear weapon program. In short, there is no evidence that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

After Buchanan’s ‘input’, the author wrote, he was expecting a shift in the discussion or at least a change in the tone. After all, the premise of what was being said had been preempted. To his surprise, nothing happened. The guests totally ignored what they had heard and continued with their rants until the end. The writer was wondering what gives. What could explain such conduct?

Such “conduct” is more common than many think. In fact, it is de rigueur in high places these days. But precisely because it is so prevalent, people notice it only when it takes a particularly offensive in-your-face form.

This year’s Nobel Prize in economics, for example, went to two guys who are not economists and one of them is even aware of that fact. Lloyd Shipley, one of the two winners, told the Associated Press: “I consider myself a mathematician and the award is for economics. I never, never in my life took a course in economics.”

The new laureates’ area of research is “matching”: men and women (through speed dating), students to schools, and recipients to organs.

Why, you might ask, in the midst of a protracted economic/financial crisis in the West is the Nobel Prize in economics given to lighthearted folks investigating match making? Was there no research on the causes of the crisis and the way out of it?

The answer is that the official economics cannot explain the crisis, and those works that can, are outside the accepted theories, which the Nobel Committee cannot recognize. Hence, the only option left, which is looking the other way. That’s how it comes to pass that a glaring reality that has ravaged the lives of tens of millions is ignored.

Or take the Treasury secretary Tim Geithner. According to the Financial Times, he and Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, spoke no less than 49 times in the past 6 months over the phone. How many times in person, no one knows.

Part of the conversation was no doubt job related. Geithner is leaving at the year end and he will need a multi-million dollar salary to support his family after the penurious Treasury years. It could also be that Larry Fink is auditioning for the Treasury job – or both. But the official story, that the secretary needs to be in touch with “market participants”, is also true, only you have to understand what that means.

In the same period, Geithner called Vikram Pandit, the recently ousted Citi CEO once and Bill Gross of Pimco zero times. Bill Gross is a trader and not particularly strong in matters of theory and abstract thinking; he recently likened the U.S. government’s borrowings money to an addict who “pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth,” clearly not realizing that the analogy would make him a drug kingpin. Still, if you are the Treasury secretary and want to get the pulse of the market – which was ostensibly the reason for the calls – wouldn’t you want to talk to the manager of the largest debt fund in the country?

But that reasoning would be missing the point, which is that reasoning and logic have got nothing to do with it. Geithner does not want to learn about policy options and alternatives. He wants input and direction, and Larry Fink provides both because Larry and Co. are the ones who give guidance to the Treasury. Call them the “in” crowd. The likes of Gross and Pandit are outsiders. They could get rich and famous thanks to the Treasury policy but they will have no say in setting that policy which has facets beyond matters of money and finance. For that reason, it does not matter what they think. So they might as well be ignored, which they are.

Like gold, which Shakespeare said makes black, white, foul, fair and wrong, right, being “in” makes meek bold. Witness the meek Bernanke whom everyone hailed as bold after he announced his QE3 program. In this 3rd phase of the so-called quantitative easing, the Fed chairman is resolved to buy $40 billion worth of mortgages every month pretty much until his term is up in 2014. He says he is doing it to tackle joblessness. That no one can explain how buying mortgages creates jobs matters not. He just says so, the way James Baker, Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State, said that invading Iraq was about jobs.

Meanwhile the Chairman rejects the criticism that mortgage buying artificially lowers the dollar’s value against the rival currencies (because the dollars that pay for the mortgages he creates from the thin air). He said:

The Fed isn’t responsible for artificially boosting rival currencies — and that other nations should let market forces determine exchange rates anyway.

The man who interferes in the markets to the tune of half a trillion dollars a year advises others to let market forces determine exchange rates.

Finally, the Supreme Court and the way it has been upholding the law of the land of late. A single example should suffice. No, not the much maligned Citizens United but the seemingly progressive Boumediene.

In Boumediene v. Bush, the Court decided 5-4 that the Muslim prisoners held indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay military camp had the right to habeas corpus – essentially the right to have their cases heard in the US courts – and part of the Military Commission Act under which they were imprisoned and which denied them that right was unconstitutional.

Linda Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize “for her consistently illuminating coverage of the United States Supreme Court” takes it from there:

To a startling degree, the conservative judges on the D.C. Circuit have been openly at war with the Boumediene decision [of the Supreme Court]. Judge Brown referred in her opinion to the “airy suppositions” of the Supreme Court’s majority. Judge A. Raymond Randolph ... in a 2010 speech to the Heritage Foundation, pointedly analogized the justices in the Boumediene majority to Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”: “careless people, who smashed things up” and who “let other people clean up the mess they made.” ... Judge Laurence H. Silberman, in a concurring opinion a year ago, described the Boumediene decision as “the Supreme Court’s defiant – if only theoretical – assertion of judicial supremacy.”

Only theoretical? I can’t remember such open and sustained rudeness toward the Supreme Court by a group of lower court judges ... [A] court that had so much institutional pride just a few years ago ought to care enough now not to let itself be dissed by lower court judges who, in the system as I understand it, owe the Supreme Court obedience rather than on- and off-the-bench sniping.

The Supreme Court judges are appointed for life. They are practically untouchable. They have no reason to fear anyone. Their say is the last word in law. So why do they tolerate being openly dismissed and ridiculed by the lower court judges? Where, you might ask, is the loudmouth Antonin [broccoli] Scalia to put the errant circuit court judges in their place and remind them that in dissing the Court, they wreck the institutional judiciary for which the U.S was once renowned?

That question, too, would be missing the point. It would be akin to an uninitiated outsider wondering why the person being whipped in an S&M session accepts the pain and humiliation without complaint.

Scalia and Roberts like the contempt of lower courts towards Boumediene because they share that contempt, so strongly in fact, that they are willing to let it destroy the authority of the Supreme Court.

As Nasser observed, at the age of speculative capital, speculative capital is not the only self-destructive entity around.

And that is the commonality among all these cases; do not misread them as people in the position of power doing what they please. That sort of masters’ liberty about which Thucydides perhaps said the last word – the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must – has existed from time immemorial. But the strong of our examples are not imposing their will on the weak – not directly, anyway. They are, rather, pushing against the boundaries of a system that sustains them. In doing so, they are destroying their ground of existence.

It is a fascinating concept, this ground of existence. I must tell you about it.

I will return shortly to do so.